We have tomato and pepper sprouts! Still waiting for the watermelons, though … I really hope we get to eat some fresh-from-the-vine watermelon this year.
Category: Gardening
Purple Crocus Blooms
The deep purple crocus are starting to bloom — and daffodils are popping up all over the place, so we should have all sorts of flowers soon.
2023 Garden — Seeds Sprouting
Most of the tomatoes have sprouted, and two types of peppers. Peppers seem to take a long time to sprout! I’ve also got an arctic kiwi leafing out beautifully and several grape vines that are starting to sprout leaves.
2023 Hazelnut Flowers
The bright pink bits are starting to emerge from our hazelnuts — hopefully we have bunches of nuts this year!
2023 Garden — Seed Starting
We got some seeds started this evening — a lot of peppers, tomatoes, and a few other plants. There are a bunch of other peppers to get going, ground cherries, cucumbers, cauliflower, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. And, once we can start planting outside, corn, beans, peas, and all sorts of stuff for birds.
But here’s what I’ve got planted so far:
Hungarian peppers, Guadillo pepper, Pasilla pepper
Aji Lemon Drop pepper, Peri-Peri pepper, Sugar Rush Peach pepper
Black Strawberry Cherry Tomato, Brandywine Tomato, Trophy Tomato,
Rhubarb, Sugar Baby Bush Watermelon, Mary Washington Asparagus
Dirt!
I took the cart for a walk and dug up some of the really rich dirt from the forest floor … this will be our seed starting soil for the year.
First Crocus Flowers – 2023
Planting Garlic
I planted our garlic today — an assortment of varieties filling one of the raised beds.
I only added about an inch of mulch to the bed. The garlic I planted last year never formed heads — we had lots of green leaves, beautiful scapes that we harvested quickly … but no garlic bulbs! Evidently garlic cloves need exposure to cold temperatures in order to form bulbs. You can actually mulch them too well! Hopefully I’ve got enough mulch to suppress weeds and retain moisture but not so much mulch that the cloves are too toasty this winter. 
Pickled Baby Corn
We made a lot of pickled things this week — pickled green tomatoes, pickled cucumbers, and pickled baby corn.
Frost Harvest
There were a number of frost advisories, so we harvested the tomatoes (red and green), corn (fully grown corn and anything else that was on the stalks), and last cucumbers.
