A Row of Hollyhocks

Hollyhocks 2012, a set on Flickr.

We've never really planned the front garden by the road; we just wanted to fill the space cus we didn't want to mow it. So over the years we'd just toss flower seeds of all types out there to see what they'd do. The hollyhocks have always been the happiest in that spot, and this year's crop is just about the best they could be. Take a look at the album and you'll see what I mean.

The Crunch of May

A gardener’s work is never done, but May is crunch-time. All the seeds ordered in January and all the little seedlings carefully nurtured under grow lights need to be planted in the ground. And it seems as though I work night and day to get everything planted. Oh, right: I am!

But May is also when some of my favorite things happen in the garden: the strawberries begin to ripen, the peonies bloom—oh, the peonies!—and the roses open their buds again, and we smell that smell!

We have an awesome rose hedge in front of the house. The plants came from Mike’s grandmother; he says that she was married by a hedge or under an arbor of these sweet flowers and took them home with her, where she promptly planted them and nurtured them her whole life. Mike’s brother took some plants when the farm was near its end, and now we’ve got some growing on our property. The photo shows “Grammie’s roses” and they smell absolutely luscious!

First Beds

The first crops are in! Earlier this week Mike tilled the first bed, and I planted 21 brussels sprouts seedlings and 22 cabbage seedlings. The bed was beautiful, actually, after I'd covered it with fall leaves in October. I think I overdid the amount of leaves, but they're working for now as a mulch around the edges of the bed.

Yesterday Mike tilled the second bed, and I planted two rows each of kale and bok choy. I'm excited about the kale, as I've got five varieties: Tuscan Lacinato, Dwarf Blue-Curled, White Russian, Red Russian, and Green-Curled. I've been planting Black Summer bok choy for years now; it's my all-time favorite for looks and taste, even though the China Choy variety is perfectly fine too.

The bed had extra room (how often does that happen?!), so I also put in the Copra onion plants from Fedco and all my leftover small onions from last year. We'll see what happens!

In the top photo above, you can see the garlic planted last fall, as well as a few transplanted volunteers from last year's garlic bed. I always have tons of volunteer garlic; you'd think I wouldn't need to plant any new. Actually, I haven't bought garlic for planting in ages: I just use extras from the harvest because there are so many!

And They're Off!

This time of year, when I make five to-do lists a day and complain that I'll never get everything done, is like going to the races. It's a race to get all the trays cleaned in time to plant all the seeds. It's a race to plant the seeds in time for their seedling transplanting several weeks later. It's a race to clean up the flower beds for a good mulching that will thwart the weeds. It's a race to move volunteers to their new bed (usually it's garlic and sprawling strawberries). It's a race to get in the onion plants and sets before the seed potatoes arrive. It's a race to get the brassicas planted to make room on the hardening-off porch for the new perennials and standard annuals. Oh, face it: it's a race all season long!

As much as a race, spring gardening feels like a balancing act. I can clean up the outside flower beds when the weather's nice, but if I spend too much time on them, I get behind on seed starting indoors or pot making or tray cleaning. I balance the planting of cool-weather seedlings against the weather forecasts and balance the risk of their demise with the extra time or effort or expense of cold frames, row covers, or more hardening off. Then there's deciding whether to transplant the tomato and pepper seedlings into larger pots or to start the melons and winter squashes.

Nevertheless, I always seem to get enough done to reap huge harvests in the fall, so why the racing around and stress? Because if I weren't racing around, it wouldn't get done and the harvests would be smaller, of course!

Everybody Jump Up!

A few weeks ago I planted quite a few trays with seeds—several perennials and peppers and tomatoes. That's not unusual for this time of year, but I was trying to get a lot done before a 10-day road trip. I'd asked Son #3 and my brother-in-law to water the plants while we were gone and to move the trays to the lights in the basement once the seeds germinated.

Now that we're back, the seedlings are up! How encouraging it is to see all those fragile little seedlings push out of the soil! I'm always astounded at the magic of nature, how the tiny cherry tomato seeds will eventually grow into vines that stretch to eight or more feet, how those stalks will send out tons of suckers and branches and leaves that can cover my hand, how they'll produce clusters of 10 or 15 fruits as big as marbles (the shooters, of course!).

The germination (i.e., success) rate was pretty excellent this year. I planted four trays of peppers, including hot peppers and Italian sweet peppers, and nearly every insert has a plant. The tomatoes did even better, since I put two to three seeds per insert in those trays, and most of them came up. Now they're happy under the lights (just a few inches above them and with the fans going), and I'll be transplanting to larger pots soon.

Speaking of which, I've already begun making the large newspaper pots I need for transplanting tomatoes. So far I've got five trays of 11 pots each. That's 55 tomato plants, but I expect I'll need at least twice that. The peppers get transplanted to plastic pots that work well for them but not as well for the tomatoes.

The garden stores and magazines always seem to produce much sturdier tomato plants than mine—they're a bit leggy and long before they get planted in the garden bed in May—but I haven't noticed that it matters. In 15-plus years of growing tomatoes, and usually 50 or more plants each year, I've seen maybe 10 of mine keel over. I doubt their legginess was the problem, yet the ratio is good enough for me.

Another encouraging sign when I returned from the trip: the brassicas, which were up before we left, are growing well under the lights and the broccoli especially look happy and sturdy. The weather was really warm while we were gone and has since cooled down, but that didn't stop me from beginning the hardening-off process for them this week. I set them outside on the deck in the sunshine for a few hours at a time, then either move them to the (covered) porch or into the house again. You've got to gradually get them used to the outside air—the temperature that fluctuates, the breezes, the bugs—before planting them in the garden beds, so that they're better equipped to survive the transplanting and the new environment.

The hardening-off process is similar to developing a child's immune system. You don't expose newborns to all manner of germ situations because they'd not protected from them yet. You start with Mom and Dad, who wash their hands a lot to handle the new baby. Gradually they stop washing their hands every single time, and they also introduce Baby to Grandma and Grandpa and the siblings, then friends and extended family. By the time Baby is a year old, she's developed a strong enough system to handle a cold bug (albeit not happily!). It's the same with plants, only probably a bit faster.

Cleaning and Coughing

So the seeds have been ordered, and most of them have arrived. Yet before planting can start, the basement needed cleaning. Ugh.

For some reason, every time we clean the basement we get sick, and this year was no different. It's probably all that dust and dirt that accumulates over the summer and fall, which we stir up as we clean.

After a long afternoon of sweeping, vacuuming, rearranging, tossing out old junk, and generally getting the basement in tip-top shape for seed planting, Mike and I both ended up with a cough. Which turned into the flu. With fever, sore throat, stuffy nose, congestion, the works. And it came around a second time for both of us, and a third for him. What we do for our vegetables!

But the place is clean (yay!) and I started right in on planting. I like to make seed pots from newspapers, and bought a groovy tool several years ago that works great. I can make lots of pots in just a couple hours and fill two or three of the trays I use. A bunch of years ago I bought up 25 or so cat litter trays from our local Wegmans for less than $5 apiece. That was one of the best purchases I've ever made for the garden, because they're still going strong 10+ years later. I can fit 35 pots in each tray, and I use them for brassica, corn, squash, melon, parsley, hollyhock, sunflower, and other seedlings that don't much care for root disturbance when planted outside. The trays are really sturdy, deep enough to water the pots well, and withstand the rigors of hardening off. I'd be lost without them!

Another cleaning chore awaited me, though; in fact, it awaits me all spring: cleaning trays. I don't know why I'm so anal about it, because I really do hate this chore. But all my organic resources tell me it's essential to clean—with hot water and soap—all the seed-starting trays and pots, so I do. I scrub the cat-litter trays for newspaper pots, then watch movies while making the pots. I scrub the black seed inserts and trays I've bought over the years (I have stacks and stacks of these things!). And I scrub the three- and four-inch pots for transplanting (more on them later). At least I finally gave in to wearing rubber gloves to protect against scratches from those sharp corners on the inserts.

So now the brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts) and kale and bok choy are planted, and all of them have germinated. I talk to my plants all the time, actually, and don't care what anyone thinks about it. Years ago our kids took tae kwon do lessons, and their master would say, "Everybody up!" or "Everybody very good!" They brought those phrases home, and I've been using them on the plants ever since. They seem to like the encouragement!

Death by Seed Catalogs

This year they started arriving in November. I can remember—not many years ago—when the first arrival occurred shortly before New Year's. I think they're trying to tell me that the garden should never ever be out of mind, even in the cold depths of winter.

They're right, of course. Because I had barely finished freezing brussels sprouts and the last batch of butternut squash soup before the Seeds of Change catalog arrived. That one's my favorite, mostly because I trust the purity (read: organic purity) of their products more than anyone else's.

A couple more showed up before the end of the month, and by the time I'd returned from our post-Christmas trip south on January 9, another dozen had filled the mailbox. I finally sat down with them late in January, since there was no denying that the Time Had Come.

I must receive about 20 catalogs, which really isn't all that many, I'm guessing. I actually don't mind getting ones from new suppliers, as I'm hardly ever completely satisfied with any one company. For instance, Seeds of Change has pretty high prices, and the selection seems to be smaller than it used to be. Fedco has low prices and I'm learning to trust them a lot, but the catalog is ugly. The content is clever and lively, but not my style, I'm afraid. Nevertheless, I order more from them than anyone else. Abundant Life Seeds is a nice new supplier I found a year or so ago; they seem mostly decent for organic seeds, and the variety and prices are mostly decent. I'm not sure how much longer I'll order from Johnny's, as it's really hard to find organic seeds for the varieties I want. Some suppliers I've tried and still use for a couple hard-to-find varieties are Pinetree, Territorial (but not this year), Totally Tomatoes, Scheepers, and Cook's Garden. A few years ago I received catalogs from two different flower seed suppliers—Select Seeds and Wildflower Farms. Both have done well for me in price and variety and quality of seed, and I do rely on them for many of my flower seeds.

And of course there are the catalogs from suppliers I don't use anymore: Shumway's and Jung and Burpee and Gurney's. And the garden supply and perennial flower inevitable Michigan Bulb catalogs hop on the bandwagon, too. The stack this year was close to a foot high, fercryingoutloud!

But I have to admit that the excitement builds as I review each cover, leaf through the pages, and sort them into the "yes" and "no" piles. Once I've made the piles, the first big chore of the gardening year commences. It's my seed selection and purchasing chore, and it goes like this:

• identify what I need by checking my existing supply, kept in an airtight bucket in the freezer;
• look through all the catalogs to find the varieties I want or need;
• transfer the names and prices to my Excel chart; review all prices to find the best price for each variety;
• order all of them online, which can be tedious, depending on how the sites are set up and how good their search tools are;
• sit back and wait for the packages to arrive.

 Maybe, just maybe, I'm getting more efficient, since this year's chore seemed way less fraught with anxiety about the order and getting it completed. But I kinda wanted to investigate seed saving and exchange, since I'm feeling pretty worried about seed purity nowadays. So much for any efficiencies!