Tag: garden

homesteading, Seasons

Moving Out

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My tree has a new home! I contacted a nursery, malls, the local Boys & Girls Club, friends at Microsoft. I posted to our local parents email list and the Seattle freecycle group. But in the end it was the landscape service providers for our neighborhood who had a space tall enough for a 12 foot tree. So late last week, on a day with rain (despite being forecast otherwise), this beloved family member moved out. The Tree has been launched into a new life, out of the nest. Impact Property Services, our neighborhood’s landscape services company, has an office …

Seasons

Impatience

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On the way in from lunch the other day, I peeked under the row cover to check on the seeds I planted a few weeks back. Cliff Mass wrote recently that so far our spring (ok, our March) has been cooler than average, and it shows. No sign yet of the peas or of the carrots and spinach under the row cover. It’s a bit too soon for the onion seeds in the sun room to have visibly germinated, but that didn’t stop me from peeking there, either. Come on, Spring! Grow, Green Things, Grow!

homesteading, in the kitchen, Seasons

The Circle of Potatoes

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Today, I used up the last of our stored potatoes, turning them into soup for tonight’s dinner. They weren’t much good for anything else, all shrivelly and going soft and putting out seriously desperate roots. Soup was good, though. I’m thinking I’ll drape the potato box with heavy black cloth next year, on the theory that the opening and closing of the pantry door, not to mention turning on the pantry light, for the last six months has provided enough stimulus for the potatoes to think they should start getting ready to make more potatoes. Perhaps a colder environment would …

homesteading, Seasons

Beginning the season

 

I took my cough and sniffly sinuses outside today and started Project Garden, 2011, pulling weeds, adding compost to the veggie beds, installing the pea fences and planting pea seeds. The potato bed is just about ready for the seed potatoes, which I expect to arrive in two weeks. I brought in about half of the over-wintered kale, which opens up a half-bed for starting spinach and carrots, assuming I can find my row-cover-anchoring rocks. Things are actually looking pretty good in the garden, despite the snow and the hard freezes we had this winter. There’s plenty still to clean …

Seasons

Not there yet

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Ian was given an amaryllis bulb a few years ago for his birthday. I planted it, and it put up leaves but never sent up a flower spike. Amaryllis are marketed during the holidays and I’m used to them blooming during cold weather, but I figured it was a gimmick and if we just left it alone it would eventually do what it was naturally inclined to do. If that’s the case, we have the world’s laziest amaryllis. I moved it out of the sun room after Christmas on the theory that it wasn’t warm enough. This makes no sense …

homesteading, Seasons

Garlic!

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One of the things I love about planting garlic: you put the cloves in the ground in the fall, when the air is crisp enough to let you know the season is shifting but not yet so cold as to be really unpleasant. Then you go inside, where it’s warm, and watch the weather, the windstorms, the rain, the occasional snow. And by the time the seasons have swung around and you can think about going outside in something less than 14 layers, this has happened: Sometimes gardening is a lot of work: weeding, fertilizing, watering. Sometimes, it just happens …