Cold spring / gardening

[gs_silva]

It's so sunny and beautiful outside! I desperately want to go out and get some vitamin d and rake the side garden. But it's barely above freezing - single degrees C. I'm huddled against the space heater (not literally - that would be a fire hazard) with candles on the countertop (more for ambience) trying to draw more than cry.

(It's hyperbole. I don't cry easily.)

We still have juncos. They're in the hawthorn tree, doing little acrobatic moves to grab the last berries that the robins left behind. Yesterday the crows were around, possibly nesting in the same tall pine tree they did last year. I left them some cat food and it's gone now but I don't hear them today.

Even though my backyard is swampy, I walked through it and checked out the buckthorn patch that I'd started to hack back last fall. There was deer scat in it. I'm glad the deer are finding enough to eat on my property to still make their visits. That's what I'm aiming for by letting the place go native. I was reading about how to stratify turtlehead seeds, and I didn't do exactly as it said, but they've been exposed to the cold all winter, so I guess that means I can go ahead and scatter them now. Which means I need to rip up the pachysandra now. But not right now. I'll try again when it's more comfortable out there.

The storm last night was bad enough to close some roads in my town, but not my road. I only had a couple of fallen branches.

I just saw one of the cardinal couples. Last year I watched them teaching their juvenile offspring the ways of the world - they tend to hang out in the forsythia, and they'll stay there minding their own business as long as I'm minding mine. The mom cardinal especially - she was all over the bird feeder when I had it out, and we could get in and out of the car right next to her and she didn't care one bit. That's so random. I don't know.

It's my kid's birthday next week. He wants to go out tonight though, for Steak Special Tuesday at a local restaurant, so we'll do that. We don't really have a tradition of big birthday celebrations or surprises. Each of us basically states what we want, and the three of us do that, and any wrapped gifts are just incidental. It comes from living abroad for so long. We always survived on a minimum of possessions because we moved so often and wanted to be able to pack all our stuff into 5 suitcases and a couple of tote bags and not have to hire a service to move boxes of stuff. So gift-giving had to be very modest, and mostly focused on experiences.

For instance, one time we took the kid out to see Rogue One, in Phnom Penh. That was fun but weird. (The reason we chose to travel to Phnom Penh to see a single movie is that Vietnam had slapped a PG-13 rating on it, and PG-13 means nobody under 13 is allowed inside the theater under any circumstances, but we're American so of course we're perfectly happy to bring our 8-year-old to watch a Star Wars movie - he's the target audience as far as we're concerned! Phnom Penh is a lovely, crazy city and we generally had a nice time even though it was a short visit.)

Fun fact - my son actually looks like Maurice from Alien Romance. Well, he used to, right up until he was 13 or so. (He had full bangs, though, instead of the middle part that gives Maurice his signature look - ah well, small details.) Then he grew. Now I'll have to invent a taller character to be his lookalike.

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Comments

[moth2fic]

I hadn't heard of juncos but gather they're like sparrows... Good luck with all your birds! We have a robin who is almost tame. And some magpies living in the tree at the bottom of the garden. Every year, the latest brood move out to other local trees then come back to visit and squabble.

[gs_silva]

Juncos are Canadian, primarily, but they winter here. This is probably the last I see of them until November. They do flock like sparrows - in fact you never see just one. I'd say they're similar to finches, even.

I love magpies! We don't have any here, but they were all over my neighborhood in Shanghai. Such big personalities!

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>It's so sunny and beautiful outside! I desperately want to go out and get some vitamin d and rake the side garden.<<

It's still below freezing here, cloudy, but at least it quit the howling wind. A lot of things that were leafing out have frozen. :/ But some stuff looks resilient, and at least some of my jug and tub greenhouse sprouts have survived.

Re: Thoughts

[gs_silva]

Temperate zones - so much trouble! I bought two packets of lettuce seeds exactly for this reason, and haven't bought anything else. The whole deal about winter stratifying wildflower seeds to plant them in the yard is an adventure I never had to deal with in tropical or subtropical Asia with our high-rise apartments, and waaay before that, we lived in basically a saltwater pine barrens. I have to go back to my life in the 80's for any relevant experience, and that's all out of date.

I think the thing most frustrating is that all the online gardeners' guides are scrambling to anticipate the 'last frost', but last year they were wrong, so apparently it's anybody's guess.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Temperate zones - so much trouble! <<

Trouble, but it has advantages too. Most years, low temperatures knock back the insect populations.

>> I bought two packets of lettuce seeds exactly for this reason, and haven't bought anything else.<<

Lettuce is a cool-season crop; it does well in spring and fall, but usually bolts to flower in summer. You get that second crop by planting a fresh plot in late summer to early fall. Same goes for peas and radishes.

>> The whole deal about winter stratifying wildflower seeds to plant them in the yard is an adventure I never had to deal with in tropical or subtropical Asia with our high-rise apartments, and waaay before that, we lived in basically a saltwater pine barrens.<<

You have an interesting history of places!

>>I think the thing most frustrating is that all the online gardeners' guides are scrambling to anticipate the 'last frost', but last year they were wrong, so apparently it's anybody's guess.<<

It used to be more reliable. Climate change is making this less predictable, and also, the destabilization of the jetstream means that utterly frigid air now descends as a "polar vortex" more often and farther south than it used to.

However, there are lots of ways to cope with an unexpected freeze after you've planted things.

I do use some things, like mulch. I'm experimenting with water jug greenhouses this year. But I don't overly coddle plants. Most of what I grow, I want to be durable.

Re: Thoughts

[gs_silva]

>>Trouble, but it has advantages too. Most years, low temperatures knock back the insect populations.<<

To each their own! I much prefer the insect types and population numbers in Southeast Asia over the ones here. Sure, we had a ton of cockroaches and huntsman spiders, and I could've done without the threat of malaria and dengue, but you know what we never had? Swarms. I swatted mosquitoes away once a month on average. They don't have boom-or-bust populations there.

Oh, we had fire ants, though. Not in the house. Like poison ivy, you have to train yourself to scour the landscape as you walk so you don't step into fire ant territory. That actually puts the pros and cons about equal. You can't stay indoors forever, even with fire ants waiting for you.

Everything else, well, I do know about lettuce and global warming and polar vortexes and all the other basic things you mentioned. But people have been surprised when I've told them about the low mosquito populations in SEA, and of course stories about fire ants are always interesting. :)

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I definitely did not know about the low mosquito population! Fascinating. *envy*

I knew about the fire ants. I'm a bit envious of the mound-building termites as their dirt makes excellent building material.

Given my low heat tolerance, though, I'll stick with temperate zones.