In the falling dark, and the falling rain

Last night, I planted 26 asparagii (asparaguys?) as darkness descended on our sleepy little town and the rain was fallin'. What a surprise when I visited the garden this morning, to find that some furry critter had dug up several of my asparagus roots. Fortunately, he did not find them very interesting because they were mostly intact. This is a great reminder of why I go through the trouble of completely enclosing all of my square foot garden beds with chicken wire. I may need to put down some livestock fence over the asparagus until they get established to discourage further digging.

Raspberries

The remainder of the raspberry plants were planted last night in the falling dark, twelve in all. I noticed this morning that one Poblano pepper seed and several more basil have sprouted on top of the grow lights. If it is not raining too hard tonight, I will plant the asparagus.

Progress

The garden frame that was seeded on Easter Sunday (8 days ago) is now beginning to sprout. I spied kale, beet and lettuce peeking through the soil. I removed the plastic plant protectors from the seedlings in garden 2 since we are expecting mild (though rainy) weather for the rest of the week. The progress of the seedlings is encouraging and the tomato plants inside the house are about five inches tall.

Sproutlings

We have six spinach sprouts now transplanted from the baggy to soil blocks. That is six out of twenty-four Melody spinach seeds. One of the twenty Bloomsdale seeds have sprouted. This took 5 days.

About half of the twenty basil seeds that were placed in a baggy on top of the fluorescent light fixture have sprouted and been transplanted (5 days). I had zero basil seeds sprout from the original planting in soil blocks.

April broke many records for rainfall in our area. According to Aaron Reynolds, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Buffalo, "“There’s only been six days without rain this month. The only day that was above 60 degrees without precipitation was April 9 (the high was 62 degrees).”