Honey, I drowned the tomatoes!

We had a huge rainfall on Tuesday just after a gorgeous, unseasonably hot long weekend of intensive planting and weeding. Huge! It poured all day. We had managed to plant or pot most of the sprouts by Monday night. At 10 o'clock pm, after getting the kids to bed, I went outside to plant some beans and tidy up the yard, and asked Josh if he thought the tomato and basil sprouts, the tiny ones which were still too small to plant, would be okay out in the rain, and he thought it would be okay. The temperature was staying warm, and some rain and wind would do them some good. So we left them out.

Josh was home and checked on the plants a few times during the day, dumping out the excess water from the trays under the pots and the jiffies. I got home late from work because I had an event, and before eating dinner, I went to check on the garden. I realized that some of the orange juice cartons and yoghurt containers we had used as planters did not have holes for drainage in the bottom. We did such a mass planting two weeks ago of the San Marzano seeds, I was washing the containers and rinsing them in alcohol and Josh was punching holes in the bottom and filling them with earth. I did some punching and filling too. It was such chaos that it does not surprise me that we missed a few pots. It was not an issue until Tuesday, because that was their first big downpour. I did a search and rescue mission and made sure that all pots had proper drainage, but some of the seedlings were buried in mud, or maybe fell out when I poured off the excess water. I am watching to see what comes back.

We ended up with far too much basil and hot peppers. I have been giving away big pots with tiny sproutlings in them to everyone who says they'll take some. I am leaving a bunch in pots, all over the back yard, as insurance in case snails, slugs or whatever demolishes the ones I planted.

The flower garden is looking good. Now that I am taking photos regularly, I am trying to keep track of the trend of what blooms when and for how long. Of my first blooms in mid to late April, the daffodils and hyacinths finished within a couple of weeks. The late April lameum and periwinkle are finishing after a month, and the lilacs started about two weeks ago, and are going strong. I have two stages of tulips, tall red ones and shorter ones with sunset colours of orange and red swirled, which are just finishing, and a second variant of colour changers that started out pale yellow and turned white with pink/red ripples. They are tall and gorgeous. My only surviving blue anemone bloomed for a week or so and just finished. The lillies and one yellow iris are preparing to bloom. I planted the ruffled pink stargazer lily I bought for Josh (he loves stargazers), and it just finished blooming. My poppy appeared almost overnight full sized (no buds yet). My cosmos are sprouting, even the ones I just planted. Everything doubled in size after the rain. Iulia and I are continuing to swap plants and flowers. I am trying to sprout some more dianthus, but I realized that two of the spiky pale green plants Iulia gave me at the end of the summer last year look a lot like the surviving remnant of the dianthus I almost killed a couple of weeks ago while weeding. Maybe I will have a lot of it. They are so pretty!

My columbines are in full bloom. I have one columbine which is pale purple, one colour. The rest are purple-white mix. Iulia and I are waiting to see what the rest turn out to look like, but I may not know mine until next year. They grow slow at first, then they come back every year faster and larger. My morning glories are starting to sprout, and my two roses are shooting up. My bleeding hearts have been blooming for a month, and are still going strong on the shadier side of the house next to the hosta. I am making my peace with the hostas. I never liked them much and could not understand why my mother went to such lengths to keep the deer from eating them up in Morin Heights, but (pardon the pun), they do grow on you. And they thrive in places that are too shady for much else. The one in my pit of doom is doing just fine. Below you see lameum and some type of ground cover that came with the house which is going nuts. 

Oh, and by the way, I have these wonderful blue spiky flowers that turned up in my garden last year. I really like them, and was wondering if any of my readers could identify them? Josh, reading over my shoulder as I write reminded me that Claude our agronomist friend is supposed to drop by tomorrow with his results from our soil sample and a big bottle of spray peroxide which he recommends we spray on all of our vegetables to reduce airborne bacterial contamination like we had last year. Claude showed us this cool app he has on his phone last weekend

called Leaf snap. You take a photo of a leaf from a plant, weed or tree you want to identify against a white background and it will tell you what it is. So if no one can identify blue spiky, maybe Leaf snap can.

The vegetables are a big experiment this year. I seemed to have taken care of the aphids on the peppers, but I am monitoring them closely. I am trying to keep some basil and peppers in pots and some in tubs and some in the ground. Some of the ones in the ground are getting munched despite my early saturation of everything with slug-b-gone. I am not sure it is slugs, I need to check them at night and I have not had time. The green onion and leek ends which I planted are starting to sprout (talk about recycling!) and I have seen tiny lettuces and one green onion from the seeds I planted directly in the garden. The green onions I sprouted indoors are doing better. The tomato plants which did not drown or get washed out or buried in mud are starting to grow their second row of leaves. Next week I will plant some in the garden and wait on others. Josh built the cages for those already planted, the chocolate tomatoes and the store bought San Marzanos. Based on last year's challenges, we did a single row in each cage, put the bottom lower to the ground and put up three rows right off the bat. I initially alternated rows of basil, but once the cages were up I realized it was too tight so I moved the basil to the back of each row and on the edges of the bean patches up against the fence at the back. Josh had to buy more chicken wire, and I picked up some plastic mesh stuff from the dollar store today to use as trellising for the beans on the fence, and on the trees around which we hope the morning glories and the climbing roses will twine.