iuncg day one

out at the garden for the first time ( except for a long-distance telephoto look last summer ) since autumn 2019 and there is work to do in most of the beds...although a few seem surprisingly clear of inavaders...

the asparagus seems to have survivied through last season at least...

so i cut back the dead detritus and dug a shalow trench to help the spears along in breaking surface...we will see what transpires here in the next few weeks...i found some freindly earthworms as i dug...i was pleased...

i expected my bed to be a mess and it was...there was immediate good news though...when i cut back a couple of season's worth of dead growth on the alfalfa i found green shoots...so it is fine and the bees, if any wander by, will have blooms and material for cocoons later in summer...

after i freed the alafalfa i took a weeding sythe to the invaders and then turned the bed to disrupt their roots and leave them to decompose...there will be more turnings i am sure...

as i turned the bed i popped up a few spuds...doubtlessly volunteers from tubers i missed in the 2019 harvest...definitely two elmer's blues and what look to be a couple of german butterballs...so i replanted all four and i would not be surprised to find more volunteers coming up over the coming weeks...

finally i turned in a bag of compost on the north end of my bed and broadcast in about one hundered and fifty grains of einkorn wheat...it is coming along in my yard and so will,hopefully, do well here...that's it...some clean up and a pair of plantings...the balamce of what i plan to plant here will go in after the last chance ( except for the quinoa which will be late next month ) of frost which will be later in may if the averages hold true...we will see hiow all this goes.

some chlorophyll

veering towards warm here for the time of year...no record in danger...still warmish...so i decided to have a tramp around the yard for a look and to take care of a couple of things...

i was pleased to find a couple of ramps up and running...the gardener is hoping for considerably more soon...we will see...

as a population the berries are evincing good new spring growth...where there are new leaves there will blooms and berries as verified by the basement colony ( still produceing daughters by the by )...

in other branches of the allium family ( this yard soes seem heavily biased towards allium, solanum, and zea..along with the relentless helianthus ) the garlic and the walking onions are greening vwery well...

both varieties of grape vine are budding...

the rye is rebounding...

the einkorn wheat i sowed some time back is finally beginning to show signs of turning into actual wheat...so i broadcast four hundred more seeds into the beds and will be moving towards a couple of comunity gardens to plant more later this week...

the einkorn i spilled while threshing and left in the husks just to see what it would do seems to be doing...well, nothing...inert...unsplit much less sprouted...it may be that, like mazie, it has been so radically artificialy selected that it cannot reproduce without human intervention...a sort of co-evolved dependence...read a label on some food "product" in the supermarket sometime...maize and humans seem to be unable to do without one another...

my mooseberry bush is also inert...which should..or should not...i am unfamiliar with the flora of frostbite falls and this may just be normal...disturb me...i will be vigilant...there will be news.

the day before spring

it's a seaonable day here...upper forties ( fahrenheit ) and the einkorn wheat i planted a few days ago would seem to be on the rise...which prompted me to do a few things out back...

first i dug up another corner of the winter wheat bed that seemed bereft of wheat and broadcast in another handful of einkorn and raked it in to a shallow depth...

then i filled one of the containers my friend mik gave me ( thanks coach! ) with a mix of compost and vermiculite and planted about half the packet of black tip wheat i purchased...it bears a resemblance to its cousin einkorn...however it is much easier to thresh and winnow...it is also mostly ornamental and will doubltlessly find its way into vases eventually ( depending on how the season goes )...

thirdly i put a few more handfuls of einkorn in a burlap sack and whacked it with a stick for a while to loosen the husks so i can thresh and winnow more seed to plant in a couple of community gardens and out back...

in the process of that i spilled some unthreshed einkorn and rather than pick the few grains up i decided to run an experiment and see if it will germinate in the husk...if it does so successfully in any numbers that would militate towards less work in future...if not we will know what to do...

the garlic and onions aren't waiting for tomorrow to get started...

the daffodils out by the east bed aren't exactly standing still...

and there's new growth on the berries in the bed behind them...

in indoor berry news, another stolon has landed...i am thinking this colony will be going back outside soon...in a berry-free spot where we can monitor its progress in reacclimating to the wild...betting they will do fine...tomorrow is spring...there is still no word from the ramps or the asparagus...looking to see what the next week brings from them.