It let up yesterday afternoon; so I shoveled the front steps and the walk way out, but it is snowing again today but very lightly and with no wind here. According to Doppler it seems to be finally breaking up with what is left moving north and east. Looks like the eastern edge is raining heavily on the other side of the Great Lakes already. Not nearly as severe as was predicted, thankfully. Not even a snow emergency declared here in Minneapolis. With the ground mostly thawed what did fall, although heavy and wet melted down to maybe an effective 4 to 6 and has been thawing from underneath all night long.

I expect water to be running from the street drains all over by now and will continue that way through the weekend. That should shake the fish up real good where those drains empty into streams, rivers and lakes.

It snowed here all night so we ended up with a good foot of wet heavy snow on the ground.

It's bright clouds now and light snow but it's melting already where we shoveled the drive.

Looks like Mpls. won't break that record for most snow in April after all. :-))

All the rivers and streams around here have been going down and I don't know how much this will affect things. The streams were high but not over the banks really too bad at all.

We're high and sandy here so no worries.

Bright out side here right now! Looks to me like most of the snow we got has already melted. All that is left on streets and sidewalks is slush, and those walks that got shoveled are dry already. I think we sorta lucked out. I hope to be back in the garden by next weekend.

My brother and sister were planning to drive down to KC from Minneapolis on Thursday but moved their plan up and left about noon on Wednesday. They should have left early Wednesday morning. It took them 4 hours to make the Iowa state line and I-35 was closed for a bit around Owatonna/Faribault because of an accident.

I fertilized my garlic with Urea on Saturday. I got 89/95 up from what I planted last October. Only 5 of 10 Music cloves that I purchased at a farmer's market in early September came up though. I don't think they were properly cured bulbs because they were already drying out when I planted them. I'm going to stick with German White as my only porcelain type going forward because it is always reliable. My other 2 types this year are Spanish Roja and Chesnok Red. Both are growing fine but are currently about half the size of German White.

I was going to head SW toward Windom and Worthington and then on past Sioux City on Thursday, but called it off. That would have been 165/60 along the Minnesota River; so I was concerned both with the trip down in the snow and possible highway flooding on the way back.

I have all of my garlics showing up, with Maiskij fully rowable and Japanese very close. I do not have problems with my Music, but then I have been planting back my own for something like 5 years now, and it seems to like my garden... My original Music came from Red Gate with some from a local nursery a year or two ago that they got in with their Dutch tulip bulbs from the Netherlands. I have no idea which is which. Originally I lost my very first planting of just about all the garlics, by not paying attention to winter drainage. I had to start over with a spring planting which worked very well and has been the basis of my Music since.

I have pretty good results with Japanese (Sakura?), an Asiatic so it harvests early, and Maiskij is also supposed to be very early. It certainly was the first to sprout this spring just like they said it would be.

Do you water in your seed garlic when you plant? I have always done that with my tulips and just continued that with my garlics in a raised bed, of course. I also plant only about second joint on my index finger deep. Guess what I use to dibble in the planting holes? :-)

Old landscapers trick I measured fully extended fingers and so have an immediately handy measuring "tape". Tip of thumb to tip of middle finger is 6" to tip of pinky 8". :-)

Dutch - I don't water in my seed garlic in the fall but just rely on the rain to do it. If no rain is expected for a few days I might water it. I use my thumb to poke the cloves into the soil. My thumb is about 2" long so that makes the tip of the clove 2" deep and the root end about 3" deep depending on the clove size.

I have a pretty sandy soil; so long as I have mounded up the beds I seem to have very little rot problem, and get a very good stand with about the only missing cloves being from where the damn squirrels dug in my beds.. About the last thing I do before disconnecting my hoses is plant and water in my garlics (and the tulip dividers). I have always watered in all my fall planted bulbs and since that has always worked great for tulips even in heavy soils, I just added garlic to the list. That also closes the soil bed over the garlic cloves so little curious things are less apt to dig them out. I got a plague of little curious things with fluffy tails. They don't eat the garlic but they will dug them out from time to time. They are sorta pets of some friends down the block; too bad they don't just stay in their yard.

Dutch - living in the middle of a forest I have the same problem. Over the years I have acquired enough 2"x 4" welded wire fencing to cover all 22 of my raised beds over the winter. This discourages the little buggers somewhat but they still sometimes dig through the fence holes. It would take hardware cloth to prevent any digging. I've had them dig up cloves and replace it with a acorn or hickory nut and then leave the clove sitting on top of the soil.

I did manage to thin my tree rat herd by a couple dozen over the winter with my .22 and my neighbor's kids took some out with their pellet gun. I'd been seeing a groundhog a few weeks ago but not lately. I'd like to nip that problem in the bud before it helps itself to my salad bar.

No groundhogs around me thank goodness. But the local tree rats and probably some local tomcats dig in my newly planted beds! I am using 1" chicken wire to cover and later on to protect my tomatoes. The tree rats like about one or two bites out of each one as it gets perfectly red; so I fence off the tomato plants and tie the plants to stakes so the little buggers have a tough time reaching them.

I gave up on corn a long time ago. It seems we have raccoons that run the alleys here even deep in the heart of the Metro. We even have urban turkey flocks and I personally have seen a coyote running up a main drag street not two blocks from one of the fanciest supermarkets in the Twin Cities in one of the main shopping areas in Minneapolis proper. Oh and since the elderly widows who fed the alley cats have all died off, we also have enough of a plague of cottontails to girdle young or dwarf fruit trees.

That is balanced by the pair of cardinals that nest along my back alley, and lots of other wildlife and birds. I see eagles regularly year around and coopers and sharpshins hunting the backyard every summer and of course the variety of birds they feed on. Even an occasional redtail in the winter hunting the hundreds of city pigeons. We get loons in the city, sometimes all summer along with resident mallards and Canada geese and wood ducks that nest here in the summer, and all kinds of migrating waterfowl as water opens up during iceout on the city lakes. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of crows that winter in the city proper. There are some videos of the crows and they are NOT an exaggeration which I can say from personal observations.

So I suppose a few tomatoes and some holes in this bed or that are not that big a deal or that great a cost in the grand scheme of things. It really aint a sterile city that I live in thankfully.

Raining too much to work in the yard, even some thunder, so pardon me please as I get a bit wordy. :-)