Gardening in the middle of winter may be like how women's magazines describe going to the grocery-store hungry. It seemed logical in January that I should take advantage of some time off of work to build a better shelf for starting seedlings in my basement. When it nearly fell over and crushed me weeks later, it seemed obvious that I should never try to build a shelf again, and instead replace the deadly one with store-bought metal.
Once that was assembled, it seemed obvious that I should plant something on it - all the somethings I would like to eat earlier and more of than last year.
Thus I arrived at this moment, at the very snowy end of March, with 20-some envelopes of vegetable seeds in waiting, and 5 trays of plants in various stages of infancy, including two trays-full of healthy heirloom tomato plants that may not really want to wait another 6-8 weeks to be planted.
I was advised, after this mid-Febrauary flurry of planting, that really truly I should try not to plant my tomatoes outdoors until June, when they will thrive in the warm soil and produce healthier plants. That is the opposite sort of advice from the kind of person I am. Over my three planting seasons in this garden (this being the third), I have been slowly inching up my interpretation of our "frost-free date," due to global warming and all. So now I'm just waiting to see if my eagerness will produce an early crop, or a bunch of sun-starved leggy tomato plants. In the meantime, they are beautiful.
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