It looks like we’re really heading into summer this week. On the upside I won’t have to water the garden!  Summer is usually like that here.  It will be hot and humid and then thunderstorms will roll in during the afternoon.  I’m fine with this as long as there’s no hail or crazy wind!   And weird though it sounds I’m also ok with it being warmer.  It got cold again at the end of last week, and for whatever reason this year I’m looking forward to hot weather.  Maybe it’s because of how intense this year has been?

So far I’m pretty happy with the garden.  I picked lots of strawberries yesterday.  I think I might try making scones with the alpine strawberries, or maybe pancakes…  For the big ones they’re either going to be pie or jam, depending on how much I have.  I really look forward to being able to say I made jam from my own fruit.  It will feel like I got all the check boxes or a full score or something.  We’ll see…

I’ve also gotten to eat a whole bunch of lettuce and cress from the garden.  The cress is bolting sadly, but I plant to fill that space with more lettuce and plant more cress again in fall.  These are two more garden success stories, starting lettuce inside worked amazingly well, my Ice Queens are even making heads this year!  And my buttercrunch is huge and beautiful.  (I love buttercrunch, it’s my favorite!)  The cress was also really good.  I mostly used it in sandwiches and sometimes a little mixed into salads, but I really liked the flavor, so it’s going into regular rotation, at least whenever the weather will cooperate.

For the rest of the salad bed, the radishes are ready to harvest (and are starting to bolt…) and there are a few carrots, but as usual, carrots remain a challenge.  Maybe I’ll just plant more lettuce?  And the cucumbers have germinated (or rather 4 out of 5 have, slot 5 refuses to cooperate even after 2 tries, so I guess cucumbers aren’t meant to grow there?).  Also given the recent comprehensive demise of the chard (and I was so looking forward to trying it!!!)  I’ve planted bush cucumbers in that spot because I really love pickles, and this year I’m going to get a decent amount.

As for the rest of that bed, the broccoli is coming along nicely, though I’m really hoping it will make nice big heads before the heat gets to them.  The Pacman broccoli plants are maybe 1/3 or 1/4 bigger than the Sun King ones, but both have heads about the same size.  Unfortunately I’ve been having to make a daily squishing of cabbage loopers (my mortal enemies).  I used to pick them up and throw them, but that took extra time and there’s always the chance they’d make it back, so now I squish them and wash my hands after.  I figure 90% of what ends up on my hands is liquified broccoli leaves…  (Note to self: pick up Bt at Johnsons today, put it on the broccoli and then actually put up row covers like a responsible person).  The eggplants are still there too.  They’re holding out with the recent cold weather, and flea beetles that have covered their leaves in tiny holes.  (Second note to self: see if Johnson’s has an organic gardening solution to flea beetles and cover the eggplants like a responsible person!).  Yeah, so as is obvious my major failing with that bed was not putting up row covers like I had planned.  Also there’s whatever killed the chard, which suddenly wilted.  It couldn’t have been cold since the eggplants next to them were fine, and I don’t know of any chard diseases, and there was no insect damage…  Some morning doves did ‘decorate’ them right before they wilted so maybe morning dove droppings are deadly to chard?

I also need to do some thinning.  My bush beans are all up and growing nicely, so I need to go out and clip one for where they all came up.  Putting in two seeds was the right choice given that they were older seeds and in a lot of places only 1 came up, but now I need to thin them.  Their neighbors the slicing tomatoes are doing ok, they aren’t as happy as the cherry tomatoes in the grow bags, but I think that has to do with the extra shade from the neighbor’s oak tree and the fact that the ones in the grow bags have the best soil ever (yay gardener’s gold!).  The Early Girl in the grow bag (my back up in case of another tomato apocalypse like last year) is also doing reasonably well, but I need to get another bag of soil to finish filling up the bag.  (Note to self #3….)  The only big gardening fail here is that I broke the growing tip on the Hartman’s Yellow trying to adjust it to keep it in the cage.  It has a big offshoot right next to it, so hopefully it will be ok?  But yeah, that was a major fail, and I was trying to be really gentle!  New rule for me: don’t touch the tomatoes!  Unless it’s a major issue, leave them alone!  Or if absolutely necessary move it incredibly slowly.

Hm…who else…the garlic is doing well.  We even had scapes for breakfast yesterday.  Getting scapes is almost better than the actual garlic.  They’re so good!  And my marigolds are blooming.  They’re more a creme than a pure white, but I still think they’re pretty.  My catnip or rather the cats’ catnip also appears to be getting established, which is a good thing.  And the potatoes are huge, they also have pretty white flowers, which I think is a good sign.  The bad part is I caught a squash vine borer on them.  So Note to Self #4, cover up the squash seedlings.  Hopefully none of them are infected, especially since they’re so small right now, but we’ll see how it goes.  Worst case scenario I’m going to be replanting in July.

On the upside, it looks like most of the basil, and more peas than I expected survived the cut worms.  And the pole beans are starting to climb too.  So I have high hopes for pesto, at least 1 meal of peas, and a summer of beans.  Oh and my container corn is growing, I lost one seedling that got shadowed by the potatoes, but the rest seem to be doing well.  I really need to thin them too.

Other than that, the peppers are doing good.  It looks like they might like a little extra fertilizer, but they look happy and are producing some nice wax peppers.  The other berries are mixed.  My currants are actually doing really well, except for the fact the deer has pruned them again for me.  The raspberries are mixed.  But I didn’t do a great job planting or weeding them so that’s probably why.  I have rhubarb, but even though I thought I got a red cultivar most of the stalks are green which weirds me out.  I should just be brave and ignore that…

So I’d say so far I’ve got more successes than not!

All the plants are officially in the garden now.  Which is a nice feeling!  Actually, everything is even bigger now than in this picture which I took a little over a week ago.  The potatoes have been all hilled up and are huge.  Still no garlic scapes, hopefully soon?

Here you can see all my nice neat rows.  This will be a fond memory during the jungles of August!

So unsurprisingly March includes a bit more outdoor activity than February.  And some flowers.  So far there are crocus and snow drops, and not even the local deer population has managed to eat them all before I could go out and see them! This week it’s finally supposed to warm up some; even though the average high for March is about 50 degrees, it’s been in the 30s and 40s all month.  So this week we’ll finally get to go out and plant some peas and lettuce and other spring vegetables. I’m also hoping to plant the potatoes this week too. We got the jumbo grow bags this year (4 of them!) so there should (hopefully!) be lots of potatoes. We picked up the potting soil today, so we just need to dump the first half into the grow bags this week to get started.

So far my spring seedlings have been stuck inside, though they got a taste of outdoor life last week. This week I’m hoping to get them outside some more. I’m planning to start them out in the porch on Monday and Tuesday and slowly expand that to spending the day in the sun. The overall goal will be to plant them next weekend. I’m hoping to plant my violas, pansies, broccoli and lettuce.

The other seedlings are doing well. I think next year I’m not going to start the impatiens quite so early since they’re happily blooming away in the basement. On the upside, despite all the issues I had getting to germinate I have one of each color! So in a few weeks they’ll be ready to head outside too. I’m going to plant them along the edge of the porch since that’s mostly in shade. They will be some nice color at the feet of the sweet peas and morning glories.  The sweet peas, being more cold tolerant, will get planted tomorrow so they will have a head start on the impatiens and morning glories.

At least even if it doesn’t really truly feel very spring like at the moment, warm weather is getting closer!

The last couple of years by the time October (and our first freeze) rolls around, my garden has grown into a giant jungle worthy of Jurassic Park that tries to eat me as I fight my way in to get the last tomatoes/peppers/lettuce and I’m secretly almost glad to see it go to sleep as the weather gets cold.  Now, this may have something to do with the fact that I have a full time engineering job and have been taking grad school engineering classes in my free time…in addition to all the other life stuff that’s been going on.  But that’s been my fall experience the past few years.  (Note, the flowers are the exception, I always miss those.  I refused to pull up my flower bed until they were entirely gone and P. had made a couple of concerned comments about the look of the front yard…)

Still, when the seed catalogs come out at the end of December I’m very much ready to have plants again.  I’ve never been very good at houseplants, and winter is always extra hard to keep up with watering, so I really miss my garden during the winter.  As I learned last year though, no matter how much I want plants starting seeds super early ends badly.  And by ends badly I mean ends up with buying a card table and window boxes for the dozens of extra celery seedlings that were definitely big enough to be planted out by Valentine’s Day… So this year instead of planting everything at the earliest possible date and growing as many different types of plants as possible, I’ve tried to carefully think out what would be best to grow and what would be the optimal time to plant my seeds.

So February ended up being when I could start planting.  The first batch of seeds has been all flowers because they grow more slowly and fit in the six-packs much better and longer than the vegetables, also some of them can be planted out before the last average frost date.  So I got to start my first violas, pansies and impatiens right at the start of February.

This is my seed growing set up in the basement.  I have my own shelf this year.  Last year my plants were sharing space with the pantry goods which was a challenge for everyone.  The shelf is the basic wire shelf for Home Depot, and it’s 4 ft long and wide enough for the lights to fit between the vertical supports.  I got proper EnviroGro lights with four T5 bulbs in each light.  Last year I got two bulb lights by Lithonia from Home Depot that cost almost as much but they didn’t provide enough light and one of them promptly broke.  The new ones are much sturdier and provide plenty of light.  They’re also plugged into an outlet timer to keep the plants on a proper day/night cycle.  I’ve found that the T5 bulbs don’t make a noticeable difference in our electric bill so it’s definitely worth going for the nicer lights to be able to use those.  The other advantage of this set up is that I can adjust the height of the shelves to give plenty of room to raise and lower my lights as the plants get bigger.

I’m also using the seedling trays from Burpee.  I like them because the capillary mats (the black mat in the picture) does a much better job of watering appropriately than I do on my own.  The best part is you can reuse them by washing them at the end of the season with a very diluted water/bleach solution to sterilize them.  Sterilization is important to prevent damping off and other problems.  I now have four sets, two regular (72 count) and two XL (32 count).  For the most part the larger ones will be for the vegetable plants and the smaller ones for the flowers.  They also come with covers so they can function as greenhouses when the seeds are first planted.  You just have to remember to take off the lid as soon as seeds start to sprout.

I’ve also been very careful to label each plant.  Last year I thought just making a diagram would be enough, but I forgot that once I picked up my six-packs to move them outside I would no longer know which tomatoes were on which side…

So far I’ve planted the flowers I listed earlier, broccoli, habanero peppers and Pow Wow White Enchinacea flowers.  The last flowers are perennials which should get pretty big and have awesome white daisy-like flowers all summer.  I’m hoping it will be a nice low cost way to fill in some of the gaps in the slightly neglected landscaping in the house we rent.  The hard part now is waiting to plant the rest…  Next week will be the rest of peppers, and the tomatoes the week after that, and lettuce and marigolds the week after that (I’m getting a head start on the lettuce), and herbs the week after that, and last the zinnias the week after that.

It’s tempting to plant them all now because planting them is fun and it’s exciting to see them grow…  But as I learned last year, this is a bad idea.  So!  As usually, making things is an exercise in awesomeness and patience.