I waded through the calf deep snow still in my yard over to my garden which is about half revealed to find… Weeds.
It’s too soon yet to plant anything in the garden, I can’t even get to half of it and I’m already WEEDING! WTH is up with that?
Also, it looks like some plants which I didn’t get around to removing are still there and green. Either that, or the cucumbers are growing back. :dubious:
Broomstick, it’s Bonide Repels All and the 4th page of that link tells how to use it to protect bulbs and seeds.
I hear ya - my chickweed is going great guns.
I bought a couple of pink lily bulbs yesterday - the picture looks about like this. It was $4 for two bulbs, so I figured I’d take a chance, even though I had no luck with my daylily bulbs last year (I ended up just putting in three potted plants instead). I love lilies, so I’m planning to collect a whole bunch of them. I put some Casablanca lilies in last year that I hope come back again this year.
The squirrels go after my bulbs and new transplants, too. Little fuzzy bastards.
Problem is, that’s not healthy to use around anything you intend to eat. That might work for my daffodils, but not for the rest of the garden. The coyote pee is safe to use everywhere in the garden.
Oh, and good news! The radishes, onions, and either beets or turnips (forgot which row is which) I planted outside are coming up!
And the indoor seed are now outside. I’ll probably have a few casualties, but they’re looking pretty good, too.
And the tea rose - which I’m never sure will make it through the winter - is coming back again. It’s the sorriest looking, scrawniest, most pitiful looking rose bush you ever saw (90% of it right now is dead wood I’ll have to prune back soon) but it blooms roses the size of saucers/small plates with the most wonderful subtle fragrance.
Roses are another plant that I think tends to surprise people with its hardiness (the other I’m thinking of being lilies). I only plant hardy plants, and I’ll have lots of roses and lilies around here soon.
Spring has arrived! My daffodils are about to bloom. Apparently, they’ve done a good job of protecting the dwarf iris from the critters because that is pushing up too. My dogwood cuttings survived their first winter but I’m still waiting to find if the black raspberry canes and reblooming lilac made it. Please, oh please…
In last year’s gardening thread I complained about my battles with Joe Pye weed, which is nearly impossible to get rid of. And this year I’ve learned that the conversation society sale is selling the stuff to people! Argh, why???
I worked on tomato cages today. Yeah, actual planting is still at least two weeks away (and there is a chance for freaking SNOW this weekend), but dammit, I can’t wait for homegrown tomatoes!
Well, lilacs and raspberries are really tough, if that helps at all. 
I think I have to go to the greenhouse today, and see what’s in. Maybe I can get a couple of tomato plants to baby for the next month or so until I can plant outside. I’m desperate for home-grown tomatoes, too.
Hey, a gardening thread! Can someone tell me if my star jasmine is a little late wrt producing the blooms? I’m not seeing them blooming in the ground cover at the mall either, fwiw, but spring is getting on.
Southern California, near Disneyland, btw.
Kaylasdad99, my Star Jasmine is blooming profusely right now, as is that I see at the nursery. Been doing so for probably the better part of a week. Texas Gulf Coast, Hardiness zone 8b to 9a.
Unfortunately, now I’m less convinced the fourteen large Italian Cypress are actually recovering. At 16" average for the trunks this would be an enormous loss.
Well, for the first year ever, I managed to actually get the first planting of sugar snap peas to come up without the squirrels and birds eating/moving all the seeds. Yesss! Also the asparagus is starting to poke up. It’s year 3 for the asparagus so we should be able to get a good harvest out of it.
I also have some very nice seedlings coming along. A couple of the pepper seedlings and a few of the tomatoes developed some kind of white fungus on the leaves, but I removed those with extreme prejudice, and the rest seem healthy so far. We’ll be planting out in early-to-mid-May, most likely.
It’s so much fun to read everyone’s updates!
I haven’t planted my cool-weather veggies yet, but I did a lot of clean-up and flower- planting in the front over the weekend. I started planting flowers in my tree lawn a couple of years ago and have finally gotten the maximum amount planted that I want to do. This means I just have a little patch of lawn left that I use for putting out recycling and yard waste.
Later this week and on the weekend, I’ll be doing the rest of the front yard and, I hope, getting a start on the back. I added some pinks, creeping phlox, scabiosa and candytuft in front and also planted sweet alyssum and snapdragons since it won’t bother them if it cools off again (unless we get persistent hard frost). I’ve planted sweet alyssum too late the last several years and had it poop out midsummer. I’ve had good luck planting it mid-April before, so I’m hoping it’ll work out.
It’s really fun to see things coming up. My first celandine poppies are opening and my shooting stars have buds, so they’ll be opening up in the next couple of days as well. All kinds of other plants are growing, so it’s really starting to look like spring. Yay!
Onion chives are up and running and the strawberries are greening up too.
So elfking, I should ditch the Joe Pye weed someone gave me last year? Is it good at holding back an eroding hill? It might be worth keeping the stuff if it does.
Those blue and white crowns are flowers. You will need to cut them off or the coleus will think their job is finished and die.
This week I thought I had ordered some vegetables and fruits from a co-op/CSA type thing. I received a confirmation email of my order and I went to pick up my produce on Friday where I learn the guy was trying to get out of the business but couldn’t be bothered to post that on the website or disable ordering. But he showed me around his garden.
He had a lot of vertical stacked styrofoam containers that seemed to be connected to a drip irrigation system. I tried looking for some info online but it seems that they are mostly used for hydroponics but it sure looked like he had soil in the boxes. They looked like “vertigro” containers which I found online. I wondered if the containers could produce a lot since the way they are stacked there is a lot of unused space but the advantage is that it’s vertical and not spread out.
Has or does anyone use these type of systems for gardens?
Well no, coleus won’t die if you let it flower. Some people think the flowers look scraggly and cut them off for that reason. And vegetative growth might be less abundant if the plants flower. But it does no harm to the plant otherwise.
That, and coleus needs to be pinched out regularly or else it just elongates until you have a thousand long, skinny sticks with leaves every 6 inches.
This is my back yard today.
This is the other bed in the back. I put extra snow on to protect the little plants that are starting to come up from the bitter cold last night.
This is a little statue of two birds.
This is a lily from warmer times (and my old yard).
Gardening in Western Canada is not for the faint of heart. 
