Warming yet?

Sounds like these past few months have been pretty hard on just about
everyone's plants. I'm wincing just reading the descriptions of all your
spring blooms getting blasted...it's got to be disappointing. I sure
hope the weather calms for us all; it wasn't bad here over the weekend,
breezy and a bit overcast, more like a typical spring.
I'm still discovering - or maybe "not discovering" would be more
accurate - plants I used to have before this last winter. The latest
realization is that gophers seem to have eaten my big liatris clump over
the winter. Another replacement to put on the list. Well...I suppose
having lost so much stuff will make weeding easier, I don't have to be
as careful about what I dig up.
On the plus side, I got almost all of the veggie garden planted on
Saturday. It didn't start off promising, I went out Friday night to
discover that the plants I put out there to harden off had been attacked
by some critter. The culprit? A chicken that escaped the coop and
navigated through all the protection. We salvaged what we could, I took
some back into the greenhouse for repotting and in the end it could have
been worse. So we clipped their wings, they won't be getting out that
way for a while.
I was going to put in 24 tomatoes, 18 paste and 6 fresh eating but Ms.
Chicken changed the proportions for me to 12 apiece, since I don't have
enough of the paste varieties left. For fresh I'm growing Red Rose,
Arkansas Traveller, Sioux, Sun King, Grape, and, ummm, I forgot one.
Paste tomatoes...what I have left is Super Italian Paste, Saucy, and
LaRoma. It would be nice if I actually got any tomatoes this year, last
year was a bust.
I sowed the soybeans, the squash, the melons. I realized I didn't plan
on a spot for cucumbers so I'm considering where to put them. The green
beans look okay when I peeked under their row cover but I didn't have
time to look closely at much - I'm almost afraid to look at the peas,
what's there will be what's there since it's too late to replant them.
Things would be so much easier to check on if I didn't have to cover
everything up to protect it.
We set the ground squirrel trap and caught one already, with luck we can
get rid of the existing ones. Last time we went through this it took
them quite a while to move back in so here's hoping.
My weigela is blooming, some of the roses are blooming, the iris are
just starting. My white lilac is full of blossoms, it must have liked
the cold weather as usually I don't get much off it. In the dry garden
the salvia greggii, most of the penstemons, and the buckwheat are
blooming. I'm waiting on the lavender but I don't expect to see anything
off the other salvias this year.

Cyndi

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