spring garden notes

[buckwheat]

ventured out to check vegetable garden today .......I'm in michigan and this is first day this year temp has risen above 50 i covered carrots with a large amount of straw last fall.... could only find a handful of about 10 or 12 pounds that i was expecting to find. looks like the mice?? got most of them.

tilled mucho horse manure into soil last fall and covered with wheat straw..........lots of wheat berries in the straw and it grew few inches before it got real cold......i read that wheat was an annual and that the wheat would die off by spring........but that did not happen......

soil is still wet, thought not soggy.....is it ok to plant peas and lettuce? TIA.............

[Brooklyn1]

Was a very cold winter, critters ate whatever they could find. Here in The northern Catskills I've learned not to plant much in the fall to over winter, just onions and garlic... critters don't eat alliums. I don't plant carrots, they're a pain to grow and caqrrots are inexpensive when purchased in bulk.. I feed carrots to the deer so I buy 25 lb sacks for about $15.

Find another source for straw, it shouldn't contain seeds... but horse manure always contains lots of seeds don't use it unless it's been hot composted to kill the seeds.

Now is probably a good time to plant cool weather crops, like peas, anything in the cabbage family, beets/chard, lettuce, turnips, spinach, etc.

[songbird]

[e-mail] wrote: ...

yes, wheat is an annual, but it tolerates quite a bit of cold with a good snow cover and we certainly had that this year. :)

winter wheat is a common crop here in michigan, i'm not sure where you heard that from? i planted both winter rye and winter wheat last fall as ground cover crops and green manure for later this spring (when i can actually do something and turn it under). both of them have done fine. even some of the last planted seeds that went in right before the ground froze seem to have sprouted under the snow and are now growing when we get some sunshine.

oats won't make it through a winter.

i too went out yesterday and today to check a few things out. a few flowers are starting to poke up. at last. been a long cold winter.

good luck if you do, i'll probably wait a few weeks yet, the ground is frozen in most places here and the weather is still looking to be too cold overnight.

songbird

[David Hare-Scott]

No, you are over generalising. It depends on what the horses have been eating. There are plenty of situations where horses on either hard feed or pasture do not eat viable seeds. If you don't know then test some first and if it sprouts then hot compost it. There are other reasons why you might want to know the provenance of your manure as well, such as the possibility of contamination.

David

[songbird]

David Hare-Scott wrote: ...

from my reading of the OPs post i'm thinking they knew it had seeds in it but was just mistaken that seeds/sprouts would survive the winter.

songbird