March Gardening

Our camera is broken :-( so this post will be without photos of the 2 inch tall tomato starts, the teeny tiny lavender from seed starts, and the finally turning green, starting to look alive yard.

I planted the tomatoes & eggplant from seed, oh, about a month ago now, and they are just now getting their second leaves. This year I did Heinz and Couer de Bue tomatoes from last years seeds and a new variety-- Mortgage Broker. Strangely, the old seeds are faring better than the new ones and I don't know that we'll end up with more than two Mortgage Broker plants.

I put in lettuces and kale from starts two weeks ago, and then promptly started worrying about them since it's barely hovering around 40 at night, and many nights we're closer to 35 than 40. They seem to be doing ok, now that they are protected from the greens-seeking chickens.

The chickens! Who are laying again! All three are back to business (or so it seems from our egg count, though our confidence in Goldie is so low that neither of us will truly believe it until we SEE it).  It's great to have overflowing egg cartons in our fridge and the daily egg-hunt underway.

A week ago I put some sprouting out of control kitchen potatoes (i.e. potatoes we bought from the store and intended to eat, not seed potatoes) in the ground. And I supplemented them with three varieties of seed potatoes today-- Purple Majesty, fingerlings, and Caribe super-early.  We'll be swimming in potatoes come summer, and I'll wonder what I was thinking, but if there's any urban farm activity that I enjoy more than the egg hunting, it's the potato harvest! It's far too much fun to dig around in the dirt and find dozens and dozens of potatoes in there. (I'm also a big fan of the way that potato plants look when they are full and flowery and so un-potato looking.)

This March has been WET. Last March was dry and springy; I remember last March so quickly because it was our first month in our new house.  We're continuing to hunker down (all the while hoping that April brings SPRING. And SUN.)

Since I can't post a true garden photo, here's an update on our resident rodent controller, who also happens to be the best resident lap warmer, all grown up (or mostly anyway):