Category Archives: Gardening

Apr10

Green fingers and thumbs and toes, oh my

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I managed to do some planting over the weekend! It was lovely and sunny on Saturday, and I got out my box o’ seeds and decided what I wanted to grow. I had a look back, and I’m two weeks ahead of when I planted things last March, yay!

In one of my big raised beds (the ones I made last year), I put radish, two kinds of carrot, and some rocket. There’s two of last year’s late-planted carrots and a sad excuse for purple sprouting broccoli that have survived the winter in that box, so I left them alone. The carrot packet in the photo is dated ‘for planting year 2001′. They’ll still grow, I promise!

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For veg, I have a dearth of good things, it seems. I gave up on cauliflower (blecch, anyway) and regular broccoli a few years ago. They are related to cabbages, and probably because cabbage is so common, this country has every insect and disease known to horticulture ready and waiting to attack members of the brassica family. I never knew cauliflower could turn bright yellow and go slimy. Hubby never ate the heads I managed to save, anyway. And it stinks like the inside of a cow’s intestine. I’m not a fan, can you tell?

I always grow basil and it always looks great and then turns black. Sigh. Got some red cherry tomatoes, some kind of supposedly edible gourd, bell peppers, courgette (zucchini) and broad beans. I really want to try to grow corn but I have low-to-no hopes for it surviving here. I don’t have any seed, either.

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I have three definite colours of iDJ’s favourite, the cornflower – red white and blue! Also a mix, in the hopes that I get some pink ones.

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His other favourite, cosmos, is also in three colours, white, white with a pink edge, and a mixed selection that also has funky double petals. I didn’t grow the pink/white ‘candy stripe’ last year, and I missed it, so it’s back.

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His last year’s favourite, rudbeckia, did not survive the winter here (despite the advert on the packet, hmm) so I’ve got it on the go again, too. You would not believe how TINY rudbeckia seeds are! I’m going to surprise him, hopefully, with a new bloom, gaillardia. The aquilegia (what I call columbine) and the coleus are for me, taking me back to a good flower garden I had in Ohio.

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I’ve also got two kinds of red sunflowers for him, with no clue where I’m meant to put them in my garden. According to the packet as they grow 6 to 9 feet (1.8 to 2.7m) tall, yikes! I have some violas and dianthus (a different variety of dianthus than what I’ve had growing out front for years). I think I tried to grow both last year with no germination. Oh well, the seeds are free!

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I put out a lot of garlic that had gone well past its use-by date, as in it was mostly dried up or had a long green shoot coming out of each clove (or both). I find it grows amazingly well here. Easy and no maintenance to speak of. Shove it in dirt, water when dry, dig up when the greenery dies back. In a few months, one sorry-ass clove becomes a good sized garlic bulb. It tastes wonderful fresh.

My back didn’t appreciate the work, and our weather is meant to be very cold and windy but dry until the end of the month. Nevertheless, I’ve got everyone snug inside their propagators, and we move them from sunny morning windowsill to sunny evening windowsill daily. I dreamt last night that they had already begun to sprout – so I had a look when I got home tonight to see if I was right.

I was! The early birds are the gaillardia, all of the cosmos except the white, the mixed cornflower, and the ‘velvet queen’ sunflower. I’m so excited!

Sep15

Growing Thing

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I ran into the house few minutes ago. “Come see! Come see! Better put on shoes, it’s damp out.”

Fabulous hubby, iDJ, didn’t stop for shoes but did grab his iPhone.

“It’s over here, in the corner, you probably won’t get a picture,” says I.

I showed him a gourd I’ve managed to grow. As he was taking a pic, I was blathering away about how I didn’t know if it was a pumpkin or a courgette (zucchini). I lose track of these things, he knows well. I also was telling him how I figured out how to stop gourds from rotting on the vine – it’s called blossom-end rot and if you just manage to keep an eye out for baby fruit after the bloom has faded, you can scrape off the mushy flower with a fingernail and voila! it doesn’t get all icky and decide to die. Hey, I had to Google that one, it was killin me to have a fruit and then, suddenly, a ball of mush.

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It’s still small and unidentifiable – I’m guessing it’s a courgette based on two things – I think that’s what I planted there, and pumpkin usually comes from the vine rather than right at the heart of the plant.

Look at all the other female flower ready to bloom! I might have more, yet – and there is another small one at the back that you can’t see.

Wish me luck!

Sep9

Harvesting garden goodies and some brotherly lurve

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Good morning! How’s this for a change – me doing a post before noon and I’m totally sober! Usually two of the three things go together: morning and sober. I think attempting to blog before noon might be a first.

Today I’m not even hung over, not a little. I am, however, juiced up on coffee and stuck indoors as the weather is absolute shite. It was bearable outside yesterday so despite a pretty good case of ‘one too many the night before,’ I got a lot of tidying-up done in the garden. Empty pots put away, icky soil and mint that can’t ever, ever, go into my compost bin thrown out, carrots, beets and garlic pulled, monster tomato plants trimmed of dead bits. I’m pleased with the garlic. It’s “oops garlic.” Oops garlic is garlic that you bought in the store and forgot about/didn’t use fast enough, and the next time you look at it, it’s all shrivelled with a massive green spike coming out of it. Oops! I plant it. This year it grew really well for me:

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I might give up on beets next year. Or try another variety. Or actually look up what I’m doing wrong. The beet roots on mine are all too tiny. Easy to grow but… meh. Not worth the effort to peel the little things.

I also think they mixed up my carrot seed with something out of a grimoire:

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These aren’t carrots, they’re Mandrake Root. Oh well, the dog will eat them anyhow. I hope she doesn’t turn into a zombie-dog or werewolf. Hmm, maybe I do – things have been a bit boring around here lately.

So, I promised I’d mention the boys in my next post! Which is now this post. And it is now after noon, by the way. Oops!

I caught the guys in a big cuddle-fest Thursday morning, and for once Lokii’s little black face is clearly visible. So hard to get a shot of him that isn’t anything but big blue eyes in a flat-black wedge.

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Lokii looks happy and interested, Spot looks like he’s got murder on his mind. Let’s try to reverse that, shall we?

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Not so much. Lokii just isn’t capable of looking grumpy. Glad to be able to share his giant schnozz with you this morning afternoon.

Sep4

Live! Nude! Plant sex organs!

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Pssst. Hey. C’mere. I gots sommat you might like to see! Shhh, not so loud! You wanna bring the heat down on us? These are young ones, spread for your pleasure! Not even a year old!

*_*

Ewww, I just made myself a bit sick with that, sorry. A joke too far, clearly! I think it was the use of ‘spread’ that was too much. But open, or ripe, or fertile would have been just as bad…

In any case, I have more plant pictures. And yes, they are mostly of their sexual organs: usually called flowers by sane people. Plants just have much, much more attractive ‘bits’ than mammals do. I own a mirror, and know how to use Google. Trust me, the plants are way better at ‘pretty.’

And it’s a good thing, as evidenced by the plethora of bees I’ve had this weekend. I was so glad to have them back – I’ve not seen any since spring. They aren’t impressed with the rudbeckia, it being a northern American plant, but they love the lobelia and the devil’s-bit scabious I dug out of the ground by the railway tracks two years ago.

I didn’t take any pics of the bees. That would really be pushing the boundaries of plant porn: inter-class sex. I’d get this post banned, even if I do rate my own blog XXX so the kiddies won’t be offended when I say ‘cuss words.’ (I’ll never be Freshly Pressed because of this, ho-hum.)

So! Who wants to see plant bits? I do, I do!

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Rudbeckia! As I’ve said, I’ve never grown this before. As predicted, hubby loves it! I also didn’t realise it is the ‘black-eyed-Susan’ I’ve heard of all my life. I also didn’t know there’s like a bazillion varieties. Most of mine look like the above, but some look like this:

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I’m happy with them! The blooms last weeks, yay! And they are sure to last after the rest of my babies die off from chill and wind.

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My white and purple calla lilies – they only seem get started just when the afore-mentioned wind and rain sets in.

I’m not too upset about the lack of flowers, the spotted foliage is amazing. Like the skin of a salamander or an alien being.

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Speaking of aliens, this is a macro shot of the finished cosmos flowers I snipped off, to encourage more blooms. I was going to compost this, until the shiny, waxy surface caught my eye and made me look closer. Doesn’t look real, does it? Too perfect, too veiny, and too strange. The seed heads are only about the size of a thumbnail. Neat!

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This is why I have trouble trimming plants. Deadheading feels like beheading when I find such unexpected glories.

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This is the one surviving raspberry plant, grown from seed this year. It’s teeny-tiny, but it was so tiny up until now I couldn’t even take a pic. The other five plants didn’t make it. I learned that berry seeds need high heat for a while before they will germinate. About the same amount of heat they’d get passing through an animal’s digestive tract. Duh! That’s a trial-and error education, by the way.
Please ignore the moss growing on my soil.

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Lastly, my hot mess of flowers. This pic is the only reason I started this post – last weekend! You might recall this planter from a previous post, when I’d nearly forgotten what was in it. My how they’ve grown, despite taking a header off the kitchen windowsill two days after that post! I had to move them to the ugly location here (maybe next year we’ll paint that wall. I wanted to do a mural – maybe a beach scene). There’s a coleus from seed in that shot too – two years old, I overwintered it indoors and it was fine.

Right, this has been the most labour-intensive post ever. I couldn’t get the photos right. Too big or too small, in the wrong place, or adding in a hyperlink I never asked for. I give up! Yes, of course I have more pics…

Aug10

Revels in the Green

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I HAVE SUNSHINE.

I’m over the moon – or should that be over the sun? about this. See, our summer is officially over. Over over over. Even though for me, having grown up in Florida, August is supposed to be the hottest month, and the best month to have a birthday (no school! no annoying classroom acknowledgements of said birthday! Sun and life verdant and nothing but books and the woods to play in). Mentally, I’m not ready for autumn at alllllll. So! Sunshine and heat today and tomorrow, back to rain on Sunday – total misnomer this week it seems.

Anyhoo! I’m in the sun, sports bra and shorts, and quite merry from all the beer I’ve imbibed since I got home at the ‘expected’ time: that is, if I only work until 5. iDJ had my favorite camp chair already set up in the sunny spot out back and a beer on the countertop ready to be cracked open. Aw, I’m easy to please! And I’m happy he knows it.

He’s also been busy taking brilliant photos of my flowers grown from seed. Which makes me think of something I saw this week on FB – some guy still trying to say that appreciation of flowers is not a masculine enough occupation, in his estimation. Um. Why would adoring the beautiful female form be any different than realising the majesty of a flower? What-ev-ah. *hand wave*

It could be that hubby only loves my flowers because I grew them, but he has his favorites for sure. He put this one up on FB and said ‘I love these!’

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My cornflowers, this year in both blue and white.

I think I’ll have to grow these every year, just for him, as he adores them and is just amazed by their color and proliferation:

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The California Poppy! They kind of collapsed at ground level, but are still blooming like mad. Not sure if was the horrible compost we bought that made a lot of plants rot at ground level, but I lost a good few plant-babies to that this year. Sad. But…there’s still life!

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This is a planter I made up of larkspur and rudbeckia. It’s on our kitchen windowsill because the slugs killed about a dozen rudbeckia before I put it up so high. The larkspur is juuuust blooming, the rudbeckia is taking forever! I thought maybe they would open last weekend but nooooo, and they are still just thinking about it hard. I’m not really sure what they will be like, but if they are yellow or orange like they seem to be thinking of being, I bet hubby will love em. I tend toward purple myself, but I think he likes the warmer colours. I hope the blooms last for ages, since they are so slow to ‘cook.’
Lastly, our cosmos is finally starting to bloom! Last year our next-door neighbor told me that it made her sort of sad to see me growing them, in a good way, because she is from South Africa and they grow wild there. Last year I had ‘candystripe’ and this year I grew a mix. The photo he took today of one of the first blooms is just amazing, hope you like it as much as I do.

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I have more photos… Oh yes. I’m trying not to overload here! But… I can’t exactly explain why I love plants so much. I always have, but never really got to try my hand (hand? It’s called green thumbs in the US, green fingers here in Ireland! I have green fingers and toes, it seems, yay!) until I was in my late 20′s. Perhaps it is so simple that I connect with the life, so visible, so joyous, revelling in sun and water like I do myself. I cannot imagine my life without plants any more than I could without cats.

Jul19

Raised beds made from Chinese shipping pallets

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Ever try to type with a Siamese perched on the back of your neck? It’s a challenge. So much so that it took me three tries to type ‘with’ just then. Lokii’s in Super-Love-Me-Mode, despite being held and cuddled and snorgled to the point that I had to pick hair out of my mouth.

It’s just never enough with these guys, sometimes. Oh, what a hardship.

But, I wanted to talk about my new raised beds, or big planters, or whatever the hell they are, so I’ll just hunch over a little more and ignore the claws that occasionally dig in to my back.

iDJ works at a company that gets products in from overseas. Sometimes they come in really useful boxes. We currently use a former shipping crate as a coal/briquette bunker, for instance. I stained it mahogany to match the door to our shed and our garden bench. It’s a bit rotten now, but still more ecofriendly than some ugly plastic yoke. And we can always burn it for heat when it totally collapses, of course.

Anyhoo, lately he got it into his head that some of these crates would make good raised beds. He talked about the idea for a few weeks, a lot, as he is wont to do (oh iPad, you just let me down, trying to put an apostrophe in wont). One day I came home from work and found this:

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Three. Three! huge crates in my back garden. And not a lot of room for even one. Two are deep and match, and one is shallower. Where was I meant to put them? What was I meant to do? And how the hell did he get them home when he rides a bicycle to work and I have the car? Which even if he’d somehow spirited it away from my job and back again before I noticed, is a freakin’ Mini Cooper that is barely larger than one of these things?

Right, so – smile and nod, and leave them there to kill the grass for a few weeks while I figure it out. The usual! He gets the ideas, but I’m the handy-man around here. And I wasn’t ready for an invasion of timber.

Ah, worse – possibly chemically-treated timber. Nasty chems to kill any potentially imported insects. I heard about a slug as long as your arm that showed up in his warehouse. And I’ve seen pics of some dammed big spiders, too. Not that I mind them, of course – but big slugs can just DIE. The chemicals were a potential problem. We wanted to (iDJ wanted me to, that is) grow carrots, in particular, in one of the deep boxes. Would we be at risk of poisoning ourselves? The consensus was that a few weeks in the rain would wash most of it away. And lawd knows, we have enough rain around here.

Last weekend I finally had my plan, and a donated roll of the stuff you line planters with. So we set about measuring, cutting, and stapling liners into two of the three boxes. The third box is now holding the many, many bags of coal that have been slumped at the side of the house since winter.

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Half-way done with the second one. By then my back was screaming and I finally had this brainstorm; ‘Hey, we should stop and take pictures! So I can go sit down for a few!’

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All done! But now we needed dirt, and a lot of it. This is the shallower box and it got the remainder of what I dug out of the compost bin, along with some native soil picked clean of most rocks, and then a topping of two different store-bought bagged potting composts.

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Shallow box; named box 1 in my head, full of pretty, pristine soil!

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The Stupid Girl box, so named in my head because of my thinking about this post by Sledpress the whole time I slowly, not-back-breakingly, dumped in 3.5 bags of compacted potting soil and broke it up by hand. I love fresh clean slug-free soil without rocks. It’s fun to play in, and smells good, and I know there’s no accidental seeds like in my own compost, or bits of glass, plastic, mould, and huge chunks of wood like in one of the store-bought brands we purchased recently – oh yes, they are getting a nasty email very soon.

So! What to plant, when summer here is nearly over?

Jun28

Lavender Roses

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As usual I have too much in my head, and too little time. But I wanted to share a couple pictures of my very favourite rose I’m growing. It looks blah when still a bud:

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But it’s pretty wow when open:

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I just love this colour! And it smells lovely and sweet, like rose candy. Damn, now I want some Persian sweets…

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Both blooms, with my paw in for size comparison. They are pretty big, considering the entire rose bush doesn’t even come to my knee! I really thought I’d lost this one over the last winter, so I’m glad she’s back.

Jun17

Who wants to bet I’ve killed this poor ‘mater?

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Last year I tried my hand at growing tomatoes from seed. They grew, much to my surprise, but they were only just getting ready to fruit when our season ended, hard, in one day. I scrambled around trying to save what I could of my potted plants by bringing them indoors. It was a fatal move for the oregano (which overwintered just fine outside but died fast indoors). The tomatoes, however, grew and grew and grew… up the window, over the blinds, and down again until some of the weak, lanky stems were over eight feet long.

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Wait, how did that get there? Am I having a tasty beverage in the sun again? Mmmmm, could be! It’s not Paulaner though, it’s Franziskaner. We only have one Franziskaner glass and I kindly let iDJ use it as he’s sorta picky that way.

Anyhow, since June is over half over, I figured it is time to take the damn tomatoes out of our spare room. I’ve been putting it off as they are so intertwined and it is a two-person job and we rarely seem to both be available when I have the time to mess with them. But today when I walked in the room for something else entirely, I saw that since the last time I watered them, a few stems had fallen down below the windowsill and had grown another foot or so back upward. Ok, too crazy. And hubby was right there, so I untangled one and brought it downstairs and outside for some surgery and assistance.

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The victim, I mean patient, before trimming and repotting. Sad, sad, sad. That pot is way too small, how did I let this happen? Out with the scissors and bamboo canes and wire, a bigger pot at the ready, and this is what’s left:

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It is already drooping over pathetically since I took this shot. I have no idea what I’m doing, you see. I don’t even like tomatoes. Well, I do – but only in one dish that I made up. Basmati rice, butter and salt, and sliced homegrown tomatoes and homegrown snow peas put in raw and let to warm with the heat of the rice. That’s it, and it’s gorgeous. See, I don’t always have to have meat! Some fresh dill would probably be good in it too, but I don’t have any and I like it just the way it is.

In any case, I’m holding off on giving this plant a feed as I think I’ve shocked it enough for one day. Fingers crossed we don’t have any violent wind in the next few days, because after all the gardening I did today, my back isn’t going to allow me to bring this back inside in a hurry. Especially up the stairs again… which is 100% necessary or it will turn into cat-snacks and that’s a bad idea all around.

Jun3

Garden update

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We have yet another bank holiday Monday tomorrow, so yet another 3-day weekend for me, yay! This one hasn’t been warm, or sunny, or dry. I have laundry on the line to dry, but I’m in sweatpants and a tshirt with my fuzzy warm ‘smoking jacket’ on over it. It feels and smells like a cool October day, not early June.

But I’m still outside! Unlike the hubby who seems to be trying for the record of ‘most crappy TV watched in one day.’ On my trips inside for this and that I’ve heard: an Aussie Baptist preacher spouting whatever nonsense he was spouting, BBC Jubilee coverage, bad Irish commercials for upcoming family events around the country, The Big Bang Theory (twice), The Simpsons Movie, and most recently both Big Daddy and one of those Honey I Shrunk the Kids films.

This after we watched Battleship, with his finger on the fast-forward button. I napped, then when I woke up and it was still on, I left to go do more gardening in the cold. Terrible, truly terrible, movie. We also watched Iron Sky – which is one of those I’ll have to watch again to see if it was bad or funny. I did laugh a lot, but it felt a bit forced even to me. Very much a political movie as well, which went oddly with the humour.

Anyhoo, I took a few photos of my plants on Friday evening. They aren’t great pics, except for one. Should I start with that one? Ok. it wasn’t dark out – its just a quirk that the background is nearly black.

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This is one of two massive blooms on my white climbing rosebush. I bought four rose plants a few years ago for €1.99 each from Aldi, and this one alone has proven to be worth the price of all four and then some. It was supposed to be planted out front, but I messed up and didn’t identify them properly. This is after I left them in a bucket of water for about a month (they were bare-root roses). In other words I did my best to kill them! But I’ve never had roses and they were so cheap, I really didn’t expect them to live. My intention was to put the two climbers out front, the white and a pinky-red. Then out back here, a lavender and a true red. Well, oops. The non-climber red one is a let down, its too pink and is a bit, well, boring. The lavender one has absoloutely gorgeous, if small, blooms but it nearly died two years ago and is only about 1.5 feet tall. It does have two buds on it now though – yay! They all got a feed today, too.

But, two days later, the white roses are really enormous. Hold on, let me take a current pic but not with the iPad, it just is a terrible camera…

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My very dry-looking hand in there for size comparison – and remember I wear a size large glove :)

Here’s the climbing rose out front – it was drooping way over so I wired it up to the wild ivy I let grow on the wall. Probably much to my neighbour’s chagrin – it’s technically his wall.

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And in the front corner of the same wall, my wild sweet pea. I had NO idea what this was when I grew it. I’d gathered the seed so long ago that I couldn’t recall what the plant it came from looked like. I had written, ‘pretty flowers, climber, likes sun’ on the zip-lock baggie, however – and I knew I got it somewhere in Akron, Ohio. In approximately 1999. But hey, why not give it a try in 2005 and see what happens? This is what happens:

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Now, these sweet peas are just only getting started. See that patch of bare dirt at the bottom of the frame? It’s bare because these friggin’ things go mental every year. They come a good 8 feet out into the grass and then go across the driveway! Again, I planted let wild ivy grow in the corner so the sweet pea had something to hold on to, and I put bamboo canes in a teepee formation in the hopes that they would go up and over the front wall instead. I’ve been working on that for a few years, but this year my plan seems to be working – the pea is mostly vertical and holding on to that ivy. Man, my neighbour must hate me. Also in shot – the pathetic remains of my tulips. They were expensive, and hard work to plant: lovely dark purple and white/purple variegated, but they just don’t like it there. This year after the foliage finishes dying I’ll dig em all up and find a better home for them. Somewhere. Maybe in pots?

I have most things in pots, due to lack of good soil, the massive slug problem (hate them! killed a dozen today at least), lack of room and the lack of any real plan for my garden. My blueberry bushes are in pots, and the warm weather made the one I bought last year double it’s fruit size in just a week.

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Yum, yum yum. Can’t wait to be going out every day and picking the ripe ones. So far we have no problem with anything eating them – the birds don’t seem to know what they are.

The strawberries are in the ground, not pots (despite birds and slugs knowing just what they are) and are the very first thing we planted when we bought the house seven years ago. This pic is of slightly more than a third if my strawberry patch. Unfortunately it seems they have a limited life span, despite all the new plants created every year. I don’t even have a single bloom, much less a berry. I hate killing plants, but I think I’ll have to dig them all up and buy new ones next year. Sigh.

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I think I’ll stop here – I could keep going but this post is already a bit long. By the way, even iDJ finally realised he was wasting his Sunday with that ‘Honey, I…’ film.

Apr20

Seedier than usual! Betcha didn’t think that was possible.

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It’s been coooold here. Currently, at just about 8pm, the sun is bright but I’m indoors instead of outdoors. I gave it a good try, for nearly two hours, but it’s bloody 10 outside. 10C. That’s 50F. I’m warm-blooded and all, but the breeze makes it even colder and I just couldn’t take it any longer. When my nose runs and a couple of random fingers turn white and numb, it’s time to go in. Sigh.

But from the looks of it, we have at least another hour of sunshine beating in through the windows, which is fantastic. Because on Sunday, I spent a few hours making an unholy mess in the kitchen planting seeds.

Which of course, required me doing a shit-ton of dishes first, so I had room to make said unholy mess. How did I end up being chief dishwasher and bottle-scrubber? Bah. In any case, I put my time in, and took breaks to sit in the sun so the stupid back didn’t get too annoyed with me, and I ended up planting a small fraction of my seedacopia (It’s like a pharmacopeia {eww, the UK spelling for that is just wrong. Reminds me of coprolites} but with seeds). My mother in law works in a newsagent and when no one buys the magazines, they rip off the cover and return it to the publisher for a refund. But gardening magazines usually come with free seeds. Instead of throwing them away, she sets them aside and gives them to me! Hence, I have a lot of seeds.

I’d love a proper and pretty metal seed-organiser, but as ye know I’m cheap and I recycle/repurpose, so a big shoe box holds them for now- until I have too many and need one box for flowers and one for vegetables. Maybe I’ll paint the box I have! That’s a good idea…

Anyhoo, the sun is helping these new lives begin, and I’m thrilled to bits. If you have never grown from seed, start with carrots – it’s amazing something so big and tasty can come from something so damn tiny! I’m amazed every time when my minimal effort, some dirt, water, light and warmth can bring forth a huge plant from a tiny, dry nubbin that seems so very, very, lifeless.

But…as I said from the start, it’s coooooolllllldddd. I didn’t think anything at all would have the moxie to actually make the effort toward life, even though I’m keeping the seed trays indoors. Imagine my surprise when by only Tuesday I had sprouts! It was the morning glories I started for my Canadian friend. She has a long garden at her new rental house, and needs something to grow upwards and be a visual blocker to keep her greyhound from going through the fences. I thought a nice hardy and pretty climber might do the trick. According to Lagitana, morning glory is a bit of an invasive weedy pest, so it makes sense that it was the first to catch the spark of life.

I got a bit smarter this year and actually wrote down what I planted! So here’s the list, and believe me, I’d love to have about eight more seed trays so I could keep going and going and going…

April 15 plantings

Beets, Carrot autumn king, Purple broccoli, Basil
Californian poppy; Morning glory; Ladybird poppy
Coleus mix, Cosmos mix, Dianthus
Rudbeckia, Larkspur, White cornflower, Blue cornflower

I also tried some ancient beans iDJ found in a skip (Dumpster) and raspberry and lilac seeds I collected in the wild – not likely these will grow but what the hell.

So far I have the morning glory, both colours of cornflower, the rudbeckia, the cosmos and either the coleus or dianthus (I don’t know which end of the tray is which, oops), the rudbeckia… And I can’t really figure out what else. Nothing out of the beets, carrots or broccoli yet, but I didn’t have them under cover until today when I decided to put them in a clear plastic bag to help out.

I’m so surprised it took them less than a week. The cornflowers are the tallest, by the way – and I did the blue ones last year in pots out front and enjoyed them – they got so tall and flowered for ages, and the dry blooms looked nice in an unused vase until the cats decided they were a tasty treat…

Oh – last but by no means least is the lavender from seed! Apparently this is a difficult plant to get going from scratch, but a month in damp soil in my fridge (in one of the plastic-lidded takeout containers from our gorgeous local Chinese that I saved. See, being thrifty comes in handy!) did the trick and I now have five little guys about a centimetre tall each in their own 3″ pot – I really hope I can keep them going, as my store-bought lavender died two years ago in our first bad snowy winter.

Yay for some green!