What to Plant Outdoors This Week

(5 weeks before the last frost*)

Seeds
You may have already planted seeds for peas and spinach outdoors, if the soil was workable, and maybe carrots, beets, lettuce, green onions and parsnip seeds.  

It also pretty safe to plant chard, kale, endive and kohlrabi seeds.

Plantings
You also might have already planted asparagus crowns and horseradish crowns or roots. Onion sets or hardened-off onion or leek transplants can also be planted in the garden.

This is also the week to start potatoes.


*  I like to use Dave's Garden website for calculating freeze/frost
    dates. They predict the following for us here in the Green
    Spring/Levels areas:

• Each winter, on average, our risk of frost is from October 12 through May 4.
• Almost certainly, however, we will receive frost from October 25 through April 18.
• We are almost guaranteed that we will not get frost from May 19 through September 29.
• Our frost-free growing season is around 161 days.

Our friends Steve and Ruth at Church View Farm near Three Churches use May 1.

Crocuses and Daffodils

We woke to a covering of snow this morning, after a little more than a week or 10 days of crocuses and daffodils blooming.

Capturing April Showers

I bought these old wine barrels a long time ago, and finally installed them this weekend. We've not yet connected the distribution and overflow hoses, but we've now got a downspout in both front and back yards draining into barrels. Our other two dounspouts drain into an underground basin in the flower bed next to the driveway.

Back-Crossed American Chestnuts

We've got about 40 American chestnuts (Castanea dentata) on our farm, all grown from seeds. At least 20 are third-generation back-crosses with Chinese chestnuts (Castanea mollissima)

to develop resistance to a fungal infection called blight. Specifically, the blight is caused by an Asian bark fungus (Cryphonectria parasitica, formerly Endothia parasitica) accidentally introduced into North America on imported Asiatic chestnut trees in the Bronx Zoo in 1904.

In these photos, Diane is looking at the Spring buds. Among our varieties, the bark and buds are distinctly different between the two BC3 back-crosses we've planted (Hahn x OpAm and Cain x OpAm). The Hahn trees are faster growing with many Chinese qualities.

You can view the slides from a presentation I made for the Growing Native Program administered by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and now the Potomac Conservancy.

Pruning River Birches

We don't like to prune River birches (Betula nigra), ever. We've got an 18-panel, 4.2 kW, grid-tied PV solar system, and in the summer, our very large river birch blocks it, reducing its capacity by almost 40%. We decided to remove one of the four main stems, and we followed conventional wisdom, making the cut in late January. Because the limb hung over multiple phone and power lines, we hired a tree service to remove the limb with their boom truck. Admittedly, there was no natural collar that was evident, but I was immediately concerned that the remaining stem was too long.

I had only my small 14" arborist saw in the truck and decided to fix it when I had my big saw with me. I also wanted to use a taller ladder than what I had on hand, because i didn't want to accidentally damage the adjacent trunk. Unfortunately it warmed up right away, and we missed those next to weekends at the farm. I should have found a way to do it with the small saw. As we watch the sap free-flow from the cut, we're crossing fingers hoping the tree will continue to thrive.

Normally the beginning of meteorological Spring is a time full of optimism. I don't think I'll be content until I see this tree leaf out in April.