Nick's Lilac

 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.

Transplanting and the Polar Vortex

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!

Snow!!

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.

Time to Resurrect My Favorite Blog: Now We're Gardening!

Hello! I seem to come back every couple of years, write a quick post, and then vanish. But I've been looking for somewhere to keep track of my garden and this seems to be the best place. I'm certainly making a dream, a dream of food and flowers--and you may as well hear me say it up front--NO SQUIRRELS. They've destroyed my every attempt at gardening for years now, and what they haven't gotten, the grasshoppers and roly-polies and late frosts have.

I should update on my last posts. My hugelkultur beds were a great success and the elderberries I planted in them were exuberant--too exuberant, because we discovered to our dismay that Gryph is allergic to the blossoms. We finally had to give the shrubs away. 

Doing Intuitive Readings only lasted for a while, because in July 2015 I got a perforated bowel and ended up in the hospital for three weeks. It took me a long while to recuperate from that. 

I went back to school in Fall 2016, majored in music, but in the spring of 2019 I got cancer. It came as a huge shock. All that I knew I had was diverticulitis, so when I went in for antibiotics and instead had to have immediate surgery, I was blown away. I finished that semester but couldn't go back; had chemotherapy that summer and the side effects seem to be permanent. I still write and arrange music. Probably always will, but school is over for me.

The new roof is holding well and we got a wheelchair ramp off the back porch as well, so now we can get up and down more easily. 

I did my best to recover from the aftereffects of the chemo all through this weird tough year, tried to garden, and was defeated at every turn. Which brings me to now, and my Yuletide gift sitting in the back yard: a small portable greenhouse! We dragged in some of my bigger pots and I replanted the peas which the squirrels have been ravaging, plus I got lettuce, kohlrabi, and swiss chard planted. The greenhouse has shelves, so today I went rummaging through the recycling bin and pulled out the toilet paper and paper towel cores, plus I pulled out the cores I had stashed in my craft supplies. I used saved deli trays as bases and filled the cores with potting soil, planted a couple kinds of beets, a couple kinds of carrots... and totally ran out of room. Huh. That did not take long!

Because I'm planting two and three year old seeds, I planted pretty thickly. (Germination drops off year by year.) I'm hoping it hasn't been too long. I might drop in some fast-sprouting lettuce seeds to get the best use out of the "pots"... ah, there we go. "Merveille Des Quatre Saisons" lettuce--this year's seed from Baker Creek, so should germinate strongly--and as I thin the baby lettuces, the beets and carrots should start germinating.

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