Rain, rain, go away...Garden update, hardening off, pea progress

It has been a hot minute! The month of March here in good ol' Corvally was definitely a rough one for this girl. Not a lot of sun really puts a damper both on my gardening efforts and my mood. I have to take a second to give mad props to the manfriend for putting up with me like a champion through this depressive period. He lives just about 3000 miles away and has basically been a saint. Love that guy.

End sappy interlude.

My little babes are growing up nice and strong for the most part and I'm pretty pleased with how my expansion turned out. I left the plastic over the section that will be dedicated to greens and snow peas for a week or so and was pleased to find a PLETHORA of worms when I pulled it back! This is an excellent sign my friends. These worms have been working hard to pull the organic matter (compost) that I piled on deep down into the soil. This creates macropores for drainage, and also incorporates that OM into my clay-filled soil plot. Soil is truly a self-organizing living body. A beautiful thing.

This is my little plot of heaven just after I planted a few square feet of greens. They're hard to see because I might have jumped the gun in planting them so soon, but I just got so excited...In there I have spinach, lacinato kale, white russian kale, curly scotch kale, collard greens, bibb lettuce, and green romaine. Quite the collection! During the summer I juice. Like...really juice. Like. A LOT of juice drinking. I like to make sure I have a pretty large collection of greens to choose from as my juices are at least 50%-75% greens.

Since I planted so early and did not give my seedlings enough time in the hardening off stage, I lost three of my plant babies to a storm. Hardening off is truly an essential part of the transplanting process. This stage involves placing the seedlings outside for a few hours a day, increasing their time spent outside as the days pass. Last year, I started putting my seedling greens outside two weeks before they ended up in the ground. Every day, I increased their exposure to outside conditions. Not only does this prevent shock in your plant babes, it also increases their ability to cope with conditions such as wind or rain. As the plant babes blow around, they strengthen their stems and build resistance to these conditions. We had a pretty solid storm shortly after I transplanted these seedlings so, I lost the youngest of the 16. Their replacements, along with another row of greens are being hardened off as I type!

The rest, I am pleased to report, are thriving! As you should also be able to see on the right, my snow peas have started poking up and are also doing quite well. I've never grown snow peas before, but I'm pretty excited about them. They're one of my favorite snacks.

I planted two varieties of snow peas from seed just to see how each would fair. Not surprisingly, the Oregon Giants did considerably better than the Sugar Ann. Go figure, eh?  The peas closer to the bottom of the picture below are the Oregon Giants, while the peas closer to the top are Sugar Anns. Just over half of the Sugar Ann seeds never emerged from the soil. Last week, I went ahead and filled in the Sugar Ann gaps with Oregon Giants. They should pop up here pretty soon!

The weather here is finally starting to calm down a little bit. We're supposed to get a little bit more rain this weekend, but after that, sun for the foreseeable future!! Look for more posts soon! Thing are about to start heating up :)