In an unbelievably balmy weekend, actually kissing the average highs for the season with enough sun to burn my whiter than white shoulders (it’s a good sting, sort of), we planted everything but the watermelons in their permanent homes. We have too many cauliflowers. The original ones have grown much bigger leaves that are overlapping each other.

We pulled up the bolting spinach and a few of the lettuce and replanted. Here is a syphid fly (sweat bee) hovering over them before the destruction:

Several tiny pieces of doomed tomato plant that I dug into the garden plot ended up sending out roots. If an inch and a half is all that a tomato needs, I hate to think what a japanese plant can get by on. We also have a volunteer tomato, probably from seeds from rotten tomatoes we left on the ground from last year.

I doubt it will make it so far as to give us fruit so that we actually can identify the variety.

These are the spots on the yellow pear leaves (and more cat deterring purple yarn!). It hasn’t gotten any worse lately. We weren’t able to find any copper sprays at McLendon’s. Perhaps the warmer, dryer weather is helping.

It wasn’t exactly ideal, but here is one of our carrots, now in the ground around the tomatoes. We hope they can push through the stringy pots. I prefer the peat ones, that apparently Bellingham has a monopoly on.

And chives:

I saw my first blackberry flowers on Friday.

We bought two Atris sweet pepper plants at the Olympia Farmer’s Market. The container book of goodness says that peppers are related to tomatoes, and similarly don’t like cold, so they will be ferried inside at night with their containered cousins.

… it’s colder than Siberia!

But then, it’s not flooding like Iowa or boiling like New York. Then there are the standard California wildfires. About the only normal weather can be found in Phoenix, and there’s only so much good dry can do in front of heat before misery takes over.

All of which is reminding me of this blog post about global warming and how it’s about destabilization and not a pleasant two degrees increase all over the planet.

We planted corn and two types of squash in the ground, along with a few more onions last week.  The cauliflower in the ground has grown a bit, despite whatever has been eating tiny holes in the leaves. The spinach is looking close to bolting.  We have a single flower on the peas and the chive flowers have burst into balls of petals.  It’s slow going back in the cold and wet.  Today’s high was 55, missing the average of 70 by a long shot.

There are dark shiny spots on some of the tomato leaves in the large pots.  We think it’s bacterial speck or spot, whose only treatment we’ve read about is copper spray.  We couldn’t find anything useful at Lowe’s, so we’ll try McLendon’s this weekend.

Mike has confirmed Tux’s guilt as garden destroyer.

Here’s one of the happier still to be planted squash from a few days ago:

I miss Bellingham! The snakes are still at Squires Lake, and Avenue Bread is just as yummy as I remember.

Bleeding hearts

Spring is still unfurling

Damsel fly

Beaver Pond feeds Squires Lake. Here’s the pond:

We saw several frogs in the murky standing water near the pond.

We didn’t see as many snakes as last year, but there were more people around as well.

Even when the parking lot at Squires Lake is packed, as it was for us, it’s still not so many people that you can’t explore in peace.

Two of the overgrown tomatoes made it through their adventures outside.  They’ve come back inside and are stuffed in the window sill.  The cat came back (… the very next day…) and dug up the peas.  Again.  We’ve got two pea plants that look like they will make it.  I’ve covered the pea and parsley containers with crisscrossings of yarn, which seems to be working so far.  We’ve left all of the indoor started plants, besides the large lettuce, outside, and though they’re not looking the best, at least it’s stopped freezing.  With the lone cauliflower that sprouted outside eaten by a bug, we transplanted the potted cauliflowers to the same plot of real dirt.  Lows are around 43 and highs in the upper 50’s (ugh).

We sprouted new cauliflower and tomatoes inside.

The garlic is doing fine, at least:

And the outside lettuce and spinach is starting to fill out their container:

We had a lovely, warm weekend. At last! Though, again, the outlook now is rain with highs in the lower 50’s and lows not much above 40.  We put all the windowsill plants outside on Saturday.  They came through last night, which got down to 48, just fine.  We’ll have to bring the less cold tolerant plants inside tomorrow though.

We have been eating a leaf or two from the larger lettuce that we started indoors, along with using some of the chives.  I am a lot more enthusiastic about our homegrown lettuce than I was expecting.  The leaves are very delicate and have far more flavor than the store bought varieties. The Columbia City Farmer’s Market starts next Wednesday.

The cat dug up one of our 2 pea plants (with no signs from our second planting, still).  Tux, is that you?  Nothing was touched last year, but this year it seems like it’s more likely than not that anything we plant outside will be destroyed. The green garlic (perhaps it doesn’t smell very good to a cat) has started to come up, though, and we think we see a few cauliflower sprouts.  There are some tiny sprouts where we planted alyssum, but it’s too early to tell if they are weeds or flowers.  We’re trying again for some parsley and some not so lanky tomatoes.