Briscoe's Seeds for Thought

Here I am in the Bahamas, after months of snow I was hoping to be warm for a while. Even though I am standing under a palm tree, please note I am wearing blue jeans. The Bahamas have been cold this year too! Not freezing, but not all that warm. Compared to Virginia it feels great. I have located some blooming bougainvillea and some other flowers. My next blog photo will be off masses of flowers, something all us gardeners have been dreaming about. Because it has been unusually cold here, no one has set out their annual plants yet, only the perennials are blooming now. Until then, I will be gone fishing. Talk to you later!

We are finally able to report actual planting in our “A Year in the Life of a Garden” cold frame. Today we began by helping ourselves first with a salad garden. We are growing all the lettuce varieties offered by The Growers- Exchange.com: Wildfire, Arugula, All Greens, and Spicy Mesculin. All these annual plants will be finished by June, the lettuces wilt in the early summer heat.

The night temperatures restrict us to cool season plants for now, but as spring progresses we will add a basil plant along with any other herb plants useful in cooking. Our small gardens will produce plenty to eat from our veggies and culinary herbs.

We plan to add lots of flowering annuals to compliment our herb plants. Annual vines such as Moonflower and Hyacinth Bean will climb trellises and frame our beds. We like to grow old fashion favorites like celosia. We have several varieties: the brain varieties ‘Cramers Burgundy’ and ‘Lemon Lime’ always draw attention in the garden and as a cut flower. The plume type celosia plant has an entirely different flower and makes a great filler in bouquets. I am getting ahead of myself, celosia planting time is at least a month away.

For now we will grow salad plants and a little collards, kale, and broccoli too! Soon we will begin planting example gardens for our herb gardening kits. We hope to have pictures of all growth stages, which we can post on here on the blog. Herb gardening can look like weed gardening so our challenge will be to add flowering annuals for color and texture.

Next week we will have photos of the baby salad plants! We encourage you to follow our garden and makes suggestions if you like…

Last fall when I first began this gardening blog, I reported on my seed collecting endeavors. Seed collecting is just the first step towards growing plants. All those ziplock bags full of seeds were carefully stored over the winter.

And now we are at the next step, which is to plant the seeds. I had collected seeds from various flowering annuals, some perennials, and a few herb plants. The goal is to plant wildflowers in all the conservation grasslands around the farm. Annual plants such as cosmos and Gomphrena will give color this year as the perennial natives establish themselves. To create a blooming prairie effect Dames Rocket and Shasta Daisies start blooming in spring and are followed by Coreopsis, Rudbeckia, Ratibida, and Echinacea in summer. A total of thirty types of flowers were planted

This year I am planting what I call “the grand finale”. Summer into fall will find Helianthus full of yellow sunflowers intermixed with the blue haze of wild Ageratum. I will have to wait until the following fall to see how it works, perennials must have time to establish. But for now we must wait and have faith that planting these seeds in the cold ground will sprout and grow in spring.

As spring gets closer, these recurring winter storms will have to stop sometime. Today is bright and clear but the fifty-degree temperature feels more like forty. We are not there yet! Here in our greenhouse, spring feels like a real possibility. All of the little annual plants are growing nicely. Herb plants are a little more complicated, so some are grown but dormant.

No culinary herb represents summer better than the basil plant. Looking at these strong little seedlings, we know we will soon be herb gardening. And basil will be high on our list, our frozen pesto is long gone, so we cannot wait for this year’s first crop of fresh cut basil. Read this recipe and start dreaming yourself…

The Perfect Pesto