Five Things Friday: where I assemble assorted favorites, oddities, announcements, discoveries, random thoughts, life tidbits and whatever else wasn’t quite long enough for a real post. This week: thinking about garden clean-up, snow in the garden, rethinking school and more.
Have a great weekend, friends!
Do One Little Thing This Week
If you are in a mild climate, now is a good time to start to think about garden clean-up and soil prep. There’s no huge rush on this, especially since here in the Northwest we just saw unusual late-February snow.
But spring is fast approaching, so if you get a nice sunny opportunity, get out there and cut down the stems from your perennials, rake the leaves off anything that’ll be pushing through the soil soon, and weed and add compost to your vegetable beds.
If you’re planning on early transplanting, and you’re not opposed to using plastic in the garden, now is also a good time to lay black plastic over any beds that will need extra heat, and set up low tunnels that will help warm and dry out your garden beds.
If you garden is still waterlogged, hold off on doing anything involving digging until it dries out.
In The Garden This Week
Snow! Low temps and crazy late winter snow fell across the lowland Pacific Northwest. Just goes to show that even in very mild years, it can pay not to jump the gun too much.
What I’m Reading
Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child’s Education by Susan Wise Bauer
I had the great pleasure of recently helping to bring homeschooling guru Susan Wise Bauer to speak at our homeschooling campus. Her talk, partially based on her new book Rethinking School was amazing and all my fellow homeschool parents in the audience loved her message that the standard K12 system simply doesn’t work for many of our kids.
Here’s the extreme TL;DR: despite all the caring efforts of individual teachers and administrators, the K12 school system is fundamentally a top-down, industrial-production model for education. If your kid isn’t naturally a good fit for that particular system, that shouldn’t be considered a condemnation of your individual child who may simply need a different environment to thrive.
Here’s the full list of what I’m reading this year.
Quote I’m Pondering
“Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.”
- Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
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The low tunnels and the black plastic are and either/or thing, right? Or would/could it be both?
I love your pics (different page, I guess from a few years ago) on how to use PVC to make a low tunnel. The details are great for newbies like me.
Either or both. For the most heat boosting both will work, but that’s only really necessary for melons, sweet potatoes and other real heat loving crops. And there’s a risk of too much heat, too, if you keep the low tunnel closed up, so you have to watch that.
Erica,
Random off topic question, but I have seen great comments about your garden planner over the years. Are you still selling those? I’d love to buy one.
Love the sites. You are an inspiration!
The garden planner is currently on hiatus until I can re-format it and improve it. I’m hoping in the next iteration to make it editable PDF so people won’t have to re-write the same stuff by hand every year. But I’ll be honest: it’s almost certainly not going to happen this year. Just because of time. Thank you for asking!