With warm weather ( 40 degrees is warm compared to what it has been) comes an urge to get out of doors. A good February activity is to get the apple pruning done for spring. My three trees always benefit from a good pruning. The Fireside tree with its newer grafts needs work to open up the lower branches to more air and light. The Wolf River with its very old grafts needs work to eliminate some of those older grafts that do not seem to produce as well as I would want. And the little "Five on One" in the garden just needs some quick work on the extra grafts that were added to make it a "Seven on One". These three trees contain about 30 different varieties of apples as just having one variety on a tree is not a good use of my growing space even though multiple grafts on one tree presents some bloom and pollination problems. The grafts have been added each year since about 2000. Grafting is great fun and really not that difficult.
My seed orders are arriving daily. With the orders placed on Wed. Feb. 4, the first to arrive was from Territorial Seed Company on Saturday! and Johnny's and Scheeper's arriving in today's mail. They have been listed in the seed journal.
Today, I bought the plastic and staples to cover the inside of the greenhouse. I hope to get that job done this week. My small greenhouse will warm nicely with the March sun so I can get an early start on some greens but I need the inside covered with plastic to collect and store that heat. The cost of heating that space with natural gas is such that I only start the heater in April and by May my heating season is usually over. One month, with the plastic as insulation I can manage. So because the weather guy predicts warm days this week I should be able to get the plastic in place.
Happy Gardening
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