What's Happening in the Garden - Early May

It has been an exceptionally busy start to the month.  I'm being pulled in half a dozen different directions with everything that needs to be done NOW in the garden, not the least of which is creating the new beds on the hill:

Partially completed beds moved to the hill

If you look closely you will see 5 regular sized beds (4 for me and 1 for the kids) plus 2 smaller beds for the asparagus & blueberries.

Normally, I build the entire bed in the garage (since it's much easier to do on a level surface) and then my husband and I move it to the garden.  I find the weight of wood to be deceiving - it often weighs much more than I think it will.  A complete bed is heavy enough when you are moving it on flat ground - I wasn't thrilled with the prospect of lugging it up a hill.  So I decided to assemble only the lower half in the garage including the supports, and them simply screw in the top section after we moved it in place.  What you see in the photo is not the final position of the beds - that was simply where we placed them as we moved them.

Now on to what is happening in the rest of the garden.

First up are the alliums.  The garlic is up and growing very well.  It's always comforting to see all that green popping up, letting us know that everything is fine.


Garlic with Shallots at the far left

You'll notice that the bed is netted this year - a first for me.  Last year a good chunk of my onions and shallots were damaged by leek moths*, so I'm trying to prevent that from happening this year.

Last fall, I decided to see if the Camelot shallots that I grew from seed would overwinter & multiply in the same manner as regular shallots.  So far, we are looking VERY good on that front:

Overwintered Camelot Shallots

The question still remains, however, as to whether these will multiply or not and, if so, will the bulbs be anywhere near the size of their parent, which you can see near the bottom of this POST.  I actually have some of last years Camelot shallots hanging in my basement and they are still firm and fresh.  I've only had one sprout on me so far...not too shabby!

As a side note - see those little cucumber type seedlings in the photo above?  Well those are self-seeded borage.  I believe there was a question last year about whether or not the seeds would overwinter in our climate...now we have our answer.

The He-Shi-Ko perennial bunching onions that I grew last year are failing to impress me.

He-Shi-Ko Perennial Bunching Onions

Most survived the winter (about 1/3 of them died), but they are just not growing or dividing as quickly as I would have liked.  Sometimes, you have to try many, many varieties before you hit on the "one" that does best for you, so I'm ok with that.  I'm growing two new varieties this year (Evergreen Hardy & Evergreen Long White Nebuka) so we'll see if these are any better.

About half of the potato onions that I planted in the fall have come up so far, but even that is a success in my book as almost all of them had leek moth* damage.  I half expected them to simply rot in the soil.  Once again, I have no idea what to expect from these so we shall have to wait and see what they produce.

Potato Onions

The onions, shallots (from seed) & leek seedlings were transplanted on April 18th.  I really must try to remember how labour intensive planting out onion seedlings is.  Next year, I'll be breaking this task up over a couple of days instead of trying to get it done in one go.

Onion Bed Today

The onions look so small right now, but I recall that I had the exact same impression last year and they ended up doing just fine.  It takes them a couple of weeks to settle in before they start to bulk up.

Onion Seedlings Before Transplanting

Unfortunately, a few of the leeks are goners - out of the possible 8 that I had, only 4 remain.  They were just too tiny to brave the elements a couple of weeks ago when we had several days of sustained heavy winds.  The remaining ones are not looking that great either, but at least they are still alive...for now.

The only Jolant leek left & the healthiest of the bunch
Yup - pretty sad

And then I found a rogue onion in last years onion bed:

Rogue Onion

I'll just leave it be until I need to plant up the bed in another few weeks - hopefully it will be good eats once I pull it up.

I have been pre-germinating and sowing spinach seeds to replace those that were lost during the windy weather.  With our great weather last week, those seedlings that did survive are starting to put on A BIT of growth...emphasis here is on "a bit".

Renegade Spinach - 7 weeks

I'm hoping that this is simply their growth habit and that I don't have a repeat of last years tiny plants.  Since I've never grown a good batch of spinach, I really have no idea what they are supposed to look like at this stage.  It's been 7 weeks since I soaked & pre-germinated the seeds and it seems like an awfully long time for them to still be at the seedling stage.  According to the days to maturity on the seed packets, I should have fully grown plants by now - would the cold weather in the last few weeks make that much of a difference?

Many of the direct seeded spinach seeds are just starting to poke out of the soil & I'll be interested to see how well they do compared to the transplanted seedlings...I wonder if they will catch up, seeing as how the transplants are still so small.

And speaking of the brutal winds, they really did a number on my collard seedlings.  I planted out 4 plants and three of them looked so bad that I was certain they weren't going to make it, so I started new plants.  Now it looks as if they may, in fact, pull through, but I think I'll hold onto my transplants for the time being, just in case.

Collards on April 25th



Looking much better on May 6th

The kale also suffered but nowhere near as much - I was fairly certain that it would be ok.



Kale on April 25th



Kale on May 6th

My strawberry plants are just staring to flower...to be a bit more accurate, one of my plants has a couple of flowers on it:

Two lone flowers on the strawberries so far

I need to do a bit of work in this bed, including cleaning up the dead foliage, adding some straw, fertilizing, etc.  This will be the 2nd full year for this bed and I'm expecting big things from it.  These first blooms are a full 2 weeks earlier than last year, which is promising.  I took a photo in early June of last year, which is when blossoming really got going, so I'll have to compare to see if the bed is doing any better.

Sometimes not being on top of things works in your favour.  I had really given up hope on the sage but only this morning, I saw some signs of life amongst the dead foliage:

Purple Sage - Signs of Life

Daphne was joking around about her brown thumb because her Mojito mint died.  Well, I must have a black thumb because BOTH of my mints died.  That's right...both the chocolate & regular mint.  Dead.  I can't believe it either.

I obviously have to re-think my mint growing strategy - perhaps I should grow them in a larger container or bury the pot in the ground.  I'm still undecided.

My cherry tree is starting to flower.

Cherry Tree

Cherry Blossom

Last year I did have a few flowers but no cherries.  This time round, I *think* that there are many more blossoms on it, although not as many as 2 years ago when I did get a small crop of cherries.

Likewise, the plum tree flowered "a tiny bit" last year, according to my notes.

Plum Tree

This year, it's actually surprising me.  Contrary to my original thought a couple of weeks ago, it looks as if there will be plenty of flowers on it, at least from some of the varieties.  Hopefully this will translate into some plums.  I won't be greedy - if I can get a nice little basket of plums, I'll be more than happy.

First of The Plum Blossoms

The peas are also up and the favas are just starting to peak through the soil...I won't get into detail here since I'll be doing a post on them in a couple of days.

And lastly, I thought I would add some pics of what's blooming in my garden right now.  Most of the bulbs/perennials in my garden were planted long before we moved here.  I don't really know much about flowers (yet), so I have no idea what specific variety they are - it definitely doesn't keep me from enjoying them though!



Daffodils



Forget-Me-Not

Glory-of-the-Snow

Till next time...

*I originally thought that the alliums were being attacked by onion maggots but have subsequently realized that, in fact, I was dealing with leek moths so have adjusted this post accordingly.