The First Wildflower

The first really warm day of 2010 came upon us suddenly, last week. Temperatures soared into the 60s and low 70s. Tops were down on the convertible cars, families went for bike rides, and teens floated in rubber rafts on the lake outside town.

For most of April, we were teased with a sunny, clear day, that might hit 50°, only to be beaten back the next by a whiteout of frozen mix driven sideways by howling winds.

Despite the snowy violence, the daffodils on the front of our house popped, thanks to heat reflected off the walls. And when the snow in the backyard melted away from the garden beds, the crocuses appeared. Out in the fields, the first green blades of new grass began to thrust up through the mat of brown, dead stalks.

Walking the dogs through the field last Friday I saw the first wildflowers: spring beauty (Claytonia lanceolata). That day I counted just a few, but over the weekend hundreds more appeared. It’s a remarkably predictable flower. My records indicate the earliest appearance, in our 10 years here, was April 10. In 2004 it was April 12; in 2008 it was April 13; and in 2007 it was tax day—April 15.

Soon to come are the yellowbells, woodland shooting stars, several varieties of phlox, and streamside bluebells.

On my errand list today is new fabric for the vegetable garden hoop tunnels, because around here we know there’s more snow in the offing—right up to the first week of June.

—Dan Spurr

Ax In The Garden

Yesterday Bob fired up the rototiller and tilled most of the vegetable plot. The riding mower was stubborn, though; the battery needs to be replaced, an annual event. I divided our perennial bachelor’s buttons and daylilies and set about putting down new landscape fabric and bark mulch. I used a spading fork to lift the clumps, but then, the clumps were so tough I thought an ax would be better than a shovel to divide them. Bob came over and laughed at me; he said I didn’t mess around—I had grabbed a splitting mall instead of an ax. But it sure did work well!

—Cheryl Moore-Gough

THE GARLIC AND RHUBARB ARE UP!

Today while I gave an early spring gardening talk at Bozeman’s Winter Farmers Market, Bob sowed tomato and pepper seeds for this year’s transplants. We’re seeding our very favorite heirloom tomato, ‘Black Sea Man’ and also ‘Bloody Butcher’ because it works for us in our garden. I simply must have ‘Sun Gold’ cherry tomato—the sweetest treat in the world, but it cracks horribly if you don’t watch the watering later in the season. We’ve had great success growing ‘Big Bertha’ sweet peppers so we’re repeating them, along with ‘New Ace’ which is blockier and ‘Pepperoncini’ for something new to try.

We figure it takes six to eight weeks to grow a good transplant of peppers and tomatoes; we’re soaking okra seeds (aids germination) and will sow them tomorrow. Bozeman is definitely not the best location to grow okra, but we like to try new things each year. Our onion and leek seedlings are doing nicely, and I’m keeping them trimmed to 4 inches until we can set them to the garden.

The foxglove is huge, and the catnip…ah the catnip. I planted some free seeds from the bottom of a container of catnip I purchased at the pet store, along with some newly purchased, fresh seed. What a huge difference. I’ve harvested enough catnip to put my cat into la-la land for a year from the fresh, and the barely living plants from the old seed hit the trash.

Our fall-planted spinach is up and looks good…we had good snowc over so we didn’t mulch or anything. The September/October-planted garlic is up and we can see it from the kitchen window. Our salsify overwintered and we’re looking forward to saving seeds from it this year as it’s a biennial. I’m anxious to see the blue flower since the only salsify I’ve ever known is a yellow-flowered weed. Edible salsify is different. The fennel overwintered nicely and I’m really looking forward to saving seeds from those plants!

The rhubarb is up, and we have our first crocus flowers this morning.

Don’t you just love it when the earth awakens in spring?

Cheryl Moore-Gough

Parsnips, And Two Lives, Come Full Circle

The month of April has taken the frost out of the ground and I have taken the parsnips. They overwintered just fine in our zone 4 garden, protected from the deep cold by a good blanket of snow. Their tops had begun to green, Nature's signal that we had better use them while they have plenty of sugar left or Nature will use the sugar to form their seed stalks. So I took what we needed and left the rest to complete their biennial cycle and set their seeds.

We save seeds of our open-pollinated vegetables every year and look forward to a good harvest of 'Hollow Crown' parsnip seeds in August. Saving seeds saves us a little money and gives us a larger sense of self-sufficiency, and the pleasure of seeing our vegetables complete their lifecycles, itself a reflection and a foreshadowing of our own destiny.

It is an expression of that sense of Nature's completeness that led us to write our next book, due out in Spring 2011. Over nearly a century of combined gardening experience we have taught folks how to plant, care for, and harvest their crops. So it was only fitting that in our next book we tell readers how to save the seeds of nearly 2,000 species of vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruit, trees, and shrubs. It is a thorough book that itself completes our own journey in horticulture. We have come full circle, from seed to seed. The parsnips I left in the ground will do the same and that is good.

—Dr. Bob Gough