abnormally dry...

is what the national drought monitor is calling it...which, i believe, i have already pointed out somewhere or other...it's a holiday and a day off so i did garden maintenance this morning and i will present them in inverse order since the campus garden was a bit later in the morning and is the best illustration of "abnormally dry" as you can see by the lawn there...

there are clear signs of water stress and more than a few bare spots developing...

even though i watered thoroughly last trip out the soil in the beds was dry a couple of inches down...

so i watered again...thoroughly...

things were so dusty dry that the peat moss was floating on top of the water when i started and it took a few minutes before it had absorbed enough water to sink...admittedly peat moss is fairly powdery anyway however the water was raising dust clouds...

dry or not there seems to be a fairly robust potato community cohabiting with the asparagus...

on the other side of the bed, "ferned" asparagus has already begun to topple over...

so i drove in what will be the first of many stakes in the bed and returned the miscreants to upright for their own good...

as the season progresses the spear production has lessened...and i saw no signs of harvesting...

over in my "offical" bed, the garlic is still spluttering...

however there are a couple of new, healthy looking, volunteer spuds up...

my very favorite correspondent will be pleased to see the alfalfa is still enggaing in patenetly reckless defiance of limits...

and my surmise that the alfalfa was preparing to bloom from the last visit has proved true...

while i was there i also planted five hopi blue maize seeds ( i am uncetain about the viability of the third one in the second row...we will see )...

and took note that the carolina horse nettle was ignoring the dryness and going strong in both the beds and the lawn...

the campus garden was the last stop...the portage community garden was the middle one, where i went to water and have a look at things...

here too there are healthy looking spuds...

the garlic is spluttering ( one imagines this will be my only foray into spring garlic...autumn planting here on out )...

and, unsurprisingly, none of the dozen spuds i planted there in another bed two days ago have broken surface yet...it is warming...give them a week...

if you can call my back yard a "stop", that is where i started...after i watered i turned some compost into a bed...

and planted some hopi blue maize...and that is enough gardening for the holiday.