Spring, 2020
Well, this is an interesting spring to say the least. First of all the WuFlu, dare I say hoax?, to deal with. But aside from all of that, no matter what your opinion of that may be, the weather, at least in the PNW, has been, somewhat challenging in terms of gardening this year.
We didn’t have snow in February this year! Fall was a bit dry, but the rains did come and wet everything down sufficiently. Spring, well, has just started to “spring”. My large peach colored rhododendron, the first one to bloom, was a month late. April was freezing at night, almost every night. It would warm up a bit during the day, but, night was chilly. This last week we had some warmer night time weather, but last night was chilly. It was about 44 degrees when I checked at 8 am.
We checked our fruit trees, and it looks like we will have wild plums and a few on the young schoolhouse plum this year as well as some pears. We have yet to check our apple trees. The currants have lots of fruit, and hopefully won’t have too many worms this year as I did dust with diatomaceous earth last year.
This year, courtesy of a commentor on a blog I look at, I followed a link to a market gardener in England that utilizes a “no dig” method. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB1J6siDdmhwah7q0O2WJBg
We decided to try this method out in a strip next to a portion of our deck for a couple of reasons. The weather, temperature, types of naturally occurring weeds and pests are very similar to what we have here. The other reason is this particular strip has some hard pan close to the surface, and I have wanted to plant something in this area, but had not wanted to deal with the hard pan. I did happen to have a good selection of cardboard as well. So far I have planted a few onions, a little old spinach seed which did germinate, a row of snap peas, and the other day planted some zucchini seeds as well as transplanted a start. Last year we put in a planting strip on a different section of the deck where there isn’t hard pan and grew zucchinis, and it looked nice.
The other thing we are trying this year is growing lettuce in pots. We have lots of bunnies, slugs and snails, so we are experimenting with that. My daughter is spearheading that effort. I do pretty good with plants in the ground, but I tend to be somewhat “un-talented” with plants in pots. I did some tomatoes in pots last year, and they did okay, but some fruits had brown spots even though I did supplement with some calcium. I guess I just needed to have added more.
I started cleaning out the one boxed garden area, it had been ignored for a couple of years, and had become overgrown with buttercup. Several years ago I had planted some parsnips in that box, and had missed one that went to seed the next year. I found that it happily reseeds itself if you leave one to make seed. So I saved seed from one the previous fall, and fixed a bed for them, and planted the seed very early spring last year, and then moved a few volunteers as well as filling in with seed later in the spring. So this year, there are some parsnips that need to be pulled as they are woody now. The voles seem to leave the parsnips alone too.
I haven’t decided what to plant in that bed this year. Maybe we’ll see if we can get more herbs going in it. I did get burnett going in there last year. Burnett tastes a bit like a cross between celery and cucumber. It has smaller leaves that can be added to salad. I’d like to have a strawberry bed again. We lost the other box due to the necessity of a construction project, only it turned out that we actually need not have lost that particular bed. So that is a project we’re going try working on this year, reconstruct that box or at least make it plant-able again.