Flowers in the Lawn

We found the first couple crocus blooms today. It's been so cold that the bulbs have been taking their time. I have to enjoy these flowers every second I can, since the bunnies typically eat them later the same day I find them.

 

My seed starting experiment is going pretty well. I definately haven't had 100% germination, and i think i've killed a couple seedlings, but overall it's successful. Some of the first seeds i planted now have a second set of leaves. And i discovered that Castor Beans grow really fast and emerge from the soil in quite the dramatic fasion. Those are the squiggly pink ones on the far right. The tall seedlings next to them are Black Eyed Susan Vine.

 

 

The Tulips Have Arrived

It's about 35 degrees out and there's still close to a foot of snow cover in most of the yard, though it has melted a lot in the past two days. Adam and I took a walk around the yard today to see if anything is awake yet, and we spotted the tulips on the south side of the house and a couple teeny tiny bloodroot shoots. Here are the tulips.

I checked my garden journal and it looks like this year is actually pretty similar to last spring. Here's an entry from 3/23/13:

"Tulips are coming up. However, because we still have around 12" of snow in the yard, the bunnies don't have anything else to eat so they've munched all the tops of the tulip leaves. Weather has been unseasonably cool. It's currently snowing."

The only real difference between last year and this year is that I think more of the bunnies died this winter because of the extreme cold. I have not noticed as much rabbit damage this spring so far. Of course, if you compare to 2012, it's quite different. According to my journal, I spotted tulips on 2/19/12 and the first one was blooming on 3/24/12.


Update on my seed venture:

My first seeds sprouted about 7 days after i planted them and now have two tiny leaves. I planted additional seeds today.

A New Venture: Seed Starting

Given the relatively short growing season in southern Wisconsin and the fact that starting my own plants from seed indoors has always seemed a little daunting, thus far I've been confined to growing the types plants available from local vendors and those that germinate quickly enough for me to directly sow them into the ground in the spring. When tomatoes and peppers were the prime plants that I had to purchase, this wasn't so bad. The selection of unusual and heirloom tomatoes and peppers in Madison is pretty good. But now that I've fallen in love with many annual flowers, it became a pricy proposition to include a lot of annuals into garden beds. Enter the grow light. My MGV friend Melissa decided she wanted one for her birthday last month and it was like a lightbulb went off in my head (no pun intended). Why couldn't I have a grow light in my basement too? Luckily, I have a very handy husband who promptly set off to Home Depot to build me a grow light. You can buy full kits, but like most things, you can build this yourself for less.

The last frost date in Madison is May 15th. So counting backwards, of the seeds that I bought, the seed packets that indicated they needed to be started earliest were Coleus, Verbena, and Angelonia. March 2nd was the day. Here's the rest of what I plan to plant in the next few weeks.

 

The grow light Adam built has 4 full UV spectrum florescent bulbs, indicated for plant use. They are 4' wide, so it fits just over two standard size trays. The trays I bought have 36 pots each, so I have a total of about 80 pots total. This should be plenty for me to get my feet wet with seed starting and grow a few things that  I otherwise couldn't have grown or would have to buy at $1-5 per plant. The grow light is on pulleys that allow me to raise and lower it to the desired height. Here is my system with the light raised.

 

 

Here are the first 25 pots I started. I have a plastic dome that goes over the seeds to keep the temperature warm. I misted the seeds with a smaller mister bottle I already had and I'll check the seeds every day to make sure they stay moist. The light is currently just above the plastic domes. After the seeds germinate, you take the plastic dome off and begin to raise the light to keep it 1-2" above the tops of the leaves.

I'll post again once seeds start to germinate. It's rather amazing how long some seeds take - up to a month in some cases.

Salad Spinners Strike Again

The Salad Spinners once again competed in the Great Urban Race: Madison this year.

Fun Fact: How did we get our name?
Funny story. The race used to take place in June. The first time we did it, we signed up 2 weeks before the race because of a Groupon. When you sign up, you need to come up with a team name. We didn't want something lame like "Buckingham Team" or "Mad about Madison" so we tried to think of something unique. Early June is characterized by a few things: Frequent lawn mowing, wedding invitations, and copious amounts of lettuce. We took our name from two of the above, want to guess which?

We were going through a wedding registry for one happy couple (we will call them the Lactucas), and laughing at some of the silly things they wanted. For some reason, we found it particularly funny that they had registered for a salad spinner. "Wow, they must really like their lettuce dry!" "What kind of people eat enough salad to warrant an entire tool for drying your lettuce?"*

That, and the fact that we had a bathtub's worth of lettuce in our fridge inspired our stellar team name: Salad Spinners! We got some green shirts and the rest was history.

Back to the present: this year was our fourth year doing the race. The start was at the Coliseum Sports Bar near the Alliant Energy Center. It's a big bar, with a parking lot, so that was good. However, it's also a full 2 miles from Capital Square with nothing of note in between. We were concerned that the course would be significantly longer than it has in the past. Compounding on our concerns was the fact that there is only one bus route that goes past the Coliseum on the weekends, and it doesn't even go downtown! We decided that we didn't care how we finished, it was more important to just have fun and not worry about running too much.

As we started solving clues, we were pleasantly surprised when we learned that the course had been designed such that all the locations were west of Capital square. In fact, all the locations, except one, were within a nice tidy circle near the bar. The one location was on Capitol Square, and would take us a couple of miles off course. Luckily, we could skip 1 location, so that made the choice easy.

We had to do a few interesting challenges along the way:

First, we stopped at a Kombucha making company. Kombucha is a somewhat sketchy fermented tea beverage. It's supposed to have health benefits, or maybe kill you. Jury is still out.

We had to "wash" our hands in a vat of yeast and bacteria used in making the drink.

 After the Kombucha stop, we ran over to Vilas park. Adam had to ride a bike very slowly through an obstacle course. The only rule was that you had to take longer than 1 minute to complete the course. Adam's expert skills at riding a bike slowly paid off!

 We then had our longest running leg of the day, half way around Lake Wingra to Wingra Park. There we hopped into a kayak. Sweet! we kayak all the time, no problem. Wait, what? We have to do it blindfolded? Oh...

Emily sat at the front and shouted commands to Adam in the back, paddling with a blindfold. We had to navigate a figure 8 course and return to the dock. We did it with minimal crashing!

 From There, we had a couple of stops at locations along Monroe Street, including our favorite kitchen shop, Orange Tree Imports, and the delightful Maurie's Chocolates. We even got a sample Truffle!

Also, as an added bonus, Adam got to push Emily around in a shopping Cart. Don't tell the fine folks at Trader Joes!

From there, we headed down to Regent Street to play Bacardi and Coke Plinko, and then to a yoga studio to mock up a fake person's yoga schedule. Since we skipped the Capital Square location, we turned back toward the finish.

Two more stops: Movin' Shoes for a shoe kicking challenge, and then Nutzy Mutz where we got to hold naked mole rats. Then it was just a short jog back to the finish.

We finished in 2 hours, 50 minutes, which was good enough for 8th place! Another top 10 finish for us. In total, we ran almost 8 miles over the course of the race. We didn't take any bus rides, because the course was easy enough to just run the whole thing. There weren't any places that a bus would have helped much.

We had a ton of fun again, and we look forward to doing it again next year!

*Apparently, the answer to this question is people like us. We now own a salad spinner.

Sad bear (I mean pear)

I guess our garden was running a little too smoothly this summer. Chalk this one up to gardeners' greed. When we came home from church on Sunday, a large branch of our Karl's Favorite pear tree had cracked off, taking a good chunk of the trunk with it. We salvaged the pears we thought were big enough to possibly ripen (count = 150) and composted those that weren't (count = 50). See what I mean about being greedy? :) The pears on this tree are supposed to get Mason jar size, so 200 on any one branch is a little ridiculous. But this is the first year it has blossomed and thus produced fruit, so we just couldn't help ourselves. I emailed a local tree expert to get his take on the best way to help the tree. Hopefully he has some good advice.

On a happier note, here are some pictures of our yard this summer. Each year it gets better and better, and each year I start making my plant shopping list for the following spring a little earlier (I already have a fairly substantial list for next year). Adam decided I'm officially a "garden geek." Since he also calls himself a geek in certain areas, I take this as a compliment.

Ok, so this next one wasn't taken in our yard, it was taken at Nelson Dewey State Park. But they did have a nice prairie. I can only dream of my own full-fledged prairie some day.

 

Vigilance

Posted: Rabbits are not welcome in our yard.

You have received fair warning.

Did you know that rabbits are not rodents? I always thought they were, but apparently, they are lagomorphs.   The distinguishing difference is that lagomorphs are voracious herbivores, while rodents tend to be omnivores. Try to fit the word lagomorph into your conversations for the rest of the day. For example: "That Kyle guy's a bit of a lagomorph, don't you think?" 

Cute, huh?

We have a bit of a rabbit problem. They eat everything. They eat our shrubs. They snip the flowers off our bulbs. They nibble our rose bushes. They even strip the bark off our fruit trees. I have tried repelling or trapping them in the past without success. It was time to escalate the battle.

Yesterday, I purchased a Daisy Powerline 880s pellet gun. It looks really intimidating, and even comes with what I will henceforth refer to as a sniper scope. In truth, it's not terribly powerful, but it is enough to get the job done. I have not yet dialed in the sight, because I need an opportunity to do a little target shooting in order to do that.

However, I discovered this morning that the sniper scope is accurate enough to hit my target at 15 feet. Specifically, I hit a rabbit from 15 feet away out my guest room window.  It was a pretty clean neck shot, which would be perfect if I were planning to save the meat. I am not ready to skin a rabbit yet, so I did not keep the meat. Luckily for his friend, it's not yet accurate enough to hit my target from 35 feet. Soon.

In a lot of old westerns and fantasy novels, people name their weapons. Davy Crockett had Ol Betsy. The Bagginses had Sting. Anybody have a good name for my rabbit-sniping pellet gun? I was leaning toward Widowmaker. 

A quick garden tour

Just a quick tour of our yard.

The first rose of the year. This one smells fantastic!

Baptisia (False Indigo)- A Wisconsin native perennial.

nascent Pears:

Blueberries in bloom:

Siberian Irises

Perennial Bachelor Buttons

Garlic in the front, potatoes in the rear.