Around the Garden: What's Up, What's Blooming, Booming...

The star of the garden show, my rhododendron 'PJM', blooming nearly a month earlier than it ever has.


These scilla bloom under the carefully manicured privet hedge. They are only truly visible to my ankles and the rabbit. The privet is just starting to leaf out so there is a bit of a blue glow about the base that is visible, and that's cool.

These are the unopened flower of the prairie smoke, geum triflorum. Each phase of the flowering, bud, flower, and seed pod looks like a "flower" so the triflorum part, I suppose. Although, if I actually pulled one apart, I'd bet I see only three sepals or tepals.

A better look at those pretty blue scilla.

Raddichio in garden, coming up from last year. It seemed to have a very bitter taste last year. I see this morning the rabbits have found it. The flavor must have improved.

Lysimachia 'Gold Coin', has a beautiful gold glow this time of year.

Rhubarb just coming up.

There's a lot going on in the potager. The peas I have planted are up. I got a great stand, good germination rate. I typically plan on 50% -65%, but I would guess it is closer to 100%. This March has certainly been good pea weather, unlike last year.

That means over in the family garden the peas are certainly coming up, too. These are the peas my sister-in-law asked me to please plant for baby Asher, who has stubbornly not made his way into the world.

Other things have been stubborn this March, too. My Internet connection has been driving me nuts. Currently, we are able to make only a tenuous hardline connection to the Internet, in a household filled with wannabee wireless devices. Probably a router, but maybe a cable. More trouble-shooting this time-waster.

The huge limb that broke off and hung up 30' up in my white pine crashed to the ground last night. Just last week, I was calling around to find someone with a cherry picker to come and charge me an arm and a leg to remove it from the tree. Last night's wind did the job for me, saving me $250 to $500, maybe more.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif My calling range was getting increasingly larger, 100 miles. No one had the type of equipment that would have been needed. With our early spring, I was increasingly worrying about finding someone with equipment, AFTER my gorgeous hosta had poke up their eyes and started unfurling their leaves. I had ghastly images in my mind of torn, tattered, and bedraggled hosta just in time for my Handsome Son's graduation party.

And, I heard that another boom rocked Clintonville last night. Out of curiosity, I will check the vertical ground tracking on the Shiocton seismography station. (It does appear there was some heavier vertical plate grinding between 4 and 6 AM.)

My son and I always talk about preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse. Perhaps, we should now be thinking earthquakes, instead. Possible the earthquake dislodged my stubborn white pine widow-maker?

Tonight, as fate would have it the Emergency Management Direc`tor for the county has a tabletop disaster exercise planned. I get to play myself, village trustee. Invite only, it should be interesting.

Phenology Events

Today my willow looks like this picture I took on April 14, 2007.



This picture of my forsythia in full bloom is dated April 14, 2009.

Two people have told me they saw red-wing blackbird. I saw one as well. It wasn't until the second one told me this a bird that comes back in summer, when the weather is predictably warm that I did a double-take.

My son saw two bats.

My forsythia is about to bloom. Pretty sure it will bloom tomorrow. Crocus were blooming yesterday.

My Artic blue willow is budded up.

The frogs are singing tonight.

So what's a gardener to do?

I'm working with the idea that we are have a zone 6b spring and the calendar says April 17, not March 17.

I rototilled the family garden. Thanks to handsome son for taking a small engines course getting an A+ AND overhauling my tiller! I planted peas. I planted carrots, radishes, and lettuce. In Wisconsin. I am thinking of planting some fava beans. Generally, I don't think favas are planted here.

I haven't planted my tomatoes for transplant.

I'm going to make the best use the weather. I'm not going to plant heat lovers, but if it can take some cold, it's getting planted.

Pea planting tips: Soak in warm water for 20 minutes before planting.

Beet and Swiss chard planting tip: Put seed on a wooden cutting board and crush them with a rolling pins. Each "seed" is actually a pod with 3-4 seeds inside. The small seeds are dark, radish brown, to black.

Succession Planting, Broccoli

A nice head of broccoli forming in September.


Will a frost sweeten up this Tuscany black kale?


I didn't do near enough succession planting as I should have this year. All season I struggled with what I felt were tough, crappy growing conditions. We had tornadoes in April. It was bitterly cold and rainy or snowing in May. We had a upper 90s heat wave the first week in June. We recorded record rainfall in both June and July and a drought in August.

The first crop of broccoli bolted. Lettuce quickly seeded out, too. I had spring-planted carrots set flower heads! The radicchio just never tasted right. The black kale went from fairly good juvenile leaves to very bitter adult foliage very quickly. Fennel formed seeds without setting bulbs. The peas got buried in the rambunctious growth of grape leaves after waiting an extra six weeks for the buds to unfurl their leaves. The mesclun mix I planted early season was over-run with leafy, fast-growing mustard.

During the small windows of good weather, I planted, transplanted, weeded, attempted to rototil. I couldn't get out to the garden to plant a second planting of sweetcorn, the rain never let up.

I did plant a couple additional seeding of mesclun, a fall crop of peas, and a second round of carrots at both gardens. I replanted cucumbers and honeydew after the first crop did not sprout.

The broccoli continually tried to bolt until the weather started to cool. I had kept cutting back the shoots that seemed to bolt out a foot tall and burst into yellow riotous bloom overnight. The few heads I harvested in August seemed riddled with the worms of cabbage moth, a result of the rainy June and July. Now that the weather has cooled the worms seemed to gone on vacation. Eating broccoli is no longer like walking through a gastronomic mine field.

The mesclun seedlings have been turning out a bowl of greens every couple days in my potager and the family garden. The 'China Rose' radishes I planted also just get longer while maintaining a sweetness that bolted from my grasp in June.

A second planting of dill would have been nice. Planting more carrots would have been nice. Onions have not yielded anything near my expectations.

In small spaces, succession planting is key. I have not made good use of all my space resources. I could have done better.

Saturday in the Garden: Damn Sapsuckers!

I talk to plants by being observant. Recently my Austrian pine has been trying to get my attention. Although evergreen, conifers are greener some times of the year than others. They lose needles just as deciduous trees lose leaves. My Austrian pine has had about 25% more brown needles than I thought would be normal. Today while cleaning out the bed under my pine, I realized why. I found a series of 1/4" ovalish holes in rows like kernels of corn on a cob. I found several sets of these holes. I'm not sure, but maybe enough set at different places up and down and around the trunk that possibly the damn sapsucker may have girdled my tree. It's about 6" in diameter and 15 feet tall-- small enough to remove myself.

But,sob! Is it going to die? That's the question. I probably should try to fill in the holes to prevent depredation by insects and pests. I should attempt to place a barrier on the trunk of the tree to prevent further sap sucking. Sap suckers, or woodpeckers, are protected. Not that dealing with a bird in that manner would even be an option. In this case, though, I am going to attempt to separate the bird from this particular food source. The pine hides my neighbor's hideous garage with its peeling paint from my view.

Among the other deprecations of winter, the "free range" dogs in the are starting to drive me crazy. I have a dog. Faithful Companion is all anyone could desire in a dog. My dog is always on a lease when out of doors. When my dog does her duty, I am there and know where the poo lands. I have a specific area in my yard for my dog to poo. Yet, I find poo EVERYWHERE in my yard. There is nothing more unpleasant than gardening and stepping on poo or sticking your hand into poo when weeding. I have had dogs deposit their poo on top of bird netting placed over my blueberries to protect them from rabbits and in a 18" tall pot that held a bush clematis I grew from seed that had big navy bell-shaped flowers (substantially killing it).

So, I have been looking at my yard with thoughts of how to cut off the canine thoroughfare my yard, a gate across my walk, a low fence around my potager. A section of fence I will be adding to my yard would run directly across my white Japanese peony. I moved it today, a second time.

Today, I also put down black landscape fabric in a 6' by 20' area in my potager to warm the soil. Eventually, I will cut slits to plant a few tomatoes, peppers and melons. These plants like warm soil and hot weather, something of which our area has had very little. My mother who keeps track of all this sort of information, tells me that by last year at this time, we had had 27 days of 60 degree weather. This year, we have had three!

A cold, wet spring, and it is raining again. I worried that the peas I had planted outdoors were going to rot In the ground. They obviously like it cool, and wet. It looks like I am getting good germination.

April 22, 2011: Today in a Zone 4 Garden, Central Wisconsin

This afternoon, the sun is beginning to peek out. It seems like forever since we've had that much light! It is not supposed to freeze for at least the next several days, although we are supposed to have some wind today. It is pretty wet to work in the garden.

I did move three flats filled with kale, cabbage, and onions out of the cold frame and under a storm door screen. I have found the screen provides just enough sun, wind, and torrential rain protection to serve as the perfect cover when hardening off plantlings. One edge of the screen is on the cold frame the other two corners are supported by a stack of bricks. I tucked three flats under one edge next to the thermal mass of the cold frame.

This frees up space for three more flats in the cold frame. At this point with temps in the mid-30s at night, I don't want to bring out peppers, eggplant, coleus, or tomatoes; but dino kale seedlings, radicchio and head lettuce starts may do well in the cold frame.

I started some peas indoors and after they have germinated and grown true leaves, they will be candidate to bring out to harden off. There's still no sign of those I planted in the ground. I also planted some yellow onion sets before our major spring snow storm. Onions are pretty cold hardy and even wet, cold ground should not deter them.

This activity has also freed up space on the grow racks. The average last frost date is about 4 weeks out. I am thinking of getting some more spinach started, including a climbing spinach.

After May 1, I will start some heat lovers, like melons and pumpkins. These won't go into the garden until almost June 1 here, well after any chance of frost.

More Snow in the Forecast for Wisconsin

More snow is in the forecast for Wisconsin gardeners, particularly in the northern (Sorry, Debi-o! See her pictures of "'Springtime' in the North Woods") and central parts of Wisconsin, possibly as much as six inches! Snow is in the forecast for overnight tonight and overnight Tuesday into Wednesday.

Two snowfalls will once again cement the leadership and knowledge of all things weather of our village Snow Witch, giving her smug bragging rights. She would never come right out and say, " I told you so..."

Gardening in Wisconsin is starting to look a bit more like a Greek tragedy than anything else. The snow also give weight to weather as an externalization of internal mood of one of my life's leading characters, my teenage son. Having recently dissolved things with his girlfriend of a year; he says his heart just feels cold.

I used to tell him he was always so very funny, although not a good joke teller, more of a "life comic" along the lines of Adam Sandler. Nowadays, it seems like total Greek Tragedy at this Wisconsin gardener's house.

His history teacher has assigned him a "This Day in History..." paper to be written in front page newspaper style. My son, being as one with his "Cut and Paste" generation, went to the Internet to pull up everything that happened on his birthday in recorded time in one fell swoop. While he was in the shower, I snooped.

"You could title your front page 'On This Day in History...: Son Born, Comedy Dies-- Last episode of Monty Python Aired' Sub-headings include: 'So Many Football Players, University of Pittsburgh Takes to Numbering their Jerseys' and 'Electric Car Goes 15 Miles Between Rechargings-- in 1893'," I say.

1893???

"What's Monty Python, Mom?" the apple of my obviously ancient eye queries.

"Before there was Saturday Night Live, and William Sandler, Rob Schneider and that crew, there was the Three Stooges and Monty Python," I reply.

"ADAM Sandler, Mom!"

"Musta crossed a circuit with Adam and William Shakespeare," I mumble.

Comedy has decidedly evolved.

Unfortunately, weather in Wisconsin seems to be moving toward Spring at the same rate we are moving toward having a viable electric car-- way too slowly for me.

As for the garden?

I moved one more of my cole crop type trays of starter plants into my cold frame, which is now full with five flats. Even though the temperatures have been in the freezing range for most of the day and night here, and the seal where the bricks and storm window meet is far from perfect; the plantlings are soaking up any sunshine with which we are blessed.

I walked through a Big Box store the other day and noticed a lot of herbicides and pesticides for sale, far out numbering any growing things. One other thing caught my eye, though. I first noticed this on a NYC gardener's blog, "66 Square Feet". She is a rooftop gardener, or "farmer" as her zoning requires her to be; and seemingly a fairly good one, not having farm roots. She started her peas in fiber pots!

What? Peas pre-started in fiber pots. Now here is the same thing, a six-cell of peas about 3"-4" tall for $1.93 in the Big Box store. Peas germinate in about 3-4 days. If soaked overnight, it improves the consistency of germination. In the spring, you can almost always count on a least one of those four days including a shower. Keeping the seeds/planting area from drying out in for 3-4 days is not much of a struggle. Translate that into a NYC rooftop with a city's heat sink and winds, that's a different story, transplants for everything has to be the way to go.

So how does this apply to gardening in the central part of Wisconsin? Well, I planted my soaked peas 10 days ago today. As of yesterday, nada, zip, zilch. The weather is making everything so slow here. On the flip side when this weather pattern exits the state, we are more prone to having the temperature shoot up to 90 degrees while the rest of the state settles into a balmy 70 degrees. Those 3-4 hours when the sun is at its peak and temperatures that high are killer for young peas. I talked with some gardeners a few days back, who spoke of planting their peas through the snow, because of those central Wisconsin temperature spikes.

As I mentioned before, peas are problematic here. Might planting them as transplants make sense for us just as it does with the NYC gardener and her unsual micro-climate? Are pre-started peas a "Best Practice" for central Wisconsin gardeners who want to ensure their spring pea harvest?

For all you non-gardeners, happy sledding and may you have a Wonderful White Easter!