Early planting 2015

After the coldest winter (and latest cold) in decades, we're now having a week of 80 degree temperatures in early May. I'm half tempted to go ahead and plant the tomatoes and peppers a good three weeks ahead of schedule, but it's probably not a good idea. I did throw some bean and zucchini seeds into the garden, figuring it would be ideal germination weather.

Also planted the shallot seeds (Conservor, 110 days to harvest, then sun cure for a week before removing tops; 250 seeds!) and Sugar Ann snap peas (less than 60 days to harvest). Weeded the strawberry bed (no idea what variety; they were a gift from my tenants), and noticed the first bloom.

The Crimson Red rhubarb is doing nicely. (Shhhhh, pretend I didn't say that. I'm afraid of jinxing them, given the bad luck I usually have with rhubarb.) And the asparagus is getting out of control. Must harvest it tomorrow when my co-gardeners will be home to eat it for dinner.

I need to make a list of the plants to get at the local nursery, and look up what I spent on stuff from Johnny's. Will be getting manure and straw later this week. What a glamorous life I lead!

Spring? Please?

After a brutal winter (that isn't over yet), I'm starting to think that maybe, just maybe there will in fact be a planting season this year. Just got a notice from a plant supplier that rhubarb roots are on the way, even though the ground is too frozen to dig a hole and likely will be for another ten days to two weeks.

The one encouraging note: the new variety of garlic (Red Russian) that I planted this past fall has sprouted (5 plants, out of what I thought I recalled as 6 cloves, but I may have remembered wrong, and even if we lost one, it's hardly surprising given the intense winter) and they're a good 3" tall. In contrast, our regular variety, German Extra Hardy, hasn't sprouted yet.

ETA: I just found my planting notes: 68 German Extra Hardy from full-sized heads, 86 German Extra Hardy from 2-clove heads (wild plants) and 6 Red Russian.

Drought to rain

First, it was so dry that about half of our onion plants died.

Now, we've had so much water that the water table is flooded, and there's about 4" of standing water in the garden. Most of it is in the pathways and the beds are raised enough to be dry on the surface (don't know about where the plant roots are), but one corner of the onion & squash bed is visibly under water. I may need to re-seed (again) the squash, which had JUST sprouted.

Purple asparagus!

We're trying a new variety of asparagus -- purple passion. The first sprouts are just coming up.

We had a hard freeze two nights ago. I brought in one semi-hardy plant from my deck but forgot I'd put the rosemary out in the garden. Fortunately, it survived. So did the sugar-snap peas (not so surprising) and radishes and dill and onions and garlic. The tatsoi is almost ready for harvest and is absolutely loving the cool, wet weather. (That may be our new shorthand for cool and wet: "Will the tatsoi weather ever improve?")

The new (to us) variety of garlic isn't looking all that great. They're tremendously uneven, with a few really pitiful patches in the row. Normally, I'd attribute it to an area of less fertile soil, but the old (to us) variety is growing more uniformly in a parallel row just a few inches away, which makes me wonder if the patches of anemic plants all grew from the cloves of a single head, and the variety just has more than typically uneven vigor from plant to plant, head to head. If that's true, I wouldn't recommend the variety for the basic crop, but it does offer extra-early harvest, so it may be worth putting up with the uneven growth in a crop that's only intended to provide for a short period when the prior year's harvest is completely gone and it's too early for the current year's main crop.

Behinder

There's a saying attributed to the Amish: "the faster I work, the behinder I get."

I haven't been working particularly fast, but I'm definitely getting behinder fast. We lost most of March and April to rains and floods, and we're still mired in what seems to be a perpetual rainy season. The garlic, which I thought might drown, seems to be thriving. The red onions -- all 200 or so of them -- were planted a few weeks ago. The peas have sprouted, and so have butternut squash from the compost pile. The asparagus is growing faster than we can eat it.

I just noticed yesterday that we have a few billion self-seeded dill plants. They've overflowed the whiskey barrel where we grew them last year, and have sprouted all around that barrel and in an adjoining one too.

I'm really late with the early crops and the indoor-seeded crops. I just started basil plants a couple days ago, and I still haven't started any lettuce. We had temperatures nearing 90 degrees the other day, which made me fear that I'd missed any conceivable window of opportunity for the cool-weather crops. I half expected the tatsoi to start bolting. Today, however, is barely into the 50s, if that, so if the thunderstorms ever stop, I'll get some lettuce seeds into the deck planters in the next couple days.

The lilacs have bloomed already, and the peonies are about to. The tree pollen is overwhelming.

Next week, we'll be getting nightshade-family plants from the local nursery. It's too early to plant the tomatoes and peppers, but I don't want to risk finding that the preferred varieties are sold out. I'm behinder enough without that happening!

A little dryer

We've just had three fifty-year rainfalls in about a two-week period (and I sorta' think the third one was a hundred-year rainfall), with flooding all around us.

The garden dried out remarkably quickly, although the ground is still a bit squishy and I step carefully, for fear of sinking up to my neck.

The garlic was under water for about five days, but seems to be okay. I swear, the green tops continued to grow even during the flood.

Daffodils are in bloom, forsythia is at peak, and the chives (that I thought I might have transplanted a wee bit too early) are thriving.

Under water

The garlic is under water for the second time in about a week.

The garden slopes a bit (from left to right in the picture), so there's a big puddle in what is usually the main path into the garden. There are canals along the perpendicular paths, leading to the puddle.

Over the winter, the ground settled where the garlic is planted, so those two rows are canals now too. The early garlic is visible, looking a bit like rice plants, along the far edge of one canal. The regular variety is shorter at the moment, and entirely submerged.

Tomorrow's forecast calls for more rain. And snow.

Another weather rant

The humid weather is making me cranky, even as it makes the garden explode with goodness.

What's really irritating me today? Forecast teasers on television.

You know what I mean -- the meteorologist does a ten-second spot that says "the weather has been bad/good/whatever recently, but will it be better tomorrow? Stay tuned for my forecast after this show, and I'll tell you."

No. No, no, no.

Coyness does not suit you. Either tell me now, or don't say anything. If I want to know the answer right now, I can just go online and find the answer. If I don't want to know, well, then I've got no incentive to stay tuned, so all you've done is irritate me. I'm cranky enough already.

And don't get me started on the way that some newscasts now offer a mini-forecast during the evening news, which is actually a retrospective: it was sunny/rainy/whatever today. I KNOW that. I want to know whether I need an umbrella tomorrow, or whether I should wear a sweater instead of a tank top. That part of the forecast comes much later in the show, trying to make me stick around for the whole thing. That might have worked before the internet, but now I don't need to stick around and listen to news I don't care about. I just go online.

On the other hand, if the ten-second spot was a useful announcement like, "It's going to be hot/cold/dry/wet/whatever tomorrow. Stay tuned for the details," I might actually stay tuned. And not be so cranky.

It's raining snails

Yesterday, I was pruning some of the brambles encroaching on the garden, and started to hear the pitter-pat of heavy rain hitting the landscaping fabric at my feet. Except it wasn't water: it was snails!

Sun (a little)

While I wasn't looking (because the rain kept me indoors), the garden grew.

In no particular order, today I found a 2" banana pepper that's already set (while many more pepper plants are flowering, both bananas and Ace); yellow squash on the verge of blooming; and grape tomatoes that have set. The swiss chard is starting to look good too, while the basil is struggling in the cool dampness.

For a while, the onions were threatening to be very large scallions. It's more than time for them to have started bulbing, and as of a few days ago, they looked like leeks (except they were red). We'd have found a use for them anyway, but I was pleased to notice a definite trend toward globe-shaped root tops. I still think they're going to be late, but they could turn out hugely magnificent with all this rain.

We've harvested about a quart of sugarsnap peas so far, most of them eaten before they leave the garden. Many of the pods are extra-long and empty of peas, though, more like snow pea pods. I'm attributing it to the rain, which may be causing the pods to grow too quickly, sort of the same way sudden, excessive rain leads to cracking tomatoes.

Rain and rabbits

There hasn't been anything to blog about, because all we've got in the garden these days is rain and rabbits.

I definitely can't do anything about the rain, and the rabbits,well, the rain is limiting me there too.

The organic (and non-lethal) ways of dealing with rabbits basically consist of sprinkling the edible plants with stuff that the rabbits won't want more than a single nibble of, like hot pepper, or surrounding the plants with scary stuff, like blood meal. Except for these things to work, the distastesful stuff needs to stay on the leaves or on the surface of the ground, and not be washed away in the chronic, daily downpours.

So -- rain and rabbits. All I can say is that they're a lesson in recovering the ability to accept the things that can't be changed.

Nothin' but rain

The chilly spring continues, and now it's damp too.

Bean seeds are busy sprouting (weeds too, most likely), lettuces are thriving and onions are fattening.

The gardeners, however, aren't doing much in the mud. I have a feeling we'll be playing catch-up once the sun returns.

More weather

We had a frost warning last night, but, while it was definitely chilly, there was no actual frost.

Memorial Day is early this year (25th), but planting weather is arriving late. With night temperatures predicted to be in the 40s and 50s this week, I'm reluctant to put the tomatoes out yet, even though the holiday weekend is the traditional planting time for them.

In the garden, weather trumps tradition.

Weather

When did "weather" become synonymous with "bad weather"?

Forecasters now say things like, "Don't get used to the mild temperatures; we've got some weather coming." By which they mean "bad weather." Not just a change, but a negative change. No one ever says, "It's been tough with sub-zero temperatures lately, but don't worry -- there's some weather coming."

The thing is, any gardener knows -- we've ALWAYS got weather coming. Sometimes it's plant-friendly weather, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's people-friendly weather, sometimes it's not. But it's always weather, and it's always here and it's always coming.

The last few days' weather has been rainy and chilly. Not people-friendly weather, but it's just what the garden needs right now.

Good or bad, though, it's always weather, and it's always on a gardener's mind.