I set out my one tomato plant in a large container yesterday. All done! I use to have a huge garden. I gave away as much as we ate. I enjoyed having a garden. Then I had several bucket gardens. I grew tomatoes, spinach, squash, cucumbers, and snow peas. Now I'm down to my one tomato. My son has raised garden beds and he keeps me supplied with fresh vegetables. He hasn't planted yet but he is tilling and getting ready to plant.
We have little snow on the ground. It is supposed to snow tonight and melt or turn to rain tomorrow. The mountains will get snow, though.
Maybe it is time to get serious about that move to one of the southern states that you have mentioned several times, @Ken Anderson ? Bobby has been working out in his greenhouse out behind his shop, and he has planted tomatoes and they are sprouting already, he reported yesterday. I have the green peppers that we started in the aerogarden planted in a large pot and they are growing out on the front porch. I need to start more new plants, but have the aerogardens turned off and empty right now. It is supposed to rain this weekend, so that is always a good time for inside projects.
I planted corn yesterday. I'm hoping to plant okra and cucumbers tomorrow. Potatoes are looking good and I'm still able to find the asparagus among the weeds.
I still would like to grow some large sunflowers, and Bobby and I have been talking about how to manage that because those pesky squirrels dig up and eat just about every seed that we plant. Mostly , I can start things in the house and then transplant them outside, but sunflowers do not like to be transplanted, even when they are in those little degradable planing cups. Corn is about the same way, and if we grew some of that, it would be more for decoration than for anything else. The Jerusalem artichokes are starting to come up, so if I am going to transplant any of those, I need to do it now wile they are still small. I am thinking of putting more of them out back along the back fence to add some color out there in late summer.
@Yvonne Smith you can transplant sunflowers. We do it every year, but you can't start them too early or they will shock when you move them. We usually start them about three weeks prior to transplanting. I am using soil blocks this year to minimize transplant shock on difficult-to-move plants. We also transplant corn. If we didn't we probably couldn't grow it here. The key to most of it is not to start things like that too early. I also have beets going for transplant. I used to transplant mangels (livestock beets) when we had goats, but I haven't bothered with it since we got rid of our livestock, but I decided to mess with it again this year just for fun.
I remember trying to row mangels, years and years ago. I don’t think we ever got any. We had horses and goats, and they were supposed to be an awesome life sock feed. Have you ever tried eating any of the mangels ? Some of the pictures that I have seen, they remind me of kind of a cross between a huge beet and a Korean (Daikon) Radish. In case anyone does not know what a mangel is, here is a picture.
We ate mangels when they were small, and the goats loved them when they were cut into easily ingested pieces. https://postimg.cc/nCkCH9Rq
I bought 8 azaleas, 4 Mediterranean Pink Heather (they look a lot like the purple weeds covering my yard before I cut it), 6 Yoshino Cherry trees (Arbor Day Foundation) plus 2 free Forsythias and a red maple (the Forsythias and red maple look like a stick). I sure hope they all live. I had to dig through gravel and get all the A D plants into the ground. They ship with bare roots. The brown snake I wrote about in another post is just doing splendidly. He crawled ahead of me while I was carrying my tools this evening.
My time's been taken with rescuing cats, 3 who have joined our household and have become elegant, lithe panthers who destroy plants! So, my brilliant scheme is to start seedlings at my daughter's home, and eventually transplant to garden. The bad thing is I won't be able to coddle them every day! Char
Now that the snow has melted, I can see that I was right in what I suspected, which is that our plow guy made a mess out of my above-ground planter. Rather than building new ones from scratch, by myself, I was looking at some kits that I can get on Amazon. The price is similar to what I'd pay in lumber if I built it myself, but this would be cedar, which should last a bit longer than pine, and not require any cutting and stuff. Rather than placing a large garden bed at ground level, I would rather have some smaller ones above ground, like on sawhorses. That might reduce the number of insects that I'll need to worry about.