The northward migration is in full swing. I've been seeing Canada Geese streaming overhead every few days for the past week or so. Today, two enormous skeins went over, and then a smaller one. But the glory of the morning was to see the Snow Geese passing over. They have a sweeter, more musical cry than the harsh honks of the Canadians. I heard them long before I saw them, then waited, scanning the skies until I saw them. They fly higher than the Canadians too, way up into the reaches, looking like nothing so much as a thin silvery chain trailing across the heavens.
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Yesterday I bought what I needed for my early veg garden. Four pounds each of Yukon Gold, Red Norland, and Eva seed potatoes. 'Eva' is a new to me variety; the nice man at the feed store said Eva produces more uniformly sized, medium spuds and they store better than Kennebec (which is what we all plant around here). I also bought a small packet of yellow Stuttgarter onion sets. I'll try again this year to get a crop; it's very disheartening to have to battle this new pest, the allium leaf miner, because up until about 6 years ago, onions were an easy and bountiful crop for me every summer. Now it's a cause for rejoicing if I get a handful of edible bulbs. Last year, I covered the little bed with fleece and sprayed/dusted the sets and emerging plants with Captain Jack's Dead Bug juice, which contains spinosad, an organic pesticide recommended for allium leaf miner. This seemed to work pretty well; I got a little lax about keeping the fleece tightly closed and i think some of mature flies got in to lay their eggs on the onion leaves. But at least I got a few good bulbs, which is a victory because otherwise I'd have got nothing. So this spring, I'm putting the sets in and immediately dusting them and covering them tightly. I'm also going to sprinkle the soil with wood ashes, which are supposed to be a deterrent.
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I got a $5 gift card from Ace Hardware for my b.day and I blew it all on seeds! I bought fennel, penstemon, yarrow, poppies and I think something else, but forget. I am getting old.
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This morning, possessed of a garden fury, I went ahead and actually PLANTED all those new seeds as well as a couple of things I've had sitting around. I've got trays under lights on heating pads and in the greenhouse. If everything actually germinates I'm going to be swimming in new plants.
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Continuing progress on the Folly Wall. I set 20 more bricks on the south door jamb. Then, while that was setting up, I poured two more small pavers (in the basement; they'll cure better down there). After that, I tore down part of the south facing wall of the first raised bed, which I really just threw together a year ago and it looks like it. I got some secondhand concrete blocks a few weeks back and I used them to rebuild that section of the wall, discarding a lot of the stones that never should have been used in the first place. It looks much better and it's certainly a lot more stable now (part of it was sliding down against the weight of the soil in the bed).
This afternoon, I'm going to try to level out the soil in that raised bed and move it back against the newly re-set wall. Then, I'm going to turn my attention to the south east corner. That corner is built up of half-width concrete blocks to form a sort of half fallen down corner...the whole idea of the Folly Wall raised beds is that they look like the remnants of an old building that has collapsed, leaving uneven stone and brick walls, some filled with compost, some with water. That southeast corner has a square water feature tucked right up into it and that needs to be finished. I want to make the corner walls a little higher and then paint them some dark color (probly black so that tall water plants in the water feature will "pop" against the dark color).
Well, it's a very silky soft day out there today and the spouse needs to be taken for walk so I better move.
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