Seeds Are Up!

This morning was beautiful and sunny - the kind of morning that you draws you outside.  And there were certainly no end of things that needed doing! First up, check the seedlings in the potting shed.

Seedlings - some potted up and others waiting to be planted outside

All my seedlings are currently in the potting shed.  A few days ago, I potted up some of the lettuce and mescalun seedlings.  Everything is doing fine.  Even the seedlings left in the original pots aren't wilted at all.  If you do it early enough, nothing suffers.  The extras will be potted up as well and go to my daughter and daughter-in-law.

Pots of carrot seeds

Then I filled some 4" pots with soil, wetted them down and carefully placed 9 seeds in each pot.  I learned this way of growing carrots at a workshop last year and it turned out so well, I'm definitely going to continue to grow carrots this way.  In my garden wood bugs eat the carrot seedlings as soon as they come out of the ground.  By seeding in pots and then planting the whole pot outside once the seeds have germinated and gotten a bit of growth, they survive the wood bugs.  I planted 3 varieties today - Bolero, Scarlet Nantes and Mokum, a new Imperator variety. It's a bit fiddly seeding this way, but there's no thinning later on and you can pull up the whole bunch for dinner.  I will be doing more carrot pots, of course.

We also created a new bed in our deer-proof fenced area so we can transplant a much-loved rose.  Abraham Darby is a truly wonderful David Austin rose.  The big, beautiful flowers are strongly scented and the plant itself was a parting gift from fellow staff members when I moved locations.

Abraham Darby Rose

We stripped away the sod from the target area below the pond where we will be able to see the rose from the house.  My husband dug a pit about 2' deep and we built up around the new bed with rocks - of which we have an abundance on our Gulf Island property!  I filled the hole with a mixture of garden soil and compost and then the rest of the bed was completed with sieved soil from the digging mixed with more garden soil.  Another day we'll move the rose.

After a few more chores - planting radishes in the garden and putting compost on a vegetable bed which I'd spaded over, there was time to check for more spring signs.

Fordhook Swiss Chard planted last year is sending up new growth

King Edward Flowering Currant buds bursting open - Rufous Hummingbirds will soon be here!

Coral Bark Maple branches flaming in the spring sunshine