Oh. I thought you might be reporting nighttime insect song, Zach!

I had thought to comment on the 5th fly that I've seen in 2016. Each of the poor things have been so cold that I'm not sure if these sunbathing flies have actually flown so far this year. Slapping at them seemed unnecessary and entirely, unsportsmanlike.

Since I now have completed DD's fence (except for an 8" gap beside the garage), I had the opportunity to take an afternoon walk for exercise, yesterday afternoon. I was surprised that my Indoor Mile had continued to be useful during recent days but rain and being overtaken by evening darkness has made it so. The rain has added to our snow pack, a thousand feet uphill where it is locally holding right at 100% of normal. Yay!!!

Bok choy seedlings are now out in the cool, unheated greenhouse and tiny snapdragon seedlings have taken their place in the South Window. I am becoming very impatient to see pepper seedlings emerge and have 3 containers with the first round of tomato seed above the kitchen fridge. If the peppers don't hurry up ...

I need to square away arrangements for Gardening on Other People's Property (GOOPP) for 2016, if that is what I'm doing in 2016! A visit after a short drive, an email, and going through the gate in the backyard fence is all that it will take from me. Surely, watching snapdragon seedling leaves unfold can't be too much of a distraction ...

Steve

Unsportsmanlike or not, I take what I can get, either cold slow flies or hot lazy ones in the middle of summer.

I would think that building a fence is exercise enough in and of itself really. At least that's what I tell MYSELF after dethatching the lawn...

I've got some more seeds up myself, parsley that I started indoors is growing well, and the the cabbage, broccoli and broccoli raab are all sprouted (only took like 2 1/2 days, that was fast!) The raab has been outside ever since and I stick the other two out there today since the clouds rolled in pretty heavy. Hopefully this nice weather holds out so I can get them planted next month. Peppers were right on schedule for me, 6-8 days they are all up too, though I planted less than half of what I did last year because I had to make room for some ornamental plants. But, now I done planting seeds for at least a couple of weeks.

Could use some rain around here ourselves. I'm over snow, but I did put out some grass seed right after I raked the thatch out before the last little dusting we got a little while ago, but it has been bone dry ever since...

I've been lurking around. Greenhouse seed starting is going OK, need to be doing more of it especially now that it's already March (already !?!).

Yeah, ALREADY, and fast approaching April....

Yes, I think we're all outside in our yards. I transplanted 4 trees today. I have never been able to do that the first week of March before! I figured it'd be good to get them moved while the weather's nice and hope we get some rain tonight/tomorrow.

The buds are swelling on the lilacs and the roses. Roses, please go back to sleep. It's too early, but what can you do? Let Mama Nature have her way, I guess.

I have 2 starter flats filled and ready for pepper and tomato seeds. I better get them going. Time to start swiss chard and lettuce, too. Pansies and onions are coming up in their pots.

It sure feels good to be outside!

Wow kudos on the trees, that is not a light task. They are calling for rain tomorrow, we will see, I have had to water as dry as it has been, also very uncommon for early March! Its shaping up to be a very warm, dry spring if this keeps up.

Lots of things are waking up though, saw some new growth on the monarda just above the soil and all the evergreen stuff now has definitive spring growth. I still very concerned that a were do for a nasty cold snap in the coming weeks...

But the 10 day forecast is calling for low 70s by the end of the week so I went ahead and planted peas and arugula, if this does turn out to be an uncharacteristically warm spring, I'll want them to be able to grow while it's still cool.

I was planning on sowing lettuce more towards the middle of the moth (indoors because if if I start them outside, they get decimated by slugs) but once again, maybe I should a little sooner....

But I'm still mostly cautious, most ofy work has been "season appropriate" tilling the beds, doing some hardscaping, laying irrigation lines out, and A LOT of general clean up.

It feels amazing to be outside!

They were only 1 gallon sized, Zach, but 3 of them needed pretty extensive root teasing. I pulled them out of their pots in fall and plunked them in temporary beds to overwinter. Much of my day was spent sitting in a chair with a 5 gallon bucket of water on the ground, soaking, teasing and repeat. Digging the holes felt like the easy part! But i must confess to feeling it a little today.

I checked John Cretti's Month by month gardening in the Rocky Mountain's guide. I use it as just a general guideline. It says start lettuce inside March 15th, plant out April 15th. I agree with you, it seems like we should take advantage of this warmth.

Skybird is starting potatoes and Rob Proctor's gardening segment on 9 news yesterday said go ahead and plant out onions, shallots, potatoes, rhubarb and horseradish. He said, yes it's early, but the ground is warmed and ready!

I almost forgot to mention, we have both flies and robins here. Go spring!

Today i planted all my breeding peas. It included 'Orange Pod' from IPK Gatersleben, Salmon-flowered (with potential F1 hybrids with Biskopens), Biskopens (with various potential F1 hybrids), Joseph's Red Podded, Joseph's Red Snap, Joseph's Yellow podded, Joseph's Yellow snap with pink spots, Virescens Mutante, Kapuler bred varieties: Sugar Magnolia (with various potential F1 hybrids), Spring Rose, Green Beauty and Sugaree. And others including my brown mottled Mummy pea and green seeded unnamed umbellatum originally from USDA GRIN.

In addition i direct seeded a few seeds i saved from the teosinte diploperennis-corn(maize) hybrids and Zea Mexicana teosinte within the pea breeding patch. I'm hoping at least one will make it to seed this year before fall ends. Here's crossing my fingers. I planted my pea stakes in a circle this year specifically to create a fence around the teosinte and teosinte hybrids. Last time i grew teosinte the racoons broke them stupidly thinking it was corn with something to eat. I'm sure they were disappointed. I sure was.

I got them planted before it started to rain.

I preparing to have a large tomato grow out this year. Generally i stay away from tomatoes as i have not had great luck in the past. But i'm going to try and change that this year or at least work toward it. I'm tired of cardboard tasting pale red store tomatoes. I want some color and flavor. I also would hope to eventually work towards Joseph's goal of a highly attractive to bees and highly outcrossing tomatoes. Bonus if those tomatoes are frost tolerant. Biggest selection is tomatoes that do well here. And by that i mean they thrive even in poor soil, produce abundantly, and fit my other tastes. I does not matter if an heirloom like Cherokee Purple tastes great, but only makes one tomato the whole season. That's just lame.

I already have some Mighty Midget and Purple Passion peas growing in my cold frame. Also some discarded small peas were some of the first to grow that i threw in a spot last fall. I guess you could call them winter peas. This is the earliest i've ever planted before. But based on what others have said and my climate graph of my area it seems like i could have always planted peas in march. It's certainly been warm enough. It's even warm enough i'm considering planting some indian corn since i know it survives frosts just fine. But i dont know if i'm going to plant corn this year... Im still thinking about it.

treebarb(5b Denver, CO) . . .
I checked John Cretti's Month by month gardening in the Rocky Mountain's guide.

Wow! You mean there is a guide for the Rockies?!

I bet you have seen a USDA hardiness map of Colorado, Barb. It's a crazy quilt of variabilities!! Of course, that's for winter hardiness but there are so many ups and downs in Colorado!

We have a 30% chance of snow for tomorrow morning. It was 59°f on Friday afternoon - the warmest since October. I'd put a thermometer in the soil of my most protected garden bed but I'm sure it wouldn't encourage me to plant anything ...

Steve

edit to say: I made it through the back fence to visit my good neighbor and his dog Buddy! First thing he said was, "When are you going to start over here? Oh, I thought it would be early with our warm weather ..." I'm a lucky guy ツ.

keen, How exciting to hear about the different peas you're planting! The colors!

While not anything special, I'm hoping that something interesting might come out of this: A couple years back I grew a yellow podded snow pea, supposedly from India, that I bought from Baker Creek. It has lovely violet-pink flowers, and delicious pods that were plentiful. In the same row of peas - in fact, every other plant - I seeded Wando. I saved a few seeds from those plants, and I'm curious if there was any cross-pollination, and if I might get anything accidentally interesting from them. I have 40 seeds, all collected from the snow pea, that I'll be planting Wednesday evening after work.

I'm hoping the peas are spared the obligatory hail this year.

Otherwise, I've got onions, leeks, and shallots under the lights, peppers will be started this week; the garlic and rhubarb are already showing off a strong start outdoors. Red orach that has naturalized is sprouting throughout the asparagus patch, but it's delicious and it looks great with the asparagus, so I leave a few dozen plants each year.

Normally at this time of year, with this weather, I'd be busy turning all of my soil with a spade shovel. This year, except for one raised bed, I'm leaving all my soil undisturbed, and just planting in it directly, only digging where necessary to plant. It's an experiment! I had one bed with un-turned soil last year, and it surprised me with the most impressive beets I've ever grown, which was entirely contrary to my expectations. So, except for one bed, I'm going to leave the rest of my planting beds un-turned....and just see what happens with all the different crops.

The bed that is being turned, ironically, is where I'll be planting beets... And carrots, parsley root, the allium transplants, spring greens, cilantro and bush beans.

treebarb, I'm hoping to plant some fruit trees this year. I have a space that I think will fit a couple semi-dwarf trees and I'll keep them compact through strict pruning. I'm leaning towards apricot and cherry. Do you have any fruit trees?

Lastly, on the subject of corn...I'll never grow it again. lol So, last year, I planted a total of 40 seeds, in three rows roughly 14 feet, side by side. It was an heirloom called Country Gentlemen. That corn - I swear - grew 12+ feet tall with stalks that were still two-inches thick 6 feet off the ground. I couldn't give it enough water - it wanted vast quantities of water, daily. It was literally ridiculous looking, like dinosaur plants, and impressed everyone who saw it. Each stalk produced a single ear of corn about 10-12 inches long, with several more that might have developed with 60 more days of growth. It is the toughest, chewiest corn I've ever had, and even after being blanched, scraped off the cob, and frozen, it still has to boil for an hour to even be slightly tender. And that's not even the worst part!!

The worst part was at the end of the growing season, when I realized I was stuck with 40 12-foot corn stalks, and no convenient or practical way to utilize or dispose of them in my precisely segregated urban backyard. Never again!

Digit,

I was pretty excited to find a guide specific to the rockies. I understand he's expanded and published guides for other western states. Some of it is pretty basic and there's some repetition, but I've picked up some good tips. There's a 3 page chart for starting vegetables and herbs that I've found pretty handy for timing of inside starts. I have the 2005 version, there are newer editions now.

keen, good for you on getting peas planted before the rain/snow. That's the best start they could get!

matthew, I'm with you on corn. It takes too much of everything, space, nutrients and water to get a good crop. What little I do plant is more for ornamental purposes, I like to have corn stalks up for Halloween.

I have a 2 year old Honeycrisp apple and a 3 year old apricot tree left. The 10 year old Golden delicious and 7 year old Granny Smith didn't survive the fall flash freeze of 2014. I ordered a new Golden delicious and a Granny Smith apple, a Montmorency cherry and a mulberry from Stark Brothers that should arrive sometime this month. I have a baby pecan tree, the lone survivor of three I planted last spring. A plantsman from Illinois is sending me 2 grafted, nothern strain pecans this spring, too. The pecans are an experiment, trying to take some advantage of the different soil types that were deposited here from the 2013 flood.

Okay, Barb!

I've got it on hold at the library. The 2015 edition is a new acquisition and hasn't made it onto the shelves.

I hope it arrives in the next few days because rainy weather will confine me inside. (And, tramping the Indoor Mile holds my interest for milliseconds! :o)

Steve

I have grown corn once for real, and last year the kiddo wanted to grow some and I had left over seed so I planted 4 of them in a 30 gallon tub. Both times it was golden bantam, so, no 12' stalks, only about 5' at the tallest (naturally the ones grown in a tub were much shorter, about 3'). Not an impressive yield, but then again, I am terrible at judging when the corn is ready to be picked, it wasn't terrible eating, what little I got.

There is a corn out of Montana that is a weird amalgamation of heritage corns that was "bred" specifically for high altitude, short season, poor soil, and low rainfall areas of the mountain west. Painted mountain they call it, a field corn typically sold as an "ornamental" variety by the seed houses but designed to be grown for food. I am trying that one this year just see what it's like, and once again, because the little one has a fascination with corn and thinks we need to grow it every year. Any time I can get him excited about doing things outdoors rather than in front of a screen I am happy to oblige, even if it means sacrificing garden space for an otherwise poor crop for the home garden.

One of the media outlets here had an online month-by-month gardening list, can't remember if it was the Denver Post or one of the news channels, but it was helpful in prioritizing tasks, though I cant seem to find it. the 15th was when I was planning on starting lettuce, and I've even got some volunteer lettuces showing up outside now. Looks like I've already lost a few, I don't know if slugs are up and about when its below freezing at night (seems counter intuitive to me), might be something else that got them....

Sweetcorn is important in my gardening interests. I would miss it.

I will link something from about 4 years ago about making use of Painted Mountain flour corn in your kitchen.

I'm sorry that Picasa made changes with their service a few months after I posted - totally messed up lots of my posts here on RMG. I can go there, download, and post again after uploading to the houzz gallery if anyone wants to see the pictures. The first pic is from photobucket and continues to come through. Anyway, there is a description of how you can make cornbread with a blender and no flour mill. It's great!

3 Sisters Dinner (link)

Steve

Zach, I bet Kiddo would love it if you grew some popcorn! There's a pretty pink popcorn called "strawberry" popcorn, which also works well using the cobs as an ornamental. It pops white, but I think there are some others that actually pop some other color than white--not positive about that! Bet he'd think Indian corn (which is a meal corn), with all its pretty colors would be fun too! And you could get yourself an mano and metate and grind yourself some blue flour! ;-)

Digit, Picasa is "going away" in a couple months! They're not gonna update it anymore, but I believe with the application installed you'll be able to continue to use it to do edits. (I haven't updated mine for years now, so I don't think anything I've posted has been messed with.) But WebAlbums is morphing into google-something-else, which is beyond a catastrophe! It removes ALL the captions and smashes all the pics together into something that looks, to me, like a collage! TOTALLY unusable! First they wrecked their maps, and now Picasa and WebAlbums! I've spent thousands of hours captioning pics so people would know what they were looking at--and now it looks like it's all just going to disappear! I guess when it happens I won't even be able to post the links anymore--and don't have a clue what will happen to all the pics I've posted in the past--one of which has had over 11,000 views! And I'm so mad that's all I have to say about it!

Barb, you should think about getting a couple of Seed Savers heritage apple varieties some year. They're pricey, but it helps support Seed Savers, so you'd be doing a Good Thing for Future World, and I bet you could find some fun varieties!

Skybird

Zach (and everyone else who might want it):

http://www.colostate.edu/Dept/CoopExt/4dmg/Calendar/gardenin.htm

It has links for each month of the year, with a schedule of sorts showing what you might be doing for the early, mid, and late portions of each month. It's a great tool for planning a chore list around.

treebarb, has your 3 year old apricot produced? I'm thinking probably not much so young, or did it hit the ground running? I'm really excited about having apricots in the backyard. I love going to the Denver Botanic Gardens in August, because there is an apricot tree on the south side fruiting and you can snack off it as you go by!

Matthew,

It hasn't yet produced yet. I planted it in spring of 2013, a 1 foot whip. It's about 9 feet tall already. I've never had a plant grow at a rate like that before, one good thing to come from the flood. I'm hoping conditions will be right this spring for flowering and fruit. But it is Colorado, so fruit trees aren't likely to produce every year.

Thanks for sharing that link! I looked at the March calendar info and will be going through the rest soon.

Mathew, thanks. It should be fun. It always is. I will try to come back and post some pictures of the peas later this spring/summer. The Yellow one you speak of is probably golden sweet, and while not really all that sweet it is a fantastic variety and actually part of the heritage of the yellow ones i'm trying to grow out this year. It was recovered from india, but it's also believed to be the same original variety of yellow pea that Gregor Mendel worked with as a Monk in Europe all those years ago. Peas very rarely cross pollinate since they self pollinate before the flowers even mature, but in some cases they do with the help of bumblebees and maybe weevils tearing through the flowers, in any case I wish you the best with your peas!

When it comes to corn i really don't have good soil or the space to do them justice. The main problem is the heavy raccoon predation i get. Their favorite food seems to be corn. One year my flint corn was super early and beat the raccoons. It was dry and hard kernels even if they had tried to eat it it they would have failed. But honestly in some ways it's not worth the effort. Still, its one of those plants that i love to grow just for the sake of growing. One of these days i hope to invent a motion detector strobe light to deter racoons at night. Or put up a cage.

Painted Mountain corn is a nice colored corn and it has a certain charm to it. But when i grew it it was actually too short. Only grew from 6" to 2' max! I'm serious, it was pitiful. Perhaps that was just a bad year, and perhaps my soil was a little compacted, but even then they were really short. Plus they are a flour corn, and i dont like flour corns. If someone crossed it to a flint corn i would grow that. I think someone crossed it to a sweet corn though. Maybe i'll try again with a trusted source like Joseph Lofthouse from Utah. His painted mountain corn has surely been locally adapted by now, and his conditions are close enough to mine that his varieties always consistently out perform any others. In fact i just planted some early sweet corn he sent me this year today.

Today i planted 2/3 of my watermelon seeds. And in one area i intermingled a haphazard plot of the rest of the Zea mexicana (teosinte) seeds i had saved and some sweet corn. The sweet corn is not a priority, but i'm hoping it will help me to easily identify any teosinte-corn hybrid kernels i may get. I saved the last third of my watermelon seeds just in case so i can plant them at a more usual time. But i don't foresee any problems. I also have a few tomato seedlings started inside. It looks like i'm on a roll to early planting this year. I will still need to wait a while before i can plant squash, beans, and my sweet potato slips.

Keen, I don't know if you're interested in this or not, but there's already a motion-activated strobe (with ultrasonic sound) animal deterrent. I've had a problem for more than 10 years with my neighbor's cats using MY yard as their personal litter box! Even worse than that, they lay on top of my perennials, killing some of them, while they "lay in wait" to catch and kill the birds I feed. They've destroyed several expensive feeders by jumping up and trying to hang onto them to catch the birds. They've dug in most of my perennial beds to poop, sometimes completely digging up small plants, and one time when I was using potting soil I had in a big tub on my deck I suddenly ran into "something squishy" and it turned out they had used THAT for a litter box too.

After many years of "mentioning it" to my neighbor, last summer she showed up with a Hoont Animal Deterrent for me to try. Don't know what she paid for it, but she implied that it wasn't cheap! She had put batteries in it when she gave it to me, so I stuck it out that way, but the batteries didn't last long so I hooked it up with the adapter that comes with it. It can be set to go off with the electronic sound plus the flashing lite plus an AUDIBLE alarm, or with just the electronic sound and flashing lite, which is the way I used it, or a couple other combinations. The audible alarm is pretty horrendous, so if you have neighbors that's not gonna work for ya! (Even if you don't have neighbors, if you want to sleep at nite it's not gonna work for ya either!)

The neighbor told me she tested it inside of her house to see if the electronic sound seemed to do anything to the cats, and she said they went crazy!

With the cats in my yard, as near as I could tell, it didn't seem to do much at all! At first the flashing lite, after dark, seemed to scare them away a few times, but they seemed to quickly get used to it and when I looked I'd see them just standing there staring at it. In the daytime the lite did absolutely nothing!

And as near as I could tell, outside the electronic sound didn't do anything either! I'd see the cat laying out there right underneath the feeders with the "deterrent" going off several feet away! With cats, at least, I considered it to be totally ineffective. [She also bought me a container of coyote urine, and as near as I could tell that had no effect either!]

I now have all my perennial beds near the birdbath covered with bamboo skewers--stuck in the soil a couple inches apart, pointy side UP! Sure makes gardening hard, but even that wasn't enough to keep the cats out, so now the whole area around the birdbath is also covered completely with chicken wire and some of my welded-wire trellises! They can't walk over that--and if they try, the skewers are waiting for them under the wire! I like my neighbors (or I would have called animal control long ago), but I maintain that people should be required to control cats the same way they're required to control dogs!

But! The "deterrent" did not seem to work for cats, but it might for wildlife! So rather than taking the time to "invent" one, you might want to give this a try. Here's a YouTube video I found which shows the white model she gave me, and the second link shows what appears to be the same thing I got, but apparently it's green now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3uXiBAP_pA

http://www.amazon.com/Hoont-Powerful-Electronic-Outdoor-Repeller/dp/B011A87Y7W

I do not own stock in this company! And I have no idea what it would or would not do to raccoons!

Skybird

I am growing and "Indian" corn this year, and I bought packaged of bothe strawberry and Dakota black popcorn seeds, but he wasn't all together excited one way or the other on which kind we grew, as long as it was corn (he told me "farmers grow corn, so we have to grow corn, too"). Since I can't grow it all, I'll stick with the painted mountain just to see how it fares.aybe in my highly amended garden soil it will do better, who knows.

CATS! Oh how I despite people who let their cats roam around the neighborhood! People across the street do it and just like you Skybird, I Find their little "surprises" after they have dug up my beds.

I figure, hey, if it's okay for them to let their cats out, its okay for me to let my dog out, too right? So whenever I see them I let him out and he runs them off. They are typically wary when they see me outside since I scream and chase them, but that only works if I'm around.

I tried the skewers last year but it didn't work. They just pooped around them (I imagine it was quite a feat, they were only an inch or two apart.

The good news is they typically stay away once the plants are filled out and they seem to not like having to dig through 4" of straw, leaves, and grass clippings to get to the dirt right now. Is usually after I till and plant seeds and there's all kinds of exposed, fresh dirt that they go crazy.

This year I cut down a pinon pine on the front yard that is piled up still, so after tilling, I cut some branches off it and laid them over the freshly tilled beds. So far, so good....