Garden Thread

Aw, BOOOOO! to the critters eating so much of your garden!  Cukes and pumpkins sprout really quickly and grow well directly from seed, so maybe you can just sow some more in their spots?

But YAAAAAY! to the things that are being successful!

I was getting really stressed out by the lack of planted peas at stately Dick n Hisses Manor, but this weekend ended up not having the opportunity for the bed-rebuilding that needed to happen before planting them.  I was on the brink of having a nervous breakdown when Hugs, ever the genius, uncorked a brilliant solution.  "Why don't you put them into the bed we rebuilt last year?"  WHAAAAAAAAAA???  How does she come up with such clever ideas??  (For the record, we've had a standard placement for the peas for the last 10 years, because it's the bed that gets the most early-season sun.  The one we rebuilt last year gets the least.  So there was a reason I hadn't considered relocating the peas myself.)  It was such a load off to plant those peas on Friday after work, and now we have TWO things growing in the garden: garlic and peas!  Things are really moving along now!

I also finally planted the new apple and pear trees on Sunday.  It was chilly but absurdly sunny, and it felt almost obscene to be playing in the dirt while soaking up all that sunshine.  Ahhhh...

We didn't get around to repotting the pepper seedlings, because we were clearly really lazy this weekend.  But they'll be fine waiting another week.  The onions would probably really like to not be in their tiny pots anymore, but looking at the weather forecast it seems we can transplant them into the garden proper next weekend.  So it seemed like kind of a waste of potting soil to do an intermediate transplant for just one week.  We'll start hardening them off now, so they'll be ready to go into the garden on Sunday!

Oh, and for years we've been saying we need to do an in-bloom assessment of the daffodil spread in the orchard, to figure out what spots need more bulbs in them, and of what colors.  And we keep not doing it.  So while we didn't do all the vegetable garden things we'd threatened to, we did manage to go out this weekend with a yard map and mark where there are entirely not enough daffodils.  It turns out we have so many bare spots that we're just going to order a couple of batches of White Flower Farm's daffodil mix, 'The Works', and let the colors sort themselves out.

The daffodils along my fence are starting their bloom cycle and I have some tulips in front that are about to pop off. Will I get peonies (purchased from Peony's Envy) or blueberries this year? Only time will tell!

moimoi -- what's better than a row of daffodils on a sunny day?  NOTHING!  Yours look so fantastic, and I love the mix of colors!

🐍 cahusserole 🐍 -- that looks like a really good plan for irrigation.  I've never tried anything like that, but it makes a lot of sense that it would work well.

In our garden news, it was glorious yesterday, a perfect day for repotting all our tomatoes, peppers, basil, and tomatillos.  And the onions all went out into the garden proper.  Normally our onions seedlings are all really scraggly and small when we transplant, and a good half of them die almost immediately.  This year they were sturdy and big, so we decided to try a tip we'd picked up from a local farm's instagram feed.  They suggested trimming the tops and roots of the onions before transplanting, so we gave our little guys haircuts on both ends.  And man, they look incredible this morning.  All of them are standing tall and look super vibrant green and happy.  So maybe there's something to that?

Oh, and some of the peas have sprouted!

We still have two kale plants that are about two feet tall and going strong that made it through the winter. But in addition, we transplanted our tomato and cucumber seedlings to a bigger planter, where they're progressing nicely and putting out more leaves. We discovered that there were dozens of tulip bulbs in the garden that we didn't know about when they all came up at the same time, but now that they coming to the end of their bloom it's time to thin them out and put vegetables in.

Are tomato cages the only option, or are they just the best available option?

I'm a big fan of tomato ladders.  They're sturdier than cages and easier to get into the plants.  But really, anything that'll support the branches would be fine.  I've always loved the looks of those tomato trellises made out of wooden supports and woven string, but I think I don't prune my tomatoes enough for those.  I need something heavy duty that will support an overgrown mess of a plant. 

My big garden excitement is that dammit, I'm buying myself a new hose nozzle!  My old was is all busted up.  It makes me seriously unhappy every time I go to water the garden.  This will never do!  (For some reason, I got it in my mind last June that Liz n Dicksgiving and Boomer were going to get me a new hose and nozzle for my birthday in September.  Why?  No clue.  All I know is I spent all of June, July, and August dreaming of my brand new awesome hose set-up. Guess what I didn't get for my birthday?  Guess who laughed uproariously when I finally admitted to them last week that I had been expecting to get a new hose set-up for my birthday?  So yeah, I think I'm going to have to buy my own fancy nozzle.  But at least this year I won't spend all of garden season cursing the garden hose non-stop.)

Oof, destructive cats?  I'm so sorry!  That's one of the few garden pests we haven't had a problem with, so I can't offer any advice.  I can tell you that those decoy owls and hawks do nothing to stop rodents, though. 

moimoi, your flowers are GORGEOUS!!

Everyone who has yard space should totally plant apple trees -- ours are so fantastically gorgeous this year!  The peaches had a really sub-par show of blooms, but the apples are more than making up for it.  It's hard to get a picture that really conveys how fluffy and joyful they are, because the trees are still very small, but yesterday afternoon, in the hazy sunshine, they looked pretty great:



Meanwhile, my garden update is that the onions are struggling.  It's been bone dry since transplanting them, and we're having a really hard time keeping them watered enough.  But the peas are springing up like gangbusters now -- you don't even have to walk into the garden to see them!  (They are still just tiny little new things, though.  Hardly, like, climbing up the trellis or anything yet.)  Volunteer cilantro is bushy and awesome, volunteer mint is creeping into the front yard proper, and the garlic is now in official "time to start picking half of this stuff as green garlic" season (we double-plant, so we're not shorting our final garlic crop by picking half of it green).  The other seedlings are sturdy and awesome, and I thinned the basil last weekend and got to chop the microbasils into our Saturday-night pasta.  And our favorite farmstand just put out the mixed baby lettuce pots that I love so much, for cut-and-come-again use.  So now we've got a pot of fresh lettuces to be working on.  Things are starting to get delicious around here!!  Other than the onions, of course.

By the way, I wanted to state for the record that I'm not opposed to getting Hugs a new hose for her birthday.  Boomer and I just laughed uproariously at her sad tale of not getting a hose last year because it would never in a million billion years occur to us that this would be a welcome birthday gift.  Someone needs to work on TELLING US if she wants a hose!  Now she says she dreamed all summer of that shiny new hose that she'd get to open on her birthday?  Well, THAT WAS NEWS TO US.  

I have raised some of my strongest-looking tomato and pepper seedlings ever. Now if the garden can just dry enough for me to get out there and turn everything again before planting.

After a week of rain (and one night of hail) I went out yesterday just to peek at the weed level but not to do anything because it was all muck (standing puddles on mud). On my way out I met a woman who was doing the community garden thing in one of the plots. She pointed it out to me so I could see how covered with weeds it was. She said she was there to do some planting, taking advantage of how wet it was. I recommended against planting in such conditions, but she blew me off. I wonder if her store-bought plants will be hardy enough to tough out disease and drowning roots.

What kind of irises?  My bearded irises are just days away, but the Siberian ones aren't even showing buds yet.

Bearded irises, and they look like they're months from blooming.  Nary a bud in sight.  I mean, normally they're at their peak later in the month anyway, but still!  They seem unusually pathetic for pepper-planting season.

🐍 cahusserole 🐍, that picture is killing me!  We are SO FAR AWAY from having anything like that, and I can't wait!!  They really do look awesome, and sound like they're going to be super-pretty.

This morning Hugs had the genius idea of, instead of doing our usual strength day musculating, getting our workout in by hauling bags of leaf compost and soil into the garden to top off the rebuilt beds.  It feels so great being at work now, having spent 45 minutes playing in the dirt in our delightful garden in the morning.  And man, it just comes to life out there when the beds aren't sloppy and half-empty and full of spring's weeds.  It looks ready to start growing this year's bounty!  I think regardless of the cold, we'll be transplanting all the seedlings this weekend.  I mean, yes, it's chilly, but it's not cold cold.  I mean, they're not going to freeze.  (Also, I checked on the irises.  They have big buds, so they're not as far off as I'd feared.  It's all going to be okay!)