After five heavy snows in five weeks, this is about how I’m feeling.  I put my cabbages in the ground the week before Easter, and they’ve been limping along weakly since then.  Every week they get buried in another six, seven, or eight inches of snow.  This past Wednesday, there was eight inches of heavy snow atop them.  My beat and turnip seeds are not even bothering to come up, and they were planted on Easter.  The squash and pumpkin I started in big peat pots in my living room window are so big they really do need to be in the ground.  But it is way too early.  I should have started them two or three weeks later than I did.

The weather has been more normal in between the snows – temps in the 50’s and 60’s during the day, down to near or just below freezing at night.  Things that should be showing green are doing so, encouraged by the dearth of moisture.  The grass is green, my privet hedges are budding out, the lilac is too, and the apple trees are starting to show little green leaves.  The lettuce seed I planted in the little garden off my patio has finally decided to germinate, along with all the bird seed that ended up in that garden over the winter.  I planted pansies in the planter by the front door, and I added more dianthus to the garden behind the house to replace the ones that didn’t survive winter.  Pretty much, things are normal here, except for these weekly snow storms.  “Normal” April would be full of showers, even here.

It only goes to show, you just never know what kind of weather you will get in Colorado.  And we are still in a drought situation, for the third year, so even if our moisture is coming in the form of snow instead of rain, we’re pretty much not complaining. We need so much more to get back to “normal, especially in the southeastern part of Colorado.  Everyone is hoping for a wet year, although most long-range forecasts predict another dry year.

A week or so ago, I noticed something strange going on in my garden plot down at the community garden.  When you rent your plot, they give you a bale of straw for mulching your garden.  I had used about half of my bale of straw on the row of cabbages I’d planted.  When snow was predicted, I would push the straw over the cabbages, and uncover them when the sun came back out the next day or day after.  The other half of the bale sat in the walkway.  My entire garden plot is currently weed-free after being tilled nicely by one of my plot neighbors.  But this was not true for the row of cabbages.  Poking up through the straw was sturdy, bright green grass.  When I investigated, I found seed heads, and worse, a tuber with a dense root ball, at the bottom of these blades of grass.  Even worse than that, some of them had already insinuated themselves more than 2 inches into the moist soil around the cabbages.

The only place the grass was, is where the straw was, including the straw that had spilled over onto the walking path between the plots.

This was not straw, it was hay.  Hay with seed.  I sent an email to the coordinators of the garden about the problem, and was told this “has happened before.”  That’s just great, but now I had a major problem on my hands.  Even if I pulled the straw off, there’s all that grass to dig up, and then what do I do with it all?  Putting it in the compost pile is a bad plan, as it would just continue to grow there.

I spent two hours this morning bent over my plot, first raking off the “straw” as much as I could, then using a hand-fork to dig out as much of the grass as I could.  And I know I didn’t get it all, and will be fighting this monster all summer long.  The only way to truly get it out of there would have been to dig up everything and sift it, killing the cabbages in the process.  I did the best I could, what my back would allow, and recovered the ground around the cabbages with the bark mulch that the garden provides.  It wasn’t my choice to do so – bark mulch is great for pathways and for flower gardens, but not so good for vegetable gardens.  It doesn’t break down quickly enough and doesn’t add any real value to the ground.  I will likely be raking most of it out of there this fall.

I filled up two of the city’s “compost only” bins, and it will be taken away, rather than to sit in our garden’s compost bin.  I am pretty aggravated by the whole thing.  That two hours could have been put to better use, and was not work I was expecting to have to do.  And knowing that I will fight this problem the rest of the summer doesn’t make me feel any better about it.

I can guarantee next year I won’t be using straw that the garden provides.  If this has happened in the past, it will happen again, and I don’t want to fight this battle next year or the year after that.  I will buy my own straw from a reputable source, or use a different mulching product.  In the meantime, I’ll hope for the best.  I may spend next weekend raking off the bark chip mulch and laying down a layer of newspaper, then putting the bark back in place.  That may help later.  I hope.

The good news is that the ground under the straw was quite moist, and the cabbages are starting to actually grow, despite all the mashings under the snow they’ve gotten.  I have lost one hybrid for sure, and another hybrid has been pretty badly eaten by some pest.  The savoy look the heartiest at this point, with the stone head looking passable.  The purples still look gangly, but healthy.  That means I still have fourteen cabbages to look forward to.  I also planted parsnip seed today, two ten-foot rows of it.  Apparently, root veggies do well here.

This week’s forecast calls for rain every day in the late afternoon.  I hope it does.  The less watering I have to do, the better.

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