In and Out

 I have been hardening off my seedlings rather than just throwing them out in the cold frame.  I'm working around the house each day so it isn't too inconvenient.  They can be out for several hours each day now and by the weekend they will be fine in the cold frame all day.

The Coleus and Marigolds are out there already.

I am warming the soil for my Dahlias.  The regular soil temperature here is 50F but under the panels I have it up to 64F.

I finally got the Caesar's Brother Siberian Iris planted.  

We decided to remove the brick border.

We got our new mulch and finished mulching.

I am enjoying some of the new to me perennials.

This is Penstemon Onyx and Pearls.  The foliage stayed "green" all winter.

This is Amsonia Storm Cloud

I've had this several years, but it is the first year it has significant blooms.  
It is Lemony Lace Elderberry

The Bartlett branch of the pear tree is blooming.

Both Northern Spy apple trees are full of buds

The later blooming daffodils are opening and there are new variations every day

And the strawberry plants are blooming.  These are first year plants.  I snipped the runners from the neighbor's plants last year.

Spring is under way.

Sunny Day

After several days of cool temperatures, mid-40s at night and mid-fifties during the day, we finally got a warm, sunny day and I can open up the cold frame for more than a minute, inspect some of my plants and give them liquid fertilizer.  The cold frame has needed to conserve every degree of temperature it can so I've only taken quick peeks to make sure nothing was drying out.

First are my Orange Hat Micro tomatoes.  This solves the problem of "cherry tomato plants are so BIG!"

Mature size and blooming

Below are my dwarf tomato plants and the Havasu hot peppers that we enjoy as pickled peppers.

These are ready to transplant but looking at the long range forecast, we are still getting night time temperatures below 55F for the next three weeks so I am not in a hurry.  I may go ahead and put the peppers in their large containers, but I will have to keep frost cloth around them and create a little personal cold frame for each container.

The indeterminate tomatoes have been up-potted one more time and are in no hurry to go in the ground.

And finally, my Large Exhibition Coleus Mix.  This is year two for this packet of seeds an they germinated well.  I am happy that I got two of each color so I can pot up a pair of matching planters.  

I also got extra of the Mosaic color which I will use in the planter in front of the chicken coop.  That solves that problem because I was feeling pretty cheap, lazy and uninspired about that planter.  Why not fill it with what are basically "free plants".  I'll just buy a Sweetheart Lime sweet potato plant to spill over the front and I'll be all done.

Time to Tidy Up

 I've been reorganizing my cold frame as I get things planted out.  Consolidating trays.  Washing out pots and putting them away.  The first picture is my tomato plants.  The peppers have been planted out.  Tomatoes are next.  The plant under the red arrow is a dwarf.

No really.
It's a Wherokowhai

My first attempt at Coleus went well.  I've already used a couple.

The Marigolds are doing OK.  I'm waiting to plant them out until they are big enough that a slug can't eat one in a single bite.  I use slug bait but the plant needs to be big enough to have a fighting chance.

Snowball Marigolds

The Celosia are transplanted and overseeded.

I had some Snapdragons and Sahara Rudbeckia wintersown in milk jugs.  Its a really simple, low maintenance way to get some seeds started.  I transplanted them into cells to grow on a bit.  When they look a little less bedraggled I will post another photo.

My grow thru grids saved the life of this Cheyenne Spirit Echinacea.  A deer tried to take a bite out of the side of it during the rainy night and found it too much trouble.  It also tasted bad because it had been sprayed before the rain.  The rain had washed the repellent off enough to make it seem appetizing but it stuck well enough that they spat out most of the leaves on the ground.  I use both covers and repellent to deter the deer.

I have been very diligent with spraying and I think this is the first year they have not gone ahead and mown down my woods hyacinths.

The Hosta get sprayed about every other evening.

These Hosta are both second year divisions from existing plants.

Today I finished planting out the Dahlias and weeding after the rain.  We are having another warm, sunny stretch and everything is growing like gangbusters.

A Hot Mess

Today's forecasted high was 78 degrees.  It was 53 when I got up this morning and by noon it had hit 83 degrees in the shade and it stayed there all day.  It is currently, at 5pm,  81 on the north wall of the house.  For several days I debated whether to change the broccoli and cauliflowers to the insect mesh but since tomorrow is supposed to return to more reasonable weather, I decided instead to just run their pant legs up.  I didn't want them to cook in their little greenhouse.

The cold frame was another challenge.  I have several trays of young seedlings in there.  I can't just open it up the because the polycarbonate panels do block some of the sun and experience tells me I can easily scorch them.  With one panel down, a 50% shade cloth, and a fan running the air temp was 95 and the soil surface temp was 103.  I think everyone is OK

There was at least a nice stiff breeze today and we got another chunk of the mulching done around the house.  It was actually sort of pleasant because I had already cleaned, raked out and weeded the beds earlier in the week and we just had to cut some edging and do a lot of shoveling of new material.  Then we turned on the fridge in the garden shed and stocked it with water, sweet tea and beer.  Then the lawn was mowed for the first time.

I went around taking photos of daffodils to keep track of where they are for the next time I decide I must need a whole bunch more.  Which I don't.

I might add some yellow with deep orange centers.  They are a real stand out.  Most of mine are the giant mix for naturalizing and over time, the standard all yellow or white with yellow tend to take over.  I have only ever singled out the all white Mount Hood or the white with peach Salome.  But I am seeing a whole lot of the Ice Follies with their wide open pale yellow centers.  I was so sad last week when we got the eight inches of snow because I was afraid they would all have been crushed, but the two cold and lightly snowy days before hand had made all of the flowers close back up so when the heavier snow came on Tuesday they were less vulnerable and very few bent over.

It is a banner year for daffodils

Current Situation

 This is why we wanted to play outside in the mud when we got some spring like weather.

But indoors we soldier on.  

I have six Flame Star cauliflower doing awesome (above far right) and already transplanted out of their seed cell in another tray (below).  

One Diplomat broccoli (upper right cell) trying to sprout from old seeds and I reseeded yesterday.  I have one very nice Golden Acre cabbage seedling (above bottom left) and the second seed I sowed tried to sprout upside down (root in the air) and I moved it to the cell on the right where it seems to be figuring things out.  One Violaceo di Verona seed sprouted sluggishly (above center right) and I seeded more yesterday.  This is the hassle with sowing directly into cells without the plan to transplant as I did the Flame Star cauliflower.  You would think I'd learn

I also sowed hot peppers directly into cells (grow light photo center tray).  I only got 3 plants from 6 seeds, but that is fine.  I just have three empty cells that will drive me nutty. The seedlings look really nice and they are going into a 15 gallon pot so 3 plants will be plenty.   I will sow tomato seeds in a couple of weeks.  This winter blast has reminded me that spring is not here yet and a cold frame can be a difficult thing to manage in April.  

I have made a few temperature related plans for managing the cold frame more reliably than I did in 2020.  But I don't want to get ahead of myself if this is going to be another difficult spring.  I remember one year, 2012 I believe, we had all of the edging and mulching done by the end of March and I had tilled and planted the tater patch.  I hope we don't have snow in May for the third year in a row.

It May be Spring

I've figured out why they call this month "May"  It may be spring. It may be winter. Some days it feels like fall.  Its actually snowing now even though its in the 40s.  It is overcast and raw and the sun only shines every few days but you know its on its way OUT and not IN.  So it is almost tolerable.  You make a little list of outside things that you want done and get those done and then head back inside.  

I wanted to try this neat looking lavender cauliflower but the seeds took forever to arrive.  When the seeds finally came, my cauliflower plants were already transplanted.  But it didn't take them too long to catch up.  They're small but they are out in the big world.  The big cold world.  Luckily they are used to the unheated basement so they are not too coddled.

I didn't want to cover the entire bed with a shade cloth so I used the little wire baskets from the Dollar Store to shelter them from the wind and sun.  If we ever get any.

I made an addition to my row cover system. 

I put these pipe straps at the end to secure the netting.

They will gather the netting on their own for awhile as you make adjustments

Then a clamp secures it.  This keeps the knot from blowing back in against the end plants and also lets you put some pressure on the end hoop to keep it straight.

The Easy Out Earth Staples I use for the floating row covers are too small for the netting but the pipe straps and clamp works well.

I am getting ready to plant potatoes in grow bags.

The peas are doing their thing

The old lettuce seed I scattered as ground cover are doing better than their counterparts in the cold frame.

I have a couple of flats of annuals under cover.  As I make my rounds of the greenhouses if I see a variety I want I grab it whether I am ready for it or not.  They would barely fit in the cold frame if I tried.  These are flats of zinnias, calendula and nasturtium and all are at least germinated.

My pear tree is turning into a pretty happy little tree.  It is putting out a lot of new growth and the Bartlett and Bosc limbs flowered.  The other limbs are Summercrisp and Seckel.  This little pear tree has weathered some challenges.  After its rude introduction to our climate, it had some fire blight on two branches that had to be pruned out.  It looks like it is really going to try.  I hope it does well this year.

The Surecrop strawberries are looking great and flowering well.  I fertilized them with Tomato Tone on the theory that both tomatoes and strawberries are berries and they should need the same N-P-K ratio.  If I come across any Berry Tone I'll pick some up.

Thanks to the world wide trade interruptions due to Covid, some things have been hard to find.  If I can buy something locally instead of shipping it in, I will pay a couple bucks extra.  But the options are pretty limited around here this year.  I've had to ship in gallons of Neptune's Harvest fertilizer and Repels-all deer repellent.  And then I had to order in Milorganite because the only stores around here that carry it are Tractor Supply and they just can't get it.  The one in the next county had it but it sold out fast.  At least, so far, the Espoma fertilizers are available and reasonable.

I've gotten all of the perennials fertilized and sprayed for deer.  Now I have to plant up the whiskey barrels.  I have some shrubs and perennials still shipping in and even though I've filled my allotted space for dahlias, I went and ordered some more on sale.  If push comes to shove I have a lot of pots to use!

The Cold Frame - Mark II

Since I don't have a greenhouse yet I make great use of my Cold Frame that  was built 10 years ago.  I use it to start seedlings a few weeks early, harden off all of my seedlings and store greenhouse purchases until weather permits planting.

It was quite pretty in it's youth.  The lids were picture framed with mortise and tenon corners.  The panels, salvaged from a friend's commercial greenhouse, were set into grooves.  All these details made the lids attractive, but also created some problems.  The panels were recessed below the wooden surface which made a great place for ice to collect in the winter.  The weight of snow could bend the panels enough for them to pop out of their grooves.  Water accumulated along the lower edge and any moisture or dirt that got into the channels of the panels, from either end, was trapped there forever.

Last year the corners of the lids gave out.  My husband really wanted to throw the whole thing on the burn pile and I don't blame him for that.  It was definitely past it's useful life span.  But instead he reinforced the corners so it would survive the winter and then this spring he offered to make repairs.  

We could have used the remaining salvaged panels and rebuilt the lids exactly the same.  But the remaining panels weren't in much better condition.  As the polycarbonate ages it discolors and becomes brittle.  The old panels were no longer surviving hail storms and were beginning to look as if someone had shot them with a pellet gun.  Last spring when the weather was so cold they did not let in enough light to raise the temperature much.  So it was time for a little redesign.  

Voila'. I give you - the Cold Frame Mark II

Greenhousemegastore.com sells reasonably priced 2 foot by 4 foot twinwalled polycarbonte panels in packages of 5 with free shipping.  And they also offer a 10% discount to listeners of the Joe Gardener podcasts. These panels are perfect for a do it yourself cold frame project.  They come in either 6mm or 8mm and I ordered the 8mm.  My husband was really excited to hear that their size (while convenient to ship) meant the lid would have to be built in three pieces instead of two - but not excited in a good way.

Has anyone recently checked on the price of a 2x4?  Anything that gets built around here this year is going to need to be made of salvaged material.  We had some lightweight 1x material left over when we replaced the deck, but not enough to make three lids.  This meant they had to be built out of 2x4 scraps.  Which therefore means they are heavier and super stiff.  The large lightweight lids had a tendency to become sails in any sort of a wind.  If you were lucky this meant they could slam closed.  If you weren't lucky it meant they would wrench off a hinge.  We use old window weights to keep the lids weighted closed, and chains to keep them from resting the weight on the hinges.

I'd like to point out two significant changes to the lid design in case someday you want to build something like this yourself.  The panels are attached to the face of the 2x4 frame with special padded washers designed for twinwall polycarbonate.  You can find an example here.  You first drill a slightly larger hole and then secure the fastener.  The fastener allows for expansion and contraction.  Our friends actually included some of these when they gave us the salvaged panels and my husband even knew where he had put them all those years ago.

Because the panels are secured to the face of the frame, the bottom edge is open to allow any moisture trapped in the panel to run out.  Also, there is a piece of wood with a rabbet cut along the edge to overlap the top edge and prevent water from entering in the first place.

So now I am in business for spring planting.  The cold frame, while its base is weathered and warped, is sturdy and functional and looks clean and respectable.  A lot more sunlight is making its way in.  I have a thermometer in it so I can get a feel for its temperature swings with the new panels.  I have moved several potted herbs from my office window to the frame, and I am preparing flats so I can seed some annual flowers and lettuce.