Saturday, March 22, 2008

March 23, 2008

Ok, I wasn't sure what to call this post.  22nd part II or early 23.  I decided on 23 because "today" is Easter even though it's just past midnight.  We were at a Party Like a Rock Star birthday bash where we played Rock Star on the X-Box.  Now I know what the kids these days are talking about with their Guitar Hero and the like.  Hard, but fun.  Anyway, not gardening related, but why I'm posting so late.

In stark contrast to last night's frigid 35 when I dashed out to put up my coldframes near midnight.  Right now it's a balmy 50 degrees!  What a change.  Tomorrow is rain, so Mother Nature's doing my garden a favor but making my kids and I pay when we go hunt Easter eggs.

I wanted to post because the birthday girl's house we were at was my gardening muse.  No, not Judy, though I've learned so very much from her.  The b-day girl was the one that directed me to read Mel's book when she found out I was going to turn my dog-run into a garden. 

I wanted to share some observations about her yard.  I didn't take pictures, but her yard is immaculate.  She doesn't have raised beds, but her back yard was recently completely transformed by a landscape designer and contractor.  Her terrace pathways are in flagstone slatelike rocks and intricately laid brickwork, with a hot-tub hut.  All around the paths are mulched garden areas with a great mix of local plants, a couple blueberry bushes, a few soon-to-plant tomato plants, no fewer than 4 trellises for peas. 

And you should see her seedlings.  She's got multiple flats of jiffy peat pucks with all sorts of herbs, veggies and companion plants growing.  She's even going to save a red and green basil seedling for me to plant in between my tomatoes.  She's got almost as many seedlings as you see in those pics on GardenWeb where you wonder how many thousands of SF they have of space to plant all the seedlings. 

Oh, I just remembered, I am supposed to succession plant tomorrow. Let's see, I'm going to plant more lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, green onions, maybe radishes and carrots.  All the peas are in the ground so no need to succession plant them.  However, I'm not sure succession planting now is a good idea since nothing but my radishes are sprouting from the last planting two weeks ago.  It's possible that anything I plant tomorrow will sprout at the same time as my other seeds if the reason the old ones haven't surfaced is weather related.  Regardless, next time I plant I'll poke my finger in shallower so they don't have to worry that I planted them too deep and smothered them with too much dirt.

Well, that's enough for tonight, the kids will be up and ready to go way too early. 

Happy Easter all!

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Well, instead of a new post, I thought I'd edit this one.  Its raining as I expected, so no planting today. Besides, we've got about an hour to get to my brother's house for Easter.

Today, after checking the boards, I went through and set up categories for my blogs and edited nearly every post to categorize them.  It was also good to re-read some of my earliest posts to see how excited I was one day and dejected the next.

About the only thing I did in my garden was to remove the coldframe like GardenGirl suggested, as well as the plank.  Now all the beds can get good natural watering.

Silly me, before we went over to my brother's for Easter, it was  almost flooding in the streets it was raining so hard.  So I ran out and replaced the plan and put the coldframe back up.  One problem though. I was in a hurry because I was in my nice clothes and without a jacket in pouring rain.  So I kinda went fast on placing the coldframe and the frame got caught on a staple.  I tried lifting one corner to get it over the staple and tweaked it too much.  Crack!  Thank goodness I didn't remove the duct tape because it kept the window from shattering and scattering broken glass all over my bed.  It's still holding together, but I'll need help to remove it tomorrow.  It shouldn't hurt anything to be on there another day.

1 comment:

  1. I'm your garden muse? Aw, thanks, that's so sweet! I'm just glad you've found something to do with your sideyard that you enjoy so much. My peas aren't even sprouting yet, look at yours! With all the warm rain and happy-seed-bearing birds around here, I'm sure I've got a Weeding Weekend coming up. Hope we get a Saturday sun break, though looking at the weather projections I'm not too optimistic.

    Thanks for coming out to the party, and giving the game a try! It's got a bit of a learning curve, but is lots of fun once you get grooving on it. Kind of like gardening. :)

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