One of the Joys of Maturity |
|
Affiliated Advertisers |
Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - Hanging Basket Petunias I moved some petunias to large hanging basket pots this afternoon. With the temperature outside around 50° F, I chose to do the transplanting on the edge of our back porch. I'd left a new bag of potting soil on the porch through our recent cold spell. While the bag of soil had thawed out, I watered it in the pots with some lukewarm water before transplanting.
I've happily used the Supercascade and Double Cascade petunia varieties for years for our hanging baskets that line our back porch each summer. They produce an abundance of large single and double blooms, respectively, throughout the summer months. They really don't cascade all that much, but they are pretty. I moved our most recent planting of egg carton petunias to our kitchen windowsill to make room for the hanging baskets under our plant lights. They'll stay there for a few days before being moved to our sunroom or dining room table. Our plant rack is once again full. A mistake I've made with our hanging basket petunias is to hang the pots in windy weather. While the petunias usually survive, they get damaged by the strong winds that frequently sweep across the fields west of us. I'm going to be a bit more cautious this year in getting our hanging baskets hung as early as possible.
Sometimes the little cheats I do in planting catch up with me. While looking over the plants under our plant lights yesterday, I realized I was way behind in uppotting plants started in communal pots. There are communal pots of celery, snapdragons (2), parsley, impatiens, daisies (2), and milkweed all about ready or way past ready to move to larger quarters. The celery and parsley turned out to be not as far along as I thought, so they didn't get moved. And I forgot to bring the milkweed upstairs for the repotting. It wouldn't have made any difference, as I ran out of potting soil fairly quickly. Our painted daisies, snapdragons, and impatiens appear to have handled the transplanting well. Some of our Alaska Shasta Daisies were a bit too large for transplanting and may not make it.
Sorry about the plant rack photo at right. I took it on manual, which is usually just right for photos of stuff under the lights. But the bench holding a flat of plants in front of the plant rack is pretty dark. You may have noticed the onions in the background of these photos. The onion plants are thriving, but are also ready for their second haircut (trimming). Cutting them back produces sturdier plants and also prevents them from falling over. After a trimming, probably tomorrow, they'll still need one more trimming before getting transplanted into our garden.
I did a second trimming of our three flats of onions yesterday. Some of the onions had grown to 6-8" with several falling over in the flats. I cut them down to around two plus inches. Seed Libraries I received an email yesterday from John Fischer of the Normal (IL) Public Library. His title is Adult Services & Circulation Manager. He's also their seed librarian. From Wikipedia: "A seed library is an institution that lends or shares seed. It is distinguished from a seedbank in that the main purpose is not to store or hold germplasm or seeds against possible destruction, but to disseminate them to the public which preserves the shared plant varieties through propagation and further sharing of seed." Like the Normal Seed Library, many seed libraries are part of public library systems. They offer free open pollinated seed to gardeners with the hope/expectation that folks will save seed and return some of it to the seed library for others to use. Doing so does help preserve open pollinated vegetable varieties, but also provides folks with free garden seed. John's email was a request for seed donations to his library. I've contributed seed to them several times over the last five years. While the Normal Seed Library isn't the closest one to us, it is the one that always sends a "Thank you" for seed donated! John's email:
I also refreshed our old listings for Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed on the Grassroots Seed Network and the Seed Savers Member Exchange. Our seed has had several years to adapt to our regional growing conditions. I still recommend folks not living in the Midwest patronize seed vendors such as the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange or High Mowing Organic Seeds. And of course, our seed needs to be soaked, stratified, and/or scarified before planting to ensure good germination. (How's that for a put off?) BTW: Mr. Brown Thumb has a good page about Seed Scarification, Seed Stratification & Seed Soaking. If you're looking for a seed library near you, the Seed Libraries or the Seed Librarian sites may give you some direction. Also, just Googling "seed library" with your state name may help you find one nearby. Later I planted a row of the Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed I'd started priming a week ago. The seed had soaked for 24 hours and then been dried and stored in the refrigerator until today. The seeding took all of about ten minutes! I used a piece of scrap one inch lumber to make a furrow along the edge of the raised bed where we have peas planted. Then it was just a matter of dropping in seed, covering it with soil, and patting the soil to firm things up a bit. I did make one glaring error, though. As I planted, I wondered if this was the same spot where I grew spinach last year. Upon consulting my records, it was. Hopefully, for a short season crop, the time from spring to spring will be enough that my poor crop rotation won't hurt the spinach...if it even comes up. I also have lots of Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed on hand in case I have to re-plant. Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - Dormant Oil
With just three apple trees to spray, the job didn't take much product or too long. Two of the trees are in our yard with the third being a volunteer tree just outside our East Garden plot. It grew from Stayman Winesap cull apples we used to dump at that spot! It produces small, red apples with a crisp, sweet taste that's a cross of Winesap and Red Delicious. I often get a dormant oil application on our trees in February. This year's weather just didn't cooperate until now. Lettuce I started some lettuce transplants today. We're now less than six weeks out from our last frost date, so it's high time I got our lettuce going. Our spring lettuce season is always too short, as hot weather quickly sets in and makes the lettuce bitter. Besides lettuce for salads, I want to let a couple of heads of Crispino head lettuce go to seed this season. My current saved seed from the variety was collected in 2014! Other than our saved seed, most of our lettuce seed comes from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Their seed prices are somewhat higher than other vendors, but we get good, non-peletized seed from them that seems to store forever in our freezer. This year I mostly went with our favorite lettuce varieties: Crispino and Sun Devil head lettuce from saved seed; Jericho and Coastal Star romaine; Nevada summer crisp; and Nancy and Skyphos butterheads. I added one fairly new to us variety at the last moment to fill a couple of empty cells, Better Devil, a butter-cos-romaine variety that really didn't do too well for us last year, but deserves another try.
Some lettuce varieties need light to germinate well. Others don't, but sorting out which is which is beyond my aging mind. From The Spruce's Seeds That Need Light to Germinate:
I also moved four hanging basket pots of petunias first to our back porch for the afternoon and then onto our dining room table. The petunias look great so far, but I kept them close to the house to avoid the strong winds we're experiencing today. I hung our pots of petunias from the back porch too soon last year. Strong winds damaged those plants.
In what turned out to be a busy gardening day, my last gardening chore was doing a first till of our East Garden plot. The soil was just barely dry enough to rototill. When cleaning the tiller, there was more soil caked in the tiller housing than I'd ever seen before. It was a mess to clean out. But getting a first tilling in this early will suppress weed growth in the plot. I'll definitely have to till the area once or twice more before we begin planting melons, squash, sweet corn, kidney beans, tomatoes, and peppers into it. Having a full gardening day this early in the season is a real blessing. At 72 years of age, who knows if I'll ever pick an apple from a new tree coming in. But starting plants and working the soil thrills my soul.
I spent several pleasant hours outside today working in the flowerbeds around our house and working our compost pile. I'd pretty much ignored the flowerbeds last summer, and they got overgrown with weeds. Our daffodils, tulips, and one surviving daisy beginning to grow motivated me to begin pulling weeds and adding a little fertilizer around the plants. I still need to run our scuffle hoe through the flowerbeds. There were many small weeds I missed pulling. I ended up with a garden cart full of weeds. So I took the weeds and compost from our kitchen to a corner of our East Garden plot and started a new compost pile. I also forked off a lot of undigested material off our existing compost pile, mostly asparagus stems, and added them to the new pile. There's still more material to be moved from the old pile to the new one. I'll let that happen when it's time to break open, screen, and use material from the old pile. Yesterday, I noticed some of the lettuce I seeded on Tuesday was showing signs of germination. By this morning, almost every cell planted had germinated at least one plant. Many cells where I'd used old seed had lots of plants up, necessitating some thinning in a few days. Only our Nancy seed didn't germinate. It was new seed I'd purchased this year. While I turned off the soil heating mat under the lettuce, I spread some old Nancy seed I had left over the ungerminated cells.
Note that while we didn't get any rain this month until Thursday, I had thoroughly watered the pea bed with our hose. The soil surface had dried out, but about two inches down, the soil was still somewhat moist. When I brushed soil off down to the germinating pea seed, I usually found swollen seeds that had put down a root, but no topgrowth. While down in the basement this morning, I found that thirteen of our gloxinia plants had broken dormancy since I last checked them. While I have several days to do it, the plants will need to be re-potted with fresh potting soil. They'll also need to get some good light. To begin making room under our plant lights for the gloxinias, I moved the tray of sage plants from our sunroom to our back porch. A tray of gloxinias, onions, or possibly even brassicas will go to the sunroom. I also drug the frame of our PVC cold frame into our back yard, preparing for covering it with clear plastic and moving hardy plants under it.
Next up was a light pruning of our apple trees. Our young Stayman Winesap just needed a couple of snips. The well established yellow apple tree had lots of inward growing branches and several broken ones that required pruning. I still need to "top" that tree, but didn't feel like putting a stepladder in the bed of the truck to reach the top of the tree with my pole pruner.
I trimmed each sage back to about six inches tall, totally removing dead sections while respecting branches showing new growth. I used my CobraHead Weeder and Cultivator to cultivate around the plants and dig out existing weeds. Each living plant got a very light sprinkle of 12-12-12 fertilizer around it. And the CobraHead was invaluable in digging out one recently deceased plant's rootball. When done, all of the cuttings went onto our burn pile with several cardboard boxes under them. The cuttings would take forever to break down in a compost pile, so they got burnt. I had lots more I wanted to do today, but simply ran out of energy. But that's part of the joy of gardening as a senior. There's always tomorrow...until there isn't.
A good watering early last week followed by an inch and a half of rain on Friday and another half inch today has popped up the early peas I seeded on February 27. I worried the whole time it took for them to begin emerging, even though I knew that peas seem to come up when the time is right. For such early seeded peas, fifteen or sixteen days from seeding to emergence isn't all that unusual. As soon as the peas begin putting on tendrils, I'll need to pound in T-posts and string trellis netting for the tall pea varieties to climb on. See Another Garden Delicacy: Homegrown Peas for how we grow, harvest, and store both our early and later pea crops.
Our original cold frame here was built with treated lumber based on plans from much larger cold frames from my farming years. It lasted about six years before rotting out in places. Determined not to have that happen again, I decided to use PVC pipe for a new frame with greenhouse corner fittings. Sadly, I didn't count on the PVC cement not being that strong. I should note here that I also built the PVC frame too light. It blew away several times in the strong winds we experience here before I filled one bottom pipe with some cement for ballast.
Inside, we have lots of flower and vegetable plants ready to go outside and/or under our cold frame. Some Super Elfin XP Clear Mix impatiens that I'd ignored in their fourpack insert until they started blooming are doing well now transplanted into our cocoa hanging basket. Seeing how hardy these plants are, I probably need to start another hanging basket of them. Speaking of hanging basket plants, we have four baskets of petunias and two of Wandering Jews doing well on our dining room table.
Our second round of egg carton petunias are just getting started. I had to re-seed one of the varieties that set the whole planting back a bit. These plants are for our garden plots, so they have lots of time to mature before going into the ground. Some of our first planting of egg carton petunias are pictured above, now in hanging basket pots. Every now and then when taking plant and garden photos, you get one you really like. I grabbed a shot of a gloxinia maturing our first blooms of the season. Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - St. Patrick's Day
I did the repotting along the edge of our back porch. The weather was fairly nice, and the porch is just the right height for me to stand and do the repotting. The plants went back inside under our plant lights in the basement. It will take several months for the plants to begin producing blooms. On my way back to the house from checking our asparagus bed (no action there yet), I saw that the spinach I seeded on March 6 had begun to emerge.
While I planted the spinach seed in the wrong spot, it's going to stay. This is the saved spinach seed I thought wouldn't germinate well.
We're having another rainy day here today, but nothing like folks in the South are experiencing. With a dental appointment later this afternoon, I'm just goofing off and taking pictures today. Below are the plants currently on our sunroom bookshelf. There's hostas, brassicas, asparagus, geraniums, and impatiens. Our sage plants that were upstairs got moved to a sheltered area on our back porch several days ago to begin hardening off. With overnight lows of 29, 26, and 33° F predicted for the next three nights, the sage joined the hanging baskets of petunias and Wandering Jew on our dining room table.
Our plant rack in the basement is still filled to capacity. There's one gloxinia, some leftover dianthus, and what's left of our dwarf geranium just outside the plant rack where they all get at least a little light. Outside, I'm a little worried for our early peas and spinach. Both have come up nicely and probably would survive a light frost. The 26° F morning predicted has me wondering if I should get out in the mud and spread a floating row cover over the raised bed. Once we get past those cold mornings, it will be time to cover our cold frame with plastic and get some plants outside to harden off. Saturday, March 20, 2021 - Hot Water Treating Tomato Seed
Hot water treating seed can kill some seed borne pathogens. It shouldn't be necessary with seed purchased from reliable seed houses. But after our bad experience, I'm back to treating all of the tomato seeds we start. A lot of the tomato seed we'll use this year was treated last year and won't need to be treated again.
I describe the process in some detail in our Saving Tomato Seed how-to. Basically, you put your seed in 122° F water for 25 minutes to treat it. Since I had five varieties of tomato seed to treat, I wrapped the separate varieties in cheesecloth sealed with and identified by colored twist ties and bread clasps.
So once done with the hot water treatment, I seeded two deep sixpack inserts to Earlirouge tomatoes. Since I'll only have room for six plants in the narrow raised bed reserved for them, I sparingly put just one seed per cell in this planting. While hot water treatment can decrease seed germination rates, this seed had tested at 100% last fall. As to the anthracnose that can survive in ones soil, we rotated around the affected area last year and had no disease problems. Our tomatoes in the East Garden this year will all be several feet from where the infected row was in 2019.
Years ago, I bought a 20' x 100' roll of 6 mil clear plastic. When I measured and cut it this year, I remembered that what I cut off was double what was needed. Last year, I used the leftover plastic from the year before to cover the frame. Next year, I'll use this year's leftovers. I wonder if some of the roll will still be left after I'm dead and buried. I moved lots of plants under the cold frame, filling it to capacity. I also put a tray of sage on the edge of our back porch and six hanging basket plants close to the house on the porch. With frost danger pretty much past, the cold frame protects our young plants from the wind.
I prop open the cold frame with an assortment of scrap lumber. That allows some light to reach the plants while somewhat protecting them from strong winds. Sadly, the propped open position is sorta of iffy for the frame, as strong winds have gotten under it and blown it yards away on several occasions, even after I filled a part of one PVC pipe with concrete for ballast. It appears that our high temperature for today will be around 66° F. It was pretty pleasant working outside today. It's about that time!
I left our hanging basket plants up against our house, as there was a pretty good breeze that could damage them. I hung our hanging baskets a bit too early last year, and the petunias never recovered from the strong winds that blew their growth all to one side of the pots. In between rain showers, I uppotted our geraniums from three inch pots to four and four and a half inch pots. This uppotting gives the plants a good growth burst each year just before we begin hardening off the plants. For now, the geraniums went back to our sunroom. Like tomatoes and peppers, geraniums will stunt if transplanted into the garden too soon. So I'll wait until things warm up a good bit more before adding geraniums to the corners of our raised garden beds. While I could have saved lugging two heavy trays of geraniums back to the sunroom by just putting them on our dining room table, our cats have taken over the empty trays and spaces left when I moved plants outside. Even so, we still have at least one freezing morning in our extended weather forecast that will require closing the cold frame and bringing in the plants that are now on the back porch. It's raining again this afternoon. A local weather reporting station shows we've received a little over four inches of precipitation so far this month. Our extended forecast suggests we may get another inch before the end of the month, making this a pretty wet month heading into our growing season. I lucked out and was able to do a first tilling on our large East Garden plot earlier this month. Our raised beds all got fall tilled. So even if the soil doesn't dry out soon, we should still be in good shape for planting our raised beds and not having weeds go wild in our East Garden plot. Knowing rain was coming, I worked on our back porch this morning transplanting gloxinia seedlings. These plants were started from some very old Empress seed on December 18. Even though we have lots of gloxinia plants up to seven years old, I wanted to start some pure Empress seed to breed back into our landrace gloxinias, hoping to reduce the leaf size of plants grown from future saved seed. The sixteen gloxinia seedlings transplanted this morning will give us way too many plants come mid-summer and fall. But those are times when we have lots of space available on our dining room table and under our plant lights. And...gloxinias in bloom are an attractive gift for plant loving friends. While looking up the date when I started this last batch of gloxinias, I came across an ad for one of my favorite coffee mugs.
Words to live by.
The weather and my forgetfulness solved my too many onions problem last night. When I looked out the window this morning, I saw that our cold frame had been blown about twenty yards into some bushes. I'd forgotten to totally close the frame last night and strong winds had gotten under it. The PVC frame was broken in three places. When I looked to our plants that had been under the cold frame, all three of our trays of onions were flipped over. Fortunately, none of the other trays had taken flight. I scooped the onions back into their trays, later trying to get them in rows. With the flipping, the varieties had been scrambled. If the onions survive, I'll not know what is where until the plants begin to bulb. Some duct tape got the frame back together, although I think this may be the last year for this cold frame. It has more joints held together with duct tape than with PVC cement! Sunday, March 28, 2021 - March will be March
With steady 20-35 MPH winds, I opened our cold frame just a few inches this morning, hoping the thing wouldn't take flight again. After an hour of hearing the howling wind outside, I decided to close the cold frame for the day.
Despite the strong winds, I got out and covered our raised bed of spinach and early peas with an Agribon AG-19 floating row cover. While that thickness of row cover only protects down to 28° F, peas and spinach are hardy enough to survive the cold with the row cover on. And while the link above is to an Amazon page, it wouldn't hurt to check prices at Johnny's Selected Seeds, especially early and late in the season. I picked up an 83" x 250' roll of the stuff in 2014 that I'm still using at quite a savings.
Before our weather forecast included some freezing weather for this week, I'd planned to move the gloxinia in a kitchen window to our dining room table. With the hanging basket plants there for most of this week, the gloxinia will have to compete for space and sunlight in our west facing kitchen window for another week. Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - March Wrap-up
While the peas and spinach are the only crops we've started outside, I've seeded lettuce, some tomatoes, peppers, basil, and dill inside this month. I've already re-seeded the Earlirouge tomatoes, as only three of twelve seeds planted germinated. I fear I may have gotten my water too hot when I hot water treated tomato seed this month. I'm also going to have to re-seed the basil which showed no germination.
On the ninth, I tilled our large East Garden plot. While the area is now showing lots of weeds germinating, the early tilling will make later tillings much easier. It's rare that the soil dries enough in March for any tilling, let along the heavy clay in our East Garden. I switched out our tiller for the mower deck for our lawn tractor and got the first mowing of the season done yesterday for our lawn. The one plus acre field the East Garden is in still needs to be mowed, but that will have to wait for a sunny, dry day.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
Affiliated Advertisers |
©2021 Senior-Gardening.com