nngh

[dragonlady7]

Headache.

Have been considering myself in a good mood this 'weekend' so far, but upon reflection, I really have been rather grumpy and testy. I think I need a nap. I will take one, in a bit. I seldom nap nowadays, but when I have a day off I always stay up late the night before-- and then get up when Z goes to work, which means I don't get any sleep. Which might explain the grouchiness.

Mostly I have been spending my time pondering gardening, and doing laundry. I know that leaves a lot of hours unaccounted for, but that's sort of always the way of things with me-- where does the time go? I don't know.

Most interestingly, I am consulting the seed catalogues and the Encyclopedia of Gardening my mother loaned me, and am putting together A Schedule for the garden. Since I'll be starting seeds indoors, I'll need to have some sort of plan lest I totally miss all sorts of deadlines.
I am being assisted in this endeavor by a wonderful calendar given us by Z's mom, who got it from her church: it's just a twelve-month typical wall calendar, but it's illustrated by Catholic paintings of the Aryan Jesus sentimental tripe sort, and has all the major Holy Days of Obligation marked, and this is the best part: Every day you're not supposed to eat meat is marked with a line drawing of a fish. How much does that rule?
I am halfbreed-Catholic enough that I find this overwhelmingly amusing.

So I am annotating this calendar with all the dates upon which I must plant or move things. I am slightly hindered by my lack of a firm date to apply to "when ground can be worked"-- peas, lettuce, and a couple other things want to be planted then, and I know it's before the last frost, but I don't know when it is. (Obviously, it varies.) So I don't know where to put that on the calendar. Perhaps I should consult the Farmer's Almanac...

I also think I need to buy a truckload of topsoil for the front yard, where the ground has subsided after sewer work was done. I also think there should be either a hedge or a raised bed of some sort, or something elaborate, up there, just to make use of the space and conceal the utter shittiness of the repaired lawn over the sewer.

But partly I am grouchy because the drain in the basement into which the washing machine empties has suddenly become clogged, and I don't know why or when. This means that tens of gallons of soapy water have been puddling across the floor. The drain does eventually, well, drain, after an hour or so, and so I've managed, by spacing it out, to get all my laundry done, but I really don't know what to do-- it's very annoying, and the dehumidifier is naturally finding this to be rather hard to deal with. And I'm tired of bailing the standing water into the basement's other drain...

Comments

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to tell you how jealous I am of you and your seeds and your basement and your grow light. I just got my Burpee catalog yesterday, and will thumb through it and enjoy it, but that's as far as I'll go. Hey - maybe the White Flower Farm catalog will be coming out soon!

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

But you have a yard, don't you? Some of the seeds, you can just kinda open the door and fling them out into the yard, and lo! a couple weeks later, you've got plants!

I know my eyes are much bigger than my... well, than my Gro-Light, to start with. But Z is interested, too, and he's considering going out and renting a Roto-Tiller, which would be infinitely preferable to the hours and hours I spent last year cutting sod just to get the like four-foot-square patch I wound up with last year.

Still. I have 250 pepper seeds on their way, and space for about six pepper plants... I think I'll buy a bunch of cheap pots and make eccentric gifts to all my friends... Shall I mail you an ancho pepper? I doubt it would survive...

White Flower Farm is porn, man. Porn.

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

I would think the Farmer's Almanac would be fairly reliable for that info. In the first place, it's remarkably accurate, and in the second place, with all you're doing, you probably want to 'plant by the moon', and it will have that info also.

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

I have a yard and a little vegetable garden. I even have my own mini-roto-tiller. I think it cost around $100, and worth every cent. I tried peas once but they shrivelled up before I got any blossoms. What other seeds can you do the fling-and-lo thing with?

My personal gardening tradition is to go to to Goebberts Farm Market (http://www.pumpkinfarms.com/splash.html) every Mother's Day and go insane. I can get plants so tiny I can almost lie to myself that I started them.

"White Flower Farm is porn, man. Porn."
And how!

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I had pretty good luck with the peas-- but not regular peas, sugar snap peas. The regular peas were okay, but mostly fell all over themselves and produced, like, two peas. The sugar snap peas were like "Whoa! Sunshine!" and climbed about six feet and threw peapods at me. So I'd definitely recommend Burpee's (original flavor, I think) Sugar Snap peas. And water them plenty. And yeah, we just stuck those in the ground. Poke a hole, stick seed in, push dirt back over, water, wait two weeks.
We did the same with the beans-- just stuck the seeds in the ground. Not so much flinging, I suppose, because they actually wanted to be buried... Still, they weren't so awful. We also planted cucumber seeds and were perfectly satisfied with the results.

But I talk like I know what I'm going on about, but really this is only my second year with a garden. This year I think I'm going to have to actually discover what this "fertilizer" lark is all about. And we'll see whether I can actually manage to get any seeds started... preliminary experiments with basil and sweetpeas suggest my average is pretty dismal. The morning glories were a freak thing-- I guess they like it to be too dry. 99% of those sprouted within three days. Everything else, I'm getting like 25% success at best. So we'll see once we try in earnest-- although my mom gave me the invaluable hint that I should simply place saran wrap over the tops of seed pots until they sprout, to keep them from drying out.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I have the 2005 Almanack-- Z gave it to me for Christmas last year. I have found a lot of good charts for agricultural purposes, but actually nothing about planting by the moon-- and astonishingly enough, it did not have information on the region's frost-free dates. To my total astonishment.
All it had was a little paragraph that listed traditional planting times, but that's thoroughly unhelpful: I do not have an oak tree, nor do I have a squirrel, and so telling me to plant corn when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear does me precisely no good. (There's not even a ballpark estimate, like "that's sometime in April"-- nothing. Worse, it's a list of numerous of these folksy sayings, and they're out of order, so I can't even say well, the oak trees will have leaves the size of a squirrel's ear sometime before the aspen and chokecherry trees leaf out... Not that I've ever seen a chokecherry...)
So, it seems, the Farmer's Almanac isn't doing me much good thusfar. Although it does have a nifty recipe for homemade lip balm, involving Crisco and Kool-Aid.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Ah! I was wrong: in a part of it entirely separate from all the other agricultural things, there is indeed a table of planting by the moon!

...
But still no frost-free date information. The Internet tells me April 30th. I guess I'll go with that.

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

Burpee sugar snap peas - put it on my list.
Beans - what kind? Do you remember? I tried some once and got about four beans, ate them as soon as I picked them, and that was the end of it. There is nothing as good as a freshly picked green bean.

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen one in years. Decades, actually. But they used to tell what weather to expect on each day.

I would hazzard that you'd be safe to plant on the full moon previous to April 30. It's usually almost hot by then, even though it can get colder again in May.

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

"There is nothing as good as a freshly picked green bean."

Except peas. Or tomatoes. Or ...

nevermind

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

Waaaahh. It's only the beginning of January!

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Beans-- I got "Kentucky Wonder" pole beans last year, from the garden center where I buy most of my crap. They were all right-- not hugely productive, but fairly. The secret, I think, was that we had a trellis for them, and so they could climb and were happy. They actually didn't get a whole lot of sun where we had them, but they were good and productive. I've never tried growing bush beans, and think pole beans may be the way to go.
This year I've got seeds I harvested from the Kentucky Wonders last year-- they were huge, by the way, with like 9" pods-- and I also ordered scarlet runner beans because I'm going to attempt to have a prettier garden this year, and they're supposed to be pretty good and have bright and pretty blossoms as well.

My mother used to mass-produce both green and yellow beans, and I don't know what variety she used, but she would freeze bags and bags of them. I never did much gardening work as a kid, but really, my mother was a subsistence farmer and raised much of our food when I was very young. It's been said all through my life that I'm the weird one because I was born at the end of a long hot summer that Mom spent almost entirely bent over double working in the garden, so I was upside-down the whole time. (All my sisters were born in either winter or spring.) I really ought to ask her what varieties she used, though, because really, she got huge yields and I know she never did anything elaborate to get them. I don't think she ever started anything indoors until I was in high school and gardening was more a hobby for her.


But yes-- there is nothing as good as a freshly picked green bean, except a fresh pea pod you get to shell yourself. Z vastly prefers sugar snap peas, but I admit that secretly I was very disappointed by Burpeeana Early's performance last year-- we got very few regular, non-snap peas, and while I academically prefer the efficiency of eating the pods, I have so many blissful memories of shelling peas as a child. Mom would just give us each a big bowl full of unshelled peas and we'd shuck and eat them at the dinner table to save her the effort.

Have just gone down to basement to check: "Sugar Snap" is the variety ("the Original Snap Pea!" it says), and the packet reminds me to provide strong support for 6' vines-- my chain-link fence with a pole and some twine was our feat of engineering. And the "Kentucky Wonder" pole beans were from a seed packet from Bentley, not that I've ever heard of them. Still and all. They did OK. I recall that I watered them almost daily, but it was a really dry summer. We'll see what this one's like.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Z is all excited about the raspberries. We have such a tiny yard we really don't have room for them, but he made me order five of the yellow kind of raspberries, so... He keeps asking me how soon we'll have them. "They won't even send the plants until spring," I answer, but it doesn't stop him asking.

I'm just excited about vegetables in a way I'm not excited about them when faced with the prospect of buying them in the store.

But yes. Cruelly, it is still only January. This is all made so much harder by the fact that it is nearly fifty and raining in a very springlike way.

Oh-- one of Z's coworkers pointed out that if we have another cloudy day tomorrow we'll set a weather record for sunless days in Buffalo. Me, having lived in Rochester, I haven't even noticed that it's been so dark, really, but this is pretty bad for Buffalo...

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

My mother used Kentucky Wonders.

[mother2012.livejournal.com]

Actually, if you had the raspberry shoots, right now would be the time to plant them. Now that you've reminded me, I'll go out and trim this years shoots tomorrow.

I wish I could garden. I want to garden. I want tomatoes ripening on my windowsill, peapods to crack, fresh sweet carrots, onions on demand. Alas, I doubt I'll ever be able to do it again. Unless we build a greenhouse, where I can have my plants on nice convenient shelves.