Seeded

The cotton has sprouted.

These things are enormous. You know what else is enormous?

The luffa seedlings. These are some of the few things still on the windowsill inside–everything else is either planted or sitting in the greenhouse on the patio, waiting for the rain to subside. Good thing, since these things don’t leave a lot of elbow room.

My Asian cabbage appears to be flowering. Why is it flowering?

It doesn’t look like it was mistakenly mislabeled. It looks like cabbage. Beautiful young three-inch cabbage with no heads and flower buds. I think I’d feel this way if my kid brought home an all-A report card and the next day her teacher called me up to say “Your child is in danger of failing if she doesn’t shape up and stop making paper airplanes in class.”

Of the two Sorrento broccoli, one is also budding–but then, it’s supposed to, though not this early, I think–and the other has been all along, in two- and three-flower groups,a because it apparently never got over being inside. There is one Green Goliath broccoli that’s doing well, and while it looks fine at the moment, I’m not hopeful. I’m discouraged about this growing brassicas idea. At least the kale looks okay…for now.

When I came home, Eric was trying to nap and didn’t want to be disturbed (I feel this is entirely unfair, considering that one, it was his back problems that kept us up over the weekend and two, he stayed home from work yesterday, again due to the back, and thus got lots more sleep than i did) and so I went outside.

The promised rain had not materialized so I did nothing with the winter-sown lettuce (which, by the way, is doing better than all the other lettuce, including the stuff I started inside early and then put out as rabbit bait), but I did plant moonflowers, morning glories, red flax, toothache plant, balloon flower, safflower, Trionfo Violetto beans, Hutterite beans, and Hopi Red Dye amaranth. Then I decided the time had come to put up my Christmas tree.

Last year, see, I read something about saving one’s Christmas tree for growing pole beans on. I thought this was totally awesome. “Why not?” Eric said when I told him about it, and so instead of putting our tree out on the curb we heaved it into the side yard to de-needle itself and await spring.

The only problem here is that as it turns out, fir trees take longer than four months to lose their needles. The Christmas tree still has most of its–dry, and turning brown in places, granted, but still there. And we like the kind with well-defined but close branches, so there was a lot of bulk there. And in order to give the beans space to cling and roam and me space to pick their resulting offspring, I figured I needed less bulk.

So I dragged it over to an as-yet-unplanted area of the garden (oh yeah, cilantro and dill seedlings are up, as are the carrots in that garden. No sign of parsley or parsley root yet, but I wouldn’t expect one without the other anyway) and stood over it, pruners in hand, contemplating. A Noble fir is a complex organism, small branches forking everywhere. Eventually I just started cutting, thinning out the branches, cutting away bulk small branches with lots of needles in favor of leaving thick, bare branches for better bean purchase.

At length I dragged it over to where it’s supposed to go, dug a hole, stuck it in the hole down to the first branches, and replaced the dirt, stomping it down. Then I cut away the first branches because they were encroaching on the broccoli and the peas and didn’t look useful. Then I planted Cherokee wax beans all around it, blessed it, and walked away. That part of the garden looks ridiculous, with the pea trellis, three branches tied together as one bean teepee, and a partly-nude, thinned-out Christmas tree as another. But I’m hoping that in a few months these bones will disappear under lush foliage and flowers.

Today’s Done list:

-cleaned up porch to make room for trays for hardening off

-put out bay tree

-filled planter with dirt (for the winter-sown lettuce…didn’t plant it because I got impatient trying to wet it down; I’ll let tomorrow’s projected rain do it for me)

-pulled out innumerable tiny bindweed sprouts

-sowed the wildflower seeds from Burt’s Bees (same bed as the borage)

-planted Mammoth sunflowers seeds in the vegetable garden

-planted scarlet runner beans along a few fences

-pulled more bindweed

-planted a Silver Mound Artemisia and a Lavender Cotton I bought at the farmer’s market two weeks ago

-did not actually put out the trays to harden off

Then I was driven inside by incessant sneezing. My allergies have been extremely mild this season until today. I hope today was just a fluke.

Here are all the beans in my yard at the moment:

The fava beans are doing well, with nine out of ten sprouted. The lentils not as well, but that’s okay; I need a place to put my Hutterites anyway. And the Trionfo Violetto beans have come up in the herb garden, lived two nights, and seen two mornings, so the rabbits are either taking the weekend off or not interested. I love the complexity of bean and pea seedlings (the Pioneer and Golden Sweets are doing just fine, too).

I also planted the borage into that cement-surrounded bed and put some thyme out. The Romanesco cauliflower was doing poorly except for one with no collar, I noticed, so I pulled off their collars. Now all of them except the one without a collar are gone. Sigh. I guess that’s another place to put the Hutterites.

Started yesterday: Nankeen brown cotton, Erlene’s Green cotton, indigo.

Planted yesterday: quinoa (from the store). They may however be all gone because when I went into the vegetable garden this afternoon I startled an awful lot of birds.

Started today: lemon cucumber, Straight 8 cucumber, Parade cucumber, Yellow Scallop squash.

Planted today: Zahra hybrid summer squash (because I just can’t wait! And the ten-day forecast looks good! And I have plenty more seeds for when they freeze or fail to come up!)

Dug today: a bed by the side of the garage, destined for sunflowers and maybe daisies; a DMZ between the herb garden and the grass, at Eric’s desire, for turning the lawnmower around in. I want to grow Irish moss there, because we saw a six-pack of it at Meijer and thought it would make a great lawn someday when we have lots of money, and it would be nice to grow it now and see what it’s like (plus maybe get some seeds?).

Petted today: a tabby cat who apparently enjoys rolling in my scallions and skulking along the narrow paths in the herb garden.

Noticed today: a luffa sprout is up; an onion I left in the vegetable garden last year has sprouted; the bindweed and grass are growing faster than I like; the farmer’s market turnip I planted is already starting a flower stalk; the red, pink, and green trees I can see from the herb garden are breathtaking in their transient beauty.

Marigold tagged me for a meme. Suddenly I feel like I’m thirteen again and somebody asked me to sit with them in the cafeteria. Incidentally, I wrote this entire post at work and then copied it in order to paste into a post here. Then I got caught up in work stuff and ended up copying something else onto the clipboard and lost the post. That’ll teach me to write posts at work. (Okay. It won’t.)

The Rules:
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write six random things about yourself.
Tag 4 people at the end of your post linking to their blog.
Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Six things about me:

1. My hair is brown, but it reddens with age and sun. When I was about ten I stayed with my cousins for two weeks in the summer and when my mom came to pick me up she screeched, “What did you do to your hair??” thinking I’d dyed it because we had spent the whole time playing outside.

2. I never went to high school. But I did go to a prom, my cousin’s.

3. I’m about halfway through writing my second novel. (Come to think of it, one of my characters did just dye her hair, to avoid being recognized.)

4. I’ve been a vegetarian for thirteen years. I remember my last meal of meat: pork chops, made by Mom.

5. According to my in-laws and ex-employers, I don’t smile or show my emotions enough. I contend that showing my emotions is not necessarily desirable, especially in the situations in which this comes up. Also that I would not be told to smile if I were male.

6. Altogether I’ve taken several years of both ballet and fencing, but I haven’t gotten better than covering the basics of either because of what classes I took and when.

I shall tag:
Mostlygardening
Disorganization
Vegmonkey (and/or the Mrs.)
(eh…I think three is enough, don’t you?)

Also, on a strictly gardening note: (1) everything seems to have survived the frost fine and (2) the borage sprouts are really scaring me now. I also hear they spread like mint. I have this small bed surrounded by cement with a roof edge mostly covering it, so almost nothing grows. I’m tempted to see whether borage could take over that bed, and if it can, bless it.

I was playing WOW with a friend of mine who lives near Cleveland last night, running across The Barrens and chatting about work and irritating customers. “That doesn’t sound good,” Eric commented, looking out the window. It didn’t sound good; it sounded like icy snow; so I told Courtney > BRB, I think it's snowing and I need to cover my plants, and went out into the darkness.

I brought a pot and the ice cream bucket (incidentally, it’s occurred to me that salt water would be a great way of killing the weeds in the strip between our garage and the neighbor’s yard that I just want to cover over with gravel) and mainly used my hands to find the two herbs in the herb garden I was afraid for in order to cover them. Everything else took its chance. I lugged the lemon tree inside and covered the winter-sown containers. I returned, dripping and muddy, to the computer room. > Is it snowing? Courtney asked.

> It's hailing, I said.

Tonight we have an actual frost advisory (which I find completely charming–that they make an actual advisory, that is, not the frost itself). I’ll go out earlier tonight.

This was a peach tree blossom on April 22:

And this was a peach tree blossom on April 26:

I don’t think it was the same flower, but the tree was uniformly pink both times.

On second thought, there will be at least some hands-on gardening today. The potatoes are here!