cutest ever basil seedlings

I don’t believe my other seedlings are jealous of the basil. They are plants. And while I enjoy a bit of anthropomorphisizing, I don’t think jealousy is in their dna. Envy, maybe, but not jealousy.

cotton seedlings

door jam volunteer seedling

front: hairy balls seedlings back: eggplant seedlings

pet (wheat) grass seedlings

tomato seedlings

Hang in there little seedlings. Just another 7 weeks to go.

image credit: travis s on flickr

I am planting cotton as my new seed growing endeavor for 2013. I remember a cotton boll in a glass jar back in my childhood Ohio home. Not sure where it came from, but I hope to recreate it this year. Cotton requires an extra long growing season, so I might need to keep one plant in a large container so I can protect it when frosts come… or I’ll need to just hope for a long season this year. The cotton seeds are planted, and on the heat mat – but they are not up just yet. Also planted two pepper varieties as they take about 80 days to maturity. Cotton apparently needs about 130-150 days. That’s a lot of days for Iowa.

Here are some other seeds we ordered for the 2013 veggie garden:

• LAVENDER TOUCH EGGPLANT
• PURPLE RUFFLES BASIL
• LEMON BASIL
• LETTUCE LEAF BASIL
• LEMON CUCUMBER
• DANVERS HALF LONG CARROT
• SPACE SPINACH
• MARCONI RED PEPPER
• ORANGE SUN PEPPER
• KELLOGGS BREAKFAST TOMATO
• SOLDACKI TOMATO
• SUN SUGAR TOMATO
• GOSSYPIUM COTTON
• DRAGON LANGERIE BEAN
• LEMON DROP HOT PEPPER

I guess I could call these resolutions, but intentions sounds closer to how I feel about most garden projects.

• Plant veggies with a purpose – I suspect most gardeners are like me and have a tendency to over order and then later when all the seeds grow, over plant. This year, I’m lucky to have an outlet, so expect a portion of the seeds we start for our veggie patch to show up at NewBo. I still want to plant enough to share with local food pantries – they love donations of zucchini when everyone else is running the other way.
• Use an organic pre-emergent to control weeds. We’ve learned that corn gluten can be added to beds in the spring and again in Summer to control many of the weeds the garden experiences. Need to give this a try this year.
• Spawn some green lacewings – Like ladybug larvae, these little guys will devour lots of aphids. I really do not care for cleaning aphids off plants. Might be my least favorite garden chore.
• Grow more flowers! Yay! Veggies, fruits and herbs are more my thing in the garden. But I’m growing more interested in flower cultivation. Zinnias, poppies and sunflowers have been my stand-by favorites for a while, sliding in between peppers and basil. 2013 will see more interspersed variety.
• Take more photos – I’m saving up for a telephoto zoom lens. That’ll be fun.

So what am I missing? What garden intentions/resolutions do you have this year?

Nights are earlier as the days are shortened. This gives me more time to be in the night. Driving home is now a dusk to dark commute. Letting Dopple into the workshop for dinner means a short walk in the evening. Or sometimes longer if Dops doesn’t wish to be found.  I find these quick immersions into the cool country night to be calming. The gardens sleep. The owls wake. A set of four flashing LED lights can be seen in the Willow bed – a new attempt to frighten away destructive deer.

Silhouettes of trees and the old forgotten house across the street are punctuated by the curl of the moon. It’s a passive moon. Passing through the night and pausing to chat a bit with a trees and me.

I started with the smallest and most intricate of the letters – the & sign. The result was decent enough to continue and justified the purchase of a small scroll saw. The blades on the scroll saw broke rather frequently, so it proved less helpful than we thought. Maybe that’s normal for scroll saws. I secretly toyed with the idea of buying a makerbot 3d printer — how cool would that be to print the letters in three dimensions! I might need another project to justify that purchase.

I went back and forth between the old jigsaw and scroll saw and finished each letter with a dremel sanding drum. The old backer-board was found in the barn and cleaned up a bit. Anne painted everything and we glued it on. But not before playing with the letters a bit.  Hmm, with the makerbot I could fashion all kinds of playful letters…

The finished sign in now hanging in our space at NewBo City Market. Grand opening is this weekend, October 27th! Hope to see you there.

This is the first Friday in 4 and 1/2 months that I haven’t been running around in utter panic. Market season has ended and I have to admit it feels good, although I will miss seeing customers and other market vendors.

Here are the last few Fall planters I made and sold:

Perennial succulents in a rustic Iowa barn wood box. The Des Moines Downtown Market customer who bought this one said that he had been watching for me for weeks- there was a month gap between my last 2 Des Moines markets. This sort of feedback feels so good!

Succulents in planters are a great “green” alternative to traditional wedding or event centerpieces. Flowers are wasteful when flown in from afar, and they do not last long. Succulents will live for years.

More perennial succulents in a rustic box. Don’t the nail holes add texture?  Succulents are very happy in wood planters since wood breathes. Do not overwater succulents as this will cause root rot, which can kill the plant.

I also like to plant succulents in vintage enamelware. I love it when I find these larger rectangular pieces. I can squeeze in lots of varieties.

Mum, purple sedum, blue fescue grass and variegated creeping charlie in an old galvanized pail with a gorgeous patina. I am trying to create that patina on some new galvanized sheet metal. It isn’t proving easy. That’s our cat, Dops, in the background.

We have been waiting for Dexter Season 6 to be released for months now and it finally arrived in today’s mail. Despite several obstacles- sound problems on my laptop and NewBo buildout issues needing to be discussed – there was no way I wasn’t going to watch Season 6 episode 1 tonight. So we watched it and…..yep, it was entertaining but I’m questioning whether I can continue to watch Dexter after having discovered Six Feet Under in the interim (i.e. between finishing Dexter Season 5 and the DVD release of Season 6). To my mind, when one watches every season of Six Feet Under and the insanely fitting finale, Dexter in comparison seems one dimensional and shallow- impressions that didn’t crystallize for me until experiencing Six Feet Under.

Seeing Dexter on the screen made me long for David. And Keith. And Nate, Claire, Ruth, Brenda… and real situations and emotions, death and how it changes everything and yet nothing. Not action and certainly not the Dexter’s emptiness.  I don’t think I can watch episode 2.

Since living in the country, I have had a few encounters with dying animals: a tiny kitten that died in the night after sustaining injuries by a predator. And a baby bird that fell out of its nest and hung for hours. I feel the most important thing I can do is to enable them to die in peaceful surroundings and with dignity. While at my market stall, I kept thinking about the bird and wondering about  how much pain it was in and the comfort of its surroundings. Was the blazing sun and loud music coming from the nearby stage too taxing? I concluded that the bird would be better off in the cab of my truck, shaded by the roof and further from the blaring music. It was in the same spot as I left it, still breathing. Into an enamelware pot it went (atop a soft towel). And after the market we headed home to the country together.

I tried dribbling water onto its beak many times that afternoon and evening, but it showed no signs of wanting water or food. A random time or 2 it opened its beak slightly, and I’d like to think a little water went down, but I’m not too sure. Mostly it just stood immobile, eyes closed. The thought that any creature can be seriously injured and still hang on helplessly for hours afterward is troubling to me.

Alan’s sister, Ann, a trained ornithologist in Oregon, suggested we try feeding it small caterpillars. The only ones I could find in the dark were cabbage worms. The bird showed no interest and I can’t blame it- those worms smell terrible.

In the morning I expected it to have passed in the night. But there it was still breathing. I dribbled water onto its beak and it shook its feathers. I held it in my hands, hoping the warmth would somehow be soothing and healing. Over the next few hours it was much more alert and even moved around a bit, but did not attempt to fly. Did it have a broken wing but was fine otherwise? Could I find a vet who would operate?

Around 11 a.m. I was doing dishes and the bird was in a basket on the table. I walked by and saw no bird in the basket. Or on the table. I scanned the room and spotted it on a window sill, attempting to get outside! I picked it up, feeling  the flutter of its wings, and took it outside, where it immediately flew off high into the air- to the east. What a truly happy and unforeseen ending!

On Sunday morning my warbler was much perkier, even perching on my neck!

We planted grapes our first Spring on the acreage in 2008. The variety is Marechal-Foch, a French-American hybrid. Eleven rows were planted which proved to be too many to take care of with our regular work schedule. We reduced the vines to just five rows, and last week we pulled nine five-gallon buckets of grapes off the vines.

This was way more volume than we expected. Looking at the grapes on the vines, they were spread out and didn’t appear too intense. After harvest, they became this giant mound clustered goodness.

Next step was to de-stem the grapes and then either press them or, in our case, freeze them since we were not ready for pressing and the making of wine. The de-stemming of nine buckets took about eight hours with three people. It was great to take the time to pull out the greenies (and spiders), but a de-stemmer/crusher would have made the project much quicker.

We froze 31 four-pound bags of grapes. The plan is to convert 27 bags into nine gallons of wine stuff. The rest is for jelly. I’m trying to restrain my hopes for either of these items — we are newbies — if all goes well, we will raise our glasses in a toast to beginners luck.