Last weekend we were scowling at an overly persistent winter. Yesterday I worked outdoors with bare arms and bare feet. When I read "cool season" in a plant's description, I wonder if it has a chance in this climate of rapid and extreme temperature fluctuations. Not that 15C is extremely warm, but already it is necessary to watch that the greenhouse doesn't overheat. The delicate cauliflowers that were transplanted yesterday are looking limper than ever after a sun-intensive day followed by a near-freezing night.
All the planted seeds, on the other hand, should be fine. The past few days have seen the addition of three raised garden beds (just mounded, not walled), transplantation of cauliflower and borage, a few rows of seeds sown (carrots, parsnips, pak choy, radishes, garden cress, lettuce, and peas), and installation of structures to support the peas.
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| pea fences |
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| pea cages |
This is our seventh year of growing peas and we still have not taken the trouble to build good fences for them to climb. This year, again, they will cling to various improvised structures that limit their soaring ambitions - a short sturdy fence, a taller floppy fence, and few tomato cages embellished with twine. The latter are a bit of work to create, and lacking in stature, but once made are easy to place. All you need is a square foot of ground.
Every time I insert the shovel into soil, I hear admonitions against disturbing the soil structure. It echoes again when the shovel-full of earth is squirming with earthworms, who are apt to now consider this a bad neighbourhood. A better gardener would use other methods (black plastic and patience, maybe) to rid the garden of last year's encroaching grass, dandelions, yarrow, and chives. Perhaps someday I will be that better gardener. If it meant the first heat wave following the June rainy season would not turn our soil to quasi-concrete, it would be a worthwhile effort.
Besides following the seed-germination route to new plants, other propagation methods are in the works. The two bee balm plants are now eight (we hope). This was achieved by brutally forcing a shovel, east-west and then north-south, downward through the base of each plant. Although there was far too much of that root-ripping noise as sections were removed from the ground, they all appear to be alive two days later. I wonder if they will grow in quarter-round shapes this year. The purple flowers on one are a big favourite with the local bees, and the red flowers of the other drew the attention last summer of the first hummingbird that I've seen in Lethbridge since 2007.
One honeyberry bush now sports two rooting pots in an attempt to create two more bushes. Honeyberries are tart dark blue berries, attractively shaped to resemble giant mouse droppings. We have two varieties that both offered a decent quantity of fruit last year, so why not have more. (I finally gave up on Saskatoon bushes last year. It was humiliating that a shrub which flourishes in the wild would not even grow, much less produce fruit, while in my care.) The rooting pots were advertised in the Lee Valley catalogue as a way to clone woody plants much more rapidly than by traditional cutting methods. No doubt there was a "results may vary" caveat in the fine print. While trying to slice off a half-inch circumference of bark, I found the bark to be soft and stringy. Far more than half an inch was stripped away. Well, what's done is done and I might as well proceed now that the branch has been damaged. The branch wasn't quite thick enough for the opening, so the pot tended to lose its grip and slide down the branch to where it was not wounded. Nor was the branch quite vertical enough. Hence, water is leaking out of the reservoir. On the second attempt, on another branch, I realized that the stringy outer layer was making way for the real bark, which I was able to cut away in the prescribed size and shape. But then the same problem with inadequate verticality and girth. We'll see how it goes.
1. This scabby excuse for a beet green is the victim of spinach leaf miners. I knew they were almost inevitable and did mention them just after planting all the susceptible varieties in the same bed where they were attacked last year. The bed was covered with a white row cover with only a few bird-pecked holes in it. But I don't know if the miners came in through the holes or had been lying in wait in the soil. Beets and Swiss chard planted elsewhere in the garden, not under cover, have also fallen victim to this pest. Still, the plants are vigorous and we have enjoyed an abundance of blemish-free spinach leaves. So we continue to hope for well-nourished beetroots.
4. Overly heat-sensitive greens get on my nerves. Very much like that one isolated incidence of frost that needlessly ruins everything, it seems to take only one warmish day to send garden cress or pak choy bolting into a seed-generating frenzy. Lettuce isn't much better. Mind you, it has been very warm for about two weeks now, so I could understand if they want to bolt, but this happened some time ago. We are trying shade cloth on a small patch right now. Results are inconclusive thus far, though germination and growth are definitely good. This pak choy is all over the place, growing long seed-bearing branches and dangling them over the adjacent beets and beans. I trimmed those ones today, thinking that half a million seeds will likely be enough for us.
