Very grateful for today's rain.

I'd have to look back and check for sure... but i think we had gone about 3 weeks without significant rain until last night.
The way i remember it is that its been more than 2 weeks since we got Molly and i have not had to walk in the rain to take her out for her potty break until this morning.

But the garden has been quite dry even though i had been trying to water it every other day. The carrots and parsnips got water every day.  The dry weather makes it difficult for garden amendments to make their way into the soil, i could still see specks of the lime hubby spread out a few weekends ago.

I need to get the worm castings out of the worm bin. It is going to be a messy project to separate the Red Wigglers from the finished material. We have been sprinkling the liquid from the bin around in the garden, the bin produces about a pint of liquid every few days. I need to put it in a hose end sprayer and broadcast it on the garden, i  bet it will make a big difference.  I also can't wait to see how many worms i now have. I started with only one pound last winter. The selling companies like you to buy 2 pounds, but even the lowest prices are a bit on the ridiculous side and i wasn't worried if it started out slow. Considering how they consume kitchen scraps, i bet i have quite a few more than before.

I decided to try making Lilac Wine after reading about it in the comments of another blog i follow.
I have 13 cups of petals prepared so far.  I only have 5 gallon carboys, so i really should make at least 4 gallons in it. This means a lot of petals.  Good thing is that i have plenty of lilac flowers available for picking.  Some are starting to go by, but some are just about right.  Good thing is that plucking the petals is something i can do seated at the table.
I have most of the materials on hand,  the rest will require a quick trip to the LHFS.

Off to pluck more petals...!

Risky business...

Maybe it was early onset Spring Fever...  but i did it.  In early February, i tempted fate and granted the mail-order plant company with one of the worst reputations about $39 of my own money in exchange for some miniature citrus plants. 
According to my account, the plants will begin being shipped within a few days:

I don't like to be skeptical, cause being skeptical insinuates that i should have known better. But i feel i need to plead some sort of insanity...  of course i am also holding out that this company, despite all the evidence against it, will man up and send me something alive and in generally decent health.
I'm not expecting the Rutaceaen version of a mighty sequoia to be shipped to me in a box with fruit ready to be harvested...  but i would like to get more than a scale covered stick that dies within 2 weeks.

I have ordered from them before, with so-so results. I admit, at the time i ordered from them, i was even more a novice then than i am now. Some of he items came bare root and looked like something i fished out of a clogged sink...  but other things looked fine.
If i remember correctly i got some Japanese Toad Lilies, some English daisies, Ranunculus and i ordered some Manchurian Apricots.

The toad lilies did well enough and bloomed the year i got them. I think the bare root daisy may have had a better shot had i known what i was doing.  But it was a bust.

The ranunculus grew but never flowered.

The apricots never arrived. I was told they were backordered, and when it was shipped, i was sent a really nice looking forsythia by mistake.  I was told i could keep it, so i gave it to my parents- but they never planted it. That really bugged me because it was actually pretty nice.

They ended up sending me a store credit for the price of the apricots (about $7) that i never used, because the following spring they had filed for reorganisation bankruptcy or sale - and were shutting down during that time. So i kept the voucher but never used it.  I had planned on buying their multi packs of old fashioned lilacs with that voucher, but in a way i'm glad i did not because when we bought the new yard, i ended up with more lilacs than i could give away!


But i will try to be optimistic that i get the correct items, that  they arrive healthy, if probably smaller than i'd like, and they ship quickly because our weather is a bit odd in this "El Nino" year.

I am eagerly awaiting my Richters order. I want to get some of those seeds started. A number of them are hardy types that can be sown now. I got the ship notification on the 9th, so it should only be a few more days.

I think everything in the greenhouses did ok overnight. Before it got too cold, i put a heavy blanket over each one just to keep in whatever heat the containers had absorbed.

I need to write a list of what has sprouted already, just so i won't forget next year.  Many things have been up for a number of days, but i have been too busy to write down small details like that.

The Buttercrunch lettuce looks like it will be edible quite soon....

I cannot believe that these Tomatillo seeds as old as they are, are sprouted and look pretty good!

  A bit fuzzy, but i think these are the Polfast. The stick is facing the wrong way for me to read the name and i forgot already.

Pruden's Purple tomatoes

Yellow Pear tomatoes

Gypsy broccoli

Welsh onions and Mirage shallots

Collards...  i should have had faith and sown one seed per pellet. Now i have to thin them. Glad i only sowed two seeds each. I have had great luck storing seeds, so i tend to think of every thinned seedling as a whole plant wasted since i can keep my seeds in high germination ratios for many years.

Pak Choi...  I can't wait to grill up a few of these!  I need to do successive sowings of this!

Mixed flat of assorteds...in the front on the left is Burdock, on the right is Kolrabi
in the back i can see the tag for the Oregano, but no sprouts...  on the right, i can't remember what that is and i can't see the tag, but its obviously some sort of cole crop.
See why i need to write everything down? lol

Some brave little  tomatoes are sprouting in there...  both from seed that is over 7 years old.

Mixed flat...  the Swiss Chard and Point One cabbage are waking up.

Finally, the Rosemary...  it has been cold, but they have made it very well.  Now that i have the light setup, i might bring them inside.  I will need to pot them up soon or i will damage them too much if their roots get tangled.

The Electric Fence kit i bought from Tractor Supply has come in, i just need to go pick it up. Maybe later today. There is no real rush since i can't install it yet- nothing to guard.... and i don't want to have it too long before installing in case the warrantee is too short.  I have at least 30 days before i will need it and most return policies are "within 30 days".  So i won't get it until we can test it some weekend.  Lay it out and make sure it is sturdy and complete.

I saw my first cabbage butterfly yesterday...  i felt kind of bad giving it the stink eye as it merrily fluttered across the yard.  I covet my future broccoli and cabbage plants, if the electric fence keeps the woodchucks out, i don't want to lose everything else to caterpillars! Even with the row covers, i don't want to have to use a bunch of bug killers to fend off a plague.

Soon i have to clean out the Worm Farm.  The red wigglers have been happily munching away at kitchen scraps all winter. The topmost bin is looking quite full. I am not sure i know how to remove all that black gold without losing half my worms.  Its too cold for them to live up here through winter, so if i lose any to the garden they won't last. I know they are just worms, but they do such a good job :0)

Well i have cleaning to do and if i get it done before nap time is over, i might get to read a little too! Yay.

Rosemary pie...?

Before i sowed my rosemary seeds, i tried to read up on how best to go about it. Half of the sites i encountered claimed that rosemary was bordering on impossible to germinate and took forever- better start with cuttings. I even found a paragraph on the garden watchdog site where a person was berating Richter's rosemary seed age and germination rates.

My seeds are from Richter's ... so i was thinking, maybe this was going to have been a disappointing waste of my money, since my Rosemary seed are from last year and not fresh right off the bat.
So i sowed the whole packet, i didn't even squander a precious seed flat on the doomed seeds,  i sacrificed a single pie tin and about 3 handfuls of soil covered with a sheet of clingwrap.  The seeds were planted 3-19-10 and set in the window sill of the bathroom upstairs in anticipation of being forgotten with no regrets and no expectations....

and imagine my surprise when i happened to go to the window and move something...and i saw a few specks of green...

So, since i didn't wintersow them, i have to provide light artificially for now because its too cold to plunk them outside. 

Planting tool....
Ok, so i'd say "i need a hobby" when i get excited enough about a new found tool to blog about it, but its a rainy day and i'm too achy to do much housework and i thought it was such a neat thing i took pictures of it.
 
But this IS my hobby.


Ha-ha....

 Strawberry seeds are tiny... not the tiniest seeds on the planet, but very small!
And there are neat things that can be begged off the nurses at the Pediatrician's office.

I don't  know if they simply call it a probe or if it has a special extractive name, but its a pencil shaped tool for extracting things from kids' ears, noses and who knows where else a small child will stuff any number of foreign objects. They come in a few sizes, but this one looked immediately promising from the second i saw it: 

Handy-dandy tiny seed tool.

See how small they are in their cozy little glassine packet?

When i dredge the stick in the packet, it tends to pick up only one teeny seed at a time, exactly what i want. My fingers are too dull to do this job as they are.  So this is an awesome help!

So i was able to plant 27 seeds into 27 Kcups with little effort and i didn't drop any. No seedlings wasted to thinning.  Strawberries are a little iffy in germinating, so this is probably the best way to go about it.


Apple trees.

Hubby went to Home Depot during his lunch break and i had him pick me up a pint of Bonide Fruit Tree spray.  I don't think it is organic, but this year i'm going to simply attack the apple problem with the biggest guns i can find.  I can go organic once i get other preventative measures in place- like deep fertilization, companion plantings-( the ring of chives and welsh onions i plan to plant at their bases) and i can get the trees pruned correctly and get their trunks straightened.  So the non-organic spray will hopefully beat out anything that might add to their weaknesses...

SFG.

I need to figure out if my soil will be fertile enough to do the square foot gardening system this year. It looks like the method begins with raised beds...which i  am not going to do, and they want you to use a combo of premixed soil, compost and vermiculite.  I need to find a way to make sure that after my large amount of kitchen compost (from the outdoor Darth Vader helmet-like composter) and the worm castings from the indoor worm hotel, plus the horse manure and the tilled-in rye grass will be potent enough to feed my plants in such tight spacing. I also need to look at drainage of the soil....  vermiculite might be a challenge to find in large quantities,  i can get peat moss in large bales though.

I won't know any of this until it is all tilled and mixed together... but i want to be prepared if i have to buy more amendments.

So, those are the things i am thinking of on a rainy Tuesday afternoon.... with 52 days left 'till last frost date.