SLOW-arriving spring

Everything is about two weeks or more behind previous years' progress - lilacs blooming, peas growing, aspen leafing out, everything! Irrigation system is set up and working on shrub, flower, and vegetable gardens. We had a hard frost (about 26 degrees) last week one night, and I had accidentally left many little seedlings sit outside, so ended up losing several basil, tomatoes, and cabbage plants.]
We've had Dust Bowl-like blowing conditions in the San Luis Valley this spring - days where automobile accidents occurred on the stretch of highway between Monte Vista and Alamosa due to low visibility caused by airborne soil.

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.

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.

Onion bulblets planted

Tonight I planted the first garden plants of the season - about 40 or 50 small garden bulbs of Walla-Walla onions. They went into the newly sifted raised bed that I changed a little bit this year (extended in length and shrank in width, the latter to ease access). The planting instructions recommended each bulb be about 4-5" apart, and rows separated by about 10-12". Until I set up my drip irrigation system, they'll be hand-watered

about an inch a week.

The cool weather we've had the past couple of weeks slowed all growth down - the green shoots that had been coming up all over outside are just sitting in place, probably waiting for warm temperatures again.

Even the indoor seedlings aren't doing a whole lot; every day after work I rush into the plant room to see if anything shows noticeable growth - what I see is mostly NO. Maybe too cool? Seems like in the past there's been a visible spurt of growth not long after they're transplanted into bigger pots.

More patience is needed!

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.