New England, April 2016

Welcome to April 2016... Rain, snow, temps in the 20s, rain, winds to 70 miles per hour, snow, rain, snow... And on and on. 

My SFG is fully planted for spring:
I will be covering with screens shortly against the snow and winds that are forcast for tonight through Wednesday.

Meanwhile Miss Lilly is bored. To. Death!

What's everyone else up to?

Cute!

My little plants (spinach, lettuces, peas, radishes, kale) are and have been taking a beating! Cold, hail, gale force winds, snowy mix....yuk! I have towels on 'em. We will see.

Lily - cuteness overload.

I was diligently working in my compost area over the past week, spreading black gold every where, and now this:
Certainly puts the brakes on!

Brought in the outside lettuce and leafy greens cell packs last night.  Gotta divide and up pot the tomatoes today:
(I was sitting out having lunch and catching rays in that blown over chair just the other day.)

Meanwhile, my Easter tulips from a neighbor are feeling cozy enough to bloom:
There was no name on them so I'm unable to find out if they will come back next year, but I'll plant the bulbs out anyway when the time comes, just in case.

Lovely tulips! I too was sunning on the patio on Easter, this morning, a dusting on everything! Hope stuff didn't freeze.

  Quiltbea!!!

Some flowers for you...

This April is starting extremely below average, this is normal for Colorado and not for New England states!

This reminds me of 2007 and 2003!

April, 2007 was when Rutland, Vermont had wind damage! 

Rutland, Vermont is known to be windy, has been, at least since 
the early-1990s, but not damage like during April, 2007!

Nasty looking weather. But the flowers are lovely.

Friday was so lovely as was the preceeding few days, so I planted pansies.  The garden shop assured me they could take the little snow forecast for the weekend.  This, however, I am not sure about....

So, I hope my 7 six packs of pansies were not a two day joy......

Pansies are pretty tough! And festive! So colorful! And if your plants have been in cold, like MINE all have, they will do better with the cold than a plant that went from greenhouse to 20*F....makes sense. People are the same way!

I've been tending my windowsill garden. Ha! I was looking through the Burpee catalog, and I admit, I fell in love with their beauty, the Thunderbolt peppers. They took a while to germinate, (my house is pretty cool), but every seed did come up, and now they're waving their little arms at the sun, and trying to ignore the snow outside the window. These look a lot like the peppers I bought several times at the farm stand last year. Hopefully, I will have luck with them.

CapeCoddess, as far as retirement goes, if you're even thinking about it, you could start getting your ducks in a row, because there's a lot to be done before everything is official. Decide what you're going to do with your 401k, and pension, figure out which direction to take as far as Medicare goes. I was lucky enough to find a financial advisor I trusted, who helped smooth out a lot of the bumps for me. I would have been lost without her.

As far as actually being retired...people I worked with kept asking me what I was going to do with myself, wasn't I going to be bored? I was always dumbfounded by that question. Although, most of them were pretty young, and may not have had time yet to develop any interests.(Other than texting and taking selfies...warning, someday you'll be retired too, and you're going to want to have something more interesting than that to occupy your time!) I have so many things I love to do, and now I have time for all of them, and I get to spend time with my friends, something there was never enough time for before. And one of the best perks is that on miserable, snowy days, I don't have to get up early to snowblow the driveway and then try to make it to work. I can light a fire in the fireplace, have a second cup of coffee, curl up with a book in my hand, and a cat on my lap...have I made it sound tempting enough yet???

I tried to post a pic, but all I managed to do is post the link. Here are my Thunderbolts,

https://i.servimg.com/u/f86/19/45/37/14/thunde10.jpg

Hi hammock gal: I see you have been the cause of a new thread about Retirement.

See you there.

Kelejan

I guess we may get snow tomorrow night with cold all weekend so I grabbed these photos just in case...

Inside out:
Inside - tomatoes, peppers, brussel sprouts, mustard spinach, stevia.  Outside - pak choi, lettuce, collards, kale

Kale & collard bed, with lettuce interspersed, and garlic for grid markers:

How cute are these shallots planted end of winter!? Garlic in behind planted last Halloween & some Lolla Rosa lettuce here and there:

Salad box - Mustard spinach, Marvel of the Four Seasons, Monster spinach, Black Seeded Simpson, garlic, scallions:

Sugar Snap Peas - all 3 plantings, planted about 10 days apart from each other, have sprouted! This is the first one:

The pile of pine needles covers them up during snow fall.

Screens, hoops and a bag of pine needles at the ready for Sat nights snow:
It's so windy that most all of my venetian blind grids have blown off and are now laying next to their beds.  Well, at least the ones I could find are...


Celery stumplings in the kitchen window:  
I never have good luck after I plant them out.  I think they need watering more often than I'm willing to pour.

Check out this experiment - a neighbor pulled up his ornamental cabbage and donated them to my compost pile.  I planted a few in hopes of getting seeds this year and voila!  Sure enough, they all came back like this one:
I wonder what color the flowers will be...?

Nice! I don't even know how to help my plants! I have peas, kale, spinach, lettuce, radish sprouts out there, and my 3 measely onions....they have been under towels all day here. Snowed, rained, ice pellets, sleet, yuk. High tomorrow is 33* and low 20s for tomorrow night too

Unseasonably low night temps ahead, (low 20s, if not the teens!) could be hellacious on my scanner within about 24 hours later... (Fires and fire departments being super busy, because of woodstove issues or the like)

It's definitely gonna feel like I'm in zone 4, if not zone 3b!

CC, I'm curious about the seaweed you put on last fall. (?) Did it all break down and that is why I don't see any? Or did you only put it in beds without closeup photos?

Hi RJ!  Thanks for the heads up!  Have you started any plants yet?

sanderson wrote:CC,  I'm curious about the seaweed you put on last fall. (?)  Did it all break down and that is why I don't see any?  Or did you only put it in beds without closeup photos?

You see all those shells?  They came in the seaweed.  It pretty much broke down.  But early March I also dumped compost right on top of all the beds. Any remaining seaweed clumps I ran into when planting I moved over a bit and left there as mulch. There's a clump in the shallot photo on the right just below center. Once you know the color of it you can see little bits of it through out that photo.

Beautiful day today but boy is it cold this morning!

A new thread!

I promised photos on the onion experiment. So we have the onion seeds I planted from the 2015 packet (from last spring):



And then I thought - hmm. That's not enough for a 4x8 bed. So I found some old onion seed packets in the fridge from 2011 and dumped those in a new tray about 2 weeks later and these are those:

and so, the moral of this story is, don't believe that onion seeds are only viable for one year. At least not if you put them in the fridge.

Yikes, a new image hosting procedure. Well, if I can do it, then it's a good new plan!

I have my seeding trays in the portable deck greenhouse shelving today. Everything is coming up pretty well, bought some new seeds and potting soil yesterday so need to continue indoor seeding today. I never even dragged out the fluorescent lights this year! Just stuck the trays in whatever sun in the house I could find. Seems to have worked pretty well. Maybe because up until recently it was a pretty warm and sunny spring.

I have about 5 elderberry cuttings from my profuse tree and I plan on planting those around, for the bees and the birds and the chickens. They sure do seem to thrive, may as well capitalize on that. I also have about 5 or so grape vine cuttings that are budding. I took them from my one grape vine that is climbing the wire mesh of the chicken run, and I hope to plant the rest of them around the run so that eventually the run becomes a grape trellis. (Have I already said this, 5 times?)

Didn't buy any new trees, etc. to plant this year, just watching the ones from the past couple years. The voles had eaten the bark around my new fruit trees BUT I think they're in the midst of budding anyway! How can that be? Either delayed death, or maybe the vole didn't chew the layer that was really important. I don't know. If they leaf out this summer, I will take photos of the way they girdled the trees because if they are alive, that's another thing that goes against conventional wisdom.
 
Or maybe there's a garden fairy out there.... THAT COULD BE.

CapeCoddess wrote:Hi RJ!  Thanks for the heads up!  Have you started any plants yet?

Nope, but I still have marigolds from last year blooming next to the south-facing window in the living room!

Spider mites didn't get them...

NHG, my green bunching onions germinated terribly. Had 16 in, got 3. And they might be frozen, afraid to lift the towels until tomorrow. Weird. Maybe they didn't like the warmth, they were in there when I was doing the peppers. They all came up!

Also, elderberries! I love that jam, pie, etc. Thanks for the reminder! And grapes, if I put in some Concord grapes, do I need 2 plants? I will probably put 2 in however.

I think it is the cambrium that is the "IT" layer for tree survival. Long ago botany...

Wow scorpio, I'm impressed (with the botany lesson)! Crossing my fingers that cambrium layer didn't get crossed.

I don't think grapes need more than one vine (for pollination I presume). 

Looking forward to next weekend, finally into the low to high 60s...

NHGardener wrote:Wow scorpio, I'm impressed (with the botany lesson)! Crossing my fingers that cambrium layer didn't get crossed.

I don't think grapes need more than one vine (for pollination I presume). 

Looking forward to next weekend, finally into the low to high 60s...

Don't be, I am probably wrong! Sans Google as I was! I too am looking forward to the week to come, you guys are a day or 2 behind our warm up....but it's comin'!

CapeC......Thanks for the lovely orchids (photo above) you posted for my BD.  I loved them.  I just got to see them today.  My puter went blank so I'm borrowing a friend's this week to catch up on things.  Love the orchids.  Its been awhile since I grew them myself.

NHGardener......I know that the info on seed packets can be misleading.  I think they just want you to buy seeds more often.  But viability drops as the seeds age.  The percentages are lower but you just have to remember to sow more.
The only one that lived up to its name for me was parsnips.  Mine never would grow if the seed was over a  year old.

You have a great blog, QB. Figuring out how to do that is not easy, and I imagine keeping up with it is not either, so I really hand it to you!  

Gotta bookmark that for later.