The warm weather has finally arrived. The apple trees are beginning to show signs of life with buds starting to swell into the Silver Tip stage. This means that it's time for me to break-out the spraying gear for the first organic spraying of the season - the first of many.
Speaking of trees... This is a shot of my twin black willow trees with the morning sun melting the frost on its branches. The yellow color appears before the leafs begin to bud - yet another observation to let me know that spring is finally here.
The garden out front gets the most sun so all of the snow has melted away. I still need to fix the battered fence. It's hard to believe that this was covered by 3 feet of snow only weeks ago. But guess what?
The garlic is up! I was worried that I set them out too late last November, but they seem to have done just fine. It will take a few more weeks to see if they all made it, but for now it looks like most have begun to sprout through the straw.
The larger gardens to the east still have some snow as of April 9th, 2011 - but with the temps expected to be near 70 degrees over the next few days, the rest of this stubborn snow should be history.
Back
inside, the seed flats are slowly coming to life with flowers, peppers and tomatoes. The T8 florescent lights are turned on for 14 hours each day. I will list the pepper and tomato varieties started here:
Peppers:
Beaver Dam, Budapest, Bulgarian Carrot Chile, Early Jalapeno, Fish Pepper, Hot Portugal, Pizza Mild Jalapeno, Purple Beauty Sweet Bell, Purple Jalapeno, Serrano Tampiqueno, and Tomato Pepper.
Tomatoes:
Better Boy Hybrid, Alaska, Crazy, Dad's Compost, Djena Lee’s Golden Girl, Experimental - 11-F-A Medium Red, Ildi, Orange Roma, Red Robin Small Red, Sasha's Altai, Siberian, Silver Fir Tree Red/Orange, Striped Cavern, Taxi, Totem Small Red, and Valencia.
There are three varieties of marigolds started (both African and European) which will hopefully keep the moles and voles away!
:)
