Garden Thread

Picture update time!

The peppers are ridonk -- they wasted no time at all germinating, and are now a riot of sturdy little two-leafed baby plants.  Their bright spring green is such a refreshing sight out in the sunroom under the lamps... here they are in a throwaway shot taken long after sundown, so it's a bit darker than a real celebration of this green-ness should be.



And elsewhere in the sunroom we have a potted dwarf Meyer lemon tree that dropped all its leaves last fall and seemed for all intents and purposes to be dead.  But lo!  What hath spring wrought?


It's coming back, baby!!

No, our tree is a very cuddly little thing -- just leaves and flowers and when we're very, very lucky, the odd fruit.  I know you'd mentioned yours had thorns and that seems so bristly!  Although I suppose ours sort of has little off-shoot twigs that could possibly be construed as being vestigially thorny, from some genetic throwback...

No!  That shirt is awesome!  Or, I suppose, if liking that shirt is dorky, I don't want to be cool.  

Today's one of the great holidays of the gardening calendar -- St. Patrick's Day means PLANTING PEAS!  WOOOOOO!!!  Last year our soil wasn't workable yet, and we didn't plant until April 1, but this year?  I'm planting today!  I do shelling peas rather than snap or snow peas, so the haul is always hilarious.  We'll either get a scant handful every few days for a couple of weeks, or one all-at-once harvest that yields, like, a small bowl of peas.  But I plant them every year regardless.

Looks like the squirrels spared a single crocus! Check it:

Oof.  That's a total drag.  Can they get by without being repotted?  We normally let ours get all kinds of leggy, and then stake them up with bamboo skewers if necessary. 

Bedroom Pastrami go for it! Last frost isn't until mid-May in Chicago, so you have plenty of time to start tomato and pepper seedlings.

Last week I tilled a bit and planted two rows of peas. I'm going out there to till some more this afternoon without planting, just to keep the clover from growing.

Re-potting seedlings is the worst garden-related task. I would rather spend an equivalent amount of time doing absolutely anything else: tilling, weeding, hoeing, putting up trellis...

The latest update from stately Dick n Hisses Manor orchard and garden:

The seedlings are all enormous, and it's time to re-pot them this weekend.  I can't wait!  Less fun is the fact that we keep punting on doing the necessary bed-rebuilding, so that's still on our docket and looming ever larger.  The lumber's all in the garage, but we keep finding all kinds of excuses to not do the work.  I still haven't planted our peas, because I am a failure, and because the seeds didn't get here until I was away on vacation and now I want to wait until the bed is rebuilt before putting them in. So... maybe this weekend?  We also have two new fruit trees to plant; I would have done it this past weekend but figured the little trees probably would be happier to wait out this week's ridiculous deep freezing.  One is a Keiffer pear, an apparently extremely rare heirloom that originated near Philadelphia, so it's probably going to be very happy to be living here.  The other is a Black Limbertwig apple, which Trees of Antiquity calls "the oldest of the Limbertwigs".  Of course!

Speaking of fruit trees, the crazy warm winter has led to the peaches being in full bloom already, weeks ahead of usual:

This would be great, except it's getting bitterly cold overnight this week, so we're likely to lose our entire peach crop.  In what is probably a laughable attempt to hold off the cold, we strung our paltry amount of old-skool incandescent Christmas lights into our favorite of the trees yesterday, to try to keep the blossoms warmer.  The three other peach trees, and the blooming Damson plum, are on their own, unfortunately.  One cherry tree's also got swelling buds, so I'm not sure if it's going to have trouble.  Not that we ever get to eat any cherries because the birds are way faster than we are, so that's kind of moot.  I'm optimistic that the apples are still far enough behind that this all won't be a problem for them.

And because it's stupid cold out today, and I had to bundle up to leave the house this morning, and I'm freezing indoors too, here's a dreamy-ish shot of our garlic from Sunday afternoon, when it was actually also really stupidly cold, but it at least looked nice and summer-sunshiney:

ALSO: Hello, all of you who are good at starting seeds indoors! I need your help. We started seeds in one of those adorable little biodome things, and now have dozens of seedlings that are an inch or two high. What do we do with them now? Do we transplant them into pots/planters as an intermediary step before planting them in the actual garden next month? Should we set up a bottom irrigation arrangement for those pots? What's next? This is new for both of us.

Do you bottom irrigate them while they're in the seedling tray?

We might email our church list to see if anyone is interested in paying $.50 each for well-established tomato seedlings. I like pocket money. 

I suppose that means we need to rig a bottom irrigation setup. Hmph.

So far I don't think we've even watered them since we planted the seeds. 

I don't think our Christmas tree light plan worked on the peach tree.  Its flowers this morning are getting all brown and slimy, so, at the very least, there will be no gradual, lovely dappling of the lawn and driveway with pink petals this spring.  In all likelihood, also no peaches.  Oh well.  The flowers were kind of pretty with the lights strung among them...