Another week, another Nor'Easter

As Charles Dudley said, "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." We have had the most unusual March weather I can remember. We have had a snowy Nor'easter once a week since March started. I still have patches of snow in my garden from the last one!

Tomorrow is the first day of Spring, and of course, we have a snowy Nor'easter heading our way. (With talks of another this weekend?)  If there was something I could do about it, I would because Saint Patrick's Day has traditionally been pea planting day for me and my peas are still in their seed packages! 

There is really no need to rush pea planting. They don't germinate well if the soil is too cold and they rot if it's too wet. Our soil temperature is in the mid 40's, which would be perfect for the peas if it weren't for the forecast! 

I don't watch broadcast television, so the first I heard of this snow was Saturday. I was planning on planting the peas today. It would have been perfect. It's warm (well, high 40's - feels warm to me!) and the soil is workable in the areas I'm planning on planting peas. The 7 day forecast had been talking of a warm up. Then we got the forecast from Big Sky on our Alexa Saturday morning and heard about the snow. Boy, were we surprised! 

Still,  it was beautiful out today, so I did prepare the beds for the peas (and potatoes and arugula, and spinach and radishes.) I pulled any weeds and topped all the beds with compost. It felt so good to be outside gardening.

This bed has my fall planted garlic in it.  Garlic and peas grow well together. I was going to prepare the bed next to this one for more peas, but when I took off the mulch, it was riddled with vole holes!😡 I was going to wait until the fall to put hardware cloth in that bed, but I am thinking I may try to do it this spring, if I can.

This past week I planted my pepper seeds inside.

I planted 20 peppers, because they freeze well, they are easy to grow, and because they are very healthy for you. They are the highest vegetable source of vitamin C, in addition to other vitamins and antioxidants. These benefits are especially high when you allow your peppers to ripen to red, orange, yellow or purple, depending on the variety you plant. I also like green bell peppers, so I planted 4 varieties of bell peppers so I could let three varieties ripen and eat the green bell peppers from the fourth one.  I also planted another sweet pepper that I grew last year with good results, that is more horn shaped, Corno di Toro, which translates "Bull's Horn". I had already planted cayenne peppers the week before, and I also planted jalapeno and Anaheim peppers for some heat. Yum!

Peppers like hot temperatures, while growing and while germinating. I put the seedling tray on the shelf in my kitchen above the kick-space heater, where they will be nice and cozy. When the seedlings appear, I will move them to lights in my grow room.

When I put the peppers in the potager, probably after Mother's Day, I will avoid areas where the garden is cold (like the bits where the snow still hasn't melted) and instead place them where it is warmer. However, peppers don't do well with too much sun, so warm with afternoon shade would be ideal.

This week as the snow falls, I'll be in the grow room planting seeds for tomatoes and flowers.  Hopefully next week I'll be able to let you know how the pea planting went! If it's not snowing again!

I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow.
— David Hobson

March is roaring like a lion!

Last week the wind and rain we were expecting turned out to be a snow storm. The wind knocked down a section of fence in our yard, snapping the post at the ground level! By the next afternoon, it was as if it had never snowed! March roared in like the proverbial lion!

Then yesterday, another nor'easter blew in. They said rain for our area and we ended up with 4 inches of wet snow!

I went out to snap a photo of the garden in the snow and the dogs followed me. They are not allowed in the garden during growing season, but they really enjoyed their chance to run around. Teagan flew through the paths and Chase - well, chased.

In that bed to the left you can see my garlic poking through the snow. It was planted in the fall. There's also turnips coming up in another snow covered bed. Nothing the romping dogs could destroy with the snow cover.

Today the sun is shining and the weather is warming up. I had brushed the snow off the cold frame last night, but it had to be vented today, so that was my only outdoor garden chore.

 I use scraps of leftover lumber for venting.  I lay them flat for temperatures in the thirties and stand them up for the forties and if the temperature goes into the fifties the glass comes all the way up. Heat builds up in this little cold frame!

This is a peek in one side of the cold frame. There's some kale and spinach (which we've been eating) and all those baby seedlings are Arugula.

It's 8 weeks until the last frost! (Hear that, snow??) It's time to sow a few things in the grow room. Today I planted 12 Aster Opus, 6 Pink Catmint and 4 Cayenne Peppers, all from Pinetree Seeds.

I only need 2 Cayenne Peppers, but I have someone to take the extras if they all succeed.

The Catmint will form a nice mounded plant with pink flowers. It's a perennial. It will be outside the garden in our flower beds. I think it will attract pollinators and while it's a mint, it will not get out of control. The cats will enjoy it too!

Pink Catmint - Photo from Pinetree Seeds

Aster Opus - Photo from Pinetree Seeds

The  Aster Opus is also for our flower bed. I think it is so pretty!   It is an annual Aster. I am going to plant it in front of the Purple Millet I am hoping to grow. The Aster Opus is supposed to form bushy 2 1/2 foot plants with lots of stems of white flowers with a faint pint tip.  I am envisioning a hedge of them. I think it will be stunning!

While I was working in the grow room, I noticed that all the onions in the front of the tray were shorter than those in the back.

Then I noticed that there were onions out of the tray and realized that the cats were chewing on the onions!

I have to keep the door to the grow room open, because at the moment there is no heat in that room (we are remodeling our bathroom and all the heaters in the front of the house were on the same breaker! ) I over planted onions anyway, so I will be fine. I just didn't expect that!

Also in the grow room, I am chitting my potatoes. These are Red Norland and Russet that I bought locally. I have more potatoes coming from a seed company soon.

Lastly, I thought I'd give you a peek at the free package of Mesclun I received from Botanical Interests. I planted them in a tray, hoping to harvest a early salad or two from inside the house. If this works, I may plant salads all through the winter! 💚

That's all that is happening this week. Next week I will be planting my peppers! (Indoors, of course. )
Let me know what you are doing in your gardens!

¹⁰ “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
    and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
    giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
¹¹ so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
    it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
    and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

Isaiah 55:10-11 (ESV)

Hard Work for a little Problem

Our weather forecast for today and tomorrow is wind and heavy rain. I'll be in the grow room trimming my leeks and onions and planting eggplants. I am trying these this year.

I have never had good luck with Eggplant. Usually my problem is flea beetles. But then I learned that Eggplant is self pollinating, so it can remain under row cover and be protected from flea beetles and other pests.

I tried the row cover last year, but a pest got under the row cover. Actually, under the eggplant.  One morning my eggplants were blooming and looking healthy. The next day, the entire plant was gone. Gone into a hole. The vole got it.

 

 Moles are destructive in that they make tunnels and disturb plants roots. But they only eat grubs and worms. Moles are larger than mice and have that star-shaped nose. 

Voles, or field mice, are herbivores. They eat grain, seeds and pretty much anything else that is plant related.  They are so much worse for a gardener. Voles look like mice, only they are a little bit larger, have a more rounded head and a short tail, like the farmer's wife chopped a mouse's tail in half with a carving knife.

 

Voles tunnel underground or use mole tunnels. They come up at night and leave a small dime sized hole as evidence. Last year we tried different methods to rid ourselves of voles. Hav-a-heart Traps failed. Mouse traps in an over-turned pot over the hole failed. Vole deterrent pellets failed (but smelled really good). Castor oil failed. So we began the arduous task of removing all the dirt from our raised beds and installing hardware cloth. This is not only a lot of work, it's costly.

 We did quite a few beds last year and took advantage of the occasional nice days we had in February to do a few more.  All the dirt gets removed, hardware cloth is stapled all around, leaving no openings for the voles. This has worked in all the boxes we have done this in. My hubby wonders why the voles don't climb up and over the boxes. I am not sure why, but they don't.  We are using 1/2 inch hardware cloth that is 19 gauge. Voles can chew through thinner wire, so you have to be careful of the gauge. They can fit through 1 inch hardware cloth so you don't want to use that. We get our hardware cloth at Lowes.  As you can see, it doesn't fit the boxes. We piece it together so we don't waste any of it.

Yesterday we started a second bed and ran out of the hardware cloth. This morning I found that the voles had tried to get in. (They found the edge of the hardware cloth and did get in. They are after birdseed that the birds have been flinging from our back yard feeder. The feeder needs to be moved!)

The voles are costing us a fortune. We are going to reconfigure our larger beds because to vole proof from the edges of the bed would involve digging down almost three feet to install hardware cloth to prevent them from getting into the 8 x 8 beds. So we will be ripping out the two year old beds, building new beds with hardware cloth attached and reinstalling them.  So much work!!!

Hellebore in bloom in February - voles do not eat them - but neither do humans

Daffodils coming up behind puppy - voles don't eat them - but neither do humans.