I can’t believe how cold it is today. It certainly wasn’t worth planting any more bean seeds or starting to harden off seedlings outside. Intermittent hail didn’t encourage me to be outside either.
Transplanting: tomatoes, celery, basil. It was the only gardening job I could do inside.
Sowing: more black cherry tomatoes. I don’t think the seed is very good, I had a couple of seedlings start and then die, but very few compared to the other varieties.
I’m an all-weather gardener usually, but I only managed a couple of hours in the gale force northwesterly winds that battered Wellington today.
Planting: zucchini seedlings (bought ones). Not a quick process when you have to work around the mesh I use to thwart blackbirds. Arisaema candidissimum (in front of whitecurrant), A. flavum (in front of yellow raspberry), A. tortuosum (in front of blackcurrant).
Sowing: Chiogga beetroot. I only have seedlings across part of the row I sowed early, so I’m pretending that all along I planned to do successive sowings to get a longer season.
Germinating: crown pumpkin (in pumpkin pile), Zephyr zucchini, spaghetti squash and cucumber – no sign from the horned melons yet. One Dalmatian bean and one Fardenlosa bean, sweet peas, Ladybug tomatoes, black violas, not much sign from black cherry though, no sign of the asparagus yet. Scarlet runner beans in the garden are up.
Flowering: boysenberry, Marcy raspberry, Kees Nelis tulip, Abu Hassan tulip. I still have new daffodils opening. Cerinthe major is just starting to flower by my letterbox. All the currants are now flowering.
Setting: signs of a couple of tiny beans on my broad beans, not much though. I did see a bumblebee working very hard on them the other day.
Constructing: little individual windbreaks for my zucchini seedlings.
Contemplating: hoses and hose reels. I’m going to need to water a lot this summer, despite my mulching. This will be the worst year for it, with all the newly planted trees.
Eating: celery, lots of miner’s lettuce and smaller quantities of other salad greens.
