It’s early March and FINALLY feeling like winter moved on!
Thank goodness for all the cold hardy flowers I planted late fall/early winter, otherwise I would have very little to look forward to until early summer. I thought it would be fun to show you what’s happening now before the plants burst into blooms overnight.
Long view of the field planted with cold hardy annuals.
The fancy daffodils are ready to pop.
Other than our hellebores (featured photo on top), the first set of plants to flower will be my fancy daffodils (which look ready any day now), followed by muscari, hycinth, tulips and anemones. We wait patiently all winter for these days and when it comes, the mass explosion of flowers leave little time to enjoy the moment with the need for immediate harvesting and selling. This year, I’ve made a promise to myself that I will enjoy the moment and fill my own home with flowers. (Hard to believe, but last season, I can count on one hand the times I set aside flowers for my own home).
Muscari budding up.
Hyacinth coming out of the ground
The trays of seedlings are starting to grow.
Flowers are not the only thing ready to burst. This year, I decided I will make a serious effort to grow a family vegetable garden. The high cost of food was a major factor, especially the savings we would reap by enjoying our own organic vegetables. To help others save money and eat healthier foods, I started a free grow along vegetable garden program. There’s still time to join for anyone who wants to learn how to sow seeds, plant, and care for their vegetables. If you are interested, please go to our Vegetable Grow Along page.
Fall planted garlic growing along with interplanted radishes.
Strawberry plants coming out of dormancy.
Peonies waking up.
The trees and flowering shrubs are also budding up nicely. All of our fruit trees have buds that are swelling, as are our rose bushes. Unlike last year, this year, I will stay on top of weeding the perennial garden area where our peony and rose bushes grow. I’ll also be adding in 4 more rose bushes, Distant Drums (begins with a light peachy/pinkish color and transforms to subtle light mauve/light pink color and Koko Loco with its light lavendar-ish color changing to light mauve). These beautiful roses are highly prized for wedding and design work and will flower this year so we can enjoy its beauty – can’t wait!
Montauk daisy developing nicely.
Last fall we transplanted our Montauk and Shasta daisies from the back of the annual flower field to the perennial garden and they are very happy in their new location. An important thing I learned about Montauk daisy bushes is that you must prune them down to about 6″ tall early spring and then again in July, otherwise their tall stems flop and bottom leaves yellow and fall off – not a pretty sight. I will use July 4th as marker for the second hard pruning.
And of course, I’ll be forcing the flowering of all the fruit tree branches I pruned to experiment with which ones do well. So far, peach tree branches did not flower as well as thought. Of course, with 2 cherry trees, I have plenty of their branches I’m forcing now and will have later when they bloom naturally. As much as everyone is forcing forsythia branches, I’m not a big fan of yellow so I will just leave those alone.
March and April are the busy times for the mass seeding of our annual flowers. While it’s the first sowing of warm weather flowers, we’re working on 2nd+ successions of our cold hardy annuals. So much life in the seeding room and high tunnel.
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