All set for spring.

Tags

arugula, bloodroot, cabbages, camassia, cauliflower, cucumbers, fritillaria, gladiolus, honeysuckle, iris, lettuce, onions, peas, roses, spicebush, tomatoes, tulip, wood poppy

April showers bring May flowers! Or something like that. The last couple years we had Aprils that were relatively dry, but this year we’re finally getting a more typically wet April. I know it sounds odd to “normal” people (i.e. non-gardeners/ non-farmers) to want rain, but spring rains really are a crucial source of groundwater for plants, even well into summer. And climate change isn’t going to improve matters, at least not in these parts where even in the past ten years, summers have become noticeably drier (and possibly hotter).

Anyway, today I planted the onion sets. The peas I planted last week are probably germinating as I type. The lettuce and arugula have already started to sprout. I really need to sow the carrots soon. The brassica (‘Melissa’ Savoy cabbage and ‘Di Sicilia Violetta’ purple cauliflower), tomato (‘San Marzano’, ‘Black Krim’, ‘Black Beauty’ and ‘Hahms Gelbe Topftomate’) and lemon cucumber seedlings are well on their way. In fact, I ran out of room under the grow lights, so I started hardening off the brassica seedlings today – they tolerate cool temperatures better.

The bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) started blooming last week, as did the spicebush (Lindera benzoin). I’ve had the spicebush for three years now, and this is the first time it flowered…possibly because during its first winter here, the accursed demonspawn rabbits chewed it down. So this spring I’ve learned something new about it, which is that it produces masses of tiny yellow flowers first thing in spring, before it produces leaves, and that those flowers have a very pleasant, refreshing fragrance.

Everything else is going apace – the wood poppies (Stylophorum diphyllum) are just starting to bloom, and the yellow tulips will open within a week or two. The honeysuckle (Lonicerum tataricum), which I pruned three weeks ago, is well-leafed out and now starting to produce flower buds. The roses are unwrapped, unmounded and pruned, the hardy gladiolus (Gladiolus palustris) is finally sprouting, the camassias (Camassia quamash) are up, all the irises are well on their way, and I’m nearly done with spring garden cleanup. Right now the only worry is that I don’t see any sign of my Fritillaria persica showing yet.

I know it’s a month until our spring last-chance-of frost date, but right now everything looks set to be glorious.

…I’m not generally an optimistic person, so I’ve probably just jinxed myself.

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String of vegetables.

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arugula, beetroots, cauliflower, cucumber beetle, cucumbers, eggplant, garlic, gladiolus, Japanese beetle, lettuce, nigella, radishes, rapunzel, witch hazel

Well, actually, first I will gripe about Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica). Is there anything the little bastards won’t eat? My poor witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is not looking too happy right now. They’ve also been feeding on the eggplants (Solanum melongena), but I can live with that. I hate the stuff, but the plants were foisted off on me in spring. I figured it would be a good learning experience in case I’m ever asked how to grow them…I can always give the nasty things away to the neighbours when they start producing.

Anyway, I harvested the garlic (Allium sativum) last week, but it’s been disappointing. The heads are not as large as they could be because of the unusually dry year (spring) we’ve had. The lemon cucumbers (Cucumis sativus) are still alive, which is a small and pleasant surprise. They’ve been hit with bacterial wilt because of the damned striped cucumber beetles (Acalymma sp.) and I’ve been carefully pruning off anything that looks infected, so I’ve actually been getting a reasonable harvest off them.

Here is a picture of a couple lemon cucumbers – the one on the left is one that I somehow kept missing, so it’s grown to full size (about the size of a baseball) and gotten ripe. The one on the right is more what a harvestable specimen should look like. Although lemon cucumbers don’t get bitter with age (as I did) like other cucumber types, the seeds do get large and hard. Also, once cucumbers are allowed to ripen, the vine slows down production or stops completely. But you can  see why they’re called “lemon” cucumbers.

Lemon cucumbers 2016

Back in spring a colleague offered me a seedling of a purple-headed cauliflower (Brassica oleracea). Cauliflowers have never been my favourite brassica, but I was intrigued, so I took it and potted it up. The curds are a beautiful shade of purple. I assume it’s edible, but I can only imagine what a bowlful of cauliflower cheese would look like made with this variety. The head is pretty small right now, so I hope it will expand as summer progresses.

Purple cauliflower

The lettuce (Lactuca sativa) and arugula (Eruca sativa) are well and done now. The sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) and the black Spanish radishes (Raphanus sativus var. nigrum) are well on their way, and the tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) are bearing well. I’m trying rapunzel (Valerianella locusta) as a summer green for the first time, but who knows how they’ll do.

I guess that’s it for the vegetables for now. Other new developments are the ‘Black Walnut’ gladioli, which have finally bloomed. Funny thing, I planted them in batches two weeks apart, but the first batch is only a few days ahead of the second. I’m a little disappointed with the colour; I was expecting a deeper shade and I don’t see why a cultigen called ‘Black Walnut’ has a white throat. The buds are a nice deep red, however, and the blooms are huge.

‘Black Walnut’ gladiolus

Finally, a couple years ago I begged some nigella (Nigella damascena, not the edible sort) seeds from a colleague. Hers were a beautiful shade of blue and I really liked them. I never got around to planting them last year, but I did this year, and – most of them have bloomed white. Sigh. Apparently her patch has turned more and more white in the past couple years too, so I guess it’s just unlucky genetics for us. Of the several plants I got, only one has bloomed blue, so I think I’ll pull up the others before the seed ripens and keep the blue one for seed. You can see both colours in the picture below.

Nigella damascena

And that’s it for now.

Spring into summer.

Tags

arugula, begonia, cabbages, calla lily, chickadee, dahlia, dill, Eastern black swallowtail, freesia, gladiolus, ismene, roses, sawflies, strawberries, tomatoes

Well. Something like that. This has been a crazy year for weather around here, fluctuating from one extreme to the next. Spring started cold, went hot, then went to normal spring temperatures. It’s getting hot again, but at least that’s normal as we approach July. What hasn’t been normal is the dry weather; I’m already out of rainwater and using the tap. They did forecast one of the hottest, driest summers ever and it seems that it’s begun.

And windy. I don’t know if it’s just me, but these past three years have felt especially windy. It was aggravating because we had some lovely masses of raincloud overhead a couple days ago, but they just got blown right by with barely a drop.

Anyway. The late spring did provide some surprises: for example, all the roses are in bloom at once. This has never happened before. It may also have messed around with some pest life cycles, because the rose sawflies (Arge sp.) aren’t are bad as last year. And the day-neutral strawberries didn’t start bearing until the same time as the June-bearing ones.

I’ve been doing a lot of container planting this year. A friend was given of a lot of large containers that she didn’t need, so she passed them along to me. Good thing too, because I’ve rather overextended myself with the vegetables this year, so now I’ve got pots of tomatoes and cabbages and salad greens and herbs all lurking to snag the unwary. Also dahlias, gladioli, freesias, calla lilies, ismene (Ismene x deflexa) and tuberous begonias – essentially, all the summer bulbs that I swore I’d never grow because they were too much trouble to dig up and overwinter properly. Of course, in pots I can just let them go dormant and stick them in the basement for winter, and they overwinter that way just fine.

Also in pots is the arugula (Eruca sativa) which has now begun to flower. This isn’t as bad as if, say, lettuce started to flower, because arugula is bitter to begin with, so the effect of bolting isn’t nearly as noticeable. But it’s a sign that summer is imminent.

The wildlife continues as well. On the one hand, I’m really pleased that the chicadees (Poecile atricapellus) have used the nest box, and I’m also happy that the Eastern Black Swallowtail (Papilio polyxenes)caterpillars have shown up on the dill (Anethum graveolens). I love raising butterflies and there’s always more dill than I can use. On the other hand, the squirrels have been even more annoying than usual, and the rabbits could do with a fox.

Bah. Too much to talk about. I think I’ll stop typing now.

You learn something new every day.

Tags

arugula, clematis, corn, cucumbers, elder, iris, radishes, roses, tomatoes, tulip

The iris ‘Hello Darkness’ opened its first bloom of the season this morning. It’s been chewed on by something since spring began, and I assumed it was slugs. This spring has been pretty dry and today we finally had a storm that’s been building for two days; the first rain in at least two weeks. After the storm I found a lot of snails on this iris.

This was a bit of a surprise, because I’ve never had a problem with snails before – the birds usually get them, so it’s the slugs I battle with. But as I was leaning in to pick them off, I noticed the flower was fragrant – which I certainly hadn’t noticed last year. It was a pleasant surprise.

The spring weather has made some unusual combinations. This spring was pretty cold before suddenly going warm, so it really has felt as though we went straight from winter to summer. The cold beginning meant that many plants and flowers were held back, and when it turned hot and everything suddenly started growing…there was no rain. The Siberian iris ‘Blue King’ has only just started budding out blooms.

In another first, the rabbits have been attacking the tulips. The little buggers just nipped the flowers off neatly and left them on the ground. Every single one of my new ‘Paul Scherer’ tulips got deadheaded prematurely. The ‘Paul Scherer’ is a new “black” tulip I planted last fall to compare to the’Queen of the Night’ tulips, which I’ve had a long time. Honestly, I’m hard pressed to find much of a difference other than the ‘Paul Scherer’ opened a day earlier. Perhaps in future seasons when they’re better established, more growth differences will become apparent, but the two varieties seem very similar in appearance.

What else…there seems to be a lot of dieback on the elder bushes (Sambucus canadensis). Winter was mild, so I doubt it’s that. I wonder if I’m seeing the effects of two dry springtimes in a row?

The western blue clematis (Clematis occidentalis) finally seems to be getting on with it. This is the third season I’ve had it, and the last couple years it didn’t seem to do much except sit there; last year there were maybe two flowers. This year it’s finally putting on some decent growth and starting to scramble up. There were three or four flowers earlier in the season.

I planted out the blue corn and the lemon cucumbers yesterday. Normally I would wait another week before planting those out, but as I said, the weather has been hot and there’s no expectation that will change. The first of the tomatoes (San Marzano) went out a few days ago; the rest (Black Krim and *ahem* Hans Gelbe Topftomate) will go in containers. I think the few radishes should be ready for picking in a week or so, and then I will sow sugar beets in that spot. I need to check if rabbits will attack arugula before planting any in the ground; right now they’re all in pots.

This Saturday is my Master Gardener group’s spring plant sale…guess who looks after the plants before the sale? Tomorrow we take the plants to the venue and set everything up. i don’t mind hosting the plants (if nothing else, it means I get first pick of anything that comes in), but it will be a relief to get it all gone.