Spring explosion of growth, colour worth the wait
Season is one month behind usual timing
On this Easter weekend, it seems as though spring has barely begun. From what I’ve observed, and from what I hear, the season is almost one month behind its usual timing.
My Blireana flowering plum tree began blooming at the end of March; its usual habit is to flower through the entire month. Dig This store proprietor Elizabeth Cull has noted that her forsythia began blooming around midMarch to signal it was time to prune roses. I observed the same timing in my garden. Forsythia usually begins flowering around mid-February.
Transplanting hardy things like onions and leeks had to be delayed until this month; soils remained too cold and wet in many gardens. The lengthy period of cold, wet weather will have, hopefully, set our gardens up for an explosion of growth and colour — something worth waiting for. Help. Through a friend I found a fine young person to assist in attending to cleanup chores that were left undone during the miserable winter and early spring. Over a few five-hour work sessions, we managed to rake the lawns clean, tidy the boulevard, clear and dig vegetable plots, empty compost heaps, spread the compost over the vegetable garden, and prune a wilderness of vines covering the old metal garden shed.
A few last over-wintered vegetables remained to be harvested in the vegetable plots we were preparing. I dug the last few leeks and picked Brussels sprouts — and discovered how tasty they were when cooked together.
I cleaned and chopped the leeks, placed them in a shallow layer of water in a cooking pot, and topped them with cleaned, halved sprouts. The vegetables steamed tender quickly in the covered pot and were delicious eaten with a pat of butter and freshly grated salt. Kale, revived (or not). Though the kale plants looked badly trashed through the winter, each of my varieties re-sprouted from the tips of the stalks last month. Not all gardeners were so fortunate. One of the growers at my local farmers’ market told me that every one of his kale plants was wiped out — for the first time ever in his decades of farming.
It wasn’t that the temperatures were unbearably cold, but that some plants become irretrievably damaged after a second, third, or fourth hit of cold — especially if the soil is wet.
Because of my good kale fortune I’ll be making a kale and garlic tart for this month’s pot luck gathering at my house. It’s simple. Beat together four eggs and one cup cream. Add it to five minced garlic cloves and four cups chopped kale that have been lightly sauteed, then steamed tender, and cooled a little. Pour into a pie shell. Bake at 375 F for 25 minutes or until the top is golden. The neglectful gardener. Last November, as the hanging basket begonia plants at the front of the house began disintegrating, I tucked them against the house wall under a broad porch overhang, and cleaned away the top growth as the stems became easily detachable at a slight touch.
It is at that point that I usually unpot the tubers, surround them in vermiculite in a shallow box, and store them in a frost-free carport cupboard.
That was not done. As the winter wore on, and I noticed the baskets lined up outside, I left them there, resigned to the probability of their having disintegrated into mushy messes in the cold.
Finally, late last month, I emptied the baskets into a wheelbarrow and was astonished to find the tubers plump, firm, and showing tiny pink nubs of initial growth.
I’ve had those tubers for many years. Champagne is their name. The flowers are a fetching blend of cream, pink and peach — darker shades in shadier spots, lighter in bright shade. Champagne is the toughest, hardiest, longest flowering begonia I’ve ever grown.