Garlic, onions, kale and pumpkins

With the sun blazing and the temperatures marginally above freezing, we ventured into the garden after school to put in some more seeds. In the second cold frame on the south side, we put some kale in to get some early greens (and had our first gardening spat of the season!). It is room temperature or more inside the cold frames and the soil is nice and warm so hopefully we'll get some germination. I went with red kale as it is supposed to do better in the heat of summer.

In the older garden bed at the back, the fence and stone planter always clear the snow in this section of the garden first so we put in two more heads worth of garlic and about sixty onions. Some pretty exciting planting as the two of us crouched on one unstable board in the midst of the mud! We have about 40 onions left to put in somewhere else.

Back in the house, we also planted eight of the Italian pumpkin seeds (green and white fruit) my buddy Mike gave me in pots on the window sill. I think his instructions were plant indoors a month before setting them into the garden (which is basically the instructions for every seed, isn't it?). I usually have most stuff in around mother's day and we're aiming for about May 10th on these.

As the snow melts down in the front, I am eyeing up the pick work I'll need to do on the section of (now) lawn the pumpkins will occupy. I'm thinking of using a variation on the lasagna method of converting lawn: lift sod, dig dirt down, drop sod in upside down with covering of cardboard and newspaper, dump dirt back down on top with some compost and plant surface crops this year.