LysmachiaMoon's blog: Revving up

I've been very lax about writing in this journal lately. I think it's because lately my gardening has been "scattered." I get up with firm intentions to do this, that, t'other thing. I slurp down my coffee, get on my workies, head out and then "Oh look, that clematis needs tied up." "I really ought to clean out the gutters on the garden shed." And while I'm here, I'll turn out the shed and give it a much needed spring clean... And thus and so forth.

So, I'm getting a lot done but for the life of me I can't remember most of what that was.

I do know that I got my first potatoes into the veg. My spinach is coming up nicely. Parsnips are up and growing. No sign of those dratted "pelletized" carrot seeds, so I raked over the bed and replanted it with red beet seeds. Put in another bed of carrot seeds, the regular kind. I think I'll try an experiment with the remaining pelletized seeds: I think I'll soak them over night in warm water and THEN plant them.

The experiment to start beets indoors and then transplant them out is not very successful. The transplants are barely hanging on. I think the problem is my seed starting mix. When I popped out the "plugs" of beet seedlings, the plug soil fell apart and it was very difficult to get those fine tiny roots into the garden soil. I'm going to try this again, but next time I'm going to try using newspaper pots and planting the whole thing, without disturbing the roots. I still think it's a valid idea, but I need to tweak the execution.

I'm holding off planting out the brassicas because our weather has been so wildly variable. We got to 87F the other day (way too hot to set out seedlings); tonight it's going down to 33F (too cold). I've got the brassicas in the greenhouse and they are doing ok there, so I think I'll just wait for another week. I'm going to take a chance on planting my bean seeds this week, after the freeze passes. The tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and peppers are HUGE; I've got them on chairs in the dining room, facing the patio doors. I'm hoping to move them into the greenhouse next week, again, weather permitting.

Trying another experiment. I tend to accumulate a lot of those sort of plastic sacks that chicken feed and cat food come in. They say right on them that they are not waterproof. We try to use them as garbage bags, but they don't fit too well into the kitchen garbage can and they look awful. So I thought I'd try using them as "Grow Bags." First, I turned down the tops into "cuffs" that helped keep the bags open and stable. Then, I half-way filled up 4 bags with homemade compost, set them in the greenhouse and planted potatoes in them. The spuds are up and growing! I plan to keep adding compost to the bags as the plants grow (like hilling them up if they were in the garden). Once the weather is a bit warmer, I'll move the bags out of the greenhouse and set them up in the empty cold frames. That will make use of unused space. I should probably poke a few holes in the bottoms of the bags for better drainage too. I'm thinking of trying a few more and planting eggplant, which could stay in the greenhouse all summer. I tried eggplant in the greenhouse a few years back and it did well, but did not produce many fruits because I think the pots weren't big enough. These big "grow bags" should do the trick!

I gave the Hen House it's major spring clean....raked and swept everything out to bare floors. That's a huge dusty, dirty job. This time, instead of barrowing around the dirty straw to the gardens, I simply put it into the hen run, added a couple bags of autumn leaves and a barrowful of weeds and let the girls get to work. I should have nice finished compost in a couple more weeks.

Got the Pond Circle pond cleaned out...yuck. I need to get some of the pickerel rush out. It's a native so I'm thinking of doing a bit of "guerrilla gardening" and tossing chunks of it into the marsh down the road. It's taking over the pond. I really should bucket out some of that water too and replace it with fresh. It's probably loaded with nutrients, would make good liquid feed for everything.

The big job last week was getting the entire Jungle Cliff and Under the Deck Steps gardens tidied up. Weeded everything (had to remove a lot of seedling Kousa Dogwoods and pot them up). Picked all the dead leaves and debris out of the dry watercourse of big rocks that runs under the deck steps and into the little pond in the Jungle Cliff Garden. Then put down a bag of fresh pea gravel in the watercourse. I had to pull out the tiny solar powered rice lights that follow the course of the "streambed" because it wasn't lighting up. I've got a new battery installed and still waiting to see if it works ok. Then I'll need to reinstall it. I also hauled in a huge load of mulch and covered the entire area. It looks great. Now the mini hostas and ferns are emerging in the Under the Deck Steps area and the bigger hostas and ferns are up all over the Jungle Cliff area. I also added some more big rocks to the Jungle Cliff and a couple more to the dry stream bed. It looks so much better I keep stopping to admire it everytime I come up the steps!

The tulips are fading; it was a surprisingly good year for tulips. I had a lot more than I ever expected and I'm not sure where some of them came from Did I plant them? Or are some seed grown? Whatever, they looked great this spring. The lilacs are blooming; I'm surprised because they bloomed weirdly in October last fall and I supposed we might not see bloom this spring, but there they are. Not as heavy as some years, but a pretty good display.

Right now, with the spring bulbs finishing up, the garden is mostly green, but the blue forget-me-nots and the white violets are coming on in a great wave up around the Grape Arbor Garden and in a few more weeks, the big explosion of color will start with the iris and peonies. Until then, it's weed, weed, and weed some more...

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