Fresh-from-the-garden salad

There is NOTHING like a salad of fresh greens.  I've been enjoying them for a week now.

So today was a gorgeous day to work and we have a weekend of impending thunderstorms, so I worked outside for more than 5 hours today.  The garden looks great.  I finally decided the mystery plant is a weed -- if one's definition of weed is "anything which is growing in the wrong place." -- so I pulled it.

Pole Beans

The Giant Caesar lettuce I planted didn't sprout -- perhaps old seed -- so I replanted one square and planted an additional square of it -- I love the taste and texture of it.  The pole beans have sprouted, but I lost two of the cherry tomato plants.  I may just plant 2 more beans on that tower instead.

The surviving cherry tomatoes look great!

Speaking of tomatoes, I have my tomato tower and bed set up.  I need to add a layer of composted cow manure on top of the grass clippings, and I make a well of soil for each plant.  Since I took this picture, I have planted 3 "Hungarian Heart" heirloom tomato plants from Cook's Garden.  I will plant three "Pink Brandywine" plants, and I'm not sure what I'll put on the two remaining poles.




I also planted one blackberry and one raspberry plant.  And the strawberries are looking really good:





I planted a watermelon "Sugar Baby" plant.  It's a small, seedless watermelon.  I'm experimenting with something different with it.  I put up a something for the plant to grow on to and to support the melon.  I used the wire grids from an old compost bin, and lashed it onto a bamboo pole support.  In the background are a number of different types of iris, including Louisiana Bog Iris and flags, in my rain detention bed.

I also got the rest of the lawn mowed today, and  used the grass clippings to mulch around a lot of stuff.  I planted an azalea to replace a butterfly bush that didn't survive.  In fact none of my butterfly bushes made it through the winter -- I have two dwarf bushes I need to replace.

And....just because.....more pictures of the garden:

First Day of Spring --Planting Day!

The last few weeks have been hectic and frustrating.  I managed to get the respiratory garbage that has been going around, to the point that I've spent the last 10 days or so on antibiotics and steroids.  Not my favorite thing to do, as the steroids make me jittery, and also make me crave salty foods.  Fortunately this past week has been Spring Break, and I have taken full advantage of that to sleep, relax, and (I hope) get healthy.

Monday was gorgeous -- in the 70s, but I had absolutely no inclination to do ANYTHING except sit on the couch. Today, it's in the 50s and overcast, but otherwise was a great day to work outside.  So I took the dogs out and hooked them up to the leads so they could run around, and to work I went.

I was out there yesterday to check on things, and guess what!  I have sprouts!  It's the kale I planted back in early February.  No sign of the red romane or the onions yet -- I may have to replant those.

See those tiny dots of green?  Just two little seed leaves.  But they sprouted!

Buoyed by those little bits of green, I got to work with some planting.  I've been reading up on what I intended to plant in the vegetable gardening book I found while cleaning out bookshelves.  According to that book, when planting cruciforms like cauliflower, cabbage and broccoli, one should use a cabbage collar to deter cabbage fly, etc.   The book recommended using carpet padding or something of the like.  Well, I have some left over heavy polar fleece, so I'm going to try that.  I may put a double layer -- I'm going to see how what I put down holds up in the next week or so.  It certainly adds a bit of color.

Inside each square of polar fleece is a cauliflower plant that has been hardening off in the cold frame for the last 10 days.  Along the edge, with plastic bottle cloches, are cucumber plants -- Brown Russians in the picture above.  The lemon cucumbers are in the two squares to the right of the ones in the picture above.  Once it is warm enough to take the cloches off, I'll start training the cucumbers up on the trellis.

I also planted two of each variety of broccoli I started --Waltham and Romanesco.  I have 2-4 more starts of each of them still in the cold frame.  I need to adjust my garden plan now that I've actually planted a few more things, and see what I have to work with.  I may put the rest of the broccoli in the raised bed where the peppers will eventually go, as the peppers won't be ready to plant for a while.

I started some winter buttercrunch lettuce indoors -- I haven't transplanted lettuce seedlings before -- I usually just seed directly.  But I hoped to get a head start on some lettuce, and this is a cold weather variety, so.....we'll see how it goes!

As you can also see, I've been moving the hoops around.  Still not sure how that will evolve.

After I planted everything, I covered it with the garden fabric to give it a bit of protection as the nights are still a bit chilly.

Winter Sowing Jugs Update:

I am thrilled to report the first evidence of seeds sprouting in my winter sowing jugs!  A few seedlings have begun to pop in a couple of the jugs:

There are a myriad of other signs a spring all over the yard -- daylilies are beginning to send up fans, and the daffodils have poked up their leaves.  A few of the tulip leaves have a emerged, as well, and the Autumn Joy sedum has emerged from its winter hibernation.  That means I have a lot of winter dead to get trimming!

Spring Is Coming!

It is FINALLY warming up enough that gardening and yard work is not far behind.  The snow has melted, and the rain storm we had Monday washed away the cold weather.  It also revealed all the dog .... remains...that I need to clean up once the ground dries out a bit.  Right now, it feels like I'm walking on a sponge every time I walk in the yard.

I was able to seed the ditch which runs along the County Blacktop.  The county road crew came in November, and dredged out our ditch.  Too late in the season to seed it then.  I decided to seed it in white Dutch clover rather than grass because the sides of it are now a bit steep for mowing regularly.  I also seeded some areas of the side yard that see a lot of foot traffic and the clover will hold up better to that.

I also moved a batch of seedlings out to the cold frame.  I put out the cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and some winter buttercrunch lettuce to harden them off.

I'm hoping to be able to plant them in the raised bed next Monday or Tuesday.

Still inside are bell peppers, hot peppers, some flowers, and tomatoes.

I brought in a tray of various flower seeds that had been  chilling out in the cold frame.  They are now sitting on the warming tray so I'm hoping they will sprout soon. I'm also hoping that by next week I'll start to see some signs that the seeds I sowed in jugs in January are sprouting. I have galliarda, several different kinds of sunflowers, African daisies, columbine, flax, and I don't know what all else.  :-)

I hope I'll more to report next week.  It's Spring Break, and the weather is supposed to be gorgeous!

March Came In Like a Lion.....

.....is it really possible that Spring Break is only two weeks away?!?!  It seemed much farther away than that as we moved 7 inches of snow off our driveway, and piled it on the remains of the 5 inches that fell last week, and still hadn't melted.

The garden is still buried, just under even more snow.  I had worried that we weren't having a wet enough winter, but I suspect we will go into spring with plenty of moisture.

My winter sowing jugs are buried, too, but I suspect they enjoy that lovely blanket of snow providing a thermal layer.  I can't wait till I see some evidence the seeds are sprouting.  

So.....time for more indoor stuff!  I repotted many of the seedlings I started inside, and thought I'd put away the germinator.  The one down side of my germinator is that it is designed to hold a big tray of seedlings -- 50+ seedlings.  But since things don't germinate at the same rate, I always ended up having to shift stuff around.....and it just seemed inefficient.  I discovered what I think is a better way by repurposing something which had been sitting around the house for years, unused.

For Lent this year, the small group ministry coordinator arranged a project called 40 Bags in 40 Days. Not a new concept, so if you Google it, you'll find lots of similar projects and suggestions all over the interweb.  In a nutshell, the goal is to declutter one's life by doing one thing each day of Lent (with Sundays off).  Each day, the goal is to get one bag of stuff out of one's living space.  That can include trash, recycling, things to donate, things to sell --- anything.  We gave a Facebook page for the group, and we post pictures and updates every day of how we're doing.

During one of my purging and tidying efforts in the kitchen I found clear plastic cups, and aluminum foil loaf pans with clear plastic lids.  HMMMM....the plastic cups were PERFECT to put the cucumber seedlings in -- nice and deep for both a good root system, and to add soil on the top to keep them from having spindly stems.

The loaf pans were the perfect replacement for the tray in the germinator-- each loaf pan holds 8 of the larger seed starting pellet things which expand when you add hot water.  The lid makes a perfect mini-green house, and 8 is about the right number of seedlings I need of most varieties.  Once one pan is ready to move from the germinator to just being under the grow light, I can start something else if I want.

While I was doing all that, I rearranged my seed starting station, and moved things around so I can fit two trays under the grow light. I potted seedlings, and after a couple days for transplant shock, the cauliflower and broccoli look MUCH happier with their larger root space.

I also found a fantastic book on vegetable gardening on the bookshelf that I didn't even know I had!  I've been thumbing through it, and will look at it in more depth as I'm revising the planting schedule.

Speaking of, I gave up even looking at my original planting schedule.  LOL -- I oh, so, optimistically really thought I'd have stuff in the ground by now!  I'm just hoping that by Spring Break in two weeks, the weather will be hospitable enough that I can at least plant out the cauliflower, broccoli, and some spring lettuce.  I also hope the seeds that I already planted actually sprout!  Once I DO get something in the ground, I'll adjust the schedule.  I guess I better dig out my industrial strength eraser, and/or the White-Out!

I can tell I'm ready for some green and growing things outside -- one of my "bags" for Lent that I'm working on getting out of the house is a bag of odds and ends of yarn, and I'm knitting hats with it.  Right now everything I'm drawn to is in shades of green!  This is the Northern Lights hat from the original Homespun Handknits book.  The original color ways was in the shades of the Northern Lights (which you might have already guessed from the name), but I like it better in shades/tones of one colorway.  I'm really liking how this one is turning out:

Garden Cover Salvage Job

Those strong winds last night came in with a cold front.  High of 19 degrees this afternoon, which means everything is frozen solid again.  But I was able to come home a bit early this afternoon, and the sun was shining, so I bundled up and went out to salvage the garden cover and change out the hoops.

Each of the tall hoops was comprised of two smaller segments with connectors.  I pulled out the segment that was the more mangled and bent from the wind, stashed the connectors in a container, and installed the remaining segment as a low hoop.  The hoops are pretty low because the bed is 4 feet across.

I suppose I could also change this up in the future, and do two hoops in sequence, each covering two feet of the bed, if I need a bit more height.  Something like this:

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To make my life easier, I took the two sections of heavy garden fabric inside, and used my sewing machine to seam them together.  It was much easier to drape the fabric over the lower-height hoops (duh), and I used the binder clips again to hold them on the hoops.

I had enough fabric to go part-way up the cucumber trellis, so I should be able to protect the young cuke plants through the vulnerable period fairly easily, once I plant them [which will not be for at least another week or two, I suspect.  I also have a huge swath of lighter weight protective fabric, once I don't need the warmth of the heavier fabric.

I should also note that the cucumber trellis was solid as a rock, and didn't even budge in the high winds.  It is actually attached to the end board on the frame, and the supports are sunk over a foot into the ground.  Once the ground warms up and is wetter and looser, I may need to add some additional supports, but I'm hoping not.

I also removed all the water tube cloches, which are frozen solid again (they are MUCH easier to move when then are frozen, by the way).  Last week, in a fit of optimism and in the spirit of experimentation, I actually planted one of the cauliflower seedlings (1 small true leaf), just to see what would happen.  I hadn't really looked at the forecast for the week, but....

It APPEARS the seedling survived, and after I removed the frozen water tube cloche, I got some hot water and warmed up the soil around it enough to install a plastic bottle cloche instead.

This weekend, I'm headed down to my parents' home in Southern Illinois.  They are far enough south they are usually 2-3 weeks ahead of us in spring, and 2-3 weeks later in the fall/winter.  My dad's birthday was yesterday, and I bought him an elevated raised bed on caster wheels so they can grow some lettuce and whatever else they want.  Dad has a MASSIVE fern bed, but at 78 and with back problems, it's getting harder for him to get down on his knees to work the soil.  Dad worked all though high school and college at a greenhouse, and I know he loves gardening.  I'm hoping this makes it a bit easier for him.  I'm taking a variety of seeds with me, some low hoops, some garden fabric, and anything else I can think of.  I want to put a trellis in it too so they can have cucumbers.  I'll try to remember to take pictures.

Speaking of cucumbers, one of our favorite varieties is Brown Russian . A Ukranian heirloom variety, It has been one of the most reliable varieties for us, with a high germination rate and bumper crops.  The flavor is fantastic, and it is one of the few varieties that doesn't make me burp.  I have seeds from the 2012 growing season, and I accidentally left them in the garage over the winter.  I found the seed packet, brought it inside, and thought, what the heck!  I'll try starting some in the germinator.  Within 4 days, the seeds had germinated, producing strong and hearty seedlings.  So if like cucumbers, check out Brown Russian.  The only place I've ever seen it is on The Cook's Garden website, a place I've ordered a number of things from, and always been satisfied.

That's all for now!