The fomo is real as May 15th, the magic day of gardening is rapidly approaching and I have a somewhat sneaking suspicion that I'm still lacking many essential plants for this season. It's finally warm enough to do some work in the garden and I was able to get some free goodies that might make for some interesting projects. There have been many mishaps already, including me killing my tomato seedlings, but luckily I had some help from a little bee-friend...
Lil fella was strolling around so I gave her a hand and she enjoyed the warmth for a bit.
Unfortunately bees can't write blogposts yet, so here we are delayed again. LOL
How are the seedlings doing?
Some plants like the indoors more than others and one of them is the rocoto chili and the eggplants. Both of them look ridiculously good and I'm checking them daily for first flowers that might need to be removed. Actually, I could kick my own ass thinking about how many big plants I could already have if only I wasn't so scared of planting those seeds early in February.
Anyways, some plants are much harder to contain, even at a sunny roof window. Temperatures are getting too high, so I placed the cucumbers down at a more chill window
Skylight with most of the plants. They are doing way better than the ones in the sunroom with only vertical windows.
Regarding the soil comparison we can also draw some conclusions. As expected the recycled potting soil is giving me problems for not sterilizing it and now some little buggers are eating my seeds. The initial difference between the storebought soil was neglible, but the lack of nutrients became quite obvious very fast for the sowing soil. Especially fast growing cucurbitaceae need fertilizer after two weeks or so, so basically it makes no sense to go for the expensive soil. As long as it doesn't contain big chunks, any soil should work pretty well.
Most likely larvae of the black fungus gnat that are eating cucumber seeds before they even sprout.
Bee-anca was helping me tidy up the lawn before the first mowing.
This year, for the first time, I tried to graft my own tomatoes. For that I used a currant tomato that is supposed to be a wild variety to act as a base for my graftings. What I neglected is the fact that wild tomatoes should be sown a few days prior to the other tomatoes, as they are significantly smaller at first.
Anyways, I managed to do some graftings and for now they do look pretty nice! I'm excited to see if there will be a difference in how well the plants do over the year. Compared to the regular tomatoes, they are obviously a bit delayed, so grafted tomatoes might need to be sown a bit earlier.
Unfortunately grafting the cucumbers proofed to be slightly more challenging, so I ended up using the same technique as for the tomatoes, hoping it's still working.
The procedure of grafting tomatoes
Finished tomato graftling.
For the trees the whole process was a big failure again...It seems like I can't get the right cuts that fit properly, even after trying a couple different knives. Maybe a proper grafting-knive would fix that issue, but I'm not really using it that much to justify the investment just yet.
Also the air layered corkscrew hazel turned out to be a dud. Lots of callus, but no roots. There's still one left on the tree, but I'm going to wait a few months before I open it up.
Air layering from last year. Maybe should have waited a little longer?
Bee-anca helping me inspect the lawnmower. Yeah, we definitely need a new one!
Let's check the outdoors
The quince we planted last year already produced a ton of flowers.
Some of the spare currant tomatoes were planted in late April. Probably due to sunburn or colder episodes, they didn't really grow at all and some were ripped out by pesky blackbirds.
This year the Ice Saints have been very gracious and in hindsight I could have planted all my tomatoes and peppers ouside in mid-April. The days are quite cloudy and rainy, so it's the perfect time to finally clean the garden and plant the little fellas without worrying about sunburn. Would suck if I were to be sick and could not walk and do stuff in the garden, right?
Messed up my hip and was not able to do a lot in the garden and everything I did took 10 times longer.
When I was setting up a pile of leaves for the hedgehog to use during the winter, I thought it was a good idea to put in some sticks and other stuff to keep the pile from squishing. Turns out that's not good and the fellas prefer a densely packed pile instead.
Flipping the compost there was nothing in it, but when I tried to move the pile of leftover leaves a few weeks later, this emerged:
Early April and the hedgehog decided to take another nap in the freshly flipped compost covers.
It was still deeply asleep so I covered it up and added some grass clippings to keep it warm.
Sweet dreams...
Due to the mild weather I decided to set up my hydroponics and use it to root my cuttings. We have quite a bunch of roses, some corkscrew hazel and larches, both of which seem to be a lot harder to root. I'm also having a shot at the peony, for my lady would love to have one of those.
Quick checkup.
Placing the first cuttings
For my birthday the lady got me a 3d-printer, which allows me to print all kinds of usefull things. I haven't really done any models myself but there are a ton of usefull prints on the interwebs, like bee-hotels, soil-presses and plant starter pots. Stay tuned if you wanna see more of that, the wildlife in our garden and the sad things that are part of this hobby.
Compost-sieve from the 3d-printer after the old one broke.
Time for the little fella to go back to their business. And me back to writing on my next garden journal...
See you for the May garden journal!