Saturday, April 13, 2013

Tomato countdown, seeding day

My journal entries have been less than regular of late.  I have a dental procedure and bad weather to thank for my hiatus from gardening.  Milwaukee has seen nothing but rain day after day.  Rivers are over-flowing their banks and gardens are reduced to mud.  We have been soaking up a slow seepage of water in one corner of our home due to the saturated soil around us.  And, it has been cold.  40's are no temperature to garden in.

Today is T-day.  The day that tomatoes need to be seeded in hopes that the weekend following our Memorial Day the soil will be ready to have them take root.  I have some flowers to seed also.  I am doing a second round of hollyhocks this year in the hope that these biennials will provide me with blooms every year from alternate year crops.Asters, Statice, and Thithonia are also on my seeding calendar to be done 6 weeks before last frost.  Some seeds could be direct sown, but I want to have some plants to have a head start this year.

The onion crop is still in a seed tray.  I started hardening them off and then the cold came with the ceaseless rain.  I gave up and will trim them back, again, in hopes that next week will be warm enough to set them out during the day.  Maybe next weekend I will get them in the ground.

That is the thing about gardeners.  We always have hope for the future to be just a little bit better.  We look forward while learning from the past.  Sometimes plants die and plans go awry, but there is always tomorrow to start again.

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