Missing month of May

 It's been a busy month.   The weather has been up and down.   We had a stretch of milder temperatures with no frost for several weeks.  I took the opportunity to get much of my garden in.   According to the Canada Natural Resources we are in hardiness zone 6a.    Our last frost date is supposed to be May 11 according to OMAFRA.   I lost two pepper plants last night because it got really cold and this evening I just covered all my tender plants and put feed sacks and straw around the tomatoes.    Sadly, I don't have enough sheets and covers for all the planters on the deck, so hopefully the patchy frost which is forecast for tonight, will not get to the deck.   There are two tomatoes at the back which don't have cages to support them yet, so they are just buried in the straw which I'm using as extra mulch over the cardboard.

The straw bale garden experiment is doing quite well.   The lettuce has loved it so much that I've already harvested our first salad.    The cucumbers are doing okay and beans are already coming up.  Again though, the tender new leaves are being snipped off just as they come up.   I've had to put a ratty whirly gig, faded but still spins, and some hoops over the bean seedlings to hopefully keep whatever is eating them away.   

I've seen some pretty spectacular photos and reports of straw bale gardening success, and an occasional report that it doesn't work.   I've heard of issues with bad straw, or people using hay and getting lots of weed growth.  Also, you really have to condition the bales to jump start the internal composting in order to actually have them sustain the plants.  It also requires keeping on top of watering.   Since I don't have a drip system for my bales, it means I have to go out and give them a bit of water once a day, or twice on really hot days.  It's totally not a no work garden this way.   But way less weeding, is what I'm finding.   I've been weeding the raised beds multiple times and it seems the weeds pop back the next day.  I've the Japanese Indigo bed covered, so my fingers are crossed that they'll be okay with tonight's weather.   I usually put them under cloches, but with the early May weather being mild, I didn't bother this year.    Next year for sure, as I won't risk it again.

We've been walking the local trails.   Once thing I've noticed is that some of them look so different in the spring.   This trail was unbelievably different looking with the heavy hardwood tree canopy and lush fern covered forest floor.   It's a joy to traverse the trail while we still have few mosquitoes.

Canadian geese seen yesterday.   They are huge birds!   These didn't have babies with them, which I'd normally expect to see in the spring.   Still they were a joy to watch while they paddled along until they spread their wings and headed off with a lot of honking and fanfare.

Early Spring in the Garden

 During those unseasonably warm and lovely almost summery days in early April, I got 3 of the 4 raised beds cleaned up.  I removed any remaining plants that I'd left from last summer, weeded them twice.  There was some volunteer garlic growing in one bed, so I dug up a couple of clumps and transplanted it into one of the beds.  I wasn't going to grow garlic this year, but free and unexpected plants!   The bulbs should still have time to develop.   

I took some of the lettuces that had germinated in the winter sowing containers and transplanted them into the garden and covered them with plastic cloches.    I have some woad almost big enough to transplant and some Japanese Indigo which is ready to move into the garden, but it's still too early.

We've had snow and below freezing temperatures for the past couple of days.   The daffodils flowers are bent over from the snow and the cold.  They'll pop back up when the weather warms up, but they look so sad.   I had just started transplanting the winter onions from the main garden to this raised bed.  It snowed the next day, so they didn't even have a chance to settle in.   They're pretty hardy though.  I don't imagine they'll have a problem.   I've more to move over.  I want to till that part of the garden this year, and the over wintering onions will just get in the way.  Plus these ones are almost sweet and a lovely addition to a salad or stir fry.  I don't want to lose them.

I read a couple of books on Straw Bale gardening and decided to experiment with it.  This part of the garden gets dug up by the chooks and because of the proximity of the surrounding pastures, is difficult to keep clear of weeds.

I laid down a lot of cardboard and put the straw bales on top of it.   The bales need to be conditioned so that the insides start to compost before planting them.  Both seeds and starter plants can be used.  Most of the bales won't need to start being conditioned until May 1st.  I conditioned two of them early so that I could plant onion sets, beets and chard, which are all safe to plant in cooler weather. Plus I wanted to start playing in the dirt, so an early start for some of the bales allowed me to do that.

While I could see subtle changes in the straw bales that were getting the water and nitrogen, I wondered if it was really working.  The instructions say that the centre of the bale will warm up.   It was just above freezing and the unconditioned bale inside was the same temperature as the ambient air temperature.  The inside of the conditioned bale was over 10 C degrees warmer.   Once our cold and snowy weather moves on, I'll put a bit of potting soil on the top of the bales to hold the seeds while they root, and plant the onion sets on the outside edges of the bales.  The beets and chard will go in the middle.  I've seen so many photos and read so many reviews of this method that show amazing gardens, that it was worth the bit of start up costs to purchase the bales and nutrients to get started.   The cardboard was free though and I've had great results using cardboard as a mulch.  By the end of the summer, it's starting to break down and it's composted completely by the spring.

Dye Plants-  I have a bunch of mature Madder which needs to be dug and used.   There will be a load of woad seeds later this summer and I have lots of woad seedlings to plant.    I have Japanese Indigo seedlings as well.  I'm thrilled that there is a surviving weld plant.    Last summer I stopped watering the raised beds because we had weeks of hot weather and no rain.   I didn't want to over burden our well with watering both the raised beds and the regular garden, so the raised beds were sacrificed  as they needed watering 2 or 3 times a day.   Having a weld plant which will go to seed this summer means I will have weld to play with next summer.   Plus a friend gave me some of her extra weld seed, and I've got some planted for seedlings.  The rest I'll scatter in the weld bed. My Dyer's Greenweed is totally planted in the wrong place, but it's at least surviving.   I don't really have another place to put it right now, so I'll leave it where it is.  At least the bunnies didn't eat it this year.  Last year they gnawed it practically to the ground and the poor plant had to regrow completely.