A Foolish Consistency Is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds

Today:

Me: "[rant]"
Friend/co-worker: "You do bitter very well. However, I don't know if you are well-served by it."
Me: "Since no one cares about my life, I have no reason not to eat out my own heart."

Meanwhile back at the (micro)farm...

Last Sunday I decided that I couldn't take it any longer and started gardening. I dug out (heh) my bag of seeds and went through the packets. My whimsy settled on red russian kale, a tomato my mind can no longer remember the name of, and two different kinds of peas.

One could point out that at that time Lincoln was still snow-covered and it was pretty darn cold, but that did not stop me. I have a sunroom, more plant pots than I care to admit to in public and a very large bag of potting soil. After potting up the seeds I moved the containers into the warmest parts of my apartment (namely, sitting directly over or next to a heat vent) to encourage the seeds to sprout. As I am a patient woman, I waited until Tuesday to start checking if anything had happened yet.

One of the peas is a dwarf garden pea named Tom Thumb, said to be suitable for container gardening. If peas are self-fertile (as my foggy memory keeps insisting) I might actually get a crop out of it. The other is the sugar snap pea I grew this past summer in my garden, which produced monster vines somewhat taller than me. I'm not sure I can coax it to produce pods, but if worse comes to worse I have a good source of pea shoots which are very tasty and exquisitely rare in Lincoln in the dead of winter.

The tomato is the biggest gamble; I'm not sure I really have enough sunlight to bring it to fruit inside. But even if I don't I've proved that the seed is still viable, and maybe I can keep them (so far I have three sprouts) healthy enough to plant out early in the spring. I have a package of those 'wall of water' plant shields that I was given several years ago, and I've always wondered if they would work. Sunroom + the heat capacity of water=June tomatoes? I can dream, right?

I regard the kale as a sure thing, so long as the seed is viable. It's a leafy green so I am sure it will find the amount of sunlight satisfactory, and it's kale so it won't even notice the chilly temperatures in the sunroom. My biggest question is if to harvest they leaves when they are young and tiny as microgreens or let them mature into longer, somewhat chewier leaves. I have a slightly embarrassing memory of scattering way too many seeds in the container, so might be able to do both: transfer some of the thinnings to larger containers to get big, harvest the rest as micros.

So far the tomatoes and the sugar snap peas have sprouted. This only tempts me to do more planting this weekend. Lettuce? Chinese broccoli? Radishes? Green onions? Decisions, decisions....