Jeph's Spot: Signs of spring...

Here's how you know when the temps are rising and spring is in the air...

Veggie seedlings start moving from the basement out to the deck, but for their first trip they're only out for a couple hours and they're seriously sheltered. Left to right are various lettuces, leeks and bunching onions. The lettuce look really wilty here. Their tray wasn't TOTALLY dry so I figured they could go another day without water - THEN I took them outside. The fresh air instantly wilted them. A quick watering and they perked up in no time!

I've decided to try growing Imperial Star artichokes this year..growing artichokes is a first for me, and I might've reconsidered if I realized how much of a pain they can be to start. These guys want 80-85F for 8 hrs a day, and then something like 62-75F for the remaining 16 hrs. THAT'S what it's going to take to convince them to bud this year (and if you don't know, the artichokes we eat are the very thistle-like flower buds). We'll see how this goes...no promises.

Another "high risk" plant I'm trying is this 2-N-1 plum tree I got from Stark Bros last fall. The risk is that they're Japanese plums, like what you'd buy in the grocery store for snacking. Japanese plums aren't as winter hardy as the European plums (think prunes). So we'll see how this goes....it COULD be in a few years I'll be loaded with Shiro and Redheart plums, ooooor it could be a big flop, with the flowers always being killed off with a late frost.

The raspberries I planted last year are starting off great. I thought it'd be a few years before they really started to spread.

Wow, I couldn't have been more wrong! Of the sprouts you see in the picture below, I don't think any of them are coming up from the base of one of the canes I planted last year. Instead they're coming up from the runners underground - yay!

Another risky item was this 5-N-1 apple tree I got off eBay last spring. Yes, I bought a tree off eBay... I wanted a multi-variety grafted apple that included Gala, and that's SERIOUSLY hard to find. Now this picture's not the greatest, but what happened is one of the grafts died off last year. Nuts. It'll be years before I know if that was the Gala that died off... As you can see, the other varieties (only some of which are visible here) are doing just fine.

The daffodils are blooming - definitely a sign of spring! I have to wonder if there wouldn't be more this spring if this bed wasn't riddled with vole-holes. I'm going to have to start being a tough guy about this...