What's a gardener to do when their seed-starting plant table is full, there are no suitable windowsills on which to start seeds, yet there are at least a dozen more types of seed that need to get going?
I started all of my cold-tolerant edible seeds several weeks ago: lettuce, tatsoi, cilantro (coriander). Those seedlings have been eager to get into the ground, and they're ready. The problem is the weather. Although we've had a few warm days here and there recently, temperatures in March are quite a bit below normal. The forecast a few days ago indicated that we'd expect nighttime lows of around 20ºF (-6ºC) for a couple of days, and I don't want to expose these tiny seedlings to those conditions.
Winter has been relatively mild so far -- not as much as last year though -- but spring fever still hits pretty hard. The end of January is when I start yearning for some greenery, color, fragrance, new growth. The bamboo in the garden helps, but it's not quite the same. It's time for a recharge...
I recently had a few hours to spend in Washington DC, and although I did breeze through a few museums (Native American, Air and Space, Art) on that hot and humid rainy day, I made sure to make it to the National Botanic Garden.
After leaving the cold rock garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden, I entered the tropical steaminess of the Climatron, a beautiful geodesic greenhouse, opened to the public in 1960. Upon reflection I should have gone into the temperate house first, to give me and my camera lenses time to warm up before entering the humid jungle of the dome.
This past winter was the second one that I've built a temporary greenhouse in my garden from PVC pipes and plastic sheeting (and a few other parts). Last year I took it down on May 24th, which I thought was pretty late.
Although it's been pretty cold lately, at or slightly below our normal temperatures, I decided not to procrastinate and I started removing the potted bamboos from my temporary greenhouse. Last year I remember it being pretty warm when I did this, and it took at least an hour to get the pots out. Since it's above freezing but definitely not warm right now I'm not going to dawdle this year.
It's been so warm lately. Much, much warmer than normal for February. Our normal high temps this time of year are 45ºF/7ºC, but today it reached 73ºF/22ºC, and the low temps for the next couple of days are also 30ºF above normal! This is fine unless it lasts too long and all of the dormant plants start waking up, but we're not quite to that point yet. My temporary greenhouse though -- getting way too hot!
After our recent day of ice and sleet, of course everything was covered in it and I've posted plenty of photos of the plants that were iced. I don't suppose I need to post a photo of a snow and ice-packed driveway, as pretty much everybody either knows what that's like, or lives somewhere where they never have to care. What I didn't post about is my temporary greenhouse. You know, the one that's built from PVC pipes and plastic sheeting.
Last winter was the first year for my temporary greenhouse, and I was out there almost every day checking the temperature, seeing how the bamboos were doing, and just enjoying all of the green during the blah days of winter. I'm not sure what's different this year -- maybe the novelty of having a plastic sheeted refuge from the cold has worn off, maybe I'm too busy with other things, or maybe since the bamboo in the yard is larger this year I've got enough green to look at -- whatever the reason I haven't been going out to the greenhouse very much this year.
This past weekend I took care of most of my large potted bamboos by laying them down and covering them with plastic sheeting. (Okay, the plastic is more of a blanket than "pants", but "pants" worked so well in the title and almost made sense, so I left it.) It got too dark to take final photos at that time, but here they are now.
When you put off a task until the last possible moment, you're stuck doing it under whatever conditions exist, whether they are ideal or not. This is especially true with outdoor projects, and as it turns out, most gardening projects occur outside -- at least until we all start living in domed cities with moving sidewalks and flying cars. I've known that a hard freeze was coming, and I assembled the greenhouse over the weekend when the weather was perfect for that sort of work.
As I was deciding which chores to do around the yard or house this weekend (clean garage, clean basement, pull vines, paint bookcase were all strong contenders) I took a look at the weather for the week. Good thing I did, because later this week it's going to get cold: 21ºF or so a couple of nights in a row.
The next thing I did Saturday afternoon was dismantle my temporary greenhouse. I knew this was going to be somewhat of a difficult job, but I was getting tired of looking at it.
One of my main plant passions right now is bamboo. I'll be talking about it quite a bit over the next few weeks, but all you need to know right now is that I acquired several new plants last fall, and already had several in pots of all sizes.
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