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With a relatively warm weather outlook for March, I looked up "priming" spinach seed this morning. I have some old Abundant Bloomsdale seed I'd like to try direct seeding in the next week or so. Online sources suggest soaking the seed for 24 hours, drying it for a couple of days, and then storing it in a refrigerator for a few days before seeding.
My to do list for this month includes a couple of important items:
Even though our plant rack is nearly full, my seed starting list includes:
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It's not very sexy, but today I dried our soaked spinach seed and cleaned and dried some butternut seed. Once dried, the spinach seed went into a covered canning jar and into our refrigerator. With some very nice weather predicted for the next three days, I hope to plant the spinach seed. I'd made Butternut Mock Yams last night with our supper and saved and soaked the seed from the butternuts. Cleaning butternut seed is a lot like saving pumpkin seed...not a nice task. Most of the butternut seed is still drying on a cookie sheet, while ten of the seeds were committed to a germination test. When packaging seed for the Normal Seed Library, I discovered that I'd lost or misplaced our butternut seed saved from last season!
In a desperate, last ditch effort trying to save our dying trays of onions, I took them outside and heavily top watered them with the hose. I also switched out their solid bottom trays for clean ones I'd thoroughly rinsed. My line of thought was that there might have been some bleach residue on the trays from their last washing. If it is bleach contamination, I may be in real trouble with everything we've started so far this season. I'm at a loss at what has gone wrong. If all else fails, I'll be in line with others at a local discount store or garden center buying onion plants.
I later walked out to our main raised garden bed to check our garlic. All four rows of garlic are petty well filled in now. I'm glad I pulled back the grass clipping mulch over the rows last month.
And along with everything else, I decided to make a chicken meatloaf today. I had some frozen chicken breasts that had been in the freezer a long time. So I partially thawed them and ran them through our manual meat grinder. I find fully thawed meat tends to stick and clog the meat grinder. The resulting meatloaf actually looked better than it tasted! I suspect that after this experience, I'll stick with using fat ground beef for our meatloafs.
As I'd noticed yesterday, there was a lot of new growth on the biennial and perennial plants in the herb bed. I spent some time trimming old growth off of most of the plants. I was especially pleased to see our biennial Carpet series dianthus plants putting on lots of new growth in their second year. While our sage, rosemary, and oregano all have new growth, our thyme plants may not have overwintered. And thyme could possibly be one of those plants that are slow to emerge after a winter. I did find a couple of green shoots on the plants. And fortunately, I have lots of thyme left that I saved last season.
Our always aggressive oregano had a maze of old growth to be trimmed off. Underneath was a lot of healthy green oregano that will probably once again try to take over one side of the herb bed. Besides trimming, there were lots of weeds to be pulled.
Our tulips in our front flower beds are up, but aren't showing any signs of blooming as of yet. And those beds obviously haven't been weeded this spring. A Technical Note All of my images on this site are copyrighted. They were covered by the page copyright, but we had trouble with people using our images as if they were their own several years ago. So I began the time consuming task of adding a copyright notice in the lower left of each image. The copyright notices are always in either black or white print. Years ago when writing for a computer site, I labeled an image of a motherboard in various colors. I got a polite email from a colorblind reader saying the labeling wasn't clear to him. So since then, I mostly use black or white lettering, other than circling things in red, mostly on weather forecasts.
Castigating myself for being somewhat lazy, I forced myself outside to do a job I dread. I pounded in the T-posts that hold up the netting to support our early peas, and later, our cucumber vines. Using a very heavy post driver always makes my shoulders hurt. But the posts are in. While in the area, I brushed soil aside in the bed and saw that our early pea seed has begun to germinate. While I raked smooth the area just past the pea area and was tempted to seed spinach, I decided to hold off for a few more days.
After starting some basil, dill, and thyme, I moved outside to direct seed some very old Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed. I leave space by our tall peas each year to put a row beside them. I staked and strung the row and used a scrap piece of one inch lumber to make a half inch deep furrow in the very dry soil. With rain coming tonight, I didn't bother to water the furrow before planting. The seed used was some that I'd primed and was still slightly wet. The geraniums I seeded in late January were mostly ready to be moved from their three inch pots to four and four and a half inch pots today. With the price of garden ready geraniums at garden centers running around five to six dollars, growing ones own geraniums from seed is one way a gardener can save a few bucks. I transplanted the young geraniums a bit lower in the soil than they'd been in their previous pots to give the stems some additional support. The two flats of geraniums went to our sunroom where they'll receive lots of sunlight but also experience some cool nights that may stimulate root development.
Some of our egg carton petunias were close to outgrowing their egg cells. So this morning, I moved eight of them into fourpack inserts. Since the plants were still relatively small and tender, they went into sterile potting mix. They'll remain there for a few weeks until I move them into hanging basket pots. My next indoor gardening task was supposed to be moving Goliath broccoli starts from their communal pot to deep sixpack inserts. Unfortunately, that job is on hold while more potting mix gets sterilized in the oven. Later Once my potting mix had cooled, I finished filling sixpack inserts and transplanted eighteen Goliath broccoli plants.
There are still online listings for Goliath and Green Goliath broccoli seed. I've tried some of them and found they weren't as good as the old Stokes strain. While we still grow some of the Premium Crop and Castle Dome hybrids, our Goliath consistently outperforms them. Pleasant Surprises
While out at the garden, I thought I saw something sticking up in our raised asparagus bed. When I walked back to check, I got my real surprise of the day. Quite a few asparagus shoots had emerged with more just showing a tip above the soil line. Only two of the shoots were anywhere close to being big enough to pick. But if the weather permits, we should be feasting on asparagus in a week or so. That's about the earliest we've ever started picking asparagus. While at the back of our yard, I looked out at Bonnie's Asparagus Patch and saw stuff sticking up. When I walked back to check, it turned out to be lots of wild onions that had come up, but no asparagus yet. We're blessed to have two productive asparagus patches. I started ours in 2006, enclosing it in a raised bed in about 2009. A few years after starting the bed, we began mowing some ground adjacent to our property to help out the farm renter who graciously let us use the field where our East Garden lies. To my surprise, there was an asparagus patch that had been getting mowed down for years. When I checked with the land owner, I learned that the patch was over thirty years old. A good bit of compost, fertilizer, and TLC has brought that patch back to production.
The geraniums I moved to our unheated sunroom seem to like their larger pots and new location. I just have to remember to keep them watered and to turn the trays 180° every few days.
We have a lovely day out today. But instead of working in the garden, I'm going to take a nap. I've been battling Turbotax doing my taxes for two days. I found the application had not saved some info I'd entered. Then when I was ready to file, it said I couldn't file my state return electronically, but wouldn't print out the necessary forms to mail it in. In filling out and later double checking some form 1099Rs from the passing of my mother-in-law, they wanted to know her name and when she was born! There were lots of other extraneous questions that I felt were none of their damn business and probably not required by the IRS. Turbotax has probably lost a once loyal customer. Thursday, March 14, 2024 - Starting Lettuce I'm a bit late starting our spring lettuce this year. And sadly, our spring lettuce season often gets cut short by hot weather that turns our lettuce bitter. But I went ahead and seeded eight lettuce varieties, seven favorites and one new one. I seeded Crispino and Sun Devil head lettuce from saved seed. The Sun Devil variety disappeared from seed vendors' listing years ago as it was mixed up in a PVP application that failed. It produces soft heads while the Crispino variety yields firmer heads. Another long lost variety, summer crisp Barbados was seeded using some really trashy saved seed. Likewise, our Jericho romaine seeding was from saved seed. I also started some Coastal Star romaine. For butterhead lettuce, I seeded some Nancy from two old commercial packets. For red lettuce, I started some Better Devil red romaine and some Dark Red Lollo Rossa. The lettuce was seeded onto sterile potting mix in deep sixpack inserts. Since some lettuce varieties like a little light to germinate, I lightly covered the seed with vermiculite. The lettuce seed flat got covered with a humidity dome and went over a soil heating mat set to 72°F. I'm not very good at growing lettuce, but do have a how-to on the subject: Growing Lettuce. Weather
While the rain should pop up the spinach seed, we're facing several mornings of frosty/freezing temperatures, reminding me that we're still a month away from our average frost free date. Victories today were getting our lettuce started, seeing some spinach seed sprouting, and finally finding my fishing tackle box buried under some junk on my garage workbench. I want to toss a line into the pond I stocked with minnows, bass, and bluegill two years ago. On the other side, I think The Borrowers must have run off with my camera lens cap. I can't find where I set it down, so I ordered a new one, thinking that would make the lens cap suddenly appear. Didn't happen! We now get most of our pet supplies from Chewy. Their prices are fair, and the FedEx driver gets to lug the forty plus pound bags of dogfood to our porch!
I started some Celebrity petunias yesterday for our garden plots. I already have a good many trailing petunias growing for hanging basket pots, but the Celebrities make a nice show of blooms at the ends of our vegetable rows. I also dug up weeds in gaps of the biodegradeable black landscape fabric that was under our cold frame last season. The fabric is rotting in places, and several grass weeds had gotten a good start. I considered spraying them with Roundup, but didn't want that product close to where we'll have our transplants soon. I also thought of using the homemade weed killer of vinegar and Epsom salts. But with just a few weeds, I relied on manually removing them with our CobraHead Weeder and Cultivator. Plans to recover the area with new landscape fabric got set aside due to the steady 20+ MPH winds.
Our tall, early peas are well up. I'm hoping the coming frosts and freezes don't damage them. I thought about covering the pea plants with a floating row cover, but again, today's wind made that a no-go. I'll soon need to string the double trellis that supports the climbing peas. They grow to a height of five feet and sometimes more. The row of Abundant Bloomsdale spinach I seeded ten days ago with some seed saved in 2019 is beginning to emerge! While I freeze most of our saved seed, this batch of seed had been in a jar in a cool, dark area of our basement since it was saved. I still have a bit of the seed left from priming in the fridge, and a few sprouts from the batch I started in the basement under our plant lights. Sunday, March 17, 2024 - St. Patrick's Day
Not satisfied with how our Goliath broccoli starts were doing, I dug out our broccoli seed and started a couple of communal pots of the variety. One pot got seed I saved last season. The other got some of our last packet of commercial Goliath seed from Stokes Seeds in 2017. The Goliath broccoli for seed saving will go into our large East Garden plot. The soil there isn't all that good. I have to add soil amendments such as peat moss and compost to grow good broccoli there. The End of our Fall Carrots
Only a few of a bag of large carrots were still good. When I moved on to a bag of smaller carrots, there were only a dozen or so good carrots left after adding carrots to the corned beef and cabbage. When they're used up, I'll be buying carrots until we dig our 2024 spring carrots sometime in July. Monday, March 18, 2024 - Weather We have about a week of cold mornings coming up. There's at least one hard freeze in our immediate forecast that could damage plants. I hope to use that time to get black landscape fabric on the area where our cold frame will go. And if the wind permits, I'll cover our PVC cold frame with 6 mil clear plastic. Thinning Lettuce Starts I made a real mess for myself to clean up when I seeded our lettuce on Thursday. Some of the saved lettuce seed was trashy, so I'd put a lot of it on top of the soil just to make sure some seed was amongst the leafy parts. Also, the seed was saved in 2022, and I wondered if it was still good. Silly me! Properly dried and stored lettuce seed lasts for years.
At some points in thinning the seedlings to one per cell, I just pinched bunches of sprouts with my fingers and pulled them. At other times, I had to use a pair of tweezers to separate the tiny plants. And with the seedlings this small, I nudged potting mix around the base of some of the plants. I don't recommend thinning or transplanting such small plants. I simply had no choice with many of the cells where the plants were crowding each other.
I did, however, walk out to our raised beds to check some things. The 2019 saved Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed is coming up despite some really cold mornings. and while none of the shoots were big enough to pick, we do have more asparagus growing. Even with the cold morning temperatures, I should be able to pick asparagus tomorrow for our first asparagus feast of the season. Starting Some Early Tomatoes I started eighteen cells of Earlirouge tomatoes today. Along with the related Moira and Quinte varieties, they're probably our favorite tomato variety. All three varieties were released by Jack Metcalf of the Agriculture Canada Smithfield Experimental Farm, in Trenton, Ontario years ago. They all disappeared from seed catalogs over the years, so I began saving and sharing their seed. Fortunately, the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative in Maine grew out and now commercially offers both the Earlyrouge and Quinte varieties from seed I gave them. I haven't been satisfied with our Earlirouge tomato production over the last few years, so I decided today to start some older Earlirouge seed that's been in frozen storage for years. The oldest seed started was from our farming years in 1988! Other seeds started ranged from seed saving in 2013 to 2022. If this planting fails, I still have time to try again with newer seed. The seed went into deep sixpack inserts, covered with a little sterile potting mix. I put the sixpacks in a tray over a soil heating mat set to 72°F. Our how-tos, Growing Tomatoes and Earlirouge, give more info on how we grow these crops. I moved the last of our Supercascade petunias out of their egg carton cells to fourpacks today. Somehow, I'd spilled some parsley seed into the egg carton that germinated. So three parsleys also got moved.
I've found the best tool for moving plants from egg carton cells to larger quarters to be a teaspoon! We still have an egg carton in the kitchen windowsill with a few slow growing Double Cascade petunias. The best news of today was that Alliance Tractor brought back our recently serviced John Deere X570 mower and our thirty year old MTD rototiller. I was thrilled that they got the old tiller running again. And while I'll soon need to mow, the 570 also mounts a nifty pull behind rototiller for turning our large East Garden plot. The smaller MTD walk behind tiller is essential for turning our raised beds and tilling down weeds between rows of sweet corn, kidney beans, broccoli for seed, and potatoes in our East Garden.
Area hunters field dress their kill year round, but obviously don't clean up after themselves very well. Our dogs, country dogs that run free at times, drag all sorts of deer parts into our yard. The bone shards left are sometimes sharp and could puncture a mower tire. The fact that some deer are taken out of season doesn't bother me much. When folks do that, I suspect they're trying to feed their family. Snoozing in our easy chair after my bone collecting and limb burning yesterday, my lovely wife asked me if there was anything I needed from town. I'd told her I couldn't find our bottle of dormant oil spray for the apple trees, so she stopped by Colonial Gardening and Landscaping in Sullivan and bought me a bottle of the stuff. Only, she bought the largest size, a forty-eight dollar jug of the stuff! I'll have to spray apple trees until I'm 150 years old to use that up. And unfortunately, our weather forecast suggests I won't be able to spray soon because of frosty/freezing mornings and then rain for the next week or so. The buds on our apple trees are already swelling and greening.
I moved on to spraying our apple trees with dormant oil. The oil smothers insects and insect eggs. And as the leaf buds on the trees were opening, I got the job done just in time. I'd been waiting for a day without strong winds, no rain, and no freezing overnight weather. I got two out of three, as the wind kicked up just as I was beginning to spray.
The Earlirouge tomato seed I started a week ago has begun to emerge. I planted saved seed from a variety of recent years dating back to 2013. I also seeded a couple of cells with seed saved in 1988, but nothing came up in them. While we've grown Earlirouges in our raised beds for the last seven years, I may put these plants in our large East Garden plot. There are way more than the six tomato plants I usually grow in a raised bed, and I haven't been thrilled with the Earlirouge's production the last few years. While they are our best tasting tomato, they also tend to stunt in poor weather conditions (cold, drought). Our related Moira variety may get the nod for raised bed planting, as that variety has excelled in the poor soil of our East Garden. We received a welcome half inch of rain overnight. It's still cloudy out this morning, although the temperature is in the 50s. Winds gusting to 40 MPH and more make the chances of getting any outside work done unlikely. But it may be warm, sunny, and not quite so windy the rest of the week. I started twelve cells (2 deep sixpack inserts) of Moira tomatoes last evening. I'm planning on growing our Moiras this year in one of our raised beds. And when I checked today, I found that the Seed Savers Exchange has the Moira variety in their seed bank. While I was doing tomatoes, I also re-seeded two cells of 1988 Earlirouge seed. Today, I started two deep sixpack inserts (12 cells) to Earliest Red Sweet peppers. Unlike some of my other planting photos, you can actually see the yellow pepper seed in the one below.
Our how-to, Growing Peppers, gives more info on how we grow our peppers.
Our extended weather outlook for the next ten days shows only one frosty/freezing morning. I'm hoping to get our cold frame covered with plastic and move trays of onions, brassicas, and hanging basket plants under it soon to harden off. While we have a good bird feeder, it's easier to just spread seed on our shallow well stand and cover. Also, it's easier to see the birds from our kitchen window. Often after other birds have cleared all the seed, a red bellied woodpecker comes and pecks out the seed in the cracks between the boards that other birds short beaks can't reach. And as a bonus, we have a downy woodpecker visiting the well stand. When I remember, I spread a little peanut butter on the stand for it. Time to go mow grass! Eclipse
Later I got in a little over two hours of mowing this afternoon, stopping when I'd finished our front and back yards and my injured neck told me to stop. In places, the grass was high leaving piles of grass clippings. In other areas, it was hard to see where I'd mowed as the grass was very short. It wasn't my best job of mowing, as I had the mower deck set a bit higher than usual to handle the tall grass in places. I still have an acre plus to mow in our side yard and the field our East Garden is in. I also noticed that the hairy winter vetch turndown/cover crop in the East Garden has taken off with some warmer weather. I'll need to mow it as well before turning it under. Hairy winter vetch holds back weeds over the winter and spring and provides nitrogen to the soil when turned under. I'm glad to get that first mow out of the way. It produced some good grass clippings I'll sweep up and use to mulch our fall planted garlic and along the sides of our raised bed of early peas and spinach. I also used the last of our primed 2019 Abundant Bloomsdale spinach seed to fill in a few open spots in the row. Some of the seed had germinated in the jar in the refrigerator.
The tulips in our front flowerbeds have looked pretty ratty. There aren't many tulips up, and several of them have been beaten down by the wind and weather. But one clump of tulips is in bloom giving me a nice shot of a tulip bloom. I had plans to garden outside today in the warm weather, but strong sustained winds made such work difficult to impossible. We're headed for some rainy and later cooler weather in the next few days. Wind speeds will mostly remain high. And for those of us hoping to catch a view of next Monday's eclipse, the weather predictions today have bounced between partly to mostly cloudy. But there's a week to go, so maybe the forecast will change for the better. Sunday, March 31, 2024 - Easter
On the bright side, our tall early peas and spinach are up. Our fall planted garlic looks great. We've had daffodils and tulips bloom. And we're now getting some good asparagus, one of our annual spring treats. We have onions, geraniums, brassicas, and hanging basket petunias ready to go under our cold frame once I get it set up. I got our first mowing of the lawn, field, and our East Garden done. Knocking down the hairy winter vetch in the East Garden was important as the vetch was beginning to bloom. While a great cover/turndown crop, vetch can re-seed itself and become a problem weed. And just barely in time before the buds fully opened, I got our first spray of dormant oil on our apple trees. Later I got a job done this afternoon that I'd been waiting for a windless or low wind day to do. Temperatures this afternoon were in the 70s with virtually no wind for the first time in weeks. I first spread black landscape fabric over the area where our cold frame will go, securing it with garden anchor pins. I ran out of new fabric, but discovered an old used roll that completed the job. The original roll came from an end-of-season sale from Johnny's Selected Seeds. I took a long break to watch Purdue defeat Tennessee in the NCAA basketball tournament. (I got a lot of my teaching history major from the old Purdue Extension in Indianapolis.) I drug out our large roll of 6 mil clear plastic, cut it to size, and attached it to our PVC cold frame. One joint of the frame was broken, so I had to repair it with good old duct tape. I'll begin moving plants under the cold frame tomorrow.
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