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The ranuncula corms pre-sprouted in the hoop house are finally ready to plant out, so I am madly weeding the garden to make room for them. One batch was in a clear acrylic bin, which offered an interesting glimpse of the root development taking place beneath the soil.

An explosion of crocuses!

Ewe. Are. Amazing.

Finally got 64 ranunculas out of the bins I was holding them in, and planted them in the ground.

The first blossoms of spring.

Early February was unusually cold, and in spite of that it looks like my large bins of pre-sprouted ranunculas placed in an unheated hoop house with row cover survived the cold. They've been outside for a whole month, and now they are starting to put up bright green foliage so I removed the row...

Thank you for sharing your journey with us Phaedra. It is such a a pleasure to read your posts, and to see your beautiful creations. You are such an inspiration!

We have a week of heavy rain ahead of us, so I moved some ranunculus from small sprouting containers to much larger containers close to the house so they could spread out a bit. Five went in the ground as well, as test subjects to see how they fare with heavy rain. Pretty amazing root...

Interesting. I never would have imagined that there would be such great disparity in the timing of the coldest day of the year.

Yup-- I've definitely turned a corner. Lol 😂

Several years ago a friend gave me a selection of homegrown lettuce seedlings for my birthday, and one plant in particular stood out. Its leaves were green with ragged edges, and it had dark purple blotches dotting its foliage. This was, in my view, a seriously unattractive lettuce. I...

If by 'updating' you mean editing a post that you wrote, I tend to use the 'edit' feature to just make changes to my original post. There is, however, a time limit for this function. Very old posts cannot be modified by the author-- but a request can still be sent to the moderator if something...

Congratulations on your newly acquired garden with the beautiful willow tree. And a warm welcome to the forum from British Columbia! 😊

We've been spoiled by several weeks of bright sunny weather, however later today the rain will return. Much warmer temperatures are in the forecast too, so what's left of the snow will finally melt away. Once it does I expect that the garlic will burst into fresh green growth.

Today we made a Greek salad using dried tomatoes, and we were very pleased with the results. I cut the tomatoes into pieces.

I've never tried straw so can't offer an opinion on that, but carrots do like loose or sandy soil. I would think that lifting the carrots from the ground using a garden fork could do the trick as well, as long as you stay far enough away so the carrots aren't impaled by accident.

We are finding dried tomatoes to be useful too! We dried some tomatoes a couple of years ago and they were so desiccated that they were almost like leather-- so this past summer we dried them a bit less. Then we froze them on a parchment-lined tray, and popped them in glass jars in the...

Sunny days and very cold nights will continue until the end of the week, which is spectacular. Seedlings go out each morning once it climbs above freezing, and then back in at night once it's good and chilly. With the sun reflecting off the snow it's so bright that I am having to shield the...

I moved my Purple Jean ranuncula corms to bins of potting mix yesterday. Only half of them had sprouted, and I had been watering them to try and wake them up. Well, it turns out that the ones that didn't sprout were sitting in pools of water, and they rotted. Hopefully I can remember this...

Still working on developing a more uniform approach to starting pepper seeds, and one point in particular is confounding me. There seems to be consensus that the pepper seeds benefit from heat at the beginning, which makes sense. Pepper growers also say that the pepper seeds should come off...