Memories of winter, begone!

All it took was one beautiful, nearly perfect May day, and it was almost as if our endless winter never happened.

Patch of lingering snow

Like after five months of snow, including two months of consecutive days of temps below zero, Mother Nature said, "Just kidding, time to start gardening."  So we did!

We started by adding two more raised beds behind the house, with two more to be added soon. We put layers of cardboard on the bottom to kill any weeds underneath.  As soon as spring road restrictions are lifted, we'll have a load of dirt delivered to fill them up.  (Road restrictions are posted on area roads in the spring preventing larger trucks from damaging roads before the roadbeds have thawed completely.  That didn't happen until the first of June last year, so we'll see what happens this year.)

I heard through the Port Wing grapevine, that now was a good time to plant onions, that it's good to get them started early.  I had just purchased onion sets for white and yellow onions earlier this week, so Leann prepped one of the raised beds from last year and I got them planted.  I had a little more room and we wanted some red onions, too.  I called our neighbor up the road who once specialized in raising garlic, but I knew that she had a shipment of onions to plant.  As it turned out, she had just finished planting all her onions and had some red ones left over.  She was just about to look around for somewhere to plant them when I called.  Good timing!

These are little onion plants compared with the onion sets, or little bulbs, that I have always used before.  She showed us some of the HUGE onions she still has left over from last year, so we'll see how they grow for us this year.  And next year we asked to be added to her group order for the rest of our onions, too.  

Two beds of onions and maybe it's winter PTSD, but I'm having a hard time believing that we can be planting anything in gardens yet!

And while we were picking up our onion plants, we noticed her box of potatoes she had ready to plant.  When I asked when she usually planted them, she said it should have been much earlier, but all the ice in the harbor told her it wouldn't do much good to plant at the usual time.  But any day now would be good. 

So, after we got all the onions planted, Leann dug up the potato bed so now it's all ready.  I think we'll make a trip to Iron River tomorrow to get some potatoes to plant.

That was a new bed last year and we didn't get it started until sometime into June.  You've heard this before, but we had to wait for the road restrictions to be lifted so we could get our delivery of dirt.  Then we tried something new.  We laid out the potato pieces with eyes on top of the dirt, then put layers and layers of straw on top.  The potatoes grew right up through the straw and made digging the potatoes really easy in the fall.

Last year's potato bed

Easy-peasy!  

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P.S. All of this fresh air today must have contributed to my extreme nap tonight.  I woke up for the evening news and nearly forgot that I was a blogger!  Whew!  Got it done in time!