Spring Still Paused

The Fig tree is glad to be in the greenhouse.
Part of this weeks seeding on the heating mat for 75 degree bottom heat.
Onion flats with three to four rows of seed the short way in the flat.
You can see them starting to sprout already.
Getting ready to hot water treat the parsley planting.

These pellitized lettuce seed make planting much easier and thinning really easy.
And they're off...

The 17 plus inches of snow is still here and not going any place real quick. It will take a real warm spell and some rain to get rid of this much snow. My cedar trees took a real hit on the west side of my house. They really bent over and even though I got out and knocked snow off, branches broke and a decision on which ones will stay and which ones will go will have to be made. The trees are almost 30 years old and this storm has probably forced me to make a decision about re-working that side of the yard. Opening up the area and getting some extra space close to the garden might not be a bad thing. But the bottom line is - first the snow must GO.
The birds at the feeders have increased noticeably and much more frequently. I have been feeding sunflower, cracked corn, Niger thistle, suet cakes, safflower and this week I put out grape jelly and some dried meal worms. Hope it helps some make it. The Goldfinch males are starting to change color and the male House Finches already have spring color. The number of Grackles is just huge and they are so noisy.
The snow made it tough to get to the hoop house so I only got one row of spinach planted on Saturday but I did a lot of planting in the greenhouse. Onions were the first. I will review this year the onion planting method as I like to seed onions and them plant them out in the garden. I make multiple rows (3 or 4 depending of the size) in the seed flat and then sow them thick, as I will be separating them at planting time. They are already showing signs of sprouting. I did shallots the same way - in mini rows thickly. I did find sme shallots in the store the other day and bought two bags as they looked ready to grow. I will plant them as soon as I can out in the main garden and maybe some in the hoop house.
I also started parsley today and Thursday. I put the seed in 12 packs with 3 -5 seeds per cell and then hot water treated the planted seed. I have hot water treated the contents of the seed packet before but then you have to wait to plants as the seed clumps together when wet - so I got my water really hot and treated the planted seed.
I also planted marigolds ( they are already up) two flats of lettuce. All the lettuce seed is pelted so it was easy to seed one or two seeds per cell. I planted all of the special Simply Salad Mix pellets. They were much larger than the lettuce pellets and easy to seed only one in a cell. I also planted one large wallpaper tray with a lettuce/radish mix for micro greens and plan to do another with arugula as soon as I can get that cold frame set up - the one I took back in to paint - lucky me as all the cold frames are snow buried again. I also planted some Stevia. The seed is very small so I put it all in a small 3 inch pot and will transplant any seedlings that grow. I made geranium cuttings and potted some spider plant off-shoots to replace the plants that I will use in an outdoor planting this summer.
Not too bad a effort this week after a major spring storm.
Happy Gardening