March turned out to be uniformly cold and snowy, yielding no real opportunity to work the soil. I did manage to scrape out a sextet of furrows to sow peas and spinach, although I only sowed half of what I usually do.
My heart just isn’t into it, I guess.
The cover crop of clover did establish itself well and along with the now perennially reseeding vetch is keeping the garden green instead of a muddy mess. The garlic I sowed last fall did come up and is growing rapidly. The raspberries seemed to have survived the polar vortex as did the June bearing strawberries. A significant number of the everbearing strawberries may have died.
A section of trellis on the garden fence had broken and blown down in a winter storm so I had to repair that. I ended up stapling chicken wire up along the southern fence so I can grow pole beans instead of bush beans. I am growing tired of picking beans in the heat of summer on my hands-and-knees. Maybe I’ll also try to grow some winter squash and train the vines up the trellis as well.
April continued to feature cold weather, bookmarked with two significant bands of snow in the beginning and end of the month. When the farmstand opened, I purchased six loose-leaf kale plants, a variety I usually start indoors, as well as six generic looking broccoli plants. I planted these during a brief warm period followed by some onion plants into two furrows. I failed to start anything indoors as the work area I usually use has been taken over by a DIY synthesizer project.
As soon as the snows melted it began to rain heavily and steadily this week. The sump pump has been running and we are now experiencing basement seepage from excessing hydrostatic pressure. We are going to get an inch more before it dries out for a couple of days. It is not so bad but the repeated need to vacuum up the water is tedious. Someday, I'll lave this all behind in favor of a DeLuxe Apartment In The Sky and I'll walk to buy my groceries at the local farmers market on 3rd street in Milwaukee or maybe St. Louis or even Kalamazoo.
My mother says the tomatoes are ready to transplant, but the weather isn’t ready for them. At some point it will turn instantly to summer and get hot and humid and the mosquitoes will hatch in the abundant floodwaters. I’ll probably buy some summer squash and some cucumbers to round out the crops I’ll grow. I’ll sow some sunflowers and maybe buy a ten pound bag of buckwheat seed to cover the rest of the garden and suppress weeds.