Take a gamble, plant a few thing way before you should

I think every gardener should be a garden gambler, plant early gardens and pray.

Don't be afraid to be a garden gambler and plant at least a small portion of your garden early if you have the space to play with. Plants like broccoli, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage, kohlrabi, cilantro, chives and parsley are just a few of the plants you can put out and take a chance on catching a cold night or two.

Farmers always say agriculture is a gamble. Like farmers, we gardeners don't control the weather. If you are a gambler and have a few more plants than you need, put a small number out well before the last freeze date for your area. Gamble, but don't be gambler with a problem – you succeed one year so the next you put everything out: Do that and you have a gambling addiction.

More than 50 percent of the time you will beat the odds and get the few plants you put out to grow. I was a real gambler this year. I put out a few plants when the NOAA weather chart said I had a 90 percent chance of still having a hard freeze. Still, despite the temps last night getting into the mid twenties, the only thing I lost were carrots I transplanted for bunching.

Unlike farmers who can't cover a huge field with newspaper for plastic tarps to protect plants from the cold, gardeners can. The simple act of covering plants will sometime save delicate ones that emerge before the last frost date. Often potatoes will come up early but will die if hit by a late frost.

If you plant early, you are a gambler, but don't cry if you lose your bets.

The 10-minute garden takes shape in two sessions

The ten minute garden continues to be very little work for an amazing amount of space. On two days within the same week I used a pitch fork to break up the soil and pile it into a heap in a four by four foot square bed. Make no mistake, I still have my huge garden, but I just want to see how much a person can do with as little as a 10 minute commitment.

Looking at how much I could do in just 10 minutes, I decided my bed would be a standard 4x8 foot bed and I would use the fork on another day to expand it. Voila! I have a remarkable amount of space with just two 10-minute days – that even surprised me at how little time I had spent.

In all fairness, this requires some plot of dirt that was already bare. Anyone starting with a grassy spot would have had to use 10 minutes to put newspapers down and pour bags of top soil over them to kill the grass, or the previous fall weigh down a tarp or something to kill the grass where the garden could be approached and forked up in two 10 minute periods.

Still, it proves a substantial space can be tilled on a couple mild march days, and the soil heaped up in the middle of a bed. The heaping is very important. It does what farmers do in fields with what is called a field cultivator. The surface area of the soil is raised and the amount of surface area is increased – both create good drying conditions in the spring when not all days are warm enough to dry out flat ground enough to plant.

The sun and spring winds will dry the mound of dirt faster and later it can be shaped into a bed and planted.