Climbing the Third Stair

Yesterday I started my vegetable garden by planting seeds for two kinds of broccoli, one kind of cauliflower, and four tomatoes in small plastic containers and putting them in a warm spot to sprout. Normally I'd be jumping the gun by starting tomatoes this early, but one of them (Yorkbec) was bred in Canada to be more cold-tolerant and the others are dwarf-types that I intend for container culture. My main-season tomatoes will get started later.

On Saturday I made some DIY laundry soap using a recipe someone on my FB feed was raving over. The few loads I've done so far have turned out ok, but I'm withholding judgement until I use up the container. The one downside it has from the beginning is that I can't use it on any of my silks; it has washing soda in it and (iirc) silks resent strong alkalies.

I got very little house-work type stuff done on Sunday, and this was by design. As part of my efforts to manage my stress levels I'm trying to make Sunday really be a day of rest. I can do fun-type work like gardening or writing or even cooking, but if I don't get any laundry or such done that's ok. To make this work I need to be better at getting some housework done on weeknights after I get home from work, but (the theory goes) since I'm getting some real rest on the weekend I should feel less exhausted during the week. As with my laundry soap, I'm currently withholding judgement on the project.

I came home from work and laid down for an hour. This is a bad habit I'm trying to break, on the principle that I could get more accomplished if instead of laying down I sat down and did some crochet or read a book, but I'm getting cranky with myself over how much stuff I need to get done each week and how I should be productive every single minute of the day.

Eventually I got up and changed into gardening clothes (by which I mean a t-shirt and a ripped pair of jeans) and got out to do some work in my garden. I spent about an hour and a half weeding, something that it really needed. There's more to be done, but now at least it looks more like a garden-in-progress and less like an abandoned lot. I'm somewhat depressed over it, still. I had ambitions of being able to feed myself home-grown vegetables from Memorial Day to Labor Day and everything is still so small I don't think I'll have anything harvestable on the 27th. It's a cold spring when collards, radishes, and spinach you planted at the end of March are only an inch tall on May 20th. On the bright side, all my potatoes are up and looking very strong, so at least I won't lack for potatoes.

I'm being tempted by the latest BPAL update--a Lunacy (Honey Moon) and three single notes (Passionflower, some patchouli, and Wild Dandelion). OK, so the patchouli isn't a threat and I managed to talk myself out of Honey Moon and Passionflower, but the Dandelion intrigues me. I'm enough of of a plant nerd to know that dandelion flowers don't have much in the way of scent, so this will be the PBAL perfumer's imagination of a dandelion, which means it could be anything. I find this weirdly attractive. The problem with this is that their postage is so high I flatly refuse to buy only a single bottle from them, so I need to decide if there is anything from the general catalog I want enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. This in turn needs to be balanced against the plane tickets I need to be buying soon and oh yeah, I do keep claiming I want a bicycle for transportation. Choices, I have them.

This afternoon I was running around trying to scare up enough clear plastic containers and seed-starting mix to plant seeds in and I discovered that I had five--count them, FIVE--Jiffy mini-greenhouses. I'm not sure if that's what Jiffy calls them, but that's what they are: dark plastic trays with clear plastic dome tops and 25 little peat pellets for starting seeds in. You water the pellets, stick the seeds in, put the clear lid on to keep everything moist and wait for your seeds to sprout. I had picked them up at some end-of-season clearance and forgotten about them until I was searching my sun room for potting soil.

I did not use all five of them; even my lunacy does not extend to starting 125 plants in one day. I stopped at 3: one of various tomatoes, one of various peppers, and one of various brassicas. That's waaaay more tomatoes and peppers than I need, but since I'm using old seeds I have some viability worries--best to start extras, and give away what I can't use. The brassicas include seven broccoli, despite me having four in the garden already, because this April's weather has been so weird I'm worried about it surviving. Sure broccoli can take a little snow, but can it take snow after it's been rained on for two days? I have no experience with these kinds of questions.

While eating lunch I was reading the BPAL forum and found the thread with carnation recommendations. I am in need of a good carnation scent! One of the perfumes that kept coming up was The Bow and Crown of Conquest, which had both carnation and leather notes. I had gotten a free imp of it from the lab in a previous order, tried it on, and hadn't been impressed. This had saddened me because it has an awesome name, and I'm easily moved by that kind of thing. (Writer, what can I do?) Inspired by this new information I dug out the imp and really slathered a patch on my arm to try it again.

Apparently, this is one of those scents that I can't dab on and expect to smell anything of it: it needs coverage. But it does smell nice! I can't pick out the carnation but there is a classy floral hanging out with the leather. I, um, ordered an imp of Whip (rose and leather) as part of last week's BPAL order, so now I am even more curious about how it will turn out. I like Bow and Crown of Conquest, but if I like Whip will I really need two floral-and-leather perfumes? (On the other hand, it's not like I am not accumulating a complete wardrobe of rose scents...) And would I really admit to be wearing something called Whip in public? Bow and Crown of Conquest is unwieldy, but tactically safe.

The things I end up worrying about...

I committed my first act of gardening today. One of my co-workers had told me of a method of growing lettuce that involved sprinkling it on top of melting snow, and as I had a 59 cent package of lettuce seed on hand, I decided to give it a try.

Naturally when I got home I found that the only snow left in my garden was laying on layers of leaves or straw,and I didn't think that would be a good lettuce-rooting medium. Thus I sprinkled the seed on parts of my garden that weren't covered with leaves and/or straw and then shoveled snow from other parts of my yard on top of it. I'm not sure why I didn't shovel the snow first and then sprinkle the seed, but I was tired and it's going to be 50 degrees out tomorrow so it shouldn't matter that much.

I have pansy and viola seeds that I ought to start this weekend, not to mention broccoli and any other cold-weather veggies that need starters-for-transplanting. This leads to the dire thought that I need to go though my seed collection, in the unlikely event that I need to order more seeds for this year. So much to do!

My toilet overflowed Saturday afternoon, leaving water laced with fecal matter all over my bathroom floor. Needless to say, this wrecked my plans to spend the rest of Saturday washing dishes and generally doing kitchen stuff. It was the perfect end to the week, which seemed to be designed to make me feel incompetent and generally without value.

Friday afternoon I made myself come up with a list of good things that had happened during the week. That helped. Later I discovered that my paperwhites had started blooming and my bedroom was full of delicious perfume. That helped more!

Then on Saturday afternoon, while taking out trash from the Toilet Incident, I discovered that I had a couple of Red Russian kale plants growing in my lawn. This was not as strange as it could be, because two years ago I had planted one in a corner of my garden and then instead of pulling it out at the end of the season I just let it be. It spent the summer as an untidy flowering heap that marked the northern end of the garden. What was surprising to me was that I had a second generation sprouting in the fall, and not the spring. I was also surprised that it was clearly a Red Russian kale seedling, given that I'd made no attempt to preserve seed purity. On the other hand, I am pretty sure that RR is B. rapa and most of the rest of my Brassicas are oleracea so the chance of crossbreeding is slight. Also, I appear to be the only person for blocks around that has a vegetable garden. I don't understand this. ( Read more... )

My life has been somewhat stressful and sometimes unpleasant the last few weeks, which has made it hard to journal. Some people find catharsis in writing down everything that is bothering them; I generally find it tedious. However! Today will be annoying because I'm not going to get all the housework I want to get done, done, but before noon three good things happened, so I cannot say it is going to be a bad day.

The first thing was, yhlee wrote a story for me! It's a very short story to a two-word prompt I gave her, and it is every bit as wonderful as I expected. My story: Steel-Ever-Shining. I've read it like a dozen times already and it makes me smile every time. :-)

The second is, my lemon tree is really going to bloom! I kind of knew this last weekend, when in the course of giving showers to both citrus trees, three bell peppers plants, and two miniature rose bushes, I discovered that there was something that looked suspiciously like a flower bud on the meyer lemon. But this morning I was looking it over for signs of aphids (which are thick on my bell peppers, hence the showers last week) and discovered a whole clutch of buds hidden by a leaf. Lemon blossoms! My apartment will be graced with the delicate fragrance of lemon blossoms! *swoon*

This is all the more exciting to me because I've been a little worried about the lemon tree. The lime tree, when I got it home, sat for a week and then started growing out two spiky branches. The lemon tree did nothing, except to have leaves randomly go yellow and fall off. Quite nerve-wracking. But its fruits haven't fallen off--indeed, they are ripening nicely--and now it is going to bloom, so it can't be that unhappy with life.

The third thing is, it's snowing! A snowstorm rolled into Nebraska today; I saw the first few flakes as I came back from church this morning. The weather service is calling for 1-3" accumulation, which will make walking to work tomorrow annoying yet scenic. I'm looking forward to it.

I was going to hang out with cassandra_e and her family last night, and she was nice enough to help me run home and pick up some laundry so I could hang out and do laundry at the same time. (Yay, efficiency!) As we were walking up to my door I pointed out the leafy-green dark-blue-berried fringe growing out of the gutter above my porch and dangling down in an ornamental fashion.

"See my beautiful deadly nightshade crop? It's too bad I don't have a use for it," I said.

She admired it for a moment and then said, "I foresee a livejournal post about this--'I have this lovely nightshade crop and nothing to do with it.'"

So here it is. ;-)

I did not really plant the nightshade; it grows wild in the neighborhood and most likely hitch-hiked to the gutter in a bird's intestinal track. If I had known that the upstairs air conditioners were going to do such a good job keeping the gutter watered, I would have climbed up and planted cherry tomatoes--and then I would have a nightshade crop I could actually eat.

Saturday while at the Westlake Ace to pick up a saw I looked through the plants they had for sale and discovered they had both lemon basil and lemon mint. I was especially happy about the lemon mint; I had tried that last year and found it to be a wonderful ice tea herb. My pot of it (gardening tip: DO NOT plant any mint in the ground unless you have a plot surrounded on all sides by 3 feet of conrete, or are ok with having your entire yard taken over by it) hadn't survived the winter and the store I bought it from last year didn't seem to have it this year, so I had given up hope on the matter. But now I just need to decide how big of a pot I want to give to it: the one I used last year is now holding violas, so that's out.

Sunday night I turned over the ground in my garden out back (a strip of land about 2' by 7') and added a few more feet to it. I got all 4 of my tomatoes (Early Girl, Juliet, Black Cherry and Nebraska Wedding) planted, as well as both bell peppers. I dithered awhile on my eggplant and decided that I wanted that as a pot plant. It is still somewhat small, and by the time it gets big enough to plant out I can put it in the big bucket the Purple Dragon carrots are in now.

Monday morning I saw there was a 70% chance of rain Monday night, so I came home form work, grabbed my bag of seeds and headed out to the garden. In the west I could just see the tall, puffy white towers that announce thunderstorms in Nebraska. I planted Masi bush beans, a purple pole bean from Italy, Painted Lady runner beans, amaranth, salad mix, parsley, and dandelions. By the time I finished the sky had gone gray and I was quite certain that I could rely on the incoming storm to water in my seeds for me.

Now comes the long wait. I'll have some minor harvesting from my container gardens in the next few weeks, but I won't get anything big from my garden for about six weeks. The various greens will be ready first, and then if I'm lucky I'll have Early Girl tomatoes in July. In the meantime, the strip of land in front of my porch needs love.

This afternoon, for the second time in my life, I was stung by a wasp. I could really have done without the experience, but I suppose I can't complain if it only happens about once every twenty years. There was no malice on my part nor, I suppose, on the wasp's part. I was pulling out some old plastic pots that I had saved from last year, and it had evidently been hanging out in one of them. I was in great pain for two or three minutes, and then it subsided into a dull ache. I can still feel it now, but its not enough to inhibit typing.

In spite of this, I did get a little bit of gardening-stuff taken care of. I planted sweet peas, Tom Thumb garden peas and Purple Dragon carrots in various containers on my porch. There is no point in trying to plant carrots in the ground of my garden, the soil in my back yard is far too clay-ey to grow carrots. I then planted in seed-starting pots broccoli and parsley. I also took slips of my rose geranium, honeydew melon sage and pineapple sage and potted them up. I really liked them as tea herbs last summer, so I decided to grow a larger supply this year.

I haven't yet turned the ground in my small strip of the back yard, but after all the rain I'm not in a hurry for that. Still, if I'm going to get any kale this spring I need to do it soon. On the other hand, spring has been so warm the past two weeks it might already be too late! Also, I really need to figure out where my packet of Bright Lights Swiss Chard went.

Springtime in the garden! Some year I'll draw up a plan in advance, but my current method works well enough for now.

It's six in the morning, and according to the National Weather Service it's 32 degrees F at the Lincoln Municipal Airport. This means that it's some undetermined temperature above 32 degrees F in my back yard--the location and geometry of such creates a slightly warmer microclimate than the airport enjoys--which means that my tomato plants might, MIGHT, have gotten through the night intact. Which means I might be able to eke out another week or so of Yellow Jelly Bean tomatoes.

I'm hopeful. Tomatoes hate cold, but I covered them last night, and they are in a sheltered location.... After I get dressed and before I leave for work I'll uncover them and see. In the end, that's a gardener's fate--wait and see.