Last week was hopefully Winter's last gasp. The grandkids came up for Spring break, but there was very little Spring to enjoy. It snowed off and on all week long. I put the chess pieces out and we did get a couple of games in...Gavin beat me again. The grandkids left for Houston on Friday. Of course, once they departed, the weather started to improve.
Yesterday, while still cool, it was warm enough for me to begin putting out the vegetables I had started indoors. I transplanted eight Peppadew and seven assorted pepper plants. The seeds for all the peppers were from our previous plants. In planting these in potting plugs inside, with few exceptions, all the seeds sprouted and I thinned each plug to one plant before transplanting outside. I also transplanted six blue dwarf curled kale plants. I planted seeds of two different varieties of Swiss Chard, "Five Color Silverbeet" and "Ruby". I had potted some Yolo Wonder Sweet Peppers inside, but none sprouted. I am also started soaking some heritage beets for planting today. At this time, the only other plants I certainly want to plant this Spring are some more okra (we really enjoyed the ones we had last year) and some magnolias (bunny prevention) around the kale and chard. No tomatoes this year. Don't want to deal with the squirrels! While playing the few chess games this week, we found some small black beans on the chess board. Don't know what they are, but I planted them in the potting plugs that contained the unsprouted sweet peppers. We'll see if anything develops.
Last summer, T decided she wanted more garden area than originally planned. I moved the demarcation line on the east raised bed to increase the garden size of this bed more than 50%. Now, I estimate that the east raised bed has about 250 sq ft and the west bed about 100 sq ft. Unfortunately, I found the expanded east bed was very dense clay. Last year I rented a tiller and tilled in ten bags of Scots Humus and Manure soil into the new section. We did not plant anything last year in this new section and I currently don't have any plans to plant anything in it this year. Yesterday I tilled another the ten 0.75 cubic foot bags of the same Scots soil into the new section. The soil should be getting better and better.
