Month: April 2017

Earth day (tomorrow)/ April 21

Below is the vegetable garden as it looks today, almost four weeks after sowing it and putting cloches on. I’m leaving them off all day today due to the beautiful 60 degree sunny weather we’re having…..tomorrow there will be the start of several days of rain. (This is the Pacific Northwest, after all, and a historical record year of rainfall – for the winter and for each month so far including April, 44 inches or so as of a few days ago. This tops last years record rains apparently). We’ve harvested about 30 radishes so far in the last few days, to eat and also to thin out clumped areas. They are really good straight- peppery with just a dash of salt and a beer. There are still a lot of radishes left. They were supposed to be just planted in between the other ‘crops’ to make use of all the garden area. But they opened and matured first with rapidly enlarging leaves, and if unchecked they would choke out the others.  They taste great, but they make a good weed. **So, as a cautionary tale, I would suggest to myself as well as to you, that because of all the large leaves, next time the radishes should be planted in several adjacent rows towards the ‘back’, or north side of the planters***.  Skinny leaved Onions are the best at the southern front rows, followed by carrots and spinach. 

As the reddening lower root enlarges, the radish pushes up above ground, so you can see which ones are ready to pick.  These were mostly picked early, though, since they were shadowing out the other veggies.  I had put some more radish seeds outside the cloche along the west border, which are now germinating, to use ALL the space, and some more carrots and onions outside along the east border……probably should have switched that, given how aggressive the radishes are compared to the others….the others aren’t up yet.

I do have red/yellow/orange medley nasturtiums, those are the leaves coming up (to cascade) from most of the corners. I left the whole north border clear, for future planting of  the climbing plants- pole beans and cucumbers, and maybe snow peas. That should be soon. 

New radishes left, older radishes and onion, carrot and spinach seedlings
The larger radishes planted “in between” the onions (to left) carrots (middle), and lettuce (right)

Everything’s coming up….natives! April 14

Pretty much most things need to be poking up by now or they’re not going to….except a few things like tiger and leopard lillies. It looks like all the plants I transplanted, propagated or bought last year have made it through the winter. This includes a couple of pretty Fools Huckleberrys, making a total of four. And our real native High Cranberry, the Vibernum Edule.  We had to take several non-native ones out that someone had sold us years ago, replaced them with another few which also turned out to be non native. We FINALLY ( we think) have determined through exhaustive research of the flowers, found the real thing, we bought ONE.

 I have many, many fawn lillies around now, though most are still young and only leaves, in a couple of years it will be quite pretty, meadow-like. Most of these I have propagated from seed, but some are mid-range age and should bloom soon.  I don’t know if any of them will be pink, since I mixed the seeds together with the white and off white ones, but so far none of the pink seeds that I planted in a pot have come up. Though, the pink plants that I do have are vigorous and one has now produced quite a bunch, oh, and a whole lot o’ trilliums, too.

Now blooming: trilliums, Fawn lillies, Silk flower, Darba Incerta, Monks hood and some of the Blue eyed Mary in planters. ABOUT to bloom?: Chocolate Lilly,  some Penstemons, Pussy toes, some Bear Grasses and some more fawn lilies.

Too early for the flowers of Columbines, Lupines, asters, irises, and for the sunflowers: Mules ears,  Arrow leafs, and Gaillardia, though the leaves are coming up. 

Huckleberries…..we replenished our supply of deciduous last year. I don’t think all the ones we had were planted in good areas, except for the two thriving red huckleberries. Some plants were lost to hot dry weather or just never thrived, and these survivors I transplanted to better places this spring (plant rehab). I’d  forgotten that id bought two groundcover  Vaccinium Membranaceums last year, so now we have three of those part shade plants, and two more sun loving ground cover Vaccinium Deliciosums for the front yard. These are all good black huckleberries. We added three taller Vaccinium Parviflorum (upright red huckleberry) to the lower back yard so we have six total now. We also also have an older Vaccinium Ovalifoium which is upright/deciduous/black huckleberry, which I transplanted and it is in rehab. In addition to the deciduous, there are a bunch of evergreen huckleberries, in various stages of health and size….some have been crowded or shaded but they are part of the bird-scape and provide winter forage.

Deer in the house

Telltale hoof prints, and gnawed Lewisia Columbiana.  We haven’t had a deer here since we moved in 22 years ago, and now we’ve had them twice in eight months.  The rest of our plants blooming right now are flowers the deer apparently DOESNT like:

Deer hoof print to the right

Below: Pink Fawn Lilly, Silk Flower, Trillium Ovatum, and Monks Hood (poisonous). These are all pictures from couple of days ago:

Oh, and I almost forgot, an updated picture of the hothouse, as I’m calling my raised planter now. I measured the temperature during sunny time. 55 in shade, 65 or so in sun, and 80 in the hothouse!! No wonder they like it so much. I may have to remove the cover during the warmer days, but I’m worried about DEER EATING MY VEGGIES!, so I’ll just take them off during the hottest hours of the day.

Rest of the crew….


Spinach and carrot seeds popped up at 8 days, and the ‘bunching’ onions or green onions on the 10th day.  The spinach is a “baby spinach” which is a type that has individual rounded leaves, not bunches (not “baby” at all!), and the seedlings look linear/branching, not rounded seed leaves like the lettuce. Looks like I’ll have to mark my rows better for seeds; it is true that once you’ve covered over the seeds with soil, it’s pretty hard to tell where the original line was. So the radish lines cross the spinach line and some lettuce, so what? They are loving having the cloche to keep them cozy warm like a hot house, and the radish leaves are huge already and it’s only April 3. Makes me tempted to start the cucumbers early inside the cloche,  yet I don’t think they like the transplanting needed to give them access to the trellis….technical issue I’ll have to address.

Full disclosure, this is not my cornucopia below. We started our garden way too late last year for much of anything, since we didn’t have the planter bed until end of May. But we are planting all of these things this year(see prior march posts), except green onions instead of leeks: