I am busily planting veggies...hope I am not jumping the gun too much but the weather is so good and I have raised beds with wooden frames so the soil is about 45 degress now. I have planted this weekend: peas, turnips; various lettuce; green onions; Swiss chard; spinach and radishes. Am I just too anxious? I have removed mulch in various places so I can see the bulb action. Only blooming bulbs so far are crocuses. But the tulips and daffodils are doing well. I watered my new (last year) dwarf apple trees and my blueberry bushes and my asparagus and rhubarb bed and strawberries. I continue to clear the yard and flower beds and take full advantage of the weather. Last year at this time there was snow on the ground and the beginning of several weeks of rain. So if these year is a pleasant variation on that theme, I am ready to take full advantage of it! Hope I am not going to make a mistake by this jump on the season.

Hi:
This is my second year in Maine ( 15 miles north of Bangor), and I'm not having much luck with new plantings... last spring, I lost all of the evergreens I planted the year before, and this spring, even after eight inches of mulch and protective boards around the baby pines and blue spruces, I've lost about half of them already...my land is very, very wet... I don't know what to do...spring fever is getting very depressing... Help?

Organic Janet,

Is your land unavoidably very, very wet? Is it sort of a wetland? Hopefully not an officially designated wetland. Does it just need some drainage ditches dug, or do you need to raise a garden area for better drainage? Perhaps raised beds might work. It might help if you could post some photos.

MM

What's coming up for me is a groundcover that got mixed in with a plant my mother gave me from her garden in Philly. Last year I decided I didn't need the ground cover, it was getting in the way since my other plants were growing larger, so I ripped it all out.....or so I thought.
It looks sort of like hens and chicks, but I'm not sure. I'm not really up on ground covers and I don't feel like looking it up in my books. If it insists on growing I might let it grow in another part of the yard. In a battle between it and clover, I wonder who'd win? I'd rather have it than some of that clover. I like well behaved clover, not the stuff that runs amuck through my garden when my back is turned choking the life out of the flowering plants.

I've got crocus blooming, and several daffodils are budded (a month early). Tulips are also up.
My Jacob's Ladder is awake and my Japanese irises are trying.

I just strolled through the yard.
Shastas are coming up and coreopsis, a few odds and ends of this and that are starting to show a couple of tiny green shoots. The fairy roses are showing shoots too, especially the red ones. A few daffodil bulbs managed to hang on, I started out with well over 100 7 or so years ago.
And an Alberta spruce isn't only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.
I saw in the paper yesterday that a new garden center opened up in Arundel. I shall have to pay them a call next month.

Daffs have been up for a little over a week (got severely snowed on last Wednesday but it didn't seem to bother them) Today, my first crocus is in bloom! A few straggly tulips are poking through. Unfortuantely the deer did a number on our cedar hedge, and one of my new cedars in a pot on my porch looks pretty pathetic. My main concern is my roses since we had such a lack of snow cover this year. A few near the house are showing green canes but the rest are still a mass of brown sticks!