Wild Violet's Garden Blog

Today is supposedly 6 weeks until last frost here, and that prediction is finally getting believable since it's 42 degrees out and the snow piles are finally shrinking.  Whew.  It's been a long winter.  So, we started our tomato seeds today.  Or rather, I started them, and the Girl 'wrote' the labels and watered them when I was done.  We have Roma (6 cells started, as usual 2-3 seeds planted per cell, to be thinned later), Super Sweet 100 cherry type (3 cells), Brandywine (6 cells - I intend to eat a lot of tomato sandwiches this summer), and 3 cells of one called Bloody Butcher just because I like the brutal name.  Other seedling progress: Dahlias and (leggy) Cosmos I thinned out the pansies to one per cell today, as well as peppers, dahlias, cosmos (which are leggy and should probably shouldn't have been started so early, or started inside at all?) and marigolds.  I left the plastic cover off the Dahlias and Cosmos because they are getting so tall alrea

So, I am rather of a piler-upper of stuff.  You know, the paperwork stuff I might need, but don't know what to do with right now, and so it stacks up somewhere on a corner of my desk till God knows when.  Or until it's a recycling day and I elect to purge and start over. Well, I just found a little yellow notepad in that pile with the basest of summaries from my 2012 gardening season.  Here, 'for the record' is the word-for-word, barely one page conclusion for all of my blood, sweat, and tears of garden efforts in 2012: Success: V. bonariensis Onions Peppers Lettuce Aster (1) Cosmos - good in dry but boring orange Tomatos Fail: Hens & Chicks Alch Sunflower Teddy Bear Zinnia (boring color) Envy Brocc (never set) Kale - insects? Beet - insects? Squash - vine borers Chard That's it.  2012 in a few lines.  A few further explanations of this list, before I forget: V. bonariensis is the Verbena I started from seed inside last year, transplant

Summer 2012 Doesn't this photo look delicious?  Like, I can't believe it's almost April and we're still covered in snow and I'm going stir crazy and need to dig in the dirt but at least I've got things like this to look forward to again this summer, delicious?  It's my Girl on one perfect summer evening last June.  And now it's also my desktop wallpaper to remind me of better (less snowy) times.  Seed starting update:  Pansy seedlings are up, as are peppers, basil, cilantro, dahlias, cosmos, marigolds, and I think that's everything.  Petunias are MIA.  I have already had to thin some of these ambitious seedlings to one per cell as they're growing for broke, despite technical difficulties with our lighting.  Only one of the two fluorescent ballasts above my makeshift table are working, dang it, even after hubby replaced bulbs for me.  I just moved all the flats as close as possible under the one ballast and we're making do. This week I

Technically, it's the first day of spring today, and we've still got about 1.5-2' of snowdrifts on the ground here in lovely Wisconsin.  What a difference from last year at this time when we were having weird 60 and 70 degree days and already designing landscapes for people.  Hard to believe I should be starting seeds with the scenery outdoors as it is now, but here we go.  Actually, there we went, about a week ago on March 14th, when the Girl and I started our pepper seeds (8 weeks before our supposed last frost in this neck of the woods, again, hard to imagine this year) and some pansy seeds she picked out for herself.  Peppers included Jalapeno and sweet bell California Wonder, nothing too fancy.  The pansies are called Trimardeau Mix, for the record.  We discovered he pansies are already peeking out of the soil today, which certainly caused some three-year-old excitement!  We started most of these seeds in the basement under the grow lights as usual, but also put some