The Garden Season Begins

Well, it's officially spring. The Vernal Equinox was this past weekend, we had gorgeous weather and a bright full moon. That was enough to get this gardener out in the dirt, with my little helper of course.(Big thanks to Dave for the awesome picture!)
I got the whole plot hoed, and then Rowen helped me get 50 onion sets in the ground. Those were all the yellow onions I grow as bulbs to store. We have another 50 or so white onions that I want to plant in a smaller space for green onions. Typically green onions are grown from bunching onions, but my research leads me to believe that it can be done with bulbing onions if they are grown close together (1" spacing vs the 3-4" spacing for bulbs) and picked early. This is a bit of an experiment.

The garlic I planted last fall is peeking up through the mulch. Some peeked through a little too early and got a bit of frost damage. Shouldn't set them back too far though. Maybe next weekend I'll take a few inches off that mulch so they don't rot in the damp spring weather. There were also a few garlics sprouting from the row I grew last year. They were so small I missed them during harvest. I'll let them grow a second year and see if they bulk up a bit. Worst case scenario, they don't and I toss them, but at least they can help repel some pests until then.

The turnips I overwintered in hopes of growing out for seed all look dead. :-( I covered them in mulch, but it's looking like none made it. I'll give them another couple of weeks to put on some growth or otherwise look alive, but it's not looking promising. This isn't a huge setback. It's not like there's a shortage of turnip seed. I'm just a little disappointed that I failed in my quest for biennial seed production. I'll probably try again this winter, and do something different. Maybe I'll get one of those windows from my Dad turned into a little cold frame and devote it to overwintering a couple of biennials; or try deeper mulch.

Another disappointment is the Garlic Chive plant that I transplanted from my MIL's garden. She lives in East Missouri, and last summer when we visited we dug up and potted some of her large clump of garlic chives for me to transplant to my garden. It's quite a change from there to NW Iowa, and even though I had them in the ground for most of the summer and fall, and even though I put some mulch on them at the end of fall, it's looking like I didn't do enough. Again, I'll give them another couple of weeks, but initial investigation looked not too promising. Sorry Pat! :-(

The Irises are coming up, and the Russian sage and Rhubarb I transplanted from Des Moines are both showing signs of life. With every day now something new shows some green, and it cheers me immensely.

With the start of the garden season, it's time to bring my winter storage experiment to some sort of close. I'll try and wrap it up and have something meaningful gleaned from it in the next couple of weeks.