Front paged at My Left Wing
Good morning, and this is just rigoddamnediculous! Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Snow. Three goddamned weeks in a row. We'll just start warming up, and the streets will start melting out and it goddamned snows again! Now instead of icy ruts in the street, we have goddamned chasms!
Our northern-exposure backyard is largely shaded during the winter, and the drifts just keep getting deeper.
Oh, and the extended forecast? Yup — there at the end of next week, more goddamned snow!
Thank gawd for January treasures. As I stowed away the Christmas crap last weekend, I started bringing up some of the forced bulbs. Using the water polymer crystals was, if I may say so, a stroke of genius. The description of how I prepped the bulbs is in Garden Blogging Vol. 2.36.
I don’t know if it's because I included charcoal in every container, but I've had no problem at all with the water becoming brackish. My theory is that the crystals around the base of the bulbs act like damp soil; even though the bulbs are sitting in what is, essentially, water, they aren't waterlogged so they don't rot. Even the bulb that's sitting on top of nothing but saturated crystals, with no glass gems at all for support, shows no sign of softening.
And the root development is just spectacular. You can see it better in a flat-sided container, but I really like the way the distortions look in the fluted-edged vase.
Last year I had problems with the light-colored hyacinth blossoming before they had formed sufficient stems to clear the leaves, and I see the same thing happening this year. I'm putting them in a very dimly lit, cool room for a few weeks after the buds show up, to see if I can't get the stems to lengthen before the buds open. I'm also wondering if this is a consistent problem that the floral industry hasn't solved: I don't ever recall seeing white or pale yellow forced hyacinth for sale.
Today I'll finish bringing up the hyacinth that show signs of forming buds — some will stay in the warm part of the house, some will go into dim light, and some will go into a closet. For me gardening is a never-ending cycle of experimentation.
So that's what's happening here. What's happening at your house?