The Waiting Game

This is the time of year when there seems to be a load of work to be done but you have to wait to do it.  Is it spring yet or not?  Will we get a foot of snow?  Is it going to be mild and we will regret not planting lettuce early?  Isn't there something that I should be doing?

Last Sunday I planted the first set of peas.  With peas, timing isn't as critical as say tomato plants.  If the soil isn't the right temperature, or the weather isn't optimal they just hang out waiting to sprout until they know it's time.  They can even be snowed on a little.  Peas are very self-sufficient.  Now I have to get the pea fence out of storage which is the biggest chore of planting peas.  The more peas I plant, the bigger chore it is!

This is where my gardening year begins - the basement workbench

This is my first time for starting broccoli and cauliflower seeds and it is going well.  The reason I am going to try them this year is that I evicted the strawberries from the caged bed and I knew it would be the perfect place for cole crops because the hardware cloth will keep the butterflies out of it and if that doesn't work I can easily pin a floating row cover over it.  Worm free broccoli!  Sign me up!  I have tried both broccoli and cauliflower in the past with marginal results.  This year I am making a concentrated effort to grow some really nice ones.  In addition to the strawberry bed, which will only hold about a dozen plants, I plan to put 4-6 plants under hoops in the main garden.

Broccoli and Cauliflower starts that will
be ready to begin hardening off next weekend

In addition to the broccoli, cauliflower and a 6 pack off eggplants, I have just seeded tomatoes a couple of days ago.  They are under a dome and on a heat mat with their own light set up waiting.

We've already gone through and done our late winter cleanup.  We've removed the oak leaves that built up over winter, turned the compost pile, loosened the mulch in the landscape beds, added mulch around the daffodils and peonies and just generally gone around and picked up sticks and raked. 

This clematis vine had overwhelmed it's small store bought trellis.
We stapled this extra cattle panel up behind it.  Rather than cut the panel,
we left it whole so we haven't wasted a whole panel if we get another idea

Now is the time to make sure we completed winter-downtime projects like organizing the garden shed and contemplate which of the spring projects we are going to tackle first.  While we enjoy doing things ourselves, some of our projects are really tough to figure out, plan and source.  It would be nice if we could just picture it in our head and wave a wand over it.  Even better would be computer functions like Undo, Redo, Delete and Revert to Saved.