Baby steps towards the future gardens of Beebe

[Lily left the valley]

Ah, tomatoes! You're lucky to be growing them in New England. Down South, it would get to the point where the tomatoes were green and then they would develop patches of rot. I think it's a calcium deficiency which I'm going to try to treat with lime. New England produces the most flavorful tomatoes.

We've only tried to start them from seed, and unfortunately the seed was from a company where the seeds were very hit or miss, and the tomatoes were a miss. So I thought the transplants might give us a fighting chance, and if we do manage to keep them alive, that'll be seed for next year that hopefully we'll have better luck with!

[Lily left the valley]

I didn't realize until I came back to look in this thread how much the cherry (Candyland Red) has grown. They both look like they are despondent over the snow outside.


I am really, really glad I held off on starting seeds indoors as early as is suggested. I still remember leggy seedlings of prior years because we don't have the set up to support them well and many did not do well once moved outdoors. How these tomatoes haven't keeled over on me yet...I don't know! I'm now starting to worry they need bigger pots, but then they won't fit on that windowsill and the only south facing window upstairs is the colder half bathroom. I do have a heating pad I might be able to use (meant for people, not plants, but if I take the cover off the pad itself is a similar plastic to what the heating pads I've seen for plants look like.)

I found a home with nearby neighbors for our bleeding heart currently in the garage bed. She and her mother adore them, and I'm glad to have found a good match for it.

We're going to attempt to do some trellising from the garage bed to the garage roof to play around a bit this year creating shade zones, and beans and peas will be planted with those trellises. (I think the scarlet runner beans, blue lake green beans, alderman peas and the Kentucky Wonder pole beans.) The idea is to put some of the cooler crops under the shaded part. It's something I've read about on a few different sites now. Even though we tried to plant our cools in partial shade two years ago, I think the later west sun was just too much for them which is why they didn't do as well.

A friend from another online forum is "vicariously gardening" through me as he's currently living in an apartment with a heavily shaded balcony. He's also a science geek, and he sent me some peas (little snowpea purples), some untreated and some he treated with plasma (he's currently working on his doctorate completely unrelated to botany but the lab has plasma). Apparently this can help germination rate. To use his words to explain this, "the plasma should give a slight nitrogen boost as well as increase hydrophilic activity, so they should "wet" and absorb water more easily". He asked if I would mind planting both to see what the difference might be. I happily agreed. Neither of us have ever worked with plasma treated seeds before, so this will be a new experience for us both.


Related to gardening and Gardner, I'm now part of a community group focused on Community Gardens. This was something I went to a meeting for ages ago that went nowhere, but now it is finally getting picked back up and has been gaining some legs with our current Mayor. Went to my first Zoom meeting for that last night, and next month we'll be "touring" current community gardens in the area (some have fallen to neglect and the group is hoping to revive them) with pictures of the gardens since it'll be on Zoom.

Workshops started back up at our local Agway. I went to one for pollinator gardens last week. I was thinking of going to one for herbs today, but with the snow I'm pretty sure it's canceled since they're held outside due to Covid. I went to the herb workshop last year and still have my notes, so I'm not overly disappointed about that. I also attended another Zoom last Sunday (11th) with a garden group the lady that leads the Agway workshops offers once a month from Feb-Oct (It's either Sept or Oct) each year. Next month we'll be meeting in person to mix minerals for soil amendments and I'll get to see her farm and goats. The group has a few small scale garden/landscape pros within it, and the rest of us are home gardeners. It's a nice group, and I'm really happy to be joining it.

I've been attending some native plant related talks as I can fit them in (all online), and have been watching a lot of videos related to gardening as well. One of them was fantastic. I was hoping they'd have the video up on their site from the live Zoom presentation so I could link it here, but it's still not up yet. (Held by the grow native MA folks.)

Next week will be interesting, if the weather predicted holds or we get another dip in temps to waylay my plans to try to tidy up the front. We almost put the rain barrels outside last week, and although I doubt they would have froze (and wouldn't have had enough water to worry about cracking), I'm still glad we didn't put them out just yet.

[Lily left the valley]

I got a bit rambly thinking general plans in the "garden today", so here's those bits.

I cannot find the outdoor thermometer I used to use to see how warm it was getting in our quick and dirty cold frames. We did get a compost thermometer, so I guess I could just put it inside the cloche and take the temp that way. So now I'm doubly glad we picked that up. I did refrain from moving the tomatoes. The forecast is now showing the dip at night to hit high 30s Thursday and linger around that until at least Saturday night. I reason that I've managed to keep the poor tomato starters alive this far, so another week to get past those nightly 30s shouldn't be too much longer.

We have been somewhat successful helping the one native strawberry Fragaria virginiana to spread along the wooden fence line to the east along the driveway, and the burdock is still providing cover crop in a sense there, as are the violets that I've been encouraging along that strip as well. I'll likely start pulling the burdock along that strip before the end of the month once the strawberries are leafing well (and I think flowering by then if I recall right). The other variant we have, Fragaria vesca, the critters pretty much always get to completely before we have a chance at them. It grows on the slope of the front yard, so all the tall stem wildflowers and grasses tend to hide them as well. As I've been clearing out the front yard, I've been carefully making sure any of the strawberry runners I find stay where they are as I'm pulling up other plants we don't want to keep.

I did happen to be on the front porch swing and noticed two teenagers that were daring each other as they giggled to gather various perennial flowers off of our neighbors' across the streets yards (non fenced areas). So although there were at least six flowers blooming earlier yesterday on that side, there are none after the stunt the kids pulled. I yelled at them it wasn't funny at all when I realized what they were doing, and they just started laughing harder as they ran off. I hope they didn't rip up any of the bulbs/corms/stolens along with the flowers. It was one of the few times I've been glad they haven't added sidewalk to our side yet. It's definitely convinced me to try using the wild blackberry runners as a low living wattle edging. A thorny surprise if they try to steal our flowers or even the wild berries! Which is honestly a much lighter punishment than what at least two of the neighbors will likely do if they catch them picking again--which is call the .

Of course, there's also that part of me that's thinking, "Well, I'm going to put the tawny (ditch) lilies along the street where supposedly someday they'll be adding our side of the street's sidewalk...and if they take the lilies which would be in front of the wattle...we have tons of those, and no great loss."

[Manalto]

Your restraint with the tomatoes was wise. Getting a chill seems to retard their growth and then it takes quite a while for them to snap out of it. I've done inadvertent experiments and the ones that weren't exposed to cold far outgrew the ones that were. I use 55ﾟ as the minimum.

No New England home is complete without a clump of tawny daylily.

[Lily left the valley]

Your restraint with the tomatoes was wise. Getting a chill seems to retard their growth and then it takes quite a while for them to snap out of it. I've done inadvertent experiments and the ones that weren't exposed to cold far outgrew the ones that were. I use 55ﾟ as the minimum.

No New England home is complete without a clump of tawny daylily.

I'm glad I've waited too. I checked the temp in the cloche early this morning, and it was just under 50°F. I hadn't heard about the chill retardation potential before, so thank you for that info. Now I'm worried about the sweet pepper in there.

[Gothichome]

Lily, no need to worry, they are under cover, they will be fine.

[Lily left the valley]

They're still hanging in there. Will put them in the cloche next week for certain once I figure out a way to raise the temp a bit more. Going to try moving some more rocks in/around the cloche this weekend and see how much that helps. We don't have many darker rocks, but more rocks are better than less rocks for heat capture.


One oops is I misjudged where the inherited iris in the garage bed is located. The most southern corner of of the cloche is currently interrupting their upward leaf progress. Will fix that tomorrow (likely by just adjusting the cloche's corner to on the outside rather than on top of it).

Rainy yesterday and today, and I haven't been able to do much outdoors. I did get some branchy bits off the front gutter, and noticed more leaf build up. We need to get the ladder out of the garage and clean them out better.

Will be starting seeds indoors this week and next. Have to go back through the envelopes to make sure I sorted them in the right planting time order.

[Lily left the valley]

Sean has had some schedule irregularities since the OIC at his office changed last week (more about this in my regular Beebe thread after this). This has meant less time for him to help out in the garden, so I'm really glad we shifted our planning focus to the new three groupings system I mentioned prior, because that makes it a bit easier to adjust what needs to happen when. Now that the yard is exploding in green (and in some spots, dandelions), we know I'll end up picking up as much slack as possible until some time in June or early July when his schedule should even out a bit more.

I admit, with the darn brain fog lately, it's been difficult to keep things straight in my head even with the simplified list (planting dates marked on a calendar do help), but on the worst of days (brain fog or weather wise), I try to at least do one round about the property, taking note of what needs attention and pulling up what unwanted bits I can, though many will need a fork/shovel to get them out.

I'm hoping that before the end of next weekend, I'll be starting on wrangling the blackberries even if it means halting other efforts like burdock/autumn olive/Japanese barberry/Norway Maple removal. I'm still puzzling over how best to handle the now three mini stumps between the neighboring wood fence and our garage in that gap. I may resort to using hole saw bits to drill down in the main trunks and use sugar to let the ants start the dirty work for me as I have no idea how to get at least one set of roots up since they are under the concrete blocks of the garage.

I did gather some bins to rake the old playground set gravel into as I work my way into the blackberry army camp, though it will be a while before it will be used elsewhere. I also still need to figure out when I can finish what I started in the front yard as far as beginning the first curve of the new walkway on the slope. I hope the weather holds this week, but only time will tell on that.

I have to say that in the back & side yards in particular, I am very pleased with how the long term plan of letting volunteers show themselves before weeding new bits has gone. So many new native species we can work with, and many are already sited just fine (thank goodness--I have enough going on!)

I don't know that I'll be able to start digging the new rain garden before June. I have loads of seeds that need starting, and so much else to do! Also going to a group mineral mix on Sunday, part of one of the gardening groups I mentioned finding of late.

I'm also now realizing that even just trying to start removing part of the current driveway may be on long term hold because there's no telling how the rest of this month will play out. I was really hoping to start at least getting part of the asphalt up before the weather turned too warm, but that's looking less and less likely given Sean's recent schedule change.

[Lily left the valley]

Went to a mineral mix group on Sunday. We were originally supposed to meet on Mother's Day, but some of the supplies were late in transit, so this week we met instead. It was my first time doing such, and I did take notes but can't recall off the top of my head what all we used and I don't have time to dig out my notes now, but will if anyone is interested. I didn't take as much as our garden overall likely needs (way beyond budget), but did take enough to try to help the tomatoes along, as well as a few other crops that have struggled a bit here.

One of the things talked about there was how backlogged the soil testing places are. We had planned to do that this year, but I had already read about the backlog on the gov website, so we didn't bother because we knew we might not get the results back until way later than would help for this year. So we likely will do so closer to fall when things have hopefully dialed down a bit at the labs to at least help for next year.

There was a handful of us that are relatively new to gardening, some old hands, and a few landscapers and small farmers in the mix. So it was an interesting experience given the broad range of knowledge within the group.

All three blueberries are leafing out now, which is a relief since one was much slower than a similar variety we bought together last year. The black raspberries are as well as the wild blackberry creepers. Both of the strawberries we inherited with the property are in flower and some are starting to transition. The Sequoia strawberry we bought this year is already fruiting, and since I'm so used to our two wild variants, the size of them already is quite a change.

All the starters, really, that we bought have been hanging in well. This week I need to get back to clearing beds for transplanting and seed starting. Lots to do, and it is keeping me quite busy.

We also have a lot of new volunteers this year, and I honestly am overwhelmed trying to ID both remaining past plants plus present.

I also found a new home for the bleeding heart--a neighbor around the corner that lives with her mom that loves them. I was shocked at how long the tap root was! It took a lot more work getting it out than I thought because it was in the garage bed, and much was under that blasted cheap plastic weed cloth I still haven't finished removing. The taproot thickness nearest the above ground portion of the plant which was just starting to form blooms on one branch was near a half dollar size. I was actually quite anxious trying to arrange the drop off time because I wanted it transplanted before the blooms came.

[Lily left the valley]

A good rule of thumb is that variegated plants take some shade, preferably in the afternoon. The variegated E. fortunei cultivars are not invasive, but keep an eye on it for reversions to the solid green form, which is a common occurrence. The green is much more vigorous (more chlorophyll) and will run rampant. I've seen it move from the edge of a property into the woods and up the trees.

I was re-reading this thread, trying to figure out if I had noted the name of a particular thug that despite my deep efforts last year to hew it down has roared back to life this year.

After moving "Esme" as we affectionately call her, some of her recovery was less green than before, but still striated. This year? Pure yellow leaved branches--several of them. I'm tempted to try to use one as a propogation cutting to see if it grows true to just the yellow or reverts. Still have not had issue with her going pure green. She tends to be more yellow and a bit of green than before I badly sited her and she turned pink in anger before I finally rescued her and moved her to her current spot on the west side of the porch bed.

(And I forgot to take a pic of this today yesterday to show exactly how pure the yellow is because right after I took the rhodie photo, I was distracted by a visitor to my neighbor that I wound up having an unexpectedly lengthy and pleasant garden chat with--I think he's the spouse of one of the siblings of the sick sister that moved in next door that my neighbor has been caring for some time now.)

Back to searching for that elusive weed name.