Happiness!

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!

More Seedses!!!

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.

 

Seedses!!!

 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!

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.