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okiedawn1

March 2019, Week 3, Spring Arrives For Real

Happy Spring Break if you're one of the lucky ones on Spring Break this week. Our girls are, so we'll be having fun with them here at the house. The older one leaves later in the week to go on a Spring Break trip with a close friend of hers.


I am loving this weather. Of course, any weather would be lovely following last week's cold, rain and wind, which I believe might have been the last gasp of Old Man Winter of 2018-19. Let's hope so.


This week's forecast looks really great, with warming temperatures and not so much wind. Of course, any wind we get this week will seem minor compared to last week's bomb cyclone. I'm glad that is all behind us.


Spring is exploding here, as more and more spring wildflowers burst into bloom, joining the earlier ones. Our fruit trees had been blooming, and now are leafing out. Yesterday our first redbud on our property began to bloom. I really feel like Spring is here now and there's no slowing it down or holding it back.


Our soil temperatures are slowly warming up, and I think will warm up more quickly after tonight, which is supposed to be our last cold night. We dropped lower than forecast this morning and hit freezing again, but I expected that to happen because our air was so dry. (Dry air cools more rapidly than moist air and also warms more rapidly too.) Before we even went to bed, we already were near our forecast low and I knew it was going to just keep dropping lower, which it did.


I've been hardening off tomatoes and may move them out to the greenhouse to stay in another couple of days, which will open up more space on the light shelf. I'm going to start planting cool-season crops that I've been holding back because of the excess mud and wind. This is probably my best chance to plant them while rain isn't falling from the sky.


I'll likely pot up the tomato plants before they go into the greenhouse, and will start some flats of warm-season flowers that I'll keep inside just until they germinate and them will move them to the greenhouse too. I'm not saying winter is over, but maybe we've had our last freezing night, or will have it tonight. If so, that would be earlier than usual. Thursday night looks a little chilly but probably will stay above freezing. Other than that, our forecast looks great. It had been showing all sunny and clear all week and now they're slipping in a slim chance of rain here and there, but we still might stay dry until this coming weekend.


I bought bulbs at Sam's yesterday---glads, Star Gazer lilies and something else...oh, daylily roots in three shades of pink or pinkish-red. I'll plant the Star Gazer lilies in the potato bed we converted to a lily and dahlia bed last year, and the glads and daylilies will go into the south flower border that I'm slowly converted to a perennial border, though I may always mix in a few annuals for seasonal color. It is a huge border so filling it in with perennials is going to take a while as I proceed slowly to see which ones will or won't tolerate wet feet there during rainy years. This bed sits at the highest point of the fenced veggie garden and gets a lot of runoff from adjacent property next door, so stays wetter than I'd like despite the fact that the soil has been amended.....it is like an invisible river of runoff runs under it until summer, and then when the moisture would be welcome, the river of runoff dries up.....


So, tomorrow I'll plant cool-season everything, including all the veggies and herbs I've been babying along indoors, and will sow some seeds directly in the garden, and then hopefully start potting up tomatoes. If not, I'll try to do the tomato potting up project on Tuesday or Wednesday, and will sow seeds in flats whenever I am indoors. Much depends on how the two girls want to spend their time with me. Lately we've been doing a lot of science type crafts like growing crystals and making geodes....I know y'all are jealous, right? It is a switch from making slime and playing with play dough though. Usually when we have a few days, we tie dye shirts so we might add that to this week's activities as well.


We lost a few shingles from the roof in last week's storm, and the roof is 20+ years old, so a roofer is coming to inspect it this week. I suspect we're about to experience the joy of paying for a new roof. Oh joy, oh joy. As long as it doesn't interfere in my gardening time, I don't care what the roofer does.


The stores are getting in racks and racks of warm-season flowers now. Of course, the soil temperatures are too cold for them, but I bet that doesn't stop folks from buying them anyway. Yesterday in Home Depot, they had rolled all the warm-season plants indoors on Friday afternoon to keep them from freezing and still hadn't rolled them back outdoors when we arrived at the store, so the store was full of rolling racks of tropical hibiscus and the like....I cannot believe they have those in the store already! Sure, it is great to see those hibiscus plants in bloom but our weather is too cold for them to be happy.


Some local big box stores now have spring stuff like seed potatoes, bagged onion sets and the like on clearance because the window of opportunity to plant them is slowly closing.


What's new with y'all? Who's planting what? And, if you're planting, what are you planting?


With the warmth, our winter weeds are growing....having all the blooms for the bees is really great, but we also need to mow because the lawn is getting tall.


Have a great week everyone. Happy St. Patrick's Day and Hello Spring! Okay, technically it arrives on Wednesday, but I'm saying it is sneaking in early at our house today......


Dawn

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