Garden Journal 1/12/12: Crazy Winter Weather

Southern half of the raised bed kitchen garden, as seen this afternoon from the second floor of the new house!

Yesterday it was sunny and in the 50s. I ditched my massive indoor afternoon To Do list in favor of digging chicken manure into a couple of garden beds and working on a compost pile—in January.

Today it's blustery, snowing, and, at last check, 22 degrees. When I looked at the online weather page this morning it said it was 18 degrees but felt like four. Tonight we'll probably see single digit temps, and on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday it's supposed to be 50.

Welcome to winter in Missouri!

So is it snowing or growing in your January garden? Any big planting plans for this year?

© FarmgirlFare.com, where it's definitely time to cozy up under a vintage quilt and finish the rest of that seed order. Weather ups and downs or not, planting time will be here all too soon.

Why I Love Growing Vegetables in Raised Garden Beds: Reason #1

All's Quiet on the Winter Front

I've been wanting to write about raised beds since I started this blog back in 2006. I decided to start growing in raised beds when I moved in with my hunky (and handy!) farmguy Joe nine years ago and had the chance to create another new garden from scratch. I'm so glad I did, and unless I decide to plant an acre of something someday, I doubt I'll ever go back to gardening any other way. I even have raised beds in the greenhouse.

There are many reasons why I love my raised beds, and many of you have been asking me to tell you more about them. But because it's obvious that I'm never going to get around to writing one giant raised bed blog post, I decided I should tackle the reasons one by one instead.

So here goes. This first reason was inspired by the weather we've been having and is all about form and has nothing to do with function, but when you think about it, so does a lot of gardening:

They look beautiful when they're covered with snow.

I'm also looking forward to sharing tips about creating and using raised beds in the upcoming months. Are you a raised bed gardener? Feel free to jump into this new ongoing discussion anytime! And if you've written about raised beds on your own blog, you're welcome to leave a link to the post(s) in a comment below.

More posts about the winter garden:
1/5/07: Things Are Looking Up in the Broccoli Department
2/4/07: Yearning For Yellow & Your Seed Favorites and Failures
9/26/07: How To Grow Your Own Swiss Chard (a wonderful winter vegetable) and Why You Should
3/9/08: Tips For Growing & Using Rosemary Year Round

© Copyright 2009 FarmgirlFare.com, the foodie farm blog where the other nice thing about snow on raised beds is that it even makes all the fall cleanup you never got around to doing look good—and it takes away the guilt, because how can you be expected to go out there and pull up dead weeds when you can't even see the ground? Winter can be so handy that way. Of course I probably won't be thinking that when I'm scrambling to get these beds ready for planting lettuce and beets (and hopefully a bunch of other stuff) in March.