Good morning, and we're back to weird. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging.
Denver went back to being unseasonably warm during the last week. We were in the 80s mid-week, and on Tuesday the high of 88° broke the record for the date.
Even more surprising have been overnight lows staying in the 50s — and the unusually mild and dry weather has brought the yearly Invasion of the Miller Moths, and the bloom to the backyard tree peony, two or three weeks earlier than normal
However, Thursday night we had a hell of a thunderstorm which brought some welcome rain, and unwelcome high winds, to my neighborhood, flattening a lot of the blooming bearded iris — and spawning several tornadoes on the eastern plains. The unsettled weather will continue through the weekend, meaning more seasonable highs in the 60s, and perhaps even a little more rain.
When I went to the nursery a few weeks back, one of the things I picked up was a six-pack of leek seedlings. I have tried growing leeks before — most recently with a six-pack-picked-up-on-a-whim early last summer — but never with any success. My biggest problem has been Gardening with Pooties.
I went online and to find information to increase my chances of success, then went out to the veggie garden to dig a trench to plug the leeks into. The instructions online said to leave 6" between the plants, and I had a six pack of leeks, so I figured a four foot trench would give me plenty of room.
Except… when I went to take the leeks out of the six-pack cells I found that I had a lot more than six leeks… each cell contained a half-dozen or more leek seedlings.
What I had figured to be a half-hour or less planting job became much more complicated: I had to tease the seedlings apart, and then find space for more than six times the number of plants I had planned on.
I ended up lengthening the first trench, and then finding room at the front of another bed to set up a second trench. I also took a tip from the planting information I found online and, instead of leaving six inches between each seedling I planted them closer together, figuring that some of the smaller seedlings likely wouldn't make it (more below), and that others could be harvest early and used as scallions.
My next dilemma was how to solve the pootie problem. Arwen the Terrible is named The Terrible because she is a horrible digger. She absolutely loves digging in the soft soil where I've recently planted seedlings. She can have many square feet of empty, soft ground — and will invariably dig up whatever seedlings have just been planted. Last year when I tried growing leeks she first dug up the seedlings, then filled in the trench.
So I decided to try covering up the baby leeks, and the trench, with floating row cover. Which worked brilliantly to deter Arwen the Terrible.
However, Caligula seems to think that floating row cover is a nice blankee that I've used to create a hammock for him to lie in. Sigh… he squished the leek seedlings.
A lot of the very small ones seem to have succumbed to the gentle ministrations of that plump pootie posterior. The larger ones are still showing green, even they are somewhat flattened, so I hope they'll recover.
And next year, I'll try laying wire fencing on the ground to see if that keeps both pooties out of the leeks.
That's what's happening here. What's going on in your garden?