April Flowers

It is April and it does seem like the last week has held true to the old saying, April showers make May flowers. I was sweating all the hard work I put into my garden in March with the turn towards the cold the weather has taken lately. Glenn "hurricane" Schwartz did say that after warm winters like the one we had that colder Springs are common. Lets just say I was covering and uncovering my seedlings often and also not uncovering them on the many colder days in March. But, it seems I've survived the worst of it...I've got a full crop of radishes, bok choy and lettuce that are all about an inch in height. It is amazing how hardly these plants are at these early stages of development. What is also remarkable when looking over the garden is how many other plants are hardly that one would least expect. I've already got a huge crop of "volunteer" sunflowers that are at one inch tall. I found in my grass by the garden a bunch of lettuce that also volunteered. I guess they either came from seed I mistakenly dropped last year or maybe from lettuce plants that "went to seed" when mature and flowering. I'll probably never know but I did enlist them and move them from the grass into the garden beds. Also, I have two flats of assorted varieties of heirloom peppers and tomatoes that germinated within the last month that I'm keeping in the house. They make the daily trek from the basement under the grow lights up to the windows during the day and back again as night falls - oh joy, what fun! By May I'm sure to be tired of this daily migration. I did come up with a cloche system, one that uses a recycled material, that should make the total time spent inside the house a lot less. I've have more on this and more garden updates from Ardmore in later posts.

Cheers...

ps- "volunteers" are plants that drop seed in a prior year and germinate in the ground outside when the decide the time is right in the Spring. They are a great boon to gardeners who are aware of this since one often can wait for this throng of willing plants to emerge where they can then be replanted where ever the gardener so chooses. Examples of great volunteer plants are: sunflowers, shasta daisys, cosmos, marigolds, dill, and others...