PNW: April 2014

  Congrats Marc!!   

so happy for you   and so glad you are willing to share your experience    with us!!

hugs
rose

Thanks, FamilyGardening!

Yesterday I went to clip some miner's lettuce that volunteered in what had been my small hoop house last winter. They overwintered fine. But last week, there was a big hole in the cloth. Nothing seemed touched, that I could see. Yesterday, though, it was obvious what the critters had come for. My miner's lettuce had been neatly beheaded. Apparently the rabbits or squirrels or whatever like miner's lettuce as much as I do and are pretty insistent about eating it. I guess I'll need a protective cover whenever I want to grow it.

The brussels sprouts look healthy, but they're not doing much. Some of the onions are starting to bulb just a little bit. My daikon radishes bolted and have a lot of white flowers with violet tinges on the inner petals. Pretty enough to be ornamentals. I'm going to leave them be and see if I like the pods as much as another grower here who let her bolted diakons be and then loved the pods. If nothing else, the flowers are some nice bee food early in the season. Strawberries look fine. It's quite dry here lately, so I went and watered everything. I'm hoping my lobelias start doing something, and my veronicas.

I've moved a lot of seedlings outside that I may have to take indoors again, as nights are getting cool again in this upcoming week.

Spent the day shoveling soil at a department store. Fred Myers department store has an annual "Fuschia Saturday." Customers bring their own pots, buy plants at FM, and bring them back to tables set up by the master gardeners in the parking lot to be potted with some nice Black Gold compost. The master gardeners donate their time, and I believe that in return the organization gets some sort of donation from Freddy's.

We used I think 7 ... or was it 10? pallets of compost, in single huge bags somewhere between four and five feet tall and wide, I'd guess, plus a number of regular bags.

Most of the MG's aren't young, so getting all that soil into 5-gallon buckets and other big holding bins on top of the long row of tables fell mostly to me and a fellow younger than me who's just starting to get a hint of gray in his beard, though others did help a lot, sometimes for hours. I think everyone's back was probably pretty fried by the end of the day. The event went from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., and often the pace was pretty quick.

Hard but fun day out in the sun. I bet my face hurts tomorrow. Got some more volunteer hours whittled away from the 70 I need to complete.

Harvested these for dinner tonight.  They were planted last fall.

The parsnip tops had died during the winter months but they have all grown back so I decided to dig two up.  I was surprised as to how big they were. They fed three and were delicious. I am in the process of removing the overwintered items (leeks and onions mostly) to make room for summer crops.

Nice! Reminds me, I need to get the parsnips in.

After seeing the raves for Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce here, I had to buy a packet. Seeded a few today and a few toy choi also. Got a four-pack of Juliet yellow tomatoes the other day and repotted them today into one-gallon pots, along with a beefmaster and four Better Bush, which was one of my strongest performers last year. Also planted some more peas. Delighted to see the peas I planted last week have come up and are between an inch and two inches tall. Some spinach has sprouted, but I need to get more planted pronto if I am going to have any reasonable crop of them. Lobelias are just sitting there doing nothing, no blooms yet. A couple of blooms opening on the pansies. The veronica seems stuck, too. Healthy looking, but not getting any bigger. Elephant garlic are still the stars of the show. Everything survived our 40 degree night and looks none the worse for wear from it.

Some of my jiffy-pellet seedlings are slowly growing, but I guess there's not a lot of nutrition available for them, so few are growing very much or quickly. And about half didn't germinate at all. Last year I had very poor germination rates with them too.

Yesterday I built a 1x6 foot planter box for the kids at the elementary school. I'll take it down to the school tomorrow and plant it with tomatoes, maybe let some of the kids help if there's time. I'll put in a sungold, a beefmaster, a Juliet, and I think a sweet 100 or sweet million, whatever one of the other MG's brings tomorrow. So two full-size and two cherries.

Made inquiries at a local restaurant for leftover buckets, and got a maybe, but I have to check with my boss kind of thing. We'll see.

Tore up a lot of weed-encrusted turf from our gutters today. Very tough work. No matter what we do, there's always more.

Nice parsnips happycamper!!

Marc sounds like you have been busy!

veggies are popping up and transplants are showing some growth in our familygardens!

SFG box1



French breakfast radishes



spinach is growing true leaves



SFG box 2



celery coming along nicely



SFG bed 3 herbs



so far in the herbs, the dill and borage are coming up!



chives



fennel and curly parsley



Flat leaf Parsley and cilantro



Back garden BTE + SFG

cole crops are doing well, lost a few but was able to plant some local garden store transplants and transplant some of our extra onions and celery seedlings in those squares....one of the big advantages of using the SFG method...if you lose a plant you can always replant something else in that square!! love it!



this is what we look forward too!!



happy gardening
rose......who also up loaded a bunch of pic's in the BTE thread too  

FG Rose,  Very nice.     I've failed twice with spinach.  Boy, those strawberries look very promising.  I love how you have plants in the cement block holes.

thanks Sanderson!

I just commented on how I love all your pots and containers!!

we still have to fill up most of those little areas in the cement blocks....hoping to add more flowers   my hubby and I love the idea of the garden beds being surrounded by flowers and herbs that will flower and feed us and the pollinators   

happy gardening
rose

I like your chives growing in the holes in your cinderblocks, FG. I love the idea of dozens of little planting holes like that just popping up fortuitously from the very process of building your bed. Those holes are wonderful bonus rewards for deciding to build things that way.

I gave in to the temptation -- again! -- of buying a seed packet the other day. Okay, TWO seed packets. One was for "pineapple tomatillos" and one for "Perilla Red Shiso." The tomatillos are supposed to be quite small but prolific, yellow, and taste just like pineapple. I had so much fun with tomatillos last year that I can't wait to find out how these ones do. I wonder how they would do in a chutney? The "shiso" is a green supposedly used a lot in Japanese dishes, says the packet. The pic on the front shows lots and lots of purple among deep green leaves; its front says the plant is a "curry-like Asian herb," and the back says that it is milder than green shiso. I tend to like Asian herbs and apparently have no willpower whatsoever, so I decided to try these out. Also, it says it grows well in containers, is a warm season crop, and tolerates shade -- all of which are bang on the money for where I'm probably going to grow it.

Did a lot of repotting seedlings today, amid the usual carrying chainsawed logs up our muddy hills until I'm almost positive I'm about to have a heart attack. I seeded lots of chard and it has come up very well. I'm hoping it will become one of my go-to crops I can rely on.

Pansies are starting to bloom but my lobelias are sitting there doing a bunch of nothing.

So many great spring projects to do, but hauling away all those logs and branches almost every day is just flattening me and defeating my energy. I'm not 20 anymore and can't recover like I used to. Feeling tired all the time lately.

I hear ya, Marc!  I'm in the same boat.  Thankfully I don't have logs to haul.  Branches from the fruit trees are enough for me!  And we gotta get the grass mowed today...  Rain back in tomorrow.  So hauling it is!

I keep telling myself it will help me lose weight/get back in shape...

That it will. But sometimes you don't feel like doing it all at once, right?

Branches are as good as logs, depending where you have to drag them, it seems to me. It's not lifting them with my arms that's tiring, but carrying them up and down hills. That's a full-body effort!

Marc you will have to let us know if the pineapple tomatillos really taste like pineapple...cause we love pineapple here in this house and it would be fun to grow some.....   

AtlantaMarie....I love your avatar!!

hubby is out mowing our laws as I sit and type....rain is do back here too!

happy gardening
rose....who is off to let the chicks have a bit of a free range before the rain starts

Thanks Rose!

And I agree with you - Marc needs to let us both know how pineappley they taste!

Got the grass cut.  And a few branches hauled up the hill to our burn site.  And planted several replacement tomatoes & watermelons for what we lost.  And 11 squares of corn (4/sq).  And mulched all of that plus the 40+ okra I planted yesterday afternoon.  (40+ okra from a 4-cell container!)  Oh, and dumped stuff in the compost pile.

Got a nice sunburn for my effort too, lol.

Love the springtime in GA!  Except for the pollen...

We're supposed to get back to almost freezing by Friday. Weather here can be so volatile!

The other day it rained and washed all the ink off my plant tags so now I don't know what a lot of my little seedlings are anymore. LOL Sheesh, I thought ink from a sharpie could take a little rain, but I guess not. I hope I don't wind up planting a bush tomato by a trellis and leaving a determinate out where it has no support. D'oh!

Few days ago I chopped the bottoms off some green onions I bought at the supermarket and stuck them, in small groups, into four-inch (approx.) round pots, and they're growing new tops again very quickly.

Chives already have flowers on them. I guess I'll eat the flowers.

I ended up buying some popsicle sticks in the craft dept at Wally-world yesterday.  We'll see if they do better than writing on tape/plastic tags.  Trying sharpie again.  But ran into the same thing, Marc.

Marc Iverson wrote:...The other day it rained and washed all the ink off my plant tags so now I don't know what a lot of my little seedlings are anymore.  LOL  Sheesh, I thought ink from a sharpie could take a little rain, but I guess not...

...Few days ago I chopped the bottoms off some green onions I bought at the supermarket and stuck them, in small groups, into four-inch (approx.) round pots, and they're growing new tops again very quickly...

I've been saving the bottoms of my green onions for replanting, keeping them in a ziploc bag in the fridge until I get around to it. I've noticed they are regrowing even where they are in the crisper drawer.   

I bought a grease pen from Territorial Seed Co for marking plant tags. That withstands the rain quite well.

Marc Iverson wrote:...The other day it rained and washed all the ink off my plant tags so now I don't know what a lot of my little seedlings are anymore...

I used to have that problem.  On the advice of a forum member, I switched to an industrial Sharpie.  No more rain or sun fade on plastic markers.

http://www.sharpie.com/enUS/Pages/industrial-fine-marker.aspx

An industrial Sharpie; who knew!  

We use plastic knives for markers, and a "grease pen" for the wording. You can get the plastic knives at Smart and Final. 100 for $2.99 I think it is. Got the grease pen at an art store. It's the kind that you unravel the tip. 
LOVE this set up. Tried all kinds of stuff before, wood popsicle sticks decompose, regular garden markers got brittle and broke. Permanent markers are just that, permanent so you have to search around for markers if want to re use. The grease pen STAYS on; but will come off with a little rubbing and windex LOVE IT!
The plastic knives have been in use for about 4 seasons?? Still look GREAT, virtually none have broken/snapped, and there's plenty of room to write the name of the plant too. We had a BBQ this weekend, and used the knives for our steaks. So, if someone wanted to get "used ones" I'm sure you can find those too   God Bless!!

boffer wrote:

Marc Iverson wrote:...The other day it rained and washed all the ink off my plant tags so now I don't know what a lot of my little seedlings are anymore...

I used to have that problem.  On the advice of a forum member, I switched to an industrial Sharpie.  No more rain or sun fade on plastic markers.

http://www.sharpie.com/enUS/Pages/industrial-fine-marker.aspx

An industrial Sharpie; who knew!  

Never heard of that; thanks for the heads-up, boffer.

Southern gardener, your knife-and-grease-pen idea sounds good too.

+1!  Gotta try that next time!

Its the end of april......what is planted and growing in every ones garden so far?

happy gardening
rose

Cool season:
artichokes, beets, bok choi, broccoli, cabbages, carrots, cauliflower, celery, chard, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, onions, peas, potatoes, radishes, spinach, turnips

Warm season:
tomatoes, cukes, and squash seedlings are still under lights.  I think I've finally accepted that there's no benefit to transplanting  these veggies early.  Corn and beans will be direct seeded in a couple weeks.

So far, peas are my only problematic veggie this year.   I have them planted in the ground, in a box, and in planters.  They were stagger planted over a month,  and they're all having lousy germination rates.  Yet the same seeds  in planters in the greenhouse are doing great.  All are tried and proven seeds from TSC.  C'est la vie!

Boffer our sugar snap peas are off as well.....first year for them trying to bunch all together and not grow even on the trellis......im thinking it is because this is the first time we didn't direct sown but transplanted from seedlings we started.....another sugar snap pea we direct sown in containers had germination issues this year....it the first time for us to try them.....they are seed we bought for fall sowing....they are called sugar daddies and they are a bush type of sugar snap peas....I sure hope we end up having a good harvest from them as they are one of our families favorite   

Our Cool season:


artichokes doing good we thought we lost them in the freeze........ bok choi is doing ok as the slugs are loving them!.....broccoli, cabbages, cauliflower are doing better.... celery is doing great this just maybe a celery year..... lettuce, onions doing good....spinach is spotty.....potatoes look awesome.... radishes surprising doing well as we always seem to have problems with germ over the years.....turnips sprouted and have grown since??....carrots are starting to show up   

we still have lots of green onions and leeks to transplant........

some of our herbs are up....chives, fennel, borage, dill, cilantro, parsley & we transplant a few others that seem to be munched on by something.....may end up buying starts for the ones we lose....

Summer crops

peppers are under the lights and growing slow, we pretty much lost all of our tomato seedlings so we are just going to buy tomato plants this year.....

been thinking about direct sowing winter squash, pumpkins, cucumbers and summer squash.....what do you guys think? do you think they will grow from direct seed here in the PNW and have time to mature to harvest?

will be direct sowing beans and corn.....not sure when though......Im not sitting on the ground to check to see if its warm enough.......  will let Boffer take the lead and plant when he does   

happy gardening
rose