ESCANABA -- If you look outside at your garden plot, it's probably still frozen solid. By no means, though, should you stay frozen on starting your gardening process for later this spring.
"These are things that we need to be thinking about this time of the year, like where we're going to locate our garden, what kind of crops we're going to grow, and then you might want to lay out a plan," said Warren Schauer of the MSU Extension office in Escanaba. "If you grew a garden there last year, you don't want to plant the same kinds of crops in the same space."
The first crops to focus on are cool-weather crops: peas, onions, radishes, or lettuce.
While you should hold off on sowing anything outside now, you might actually be behind already on more delicate crops.
"A lot of our vegetable plants, like tomatoes and peppers, are actually tropical plants, and they won't survive the cold. So you want to start those indoors, because a lot of them take 80, 100, 110, 120 days to mature," said Wally Flinn, Flinn's Flowers owner. "The benefit would be that you could be eating tomatoes by the first of July."
But even with cool weather crops, you should wait until around Good Friday to sow anything.
You also need to wait until the soil is ready.
"You don't want to work it up when it's too wet. So what you do is you grab a handful of soil and you firmly grip it in your hand, ball it up, and when you release it kind of falls apart, comes apart, then it's dry enough to work up. If it stays in a ball, then it's way too wet," Schauer added.
Since U.P. winters can linger, be prepared with a sheet of cloth to protect plants from late spring frosts and freezes. That way, you can keep Mother Nature from ruining your ruffage.
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