A Slow Week

It's been a busy week. I'm not sure why. I don't think I had more to do than usual but I just didn't' have the time I wanted to spend working on the Garden. I planted a few things but overall not much got done. So there's not much to blog about this week.

It's gotten warm. Last week was mostly in the 70º's or close to it. It hit 84º yesterday. Today's in the upper 60's. The rest of the garden will go in in the next two or three weeks.

We ordered 25 more strawberry plants from the local Ag Extension office during the winter came in a few days ago. I put in 75 plants last year. Those 75 put out runners that grew more plants and those new plants did the same thing. By the end of last Summer, I had a pretty good matted row of strawberries 25 feet long and about 4' wide. It has a few thin spots here and there so I planted 25 more plants in those spots. I'm sure it didn't need it. It will fill in the bare spots on its own. But I'm very impatient.

Strawberry plants don't look like much before they're planted. Actually they just look like roots. But they grow fast. These will look like strawberries in a few weeks.

strawberry plants

The asparagus I planted last year is starting to pop up. Each of the surviving 18 plants has at least one spear. The photo below is the biggest. I'm actually considering having some asparagus with dinner tonight. I've always wondered what asparagus tasted like but was pretty sure it was bad. Tonight we'll see for sure.

asparagus spears

I've got two varieties of asparagus. Last Spring, I planted 10 plants of an old variety called Mary Washington and 10 plants of a new variety called Jersey Knight. The Jersey Knight is supposed to be almost all male plants. Male plants don't expend energy making seeds and therefore grow into bigger plants that make more asparagus than female plants.

Yesterday, I picked up some celery plants and broccoli plants at a local garden center. I tried celery from seed last year and nothing even came up. I've never seen celery plants before and was looking for celery seeds to try again but found this instead.

celery and broccoli

Six celery and eight broccoli plants completed the 4th row in the garden. Last year, we grew 4 broccoli plants and harvested broccoli for a month. We don't eat a lot of broccoli but we still have broccoli in the freezer from last season.

celery and broccoli planted

I also picked up some onion sets from the garden center at the same time. Onion sets were $1.99 per pound. I ended up with 40 cents worth of onions sets. That's enough for a full row and more than I'll actually eat. I never have much luck with onions. I think our soil is just too heavy and onions don't do well if they're kept wet. They like sand because it drains easily. Add to that the fact that I should have had them in the ground a couple of weeks ago and the forecast for onions this year isn't so good.

I had planted the row of celery and broccoli yesterday and then left to work on my mower. By the time I got back out to the garden, the bag had been shredded and the onions were spread around the grass. I'm not sure what was after the onions but I'm sure whatever it was will find them in the garden and leave me with none.

The pear trees are in full bloom. If you look at the upper right of the photo below, you can see a small bee checking out a flower.

pears in full bloom.

I had posed here that my rhubarb was flowering. I did some reading and it's not supposed to. Rhubarb only flowers if it's under distress from poor soil, not enough water, or some other problem. It turns out that the flowering takes up so much of the plant's energy that it won't make many stalks. So I cut off the flower stalks yesterday morning. I've also fertilized and watered it well. We'll see if it starts to produce more stalks.

rhubarb sans flower stalks.