In April, 2010 we ordered two truck loads of compost from a company in Elk River, Minnesota. They helped the garden quite a bit. This fall, Chris decided to order three more truck loads (30 yards) before it snows, to give our garden an extra jump start next spring.

Puck checked it out. He approves. (This is him sitting in front of one truck load, 10 cubic yards).

Chris is putting in a new garden section, so this should help with that. We also cut out quite a bit of sod and top soil to prepare our current garden – and I put in a bunch of concrete block raised beds, so this black dirt will be nice to fill the rest of those in. It’s going to be a lot of work incorporating this, and hopefully the ground will stay free of snow for a couple more weeks so it will get done!

We only have a few opening up right now, because we planted most of our sunflowers to bloom in September.

Sometimes I wish I lived in a warmer place, just so I could have these be in bloom all year long.

Today… here’s Puck:

Checking things out. He stays in the paths (mostly).

“Broccoli…. cauliflower… kohlrabi! My FAVORITE!!”

Enjoying his garden

We’re finally seeing spring days in the 60s and 70s, with beautiful sunshine. But the temperature at night is still dropping into the 30s, which means that our nightshade plants are still traveling between the deck and the kitchen every day.

Tomorrow I hope to put in a good chunk of tomatoes. I’ve had problems with transplants dying off the last few years – not sure if it’s due to planting before a big rain, cutworm, or something else – but recently about 1/3 of my tomatoes’ stems have broken off right above the soil line after planting. So I have a few extras, and will wait to plant a handful for a week to see if I need to replace them with others. I have some large pots that the extras can go into, and a bit of extra space in the garden.

If the forecast looks good on Thursday, hopefully the eggplant and peppers can go out then!

Before the weekend, we still had 6″ of snow covering the ground. It’s amazing how fast things change this time of year! Of course, CBS says that we may see 3-5″ of white stuff again this week… but the season is definitely changing. Chris has found a lot of neat things sprouting in his garden already and has plans to put in potatoes soon. Actually, he may have been out there seeding lettuce and other cool crops this weekend.

My garden is finally cleared from snow, so I took some time to investigate.

Apparently we missed some onions. Last year we also found some onions we missed, and they produced some stunning flowers. Here’s our resident model showing off what happens if you don’t harvest your onions:

They are the long, green stems with pretty white flowers on top. Here’s a link to a close-up picture of the onion flowers. (He’s a 95-pound dog … those are some big onions!)

I grew some Purple Sprouting Broccoli last year, but, just as I feared, it never made any of its famed, delicious broccoli heads.  It did grow to be quite the plant.  So I took the greens for eating, chopped the stalk low to the ground and buried it in logs and snow.  Here it is after digging it out yesterday:

Thats enough for me to pretend like it is already Spring.  And here is an area where Puck and I walked to as the sun set.  The plants are mullein gone to seed:

He also is really good about staying in the garden paths. Here he’s found a small patch of shade from the arbor.

I admit this is tangenitally related to gardening, but here is puck (I couldn’t get much of a picture). When both Puck and me are outside I’ll leave the fence gate open so he can mosey around if he wants. I feel bad the dogs have to be locked up in our puny yard when they ideally they ought to be able to roam free, free as the wind blows. He loves to sniff everything, but unlike Nigel he hasn’t figured out how to eat stuff off the plants on his own.

I forgot to water the peas, socrenezora/black salsify, beets and carrots today. From what I’ve read seedlings should be watered everyday – especially carrots and maybe the salsify too because it has a pretty low germination rate. It was another cloudy, humid day. I couldn’t even say it was “threatening to rain” because I knew it wouldn’t.

Oh and we rescued a black guinea pig. It doesn’t like me and won’t eat its carrot, but I think its better off being with us than out at the park on its own. According to wikipedia guinea pigs occupy an ecological niche similar to cows! Except instead of having lots of stomachs to digest their grass they just eat their own excrement! So I gave it some regular lawn grass along w/its carrot.