2020 Garden Update: April 29

The lettuce and green pea bed is doing great!

With the end of April we're moving into the real growing season here in Zone 7, although we've continued to have rainy, cool weather and a few cold snaps. I'm hoping to see the heat loving vegetables put on some serious growth over the next few weeks! The pandemic continues to affect the usual round of garden store errands and supply runs, so we are mostly making do at home. We made one trip to the local nursery last week with masks and hand sanitizer and picked up some much needed potting soil along with several more plants, but I think it will be quite a while yet before I venture into Lowe's or any more crowded store. The future is far from certain, but at least the garden gives me something to look forward to each morning when I go out to check on everything and see what has changed.

Lettuce continues to be the champ of this year's garden; we get several salads a week out of my crop, which I'm still using as cut and come again to get the most out of it. Alas, I once again failed at growing carrots. Only the Little Fingers germinated, and while they produced big, promising green tops they only grew runty little carrots. We ate them, anyway, and cut the greens up into our salads. I think this will be my last attempt at carrots; I don't actually like carrots enough to keep struggling with them!

Runty carrots again. Sigh.

The green peas are blossoming beautifully with many little pods starting to form, and I'm keen to eat those again because they were a big hit with the family last year. I just hope the critters don't make off with them! We had plenty last year without a net, but the chipmunks here at the new house seem determined to wreak some havoc. I will probably find out soon if I'm going to need to cover the peas with a net, but I hope not! The vines are growing really tall now, and once again I wish I had planted more of them, but this year is a learning curve with the smaller space and raised beds. Both types of green peas have come up just fine, but at this point I can't tell any difference between them.

The squash and zucchini are not nearly as big as I would like, but they are starting to have flowers, too, and I hope the warmer weather ahead will help them grow. I'm not sure they are getting quite enough sun where they are, but we'll see how they do over the course of May. It might just be the cold weather that has held them back, and I did plant them out pretty early this year. The lone survivor of the original cucumber seedlings - a dragon's egg - has also produced flowers, even though it is still a puny runt of a plant. It just won't give up! I admire that and potted it up even though my second round of seedlings is growing much better. The store bought tomatoes all have baby fruit now and lots of flowers, but the heirloom varieties are slow growing (as they were last year). I haven't been able to find the determinate cherry or yellow pear types because of the pandemic and not going to larger garden centers, so we're working with what we've got for now. I expect the darn chipmunks to make off with the lowest hanging tomatoes as soon as they get at all red, but the plants should soon get too tall for them to reach.

Astilbe is doing really well.

The shade garden has filled in quite a lot with hostas, astilbes, ferns, and coral bells. Most of those were bought as bare root plants in mixed bags, but we added several coral bells on our recent nursery run. I would love to have twice as many! I really like the colors, especially the lime. It's a tricky bed to plant in because of the drainage tube, buried pipe, and cables, but we're getting there.

The sunny flower beds are also coming along, especially the irises we moved from the old house. The first one bloomed today! I can see scapes on the Stella D'Oro daylilies and hope to have the first daylily blooms soon. The regular lilies have been doing well, and the tall glads all came up, but I think the mini glads are proving to be a disappointment. I also found out that the chipmunks dug up and ate all of my replanted tulip bulbs from the Valentine's Day pot! At least they didn't get the tulips we planted in the fall.

By this time next month I hope to have lots of flowers and some real vegetable success stories to share!

2020 Garden Update: February 21

We've had nasty, cold, wet weather this week, and I have been down with a nasty cold myself, but the garden babies continue to grow at their own pace. Outside the lettuce rows have sprouted, and there's now solid evidence of pea sprouts from the Lincoln green peas in the raised bed. My second crop of lettuce, sown in a large pot, has also sprouted, although I have yet to see any signs of the carrots. All three of the lettuce varieties are doing well, and eventually I will have to thin the rows so that the heads will have room to grow, but we aren't there yet.

Inside the Jiffy pots are full of seedlings. The tomatoes are getting their first true leaves, and the squash seedlings are really getting long and turning into vines. I might have lost one of my pots of DAR Cucumber, having been too sick to come upstairs and check on them for a few days, but I have plenty of backups and can plant more seeds directly outdoors in April if I need to. The Jiffy pots will also need thinning soon, but I want to wait a little longer to see which sprouts do the best with early leaf formation.

During the last warm weather over the Presidents Day weekend, we bought more garden soil for the raised beds and also picked up several bags of plants at Costco to start filling in the shade bed along the patio. It's a very sheltered area so not exposed to the worst of the cold and wind, and when we moved in the only things growing there were clumps of boring monkey grass. We planted hostas and astilbe and will see how they get along until April, when we can start filling in with more plants from the local garden centers. I hope to add some bleeding heart and ferns and other shade lovers eventually.

The daylilies and daffodils continue to shrug at whatever the weather dishes out, but I can tell that we will have plenty of empty spots in the bank bed to fill once spring arrives. Luckily I keep getting plant catalogs in the mail to give me ideas!