The First Plants of the 2022 Gardening Season

 Every year my two great joys in life collide in an almost Armageddon-like battle.  My beautiful, delicate, sprouting seedlings meet my cats.  Not just my cats, but specifically Cringer the Battle Cat whose alias is the Plant Terminator.  Cringe is my princess.  At least that is what my vet calls her, so it must be so.  She is a beautiful medium hair tabby who is also highly strung.  OK, let us just say she is our neurotic cat.  

Cringe pays no attention to me or my planting efforts.  In fact, if anything, she completely ignores the entire process - that is until my plants start to emerge from the soil.  This is when Cringer goes into the Plant Terminator mode.  She swoops down into action batting the poor little sprouting seeds into submission.  By the time Cringe is done, most of my poor little seedlings are no more.  I have to admit it can be quite heart-breaking to come home after a long day at work only to see the cat-created devastation.  None the less, I cannot be angry with Cringer.  After all she is my little princess.

This year, I enlisted a new plant growing system to try and dissuade any cat-astrophe (excuse the pun).  Enter the NanoDome humidity dome complete with two indentations on the top designed to neatly fit two tandem SunBlaster LED grow lights.  I found these at Johhny's Selected Seeds which is one of my favorite purveyors of all things garden.  This seed starting system allows me to light 4 regular size flats with ease.  The dome is made of a rigid plastic that, so far, has withstood a cat standing on it with ease.  

The photo is a flat of germinating Cosmos.  I planted the seeds on April 7th and this photo was taken on April 12th.  So far, so good.  The seedlings are growing quite erect which speaks volumes about the lighting system.  Each 48 inch LED light tube only needs 54 watts!  I think this would be a great option for those living off-grid and using solar power.  My homestead is located in a power-outage plagued area and the wattage usage is what attracted me to this product.  These lights are very generator friendly.

I find myself endlessly admiring my little seedlings.  I go back to that kindergarten student who was enthralled by his pumpkin seedling Mother's Day gift so many years ago.  Yep, I think another gardening season has begun.  

Cheers!

Tom
                    

2022 Gardening Season Begins

 Greetings from the north!

I do not think I am alone in this, but as I grow older I tend to look back over my life lived to try and find those "formative moments" that somehow steered me, or maybe nudged me, down the path of life I am on.  Sometimes it is not clear to me how I wound up where I am at.  Other times, I can point to a specific event in my past that explains why I do this or that.  Such is the case for my love of gardening.  I can trace it back to my early childhood and a project I did for my mother in kindergarten.  You might say it was putting the garden in garten.

We decorated an empty soup can, placed dirt in the can and we each planted a single pumpkin seed in our planters.  It was a Mother's Day gift.  The teacher, Miss Tuma I think her name was, had us place our planters in the sunny windowsill of our classroom waiting for the day we would proudly take this wonderful treasure home to our mothers.  We all kept watch on our planters and I believe teacher kept them watered.  As Mother's Day approached, my little soup can planter displayed the miracle of a sprouting seed.  It is an event which, all these long years later, still causes such joy in my heart.  

I remember carefully holding my treasured gift for my mother on my walk home.  Thinking about it, I wonder how many of those Mother's Day planters never actually made it home.  In my case, my planter did make it home.  My mother placed the planter in our kitchen window which was the sunniest window in our house and told me we would plant her gift in our backyard once it was warm enough.

I am sure I was impatient and probably asked my mother every day if we could plant the pumpkin yet.  You know how young children are.  But finally the day arrived, and my mother and I placed the now vigorous seedling in the ground.  I kept an eye on the pumpkin vine all summer long.  That plant grew and grew and grew.  I was absolutely amazed at what came out of the flat whitish pumpkin seed.  By the time October rolled around, my mother's pumpkin vine had produced at least half a dozen huge pumpkins - or at least huge to a first grader.  From this point forward, I was forever hooked on gardening.  

This has been the first year I have struggled to plant my seeds.  I have been down in the dumps for months and cannot seem to climb out of the hole I find myself in.  So this year, I planted some pumpkin seeds in honor of the event that started me on my long gardening journey 52 years ago.  It did the trick.  I planted two flats of various garden plants on April 7th, which also happens to be my late brother's birthday.  Now I wait, just like that 6 year-old boy from so long ago.

Cheers!

Tom
       

Along the Garden Path

 I created this blog some years ago and never published a thing.  Just like Robert Burns said, or at least I think he said, "The best laid plans of mice and man can still go wrong."  I also might add that "life" has a way of  creeping up on us and then slapping us down just when we think things are finally going our way.  I know I am not alone in this, but over the last few years I have been quietly sinking down into an emotional hole that I just cannot climb out of.  It appears to me that our society is suffering a severe case of political diarrhea combined with an unwillingness to accept the fact that no matter how different we may seem, we have far more in common with each other than difference.  This blog is going to be my little place on the 'Net to help me work through my feelings and to share my love of gardening.

Gardeners are an optimistic lot.  We have to be.  To plant a teeny tiny seed in the earth and to nurture it, water it, feed it - love it, in the hopes that it will grow and thrive requires optimism.  Now that I think about it, what the World needs is more gardeners.  In fact what I think we need is a constitutional amendment that states all politicians and judges must be avid gardeners.  Then let us see what happens.  I would bet the World would become a more kinder place.  Or at least I would hope it would be so.

I live close to the 45th parallel and garden in a zone 4b area.  The significance of this is that my winter temperatures can dip to -30 F (which is -34 C) and remain there for days at a time.  That is where the "b" part of zone 4b comes into play.  With the continued global warming trend, the hardiness zones needed a little tweaking, thus a and b was created.  4b tends to have warmer temperatures than 4a which can make a huge difference in plant survival rates during the winter.  I can attest to this as I enter my seventh year here and have only had one winter where it got to -30 F and that cold spell only lasted 2 days.  Do not get me wrong, I am not gardening in a tropical climate.  As proof of this, I submit the gardening year of 2020.  I had an unusually late frost on June 13th and an early frost on Sep 15th.  My frost-free season was barely 90 days long!

The photograph of my little owl friend dripping with icicles was taken in my yard on April 1st and is a reminder of a gardening "truth".  I will start by stating that I do not believe their are many hard and fast rules in gardening, but if there were, probably the number one rule would be never to rush the season.  I would call this a gardening truth.  There probably is not a gardener alive that can deny the intoxicating feeling one gets from the first gentle warming breezes caressing the land after a long winter's slumber.  The urge to plant can be irresistible, but resist we must.  I am sure every gardener has a story about rushing to plant a tender vegetable transplant into the garden only to see the poor thing succumb to a late spring frost.  

I hope you will follow along with me as I walk along my garden path.  More importantly, I hope you will walk down your own garden path.  

Cheers,

Tom