Melting snow, more on the way

More cranes are making themselves heard, just in time for the Monte Vista Crane Festival this coming weekend! I went to the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge yesterday and was nearly deafened by Canada geese & sandhills. Mating displays among the latter were in full swing.

After being away from the San Luis Valley for a six-day stretch this past week, I returned to find more than 50% of the snow in the yard gone, and the ground saturated with all of the snowmelt. The soil seems to be slowly thawing. Rain overnight last night was a great sound through the open window. A current Winter Storm Warning in the eastern San Juans will mean more skiing & summer irrigation water.

Signs of autumn

I heard my first autumn sandhill crane call yesterday. Tonight we're due to have our first hard frost; I had erroneously thought it was last night (Sunday, not Monday), so yesterday harvested tomatoes & beans, and then later in the evening covered as much as I could in hopes of staving off the effects of the cold. But as it's now only 39 degrees (5:30 AM Monday), looks like frost won't occur today anyway.
Leaves are continuing to turn golden yellow, and the squirrels have been going after the crabapples which are covering the lawn.
I purchased two new shrubs recently (Ninebark and Rabbitbrush) at a great price. In preparation for planting the Ninebark, I was digging out more of the turf in the frontyard. For the second time this season I punctured the irrigation line---DANG. Now I have to hold off until I get the right part to fix it. I now consider myself to be an expert in irrigation line repair.
The monarch larva appear to be gone; if I were to look in the vicinity I could probably find their cocoons. Way too late for them to survive when/if they come out.

First planting shift

The past 3-4 weeks have found me planting seeds, and now little transplants, out in the vegetable garden, among many other activities & gardening tasks. This weekend was especially busy - I planted several brusselsprout, cabbage, and broccoli plants that I had grown from seed. Lots of people I know comment that "Yecch, I can't stand brusselsprouts!" Those people have NEVER had garden-grown & fresh brusselsprouts - there's no comparison between what you buy in the store and what you can grow in your garden. But I guess that pretty much goes for all of the produce we grow in our gardens.
Today I also planted four tomato plants and one pepper plant, also grown from seed under lights, and planted as seeds a little earlier than the cole crops mentioned above. I'd have gotten more plants in the ground today but several of the walls'o'water (season extenders) I was putting up around each of these tender plants had leaks, so I had to pull them up, dump the water out into my water barrel, and set them aside. Then start over with a new wall. I'm going to discontinue buying these - too expensive considering their fragility. Now I'll try to repair the holes if I can find them so I can continue to use them. Eventually I suppose I'll have to landfill them......
Last year I grew a couple of my peppers in walls'o'water the entire growing season--they were at least 1/3 again larger than the pepper plants grown without the walls, plus they produced more peppers. I will likely do the same this year with my two pepper plants.
I pulled my irrigation tubing out of its storage area so I can get it ready to hook up to the water supply. No rain in the forecast, and my water barrels are getting lower & lower. Irrigation season will have to start very soon!

Seedlings, blossoms & growth, oh my!

So much is happening in the garden! Lots of perennials are coming up that I wondered about over the winter - various penstemons, baptisia, agastache, evening primrose, much more. My little trees (serviceberry mostly) are starting to put on little buds. Lilac is about a week or so away from flowering. Cinquefoils putting on little green leaves, as are the fernbush, apache plume, alkali sacaton grasses. What a great time of year.

So far my spinach, sugar snap peas and mixed greens are poking their little heads above the soil. My tomatoes indoors are about 8" high, and all my other indoor transplants are doing great!

The image to the left is my Nanking cherry, which I planted for the birds' benefit, though it is still too small (2' high) to provide much of that. It has the most beautiful pink & white blossoms.

I haven't set up the irrigation system yet so am doing all of my watering by hand, but since the soil is not yet dried out it's not a lengthy task.

I tried to get my cold frame set up last night but the automatic opener device always causes vexing problems so I'm not finished there yet. My cole crops will go there when it's ready to go, so I can make room indoors under the lights for other seedlings.

Excess enthusiasm causes irrigation line holes

After two weeks of exhausting work-related travel, I eagerly headed outside yesterday to plant some raspberry canes that had arrived by mail a week ago. They were overdue to be planted, that's for sure. I ordinarily use a pulaski-like hand tool (see photo) for my digging work here, because, unlike WI, an ordinary garden hoe would break in less than five minutes with this hard dirt. The difference between the tool in the image & a Pulaski is the pointy end, which replaces the axe portion of the Pulaski.
Irrigation lines are the underground tubing that delivers water to the sprinkler heads scattered throughout the yard. Many homes in this part of the country have automatic irrigation systems due to the need to water to keep turf reasonably green. Annual precipitation in the San Luis Valley is only 7 inches.

Since I've had problems NOT missing irrigation lines before, I thought I'd learned a lesson, and have tried to be careful when using the tool . But the irrigation line that I hit yesterday was a mere 6" below the surface - way too shallow! The puncture holes are visible in the black tubing in the image - there are two of them right next to one another. The ruler is there so that I could figure out what size of connecter to buy to replace the damaged segment of tubing. (Since this has happened three times before in summer of 2007, I'm somewhat familiar with the repair process .....)

So I had to trek into town to visit my favorite True Value hardware store (favorite because of all the connecters I've bought there before....). The parts needed to repair puncture holes are shown - the flash drive is shown for scale. The only additional tool that's necessary is a hacksaw to cut the piece of damaged tubing out. Of course, this means that the hole in the ground needs to be enlarged to accommodate the hacksaw. The process of planting my raspberries, which I could have completed with ease yesterday, will now be extended into a good part of today. *^&$%@!#(%