Garden happenings

Spring may someday come to my garden. We are all looking forward to the spring. It has been a rough winter. Celebrating a white birthday that was not exactly on my wish list today.

I have some seeds started under a grow light in the attic bathroom. 

I started the first ones about two and a half weeks ago, but have added more as I've found or bought containers for them. My most successful crop has been clover. I was too cheap and had some bad experiences with commercial soil products, so used garden soil instead of a seed starting mix. Thus, I had weed seeds mixed in. But my plants are doing pretty well too. The tomatoes have done the best. I planted sungold and purple Cherokee and they already have true leaves on them. The alpine strawberries took a while to germinate, but seem to be growing well too. The paprika peppers and basil I have had less luck with. I've planted more in hopes that a second planting will successfully germinate. 

Outside, I've planted some spring bulbs that may not flower this year, but will be nice next year, unless the squirrels dig up and eat them all. I saw some tell-tale holes in the ground yesterday. I also dug up the daylilies and gave the bulbs to a neighbor. I didn't care for the plants last year, and they were in the way of where I wanted to put a border on my garden bed. 

In lieu of getting each other gifts, my husband and I buy birthday presents for ourselves. As I did last year, I'm buying plants. So I have ordered 2 honeyberry plants, 2 pawpaw trees, a pesto perpetuo basil, a peach tree, a nectarine tree, and two bush cherries. I may need to order and/or purchase locally a handful of other plants to replace ones that perished in the ridiculous winter we are still in the midst of, and plan to buy some annuals that I'm not growing from seed. But I have ordered most of the big expensive things now.