Whoooot!!!!

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!

Well, can you blame me?

 **logs into Baker Creek's seed catalog to dream for a couple minutes**

**discovers the "wish list" function**

**disappears for hours**

Oh, it's been a difficult week, for sure

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.

It's all in the perspective, right?

 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...

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.

Seed Inventory

I need to figure out how to make a good seed inventory. Being a visually oriented person, I'm inclined to use color to separate various categories, and I also want to keep track of various seed vendors. I love Strictly Medicinal, Baker Creek, and Wild Garden Seed. These highly ethical, non-GMO, organic seed companies have been my go-to source for years. Here are their addies:

Strictly Medicinal https://strictlymedicinalseeds.com/

Baker Creek https://www.rareseeds.com/

Wild Garden Seeds https://www.wildgardenseed.com/

It was a shock to me, since I tend to save seed from year to year, when I ordered my first seeds and saw the 2020 prices. Holy cannoli, they have gone UP! They've gone up enough that I don't wish to duplicate anything I already have, thus the need for a seed inventory.

Basic organization says I need one for cool season and one for warm season. I've never had a greenhouse before so I don't know what kind of overlap there might be, but since my brain is already used to dividing the seeds by season, that's what I'll do. Then of course there are the broad categories, greens, herbs, legumes, melons, squashes, roots, etc. I'll be leaving out many of my favorite plants because Gryph and I have developed allergies or intolerances to them over the years.

Ah, tomatoes are still on the list after all. I just asked Gryph, and he's willing to take a chance. Banana peppers are on the list also, and brussels sprouts, maybe tat soi or bok choy, turnips--ha! I should have asked for this list a while ago!--kohlrabi, asparagus, beans, peas, potatoes, carrots, beets, cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon (but only red! not orange or yellow or white, lol), tomatillos, ground cherries (the sweet version of tomatillos), "bell" squash (pattypan!), zukes, yellow straight neck, acorn squash, delicata (my favorite), butternut, and herbs: sage, parsley, cilantro, and rosemary. This is a pretty good start!

Annnd here is our first obstacle: looking for a link to Royal Golden watermelon so I can show you what Gryph and I are intrigued with, I hit the barrier, "Out of stock." Who knows how many times I'm going to come up against that as I try to figure out my seed orders? This past year of unprecedented demand, as people everywhere suddenly bought seeds and planted gardens in an effort to deal with the pandemic, has truly changed the seed world. Prices are up, availability is down. Seed surfing is going to take a while!

I confess it's more fun than figuring out the inventory, but I do have to do so before I can start buying more seeds. **sheepish smile** Guess I'll haul out some paper and get started.

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.

Pics for you: