St. Patty's Day High Hopes

 

The Mighty Trellis

There be signs o' the green outside. 50 degrees today. (Though we are looking at 5" of snow on Wednesday.) Ye first robins showed up. 'Tis March. A grueling and bitter month.

Crocuses seem to be popping, though:


And if I am not mistaken, tulips!


Hope they hold out through the snow.

The tomatoes are now in the greenhouse as well. Two varieties this year: Seed Savers "Wisconsin Chief" and Survival Seeds, "Tiny Tim" cherry tomatoes. We've had good luck with the former in the past.

The photo at the top is our mighty new trellis, which, when the ground unfreezes, will be placed over two separate beds, bridging them and getting the peas/beans on one side and the pumpkins on the other. Pumpkins have had a tendency to go crazy, like the Crinoid in Dr. Who (for those who remember a blog post from a couple of years ago when they overran our deck.

With the democracy being gutted as I type, it will be more important than ever to generate as many calories as we can. The bit that brings me down, however, is that this is a reversal of where we were going with the garden. We now have five beds of raspberries. Tomatoes are a "halo" crop (expensive and massively better tasting fresh) too. But we've had good luck with pumpkin and squash - valuable sources of vitamin B. 

And we'll be trying a new variety of squash this year, the "tromboncino." They seem to be more of a southern variety, but we do have some pretty warm summers. They're supposed to be like a zucchini in the summer, but if you let them grow to full size, they turn into a winter squash. We shall see.








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