Monday, March 16, 2015

tomato notes

Started a bunch of paste tomatoes in tiny pots on a heat mat last month. Moved them up to 4" pots tonight. The Amish Paste from Baker Creek seems to be slightly better performing (13/14 vigorous enough to be worth transplanting) than the Sheboygan from Uprising (10/14). The Amish ones are in the colored pots; the Sheboygans are in the black pots.

Next repotting: april?

Friday, March 13, 2015

buried treasure!!!

Look what I found when I was digging a hole for the last of the blue elderberries:
Trowel included for scale. On the bright side, by the time I finally got it out of there, I had PLENTY of room for the bare roots of the plant.

The more sincere buried treasure that I've been turning up in all this digging is, of course, the worms. The dirt below the sod layer is pretty barren and compacted, but in among the grass roots I've been finding some nice fat earthworms. And they've already started to colonize the dirt I had trucked in, too, which I take it to mean that it meets with their approval. One of the ones I turned up the other day was so big I didn't recognize it at first glance. Onward, little detritovores!

This weekend I need to repot my tomatoes for the first time. They've gotten their first true leaves and are a bit leggy, so time to move them into 4-inch pots and bury some of that excess stem so it can get to rooting.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Springing

I'm just not good at posts with pictures; waiting to get pictures of things means the things don't get posted. So here's a post with a lot of text instead.

 I have two big outdoor goals this year: to no longer need to mow the front slope, and to encourage more pollinators to hang out here. I've been working on both of them in the last few weeks! Saturday of last week was the annual King Conservation District native plant sale. I preordered a few things, and then went down there with H so we could both buy some stuff in the walk-up sale too. Now, looking at the prices on the website, I thought "well, that's a little high but reasonable," and ordered two blue elderberries and one mock orange. Then we got to the sale, and we discovered that I had ordered two bundles etc, and that each bundle was 10 bare-root plants. We promptly strategically divided our lists so we didn't repeat species, and bought bundles of a bunch of other stuff too.

 But then we have the best problem ever: so many plants that need to get in the ground! And it's a beautiful weekend! So for the rest of Saturday we worked in H's tiny back yard, where we moved around clumps of rosemary and oregano to make room for various exciting berries. She also gave me two of her rose bushes, since she's really short of space and I'm not so much, and when I got home I plopped those into the front garden bed beside the driveway, which has had a big blank spot in it ever since the old heating oil tank came out of its underground lair.

Sunday it was my turn.