Cool spring continues

Two fox pups, nearly adult, were seen by B. last night on his walk through the Veteran's Center. It's surprising that this is the first time one of us has seen them this spring; I attribute that to us not doing the customary dog walks due to Caddy's absence at "doggie day care" in Salt Lake City for an extended time.

Spring continues its slow progress. Nearly everything that's still alive after winter is showing signs of growth. Aspens are beginning to leaf out; lilacs have finished leafing out and are now preparing to flower. Pasqueflowers are nearly through blooming. Rabbitbrush is beginning to green up, and chokecherry shrubs are leafing out. Nanking cherry shrubs are beginning to bud out--they're nearly one of my favorite spring shrubs due to the small, white & pink blooms. Raspberry canes are popping out of the ground. Catmint (nepeta) is mounding up & enlarging.
I've started seeds for various tomatoes & peppers, cosmos, marigolds, cabbage, parsley, lavender, Fiesta del Sol sunflower, bergamot, hyssop, and borage.

We're still experiencing windy afternoons, some worse than others.

I haven't compared this spring's temperatures to the past several years, but this spring strikes me as cooler than past ones. We are ahead in precipitation.

EARLY spring garden events

Am finding more and more developments out in the gardens: delphinium and catmint way up out of the ground, allium bulbs sticking about an inch out of the still-cool ground, and as mentioned earlier, the garlic is shooting up. Golden currant bush (Ribes aureum) is looking like it wants to start budding out, and probably will do so since it's usually one of the really early ones.

I began some seeds inside yesterday - several types of peppers, several types of tomatoes, parsley, lavender, and cosmos. I may be starting the latter too early, but couldn't resist. I love it when those seeds start popping their little green shoots up! They're all sitting on their warming mat while I hover over them, waiting, waiting, waiting.....

I ordered some more raspberry plants - everbearing this time, since I've concluded that summer-bearing raspberries just don't work here, at least for me. I'm going to be giving my summer-bearing plants away on our local Freecycle group. I'm finished wasting water on them!

We're due to have a well-below freezing night tonight, then a number of warmish, sunny days are on the menu, yippee!!!!!! It's getting to the seasonal point where my mind is constantly wandering to the garden, whether I'm at work, or lying awake in bed, or elsewhere.

Last evening I turned my first batch of compost in my Earth Machine composter. I must have started the current batch in autumn, because it really didn't look like it had heated up at all. Nothing frozen was uncovered, which was surprising. But this unit does get lots of sun, even this time of year, so I suppose that's why it was totally thawed out. I added two buckets of new compostables that I'd stored over winter, and a bunch of last year's leaves, and will need to remember to stick the thermometer in it. I'm not sure its composition is of the quality that will heat up well; usually I can sort of tell when I'm going to get a good batch or not, and this one didn't ring any bells for me. Will see later.

Ice on Home Lake is nearly gone. Sandhill cranes and Canada geese are still around, feeding in the fields. Wind has been horrendous; visibility yesterday afternoon was akin to what I imagine the 1930's Dust Bowl era to be like; brown and sand-blasted atmosphere, soil & dried Russian thistles flying everywhere.

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!

It's transplant time!

I planted many brusselsprouts, cabbage, and broccoli seeds, indoors, a couple of weeks ago. I planted them in very small pots, and was planning to transplant them to larger pots once they developed true leaves. Tonight, I judged many of them to be ready to repot, so I filled a bunch of 2x2" plastic pots with moistened potting soil--luckily it's now warm enough outside in the evening to do this somewhat messy job outdoors on my work table--and prepared all the necessary other items, consisting of one chopstick (to make the hole), a plastic fork (to remove the little seedling from its dirt bed), a container with water, and strips cut from a yogurt or cottage cheese container to serve as plant markers/identifiers. The latter is a great way to reuse the many yogurt containers I have on hand.

Not all of the seedlings are large enough yet to transplant, so after this evening's efforts, I have 18 newly-transplanted pots of mostly brusselsprouts with a few red cabbage thrown in. Yet to transplant are more brusselsprouts and then some broccoli seedlings - those are growing more slowly than the other plants. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find space under the lights for everybody.......I hope to be able to move the cool-weather brassicas to my cold frame after a couple of weeks so I can make room for the annual flowers I'm growing from seed also.

The lights setup I have is shown in the image - it works really well. It's a large, four-shelf shelving unit, and the metal slats are perfect for hanging fluorescent lamps on. I have enough lamps (4) for only two of the shelves to be functional for growing. I put two lamps side-by-side so the plants get complete coverage. I could improve the light distribution by using aluminum foil as sort of a curtain over each of the lamps to reflect the light back to the plants, but I haven't gotten it that much together. I have all the lights on timers, and they're on from about 6AM to 10PM, so 16 hours. Believe it or not, plants need the night time hours to do their own thing (they don't really rest, they actually do plant activities, whatever those are); what I've read is that they should be in the dark at night, just like we are!

Snow has mostly melted

These are my allium bulbs that have come up over the past couple of weeks - two days ago this is what they looked like sitting in the snow from the storm that swept through. 95% of the snow is now gone, and with the temperatures predicted over the next few days we'll have none left in a short time.
My onion bulblets look good - I did cover them w/ some Reemay based on the advice an anonymous poster submitted.
Indoors, my tomatoes and peppers are doing great, and now I'm soon going to be transplanting basil, cabbage, brusselsprouts, and broccoli seedlings.
Some raspberry canes have arrived in the mail, and now I need to prepare the bed for them. I have several varieties that I've planted over the past three years, but I've had little success with them. Where I planted them is an area I did not have a soil test run on, so I don't know if it's the soil quality, too many hours of hot & pounding sun, wrong raspberry variety, or something else.

Garlic is growing, seedlings are up too

The garlic I planted last fall is getting bigger & bigger. Since it's in the raised bed on the south side of a white wall, the soil it's planted in really heats up quickly and early. Our nighttime temperatures have ranged from 16 to the upper 20's, and I haven't covered the garlic yet. It seems pretty hardy.
Indoors, the pepper & tomato seeds I planted within the past two weeks are germinating. I don't have true leaves on the seedlings yet, but that should be any day now. They're all under 16-hour-on lights now that I set up in a mostly-unused room.
My compost container contents have mostly thawed now, so I'm starting new batches and renewing the old ones. There is still one big bucket of winter-storage kitchen scraps to deal with as soon as I have space in one of the bins. I hope to have some finished compost within a month or so, and I'll probably add it to the vegetable garden or raspberry area.

Pepper & tomato seeds now planted

Today I planted seeds for seven varieties of tomatoes. Don't know how I ever think I'll have room for all the plants I expect to come up. Peppers haven't germinated yet; planted them one week ago. More and more green stuff coming up outside due to warmth. Today I began clearing all of last growing season's old growth out of the vegetable garden; should have done it in the fall I suppose. Still traces of compacted snow/ice in deeply shaded parts of the yard & garden. The compost is slowly thawing, and every couple of days I peel away another layer from the still-frozen core. I still have one compost bin that is likely totally frozen since it's sitting in the shade. The dog poops in the backyard like she never gets a poop walk; we'd be knee-deep in poop if she were only a backyard-dog (i.e., no walks).

Guess it's warm enough in the house for bugs; there's one walking across the monitor as I type.

When I was raking yesterday in a corner of the yard, I found evidence of bird mortality; wonder if one of the hawks was visiting the bird feeder? Bet so; not the first time they've found lunch here! In fact, while on a raptor tour at the Monte Vista Crane Festival yesterday, the tour guide said some bird-watchers feed birds for the express purpose of attracting raptors to the backyard for viewing!

Just finished seed order!!!

Wow, kind of a $ splurge tonight. I decided to go wholly with Johnny's Seeds this year for all my new vegetable & flower seeds. First I went through my seed stockpile armed with a seed viability chart, and got rid of a few packets based on age. Then I have 3 or 4 other packets (parsley, nicotiana [had that since '02 and not once planted it!]) that I'm going to do a germination test on versus automatically reordering. I think I've only done a germination test once before. I'll wet some paper towels, then spread several seeds out on the towels, then roll up the paper towels and put in a plastic bag. The test in our house will be keeping it in a warm place as is recommended. Depending on how many seeds germinate, I'll either use the seeds or toss them in the compost pile. My seed-starting reference book recommends waiting a maximum of three weeks for most seed varieties to germinate.
My purchase tonight includes green beans, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, peppers, tomatillos, kohlrabi, beets, chard, lettuce mixes, melon (haven't grown these before), cucumbers, sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and joe pye weed (very iffy here).
I went a little crazy with ordering sunflowers - they're such enthusiastic plants, and the birds & bees love them so!
What Fun!

Sandhill cranes & companions out & about

Sandhill cranes (see image), Canada geese, various ducks, and red-winged blackbirds were in abundance, both visually and vocally, this evening on my dog walk. The ice on Home Lake is beginning to show puddles of water on top. With a high today of 52 degrees (F), it really felt like spring! Pretty difficult not to think of gardening, planting seeds, etc. right now. But ground is way too wet. Will have to settle for looking through the seed catalogs instead. Our yard still has snow cover on about 50% or less of its area. I actually did some pruning yesterday on some crabapples and a mountain ash.

Worms slowly adjust to "remodeled" home

The worms always seem to take a while to adjust to their new, poop-free digs. Of course, I don't know what I expect them to do---jump up and down in glee, sing my praises for providing them new, clean bedding, what???? How in the heck can I tell if they're adjusting slowly or quickly, they're worms, for gosh sakes! Okay, enough anthropomorphising.
Today was a spectacular day, 41 degrees F, clear, blue sky, sandhill cranes & Canada geese flying all around, more snow melting. The yard is still about half covered with snow, but it is dwindling rapidly.
I inventoried my vegetable seeds today to see what I need to purchase. Many of the packets are fairly old (two to six years) so I need to check my seed-starting book on germination rates for these guys. I also started a list that contained many gardening-related entries, but I guess since the ground is still frozen and we're going to get at least a couple of snow storms, I should calm down a bit. Last fall Bruce happened to come across a Green Cone composter unit that was being sold down the street from us at a garage sale ($7, WHAT A DEAL). I had hoped to get the hole dug for it prior to freeze, but didn't happen, so now I want to get that done this spring. Just one of the many tasks I want to do......

Too warm for January?

Though we still have 9.5" of snow in the front yard here in Monte Vista, 39 degrees still feels too warm for January in the San Luis Valley.
Last week we were staying in a yurt outside of Leadville, CO at 12,000 feet, and the temperature did not sink below 20 degrees the entire three days & nights. That is bizarre.
Large puddles are appearing in late afternoon as snow continues to melt and attempts to sink into the frozen ground. Some perennial plants are now showing as the snow depth decreases. The gardening fever is starting to show up more often in my thoughts. Marianna, it is WAY TOO EARLY to think about starting seeds indoors.

Beautiful winter & seed catalogs!

Blizzard warnings today, mostly in the mountains. Overnight last night it was very windy, and many drifts had appeared by morning. At 7AM it was 31 degrees, now at 1:30 PM it's about 28 degrees.

Bruce split a bunch of wood yesterday so we're now safe from freezing! We have this wood carrier thing that allows easy hauling of split wood. It also makes a handy dog carrier - poor Caddy is at Bruce's mercy!

I went snowshoe running over at the state wildlife area yesterday in the late afternoon - saw several hawks and many tracks in the snow. It was beautiful but cold; returned home with a frosted face.

Had to replenish the black oil sunflower seed and Niger thistle today at the local co-op---holy cow! Not (sort of) cheap like it used to be to buy that stuff for "wild" bird-feeding.

Picked up the mail today - four more seed catalogs arrived. Got one yesterday, and received a couple more several days before Christmas. I'd hate to think how many I'd be getting if I hadn't taken my name off a bunch of mailing lists! But it is making me think of seed-starting........