Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Spring Planting

Once again, this blog entry has been slightly delayed due to a very busy weekend. From Friday through Sunday, we had not one but two RPG sessions and not one, not two, but three dance gigs. So it wasn't until today that we had a couple of free hours to take care of our big spring planting: peppers, tomatoes, climbing beans, bush beans, cucumbers, basil, and dill.

We ran into an unexpected challenge with the Climbing French beans. This is a variety we can't get from our normal seed supplier, so we save and dry some of the beans from each harvest to plant the following year. Unfortunately, when Brian opened up the jar in which he'd been storing last year's beans, he discovered they'd grown some kind of fuzzy mold in storage. It was only on the surface, but we still weren't sure how it would affect their viability. Fortunately, we still had some dried beans left from our 2024 crop, so to be on the safe side, we planted one of the old beans next to each of the newer, fuzzier ones. If we end up with too many plants as a result, we can always thin them.

We also decided, on the fly, to shake up the way we plant our dill. We don't use very much of it, so in previous years, we've set aside a single square for it in the garden. Not only does this create an awkward little asymmetry in our garden plan, it doesn't do much good, since the dill almost never comes in where we actually planted it. Instead, we get little rogue plants popping up all over the bed, as you can see here. To get around this problem, this year we intended to put in the dill toward the north edge of one of the large blocks set aside for zucchini. The zucchini plants, though large and sprawling, never actually fill this entire block; they tend to stretch themselves out southward, toward the sunlight. So we thought we could easily tuck the dill in next to one without impinging on it.

However, as Brian was transplanting the pepper seedlings, he had a better idea. Last year, we started doubling up our pepper plants, putting two into each four-square block. To give each plant as much room to spread as possible, Brian puts them in diagonally across the block rather than side by side. This leaves a little gap in the corner of each bed where a dill plant could probably nestle quite comfortably in the shade of the nearby peppers. So instead of planting all our dill in one square, I dropped a few seeds into each of these little corner spaces. If they all come up, that'll give us three dill plants, which should be more than enough for our modest, mostly pickle-oriented needs.

As we were getting these crops into the ground, we discovered that we might have a whole new crop to look forward to this year. Eleven years after we first planted our hardy kiwi vines, we finally have flowers on both the male and female plants. The female vine first flowered in 2020, and we initially hoped that the male would follow a year or two after. But sadly, before it ever got the chance, it was brutally murdered by the landscapers who work at the apartment building behind our house. (Brian had caught them snipping at the kiwis before, so he'd put up a sign on the fence reading "This is a plant, not a weed. Please do not cut it!" in both English and Spanish. But apparently the landscapers either couldn't read either language or couldn't be bothered to try, because not long after, we saw them stick their shears right through the fence, onto our property, and cut off the male plant at the root.) 

So, two years ago, we put in a new male plant (and protected it with a layer of hardware cloth behind the fence, too narrow for the gardeners to stick their shears through). And today, that new male plant flowered for the first time. The male and female vines are pretty closely intertwined, so I had to check carefully to confirm that these flowers were on the male and not a stray branch of the female. But I traced the vine all the way down to the base and confirmed these flowers definitely belong to the male. So, if nothing else goes wrong, we might finally have some berries to harvest in late summer or early fall. Of course, there are never any guarantees in gardening, so I'm not counting my kiwis before they're hatched. But at least there's a chance, which is more than we've had for the last eleven years.