April 8, 2025

Gardening is in full swing now, though I occasionally run for cover or huddle by the fire.  This week the daffodils began to bloom in my garden with many more to follow.  Bloodroot opened their chaste white blossoms and hepatica bloomed along our woods path in shades ranging from pure white to violet.  Trees are making the hillsides look soft with dreamy puffs of rose, silver and a sort of mustard yellow. It is still very early spring but a couple of above freezing nights brought on development that I wasn’t expecting.  I see snow in the ten-day forecast but I’m not worried.  I like cold nights at this time of year to keep things advancing gradually instead of all in a rush.  I’m starting a bunch more seeds inside and am considering some direct sowing.  Is it too early?  There is still plenty to do in clearing off beds to let the bulbs have their time to shine.  I have also put in a few hours of roadside pickup, always an enlightening peek at the lives of others.  

It is difficult to look closely at the flowers of trees as they are so high up, but occasionally there is a branch that hangs down enough so you can break off a twig to actually appreciate the little beauties there.  You can examine the blooms to see if there are signs of them becoming seeds eventually, or perhaps they are only pollen-bearing flowers (male) with the seed-producing flowers on an entirely separate tree.  This is true in the maple family, some of which are blooming now.  This “dioecious” (literally meaning two houses) reproduction has some cost to the plant as only the female trees produce seed but it helps exclude self fertilization and the resulting inbreeding and mutations.  The very best way to notice the details in tiny tree flowers is to make a sketch of them larger than life.  You can count the flower parts, notice whether they are opposite or alternate on the twig and make note of the colors.  There is a whole garden there above our heads that is rarely even taken into account.  

My oldest and biggest garden bed is almost solid daffodils at this time of year, followed by too much phlox, bee balm, day lilies and other fairly ordinary but colorful flowers.  It is imperative that I take out the dead stalks so that the mounds of daffodil leaves, buds and flowers can be enjoyed.  There are alliums, tulips and primroses mixed in but the main show now is daffs.  There was a lot of moss in between the bulbs so I spread a 40# bag of pulverized garden lime just before it rained.  I have completely dug over this bed a couple of times in its life to remove three quarters of the phlox but now I have given up the battle and will live with it.  The big fight there now is removal of the yellow lamium that is sneaking in.  Garlic mustard and rough bedstraw have to be dealt with too.  I will know I am truly old when I give in to that too.  

I have looked over the Fedco rack of seeds in the food coop to see if there is anything I could write that would be helpful to customers, but really it is all there on the seed packets. Apparently packets destined for a display rack get a different treatment than the ones ordered by catalog. Traditional display racks show colorful pictures but these Fedco packets have a very small detailed drawing and then a whole essay about the plant you could grow from the seeds inside.  There are 28 varieties of organic seeds for greens, including 11 different lettuces and 7 different mustards, along with spinach, chard, pac choi, parsley, mesclun, arugula, and tatsoi.  The packets include comments about who developed the variety, it’s flavor, whether it is appropriate for succession planting (every 2-3 weeks), what temperature it requires for germination, exactly how to plant and thin, days to maturity, an approximate number of seeds or how many feet of row it will fill and a germination rate.  When you receive packets via mail from Fedco there is far less information on the packet, requiring a rather annoying reference back to the catalog if you can’t remember why you ordered that particular variety.  

I always grow several kinds of lettuce and I make a rather lame attempt at succession planting.  Lettuce can be planted early and re-planted up until the soil gets quite warm.  Some old timers used to say to sow it on the snow, but I like to wait until the “ground can be worked” as the packets say.  I make short rows across my 3 foot wide bed.  I plan to follow the example of a friend and plant a six-pack of butterhead lettuce every week during April and May to insure some nice tender lettuces right up to the heat of summer.  I may do some in pots that I can move to shade to extend the season a little.  Several types of lettuce won’t germinate in soil temperatures over 75 degrees.  I remember my father putting a six pack of soil with lettuce seeds in a plastic bag and letting them germinate in the fridge.  I really admire farms that manage to have nice looking, non-bitter lettuces during the dog days of August, just when you want them to serve with those first ripe tomatoes. Cooler nights and soils of late August mark the time to start planting all of these greens again.  

I have spinach coming along in my hoop house but it will bolt as soon as we have a stretch of really warm days. I just did a small planting outdoors but mostly I focus on fall season spinach when the approaching cold makes it sweeter with each frost.  Some years I manage to carry it over for spring harvest, and that is the best of all:  meaty, sweet and earthy.  This year the only things that wintered over for me in the hoop house were arugula and mustard greens.  We’ve been eating a lot of arugula pesto, adapted from a spinach pesto recipe that has the tasty addition of sun dried tomatoes.  I think it would work well with the nettles that will soon be coming up too.  Outdoors there are a few overwintered plants of red Russian kale that will add to our greens intake as we wait for real spring. 

My next tasks in the vegetable garden are to put up my pea fence and plant a few snap peas.  I will saw off the giant stalks of kale and Brussels sprouts at ground level, leaving the soil intact and slowly clean up beds for planting out my onion seedlings and potatoes.  It looks like a pretty cold wet week ahead which means that I may end up putting off all of this.  We’ll see.