Sprouting Seedlings

April 15, 2012

Outside it still looks and feels much like winter. Thankfully I have a heater in the greenhouse or my geraniums, dahlias and canna lily would be popsicles!

The good new is that some of my flower seedlings are sprouting! YAY!
I have tiny little bachelor buttons (cornflowers) sprouting, as well as one or two Red Durango marigolds and a lavatara or two.

Still haven't made it back up to the top of picnic Hill to take a photo of the wild crocus trying to bloom there. What a shock that brave little flower must have had to find itself under several inches of snow!
The temperature warmed up enough to melt 90% of the snow today, but it still isn't what I would call "friendly weather".

Forecast for the rest of the week is mixed... some warmish sun mix days, some rain mix/ snow precipitation days, depending on which weather site you believe.

Forecast for next Sunday is sunny and 18C. Call me a skeptic, but I will believe that when I see it.  Sure would be great, though. I might get a chance to continue with my spring flower bed clean up... and it sure would encourage my fruit trees to blossom and my perennials to sprout.

Happy spring... I think.  :)

Rain and Grass

We finally got some much needed rain today.   Central Alberta is very dry and we have had a fire ban on for weeks already, due to the fact that we had so little snow this past winter. There was a big grass fire last weekend about 4 km south of here, which can be pretty scary as it can so easily get out of control.  So, yay! Bring on the rain!

I have been working on cleaning debris and grass roots out of my flower beds for about a week now and, man, that's a big job around here! I love my big perennial beds, (they look so beautiful in the summer when they are blooming), but it is major work to keep the quack grass out!
I unwrapped my rose bushes and cleaned up the winter mulch. So far there are no signs of life, but this rain will definitely help.

My Pasque flowers are blooming! They look so delicate and beautiful; I call them my domestic crocuses. :)  They even beat my tulips. There is a little ground squirrel who lives in the environmental reserve next to our property and he is helping himself, not only to the sunflower seeds that the birds knock out of the bird feeder, ( which is perfectly fine) but also to my tulip blossoms as they are emerging out of the ground! (Which is definitely NOT fine!)  I guess I wasn't fast enough with spraying my tulips with Bobbex.

My tiny seedlings are doing well. There are many tiny tomato plants, (Early Girl is doing the best so far.) several squashes, 11 gazanias, many lavatara and too many foxgloves, but I'm not complaining.

The marigolds are refusing to sprout so I guess I need to try some new seeds. There are still some dried up marigolds from last year in my triangle stack stone bed, so maybe I will give them a try...  I like to grow them in the beds at the front of the yard since the deer have a regular path past there and they don't like to eat marigolds ( or anything else smelly.)

I also harvested a lot of snapdragon seeds while cleaning up my flower beds, which I took into the greenhouse to plant in pots. I hope that some of them will sprout as well. I love the tall flower spikes on snaps and they are very hardy flowers withstanding frost to -10C!  :)

And last but not least, all my geraniums are doing well in the greenhouse in spite of the lack of sun in recent days. They like the humidity in there if nothing else.

Happy gardening!

Slow but Sure!

The tulips in my flower bed next to the house are about 5 inches tall now.... Shouldn't be too much longer before they get buds, and then, finally start blooming! YAY!

Tulip clumps on right and left... Campanula Bell flower perennial in centre

The Campanula Bell flower is sprouting everywhere in that same bed!  Time to thin them out a bit but I hate to deter anything that has that much energy to be growing already, LOL!

Oriental Poppy

Tulips, front left; hollyhocks, centre back;Bearded iris back right: Rododendron left near bottom

My hollyhocks are coming out of the ground, too (centre back of photo.) The Rododendron looks a mite worse for the wear! It was hiding under a bunch of mulch during the winter and looks pretty crushed. I planted it last year for the first time and I'm not sure if I need to trim it right back or if new leaves will sprout out of the existing branches... (Guess I need to look that up on the internet. My trusty Lois Hole books don't mention rododendrons.)

My oriental poppy has a head start on most of my other perennials. It gets huge pink single petal blooms that are very impressive looking, but they only last a day or so.  After blooming the whole plant usually dies down to nothing so I plant annuals in front of it.

More tulips, irises and a hollyhock. Well, yes, they are still pretty tiny, but considering we had snow again a few days ago and really have not had much sunshine or warm temperatures lately, I'm pretty impressed with them. :)

This is the only little wild crocus that I could find at the top of Picnic Hill yesterday (at the edge of our property.) Last week ( before the last snowfall) there was a brave ittle clump of them there, but I could NOT find them. Maybe they finished blooming already??? Did the deer eat them? (The deer bed down up there almost every night.)

There were quite a number of wild crocus leaves there which should be sprouting flowers soon...

Can you see the deer hiding in the background?

Our baby spruces seemed to have survived the winter without getting chewed up by any woodland creatures. My diligent husband did put wire cages around them to protect them. Last winter (2010) with no protection one of the littlest spruces got most of its branches eaten off, most likely by the deer, but it could have been porcupines, too.

Some of my flower beds are still pretty wet and soggy, but I saw during my garden 'tour' yesterday that the quack grass has already started sneaking it. Many of the flower beds need some major clean up done soon, even though I did do a huge amount of fall clean up...
I wish the sun would come out and join me. It's always so much more enjoyable to be out in the garden with the sun to warm your back. :)

Wild Crocuses, Ducks and Flowers

I am excited to report that I saw our first wild crocuses blooming yesterday at the top of Picnic Hill near our place!  I will get a photo later when I go back up there for another walk once the sun is shining.  Crocuses love to open in the sunshine, which will make a beautiful photo, but otherwise they tend to close their petals.

The ice on the lake here is melting now as well, a sure sign of warmer weather!  There is about 3 to 4 feet of open water all around the perimeter of the lake shore right now. Our dog sat down in the ice cold water on our walk there yesterday. She loves to lie down in the shallow water of the lake on hot summer days to cool off. This was her first dip in 2012 and she didn't seem to mind the cold.

I am also pleased to note that the ducks are back on many of our local nearby ponds and I saw quite a number of ducks in the sky on my drive to town today.  I am so pleased to see their return. There is still a lot of ice on the ponds, but the ducks have found the open water around the edges and seem quite content with that for now.  I was happy to see some black and white ducks with a white eye patch not far from here, which I believe are Common Goldeneyes. I hope to have a 'Duck Shoot' soon (cameras only :) to add some photos.

On to gardening matters:

I not only potted up 3 dahlias, 3 tuberous begonias and 1 canna lily which are basking in the greenhouse, I added my numerous geraniums which I had over-wintered in the house from last summer.
I cut back most of the long leggy branches and plunked the geranium cuttings into pots of soil to try and start a few new ones. Most of the geraniums are pink, either Orbit 'hot pink' or multiple bloom pink or maestro lavender blue. I also have a deep bluey/red (Samba red) and a beautiful white geranium.  I over-wintered one "Martha Washington" geranium and 3 fancy leaf geraniums with orangey/red feathery flowers.

This year I will try not to be lulled into a false sense of security by a boute of warm weather (like I have in the past), only to have Jack Frost pay a visit when least expected! :)

Yesterday was 'Seed Day'.  I mixed some vemiculite with a bag of cheap potting soil and filled up a number of peat pots and 4 inch plastic pots. I dug out my seed stash and planted the following:

Early girl tomato seeds
Lemon Boy tomato seeds
Back Krim heirloom tomato seeds
3 types of squash seeds (spaghetti, butternut and delicata squash)
zucchinis
castor beans

Flowers:
Lavatara seeds
batchelor buttons seeds (corn flowers)
lupine seeds
foxglove seeds
Red Durango marigold seeds
wild bergamot
and a 'mystery flower' ... I don't remember where I took the seeds from, but judging by the pods, they might be a type of meadow rue.

To Do: Morning Glory seeds

Will be interesting to watch everything grow and develop..... I LOVE this time of year!   :D
Soon our fruit trees will start blossoming, beginning with our pear tree at the far end of the yard. I am eagerly anticipating the beauty to come! :D

Next issue: dormant oil

I have never used it before, but I  bought some recently think I will spray it on my red currant bush which gets a huge caterpillar and aphid infestation every year, and maybe my apple trees...
If anyone has any advice about the use of dormant oil, please let me know. Thanks! :)

Snow Then Robins

Okay, I spoke too soon. Mother Nature didn't like me bragging about our great spring weather. We had a snowstorm on Wednesday night (2 days ago) and we woke up to several inches of wet snow covering everything, and I do mean everything. I couldn't get a signal from our satellite dish so I had to get my boots on, go out on the deck, get up on the picnic table next to the deck railing, then stand on the railing and sweep off the satellite dish. Our huge prickly honeysuckle bush was just down below, daring me to slip off the railing.  Luckily that did not happen!

But the sun soon came up and warmed up all the snow which melted very cooperatively by mid afternoon for the most part.
At one point mid morning as I looked out the computer room window, some birds in a tree near the deck caught my eye. Too big to be sparrows and the flash of red... yahoo, they were robins! there were 7 robins perched in the tree all puffed up to stay warm, looking a little annoyed at the snow covering, as I mentioned, everything.  I have never seem more the 3 or 4 robins at any one time, so I was pretty thrilled.

I used the indoor time to pot up my dahlia tubers which were showing signs of life, long shoots sprouting from some of the tubers. Even my Canna lily, which I had almost left in the ground last fall, was eager to start a new growing season with big shoots showing. Three of my 4 tuberous begonias that I brought inside had sprouted and so had 3 of the glad bulbs that I dug up and brought in. Several of the glad bulbs were going moldy, though. Somehow some water had got into the rubbermaid container that I was storing everything in in our laundry room.  (Could this be the product of my winemaking husband who recently started 2 wine kits at about that same location in the house???  The mystery continues...)

Said pots are now sitting near a sunny window in my living room. They will soon be transfered to my greenhouse, once the weather warms up a bit next week. The daytime temperatures get to about 20C in the greenhouse now just with the heat from the sun. Nights it still gets pretty cool, though and the heater would have to be turned on. Because we are getting company for the Easter weekend, I didn't want to try to start a new routine: remembering to go out and turn the heater on and off, this being my very first spring with my fabulous new cedar green house which was built by my equally fabulous (not new) husband. :D

To Do Next Week:

plant my tomatoes seeds. :)

  

April Spring- The Real Thing

Here it is April 2nd, beautiful warm and sunny, the quintessential spring day. :)  This has been an easy, gentle winter compared to the rest of the winters we have experienced both here in central Alberta and  in northern Manitoba (of course).  The weather was very mild, and the snowfalls were few and far between this winter. December, January and February felt more like early April most of the time. No wonder most of our snow has melted already! :)

Today I saw some certain signs of spring:
1) A male mallard duck was swimming around on one of the newly melted ponds at the end of our road.  The ducks are a few weeks early this year. The canada Geese have been here for several weeks, but they usually do show up long before the snow melts properly.  I wonder if that means an early spring or is this just a teaser before the next snowstorm hits?

2) I saw a huge flock of snow geese flying far above me at the shore of Buffalo lake today during my walk with the dogs, Spirit and River. There were 32 of them flying almost soundlessly, only the occasional honk alerted me to their presence, with their bright white bodies and their dark beating wings. They were flying out of the north (where else?) and flying directly south.

3) The pussywillows have sprouted in plenty of time for Easter. :)

4)The county had posted a fire ban on their web page on Facebook. They warned of the extreme dryness in the county. Yet no one has come to adjust our fire hazard status sign at the entrance to our community. The sign still indicates the fire hazard is "low".  No surprise really, since the county seldom changed the sign last year either.

In fact, I confess, one cold, snowy day in November with the snow 4 inches deep in the ditches, I got tired of seeing the fire sign at "Extreme"( say, what?!) so I pulled over to the side of the road, got my long snow brush out of the trunk, walked ankle deep into the snow below the sign, then slide (okay, 'whacked' is more accurate) the indicator down to 'Low".  And there it still sits....  Shall phone the county office tomorrow to ask if someone will come to change it or do they want me to do it. We never seem to get a straight answer to that anytime we have called in the past. They usually pass the buck and tell me to phone the fire hall. The fire hall isn't always manned, so I don't always catch anyone in there either. Good thing there isn't an emergency!

My flower bed next to the house on the south side has warmed up enough to sprout some eager tulips, one lone bearded iris and a brave oriental poppy thus far!  My long bed and angel bed in the middle of the yard is still blanketed under a thin layer of snow. And there are no crocuses popping out at the top of Picnic Hill yet. That is always a sure indicator to me that spring in the country has sprung!