Midwest Gardener

We enjoy growing common milkweed and seeing Monarch Butterflies use it to lay eggs. Sometimes we bring them indoors like this time. The wasps got some so I decided to bring these indoors so they will be safe. Monarch Butterflies will be coming soon.

Even though it's pretty early in the season, we already have some tomato plants that have fruit on them. We should probably ripe ones from these as early as next month.

I'm working on a few new tomatoes, and this is one of them. Along with being dwarf, it's variegated.

I think I might shoot for having ripe tomatoes in every month of the year. We've had a ripe tomato in every month so far, from January through April.

We had a little hail storm yesterday. I think most things will bounce back.

If you've never eaten fresh asparagus, imagine crunchy and juicy. There is nothing quite like it.

I always wondered what it would be like to have a fig survive a winter and not start from the ground up again. Now I know. Not only does it start where it left off, but it starts over a month earlier. My in ground fig won't even start showing any signs of life for another month or so. Something as simple as putting it in our detached garage did the trick.

I had this tomato plant indoors, but I ran out of room and had to move it outdoors, even though it is way to early. It seems weird to pick a ripe tomato on the last day of March.

Our Quinault and Berri Basket White Strawberries are starting to bloom.

We've had our Musa basjoo banana for a long time, and it had never started growing in March before. We have had some crazy warm weather for this time of year.

This neat little pepper seedling has one cotyledon leaves is completely white. One of its first true leaves is white also.

I hope at least a couple of them make it.

We are getting down to 18 degrees tonight, so it will likely damage these pretty green chive tops. I'll try to update how they look in a couple of days.

Our blackberries are waking up just in time for a very hard freeze. It is supposed to get down in the low 20s F. Sunday night. They are a thornless type of blackberry called Ouachita.

One way to tell if your Musa basjoo banana is still alive in late winter or early spring.

One of the straw bales in our raised bed has heated up to 120 degrees F. Once it cools down, I'll add soil. We got our first Vego Garden raised be for free. I liked it well enough that I went out and bought our second one.

This is a Midwest Kansas Chaos pepper. Up until this generation, the peppers always had at least some purple. With this one, the peppers have no purple. Don't know if I like it or not. I like the plant though.

This pepper was grown and harvested indoors. It's a Yellow Monster pepper. They get much larger, and they ripen to yellow. I was using the plant to get pollen from for crosses.

The Straw Bales Are Almost 100 Degrees F. When It Is 50s Outside. I'm conditioning the straw in our new raised bed so I can grow plants in it this year. I've been keeping it wet, and I also added a little fertilizer. When a straw bale is kept consistently moist and given a small boost of nitrogen, often just a sprinkle of fertilizer, the microbes inside wake up and get to work. As they break down the straw, their activity generates heat, turning the interior of the bale into a warm, compost like core. This gentle internal heating is one of the reasons straw bale gardening works so well: the bale becomes its own little engine of biological activity, creating a cozy environment for roots to settle in and grow.....once the temperature cools down.

This is an interesting one. Some pepper seedlings that have no green sometimes pop up, and they always die in a short amount of time. This one has one cotyledon leaf that has no green, and one leaf that does have green. We will see how it goes.