A great day to start my garden musings. My daughter's birthday. A record high temperature for the second day, leading me (and many farmers in Cal.) to fear for my avocado crop. Last year's crop was lost to a brutal heat wave right at blossom time. Standing under the trees you can still hear the roar of thousands of bees in the blossoms, which are all the more abundant from having had a year off.
Today thousands of bees were clustered on the front of the hives in a great wide pile- I don't know why. The 8 week old chickens were already finding ways out of their new yard while the older hens watched with jealousy and annoyance. They couldn't squeeze out through the same tiny gaps.
The last of the winter garden is drooping in the heat. My snow, snap, shelling and sweet peas won't take much more of this. The first pumpkins are up. The pepper seedlings stubbornly refuse to sprout. The potato bed is the best it's ever been. It's the first year I took the time to search out a great selection of good quality seed potatoes. My gamble to leave a few pepper plants in last summer payed off. Our mild winter only killed off a few of them and the survivors are exploding with new growth- a great jump start on production. The favas are covered with blossoms. In a flurry of heat wave watering, out of practice, I managed to miss the key lime which is not yet hooked up to the system. It will spring back, but has lost most of its leaves.
It was a gorgeous April day- perhaps my favorite L.A. garden month- a good time to begin, Dream away.....
No comments:
Post a Comment