This is a post I started at the beginning of April and forgot to post. Mostly recordkeeping…
Super early! First blooms on Eccremocarpus came out March 25. And a bit washed-out, color-wise. They will deepen.Also from March 25, Pulsatilla is still flowering a month later.Magnolia ‘Genie’ is now making leaves. A gift from a friend, I’m not sure where to site this yet. Possibly a large pot while I mull it over.Unflippingbelievable Hellebore started blooming January 15, and on April 25 it still looks like this.Purple sprouting broccoli knocks my socks off. It’s now in flower.Raspberries looking great, but this will be their last year with me.Came-with-the-house Clematis is 10′ tall now. Mild winter, no pruning.New plant! Chamaerops humilis var cerifera or var. argentea. This will be a focal point in the backyard.Geranium ‘Bill Wallis’ just got this from Annie’s.G. macrorrhizum (cv unknown if it is one). All Geraniums seem very successful under my dogwood tree.This poor thing. I hope it grows out of this as it gets taller. It’s Arctostaphylos mewukka ‘Mottley Crue’ and it sure is looking “mottley”. A month later it’s now showing new growth. I got this at Cistus last year.Imperial white currant starting to bloom much later than the natives.Geum rivale is incredibly cute and I’m going to have to move it now that I know it wants more water than it’ll ever get here. Very floriferous.Ozothamnus rosmarinifolius ‘Silver Jubilee’ – got this from Xera Plants last spring and it’s doubled in size (at least) now about to flower. YEYCan you see how far this tiny start of Zauschneria has spread just over the winter? I planted this one here last fall.This is Arctostaphylos densiflora ‘Howard McMinn’, also from Xera, planted last year (forgot when) and you can really see why people say it’s an easier one for the garden. No mold, lots of new growth already.My neighbor’s cherry. Brief, but so glorious. I like that some branches visit my side of the fence.
And lastly, Grevillea victoriae is making new growth! This is yet another I got from Xera last May. This is right in front of my house.
That’s it for this very belated April update. Funny, everything’s different now, especially now that we’re having some actual HOT weather (80F right now at 2pm April 25). Excellent excuse for a new post!
Back on April 9th I put the hoop house up, and I let it sit around with nothing in it until yesterday, April 19th, when I set most of the tomatoes into it for the WHOLE day which is a crazy thing to do (sunburn! cripsy!) but these plants are so hard already they’ll be fine even if they lose a leaf or two.
I brought them in for the night, and then brought them out again around noon today.
I decided to think about spacing and which ones should go in this bed (I have many more tomato plants than I’m actually going to grow here).
David happened by and took this picture. I don’t know how I would EVER get anything done around here if I didn’t have ducks to help me with planting.
Then I just decided to go for it. Why the hell not? With two exceptions I planted one grafted and one not-grafted specimen (heh) of each variety. San Marzano got one extra grafted plant. And I only planted one (not grafted) Sungold because omg you only need one. For your whole block!
So here we are, right on time. It *feels* really early to be putting tomatoes out but I always do it at the end of April. So maybe it’s a week earlier than normal? This is definitely the shortest-ever hardening-off period. Two days. I attribute that to two things: 1) they’ve been in the garage where night temps have been getting regularly into the low 50’s since I took the light off 24-hour and let the timer turn it off at night (it’s been about 2 weeks of that) and 2) they didn’t really get sunburn yesterday. Must be the brightness of that T-5? I have the citrus out in direct sun as well, and they’re not burning either after life under T-5 all winter.
I do use wood chips in my vegetable garden, I know, isn’t that weird? No one does that.
The above pic illustrates how I deal with the wood chips. The trowel marks the spot where I’m going to dig a hole for the plant. The big cleared-off bare soil area is where I’m going to put the pile of soil from the hole. Once the plant is in then I put the wood chips back over wherever there is bare soil. Some people don’t like wood chips in vegetable beds because they don’t like having to move chips around to plant things, or they don’t like it when the chips inevitably mix with the soil, or whatever. I don’t care about any of that because the chips are the best mulch I’ve ever found for vegetables. The trickiest thing is when I have to pull a big plant up by the roots – that can certainly make chips and soil mix together more than I want. But I just do it carefully and actually, most of the time I just cut the plant at soil level and leave the roots in place (really big cabbages may be an exception).
All done for now.
See how kind of dark and curled and hard those plants look? You can’t tell from the photo but these plants are STIFF. This is all just because I changed everything up a lot this year in the indoor seed-starting area and I’m still getting the hang of it. Different lights, different container medium, different fertilizer, and on top of that grafting tomatoes. Talk about unscientific experiments!
Here’s the scraggly band of remaining tomato plants – and this is not all of them. The spindly one with the yellow leaves is a rootstock plant. I just want to see what that’s like so I’m going to let it flower and fruit for the hell of it.
And in addition to that I have about 8 more inside, which I’m only *just* starting to harden off – they are very soft plants so the hardening off needs to be really careful. Of these remaining plants, 4 will go to Carol on Wichita Ave, 8 will go to my sister and hopefully the rest will find homes somewhere.
We have some exceptional weather coming up so I’m going to try to get as many plants in the ground as possible this weekend. Wish me luck!
It looks flippin awful right now but just you wait. There’s so much going on here – hoop house is up with tomatoes NOT in it (what? I don’t know, I don’t work here), there’s fencing and other crap all over the place to keep birds and dog out of the garlic, there’s a big ol’ feverfew that I’m going to put in the ground (it volunteered in that pot and went crazy), grapes that need to be pruned (in the big pots) and of course the big obvious red highlighter mark which is the hopeful eventual outline of a Eucalyptus parvula.
For a long time I’ve been wanting an evergreen tree on my side of the fence right there in between those two Styrax japonicas on the other side. I’ve considered oak, Arbutus (unedo?), cypress, and various others until it finally occurred to me that (I think) Eucalyptus feels right. So then it became a matter of selecting the species. As luck would have it I had a conversation about this with Paul Bonine of Xera Plants while in the car, and not only does he have a lot of experience in growing Eucalyptus, he also knows where they all are around town. So he took me on a little tour and showed me E. kybeanensis, E. parvula, and several others. E. parvula won the race handily once I saw the gorgeous one on N. Delaware Avenue just south of Sumner. Street view here.
Yet another stroke of luck – another friend just happened to have a little E. parvula and he gave it to me. EEEEEEE!!!
Lastly, If I say it out loud do I HAVE to follow through? I think I’m gonna take out the raspberries. They are thirsty, hard to harvest, and I have those damn spotted wing drosophila. Relatively new arrivals to the area, these assholes are responsible for significant impacts to commercial fruit growers. They are damnear impossible to control and I just don’t think it’s worth it. I’m halfway though an experiment to see if allowing chickens to forage under and around the plants will reduce populations or eliminate them (adults overwinter in/on ground) so I’m going to see that out but even if it’s successful, I’m still not all that keen on growing these. Maybe olives…
Wednesday Vignettes come to us from the genius of Anna at Flutter & Hum, so go check her blog out too.
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