Cold Climate Gardening

I finally sowed most of my seeds - 11 kinds of tomatoes, 3 types of eggplants, 5 kinds of peppers and a tomatillo. I still have to label them all - I have a detailed schematic, but if I lose that, I am in trouble. I used popsicle sticks last year, but I am out, and couldn’t get those kids in the car today.

In the mean time, I used cut up playing cards and crayons as markers. I also sowed Mexican sunflowers “Torch” , helichrysm “Bikini Mix” , matsumoto china asters, venidium zulu prince and orange prince, annual butterfly weed “silky red”, Cook’s Garden Snapdragon mix, spaeralcea incana, Blood Red Wallflower, White Stock, Hollyhock “Happy …

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After being told my webpage was fourth on the search for “garden blog” (it’s actually fifth), I had to check it out for myself and discovered Judi, Judi, Quite Contrary. Judi has several other blogs going as well, which is how I learned she’s expecting twins.

Strangely enough, I am not even on the first page of hits for “garden blogs.”

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Someone once commented to my brothers that I was an organized person. My brothers exchanged looks that said “Are you talking about one of MY sisters?” No, I’m not oganized. Sometimes I’m good at planning, or coordinating things, but I am not organized. If I ever had a filing cabinet, I would never waste my time looking for anything INSIDE of it. I would always look for things in the sloppy piles ON TOP of my filing cabinet. I would probably be able to find everything I wanted, but it wouldn’t be neatly filed away. If I ever actually put something INSIDE my filing cabinet, it would be because I wanted to use the top of my filing cabinet for something else–so I opened a drawer, dumped whatever was on top of the filing cabinet inside of one of the drawers, and neatly (hey, something has to be neat, right?) closed it. Works for me.

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Yesterday I potted on 140 assorted zinnias, most of which I had assumed would not be sprouting. The newest seed was 2 years old, the older seed went back as far as 1996, I think. The zinnias don’t really want to be potted on, they want to be planted. I refuse, though, to plant something that’s not frost hardy before the end of the first week of June. Even if we haven’t had frost for weeks, whoever is in charge of cold weather likes to stick in one last parting shot before summer really starts. Usually it’s just a light frost, but sometimes it’s a hard frost that kills anything it can get its hands on. However, most things …

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Inspecting the seedpans and seeing tiny rosebushlets and miniscule iris,

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What have people heard about soaking peas the night before planting? Dad always did, and I had assumed it was necessary for germination. However, I recently read that pre-soaking peas supposedly causes “legume seeds to absorb water too quickly, split their outer coatings and spill out essential nutrients, which encourages damping off seed rot.” (The Organic Gardener’s Home Reference, by Tanya Denckla. Too much info, and some of it seems irrelevant. I honestly couldn’t care less about how long pea roots are!) Has anyone else heard, or experienced, this? Or should I just follow my instincts and keep pre-soaking peas?

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I’ve looked up Honeycrisp apple in the Nafex archives and found I remembered correctly that it is well thought of by the Nafex folks who do go first for flavor & garden worthiness. They compared it to Macintosh for flavor. There was not much mention of Morello Cherries except that they have great flavor and will do well against a north wall (!) and that the ‘Evans’ cherry is a Morello descendant and highly popular in the Canadian prairies. DNA Gardens in Canada list them and lots of other interesting fruits–I have emailed them to see if they ship to the US–bulletins when they happen.
Applesource is a good way to ‘test drive’ apples …

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