I got my planters ready today. The three round ones from last year and two more long rectangular ones. Put some pebbles for drainage in the new-to-me planters and a sack of “moisture control” potting soil.
Think about lettuce and chard in the long containers. Beans, parsley, and maybe some sort of pepper in the round ones.
The landlord is fine with it as long as I don’t block the walkway my “balcony” is part of. Which is entirely reasonable.
I got a lot of nice compost from my compost bin. Alas the Waste Management compost giveaway got canceled last year due to Covid and will no doubt be canceled this year also.
We’ve already planted snow peas, a bunch of onions and some shallots. The oregano wintered over and the parsley came back.
Haven’t started anything else yet, but we’ll do the usual, tomatoes, eggplant, squash, bush beans, and whatever else looks interesting. I’ve grown jalapenos but the soil is wrong to make them spicy - I grew great ones when I lived in Louisiana. I’d rather grow expensive stuff.
Last year we had massive amounts of volunteer cherry tomatoes; we fed the neighborhood with them. I’m accumulating recipes already.
We had a couple Leland Cypresses taken down in the yard today and kept some of the chips, so we now have some nice-smelling mulch for the front garden.
I ordered an abelia to replace the dead beautyberry, so that will be planted in the front garden when it comes.
I also ordered some sweet pea seeds and an Eastern Columbine plant from Monticello - those are due to arrive tomorrow (which is amazingly fast). I’ll start those on the front porch and then transfer them elsewhere later. The sweet pea seeds will need to be scarified and soaked first.
The snow is almost melted. Nothing green or floral is yet manifest. Our last frost date is usually about May 15 here.
The ‘finished’ manure/compost bin finally unfroze today so my husband cleaned it out and moved it to the ‘old garden’ with the front end loader, so it is accessible to my hopeful flower garden spot. It’s 12 or 14 cubic yards. We have horses, so all the manure and then some for the garden.
I’m about to set up my seed-starting tables in the cellar. I got a bunch of old-fashioned annuals and a few perennials to start down there. This is the first year I have done anything here except plant some apple trees and some native plants. It’s a total adventure because all my lifetime of gardening has occurred in California, perhaps the most opposite climate to New England in the US. I’ll be eager to see which of the perennial flowers I planted last summer will come back up.
I bet the voles ate my crocus bulbs though.
I have a potted sage plant that appears to have survived being buried under several inches of snow, and several garlic (from bulbs that sprouted in my pantry last fall) sailed through winter as well.
Just bought a thyme plant. Gonna stick that into another pot today, along with god-only-knows how many seeds. I have a lot of packets I’m itching to start.
Flowering kudzu??!?
I’ll need an update from Treppenwitz on the medlar tree.
I went just a bit overboard on online nursery orders this year. A half-dozen are yet to arrive, including two mulberry trees, destined for the orchard along with newly planted Asian pears and Japanese plums, as well as the elderberries and two sweet cherry trees added last year. There are also plans to get up to 15 fig trees (most raised from cuttings) in-ground. By summer there should be at least 50 trees planted on the property since we moved here last February. Hopefully my back will hold out.
Many perennial and vegetable seedlings are currently growing under lights, as well as the mandrake sprouting out in the coldframe.
It’s going to be a busy year.
But of course (he replies far too quickly). The buying and planting of it was described here. It seems to be settling down pretty well, just coming into leaf. We’ve had the odd frost over the last couple of days, but they are said to be pretty hardy trees, and it seems happy enough. Can’t wait to see it fully in leaf and see what the blossom is like!
Oh man, you have an orchard - I’m so jealous. We have nice tall trees around (outside) the property, but that means sunlight is limited, so its a struggle to find locations for many plants. You reminded me - when I listed ongoing fruits I forgot to mention the fig and the redcurrant bush.
Our friend A is just starting her first raised bed (just the one) and asked me for advice as to what to grow. Oo-er - the responsibility. I sent her over some seeds: cut-and-come-again lettuce, land cress, spinach, scallions, beetroot, dwarf french beans. Told her to try a row of each and see how it works out - they’re all very easy to grow, and she should be good for salads all summer if they work… She asked about potatoes, and I persuaded her to grow them in pots. It works, honest!
j
Flowering Kudzu.
Its ok I’m in zone 5 so it will die at first frost.
Last year I made all my ground level gardens into raised beds. That was a lot of bags of soil to haul even with compostable stuff filling 3/4 of the height. I think my plan is a perennial bed, a annual bed and a vegetable bed. I couldn’t even guess how many planters and pots I’ll end up with. i also have toi change things up a bit because my backyard neighbor cut down 10 - 75’ trees that made part of my yard full shade. Now the whole backyard will be full sun.
Me too. I keep telling myself it’s too early, but still…
I don’t know what you have planned for yours, but try to get some Zinnias and Coneflowers in there. Both are easy enough to grow from seed and are great butterfly flowers. Bonus because they will attract hummingbirds also.
If you don’t have verbena bonariensis, you should plant some. It’s an absolute pollinator magnet.
The Azeleas in our garden are blooming, but the big freeze we had killed all the leaves which are only just starting , so the plants look like a bunch of twigs with big white or pink flowers, they look sort of cool.
Another new project for this year - it’s been surprisingly difficult to start this off because I couldn’t find seeds/bulbs/plants. I thought I would just be able to walk into any old garden centre and pick up some wild garlic (ramsons) for the wetter and more shaded parts of the yard, but after checking out 3 of them, all I came up with was a sachet of seeds. Well, beggars can’t be choosers, so seeds it is - maybe I’ll also find a plant or two later in the year. But for now I have started four small pots of seeds off germinating - we’ll see how that goes. I may have to do some more later on or, as I said, maybe I’ll get lucky and score a plant or two.
j
What a nice coincidence, I just read this about that tree. It is supposed to be really winter hardy, which would be good in a small balcony in Berlin, I thought. But as we are still going back and forth between Berlin and Brussels* the balcony will be sparingly planted this year, while the terrace in Brussels will start its farewell decline. A bit sad, it is.
I’m off to read about that Coelacanth Jam thread.
* Yeah, you can still move between cities, if you quarantine and test and all that. Moving house has become complicated, but you still can.
We just planned our garden for the year. Last year I fenced off a yard from the deer and elk with the original plan being grass and a place for the kids to play. I was supposed to build another fence in the back for a 100 x 100 orchard and garden but we’ve decided to hold off on the grass and the next fenced in area dye to cost. Instead I’m going to build six 3’x10’ raised bed as a temporary garden in the eventually to be yard.
We’ll be planing:
Romain lettuce, Napa cabbage, Danish ballhead cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, diakon, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and winter squash.
Most of it will be pickled or fermented.
Almost all of my planting is in containers. I tried to get a jump on the season but we had a frost a couple of weeks ago that pretty much wiped out the seedlings I had gotten out early.
Barring a really late frost, I have planted
From seed: multicolored sunflowers, Russian Mammoth sunflowers, Golden Cal Wonder yellow bell pepper, Blue Lake #274 green beans, Goat Horn peppers.
From transplants: Santa Fe Grande, habanero, jalapeno, Holy Mole, Hot Portuguese, Anaheim, Golden Cal Wonder Yellow, Big Red peppers, cilantro, 2 different kinds of beefsteak tomato.
It’s salsa time!
Later in April I’ll get in more sunflowers, the hollyhocks and maybe some late peppers from seed since I’ve stretched harvests into December before.
New abelia is planted, sweet pea seeds are sewn. Old abelia has been pruned. The front garden has been mulched, along with the new side garden I bricked out last year. More to do later. The viburnum in the front garden are also blooming, so I fenced those off until they are finished - the deer like to eat the flowers. They smell wonderful and I want a chance to enjoy that. Raspberries are starting to sprout and the strawberry plants are greening up. I harvested some chives today to use for dinner.
Viburnum blossoms (not mine, just found on the 'Net):
::cowering::
Sybil?
With blooms as vividly-coloured as, say, rose campion, doncha hate that azelea blooms last about two weeks or something and then for the remaining 50 weeks out of the year, yeah - twiggy, unless of course if it’s still young and still has (an albeit rapidly decreasing!) verdancy. Blue flag iris can be bad for bailing out quickly too.
From a slightly different perspective…Been doing the little gardening business gig going on 12 years, with 24 clients, seeing them about 34 hrs/wk, Mar. - Dec., with slightly scaled back hours over winter as sort of vacation time.
Dismayed to see increasing stress on everything - lawns, beds, hedges - taking increasingly longer in getting started to grow, each year, before I can get crackin and back to full(ish) time.
March has always been the wrost month of the year for frosty mornings, but it seems like every March there’s more than the previous one.
Rhodos, camilia, azelea, even the earlier snowdrops and krokus, pretty well everything in these parts - slowly developing buds, everywhere.
And don’t get me started on the desert-like Julys and Augusts we’re starting to get now. Sure didn’t used to be like that.
The more anomalies I see, bug me.
ok there’s the grumpy gardening post. 
How … ? 
Are your “containers” the size of a VW Bus or something? Or are the Mammoths the outliers from your “almost” ?
Yes and sorta. One sunflower is in a half barrel planter. The rest are in the ground where I dug up a decade worth of wild grass and resodded.
There are re-blooming azaleas. My next-door neighbor has them and they were in full bloom until the big freeze hit in February, but I haven’t tried them yet.
Hmmm, I do need to replace my dead bottlebrush shrubs.