PS

The tomatoes bought it too.

Late Blight

It has been devastating gardens here in the Northeast. Now it has hit my potatoes. I have about two thirds of them dug and the spuds are fine, but the vines are toast. There are small spots of it on the tomatoes...just tiny ones. I am hoping this warm, dry weather holds it in check long enough for at least a few to ripen. They are oh, so close. Dang.

Replanting Squash

Garden Pond with Water Lilies,
(which are not blue, I was just playing with the software)

Striped cucumber beetles and slugs demolished my emerging squash seedlings so I replanted today. the rest of the garden isn't doing too badly, although the slugs are outrageous...carpets of them crawling everywhere. What a summer....

A Planting We Will Go

Speedwell

Saturday the guys got somewhere between 14 and 21 acres planted to new seeding. (The planter says one thing, the map another...we suspect the planter is smarter than the map but...) Didn't get it cultipacked though as it rained at least two inches in the 12 hours after they finished. Still wet and terribly cold. Freeze warnings every night. It drives me nuts as I want to get the houseplants and tomatoes out! The cows hate it too and don't want to leave the barnyard to go to pasture. Can't say as I blame them.

Mitten leaves on a mulberry bush

The same day I put in beans and two rows of giant sunflowers. Put scarlet runner beans in with the sunflowers. Lettuce is up outside. Have planted parsnips, peas and two kinds of onions. Lots of volunteer hyssop, which I am going to pot up and let Becky sell at a yard sale if she wants to.

The scarlet campion seeded itself too, for which I am grateful as the original plant wintered over then froze in February. As soon as it warms up and dries up enough to get back to gardening I am going to be busy as heck planting the rest of the garden and moving and potting volunteers....

Allium

April

Alan and I are proud of these.
Four or five years ago he begged to pollinate my amaryllis. I reluctantly let him and it set seeds. In spring I put the seeds in the big redwood porch container and incredibly they grew. The past couple of years they have set out meagre blooms, but this year they simply went crazy. What a show!! We are going to try crossing the white and pink one, which is just coming into bloom with these red orange ones and see what happens. I also pollinated a red one in the kitchen and it is forming a seed pod right now.

Roughly fifty tomato plants started and twenty kaleidoscope peppers. More than we really need, but that beats too few every time.
Varieties: Rutgers, Cluster Grande, Oregon Spring, Better Boy and one other, the name of which escapes me.

Enjoying the merveille de quatre saisons lettuce I grew from seed that I saved from last year. It has the most incredible flavor!!! It actually tastes good all by itself, rather than serving as a vehicle for salad dressing and other vegetables.

Been potting out the tiny sunrise cacti I grew from seed this winter. It took so very long for them to begin to grow, but they are so incredibly cool. I am not sure what I am going to do with pots and pots and pots of little holiday cacti, but if I need 'em, I will have them. There are half a dozen more fruits on the plants so I could start hundreds, maybe thousands if I found some reason to do so. Room is an issue.

I guess we are in for some more bad weather, but it sure has been a nice week. Wish we had got the heifer fence done, but the good weather brings out salesmen in droves....and milk inspectors...

Happy gardening!!

Christmas in March

That is what you get when the garden season begins. It is really too early to do much. Can't even walk on the boggy clay of the upper garden.(I did spread manure there this week.) However, raking off the big flower bed was like getting a whole sack full of presents. I tend to plant and forget so there are all kinds of tulips I put in last fall, another thingie, probably a lupin, which I bought somewhere and stuck in, lots of little shoots of daylilies, iris, cranesbill and all manner of things. The blue stuff I coveted for so many years and finally bought at Cobleskill Agway wintered over. If only I could remember what it was. It won't be long now....

This is About It

For gardening just now. Soon it will be time to plant more stuff but for just now, the chives in the kitchen and the lettuce in the living room are keeping us happy until spring.