Even though it’s only the first week of March, gardeners across the state are seeing plants of all varieties sprouting. Who better to explain this odd gardening season than our resident Minnesota master gardener, Meg Cowden.

Cowden talked with Minnesota Now host Cathy Wurzer.

The following is a transcription of the audio heard using the player above, lightly edited for clarity

Fruit tree buds are swelling out there. I mean, that’s like two months early.

They don’t start to swell usually until early April. These kinds of things are out of our control. Perennials are responding to the temperatures that are obviously warmer and the end the daylight. So things are gonna start waking up, but the good thing is that if we moderate a little and don’t go totally crazy, these trees might hold steady.

They have started responding, but if our temperatures come back even a little bit, they’ll hold. My soil is still freezing. I mean, I checked it this morning, and like, my garlic isn’t up, although I know it’s up in the city for a lot of gardeners.

So it partly depends on your site. But yes, we might have no fruit this year, that could be a reality. I thought about that. If we get a really hard freeze in April — fruit trees can take some frost, you'd be surprised like, depending on the stage of the buds to temperatures, even down to 20 isn’t going to be 100 percent kill, it might not even be a 50 percent kill.

So that’s why I’m saying we have to find a way to kind of take each week as it comes and really see how the season unfolds. I don’t consider it a wash by any means.

What should we do? Are these poor little perennials toasted this point?

If temperatures are gonna get really cold, you could cover them. I’m letting things ride. I’m more curious, what’s going to happen to them? Might some of them die? I don’t think so. And like, even if we had buds that have like, leaved out a little, those buds might die, but the plant is still alive and the plant has resources to push out new leaves.

So even if you get a little bit of leaf damage, I mean, we’d have to be going into like the teens or single digits, I think for things that have leaved out already to really have damage that’s going to make us all really fret. I tend to think we’re going to be okay.

I don’t think there’s going to be a lot more snow because we have all this ground cover and now we’ve got the sun and the sun’s warming the ground, it’s the opposite of last winter. Last winter I was not expecting an early spring because of so much snow cover. I think we’re hitting that tipping point where it’s going to be hard to get snow.

The cold hardy crops, could you maybe experiment and take advantage of this early spring?

This is an emphatic yes. We have a new cold frame in our garden that my husband built last year and I started sowing things in it about four weeks ago. And you know, the sun doesn’t come back until February, so things aren’t really growing until later in February. But they germinated in about three weeks, and that was kind of my optimal ideal time I’d like to have seen them germinate. So I’ve got arugula that has germinated, head lettuce that germinated and radishes that have germinated.

Now, you’d want to check your soil temperatures. I’m a big believer in using your soil temperatures. You want your soils about an inch below to be at least 45 degrees, I use a meat thermometer, nothing fancy. Don’t buy an extra gadget, you don’t need it. But let your soil temperatures be your guide.

I also have sowed some onions outside under one of my low tunnels, but I also sowed some just in a garden bed. So I want to see when each of those will germinate. This is a great opportunity. We have an opportunity here to kind of rethink how we’re going to garden and I encourage people to reach for spinach, arugula, kohlrabi and cabbages could maybe work and yes, carrots, maybe like a little warmer peas, mustard greens, salad, turnips, radishes — all kinds of great things.

Some of those things you don’t really see in the grocery store, right? Maybe they don’t travel as well or they’re as popular. So there’s a great opportunity to kind of explore your palate and play with a little patch of earth right now.

You wouldn’t recommend doing some cleaning early spring cleaning in the garden?

I heard a bee, barely saw it. I saw a few insects over the weekend. It’s the temperatures, they’re coming out of dormancy. I know. it makes me a little worried, like what the heck are they going to eat? I don’t know. Even though we’re in early spring, I would still wait until sometime in April to do that. I typically don’t cut mine down until sometime in May.