Between rain-showers today, I went outside to survey my flowers. Here is a surprisingly early Indian Blanket Flower (Gaillardia pulchella). These flowers first came to my garden via a wildflower mix I spread around one year. The only flower I can remember getting that year was a single marigold, but the next year I had some Indian Blanket flowers and some Bachelor's Buttons. I have been letting them seed themselves and they faithfully return each year. The Indian Blankets have gotten better each year and flower through October. So I have several months still to enjoy these.
I just love Violas, and this one has some unusual coloring.
Out in the back yard, I've eaten a few very good Tri-Star strawberries already. The kids have eaten a bunch of Alpine strawberries. They love foraging for them. Preschooler has enjoyed a radish or two though I'm afraid most of them have some tiny icky worms in them.
The cold weather and rain seems to have been slowing down the garden. We still haven't had a salad from the lettuce, but I'm hopeful that we will by the end of next week. I had to spread more slug bait because everything had holes chewed into them. The kale is slowly recovering from the slug damage but the kholrabi just doesn't look like it's going to produce anything. Maybe I'm being impatient. The spinach is languishing. I'll dig up another spot for spinach seeds with more compost and see if it does better there.
Yesterday, we had a dry spell for the day and I took advantage of that by putting out three spaghetti squash seedlings and planting cucumber, dill and green onion seeds. Now, because of the rain, the spaghetti squash is practically laying down in the soil so I spread a bunch of slug bait around to keep those pests from chewing down my potential harvest. I also managed to seed my pole green beans and scarlet runner pole beans.
During the next dry spell, I will set out my "Eight Ball" zucchini, regular green zucchini and sugar pumpkin seedlings. I still need to wait for warmer weather before I can get the pepper plants outside. Looks like next week will be warm so maybe I'll give it a go then and see how they do. I still have carrot and fennel to seed. It's a busy time here even as I wait and hope for a relief from this rain.
