Sogginess

We seem to be stuck in a perpetual Spring-like weather pattern.  Cool & rainy (to put it lightly).  Yesterday was the first full day of blue skies and sunshine in a long time... I'd venture to say at least 2 weeks.  No joke.  In fact, I just peeked out the window, hoping that what had looked earlier to be a clearing in the nasty weather was still on it's way, but nope- more rain.

My radishes, peas & parsnips are doing quite well, unfortunately, the rest of my garden are heat seekers and they are definitely stalling. The strawberry plants are looking big, but the berries aren't ripening, I've got some tomatoes popping up here and there but you can bet they aren't going to be anything but green without the sun!
 

Surprisingly, my roses haven't been affected.  I think without the fir tree (see my previous post) blocking their sun they are making due with what they are getting now- which is quite a bit more.  Since there's not much going on in my edibles garden, I focused on the raised bed rose garden last weekend; working to fill in the wide open spaces in the center and also looking for some plants to cover up the legginess some of the roses get in Summer.

I settled on several different colors of 'pinks', some bright yellow tickseed for the middle to offset the large amounts of red/pink roses, a couple peach colored alpine poppies and some blue pincushion.  I think I've finally got the right placement for everything and hopefully I can get it all in the ground in the next week.

One thing I did do in the veggie beds was to pull up the carrots and spinach that  has apparently bolted.  Do carrots bolt? I don't know- I haven't found anything in my search about it.  All I know is that the tops were becoming extremely thick (we're talking 1/2" or more) and when I pulled one out, the carrot was less than 5" long and had a really thick woody core.  Not good.  I'm thinking the fact that they over-wintered did them in.  Same with the spinach.  It was a winter variety, and although the temperatures here haven't been at all "high", it must have been above what the spinach could tolerate.  Only a guess.  To fill in their spots I replaced them with new carrot seed (Nantes & Bolero) and stuffed in my impulse buy  (leeks) as a divider between the two. We'll see what happens.