it wasn't supposed to be maintenance...

but that is what it was...

it is a bit warmer today and it is supposed to rain, so i wandered out to the campus garden to have a look without much of any expectation of finding much...

and i did not find any sign of an asparagus spear...expectations met...

looking at my bed you wouldn't think much was happening there either...

a closer look disabused me of that illusion...the alfalfa is greening up...

grossly unprepared for this i did a hack job on the growth from last year with some scissors...

to let the light in...i stopped at the garden center on the way home and bought a new anvil pruner and will tidy this up next trip out...when i got home i had a look around the back yard...as i said it is warming ( finally )...

so i took the cover off the mooseberry bush...it may actually not have needed covering, however my experience of mooseberries is limited so i thought i would be safe...obviously the green has survived, either the cold or the covering...so i side dressed the bush with compost and returned the surrounding wire cage...we will watch for emerging leaves...

like all the other allium in the yard the ramps disregard the cold...they are fine and more are up...the season in that bed improves...

the winter rye is nothing if not robust...

however i suspect the winter wheat will be limited again this season...it really does need significant snow before february and that did not happen again this past winter...so...

i cleared some soil where wheat wasn't...

taking care to let the berry plants there be...

and broadcast in some einkorn wheat...we will see what happens...the season has started...slowly...it will accelerate soon enough.

asparagus ( well...not just yet )

it's the twenty-sixth of march...the ambient air temperature is around frezing...and it is snowing...time to start the season right? a day off found me headed for campus to open the asparagus bed...

so i pulled off the fabric i had covered it with last novenber...

and raked back the layer of compost i had put on top of it to make it a bit easier for the spears to break surface in a week or two...

i raked that compost back over the rest of the bed, added about another eighty pounds, turned it under, worked it with a warren hoe, and raked it back reasonably level ( not looking for perfection here )...

using a finger i dug a couple of shallow trenches...

and planted around two hundred einkorn wheat berries and covered them up...i went with rows rather than broadcast because, despite being a staple, wheat has fragile stalks and broadcast wheat ( like the winter wheat in my back yard ) is very difficult to weed without doing some damage to the crop ( at home i am inclined to intercrop the wheat with a legume like sweet clover that will set nitorgen and take up space some less beneficial palnt might inhabit )...i am at the very southern end of the range for spring wheat and with the climate changing there may be issues with this...there are issues with this no matter what happens...einkorn is an ancient variety of wheat domesticated about ten thousand years ago...it is short, with small seed heads, and the husks are tough to thresh ( i can see why they let the oxen walk on it in the threshing room )...it is, however, ancient dna and i can't help but want to keep it going...where would we be without dna? so the campus season is on...we'll see how this goes.

springier

there is rain in the forecast later today so i decided to wander out into the yard before it started...it's looking a bit more seasonal out there...

the russian olives are budding out...

more than one crocus is up...

and there will be daffodils any moment...while i was out there i decided to do some maintenance...

i cleared last autumn's detritus that had been acting a a muclch for the berries in the south bed and the last year's escapees who are camped out along the north perimeter of it...

and dressed the escapees...

and the ones still in the bed with compost...

the ramp population...

has more than doubled in the past couple of days...

them i dressed with earthworm castings ( and i actually did have my first worm sighting of the year today...unfortunately there was no camera around...still...they are there )...finally...last year i waited ( impatiently as i recall ) for the mooseberry bush to show some sign of life since it looked like a dead stick for much of the spring, finally letting me discover leaves on the twenty-fourth of may...

this year i find green emerging from buds on the twenty-third of march and wonder if we aren't a tad too early...we will see.

i'm calling it spring...

why? well it is march and...

there will be daffodils soon enough...

the rye is looking robust ( we will reserve judgement on the wheat for a bit )...

forty odd garlic plants are poking up through the straw...

the mooseberry bush is budding and showing signs of many more leaves this year...i, for one, am greatly relieved...however the biggest sign of spring out there today is...

better than half a dozen ramps are up and running in the bed...hoping for a better season this year...we will see...there is a start and the gardener is geeked almost to tesointe level...that should be another indication.