Spring In a Holding Pattern

Daffodils


'Honeycrisp' apple tree in bloom.


Bells of Ireland and heirloom peppers looking nice.


Peas and garlic in the potager.


Strawberry with a "black eye" showing this blossom has been frozen.


Frozen tips on the dappled willow


Petunias from seed for pots



Heirloom tomatoes

It seems spring is in a holding pattern. After the warmest March on record, and possibly one of the drier ones , too. Spring doesn't feel like it is going anywhere. My apricot bloomed five weeks early. We had a number of days with pretty cold temperatures. I think my apricot 'Moorpark' has mis-stepped and picked the wrong time to bloom. I am pretty sure it froze hard enough I will have no fruit. A few of my earliest buds on my very early variety of strawberry 'Honeoye' have "black eyes". A sure sign those berries have frozen also. I have heard the Door County cherry and apple growers are worried. The California fruit grower have has cold weather and hail; a harbinger of a lost crop.

The first year I owned the house here in central Wisconsin, I drove up from IL with a trunk load of plants to transplant and found the ground frozen solid on April 5. I have carrots "up" this year, not just planted. Yet I think fruit will be in shorty supply this summer.

I do have some beautiful daffodils this spring and a scattering of tulips they appear to have perenialized. My petunias started from seed for possible pot fillers for my Handsome Son's Graduation are looking nice. The heirloom tomatoes and peppers are doing great, too.

It seemed my rhododendron PJM bloomed for just forever this year, rather than a flurry of hot days the end of April (the flowers have long since gone by this year).
I have a dappled willow which I keep closely pruned. The early spring new foliage makes this shrub look like a pink and pale green brocade, hence the name 'Hakuro Nishiki', dappled brocade in Japanese, or dappled willow in good ole American-speak. This year, I can see some spring foliage has froze.

Spring...

INSTALLING SPRING...

Installing spring
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Feels that way!

I am attempting things this year gardening under lights that I would never have thought particularly worthwhile in the past. We have had years recently where we have not had frost after April 1. More frequently, the two periods of full moon between April 1 and our average last frost date, sometime around the third week in May, will bring gardeners a periodic pause to cover things with sheets or bring in tender hanging baskets for the night.

This year, this spring, is atypical. I would guess soil temps are below 40 degrees. If the snow would melt, I would find my soil thermometer and have at it. As it is, I have to dig a hole to find the garden.

So today, I planted soaked peas in a 128-cell flat, indoors, instead. The way they are going they will be better than the ones in the snow. I'll let you know.

Checking in on the progress of other garden "inquiries":

The cut-off nubs from the bottom of the celery bunch-- looked good about a week after planting and then ran out of steam, droopy-looking and dies.

The iceberg lettuce cores--transplanted to the garden. They looked good before the snow. Not sure now, though.

Pruned grapes--usually by April 7, when I actually got to pruning them, the buds are typically starting to unfurl tiny leaves. This year? No change since the end of March. They are a good 3 weeks behind. They usually are ready to pick about September 11-19. I'll let you know if this summer is a bust. Three weeks late puts us into the average first fall frost date of October 5.

Update on the Seedlings

Pictures tell a 1,000 words, so here are the pictures from the growing rack!


Great germination for the onion 'Ringmaster' from Botanical Interests.


Celery seedlings, their color is really much better than that!


Those pepper seedlings from an OP hybrid, sweet red poblano type pepper germinated like hair on a dog!


Ah tomatoes!


On the right side, in the middle you can see the celery core growing new stalks, one of my "garden investigations".

So NOAA has released their Annual Spring Weather Forecast. Wetter, cooler with a chance of flooding increasing through April. Okay. I was sorta getting that impression myself. Right now I can hear the wind sorta howling around the house, too.

Checking the 10-day forecast though, after tonight, I don't see freezing temperatures listed. Close to that, but no freezing temperatures are listed for the next 10 day cycle!

There are lots of periods of drizzly rain.

That will slow me down.

I haven't checked with the village Snow Witch, but I am hopeful. I am sure it will get chilly again next full moon. I will have to check when that is, but I am cautiously optimistic that Spring will eventually make an appearance, that my crocus will pop out from beneath their snow cover on the north side of my house, that the forsythia will bloom, that those inch-tall tulips will grow.

I think the planet can take a collective sign. This has been a rough winter. Spring is coming.

What to do in the garden, today, March 28?

Nothing.

Still over a foot of snow covers anything that remotely looks like a garden here in the Central Sands region of Wisconsin, zone 4. My Dad says we are 20 degrees below average temperature. He's a farmer. He should know; he's been growing things a tad longer than I have.

So today, my garden activities center around my seedlings in my growing racks in my extra space in my loft. I thought I would include some pictures of this growing rack, dimensions, and building tips.








Although I do quite a bit of hammering, sawing, nailing, etc.; I am far from a pro. I have built a deck ("cobble"might be a good word there), built a couple fences, and remodeled more than one or two bathrooms, and have developed some skills. I am far from a finish/trim carpenter, but this light rack was easy to build.

It measures about 20" deep, about 5 feet high, and 44" wide. I built it using (4) 2" x 2 x 8' pieces. I cut 36" off each of the 8' pieces and then cut the 36" pieces in half again. Having those (8) 18" piece is key to getting the right dimensions as I use 4 standard 10" by 20" flats without drain holes to keep everything nice and dry.

As this light rack holds four trays across (the width part), I purchased (4) 1" by 4" board and cut each in half. If I was doing it over I would go with 6 though. With six, each shelf would have three of these as tray supports.

I assembled this rack with screws, pre-drilling my holes and "L-brackets". These L-brackets on the corners with the 18" pieces top and bottom and two equi-distant spaces between form the sides of my rack. The brackets are key. Pre-drilling is important. Don't skip that step, and it helps to have a helper to hold things together during assembly.

I had the screws in my cast-offs bucket. I purchased the wood and brackets (8 in all, one at each corner.) I think the rack itself cost me just about $20.

I had a couple shop lights to start. I hang these with chain. I prefer to use 2 per shelf. If you use one only put 2 trays on the shelf and put them parallel with the width. The chains are important to keep the lights within 4" of the growing seedlings. I use regular florescent light bulbs with about 3,500 lumens. I don't use special light bulbs. The lumen thing is important, though. The higher the lumen the better. I think the minimum you should attempt to grow with is 3,200. A couple years back I bought a light meter and it really helped me nail down the issues I had with whether there was enough light or not.



I plug all my lights into a circuit panel things with a switch so I can flip one switch to turn a whole rack on or off. That plugs into a GFI-wired outlet. This space is planned to eventually be a bathroom, so the GFI-circuit makes sense for now, watering plants and using lights are not a good combo; and in the future for the bathroom. I have tripped the circuit more than once with dripping water.

The second plug in the outlet is where I plug in my one heat mat. This allows me to use the heat mat even at night to encourage those seed to sprout, rather than plug it into the light panel and turn it off. I also use two screws to attach/stabilize it to the wall.

My son, who was then probably 14 and had never built anything before, helped hold pieces of this together when I built it a couple years back. Yesterday, he and I were out shopping for a couple of new bulbs for the rack. We walked by a really fancy, metal, pre-made rack priced at a couple hundred dollars, and he commented, "Wow, Mom! Ours is really nice, and it holds twice as many trays as this one and only cost us a few bucks!"

Yes. I thought. Yes, it did.

Spring in My Garden: Looking Back to Previous Years

Forsythia 'Northern Sun'



Native Hepatica

With temperatures in the fifties forecast for western Wisconsin, the accompanying forecast of winter storm watch for my friends in northern Wisconsin sound like a bad joke.

Almost as bad a joke a the Wisconsin lawmaker who is pushing the bill to require police officers to think about whether they have reason to believe the driver of a vehicle might not be here legally, a law similar to the one signed into law in Arizona this last year.

So the fine broadcast journalists on NPR are interviewing the writer of the bill, Don Pridemore, Republican from Hartford, Wisconsin. They ask him if this isn't profiling, especially toward Hispanics in Wisconsin. He replies that Wisconsin has almost as big a problem these days with Russians coming across our Canadian border. Canadian border? (To hear the broadcast from WPR.org, from 3/21/2011, 7:30 broadcast from Joy Cardin.)
Here I thought we only had to worry about the Yoopers! If my geography serves, Wisconsin can spit into Lake Superior at Superior, provided the DNR aren't looking and we can shake hands with the fine folk in Duluth, Minnesota, but that most of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan stretches across our northern border.

No northern cheeseheads I know are boasting, "We can see Canada from our back porches!"

So, with that winter storm warning, it seems appropriate to warn my good gardening friends and relatives, "Keep your eyes open. Those Russian mafia types are here to eat our cheese, drink our beer, and dig invasives from our gardens! There are just a few days of ice pack left on Lake Superior!"