Tag: spring

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 …

Seasons

Gravity wins

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At breakfast this morning, we admired the first of the three amaryllis flowers which had opened overnight. The petals were creamy, streaked with light red (not pink, mind you, light red). It hadn’t opened all the way, only about half, so looking at it full on made me think more of trumpets then stars. The second flower probably would have opened tonight. Amaryllises are ridiculous flowers. You take a bulb the size of a medium onion and put it in pot. Sometime later, it sends up a fat stalk and then unfurls huge, super-saturated flowers, roughly the size of a …

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 …