Almost being the keyword there.  It’s actually mid February and what we residents of the Yellow Hammer state call anything goes time.  For example, two weeks ago we had a couple of inches of snow.  Today it was 65º, and it was really nice outside.  Next week we’re looking at temperatures in the teens. I reckon it’s about the same all over, though, except for Hawaii, where it’s just heavenly every day of the year.  I read that somewhere, possibly in a Don Ho concert brochure.

So what does a person do when the weather is acting like a squirrel crossing the road?  Work in the vegetable garden, of course.  After the huge, great, terrible blizzard of ’25, where we got almost 2 inches of snow, the weather got nice for a bit and I was able to till the garden and get some mulch spread.  I’ll till it again in a week or two and it will be ready to go.  But of course I can’t plant anything with more freezing weather coming up, so I headed down to the basement, carrying a bag of soil and box of seeds collected from the garden last fall.  We can collect the seeds because we grow heirloom vegetables, i.e. non hybrid varieties, thus the seeds produce plants identical to the ones we grew last year.  

And that’s where I spent most of my day today, planting tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and even some cucamelons.  Everything was watered well and placed under two banks of grow lights.  It will take a couple of months before they’re ready to be moved outdoors, and it will be that long before the weather settles into a more stable pattern.  In the meantime, I need to have a talk with the old groundhog that lives under my tool shed.  He seems to think I’m just a sharecropper.

Do you start seeds indoors early?  Or grow vegetables, indoors or outdoors?  Or have a groundhog for a neighbor?

Mike