What have you done today in the Garden?

Yesterday was potting up day. It took some time and navigating with home care chores, but I was glad to get it done. The poor peppers were in need.

The Cupid's Dart and Gazania's are coming along.




These fellas were moved to three inch pots.




And the peppers were bumped up for the third pot up to 1 gallon.





It's wonderful to see everyone's gardens and flowers. My snow is gone but the ground is frozen still. I think tomorrow I'll be able to begin cleaning out saplings behind the Haskaps, as well as the Cherry and Gooseberry.

 

Tomato, peppers and flower seedling look great. Hopefully the weather will cooperate and soon they will be in your garden .

 

Okaaaaaaay then, Mel. I can see your seedlings are coming right along. Cor, they are looking very good indeed. I was looking at your toms and thinking mine are almost that far along. We are thinking about skipping the intermediate stage that you are doing this year…and just chucking them directly into the deep Clematis pots.

I know cutting corners is usually not the best choice; but with the climate change, plant development is rushing along here at break-neck speed.

Thanks for your interesting posting with a glimpse of your plant progress. You sure do have challenging conditions over there.

 

I did clean up some brush and hauled it to the burn pile for later. We have high winds at present, so it is not safe to burn. And we are expecting heavy storms by morning. I pulled a few weeds for my chickens. They lay better when I have greens to give them, however, I think there is already a SNAKE in the hen house. I saw a black king snake the other day, and he may be the culprit? His kind kills copperheads and other poison snakes, but they also steal hen eggs and baby birds. I hate when they do that, the mother birds cry a long time over their poor babies. I just plain don't like snakes at all. I have lost hens to snake bites (probably copperheads, they are the most common), and they steal most of my eggs. If I catch them in the hen house and DS is not handy, I kill them. If he is home, he will haul the harmless ones far far away.

Some friends have told me that roosters kill the snakes??? I never had a rooster who would kill snakes. The rooster I currently have never kills snakes. He is a loud mouth...

The following plants have no signs of life so far:

My concord grapevine; my concord/Thompson cross grapevine; my mulberry tree; my tame elderberry bush; my new ostrich plume ferns; the new strawberries I planted; my favorite blueberry bush; my best raspberry bush--thankfully, I have some other raspberry bushes; my Queen of Sweden rose from David Austin; 2 Queen Elizabeth roses...

I did email the company about the ostrich plume ferns tonight, maybe it is too soon?

My oDS was home from trucking this week, and has to go back in the morning. I made us a blueberry pie for our birthdays, they are only a few days apart. It turned out perfectly, and most of it is gone already. None of us like cake much, so I usually make pies for birthday treats.

I got to talk to my yDS last night and was up quite late. He works night shift, so it is always late when he calls and we talked several hours. (he did have a few days off of vacation time he had to use up) Then I napped a lot today...

(I wrote this sunday evening, but our internet went down)

 

Yesterday we went somewhere, it's on my golden retrievers thread and today just felt lazy and didn't do anything outside. But i did do the washing and cleaned the 2 toilets.

 

Cleaned up more green moss growing on the front porch. Went around everything to monitor the garden and pasture for gophers , ground squirrels, voles. Fixing all the recharging batteries, they needed to have the contacts cleaned. Blew all the pine needles off the roof and driveway. AGAIN….!
Managed to clean the gunk out of the bird water feature that collects thru the winter. UCK…

Fed the fish in the pond lightly it’s still a bit early to fed them too much. I need to fix the waterfall pump,It died. But the air pump is still bubbling away.

Took all the dogs out running thru the pastures. Then put out a little Plantskyyd .
Opened up the waterlily pond. I keep it covered with an scree over winter to protect the plants from hungry critters .

 

Your seedlings look great buddy Mel! They are filled with optimism and the hope for deliciousness and beauty tomorrow

I'll post more on mine soon. Last year I struggled a bit because the tomatoes were getting big while the soil was still cold. They did great though. My tomatoes are all germinated now.

Night Owl, you are an amazing gardener! Wow!

How do you like your David Austin roses? Are they fragrant?

We don't have bad snakes here. I'm always happy to see garden snakes, carnivores. my chickens have been victimized by - rats? raccoons? weasels? but not in about nine months. It's usually young'ns. Hens are such great friends to us. Every egg is treasured.

We are all learning, Sjoerd. The climates will change gardens, farms, forests, everything. Not only hotter, but also areas dependent on the jet stream might become colder - so who knows. Watch and see and try to adapt!

My seedlings are all outside today. Tonight Im expecting 30s or low 40s F, so the plantmobile returns inside tonight.

 

Thank you Sjoerd. I'm looking at the long range forecast, and how are our weather trends are going too. I think I may be skipping the 1 gallon pot up on some of my Toms this year for the first time also. Because I do a ten week head start for my tomatoes, they usually spend quite a bit of time in a 1 gallon pot before going out to the cold frame greenhouse with heat lamps and heated soil cables. This year I'm ixnaying the soil cable and heating the soil early with clear plastic on the soil, which I will leave on. ( I've done a lot of reading about clear plastic vs black with the purpose of heating the soil and clear does appear to give an advantage to increasing soil temps). I'll still need the heat lamps to keep the frost off the foliage at night.

I'm curious if the weather does let me put them in early, and therefore I don't have to remove first flowers because they are in pots so long, maybe they will be happier even if it is a bit cooler. What fun!

I just phoned my neighbour with the tree and flower Nursery. She will sell me some bulk bales of top soil. I need to redo the soil in half of the greenhouse for the tomatoes. I'm thinking I'd better get on that soon hahaha. My plan if the weather looks good is to put some tomatoes out early in May ( Maybe even mid or late April?? ) That's crazy to consider here. I will wait for the rest until my usual mid May. We shall see what Mother Nature would prefer.

 

@Daniel W , I love the David Austin roses, and they do have nice scents. The Queen of Sweden has no sign of life yet. St Swithun's has leaves and is green. (My David Austin roses)

My other roses all have leaves now, but they are not from David Austin. Some of my cuttings have made it and have leaves.

The ostrich plume fern might have a sprout today. I sure hope so.

I did get my potatoes planted today.

I dug up a bunch of paper white narcissus today, and bagged them for sharing with friends. (I have loads of other paper white narcissus) I want to plant other flowers in that bed. I did add some seeds for zinnias, marigolds, and black-eyed susans, and echinacea. I also want to plant some of my milkweed seeds in that spot also.

I planted my hollyhock roots today also. I sure hope they grow and bloom.

I also bagged up some of my extra seeds for friends to plant in their gardens.

 

The snake I saw a few days ago was a black king snake almost 4 feet long, which is not venomous and will kill copperheads. However, they love to steal eggs from my hens. All snakes will climb trees and kill baby birds.

Southern Missouri has 5 kinds of venomous snakes plus many kinds of 'harmless' snakes. However, last week someone found a diamond back rattle snake in a nearby city about 25 miles from here! I hate snakes (I know I shared about being bitten by a copperhead in the summer of 2014, which was the second time I have been bitten.) I refuse to tolerate poison snakes in my yard. It is legal to kill them in self defense.

I had to learn to ID different snakes when my boys were little, they were fascinated with them. Here is a guide to Missouri's snakes if anyone is interested.

mdc.mo.gov/sites/default/files/mo_nature/downloads/page/MissouriSnakes.pdf

 

Today I limited and paced myself.

I completed the top tier of the bamboo trellis for the Honeycrisp & Gala apple espalier tree.



I stopped and gazed at flowers.


I tied some of the mini apple trees to their posts. Mini trees (smaller than dwarf) have limited root systems and can easily fall over if weighted by apples or growing branches. Now is the time to tie them. I'm waiting until they bloom, to photograph them. I think most will have a good bloom set this year.

After a week in daylily intensive care unit, these dry - storage daylilies look greener and a bit more sturdy, and are growing.



I inventoried drip lines. I want to keep as much as I can from last year. I ordered some replacement lines. Today the onion rows and lettuce area looked dry already so I watered them.

The plantmobile is inside for the night.

It's interesting. My three- and four- year old home-saved four o'clock seeds all germinated. I planted them a few days later than the new purchased ones. Also, almost all of the new purchased ones that I pre-sprouted in moist paper towel germinated quickly, but about half of the ones in potting soil still haven't germinated. The home-saved are solid colors, while the purchased ones are variegated.

 

Daniel it all lookin good . You have your hand busy with all the garden projects designed for making a great harvest.

 

Gosh @AAnightowl ....I just couldn't cope with having snakes around !!
Lovely pics everyone, this is my favourite time of year full of hope and anticipation .

Yes @Logan as it turned out to be a good day in the end I did a couple of afternoon loads of laundry.....and it all dried in no time at all. Love the longer days .

A bit late this year but finally sowed the rest of the various salad seeds yesterday. Hopefully with warmer and longer days they won't be that far behind..

 

Nothing outside,but pricked out the tomato seedlings and the rest of the snapdragons, some of the others not doing very well and some more Californian Poppies.

@Oreti that's great that you got your washing dried yesterday. I hung mine on the washing line in the garage until hubby wants to put the car away.

 

Wet afternoon so worked uncover in the greenhouse and checked over ( once again ) a few potted up Dahlias that haven't stirred from their winter sleep yet, all looked good can't find any issues . 4 others are doing well and have a fair few leaves now. So I changed the position of the sleepers hoping it will serve as a wake-up call to them.

I hoping to give these all a permanent homes in the borders this year . All our others are left insitu throughout the Winter and just deeply mulched and then covered with an upturned pot. So far we've never lost one ...yet. I find over wintering them above ground a bit hit and miss.