I don't know how to handle this dearth of pollinators. There was one white butterfly the other day, one wasp yesterday. The few bees that are out now are likely building nests and laying eggs which will give me more bees next spring, but what if we get another really harsh winter? I want to encourage the native bees, not supplant them, but do I really have a choice? If I don't see more pollinators after the rain comes on Wednesday, I may have to order orchard mason bees.
Gryph and I were working in the yard. It's pretty hot out there in the western sun! Really discomfortable... and I am discomforted to be sure! So glad we're going back to spring weather tomorrow.
Veggies: Peas are up in the greenhouse, as are lettuces and a tiny number of carrots (Cosmic Purple). We moved the flats off the fridge and the herbs off the washer, so the greenhouse is filling up.
Weeds (which are actually herbs): Henbit and speedwell are blooming all over the yard; purple archangel (deadnettle) is just coming into bloom. I notice that the polar vortex set them back quite a bit; they're all pretty short this year. Last year they were just tall enough to look like a gentle meadow. Dandelions are leafing out and once in a while blooming. No sign of violets, but the curly dock is a good six inches across.
Bulbs: The crocus finally gave up the ghost and the daffodils are just coming into full bloom. A lone tulip has come up in one of the front yard flower beds and I believe that's where I'll put all my grocery-store tulips, see if they can adapt to life in the yard.
The new peach tree is blooming already, sooo pretty those pale pink blossoms, wide and delicate. I'm considering putting her in the front yard but for now she seems to be glorying in that hot western sun so I'll leave her on the back porch.
The potatoes have gone into my first big pot by the wheelchair ramp. We left the bag of potting soil next to the pot so I can fill it as the taters grow, and covered the pot with bird netting to keep the squirrels out.
Invasives: We have to do something about the Star of Bethlehem. It's toxic and invasive and I need it GONE. It's so hard for me to deal with that I'm actually considering an herbicide for it and for the English ivy which is taking over the entire house and yard. I just haven't got the stamina to deal with them, never have had, and I also don't have the money to pay someone else to deal with it.
Hmmmm. Good and bad alike. The bad astonished me. I started with clean new potting soil and clean new pots and got damping off anyway. **sigh** Probably gonna have to replant my last two top-of-the-fridge flats. But the flats in the greenhouse are doing really well. Wish now I had put them all out there to begin with.
My big lesson here is that I simply don't have adequate lights. The seedlings should have been well past the damping off stage by now but they're growing slowly--even the ones under lights--because it just isn't bright enough no matter what I do. I've spent that stimulus check four ways from Sunday already, but at this moment I truly want to spend it on a professional lighting set up. If I'm to be serious about growing part of our food and all of our flowers, then I need the proper tools for it.
The morning glories are well up and need to go out and get tons more light, but our very changeable forecast once again calls for freezing nights midweek. I'm thinking about repurposing a craft cart and using it to take the plants outside during the day, then bring them back in at night. It'll harden them off, which has to happen anyway.
Trip to the nursery netted me many herbs, including my favorite pineapple sage and a wonderful dark green parsley, a couple of lavenders, as well a flower, Dicentra (bleeding hearts). A trip to the grocery store netted me a Loring Peach tree. It's not a dwarf, so it could easily get to 15 feet. We honestly don't know where to put it. I'm thinking it'll have to go in the front yard. The back is full!
Lettuces are up in the greenhouse and so, it seems, are a few carrots (Cosmic Purple). The new beets and chards are up. Even the kohlrabi is up, but there is absolutely no sign of peas. That mystifies me.
I have seen ants in the pots, so I am evidently not going to be able to escape them this year.
We're slowly expanding the garden floor in the back yard, just one layer right now, but it looks to me like a perfect berry bed. I want to get more raspberries and blackberries and see if I can keep them going. The harvests in years past were most wonderful; I want that again.
The lilac is planted in the front yard now and is leafing out. No sign yet of leaves on anything else. The back yard daffodils and crocus both bloomed on March 11.
I've been slowed down by illness and will have to make up for lost time as I can. Have held off on planting warm season crops because I have nowhere to put them yet--but once the midweek frosts are done, I can put them in the greenhouse.
I see there's been a week between my posts. It's like I left y'all in limbo! So! I did get the potting soil, 3 bags of organic 50 quart from Miracle-Gro for $9 apiece (Costco is mah frien'!!). 50 quarts is 1.67 cubic feet, and I could have gotten 2 cubic foot bags of conventional at the hardware store, but they would have been $15 apiece and none of us could lift them.
When I opened the first bag I almost started singing. The organic potting mix is glorious!! Fine grained and smells wonderful, feels wonderful. It's brown instead of black and holds a LOT of water.
The buckets have holes (courtesy Gryph) but I changed my mind about how I want to use them. One is now going to be dedicated to sweet peas because I don't want to take a chance on mixing them in with garden peas (sweet peas are toxic). The other may be a new potato bucket, but the starts I had are now in a restaurant to-go bag, a big clear one with handles. I just couldn't resist, lol. It's now out in the greenhouse and will get more potting soil as the leaves grow.
I've repotted the strawberries--such teeny lil things they are!!--and I've filled another flat of sixpacks with soil and seeds, part bok choi from Baker Creek, mostly salad mix from Wild Garden Seed.
Had to rearrange the garden corner of the kitchen. It still doesn't work quite right and I probably have to address that sometime in the next two weeks.
The 72 cell propagator on the fridge is filled with teensy herb sprouts, almost all of them up in just a week! But it's too soon to plant them out because we're due for frosty weather the 13th through 18th of March. After that they can all be potted up and moved to the greenhouse.
And now I think we're all caught up, at least until I plant something else!
Another absolutely gorgeous day! I watered the plants in the greenhouse, carried the salad mix flat (germination already!!) out to the greenhouse, and then Gryph and I did something we've been wanting to do for the longest time, planted Nick's Lilac in the front yard.
It was originally a start from his grandmother's lilac bush. He and Cody brought it to me in a darling little hand-painted clay pot, and we transplanted it from pot to pot over the years. Some years it bloomed, some years it got caught by late frosts. This winter it was nearly dead from drought while I was pretty sick. We got it to come back with judicious amounts of water and energy work. It was already opening leaves when the polar vortex hit and I really thought it was a goner then, but I see that nothing keeps that lilac down! It's already breaking buds again, tiny green showing against the gray. I'm hoping so much that it will root deeply into the front yard and give us that glorious fragrance every spring. We mulched it with shredded junk mail and bills.
And now I have an empty pot for the beginning of my summer garden! Going to line them up along the wheelchair ramp and fill them to overflowing, using the railing as a trellis. There are two more pots in the back yard waiting to be emptied into the compost bin, and I'm seriously considering also repurposing the two in the greenhouse plus one more in the front yard.
Over the years, these large pots have gone from $8 apiece to $20 apiece, which is why I decided to repurpose the ones I have. I can start easily enough with four of them along the ramp, and fill in with smaller pots (which I had intended to do anyway). The two in the greenhouse are filled with peas and I'm thinking I'd like to let that crop grow and produce before we move the pots. Hot southern exposure on the driveway will be way better for squash and peppers than for peas! It'll be quite interesting to see how long the plants will produce in the greenhouse since the green fibers in the cover act as shadecloth. I may have to buy some actual shadecloth to keep the sun from frying my cool season veggies next month. Always interesting the first season of a new garden tool or technique, and I think the greenhouse counts as both.
I'm sorry to say we wore ourselves out and nothing else has been done in the garden today. I do need to get the morning glories into cups or pots this evening since they've been soaking quite a while. Hoping I can get that taken care of soon.
Hello my friends! Tis a truly gorgeous day, started off foggy with rain but is now 66 F with a lovely breeze. Makes me wish for a porch swing.
Paris Island Cos (romaine lettuce) has now been seeded in every greenhouse pot, and the second 72 cell propagator has been seeded with Black Prince snapdragons, Bull's Blood beets, Touchstone Gold beet/chard, 5-color silver beet (swiss chard), Early Purple Vienna kohlrabi, Pokey Joe cilantro, prairie sage, and milkweed. This is my cold stratification flat, so it's out in the greenhouse for some freezing nights.
I have so much more to do but have used up my spoons for the day and am close to using up my potting soil. Once I get more, I'll need holes in the bottom of my two new paint buckets--they're the 5 gallon size--because those taters have got to be planted soon. Never seen anything so enthusiastic; they're already opening leaves! And the bag of taters in the kitchen is all sprouted as well, so I can grab quite a few more starts since this works so nicely. No sweet tater starts yet though; I ate them before they could sprout. Have to try that again. **grin**
A blank post from last week. How did that happen? I bet it was a day when I was having computer woes.
Replanted peas in the greenhouse today: De Grace in the long low pot, Carouby De Maussane in the two 24" pots, and Sugar Bon in the two square pots. Haven't decided whether to reuse the cardboard tube pots with all the non-sprouted carrots and beets; probably will.
Calendula are sprouting well. The weather is too unsettled to plant them out yet. Even unheated, my laundry room is 20 degrees warmer than the greenhouse so putting them in the greenhouse won't work either. But that greenhouse will be getting lavender sooner rather than later, because I forgot to read the germinating instructions and they say 30-45 days in the fridge before planting. To me that says "cold stratification" and in nature, that would be cold moist stratification (snow and rain)--easy to get right now with freezing nights. I'll likely plant the lavender and prairie sage in the same flat, and search out any others I have which need stratification.
Today's seeds, in a 72 hex-cell propagator which is now on top of the fridge: creeping thyme, clary sage, aromatic aster, lemon bee balm, purple prairie clover, and marshmallow, plus the three peas mentioned above.
Next up: salad mix, lavender, and prairie sage.
I got to the greenhouse. Everything froze to death, except the unknown weeds in the big pot. (Man, weeds are hardy! They're alive all over the yard, too!) One flimsy layer of plastic just cannot do anything when the windchill is 29 below and the actual temp is -11F. I'm so disappointed for my tiny brave seedlings. Clearly I need to know well in advance of extreme events like polar vortexes, so I can save my plants when the next one happens.
Hello! Sheesh, we made it through the polar vortex. We were among the lucky who didn't lose power although we were asked for a couple days to turn the furnace down and turn the lights off, and not to use the washer or dryer during the daytime. Mostly we did The Hibernating and stayed inside. Yesterday there was still six inches of snow in the backyard. Today it hit 40 and I took the dog out without putting a coat on either of us.
Still too much snow for me to get to the greenhouse.
The calendulas I planted in my first tray of six packs are in the laundry room. No sproutage yet.
All the seedlings have been moved to my kitchen counter and lights set up. It's gone from being dismally dark to being the bright corner! True leaves are starting to show everywhere.
The extreme cold has done a number on me, physically, and so I'm behind on starting new seeds and potting up the seedlings. It's not going to be reliably warm for a while anyway. The good news is that the slow melting of the snow means it sinks in rather than running down the driveway to the street, so when I start laying cardboard for my garden floor, the land will be well-watered.
Hello! Really worn out and worn down. This bitter cold just takes it out of me, and it snowed again too. BUT my sixpacks with the trays and domes came today!! I was quite gleeful, lol!
It took me three separate tries, but I finally got potting soil mixed with water, the damp soil spooned (carefully! I was working on my kitchen counter) into the first set of sixpacks, and then calendula seeds planted. I now have two sixpacks each of Resina (Baker Creek), Strawberry Blonde (Wild Garden Seed), and Solis Sponsa (Strictly Medicinal). These are all mixes and so the seeds are quite variable, some curled tightly, some more comma-shaped, some dark, some light.
Between yesterday's potting up of strawberries and new plantings of sweetpeas and today's calendula, I'm three quarters of the way through my bag of potting soil. Will have to get more soon. But since I am, as I said, operating at an energy deficit today, more soil mixing and planting will have to wait a while.
Hi! I haven't been here in a week because I haven't been able to garden. I did manage to buy a small growlight (LED) and I've clamped it on my kitchen dishrack (which is a two level over-the-sink rack). The seedlings get some light every day now, not ideal, but the best I can manage--and the dishes get washed at night after the seedlings go back to the top of the fridge.
The Costata Romanesco squash is vigorous and exuberant, roots coming out everywhere, so tonight I repotted them into giant styrofoam drink cups--nothing like recycled and free! It's a good thing I only started three squash plants, sheesh. Hope the cups will do them for a couple weeks. We did have to laugh when we saw all the roots poking out of the sides of the toilet paper cores! They won't be able to do that with the cups, but they will have five times the soil.
Sweetpeas have to get potted up next, because their roots are coming out the bottom of the tubes already.
I think I may be saving toilet paper and paper towel cores permanently now, because that was the easiest potting up I've ever done--just lifted the whole thing into the cup and filled around the tube with wet potting soil. I do have sixpacks coming, but there's no obligation to use them all or to use them exclusively. They'll be quite convenient for carrying seedlings to other gardens and I can keep using the cores here.
The polar vortex has called a precipitate halt to my outdoor plans. I'm not safe walking through uneven snow, so I can't get to the greenhouse and that means my plans to bring seedlings inside have come to naught. So now we are having a big experiment: will lettuce and pea seedlings survive two weeks frozen solid? They do fine at freezing, but how will they do in single digit frozen nights when the wind chills are below zero? Luckily I have plenty of seeds, right? I was going to succession plant anyway, but I tell you what, if these seedlings survive the bitter cold, I am definitely gonna save seeds from them and plant it again! Polar vortexes come 6 to 8 times a decade so plants which are hardy enough to survive them will be a treasure!
Hello!! Seeds are in from Prairie Moon and on their way from Strictly Medicinal and Baker Creek. That, I think, is the last of it until the plants start shipping in mid-March.
Today Gryph repaired our leaky hose and cut open a lot of boxes for me. I finished the greenhouse floor (for a while: it is biodegradable after all, and will need done again) and started on the area around the greenhouse. Our friend is working on liberating her hardwood floors from the carpet and assorted tacks and staples. Once she starts bringing empty boxes by again I'll start laying the "garden floor" but until then, we need to go out and cut down the weed trees which are in my way.
What a concept!! "Weed trees." Growing up in the desert where these trees were scarce it just astounds me that they're so abundant here they can only be classified as weeds! But there you have it, they come up everywhere, make walking impossible, and the ailanthus trees even kill off other plants. So down they all come and get covered with cardboard to keep them down--because the cut seedlings come back year after year if you don't actually dig them out! Who knew that could happen? Never would have in the desert, sheesh! Really caught me off-guard.... but you notice I'm still here where there's enough rain to support weed trees, eh? And I'm staying here, especially if my garden succeeds, because I'll have deepened my roots in this place. There's just something about planting trees and flowers that ties me to the land, and growing food as well sets me firmly into the seasonal cycle of a particular place. I belong here. Just as much as this place belongs to me, I belong to this place. I belong to this land. I belong to this home and garden.
Today is lovely warm and bright, a brief respite before low double-digit temps freeze us all out on Saturday. I discovered that the greenhouse plastic acts like shade cloth, so I left the door tied open for a while to get some sun on my babies and also turned the pots to get them to straighten up and stop leaning. Pretty sure the 2017 seed is not up at all and the seedlings are all lettuce from 2021 seed stock. The peas (also from 2021) are very slow but continue to peek up over the soil surface. No sign of the chard, carrots, or beets.
Tomorrow I need to get my calendula and prairie sage into a 72 cell propagator and into the greenhouse; this evening I'll check on which of my other seeds need that kind of cold moist stratification (definitely this year's chard, carrots, and beets, sheesh). I can plant more peas and the sweet peas also, but not in the same propagator. Don't want to take any chance on mixing those up because sweetpeas are toxic. They'll be by themselves and well-labeled--probably in another deli chicken container since the dome is high.
<intermission>
Gryph and I have worked a bit more while there was light. He cut down some of the weed trees and we both worked on getting that topsoil off the driveway and into the garden cart, then spread into a low spot. Here he's working on the north side of the wheelchair ramp:
Soon as we have that patch filled, we'll cover it with cardboard to await garden plants!
Checked the indoor seedlings. A miracle has occurred. For the very first time EVER, wild strawberries have germinated for me! We even have a couple tomatoes showing green hints right at soil level. All hail the warmth of the fridge top!!!
For now, it's early supper and a heating pad. Whatever tomorrow brings, I'm looking forward to it!
So hello!! Top of the fridge is evidently a great place for sproutage! Today we have Salad Mix from Wild Garden Seed; these are most likely lettuces, with other greens still to come up:
You can see my goofy baked goods and deli chicken trays and my ever-so-high-tech seedling pots. The masking tape is holding its own! Pots in the greenhouse are falling apart but these are just fine. We're not going through the toilet paper fast enough to satisfy my seedling needs (it might be pretty awful if we were!!), so today I bought two 72 cell propagators. The cells are hexagonal rather than square and I don't honestly know if they're all they're cracked up to be--supposed to promote healthier roots that don't get rootbound, but who knows, really?--the main selling point was the price, only $5 each. I'll look online to find something cheaper, since I have to start hundreds of seeds, but for now these will do.
Don't know exactly how many people I want this garden to feed. It's going to be divvied up across three widely-spaced yards, although the third garden may turn out to be pretty small. We're calling it Sisters Seed Co-op. It'll meet multiple functions; food, flowers, medicinal herbs, groundcover, wildlife habitat, windbreak, and Native American sacred plants. The white sage plants (Strictly Medicinal Seeds) are coming in March and the Sweetgrass plants (Prairie Moon Nursery) in May; the Kansas native shrubs (Kansas Forest Service) will probably come in March as well, and will need some kind of protection from rabbits. Love those bunnies, but not enough to let them eat my baby shrubs--especially since once the shrubs get some height to them, their fruit will feed the rabbits just fine.
Got a shock when I checked out a local CSA. Under "what to expect" they had a list of veggies by month and even though their seedlings are already bigger than mine, it's nothing but greens until April, then radishes and peas, but nothing that I would consider substantial produce until JULY. No tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash until July! That isn't gonna work for me! If I'm starting seeds in February, I by golly want my first summer crops on the plants by May--because most crops are 75 to 90 days, and May marks 90 days. What this means is that I have to get serious about both growing space and lights, so that I can keep the summer plants inside until it's warm enough to put them in the greenhouse (mid-March).
That's considerably more indoor growing than I had planned for and it'll be a challenge to find space for larger pots. Gryph and I are eyeing the laundry room, looking to see if we can make it work better and get shelves in which will hold the plants and give us storage both at once.
Been planning on a lot of succession planting, so I guess I'll find out if planting now is a fool's errand or not... but honestly, the kid in me is so excited about seeds and seedlings that it's worth it. Hoping to be eating baby lettuce and needing to replant by the end of February, anyway! It's almost time to get fish emulsion so I can feed all those valiant little lettuce and pea plants growing in frozen soil in the greenhouse. It's supposed to drop to single digits by the end of this week, so I'll wait on that until it warms up again.
Wasn't sure I would ever be done buying seeds but when the next batch comes in the mail, I think that's it. This is all I can handle and more besides. Now I have to divert the money to seedling pots and potting soil, drip irrigation, 20 inch pots to go next to the wheelchair ramp, bird neeting to keep the squirrels out, and fertilizer.
Unexpected find as we were rummaging around in the laundry room--weed control fabric! That combined with the cardboard which is starting to come in from one of the co-op sisters who's moving into a new garden (with bonus house! Imagine!), should give me a head start on making a good-sized garden without digging or hoeing, always a consideration when one is disabled.
Going to do my best to keep this garden organic. Have omri-certified Neem oil and copper fungicide and will find an omri-certified fertilizer as well. The cardboard should eliminate needing to spray for weeds and should also defeat digging squirrels. We've used cardboard for the path from the steps to the trash can for several years now, and they ignore it as if it were concrete, so my hopes are up!
One final weird thing: the driveway runs from the street through the yard all the way to the back gate, and I lost the ability to keep it swept clean about six years ago. Mother Nature appreciated that. Between the silty dust that blows in on the wind and the fallen leaves each year, she's managed to lay down a three inch layer of topsoil over much of the driveway in the back yard. That's basically half an inch of new topsoil per year! We still have low spots where the elderberries came out, so that topsoil now has a destination, however slow I am to get it moved. We need a clean path with safe footing along the north side of the wheelchair ramp and space for all those 20' pots along the south side. .
Well, I finally managed it! This afternoon I filled my "seedling pots" with soil and planted small amounts of several seeds! It's very interesting; if you compact the potting soil well, it stays in the pot when you lift and move it, doesn't fall out the bottom at all. As an aid to my future more-detailed Seed Inventory, I wrote the date on the seed packets. It's easy to imagine there will be several dates on most of the packets by the time the seed is used up.
BC=Baker Creek WG=Wild Garden Seed
Strawberry "Regina" BC
Sweetpea "Cupani" WGS
Snapdragon "Apple Blossom" BC
Poppy "Florist Pepperbox" BC
Tomato "Home Stoop" WGS
Zucchini "Costata Romanesco" BC
Salad Mix "Fall/Winter" Slow Germinating WG
The strawberry is a European variety, not like our commercial cultivars but like a wild strawberry. The sweetpea is one of the oldest surviving varieties, several hundred years old. The snapdragon is a 3 foot tender perennial. The poppy is for seeds and decorative pods. The tomato is Frank Morton's favorite, one he hybridized from Homestead and Stupice decades ago. The zuke is bred for flowers so I guess I'll be figuring out what to stuff them with on a grain-and-dairy-free diet! But I'm also hoping for plenty of squash because I just LOVE zucchini. And the salad mix is to grow mixed greens, of course, but the seeds are divided into slow-germinating and fast-germinating; the fast ones get started a week after the slow.
I will say that as I was cutting tubes and wrapping their edges with masking tape, my spirit guide asked, quite bemused, why I didn't just buy seed starters. "They're cheap," he said, puzzled, "and easier." I have two reasons. The first is, they weren't in the stores when I started this a few weeks ago, so toilet paper cores were all I could get at the time. The second is, starter pots are mostly peat based, and peat mining is an extractive earth-damaging technology. Not that paper-making isn't extractive! But the toilet paper cores are a waste product from something we can't do without, and here is reason number three: it tickles me to my soul to turn a waste product into something indispensable.
To show you how much it tickles me, I still use the shelves I built out of cardboard boxes and old Tupperware catalogs... and of course since I expected to use them vertically, they've now been horizontal for years. But they still look pretty much like this: http://dreambit1.blogspot.com/2012/08/walks-in-chortling-softly-im-makin.html
So this afternoon I put Gryph to work using an awl to punch holes in the bottoms of all sorts of recycled bowls, cups, and trays. As my energy allows, I'll mix more potting soil with water and fill more containers, because I have an acute sense of time slipping away and taking the seed-starting window with it. It might be ridiculously cold nights out there for the next two months, but once the heat hits it'll be here fast. I can't afford to wait for spring before I plant--spring is only two weeks long and then we're into early summer!--so I've got to do it now. And it's a joy! Who wouldn't want to do something which tickles them to the soul?
Still waiting, btw, for the next batch of seeds from Baker Creek. I had high hopes for today's mail. **drats** Maybe they'll come tomorrow.
I also checked into worm bins today. Oy, those things are expensive!! But then I found a youtube showing how to make a $5 worm bin. Well, mine will be less than that; we have an old tub we can repurpose. I'll have to buy the worms, since nightcrawlers don't work well in a worm bin. If I remember right, you can get small amounts of red wigglers as bait, but if not, I'll find them online.
In short, this is the year I'm going to find alternatives to all the things which have kept me from gardening successfully here. Soil's depleted? Fertilizer. Squirrels destroy everything? Greenhouse. Compost won't make? Worm bin. One way or another I'm going to get around all the obstacles and grow some food and flowers.
And speaking of flowers! I found vases of tulips on closeout at the grocery store last week, got five of them. Once the flowers fade---sheesh, an open tulip is like an alien life form!! lol!!--I'll move the bulbs to potting soil and fertilize them. They'll have to live in the greenhouse until I figure out how to get them safely into the yard--probably have to build them a cage out of hardware cloth since they're totally edible and enticing to any digging burrowing critter, including rabbits, raccoons, and possums. But now I'll have tulips in the yard again! I'm reclaiming my life, one plant at a time!
The Wild Garden Seeds order is in. I'm beginning to feel a sense of completion, like I'm close to having all the seeds I need, even though I'm not getting all the seeds I want. One more order to come from Baker Creek, with beans and other warm season crops.
It made me feel more secure to get tomato seeds today. Isn't that funny? We don't live a tomato-dependent life. Gryph is sensitive to the acid in them and of course they're a nightshade, so they promote inflammation. We've gone for years not having them, but somehow in these uncertain times, we need them again. Knowing I have seeds eases an inner anxiety I didn't even know was there.
Good thing I checked the greenhouse today; the seedlings were sitting in water from yesterday. Guess they won't need anything more for a week or so. Had to get a couple extra trays to be able to get them out of the water. Dumped it and some extra soil onto the calendula and pea pots.
Speaking of which--whatever is growing in the pot is not calendula. I suppose that first snowstorm took them out and what stayed is one of the weeds. And now that I'm looking at identification images, it's not chickweed either. Don't think I have chickweed in the yard, so I'm glad I bought a packet, along with another packet of calendula. The Seed Inventory just gets longer and longer!
What I haven't got and really need to is the sacred plants: White Sage, Sweetgrass, Tobacco. These are on the "definitely try again" list.
Melons and Candy Roaster Squash are on the "I wish!" list. Also on that list? A big photo keeper from the craft store. I believe all the individual keepers will hold seed packets wonderfully well, and the outer container will keep everything together.
Been thinking about redoing the Seed Inventory to add space for the seed company's name. Right now it's driving me nuts to be unable to remember where I found bare-root sweetgrass several years ago. I don't wish to try reordering seeds in a year or two and not know where to look. The older I get, the more I notice that "how could I ever forget that?!" increasingly becomes "How I wish I could remember..." so I may as well do this right from the beginning and include the seed company. That way I can also compare things like seedling vigor, growth habits, whether the plants are true to the description, yields, time to harvest, etc. I don't know if my garden will become a reliable food source or not, but the more I pay attention and write things down, the better chance it has.
I leave you with two pics. The greenhouse doesn't look like much but I think as it fills up it'll become more attractive. For now it's keeping both wind and squirrels off the plants and that's huge. The second pic is the lettuce sprouts which are making me smile bigtime.
My Baker Creek order came today! I'll be back once I finish fondl---errr, sorting and organizing them.
Oh, I begin to think my teensiest sprouts in the greenhouse are lettuce after all; one finally pushed up the remains of a seed coat, and it's same color and texture as the remaining lettuce seeds, if rather larger--I guess it swelled with the moisture. Never been so micro-focused on seeds before!
Dog had to go out so I surfaced from my wish list. Filled a watering can with room temperature water, headed out, and discovered that an unheated greenhouse is a REALLY lovely thing. Not only are my peas now sprouting (undisturbed by squirrels!!!) in a couple of pots, I have carrots sprouting!!! Whooooot!!!! Odd that they're even faster than the lettuce, especially since the carrot seeds are older, but hey--I'll take it!!! And when they're big enough for my camera to distinguish, I'll post pics!
**logs into Baker Creek's seed catalog to dream for a couple minutes**
**discovers the "wish list" function**
**disappears for hours**
Hello again. I come to you much subdued, physically, in a very bad fibromyalgia flare. Exactly nothing has happened in the way of physical gardening over the past week, although I am happy to tell you that I will soon have to update the seed inventory. I have orders in with Wild Garden Seeds and Baker Creek Seeds, both, and can't wait to get the seeds into my hands! Worked around the dreaded "out of stock" and the even MORE dreaded "out of money" to get more peas, lots of greens, zucchini, and watermelon seeds!
Greenhouse flooring continues to accumulate. I finally have a way to reuse frozen food boxes!! You can't recycle them, you know, because they're waxed. But they can be an underlayer for the greenhouse floor! At this point the squirrels are still ignoring the greenhouse and I am heartily cheered by that. It's beginning to look like a second (bigger!) greenhouse is definitely in the works for us, so I'm accumulating all the cardboard I can. And while we are in limbo, I keep plottin' and plannin' what to do next.
My favorite daydream right now is a dozen 20" pots lined up along the wheelchair ramp, beans closest to the ramp, squashes or melons or tomatoes in the center of the pots, herbs at the front edge. Haven't decided whether to use hardware cloth or bird netting to keep the squirrels out. I just know that the idea of fresh green beans dangling over the inside of the railings tickles me enormously--and melons! I ordered a variety called Tigger, little half pound stripey melons, and it would be a kick to have them dangling over the railings!!
Inside the greenhouse, I have pea sproutage. It's very slow, just the tiniest green tips at soil level, but I think every warm day will see them stretch a little more into the light. The one day I was able to check on them, I noticed the green house was noticeably warmer than the outside temp, so the cover really does work--probably not least because it cuts off the wind. It's supposed to hit 60F here Wednesday, so I'll take a watering can out. Right now I'd rather use a watering can than the hose--I can make the water room temp, which will help germination.
The top of the fridge is home to my slowly growing accumulation of toilet paper cores. I have one deli chicken container filled with them and ready for soil (when I'm up to mixing it), and a few more cores waiting to be cut for the next container. My big experiment is to wrap the tops and bottoms of the cores with masking tape, to see if it helps them hold together longer. When I've used them in the past they've fallen apart as I tried to lift them out of their containers for transplanting, which leaves the roots truly vulnerable and sets the plants back. We'll see whether masking tape is my secret ingredient this year.
As far as big melons, like watermelons, we have a driveway which runs through the back yard. Most of it is covered with dirt and plants, but the part which gets the strongest western sun exposure is still bare. I want to plant watermelons on either side and let them run rampant on the concrete. My aim is twofold: reduce the heat the driveway throws into the yard (because those huge leaves will shade it), and give the melons someplace clean and hot to grow upon. It might be that year by year, foot by foot, I'll reclaim the concrete for gardening purposes. Always have loved container gardening, and letting vines spill out onto clean concrete speaks to my soul.
Most of the usual gardening suspects are out of the question for us. Food allergies dictate that we not grow corn, broccoli, eggplant, cabbage, so many veggies... better to focus on what we can grow, I think. Gryph, although sensitive to tomatoes, is willing to try them on a very limited basis. We haven't figured out where to plant asparagus and it might very well go into the middle of some of the wheelchair-ramp-pots, since like the tomatoes we can only handle it in limited amounts. I'm seriously considering getting an indoor light set-up to grow baby salad greens until the greenhouse is warm enough (it's unheated), but the question there is how to keep Cleo (the cat) from digging in the trays... maybe bird netting will discourage her the way it discourages squirrels... the trouble is, it also discourages me!
Which reminds me, some gardening did happen--I pulled the netting out of the way and pruned the raspberry canes in the giant stump planter out front. The general rule is to cut them back to 12" in January, and this year I remembered! Also pruned the grape vine pretty severely. I didn't get either task done in January of 2020 and was startled how poorly the plants did compared to the years when I've remembered. Got my fingers crossed I'll be well enough in March to fertilize them all on time.
And that brings up a neglected subject. I've been reluctant to spend money on fertilizers, especially organic fertilizers, but now it's money-where-your-mouth-is time. I have to adjust my thinking from "omg that's shockingly expensive!" to "okay, yes, this is a necessary expenditure." You do get what you pay for, and you certainly can't get organic fertilizers from the dollar store. If our bodies do better when we eat organic food--and Gryph and I have experimented enough over the years to be certain this is true for us--then we need to get organic fertilizer.
I think the tide has turned for me, and my trips to Michaels or JoAnn Fabrics have lost their luster. Now I very much want to spend every spare cent on pots, soil, seeds, fertilizer, and whatever it takes to keep my garden safe from squirrels--be that another greenhouse, hardware cloth, or bird netting. Time for me to reclaim this great love of my heart and rebuild my yard into the paradise I've always wanted it to be, one pot at a time.
I got so excited! A new piece of the greenhouse floor came today! It was wrapped around our new can opener. I've already got the floor piece cut open and folded flat for when the snow melts and I can walk through the yard to get to the greenhouse. The can opener? Eh. It's sitting on the counter waiting for Gryph.
The floor piece also contained my newest planter. It's garden fabric, a square dividied into four pots with a drainage hole in each. The reviews were mixed. My fav were the two which said "Be careful, this thing gets waterlogged and won't drain!" and "Be careful, this thing won't hold enough water!" I guess it depends on where you use it, how much rain it gets exposed to, and how heavy-handed you are with the garden hose.
Speaking of which, I need to get a nozzle for our hose, preferably one that has a "gentle shower" setting. Won't do at all to be washing the seeds out of their pots!
And in the meantime, I smile every time I think about my greenhouse floor. It'll be layers and layers thick before you know it! No ivy taking over MY plants, oh no siree! But I do feel a little like a toddler, way less excited about the new items than the box they came in, lol...
I finished the seed inventory. Have many more packets of seeds than I expected! My warm season seeds are all three or four years old now, but my cool season seeds will have to come first. All the carrots and beets are four years old and given they take a month to germinate, I need to replace them quickly just in case they don't germinate after all. That does, of course, call for different varieties just in case they DO germinate!
I don't have enough greens and I seriously don't have enough snow peas. Not certain anyone can ever have enough snow peas! But I was tickled to discover that I had already ordered wild strawberry seeds. Really hoping they'll do well.
Everything came to a halt for two reasons. The first was a very much needed grocery shopping trip, which took everything I had. The second was four inches of snow that night. Interestingly, there was--still is!--snow on every surface in the yard except the greenhouse. Evidently the slant of the roof is so steep that it all slid off without sticking. I won't be going into the snow to check on it as I'm disabled and don't wish to take any chance at all on falling, so this will be a good test of how well the greenhouse does when temps at night are well below freezing and the gardener is well below blankets.
