Blooms!

My tulips are blooming!  The blooms are coming slowly...but they are coming and just in time for Easter.  We also are seeing the first sprouts on our kohlrabi and the peas are coming!  I also picked up potatoes, onion (red, white and yellow), and scallion sets at Gertens today, which will hopefully go in the ground tomorrow.  I got a bunch of stuff moved, but still need to move a pile of sod and pull up the remaining sod before the potatoes can go in the ground.

I also, on a whim, picked up some strawberry plants!  We have 6 plants that I think will fruit in June, and 2 everproducing plants.  Mmmmm....strawberries....

Also on the agenda for this weekend:  Thinning the radishes I think?  They are about an inch tall, so we'll pull out every other one.  We will wait to thin the lettuces until they are large enough to use as baby greens.  Yummy!

2nd Planting!

We had the first bloom of the season today!  Not something I have planted - a crocus maybe?  It makes me want to plant more...

A visit to Chicago this week has left me a bit jealous of their Zone 5-ness.  Everything seemed to be in bloom!  From the tulips and hyacinths to the lilacs along the highway.  It was a much welcomed site and one I hope will be here soon.  Many of my tulips now have large buds on them and I'm hoping a day or two of sunny weather will bring bounties of color to our yard.

We made some more progress today in the vegetable garden.  I took up a few rows of the remaining sod (still a bit to go) and made my second plantings of Spinach, Arugula, Beets, Green & Red Lettuce, and Radishes.  Still nothing coming up from my Carrots/Scallions/Kohlrabi/Pea planting, but those guys all take awhile to germinate.  My initial lettuce plantings are still continuing to grow (the radishes are quickly outpacing the others, as they should).  The rhubarb is coming along exceptionally well considering my tomatoes shaded them all of last year - but still nothing from the Asparagus.  Hopefully the bunnies didn't kill them permanently when they ate all of the foliage off last year (rascally rabbits!).

The Easter Holiday comes next weekend, so I don't anticipate much work in the garden (maybe late Sunday afternoon if the weather cooperates?), but I'd like to get another round of peas in the ground as well as the potatoes and onion sets.  Perhaps Thursday will do...

The Lettuce Are Coming! The Lettuce Are Coming!

Radishes - Day 5

Well, it's official - we have germination!  Where there was nothing to be seen yesterday we have little shoots, nicely in a row.  Some are speedier than others.  The D'Avignon radishes for example - there was absolutely nothing in that planting row yesterday and today they are taking the lead by far.  Some of them, like the beets, we are still waiting for signs of life, but we are expecting sun the next few days and I hope everything will take off!

Hopefully we can spend tomorrow afternoon in the garden.  My top priorities are:  Putting up the fence now that we have yummy lettuces growing, pulling up the rest of the sod, plotting out the beds and getting the other cold season crops into the ground.  We'll do a temperature reading tomorrow to see where the soil is at - but it hasn't gotten above 70 this week and we've had plenty of rain so I think they should still be just about right.

To update on the other seeds:

• Spinach - not much to be seen yet
• Arugula - Day 5 - A nice little row of seedlings, barely off the ground
• Green Romaine - Another nice little row, but kind of sparse
• Red Romaine - Nothing to speak of
• Green Butterhead - Nothing here either
• Red Grand Rapids - Nada
• Green Grand Rapids - Little seedlings coming through
• Radishes - doing great as we mentioned above
• Beets - nothing yet

In other parts of the yard, the bulbs keep doing well but still no blooms.  We do have solid leaves on the lilacs though!  Soon the whole south side of our yard will be green :-)  Happy gardening everyone!

Lilacs

So soon!?!

Not that I have been doing this all that long - but I think this year will have to go on record as being the earliest I've ever planted anything in a garden...

We had beautiful, record breaking weather here in MN over the last week (we even hit 80 degrees once or twice), so I spent the weekend working in the garden.

Vegetable Garden:  Post-Expansion

I expanded the existing vegetable garden - straightening it out to make it easier to fence in (pesky rabbits) and added the remaining portion between the garden and our shed.  It's now about 16' x 37'.  We still need to move the compost bin and dig up the sod, but hopefully we'll get that finished up this week.

Lettuce Bed - First Planting

As for planting, I used a broadfork on a 4'x8' section on the East side of the garden.  I run it in both directions at about 3" intervals.  My dirt is nice and moist and crumbly this year, with lots of organic material left from the leaf cover we use over the winter.

Here I planted my lettuces, radishes, and beets in 4' rows, from front to back as follows:

• Spinach
• Arugala
• Green Romaine
• Red Romaine
• Green Butterhead
• Red Grand Rapids Lettuce
• Green Grand Rapids Lettuce
• Radishes
• Beets

The Red Romaine seeds were pelleted and SUPER easy to seed.  If they germinate well, we will definitely consider more pelleted seeds in the future.  Still to plant while the ground is cool:  the onions, carrots, kohlrabi and peas.  The soil is already at 60 degrees, so we want to get these guys in the ground soon.

We hope to have sprouting seeds in 3-5 days.  More to come!