Although we have had a wet year (remember, I'm in the high desert) the moisture meter said my garlic rows were on the dry side and so now they've had a drink with the hose. Most of the plants are 4-5 inches high now. They got a jump start on spring because we have had a mild winter. Most years at this time they would just be coming up. Does this mean I will have a good crop since they will have more time to grow before the plants start to die back in July? I sure hope so.
My hubby was off with a buddy doing guy things and the weather was good so I've had a productive day outside. Finally! The grapes are pruned, garlic is all watered and so are the remaining few asparagus we planted 20 or so years ago. They showed more signs of life after the big tree was cut back to a shaggy looking stump. It was taking a lot of water! The tree guy said a tree that size drinks 200 gallons a day! Yikes! I checked all of the rhubarb locations, all showing signs of life. A couple are looking downright vigorous! Stray (missed) garlic from last year and probably before is popping up and so I dug those up and will give some to my friend who loves garlic in any shape or form. I also dug out a few more thistles. And I potted up those bare root plants that have been sitting in their little tubes waiting for a home. They have a temporary one at least. I dumped almost 4 10th of an inch of water out of the rain gauge, so that makes almost 6 tenths since I hung it up a week ago.
One of the peony plants has new shoots about 4 inches high! I looked around in the yard and found new growth on a few more of them. Some get more sun than others so the peony blooming season will be longer than what just one plant would give me. The old fashioned poppies I transplanted a few weeks ago are awake and growing. While they don't exactly look like they think nothing happened, they are alive, not wilted, and if I am lucky they might bloom this year. Lots of daffodils are in bloom and a whole lot more will bloom soon. Most of mine came from a bin of bulbs that were priced at 5 cents each. That was at least 25 years ago. I spent quite a bit of time selecting bulbs that still felt firm. They were planted in groups of 5, all in one flower bed. I have moved a lot of the extra bulbs that developed and some have naturalized.
Tulips have also moved themselves around and multiplied Not only have small groups become larger groups but the bees or wind has crossed different colors and some have popped up in the grass and weeds we mow and jokingly call a lawn. Another plant that has naturalized all over the yard is allium, the purple kind that make a flower of golf ball to tennis ball size. I need to dig a lot of the bulbs out and send them on a trip to the garbage dump. Last year I collected the flowers before they made seeds but I suspect I have decades worth of seeds and tiny bulbs in the ground. I even noticed a healthy streak of them growing in the pasture! I can't say I wasn't warned that they were invasive, I just didn't realize HOW invasive! Yikes! I now realize it was a mistake to bring home any of them!
These are potatoes I bought several weeks ago, ordinary grocery store potatoes and they think it is spring. I will select a few to plant and we will eat the rest. Those I select will be put in the basement near a window so the sprouts won't become long before I want to plant them in the garden about the middle of May. Our last frost date is about June 1 and I don't want to have to cover tender sprouts that pop out of the ground too soon. Something I want to try this year is to plant whole potatoes but with only one sprout each. I've read that the result is larger potatoes. Supposedly the energy from a whole tuber goes into a single stem. My method in the past was to cut the tuber into pieces and let everything grow. Lots of stems and small potatoes was the result. What have I got to loose?
Some rhubarb has begun showing red nubs above the dead grass and leaf mulch that nature provided. I should prune the grapes right away, and get my peas planted soon. Birds are collecting dry grass, weeds and twigs. It's apparently spring enough for some of them. And on those nice days when I wasn't using the wood stove two starlings decided the chimney was a good place to nest. I heard the familiar scratching and flapping noises when they got into the chimney and couldn't get out. I found them lying dead in the fire box when I did need to build a fire. In the past I have attempted to rescue them but choose not to have sooty birds flying around in the house colliding with walls and windows while the door was standing wide open. Nope, they made a dumb and fatal decision. Nature is sometimes quite unforgiving. By the time the birds make it into the fire box they have inhaled a lethal dose of soot and probably don't survive for long anyway.
After a few unseasonably warm, dry and sunny days we've had a lot of wind, some rain, some snow. It's hard to get anything done outside.
So what will I do today? Snow and rain are in the forecast but if I work quickly I might start pruning the grapes.
What's neglected? Well, just about everything! It would be nice to have one clean flower bed and I am working toward that. One day last week I raked a lot of dead weeds and old iris leaves, and filled the wheelbarrow. And then got the hand pruners and started trimming a big lilac. Soon I needed the long handled loppers, and finally a saw! It was planted too close to the greenhouse so I started on that side and am now trying to even it up which of course means that all of the sides need attention. We are not far enough into spring for it to have come out of dormancy. Now I have a half pruned bush and a big pile of sticks to haul to the burn pile along with that wheelbarrow full and the pile that will fill the wheelbarrow again, maybe twice. This bed has been weedy for so long I don't know what desirable plants may still be alive in it. The weeds, well, they are already awake.
I haven't made any more progress on the big bed where I want to put down the landscape cloth. It measures about 55 by 25 feet so is going to take quite a while. And there are plants that need to be moved. To where? Another overgrown, neglected spot!
It's packrat trapping season! I caught a big one and am hoping to find another when I check the trap today. I think they have families all winter and start roaming when the weather gets warm. Last year I caught a lot of them and lost count. Probably at least 10. About half of them were not fully grown. It's safe to say I prevented several future families. Mice can have 8-10 or more babies per litter so I think rats probably could, too. And probably 2 or more litters every year.
Yesterday when I was in the vegie garden eliminating small baby thistles that could grow into monsters eventually and produce thousands of seeds, I decided what to plant in an odd little corner. The past two years it's had onions, before that it was potatoes, before that it was squash. This year it is going to be edible pod peas. Lots of bang for the buck and they don't need shelling. They might be Oregon Sugar Pod. They are picked when the peas in the pod are about half the size of the shelling kind. I switched from growing shelling peas to these because it galled me to throw away more volume than we kept to eat.
The salad patch in the greenhouse is still going strong and producing more salad than we can eat. I want to be sure to plant some romaine next time because I like to have more crunch in my salad. The present stand has several varieties of leaf lettuce, all tender and soft. Sometimes I add spinach, kale or beet greens to the salads but I grew those primarily for cooking.
This morning I made a few no cost plant labels. I cut the rim and bottom off a quart size yogurt carton, cut the side walls into strips (top to bottom) and cut a point on one end. Each one is 4 1/2 to 5 inches long and about half an inch wide. I can write on the plain side with a permanent marker and poke it into the ground. One carton made 20 labels. They could also be stapled to a stick if a taller marker is needed. Other homemade, no cost things I make include toilet tissue tube pots and newspaper pots. Free is a very good price!
The first group of daffodils opened this morning. There are about 10 open already and half a dozen left to open in that group. It's nice to have that patch of sunshine with their little flower heads bobbing gently in the breeze!
This is day 4 of a welcome change in the weather. We have had sun, gentle breezes and warm temperatures! Another of about the same is forecast for tomorrow before we get a cool down. Hopefully not too far down. The last two nights have been without frost. I think I will check the forecast before I hang the rain gauge back outside.
Today I used a potato hook to clean between the garlic rows. The weeds there are two or 3 inches high. I left them to bake in the sun. In a couple of days (after those are dead) I will crawl along the rows and use the little scuffle hoe to clean between the plants. Gopher damage appears to be minimal 
There was only one gap where about 20 plants are missing. That's 20 out of about 1,500. Minimal at this time. And it could be that I lost track of where I was planting and put nothing there. Along the fence I found some healthy thistle plants so I need to take a shovel with me and eliminate those. Scottish (or Scotch) thistles are aggressive, mean and can grow to resemble small trees. I have been doing some thistle removal in the past few days, chopping down to two or three inches below ground level and removing the rosette and part of the taproot, leaving them upside down on the ground.
This past weekend we had some of our family come to stay so we put them to work. The fruit trees have been pruned! I hauled the branches to the burn pile. We had taken advantage of calm weather a day before they came and burned the pile but it didn't all burn and now it is as big as it was before!
Today I found a little clump of miniature daffodils in bloom. They are the first ones. And the old regular sized yellow ones are coming along soon. I saw two blooms that tried to open today so they should make it tomorrow. We have crocus in bloom and weeds coming up everywhere! Where do I start? My big perennial bed project has not had much attention.
You name it, it's happened this week! Rain, hail, snow, sun, all arrived with wind. It's hard to get any outside work done while being chilled to the bone and having my hat blown off! Several days ago I cleaned the flower bed just below the greenhouse. About 20 years ago I had planted a Korean lilac and had never trimmed it or removed extra stems that all came up within about a 12 inch area next to the original trunk. Some of those extras had grown to the point where I couldn't tell which stem was the original. What a job to thin it all out and remove about half of them! I know I have sacrificed about half the blooms but by next year it should look normal again, or at least closer to what normal is. I will try to remember to remove additional sprouts this fall. The blooms on that bush are much more fragrant than my old ordinary lilacs.
I raked the old dead iris leaves, salvia and several others into piles and got them carted down the hill to the burn pile along with half of that lilac. The mess stayed in place for 2-3 days while the wind howled and brought snow and rain with it. And then one day with less wind it all got moved. Some day before we have cattle in the pasture again that ever growing pile needs to be burned because if it isn't the cows will scratch, rub, paw and scatter it all. At present it is about the size of a Volkswagen beetle. Meanwhile the pile grows and the wind keeps blowing, preventing any burning. Grass along the irrigation ditches also needs to be burned within the next month, before the water starts flowing.
We keep seeing and hearing our owls. They should be nesting soon to have 30 days for incubating eggs, 30 days for raising chicks until they are old enough to fledge about June 1. They are on about the same schedule as the bald eagles. On a recent trip past the eagle's nest about 20 miles from here we saw a white head sticking up out of the nest so it looks like they have started the cycle. The nest is high in a tree and across a field from our vantage point on the road so we can't see much.
