Garlic! Potatoes! Etc.!

The garlic and potatoes, both in the same bed, have been looking pretty miserable for a while now, so I finally dug them all up. The harvest was a big (emphasis on Big!) surprise. The Rabun County garlic is the pile of big bulbs on the left in the picture:

It's a little hard to tell from the very busy photo, but a couple of those Rabun County bulbs are almost four inches in diameter. Needless to say, I'm "pleased as Punch." Most of the rest of the harvest turned out well, too, although the Elephant garlic was disappointingly average.  I haven't weighed the bulbs yet. I'm going to leave them out on the shady front porch for a couple of days to dry out a little, then finish trimming the bulbs (I already trimmed off the rootlets).

I had been thinking that the potato harvest would be pathetic, considering the weather this spring, but it wasn't. I ended up with a little more than eighteen pounds of spuds from my two five-foot rows. The two rows were crammed into a space that is only about two feet wide, and I had thought, at planting time, that maybe I should just be planting one row in that narrow space, but there I was with extra seed potatoes and only a little space.

The White Cobbler was a lot more productive than the Red Pontiac, but that may be a result of the warm spring. I think White Cobbler tolerates the heat a little better.

The basket to the right in the picture above contains the tiny harvest from the multiplier onions. I plant these every year, in spite of the lack of robust productivity, on the chance that, one of these years, I will figure out exactly the right combination of everything to make these work for me. It is possible that our winters are just too warm for them, but the notion of being able to replant onions each year without actually having to buy sets or starts of any kind is appealing enough that I am not giving up yet.

In other news, this is yesterday's harvest from the garden:

It still seems insanely early to be bringing in zucchini, but here they are!

And in yet other news, a couple of the baby bunnies will be heading off to new homes this week. Einstein (black with a white head) will be going home tomorrow afternoon, and Louie (the brown-with-silvering baby, soon to be called Darwin), will be heading toward his new home on Wednesday.

Since they are only about nine weeks old, this all feels like progress!

We plan to keep a white bunny (Burrito), as a companion for Mama Moonpie, but the other white (Tiny) and the black and white one (Holstein) that is almost like a Dutch breed bunny still need a home.

To get them all together for a group photo, I dropped a handful of alfalfa hay into the middle of their Timothy hay. They love alfalfa hay!

When the crowd has thinned out some, it will probably seem strange to be able to sweep the bunny enclosure without having two or more babies hopping into the dust pan, another one chasing the broom, and one or two others trying to sit on my feet, but I am sure I will get used to it.

Pruning Tomatoes on a Blazing Hot Day

Gardeners can be a little bit crazy, working outside in weather that everyone else avoids by staying in the air-conditioned indoors, and my crazy-gardener streak was showing earlier today. This is the first officially hot day of the year, with a high around 92 degrees, and I "celebrated" by pruning tomatoes, after hoeing weeds out of several beds, at the garden/farm on Dallas Highway where I volunteer on Saturdays.

Here in Georgia, it is a good idea to prune away, while the tomato plants are still small, most of the growth (leaves and suckers/stems) below the first flower cluster, then when the plants are bigger to give them another trim, to open up the plant for improved air flow. This pruning helps reduce the risk of several diseases, so the effort is totally worthwhile. Out at the garden/farm, there are tomato plants in both stages of growth. I worked today on the littler plants.

You know you've done a good job when you look back at the row and every plant you see looks like something Charlie Brown would choose for use in the Christmas pageant. In fact, I thought I had pretty well massacred the 40-or-so plants that I'd worked on, but then one of the chief gardeners came along behind me and clipped a leaf here and there from some of the plants. Apparently, I am a fairly conservative pruner.

Are We Sure this is Spring?

It's hard to take spring seriously when it is already looking so much like summer out in the garden. The zucchini have begun to make good-sized squashes, some of which have already made it onto the stove:

The first green beans will be coming in tomorrow:

And the peppers are already beginning to form. These, I think, are Spanish Spice:

These are Feherezon:

Is that not crazy? Elsewhere in the garden, the patch of onions that I planted from dry sets (little dry bulbs) all sent up flowering stalks before the plants even had a chance to make bulbs, so the harvest from that patch is not going to be what I had hoped for. In addition, the few good bulbs in the patch will need to be eaten fairly soon since they've been split by those flowering stalks.

The onions I planted from a little bunch of slender green starts made smaller-than-usual bulbs and then threw in the towel a week ago; the tops turned brown and fell over. Onions usually don't call it quits until the end of June. Everything I've read indicates that the alternating warm and cold weather is behind the early maturity, and the early flowering, of the two crops.

The garlic is finishing early, and strangely, too. The leaves are beginning to yellow, so I pulled a couple of bulbs to check on how the crop is coming along. This is what I got:

It's hard to imagine that these two garlic bulbs were growing within two feet of each other in the bed, but they were. They are different varieties, but the two shouldn't be so very different in size! I am guessing that the rest of the garlic harvest is going to be equally strange; however, I am going to wait until the tops are absolutely brown before pulling any more from the ground. I'd like give any remaining tinies the opportunity to get bigger!

In the good news column, the Yellow Marble cherry tomato has been busy making little tomatoes. There are lots of these on the one plant of this variety:

Most of my other tomato plants, all started in the house in mid-March, are flowering, and a few have tiny tomatoes on them. Their timing is just about right, based on the usual unfolding of the gardening year.

Since the zucchini are being nicely productive right now, I went ahead and poured a little fish-emulsion fertilizer on them, to keep them going. It would be a shame to risk letting the plants slow down this early in the season!

Also today I turned under the pea vines. The harvest from the peas this year wasn't great, but that is my own fault. It turns out that bunnies really like pea vines in their "bunny salad," so I brought pieces of the plants in to Moonpie (our momma rabbit) and her babies most days while the plants were trying to make peas. I'm pretty sure I would have had more peas if I hadn't kept harvesting pieces of the vines.

By Friday or Saturday, the vines will have decomposed enough that I will be able to replant that space. At this point, it's hard to know what to put there. Some of my crops are running about a month ahead of their usual schedule. Considering the strangeness of this year's weather and its effects on the garden so far, what will June and July be like? The answer, probably, is "continued craziness."

What Home Gardening Contributes

One reason I routinely check the Energy Bulletin news round-up site is that, in addition to the links to stories about energy, it includes a lot of links to stories about gardening and small farms. This morning's set of food/agriculture stories (click link to see the set) has a comment underneath that is worth pondering. The comment is about the imprecision of language - and math - that is used to talk about productivity of gardens and small farms.

The commenter, who identifies him/herself as The Food Calculator, wrote,

I have read reports from from urban farm, stating that they feed 100 people. They actually sell 100 boxes of 10 pounds of vegetable per week. then they tell people, we produce tons of vegetable and people goes wow!, TONS... and people goes : if this tiny roof garden feeds 100 people, then 10,000 of them in our city, and it will feed 1 million people. we don't need farm anymore! ...

The fact is that 10 pounds of tomatoes or cucumbers or other vegetables like this, at 100 calories per pound for vegetables, is 1000 calories per week. if an adult needs in average 2500 calories per day (that's 17500 per week) then the 10 pounds of vegetable is only 6% of the calories needed.

I have run into the same problem in talking about the productivity of home gardens. By midsummer, we are all hauling in many pounds of food from our gardens each week, enough food that it seems as though we ought to all be food-self-sufficient, but we are unlikely to be feeding our families exclusively from the garden. The suburban gardeners, for the most part, are still visiting grocery stores for oil, dairy, grain products, dried beans, and more. When other people, especially non-gardeners, see the great baskets of food coming into the house, it can be hard to get this point across.

My own thinking is that, unless the gardener is growing serious quantities of staple crops that provide a lot of protein - like potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans for drying, or large amounts of corn or other grains - home gardening's biggest contribution is generally in ensuring variety in the diet and providing vitamins and minerals.

This can make a huge difference in people's daily meals, especially since homegrown veggies and fruits are so very tasty, but that isn't the same as providing all the food that a family eats. Some people, whose gardens are larger and more focused on staple crops, may actually be feeding themselves mostly from the garden, but a lot of us are growing what are maybe better described as luxury foods: our favorite tomatoes, baby zucchini, specialized greens, fancy cucumbers.

The luxury foods are highly nutritious, and I wouldn't want to be without them, but in hard times it is also good to be able to grow some of the staple foods. Each year I grow a little patch of potatoes, a little patch of sweet potatoes, and some popcorn (this year there also is some parching corn). The patches are small enough that the food they produce only lasts a few months, at most, before it is gone, but they are also enough that I have a clue about the size of garden I would need if I were to try to feed my family almost exclusively from the yard. The garden would need to be bigger!

For the five or so months of our garden's peak production, my family doesn't need to visit the produce department of the local grocery store for ingredients that help us create varied and healthful meals - the garden supplies plenty - but we go there anyway because we like bananas, mangoes, and avocados, none of which grow in our yard. We also pick up oil, dairy, grain products, dried beans, and more.

Summer is Busting Out All Over

While I was gone again to Oklahoma (for an ongoing family issue) the garden decided that summer is essentially here. I got back home to find that the squash plants have begun to make squash!

It seems insanely early to me, but the biggest of the six plants all have female flowers opening. There haven't been any male flowers open to pollinate the females, so we had several small, un-pollinated zucchinis last night in our sauteed veggies, but some male flowers should be opening soon. When that happens, the zucchinis will be pollinated and grow, rather than just stay small.

For those who aren't sure how to tell the male flowers from the female flowers: The easiest way to tell the difference is that female flowers all sit on top of tiny squashes, and the male flowers are on non-fruiting stems. In the photo above, there are a couple of male flowers on long, slender stems in front, and the large yellow blossom in back, whose stem looks like a tiny zucchini, is a female.

The progress of the bush beans is less of a surprise. When my planting is on track, I tend to start bringing green beans to the kitchen in May. This picture shows a couple of pretty bean flowers and one of the tiny, just beginning, green beans. This year's first patch of green beans is in the shadiest part of the garden, but beans do better with less sunlight than many of the summer veggies, so I am expecting to eat a lot of beans from this ~3.5X5 foot patch.

It will be awhile before we have mature peppers, but the flowering has begun. I have always liked the color of the flowers on this particular jalepeno.

One side of the garden has a big, unruly patch of perennial flowers in it. This is the part nearest the utility pole. I have kept the food plants about ten feet away from the pole to avoid any possible contamination of our veggies. It was great to arrive back home to find enormous heads of lilies in bloom. I am not sure how the stalk is holding up all the weight of these flowers and buds!

The rain gauge was showing that we'd had nearly three inches of rain while I was away, and it is raining again today. Luckily, I got some yard work done yesterday in advance of the rain. It is going to be mucky for at least a couple of days after this weather system passes!

While I Was Out

I'm back from my trip to Oklahoma, and, while I was away, a lot of growing took place out in the garden.

There is plenty of lettuce for salads now:

The onions are looking surprisingly like onions, even though it isn't even close to June:

Squash plants have grown large enough that flower buds should be visible soon:

There are enough peas for snacking, but not for a meal. If these flowers perform as expected, though, we'll have peas with supper in a couple of weeks:

The corn has come up, but the "outdoor" (wild) bunnies have been snacking on the little plants. In this picture, one plant is left, but, looking out the window, I can see that that plant is already gone. Since I now have indoor bunnies and know how much they can eat, I should have expected this to happen. I will need to replant, and protect, some of the corn:

The tomato plants look a lot sturdier than when I left town. I've been putting cages around the plants, in case they grow so quickly that they suddenly need the support (it happens!):

The bush beans are starting to get bushier. I expect to see flowers within the week. These plants, which I planted as seeds in the garden WAY too early, are showing a little frost damage. It's my own fault, so I can't really complain:

The berries are blooming and making little green berries. I am looking forward to eating the ripe, sweet berries, but we are going to need some rain to move that process along:

The ground outside is very dry, and rain isn't in the near-forecast. I will be spending some time in the next day or two watering the garden. I also have a little more space to plant. My youngest son (age 21) would like to try some parching corn, so I am glad that the last bit of garden hasn't yet been planted. I can rework the plan, dropping the wax beans, and add another small patch of corn. First, though, I'll have to order some seeds. That's on the list for tonight.

Inside, my baby bunnies also grew while I was away. I can't believe I waited until I was in my 50s before having bunnies in the house! They are just wonderful:

We don't normally do the "baby animal" thing at our house. Our dogs and cats are typically adopted as adults (2-4 years old) from animal shelters. However, napping bunnies are extra-cute, but they are great when they are awake, too - a lot like big, fuzzy popcorn. Since the "popcorn" pictures keep coming out blurry, here's another "resting" picture:

Old Time Insect Control

My father told me a story this week about the Victory Garden his family had tended during WWII. The garden was in the vacant lot - with permission from the landowner - across the street from their home. They grew potatoes, pole beans, and "some other stuff." His recollection is that most of the garden was taken up by the potatoes, but there was a problem in the form of potato beetles, which were both abundant and voracious.

My father and his older brother, who were a little younger than 10 years of age at the time, had a job each day. They went across the street with two small blocks of wood each, and they used those blocks of wood to smash potato beetles. Each boy was required to clear a whole row of potatoes each day.

Apparently, I need to add some small blocks of wood to my tool bucket, for use at the garden/farm where my little family has spent some time smashing potato beetles. We have been flipping the beetles off the leaves onto a nearby hard surface, then smashing them with rocks, but bringing the hard surface to the beetles, in the form of a block of wood, makes a lot of sense.

Keeping Track of the Harvest: March

I weighed most of the produce that was brought into the kitchen from the yard in March, and these are the weights in kilograms (what my kitchen scale does best - obviously the instrument wasn't made in the USA!).

Radish, winter 1.55kg
Carrots 0.2
Collard greens 0.75
Chicory 1.1
Kale 0.75
Onions, green 0.1
Swiss chard 0.25
Dill
cilantro
mint

There aren't weights for the herbs because they were harvested in small enough amounts that they didn't register an exact-enough weight. Also, a lot of the cilantro and mint went to the momma bunny. Moonpie loves cilantro!

The March total harvested was 4.7 kg, which converts to 10 pounds, 5 ounces. The running total for 2012, Jan. + Feb. + Mar., is 25 pounds, 10 ounces.

There actually were even more winter radishes, but some had begun to bolt in the freakishly warm weather, and the roots were getting tough, so those went straight out the back door to the compost heap (well... a few little pieces went to Moonpie).

I am not expecting much for April. So far, we are bringing in herbs and little bits of spinach and lettuce - for sandwiches - that haven't been weighed, and we're rooting around in the freezer and cupboards for the last of last year's preserved foods. I would hate to get to July, when the summer garden produce is pouring into the house, and run across a leftover bag of something in the bottom of the freezer!

In the planning department:

I have saved a few sweet potatoes from last year's harvest, and those are sprouting nicely. I'll be snapping those sprouts off and putting them in damp potting mix later today so they can begin rooting. It won't take long! At this rate, the outdoor garden soil will be toasty by early May, and I can get those into the ground. They will be almost my last summer crop to go in. I also am starting a few tomatoes to plant at the end of June, to keep the harvest coming.

The garden seems to have survived the past couple of colder nights. The thermometer on the front porch was showing 35 degrees F yesterday morning, but we are back to a forecast for warmer days and nights.

New Pest: Kudzu Bug

A new, tiny brown bug - the Kudzu Bug - showed up in my yard last week, but other yards in the Atlanta area have been host to this insect for a couple of years now. A large number of calls to the local county extension office over the past year have been about this particular pest.

It shares that unfortunate habit of ladybugs of overwintering inside the walls of buildings, leading to occasional outbreaks of "what the heck?" when great masses of them emerge inside the building instead of outside, where they belong.

The really bad news is that this is not a "good bug" like the ladybug, devouring aphids and other small garden pests. The kudzu bug is itself a pest, not only on kudzu, but on all plants in the bean & pea family. It eats their leaves.

UGA's Dr. John Ruberson has published a short Pest Report (click the link to read it) about this new pest in the newsletter of Georgia Organics.

For farmers, the bug is a big problem partly because effective controls haven't yet been established, even though the bug is causing some serious damage. I am hoping that, for gardeners, the insect (which is a true bug - a Hemipteran) is not as much of a pest as the Mexican Bean Beetle, but I may have to resign myself to battling yet another beetle that eats my bean plants.

So far, my bean-beetle battle strategy includes early planting of bush beans, which works because the Mexican Bean Beetles become much more abundant as summer progresses. Sometimes, I don't see them until July, and by then I can already have harvested quite a lot of beans from bush-type plants.

According to the short article by Dr. Ruberson, the Kudzu Bug is showing up much earlier in the gardening year, and the bug in my garden suggests that he is right. That means my strategy of planting early bush beans isn't going to help much in the effort to avoid damage caused by Kudzu Bugs.

My other main strategy is to knock adult beetles into soapy water to drown them. Smashing the adults has also worked for Mexican Bean Beetles, even though it is pretty messy, but I have heard that the Kudzu Bugs have stinky guts, which makes smashing a less attractive strategy.

I also smash Mexican Bean Beetle larvae and eggs, and this would probably also work for Kudzu Bugs, but the smashing strategy isn't nearly as effective as avoidance by earlier planting of early-maturing bush beans has been. Smashing and drowning the pests just delays by a week or two the time when the crop is a complete loss.

It looks as though this will be a very interesting gardening year. Wish me luck!

EDIT: I usually get my basic information right, but in this post I originally had called the kudzu bug a beetle, and it isn't. The kudzu bug is in the order Hemiptera; it's a true bug. The information should be all correct now!

19 April 2013 EDIT: Anyone who is interested enough in Kudzu Bugs to have read this far should probably read the Kudzu Bug Update from 8 April 2013.

Spring Madness

For quite a long time, I have thought it would be nice to have a pet bunny. I even bought a book about rabbit care at a Goodwill book sale several years ago. About a month ago, I had the opportunity to adopt a bunny from a family that was a little overwhelmed by the work involved in taking care of two bunnies. They kept the black and white one, and I took the one that is white with pink eyes. Meet Moonpie:

Not only is she totally adorable and incredibly soft, but she is a great compost assistant. Ever since I starting adding the contents of her hay-box to the compost pile, the compost has really been cooking!

A couple of times a day I walk around the yard gathering bunny-salad for Moonpie to eat. She is very fond of cilantro, but she also likes a lot of the edible weeds that grow in the yard - chickweed, dandelions, violets.

In other news, of the hilarious "watch out what you ask for" variety, Moonpie had babies last week. All five of the surviving babies (a very tiny one didn't last beyond the first day) are in the picture, but one is only represented by its pink and white nose sticking out from under the pile.

The babies were born sometime between when we went to bed on last Monday evening and when we got up on Tuesday morning. We didn't know Moonpie was pregnant - she can't weigh more than four pounds - so the babies were a surprise! The book says that the babies will open their eyes after ten days, which means their eyes could open today.

We are hoping to find homes for four of them, but we plan to keep the grey one that matches our grey cat, Louisiana. My son has already named it Louie-too. With the waste generated by two bunnies, the compost pile is going to be smokin'!

Out in the garden, I've been planting almost nonstop. Normally, the planting madness wouldn't even have begun this early in the month, but the garden is nearly all planted. I have just two beds left. Of course, there will be more planting when the cool-weather crops are finished.

So far, the Kagran Sommer lettuce has not emerged (I'm about to give up on it), but the first lettuce (Capitan) is doing well:

There is spinach that is definitely harvestable (not an actual word, according to blogger):

The peas are flowering:

And the potatoes are looking healthy. I need to pull more dirt around these plants:

Some of the seeds that were planted in the last couple of weeks, for warm-weather crops, are already coming up. Four of the seven zucchini seeds have germinated, and those little plants are each making their first leaf. The salad cucumbers have germinated, too.

The bush beans have been patchy in their emergence, and when I poked around to see what was going on, I found that something has been nibbling on the germinating beans, so I replanted a lot more bean seeds. The rows will probably have to be thinned when they all come up, but I'd rather thin a too-thick patch than not have enough beans.

Hope everyone else's planting is going well!

Spring Gardening "Crunch Time" Approaches

First, let me say that, if this page looks unfamiliar, it's because I have been goofing around with the blog templates. For those who aren't currently using blogger, it might help to know that a whole lot of new options have been added sort-of-recently, and I am finally getting around to looking at them. Right now, this page looks too plain to me, but in a few days I will probably have made more changes.

Back to the blog ...

In my own yard, I have begun to work my way through the usual springtime planting; it's just all been moved up a few weeks. A patch of bush beans (Provider) is in, as is a patch of zucchini (Raven). I've also planted a few nasturtium seeds and the salad cucumbers (Straight Nine) but everything else is still in the queue.

The spring crops are coming along fairly well, but I am a little anxious about the warm weather. Will I have any lettuce worth eating? We'll see. Right now, the earliest lettuces and spinach are a few inches high, the peas are developing flower-buds, the winter-planted onions are far enough along that I've pulled a few to use as green onions, the actual green onions that I planted a few weeks back for use later in the summer are seedling-threads that don't look sturdy enough to stand on their own (and yet, they do!), and the dwarf runner beans that I plant a few of for their pretty red flowers, rather than their food value -- they don't set many beans in the Georgia heat -- have poked their first couple of leaves out of the ground.

So far, so good.

Out at the garden/farm where I volunteer on Saturdays, my little family has planted a bed of beans (white mountain half runners) and a bed of squash (yellow straight neck). This represents a very small amount of the planting that needs to get done there, though, and the pace of planting is about to accelerate. The two main gardeners there are planning a big three-to-four day planting bonanza just before Easter. They've been checking the forecast for temperature and rain, and have decided to just get everything into the ground then, pretty much all at once. It is likely that my family will plant another bed or two in advance of the planting bonanza, but the big fields that represent most of the planting space will be planted using bigger equipment (assorted tractors) than will work in the raised beds.

Out at the space where the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) project is moving to, things are moving more slowly:

The field isn't really in black and white, that's just the way the camera was set and I couldn't figure out how to change it back to color, but the space is still a grassy field.

To be honest, even though in some ways it would be nice to get started now on this garden, too, I'm a little bit glad that it is running behind. Working on the other two gardens - my own plus the one out on Dallas Highway - is getting my gardening muscles back in shape for all the work that will need to be done at the PAR garden!

The people who are planning the site (there is more to it than just our own little garden) are making a great deal of progress on sorting out the order-of-events and how it's all going to be funded, so I am not especially concerned that the site isn't ready for us yet.

Our group of PAR gardeners has made progress, too, on pulling together the things that we'll need. I've ordered our sweet potato slips (200!) from a guy in Alabama, and we have the seeds and bean inoculant that we'll need, and I've bought the cottonseed meal and Sul-Po-Mag that we'll use as our organic fertilizer.

A couple of people have been working on finding a whole lot of compost, and they've identified a source of mushroom compost that's not too expensive.

In addition, the Junior Master Gardener group at a local elementary school is helping to start our tomatoes and peppers! Their leader is a member of our PAR group, and she grows those transplants for us each year. When we finally are able to start delivering food to the pantry, it will truly have been a community-wide effort.

When we do get started, we will have a lot to do in a very short time. As one of our gardeners put it, it will be "crunch time!"

We expect to measure out the beds (we plan to use wide rows), dump compost on each bed, spread the fertilizer for each bed, and mix that all together with a tiller in one day, which is why I'm hoping my gardening muscles are in good shape by then.

We meet just once each week, so the next week will involve a lot of planting, and we'll also need to get mulch onto the paths pretty quickly. After everything is in, there will be less hard, physical work each week, but the first few weeks will be doozies.

Uneasy Spring

Dogwoods, azaleas, all sorts of little ephemeral spring things that grow on the forest floor - it's all in bloom, or even past bloom. The ground is warm enough that morels have been popping up, and at my friend's garden/farm out on Dallas Highway, the Colorado potato beetles are already out. Last year, the potato beetles didn't make their appearance until late April.

All of the unusually early activity is enough to make any gardener or farmer uneasy. If this is the end of winter, what will summer look like? And of course, there is the problem that a reversion to normal weather, with the chance of temperatures back into the mid- to low 20s, could damage the fruit that's beginning to form on trees and bushes in yards and orchards all around. Losing the early crop of figs wouldn't be too horrible - our fig tree sets another crop later in the spring - but most of the other fruits in my yard bloom and set one crop of fruit each year (Heritage raspberries, an exception, make an additional small crop in late summer). I'd rather not lose the blueberries, blackberries, black raspberries, and plums.

As the weather continues to be strange, I find myself making contingency plans for a "bad" gardening year. Grandpa Bill, gardening last year in Oklahoma's 60-plus days of above-100-degree weather, didn't really get a tomato crop. He got peppers, but he had rigged a shade over each plant to help protect the fruits from sun-scald. I am going to keep that strategy in mind - I have some tulle that I use over plants as a barrier to insect pests, but the same fabric could be used as a shade-cloth to lessen the sun's intensity over sensitive plants.

I usually start a few tomato plants in early April to plant out at the end of June, and I will definitely do that again this year, as insurance against a horrible July and August, and if we get a freeze that damages our main fruits, I'll make a big space in the garden for ground cherries, a tomato-relative that I usually grow just a few plants of. That would ease the pain of losing most of the fruit.

I'm thinking about putting in a patch of bush beans soon, too, and I wouldn't normally plant those for four more weeks. If a freeze kills the whole patch, I won't have lost much in the way of resources and time. I can just replant the 20-or-so square feet at the end of April, like usual. If we are past the last freeze, though, it will be good to have already made a start. Since the potato beetles are out and on the prowl, it's likely that other pests - and diseases - also will have made an early start. I'd like to stay ahead of them, as much as possible.

Gardeners have to be flexible - the weather is never exactly normal, but this spring is further from normal than any I've yet seen.  It will be interesting to see how this all turns out.