Good morning, and sometimes I love eavesdropping. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver started out this week with some much-needed moisture; although 2" of snow was nowhere near enough to make a dent in our water deficit, it's better than nothing. We're over 3 feet low on our average snowfall for the season.
The weekend forecast gives us a look at what's in store: with highs forecast to approach 80°, we may break the record highs for early April. With it being a La Niña year we're looking at a warm, dry April. At least the mountains have plenty of snow this year, so the reservoirs are full.
Meanwhile, the spring bulb display continues on, and I hear some interesting conversations drifting up through our open bedroom windows. My favorite this week was the man who said "I didn't know hyacinths came in this many colors. I've only seen light blue and pink ones!"
I am, however, disappointed in the hyacinths I planted out in the parking strip planters. For whatever reason they just aren't doing well out there — the stems are very short and they aren't as full as they should be. We'll see how the tulips and daffodils I planted out there do. I suspect that the soil, which hasn't had the benefit of a couple of decades of amending that the main beds have had, just isn't as good as the rest of the front yard. So I'll have to keep dumping massive amounts of compost out there.
People are also very surprised at how large a variety of daffodils exist. I added these Lemon Glow (purchased from Colorblends) ones last fall, and I'm quite pleased with them.
Meanwhile, I'm running very behind on much of my gardening — and the house is a disaster area. Over the past week I did get the brassica and tomato seedlings into larger pots and moved down under the metal halide light. I found these spiffy self-watering plant trays at Lee Valley which I hope will make it easier to keep everything properly watered.
And I did get the clematis cleaned out — the jackmani is starting its climb toward the top of the porch, but I still have to wrestle the sweet autumn clematis back onto its arch.
The snap peas are growing happily. Unfortunately, they're growing happily on the porch, and not in the ground. This weekend I want to get the veggie patch cleared out and prepped, but that also means getting the compost sifted and the tumbler refilled, which means chopping up plant debris to mix in with the winter's kitchen scraps… oy! If I think about it, I won't get started.
A lot of my problem is that although I had the week off, and although we had some lovely (if windy) weather, I had dental surgery on Tuesday. Loaded up on Vicodin is not a recipe for getting a lot done. But the swelling has now receded and I'm feeling — and looking — more normal.
I'm considering skipping tilling this spring — that way I won't have to re-set the soaker hoses since I didn't get the veggie patch tilled last fall. If I go that way I'll just throw some compost onto the rows and dig holes within which to plant the seedlings. I'll still need to rake up the last of the debris and sift the compost, but the rest of it will go a lot faster.
I do need to do at least a little bit of picking up in the house — Merry Light is visiting the city from the high country and I don't want her to think that we're total slobs. She'll be bringing me some asters, and I'll be sending off some Johnson's Blue cranesbill and whatever else strikes her fancy. While I'm digging her Johnson's Blue, I'll also dig plants for escapee, Miss Blue and Noor B.
And I'm afraid I have to trash my Inca Sun brugmansia — I'm 99% sure it has mosaic virus. Sigh… at least it's the dwarf variety that came into bloom the first year and the other brugs show no sign of the virus. I've ordered a couple of replacement plants; Inca Sun really is a wonderful brug and I recommend it for anyone who wants to try brugmansias. Beyond that it's small (or smaller), it bloomed off-and-on all winter.
The Ecuadorian Pink brug down in the basement is anxious to take off, so I think I'll have to bring it upstairs. It started putting out new growth with just the little bit of light it's been getting for the past few weeks since the cold storage space was opened up. Now that it will also be getting some overflow light from the metal halide light I expect that it will be growing by leaps and bounds and become awkward to handle in it's leafed out state. I am so very glad to know, though, that I can over-winter the brugs down in the cold storage.
Finally, right on schedule, "MJ's hyacinths" have blossomed. I plant these pale pink hyacinths in memory of my friend who died of liver cancer on April 2, 2003 — it's hard to believe she's been gone for 8 years. Still miss you, honey.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your garden?