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Start early on spring gardening

By GARY TILGHMAN
For the Daily Times

GLASGOW —

You don’t need to wait for warm weather to start your vegetable garden. Several types of vegetables can be started as early as March. Radishes, spinach, cabbage, broccoli, lettuce, onions and many more vegetables are all quite frost tolerant, and you can seed or transplant them in the garden from mid March to early April.

If you want to get an even earlier start, you could try covering an area with clear plastic film to create a mini greenhouse where plants will thrive. To try this season-extending technique first work up the soil for your plot and stretch some black plastic over the area for a couple of weeks. This will help warm the soil and give seeds and transplants an added boost.

After a few weeks under black plastic, the soil will have warmed a few degrees, and you can prepare the bed for planting and transplanting. Once planted, you should install a wooden or metal frame over the bed and cover it with clear polyethylene film. Anchor the film at the base with boards, bricks or soil, but remember that occasionally you will have to remove the poly to tend to the plants and to harvest the crop.

For this reason, it’s best if you don’t permanently attach the plastic to the frame. It will also be necessary to open sections of the covering for ventilation on warm sunny days. You can easily accomplish this by designing the ends of the covering so you can easily open or remove them during warm weather.

For more information on early spring gardening techniques or other gardening topics, contact your County Cooperative Extension Service.

Along with planning your garden, now is the time to get ready for canning. This is a perfect time to contact your County Cooperative Extension Office and have the pressure gauge checked on your pressure cooker.

Every County has an extension office - check it out in the phone book - give them a call (all of them are required to provide this service of checking the pressure gauges) this is to assure that you are getting the proper cook on anything you can.

Don’t have a pressure canner? It is the ONLY way to safely process low acid meats and vegetables for long term storage. Freezers are great, but when the power goes off, you have all your food starting to defrost. Canned goods do not require refrigeration and have a shelf life of many years. Your pressure canner also serves as an excellent sterilizer for turning torn strips of sheet into sterile bandages or to sterilize items for medical proceedures should TSHTF.

Pressure canners can safely turn bacteria laden water into sterile drinking water. No matter how long you boil water it will only get to 212 degrees (at sea level - lower at higher altitudes) and this is NOT enough to sterilize water. A pressure canner can raise that temperature to 240 degrees at 10 psi or 250 degrees at 15 psi. These temperatures are high enough to kill all known disease organisms.

Pressure Canners last for generations. One of the best investments you can make. Just think of all the produce from your garden neatly filling your pantry and ready to use whenever you need. Also it is great for when you make large batches such as spaghetti sauce or chili. Consider it for this year - you will be glad you did.