Almost There

Signs of spring are showing this week.  The weather, however, is nuts.  After two years of winters so mild the grass never browned out, this winter has been very, very cold. Not as cold as years gone by when we had at least a few nights below zero.  But we do have brown grass, and nights below freezing.  Hopefully there won't be many of those left. 

The wierdest thing is the swinging of the temps on a 24-hour cycle.  Up to 50s (and sometimes above) during the day, and down to low 30s at night.  So even though last fall I failed to get an idea of what kind of winter we'd have, I don't think I'd have felt confident about when to start the various plants indoors even if I had.  I've got some snapdragons and delphiniums that are large enough to plant out, but I can't trust the weather yet, so I've been trundling them back and forth between the portable greenhouse and the celler. 

The portable greenhouse didn't work out for overwintering plants that can't take a freeze.  If we'd had winters like the last two years, it would have probably done well, but it just got too cold for winter protection with no heat source.  Also, the wind here is viscious, and I didn't originally have it anchored well enough.  The plastic cover whipped off last fall, ripping some of the seams open.  I had to repair it as best I could, but then with the freezing temps in the winter, it really got beat up.  I've ordered a new cover, and plan to use it only in the spring next time like a cold frame to acclimate my tender seedlings to the outdoors before putting them in the ground.

This was it late last fall when I set it up:

Most of those plants croaked.

I'll just have to go back to bringing more tender potted plants indoors for the winter.  Sad face.

Actually, the one plant I like to bring in and put back out when the temperature is safe for it is the jade plant.  It changes color.  Up against the south side of the house from spring to fall, it gets lots of sun and looks like this:

In a south-facing window with much less light during the winter, it looks like this:

It bloomed this year.  I don't know if I've seen one in bloom before.

Anyway, back to the portable greenhouse: it's working well for seedling acclimation.  I do have to bring them indoors when the temps drop below the upper 30s, but during the warmer day temps, they're getting the benefit of real sunlight that they don't get under my cellar lighting, which is shop lights with fluorescent bulbs suspended from chains so I can raise and lower them to the desired height.

I start my seeds of early crops and flowers indoors in mid-winter in trays set on special seedling tray heat pads.  You can get these online (for instance, Amazon) or where you buy your gardening supplies.  They get warm, but not hot, so seeds will germinate before they would outdoors in cool soil.  I ordered domes online to go over the trays to trap humidity.  (It can be regulated by opening or closing vents.) I've only seen them in stores when sold as part of a kit.  

As soon as the seeds germinate and push their way out of the soil, they get moved under the shop lights, which are lowered down to just barely above the plants.  The lights are cool enough that even if the plants grow to touch them, they won't burn.  If the light is more than a fraction of an inch above the seedlings, unlike outdoors, they'll stretch to reach the light and become spindly and weak.  Therefore, they get placed practically on top of the plants and raised as needed when the plants get taller.

The problem with this setup is that the plant labels are too tall to fit under the lights and must be placed out of the tray in front of the packs of seedlings.  This means I have to keep a very close eye on which label goes with which pack when I invariably move them around to make room for more.  There have been times when I lost track during this shell game if I've got various colors or varieties of the same species and gotten my labels mixed up. I could put a piece of masking tape on the pack and mark it, but I've been too lazy since that means I have to peel that off when I wash the pack to reuse it. 

snapdragon seedlings

'Feathertop' grass seedlings

When the plants have two or three sets of true leaves (those first two leaf-like, green parts are the "seed leaves", or cotyledons, which generally fall off once true leaves are growing), they're ready to go out to the greenhouse/cold frame on nice days.  At first, they need some shade, because the plants are tender and not used to that level of light intensity, so I've slipped a cover inside over the top of the frame that I can easily pull down or raise depending upon the amount of sunlight hitting the plants.

Out in the garden, the rhubarb plants are coming up.  I have yet to get them through a spring without any cold damage at all, but maybe because of the deep drops in temps every evening, they'll grow slowly enough so that they're not all fully leafed out when the inevitable early season frosts hit.

rhubarb emerging

There was a beautiful tatsoi plant on the top of my compost heap that made it through late fall and early winter, longer than those smaller ones in my garden proper and after most other green things were brown.

Alas, January hit it with a vengeance.

I had an idea to plant garlic on December 3 last year, thinking of giving it more time to mature, since what I harvested last year was kind of puny.  Of course, it could have just been the quality of the bulbs I planted, but ever the experimenter - because I know way too little about most things - I put them in the ground and then figured I'd lost that work when the winter got so cold for so long.  

mulched garlic beds

I did mulch them well, though, and voilà! they made it and are coming up.  Also poking up out of the brown earth these last several days are hyacinths, tulips, daffodils, giant allium, and sedum.  A couple of peony shrubs are just starting to peak out.  And the grackels are back!

I love this time of year for the early signs of green plant life.  Every day that's warm enough, I go out and scout around for signs of something new coming up.  I'm not anxious to see some things coming to life, though. I hope the Japanese beetle population got frozen back hard this year.  

I was happy to see a video recently of a British horticulturist (Monty Don - apparently quite well known over there) advising a woman creating a vegetable garden in her front yard to plant very densely.  I've been tempting fate, I thought, with the density of my garden plantings.  

My experience is that planting almost twice as dense as the "square foot gardening" recommendation of current garden experts is perfectly fine, and in fact has two advantages: more produce and fewer weeds.  I think unless your soil is quite poor, plants do fine a bit crowded.  Commercial growing and farming are different beasts that require other methods, and if you're using a tiller, you need room between rows.  Otherwise, raised beds or narrow paths such as I have, just so you can get around and reach all the plants, will do just fine.  Monty's easy-to-utilize guide for distance between vegetable garden plants (other than very large or sprawling ones) is the span of his hand.

Can't wait to start getting some things in the ground.  If the weather doesn't get worse, I think I'll be able to plant peas, leafy greens, celery, carrots and onions next week.  And maybe set out some flowers.  Also, I'm getting anxious to get my shipments of roses and raspberries I have on order.  They should all be coming in this month.  

But first, the work:  I have to mulch paths and add a layer of compost to the beds.   And hope all my roses survived the winter.  That's a story for another day.

Happy spring, people!