If you care for rodent based prognostication, you may be aware that the little furry guy in Pennsylvania has predicted an early spring.
Now I’m no believer in augury- and yet yesterday while I was at work it was 78 degrees in the garden.
Mom was heroic and saved most everything through some emergency watering- the collard tree may be the exception sadly- that will be another post.
But the sudden warm weather has meant…
The brassicas are bolting. In winter it doesn’t matter if the cole crops get full sun- but as I discovered to my horror with the tree collard, once the weather turns, full sun can be either a death sentence or a bolt trigger.
These are my regular collards, which is unsurprising, they bolt, but it means I have to start munching them now.
What a hardship.
Even the new tatsoi is giving up the ghost, but the old tatsoi has given up completely. I am thinking about re-organizing the beds so I can have all the shade stuff closer to the house and do some of the bolt-y brassicas year round, but that’s next months project.
I’m still in awe of the komatsuna, I’m still harvesting the outer leaves and loving it- but the flowers are just fantastic. Not to mention now that the first bees of the year are out, they’re helping feed my local bumble butts.
Here’s the first bumble butt at the nursery yesterday. I also accidentally watered a bumble when I stuck the watering wand in some dry carex and a wet disgruntled bee flew out.
Oops. But hey- even by the zoo it was 72- maybe the buzzy boy appreciated the drink.
The kale isn’t bolting. The kale just keeps growing. I may end up harvesting/pulling out everything around the kale and then keeping it going. I guess I’ll plant around it for spring.
At least something’s happy! I’m oddly tanned and deeply concerned about the state of things. But it’s gonna be time for some spring planting soon- and the sudden warm weather means my timeline for that just got bumped up.
It all feels a bit like whistling past the graveyard- at this point we all know why it’s this warm this early, and it’s going to kill people. Climate change is real and serious, and while in San Francisco it just means extra odd weather, other parts of the world are going to be uninhabitable soon.
Besides voting appropriately the only thing I can do is keep growing my own food as much as possible. So if that means whistling past the graveyard and adapting to the new conditions- so be it.
At least I’ll have kale.
The Neanderthal Gardens 
Your brassicas are likely more qualified to predict local weather because they are . . . local. Well, at least they are local for your location. I don’t know what they are doing here because I have not looked in other people’s gardens. We just planted some ornamental cabbage (which was not my idea), and from their arrival, I was wondering how long they would last.
… those poor ornamentals are not long for this world I suspect
They don’t taste very good either.
right? What is the damn point of a cabbage if you can’t eat it! The black summer bok choy are beautiful enough to be used ornamentally but they taste good too!
That is what I liked about chard, although I have not grown it it years. It is very nice foliage. Ornamental cabbage and kale is just weird. I know it is colorful, but I don’t think it is very pretty. It can be eaten. It just is not very good.