I'm Baaack

So yes I'm back home. I didn't wait long on Sunday to take a look at the garden. In fact it was the first thing I did. I didn't even go in the house and put away the luggage. The spinach called to me. The overwintered spinach looks fabulous.

And lo and behold my early sowed spinach all came up.

And I'm totally shocked that my peas came up. Almost every one of them. Just a few didn't show. It wasn't that it was so cold out. The ground did freeze on them, but really they were planted on Feb 24th. No one plants peas that early here. I thought all those early sown spinach and peas would be goners when winter really hit. But it never did. Usually I'm digging my garden for the first time around St Patrick's Day.

On Monday I got the rest of the spinach bed fertilized and sowed. I don't really turn over my soil on a regular basis so I just forked it a bit without turning any layers over. I wanted to get some air into the depths. Then I added a row cover to keep out the leaf miners. With the overwintered spinach I don't bother. But this year I think I'll have problems with them in that bed. The insects are coming out a month early. Hopefully I'll get a good harvest there before the miners hit.

I also seeded a lot of soil blocks. Since the soil is so dang warm outside I decided to accelerate the schedule, if I had been home I probably would have done it even more. I seeded everything that was on the March list. Some of them are a week early, but with the soil so warm I'm not too worried.

Sadly Monday night I came down with Montezuma's revenge. I had been lulled on the ship and in Costa Rica to complacency. At the Panamanian airport I got a sandwich at Quiznos (most of the food places were American chains). Sadly I didn't tell them to keep the lettuce off. Monday morning I had a small stomach ache, but it hit hard on Monday night. Tuesday I was pretty out of it. Mostly I sat reading blogs (too out of it to comment though) and writing. I wanted to be in the garden, but standing up made me dizzy. I finally made myself go out and plant the peas and carrots at 1pm.

The weather was beautiful. It was in the high 70s. It felt nice sitting in the dirt. It didn't feel nice standing up. I was tired so I decided I didn't need to strain my soil so I could put it over the little carrot seed. Instead I put on some vermiculite. As you can see I made a bit of a mess with it, but mostly it followed the rows and was so quick.

Here you can see the burlap on the carrots. The snap peas are the foot wide strip in the back. About 3/4 of the front 8' section was seeded before and are coming up. So I seeded the last quarter and seeded about a third of the farther 8' section of bed with snow peas.

I still have many things to do that I was hoping to get done today. I want to plant my onions. I want to seed some radishes. And interestingly enough some self seeded lettuce overwintered and I want to transplant it out of the paths and into the beds. There is a lot of other things that need doing. I never pruned my fruit trees. I'll have to do that soon. The buds are swelling already. I know I'm late.

Some of my Asian greens came up that I seeded right before I left. I want to over seed where there aren't enough. There is a little bit of raking to do. Oh and lots of weeding. All those winter weeds have got to go. I ought to pull out half of my cilantro bed and stir the soil. The seed remaining will germinate. I should check under the old sweet alyssum and if it is germinating already I ought to uncover it. So much work.