Yesterday I potted up some seeds of various veggies, herbs and flowers and put them by the window: today we’re getting several inches of snow and my nice white crocuses out on the median strip are toast. 
Well, glad I wasn’t fool enough to direct sow anything outdoors during those warm days in March!
My compost/potting soil mix is clinkery rubble, though, so I’m pretty dubious about how my seedlings will do. Worth a try, though!
Well, I put in two cantaloupe and two watermelon. Soil temp in San Jose isn’t quite at 70dg, (av 65 last week), but my bed is pretty well mulched, and full of decomposing organics, which I THINK will keep them warm enough. The only seedlings available at the hardware store were very little, with just cotyledons – I hope they survive the transplant shock. They came in those plantable peat pots, which I’m dubious about for veggies, having dug up identifiable bits of them after 3+ months in the ground.
My plot is FULL. I’ve gone overboard, maybe. It’s also muddly, no straight lines or sensible grids. I put a melon right in the middle of the white onions, I’m thinking I’ll harvest them as scallions as the plants get larger. Last year I had one cantaloupe and one watermelon taking up almost half my space – this year, they’ll have to share! I can train the vines around the other plants, and out of the bed and over the path, I suppose, although I’m not sure my plot neighbors will appreciate that.
I grew Charleston Greys last year, which got massive – I had three 20lbers – this year I went with the Icebox. A more manageable size 
So the seed company, in its infinite wisdom, decided to send me the ten bare root strawberry plants NOW. It’s snowing here. What can I do with them until it’s safe to plant them outside? Can I just stick the package in the fridge? Should I plant them in pots and put them in the window with the other seeds I planted yesterday? Something else?
If you don’t have a cool but not freezing porch, garage, root cellar or pantry to keep them for awhile (i.e. wrapped/covered in barely moist peat moss or potting material) you could pot them up and place them on a windowsill until the weather is better, then transition them to cooler brighter conditions outdoors.
I am a condo-dweller, so really the only place would have been the basement storage locker (there’s no garage here, and the pantry is a converted coat closet and not appreciably cooler than the rest of the apartment). So I did decide to drag the bag of potting soil and some recycled plastic pots off the back deck in my bathrobe and slippers and pot the strawberries and put them on the plastic-covered shelf in the living room window, along with all the other trays of seeds that I planted yesterday.
Hopefully Boris the Big Dumb Lunky Cat won’t get curious again and knock everything over, but so far it seems like he learned his lesson last year.
I have sprouting from seeds:
black cherry tomatoes ( my biggest success last year)
Brandywine tomatoes
Marketmore cucumbers
Flat leaf parsley
Basil
In the garden as early volunteers
several coral poppies, (large double annual)
garlic from bulbs left behind from the fall harvest
a bazillion dill plants
an onion that grew in the “compost”
still to plant directly when weather is better:
Sugar snap peas
loose leaf lettuces
sunflowers
I am bewildered by those who apparently can’t grow basil and/or mint. I have to beat those back with a shovel.
My basil doesn’t want to germinate 
It’s in a heated propogator, everything else I stuck in there came up fine, but I got one sickly basil seedling (from maybe 30 seeds) that took two weeks to show, then keeled over within two days. Last year I did better, I got a few, and they got maybe 6 inches high before the whole lot bolted.
I’m trying again 'cos I have a greenhouse this year, rather than having to either stick them in the far too shady lean-to or outside in the English ‘summer’, which is probably the issue.
I can grow mint though 
I’ve never been a gardener before but have always appreciated beautiful flowers. I recently completed a 9-state road trip and detoured through Death Valley only because of this spring’s superbloom. Truly awesome. It happens once every 10-15 years. Much of the desert valley was brushed with pastels of yellows, purples, oranges and whites. Was really something to see. And then when we got to Texas we enjoyed the blooming bluebonnets.
So last week near home (south of San Francisco, on the peninsula below the fog belt) I saw some beautiful flowers, took pictures and went to my local garden shop. She tells me zonal geraniums, they require little water and they like a lot of sun. Perfect for the front flower bed that’s facing south.
So I have started! Flowers here, not vegetables. As a start.
Onion question! I’ve never grown them before. Put them in around Xmas, and a few have started to bolt, so I picked them yesterday to slice up as scallions. I stored them standing upright in a jar in a few inches of water, roots and all.
Ick. When I sliced them just now, the hollow insides weren’t hollow, they were full of weird clear jelly. I had planned to put some, raw, in the salad tonight, but I’ve decided to saute them slowly in olive oil and add them to the dressing instead. The jelly tasted slightly oniony, and had a gooey mouthfeel.
Anyway, what gives? Is this a sign that my onions were too old to eat green? Or was it a storage error? Or something else?
Also: can I eat the onion flowers? They’re still mostly closed, but I was thinking of pulling off each of the little florets and sprinkling over the salad… they taste a bit, well, oniony, but not offputting.
onion flowers are indeed edible, and delicious in a salad.
I just harvested my two-dozen garlic plants! Most of them have good-sized bulbs. We have some late rain happening now in the SF Bay area, and I didn’t want them getting moldy. They’re strung up in the garage with a fan blowing on them.
Everything else in the patch seems to be coming along veeery slowly. The cukes are only about 5 inches tall, the melons are sulking, and my tomatoes, well, I’ve been pruning them pretty hard. I’m growing mostly indeterminates this year, and am trying to funnel all their growth into one long stalk. Still no bulbs on my onions. Some volunteer red potatoes popped up in the compost pile, so I bunged them at the bottom of a big pot and will do my best to hill around them. I have two late cabbages, which languished under the big cauliflower plants. They’re starting to head up, just have to keep the snails out. Fewer aphids, too, for some reason, all my cabbagey things were hit pretty hard over the winter season.
Nice birds down at the patch this morning, including a family of four fledgling black phoebes, lots of juvenile juncos, and a pair of hooded orioles! And me without my camera…
Huh.
Well, my garden is just starting to sprout (thank you cool weather…!) So while I’m not harvesting anything yet I still have the growing season to look forward to.
You know what puts a real damper on gardening? Tennis elbow caused by gardening. Sigh.
Hot damn, but the elephant ears (Colocasia “Pink China”) that were touted as being hardy in my zone (z. 6) really were - today I saw sprouts.
And the hardy banana (Musa basjoo) has three good-sized stems sprouting leaves.
All I need to do now is haul my recliner back onto the patio and set my Ipod player to surf rock.
My baby tomatoes all died. I guess it’s the farmer’s market for me this year. At least they had the decency to do it before I spent any money on containers.
I’m debating putting the tomatoes and peppers and eggplants into the raised bed today, but the weather has been so crazy, I’m hesitating. I put the trays with seedlings out on the porch for a while yesterday for some air, and it was super-windy and I don’t know how happy they were about it, but today is supposed to be less windy and I think they would like some sun.
The greens are going gangbusters, as are the peas. I hope we can keep up with them! The strawberries don’t look like they made it. The French Breakfast radishes look like they will be ready to harvest in a few days, but the other kinds look like they are taking longer.
I’m contemplating some kind of additional trellises for the cucumbers and melons before I put them out. Anyone have any tips? My MIL gave us the* All New Square Foot Gardening *book for Christmas, and it has lots of ideas in it.
For melons and cukes you want very sturdy trellises. I either run them up the chain link fence on the property line or, if I use a wood trellis, either cross brace it with with another trellis at a right angle to it, or use additional wood to make cross braces. Between the weight of the plants and our occasional high winds it’s necessary.
And my onions are up! The rest are still slow to sprout but my first three lines of plants in addition to the onion are definitely showing signs of life. The other two not yet, but they were planted later.
Woohoo! Talked to the other community garden peeps, and there’s a disused bed against the garage wall that was used a couple of years ago for sunflowers. It’s long and narrow (maybe 15’ x 2’). They said if we want to pull out the weeds and put some more dirt in the bed, we are welcome to use it for melons and cukes. (Last year I gave my neighbor 2 cukes, and they took over her whole bed.)
The book gives directions for making trellises with 1/2" electrical conduit and nylon netting. I figure if we do a triangular trellis leaning against the wall, it ought to hold just about anything.
Mother’s day haul:
Cherry tomatoes
Best Girl tomatoes
Yellow pear tomatoes
Green Bell peppers
Jalapeno peppers
Poblano peppers
Sugar Snap peas
a flat of oregano to try again for the ground cover
Sage
Sweet basil
Lemon thyme
Common thyme
Purple and pink petunias
Two types of marigolds (Ball and French)
Something Justin fell in love with called Hawaii 5 O because the flowers look like police lights.
Squad goals for tomorrow (if it doesn’t rain)-- weed beds, add new soil and Kow manure. That’s how they spelled it on the bag. Black Kow is what it’s called. Also put flowers in pots for the front of the house.
That’s an amazing haul, Biggirl!
Does anyone have any suggestions for sweet peas? I got them mostly for my mom without knowing anything about growing them. I think they need to climb? A trellis is out because I can’t secure it anywhere that will get enough sun. One of the wire cones? Walmart didn’t have any yesterday so I’ll look at Home Depot this week. I’ve been looking on the internet but I trust people here more than some random web page. Thanks!