Pickle Patch Gardens

Winter here in central Saskatchewan is long and for the most part quite cold. And by quite cold we mean really cold! Usually it's around this time that the winter blues can really start to dig in. The rush and excitement of the holiday season is over and now spring seems too far away. We won't lie it sometimes hits us hard, but we always make it through.  Our 2019 focus word is Organization. ( This was before we heard of Marie Kondo or the organization craze going on.....Always a day late and a dollar short seems to be our family motto) Last years focus word was "No Regrets" somehow organization is a little more daunting and difficult!  So to try and be Organized we are planning early. It's roughly 17 weeks till the garden will go in so if anything we are falling behind..lol  In the 13 years we have been out here our garden plan has taken many shapes some fancy, others stupid and in the most recent few quite successful. The most important advice we can gi...

Sometimes it feels like you are back at step one more than once. That is true when it comes to gardening. Every year a new version of your garden in born and although you have been down this path before it is still all new. This can be both exciting and overwhelming at the same time. You know what works and what doesn't, however, there are so many variables going on that each year brings new successes and failures. Last year was a hard one for us. We started out great. We had awesome indoor germination and growth followed by healthy transplants and an easy out door planting season. That was followed by spotty outdoor germination and hail. To top that off we fell victim to the new Facebook algorithms and lost a good portion of our customers. It's very demoralising at the end of a growing season for customers to ask why you didn't post anything this year. But not quite as sad as it is to lovingly take care of a garden that falls victim to hail....

Happy New Year!! It is hard to believe that 2019 is here already! Where does the time go!  Here at Pickle Patch Gardens we are already starting to plan for this years growing season. It is a little hard to do when the garden looks like this. Yes, that is the garden behind the tractor rim in the middle of the picture. It is also hard to believe that this is a small amount of snow for winter out here. Unfortunately, we will likely have a lot more snow in the next couple of months. We need the moisture, but lots of snow is no fun either! So how do we plan for our 2019 growing season you ask?  Step 1 is to go over our notes from last year and see what worked and what did not. It will be a little hard to do this year due to the hail storm we had in June. However, we still have an idea. More on that in another post. We also go over placement, which brings us to step two Step 2 is to look at last years garden plan and do crop rotation. We have made this ...