Big Chill in the Garden of Good and Evil

Note: Pictures to follow... wanted to get this written while I was thinking about it, since I'm behind on my posting.

Mixed movie references aside, it's been an interesting couple of weeks trying to get the garden going.  We're using a technique called "Square Foot Gardening" which is basically tightly packed containers.  We've spent several weeks building our containers and had such a mild March that we decided to go ahead and transplant our seedlings, as well as plant some store-bought plants.

To do this, we had to get our final (for this season anyway) garden box built.  In a whirlwind weekend, we built the garden box, planted the plants, transplanted the seedlings, and then sat back and admired our handy work.  Shortly after, we learned that mother nature hates us.

Little did we know, the danger of killing frost was not quite so gone as we were hoping.  We finished up our work on Sunday, and then learned that we were supposed to get a hard freeze on Sunday night... and Monday night... and Tuesday night... AND Wednesday night.  Sigh.

So, off to the interwebz we did run, to figure out what we could do about it.  In the end, we decided to try to cover the boxes with canvas, and then plastic outside of the canvas.  The one box that had plants to big to do this, we decided to cover with a heavy tarp, and cover the seedlings within with styrofoam cups.

We did this Sunday, and have been doing the cover-uncover shuffle ever since.  Our seedlings just may survive (remember, they had the added protection of insulating styrofoam) but the larger plants look like they're done for.  We're hoping they'll make a miraculous recovery, but the odds don't look good.

Oh well... at least by planting ridiculously early, we left ourselves plenty of time to re-plant.  :)  Everything I've read says getting good at gardening is as much about time as anything else, so we're just going to chalk this one up to a learning experience.  Hopefully, we'll still get plenty of fresh produce from containers, but I guess time will tell.