Seed Season




Gi and I are working up the momentum to go out and run some errands... it may take a while. My immune system went on strike last Friday, so after a few days out sick with bronchitis and pink eye I took the hint and made my maternity leave official. Yesterday I felt almost human, but overdid it running around after Gi and collapsed around 2. Today I feel almost normal, and am taking it much easier.

We had a nice Valentine's Day even with the lingering sickness, E surprised me with a huge, enormous, overwhelming king size bed - a looming neccessity with a new kiddo added to the two dogs, two adults and toddler mix that we already were trying to fit onto one mattress. E didn't even notice when I left the bed last night at 3 am with preggo insomnia.... could be a good thing, could be a bad thing! One of our errands once we finally get out of the house is to go over to Sears to get a bed skirt to cover the ...interesting... black and navy blue paisley pattern of the box-spring.



I went through the linen closet yesterday and saved the nicer flat sheets and pillow-cases for quilting - I have 13 blocks done for what will probably be Gi's new quilt (the blue one is bound, washed, and awaiting a new home or a baby boy), and will probably make the log cabin variations from the Sew Mama Sew Quilt Along this weekend. It's for her toddler bed, so once I have 16-18 blocks I'll stop and start adding some khaki borders and sashing - I still have enough great red/pink batik tablecloth to use that for the binding - it should look nice. For V-Day, I made Gi the stuffed elephant from "Last Minute Patchwork Gifts" - if you want to give it a try, it's very cute and comes together quickly, BUT make sure to check the flickr group commentary - there are omissions in the assembly instructions which can drive you a bit crazy (especially at 1 AM - trust me!), but the commentary there clears up the confusion.

E and I stayed up one night this week and put in our seed orders - the bulk from Johnny's and a few heirlooms from Seed Savers. We are going to pick up our potato and onion sets as needed from the feed store - I have had some bad experiences not getting those delivered here at the correct time, and would rather just head out to pick up 5 - 10 lbs at a time on days we're planting, though we'll buy extra onion sets to store for scallions and green onions later in the season. We didn't order much seed variety - we over-ordered last year, but still spent a good hundred dollars on the stuff that we are constantly putting in the ground - rotations of beans (jade, yellow wax, royal burgundy, dragon langerie), carrots (oxheart, nantes, a new purple variety, and goldrush), radishes (cherry belle, d'avignon/french breakfast), mesclun, beets (bull's blood and an improved golden variety), peas (snow, shell, and snap)....

I have high hopes for the red zebra tomatoes we ordered from SSE - the 16 green zebra seedlings we tried last year were by far the most productive disease free variety we've ever grown, but there's only so much salsa verde we can eat, and it would be great to get the same characteristics with a nice red color for canning the surplus. We've always had great success re-homing any and all tomato volunteers that sprout up in beds reserved for that purpose, so I'm sure we'll have plenty of nice green zebras for comparison. The volunteers obviously lag a few weeks behind our earlier 'matos, but we can harvest here till the end of September, so we still have a nice long season.

.

Posted: Fri - February 15, 2008 at 02:29 PM        

©