My wife and I both enjoy gardening during the months that we can do that. But, gardening in snow country is not easy. Your growing season is not very long compared to more temperature friendly environments.
One of the best ways for us to do that is to use “raised beds”. You can certainly grow directly in the ground, but the ground stays frozen for so long in the Spring, it is difficult to get an early start on the growing season. So, we use raised beds, typically 4×8 feet in size.
I don’t know about other regions, but we have to contend with quite a bit of hail. For that reason, we have covered some of our raised beds with plastic or row cover cloth at times. We also use “hail cloth” which is very helpful. This extends the growing season, but also protects the plants to a certain extent.
Recently, we went on a tour of greenhouses our garden club sponsored (I do their website). Carol and I got some ideas about building a simple greenhouse from this tour. We will start it in early Spring next year. Here is a page of the greenhouses we saw. Definitely some work, but worth it eventually for growing veggies over a period of years.
Doug
