Seeding #5: cancelled!

  The 5th round of seeding was scheduled to take place on March 1st, but an assessment of the remaining basement space and the upcoming forecast resulted in a cancellation! March 1st was a beautiful, calm, and SUNNY day to start the month, but the temperature was barely above freezing (and of course since it was nice, I had to be away from home!)  It was tempting to seed some snow peas in the potager, and I probably could have.  However, the forecast for the upcoming week is highs in the teens or lower 20’s and one night a low of 7 degrees F.  Single digits?!?!  That’s January, not normal for March, and there is still no sign of a single crocus bloom. Right now, it’s snowing….again, just beginning but it’s getting heavier even since I returned to the house!

Thankfully, the seeding schedule is no longer chiseled in stone.  That’s another benefit of just growing for the joy of it.  It is much less wrenching to let a “deadline” pass now.  I console myself by saying “The 5th round is not a very exciting round anyway.  It’s major component is the dwarf  “Hot Pak” orange marigold planting for the potager’s main path edgings, plus a few odds and ends, and the second cippolini seeding.   Since the first cippolini planting has not even gone to the greenhouse to begin to harden off, nor the orange violas that will be the initial path edgings, there’s nothing crucial that would make a delay earth-shattering.”  What will be, will be.  Mother Nature always wins.

So, for 2019 at least, the “fifth” seeding will just be combined with the sixth round, and I don’t think I’ll even bother to renumber the schedule.  Am I becoming too daring?  Too complacent?  Oh, the freedom of it all!  If I hadn’t told you, you would never have known!  That’s the beauty of being a gardener.  Only YOU have “the vision” in your head, and unless chaos truly reigns, observers assume “it’s just the way you wanted it!”

  Meanwhile, things are growing well in the basement and the transplanting continues. The 8′ x 4′ bench is already filled (above), as is the 4-shelved light stand.    This flat of blue salvia seedlings is growing well, and it appears I’ll need them.   A survey of the gardens could find no blue salvia or snapdragons that show any sign of life, or even the possibility of resurrection.  These hollyhocks  will be needed, too.  It appears that all the plants that should have bloomed this year have rotted or frozen…well, whatever happened they are mush now (soon to be frozen mush.)  That means yet another year before there are hollyhock flowers to make dancing dolls.   😦

Despite current conditions, eventually the weather will mellow, the birds will begin singing and those crocuses that survived the neighbor’s pig will bloom.  Then it will be major catch-up time, because some of the gardens have STILL not been cleaned or tidied for spring and it’s been way too wet to haul in any mulch.  Weeks passing without jobs being marked off the list are making me nervous, but I suppose it will all get done eventually.  And, in the meantime….there’s BASKETBALL!