Taking down the greenhouse for spring 2013

This year, spring came kind of late, but this weekend, it is finally in the 60s with a forecast that looks OK. I decided to take off the greenhouse that has been up since 23 September of last year. These plants have been under a greenhouse for 6 1/2 months, but they are still looking pretty good. I keep mostly bamboos in this thing.

It took about an hour to move all the stuff out and clean up the area.

Some of my garlic emerging in the fall

It is around the time to plant garlic so I ended up putting them in rows, about 10 inches apart, while their individual distance is usually about 6 inches just to ensure they get nice and big. I tilled up the soil, and made separate beds so the cloves can dig their roots into the ground further which will result in larger bulbs next summer since they can take in more nutrients.

Here's one of my beds for soft neck garlic with last year's bulbils, and new cloves that haven't emerged yet.

Adding 10 cubic yards of mulch, top soil, and compost to the gardens

Last week I ordered 10 cubic yards of mulch, top soil, and compost with an even amount of each material to my gardens. It took me about 30 hours total to use it up, and my main project was a flower bed full of mostly tree & itoh peonies, 2 musa basjoo banana trees, and 3 Asian pear trees.

Here's about half the pile as I've already used up the other half to improve the soil in my new flower bed.

1 year old tree peonies have arrived

2 1/2 weeks ago on May 24th, I have received my order of 42 (1 year old) grafted Japanese tree peonies. I decided to start them all in 2-5 gallon pots depending on their size so I can get them well established on their own root systems before getting them in the ground.

Here's the 1st out of 2 boxes that came on May 24th.

Update on the itoh peonies

It has been 2 weeks since I received my 5 large itoh peony tubers which can be found on this link. http://stevespeonygarden.blogspot.com/2012/05/unpacking-new-itoh-peonies.html#more

After dividing all of these guys into several pieces, they have since started to sprout leaves. It's not shown in these pictures, but after inspecting one of these pieces, they definitely have root growth starting as I've been watering them with clonex, willow tea, and really pampering them. They should start producing their own tuberous roots once the leaves are done growing.

One thing that I've noticed is that the larger pieces tend to be producing larger shoots which means that the size of the tuber matters a lot. They all still have plenty of growth left in them. These plants were recently watered with worm tea so the residue is still left on them.

Scarlet Heaven

Unpacking the new Itoh peonies

Last week, I received a box of 5 dormant itoh peony tubers. It was a pretty heavy box so I was definitely excited to see what was inside. I ordered Scarlet Heaven, Lemon Dream, Canary Brilliance, Cora Louise, and Old rose.

Here's the box it came in.

Peony blooms

 I don't have that many of them at blooming size yet, but generally tree peonies have the largest blooms, and herbaceous types have the smallest blooms. Itoh or intersectional peonies should be somewhere in between.

Kinshi Tree peony

Update on the garlic

I have planted around 2000 garlic gloves last winter and not surprisingly, most of them are coming up now. I have around a dozen species, all in separate beds of both hard neck and soft neck species. I don't care much about the names since the foliage on them is very hard to distinguish, but I'll know they are different when I harvest them. One of the things I am noticing is that the ones planted earlier in october are just a little bit further along than the ones planted as late as December, but they seem to be catching up so planting times don't seem to be that big of a deal.

Here's my original species of softneck garlic which produces average sized cloves with a pretty decent flavor, but doesn't have a very long shelf life.