March 12 catch up

Hmmmm. Good and bad alike. The bad astonished me. I started with clean new potting soil and clean new pots and got damping off anyway. **sigh** Probably gonna have to replant my last two top-of-the-fridge flats. But the flats in the greenhouse are doing really well. Wish now I had put them all out there to begin with.

My big lesson here is that I simply don't have adequate lights. The seedlings should have been well past the damping off stage by now but they're growing slowly--even the ones under lights--because it just isn't bright enough no matter what I do. I've spent that stimulus check four ways from Sunday already, but at this moment I truly want to spend it on a professional lighting set up. If I'm to be serious about growing part of our food and all of our flowers, then I need the proper tools for it.

The morning glories are well up and need to go out and get tons more light, but our very changeable forecast once again calls for freezing nights midweek. I'm thinking about repurposing a craft cart and using it to take the plants outside during the day, then bring them back in at night. It'll harden them off, which has to happen anyway.

Trip to the nursery netted me many herbs, including my favorite pineapple sage and a wonderful dark green parsley, a couple of lavenders, as well a flower, Dicentra (bleeding hearts). A trip to the grocery store netted me a Loring Peach tree. It's not a dwarf, so it could easily get to 15 feet. We honestly don't know where to put it. I'm thinking it'll have to go in the front yard. The back is full!

Lettuces are up in the greenhouse and so, it seems, are a few carrots (Cosmic Purple). The new beets and chards are up. Even the kohlrabi is up, but there is absolutely no sign of peas. That mystifies me. 

I have seen ants in the pots, so I am evidently not going to be able to escape them this year.

We're slowly expanding the garden floor in the back yard, just one layer right now, but it looks to me like a perfect berry bed. I want to get more raspberries and blackberries and see if I can keep them going. The harvests in years past were most wonderful; I want that again.

The lilac is planted in the front yard now and is leafing out. No sign yet of leaves on anything else. The back yard daffodils and crocus both bloomed on March 11.

I've been slowed down by illness and will have to make up for lost time as I can. Have held off on planting warm season crops because I have nowhere to put them yet--but once the midweek frosts are done, I can put them in the greenhouse.