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.

solanum and zea

errands after work had me in the vicinity of the "other garden" so i stopped in to see how my bed there was faring...

the spuds i transplanted last visit are doing well which is good...

and a few of those garlic cloves that were rooting have broken surface expanding the population above ground to half a dozen.....

back at home i had some tubers demanding to be planted...

and some four corners potatoes that seem to just want to be left alone...

so i dug a few trenches out in the dismal wheat bed...

laid in the tubers...

and just covered them with compost...

the four corners i put in a container and covered them with compost as well...if they should decide to overcome their inertia we will back fill and see what develops...

the basment teosinte has finally found the light of day since there is little danger of frost from here until autumn...

and i am wondering if that is an ear i am seeing.

the "other" garden

after an early morning eye exam i wandered over to the portage garden to have a look and found four garlic plants up and running, equalling the campus garden total...

unlike the campus garden, when i popped a couple of cloves up there were definite signs of life...

like the campus garden there was also a sign of a very vigorous volunteer spud that i obviously missed at last season's harvest...easy enough to do...

there were more in another bed from last year...so i ended up transplanting them all to the garlic bed...so...garlic and spuds...as a special correspondent to this blog has said "sounds like lunch!"...we will see how well they cohabit the bed.