I have tomato starts doing OK, not as well as the other house, but here I don't have that sunny southern exposure all day, I've resorted to grow lights. I also had to put a heat mat under the peppers, they just didn't want to grow at all. We'll see if it helps. Delicata squash is slow also, but the Great Whites are coming right along and the Wisconsin 55s Peppi sent are trying to catch up.

I ordered three pear trees and a couple dozen raspberry canes, so I'll have to plant those this weekend, if they come this week. My rhubarb is just ahead of yours, mine have the first small leaves.

It's snowing here right now....

Annie

I got the flower beds cleaned out this past weekend. I have tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and basil started and the seedlings are doing well. I've also started some nasturtiums, marigolds and cosmos. The flowers seem to be struggling a little bit. Unfortunately the "s" word is in the forecast for later this week. So I have seedlings taking over everywhere inside the house!

sleevendog, will you really be planting 190+ tomato plants at a remote location?! yikes. That's a lot of work....

Our winter and early spring was so bad that I delayed all my seed sowing this year. Unlike usual, nearly all of my pepper seedlings came up really fast and furious, but my tomato seedlings are very slow growing this year. I still have lots of things to sow and I'm not even finished cleaning up the yard and gardens yet -- we had snow on the ground last week and now we're getting thunderstorms. :p

My first tomatoes popped up this weekend. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage are up. I have an oil radiator heater set on low under the tableful of peppers and eggplants. For some reason that works better for me than a mat.

Even though we had a warm winter, little snow and lots of warm spells, the garlic is still only a few inches tall and rhubarb is just poking out of the ground.

Scaling back this year...less of everything. And I'm down to only 14 kinds of garlic.

Fortunately I still have a house/greenhouse and garden. Yesterday our neighbor decided to create a 'defensible space' and went out into our crispy-dry meadow with a propane weed burner. Burned 50 acres, five of which is ours. Thankfully DH is an old firefighter and all it got was the electric wire to our well (and some trees, meadow etc). argh.

OMG, KatieC -- your neighbor should be facing charges!!!

I've been growing 6 different varieties of garlic for years and I think that's too much to keep track of, but I don't have a greenhouse or acres to burn. ;p

How horrible. Thankfully no structures destroyed, but still...

I need to get back into garlic. A few dozen i harvested last year were so good and not nearly enough. Grows so well here. So well, a nearby town has a huge garlic festival every year.

I have room for about 100 tomatoes. Even that is too many but we do it anyway. I always insurance plant extra. A couple years ago an entire tray fell back behind my seed table, upside down. Always something fails.

Mine was going pretty well. I started pulling out thistle and lambs ears from the veggie patch on Sunday. Then we had two days of rain and this morning snow! Not impressed at all.
I'm doing a massive garden this year and I've already told my husband he has to take a week off to help me. I just hope we get some decent weather this year. 2 years in a row with bad weather. Last year I lost 80 tomato plants. Soooo upsetting.

Saw my rhubarb coming up and chives are a good size already. I didn't notice my leeks yet. Tulip leaves nice and tall until the goats ate them. Goji berries are starting to leaf out.
Friday I plan on starting some of my seeds. This weekend I hope to get back in our bush and see how the wild leeks are coming up.

My garden planning went well, it is the implementation that is a bit off. Normally my potatoes would be in by now but they did not come in when expected and I am getting irritated with the shipping because I may not get them until next Monday. I leave next Wednesday for an out of town trip and I am quickly losing my potato planting window. Normally I have tomatoes out in wall-o-waters by now but that is not done, either. We are working on an expansion of the garden, that is not where I wanted yet either. Most of the garlic is doing well. We have eaten some asparagus. I will probably cut my first rhubarb this weekend. Dh keeps pilfering the manure pile to put on his roses. The grasshoppers are already out and are on my hit list. I am already thinking to myself I hope next year is better.

Garden planning started with te best of intention with 25 tomato seedling and some kohlrabi going. Then my back went out with lumbar stenosis that shoots down my left leg, causing the knee to buckle if I step wrong. Knee pain is the worst so I have done 2 things I have never done before....take RX pain meds and had a therapeutic epidural. So garden is on hold here!

pkramer60 hopefully you have someone that can help you out to get those plants in the ground.

I got a late start - everything should have been in the ground by the middle of March. But I finally got everything in last weekend. I bought plants for the bell, poblano and jalapeno peppers, but everything else is from seed. I love that we have such a long growing season and I don't have to spend a lot of money on plants. Besides the peppers, I planted three varieties of cucumbers, 2 varieties of summer squash, watermelon, cantaloupe, 6 varieties of tomatoes, 2 varieties of bush beans, chives, bunching onions, and threw a bunch of flower seeds here and there to attract the friendlies.

Aw, he!!, Peppi, I'm sorry. I've got your red cabbage covered here, though, hopefully. My plants just don't have that "perfect" spot that they had at the other house, so there's a learning curve.

Thankfully, most of my garden is direct plantings, like potatoes, beans, squash, melons, cucumbers, greens, kohlrabi. The 4H always has a sale and has heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, cabbage, peppers. Elery is a bit disappointed that his Carolina Reaper peppers haven't germinated yet, though.KatieC, I do hope you took a hose and beat the living devil out of that goofy neighbor, sheesh.

Annie

We have tomatoes and several kinds of peppers in the ground, but the rain started--again--as I was putting in the last of those, and it's been too wet to walk in the garden without sinking to our knees.

The rain has slowed down a little, only three or four days a week instead of every day, but we still can't plant or weed.

Snow again here today. :(

Annie, Elery might like my experiment. I grew two different varieties of tomatillo last year and had a huge amount, so decided to smoke some...while the smoker had a few pork tips and a chicken...i still had room, so i made a foil tray lined with parchment and smoked a couple dozen for just 45min...just to barely fumed and slightly soft. Froze beautifully and made the best salsa all winter. (early enough last summer to later, many times, add a tray every time we smoked).

I also tried a new-to-me hulless pumpkin/squash that make the best roasted pepitas i've ever had. Will grow more of those this year.

I never thought about smoking tomatillos. Will have to try that assuming they don't freeze out like last year. I roasted them and canned chili verde and that was pretty darn good.

I see we have Garden Huckleberries up...my latest experiment. And our seed potatoes came. We had such a problem with scab last year were starting over and going to experiment with growing them in wire cages with straw, compost and chips from the post mill down the road.

Lol, Annie. I think the guy's insurance company will hose him enough. I'd like to be there when he gets the bill from the state, fed and local agencies, helicopters, excavators, four days-worth of crew time and my electrician laying a new line to my pump. It's going to be a couple of weeks....glad I don't have a garden to water yet.

A couple of weeks? What the heck are you going to do for water? Bottled?

Annie

What about drying tomotillos? I've never tried it, but I do know it was a treat having dried tomatoes in the middle of winter. Such a nice strong flavour thrown into pasta. I just did sea salt, oregano and basil, but I bet if you did a lime juice, salt and cilantro and dehydrated that would be pretty darn good thrown onto fajitas or tortillas.

Yikes, no water is a mess. My rain barrels came in handy after storm Igor but we had a 'heads-up' with weather reports.

DH just commented on all the pollen, looking out the window...it is hail, lol. Baby hail, or more like teen hail, (baby hail would be snow?). It is snowing in the mountains where my garden is, oh well.

Finally a pic...but who wants a pic of a plantless garden. ; )

A screenshot of the pumkin variety i grew last year for pepitas. Looked like a small watermelon before ripe....did a bit of head scratching at first. Need to label better this year. Especially when putting in something new.

sleevendog, I just froze the tomatillos so I could make Ann T's stacked enchiladas. I'm betting Elery would like them smoked. But first I'm going to have to get tomatillos. I planted six, two actually came up. (sigh) It's a learning curve, moving to a new place and trying to figure out where the heck to put plants.

Annie

For a few years i had none...they just did not survive those seasons. Last year they did really well. The skin is very thin so they grabbed the smoke more that i expected. Much more that a batch of heirlooms i smoked when i had an abundance of those. Just two or three tomatillos in a quart of salsa was plenty.

Is the new garden using an old garden plot? With your experience, it should not take more than a season or two to figure out what everything needs.

Never thought to dehydrate tomatillos. I just did some tomatoes last year. And some just halfway, still a bit wet, and froze. For a concentrated flavor. Not quite paste.

I've never grown tomatillos. Actually I've never even tried one. I never see them in the stores where I am. I'm over an hour away from the nearest big city now so our grocery stores that are in the smaller towns are a little rinky dink ones.

Would these do well in pots? I do have a pool room that we don't even use. It is attatched to our house that is heated so I can move them inside in when the cooler weather starts. We often get frost in early September and it's not uncommon for last frost to be middle of June here.

On the garden front... another sucky day here. It has snowed two days in a row and it was -3 again this morning. Supposed to not get up past 3 today. :(
Yesterday morning I went down to the barn and went to fill water for the animals to find that my husband had left the hose attatched to the hydrant. So had to take buckets down. Not fun at all. Need it to warm back up so I can get water down there again.

I've decided not to grow tomatoes this year, mainly because the plants are too much trouble and always look scraggly. If I could get them to grow in the ground, I would grow them, but I am using my pots for herbs and chilies. I end up using a lot of chilies, and so they do not go to waste - if I have excess, I bring them to work and give them away or give away excess chili sauce. Most of my chilies have died back in the past couple of months, although they were producing vigorously in January and part of February. Here's how they look now:

We put in the wall fountain a couple of weeks ago, and now I am going to have to arrange the pots around it in a way that I can access them easily. The new switch on the wall controls the two outdoor fountains and has a separate switch for a flood light that will light up a fair amount of the back yard, so that I can pick herbs after dark. The fountain has lights in it, but they are no help. I want to put a large plant in front of the pipes coming down from the switch, to disguise it a bit. Don't know if you can see my chives, but they are doing well, and my sweet basil from last year is doing very well also - perhaps because the winter was so warm.

I bought new herbs last week-end: Greek oregano, cilantro, sweet basil, parsley, and cilantro. I would have bought dill if they had had it, but I have seeds I can plant. It does not do well for me, however, except in the winter. I also bought a six-pack of chilies, although I cannot remember what was in it, except that it has Habanero, Ghost Chili, Jalapeno, and three others. I hope I can figure out which one is the Ghost Chili, because I will not be using that one, although I will give the chilies away. I use Habaneros more than any other chilies, but I like to have milder ones as well, although I have to use more of them, and so I run out easily. Habanero chilies seem to have the right balance so that I can keep them on hand, and I have plenty of sauce on hand as well.

I'll post another photo when I get the plants repotted and rearranged. We have a lot more birds in the yard, after putting in the new fountain.

Lars

Oh, Lars, I like that fountain a lot. I plant hot peppers for Elery, but seldom eat anything hotter than a poblano myself, LOL, I'm such a wuss.

Sleevendog, the garden itself will be the same place as always, I've just been having trouble finding a good place to start seeds in the new house. I have no southern exposure, no northern exposure, one single window to the west. I have a big bank of windows on the East side, but the two rooms with those windows are my living room and the unheated entryway porch. (sigh) I'm thinking maybe a space heater for the entryway...

Littlemonkeys3, the tomatillos will do fine in a pot, I think, but they need something to "climb", at least mine did. They are actually very cool looking, my mother thought they were ornamentals because the "lanterns" hang all over them before the fruit fills them and matures. Mine do great here, as long as I can get them started.

Annie

" I use Habaneros more than any other chilies, but I like to have milder ones as well, although I have to use more of them, and so I run out easily. Habanero chilies seem to have the right balance so that I can keep them on hand, and I have plenty of sauce on hand as well."

Dito, we like habaneros but they do not produce well here. I buy them and they are very cheap per a dozen and last well in the fridge. The flavor is superior using so little.

The fountain is lovely and did not think of the added benefit to the birds.

The past week we have had all four seasons daily. Snow flurries that should really be flowering blossoms falling...very out of sorts...hard to dress for it. Wearing linen with a scarf and light down vest back-up, : )

Two tulips are forming some flower on long stems.. Meyer lemon tree is on the deck enjoying some nice sun.

Had the sheep out free ranging today in my garden. They had a great time munching on the weeds. Too bad I still have to get the roots. Flower gardens are going pretty well. I've got a lot cleaned out now, but everything is very slow growing this year. My forsythia are just starting to bud now.

My father had sheep at one time when I was a child in Texas, but I did not notice them until kids in school asked me about them. I did notice the cows, however.

Here's how my pots look now, but I have a few more in the back of the back yard with cilantro and parsley, which do not need as much sun:

On the far left I have chives, and behind those is the pot with basil, and then next there are two pots with Habanero chilies. The rest of the pots have additional unidentified chilies plus some oregano. The pot in front of the Madagascar palm also has Habanero chilies. I want to add thyme and maybe dill. I have some dill seeds which I may just spread in the back with the parsley. Normally, dill plants get eaten by pests, which is one reason I do not try to grow them.

Lars