Spinach and Kale

Before I get to the garden, I want to talk about my blog issues. If you don't want to read about it, just skip down to the first photo. The first issue is that Blogger really has no help. If you are having trouble with your blog, you had better figure it out by yourself because they aren't going to help you. So I had to help myself.

I ran my blog through a program that detects malware, but it found nothing. If you look at the blog source code, there is no link to an unknown source. Which means it was probably some widget. However some of my widgets were put directly in the blog template (like statcounter). Just in case it wasn't a widget, I changed my password. I didn't think it really mattered as if you have my Google password you would probably be stealing more than just where my blog gets redirected to, but what the heck. Then I removed every widget from my sidebar that wasn't directly created by Google or me. Which means my new guests have no way of subscribing except copying my URL into a feed reader of some sort. I have no way of knowing how many people visit my blog from now on (old stat was 336K). And I don't have my weather widget anymore (sob). I'll add them back in if I've gotten rid of the problem. Slowly, one at a time. In addition I changed my template to get anything out of it that I hadn't noticed and also a couple of widgets. I'll fix up the template if the problem is gone.

I'm hoping my blog is now clean. I'm not sure what else to do if it doesn't work. If you get any redirects let me know. For the iPad I cleared all the history, cookies, and data in Safari, though don't know if it is necessary. So far no more redirects. But then again it only happened sometimes. I figure if I don't get a redirect in a week, then I'm probably fine and can start adding back widgets one at a time. I really hope the problem is gone since I haven't a clue what else I could do. But back to what this blog is about - gardening.

Monday was a beautiful day. It got to 63F. So of course I was outside. My first chore was to cover the newly seeded spinach bed. I watered it first as it was a little dry. The cover will make the spinach grow faster. One year I did an experiment and the covered spinach was ready about week earlier than the uncovered. It will also keep off the leaf miners when they come out in May.

My main chore was to clean up the kale bed. Most of the kale died over the winter. All of the Red Russian died and most of the Winterbor. The best of the Kale was the Dwarf Blue Curled kale. Some of the dead Red Russian kale stems were and inch and a half thick. They did not want to come out of the ground. So I had to chop them out. There were lots of dead leaves. This patch had a bad case of aphids last fall. I'll probably have to spray some insecticidal soap on them once it warms up a bit. All those old fall leaves have been disposed of, but the new growth is probably ripe for an invasion of aphids. In my last garden I never had aphid problems. I had lots of good bugs that ate them all. Here I seem to get waves of the bad and the good. And in general I have a lot more problems here in the city than out in the woods.

Yesterday and today have been very cold and windy. I've had to rescue my row cover once after the wind whipped it off. Tomorrow we are in for a warm up. We will be back into the 50Fs again which is normal for around here. Then I can get my first round of lettuce planted. If we get a really good day I could bring my tiny just sprouted plants outside. They grow much better with real sun.