neotoma

Lamb kavurma, brown sugar kettle corn, a loaf of honey wheat bread, cheddar biscuits, strawberry lavender lemonade, garlic & chives chevre, strawberries, snap peas, deli pickle spears, square-cut radish kimchi (kkakdugi), radishes, asparagus, dill plant, parsley plant, edible marigold plant (let's hope these three don't get nibbled to death, unlike their predecessors -- I'm going to sprinkle them with cayenne pepper, so maybe?) roma tomato plant, 2 artichoke spinach die handpies, a hotdog handpie, a blueberry lemon muffin, an extreme chocolate chip stack, a peanut butter s'mores bar, and a box of cookie bloopers

Repotted my late tomato seedlings today (unknown variety, Abraham Lincoln, & Mortgage Lifter). Hopefully most of the them will survive. One of my buena mulata hot peppers is looking wilted, so I may lose that. I do have seed, so I can try starting a few more, but it's pretty late for hot peppers.

I went to the hardware store and bought 3 tomato cages this afternoon, as the Roma tomatoes were just spreading on the ground instead of growing up, and the tomatillo are getting tall, but that means they'll start spreading out soon. I may buy another cage or two next week, because some of the hot peppers are getting big and listing weirdly too.

I pulled some of the milkweed by the rose bush, and planted more marigolds by the tomatoes and hot peppers. If there are more marigolds available at the farmer's market this weekend, I'll buy another flat or two.

I still have to pull the flowerbed that has gone entirely to mint, but it's not going to be fun at all.

I went out of my friend Pseudonym A's house today and helped her with her garden. She bought this last year, and we put in some fall vegetables on Labor Day.

Today, we ripped up the landscaping cloth from two flower beds, put down better soils, mixed some of the underlying clay up, and then planted one of the beds with candy roaster squash, pie pumpkin, pickling and regular cucumbers, and two kinds of melon. I also planted a corn and a succotash been in each mound, so at least they should be identifiable when those sprout up. I looked over the cabbage, kale, and cauliflower that we'd put in along the wall last year -- most of them were bolting, but they'd done pretty well, so she could definitely place more brassicas in those places.

We swung by her local Lowe's and picked up petunias, three flats of marigolds, six strawberry plants, some potting soil, and black mulch.

Back at the house, we paused to have some lemonade, then spread most of the mulch in the pumpkin bed, potted the strawberries in a multi-pot that the previous homeowners had left, ripped up more landscape cloth from under what might be a camellia, planted the petunia, and then planted the marigolds as edging in that bed.

Lastly, I scattered a lot of different flower seeds -- nasturium, foxglove, sunflower -- and some radish and green pea seeds -- then mulched it. That bed is just going to be catch as catch can this year, I guess.

Afterwards, we sat in the sunroom suitably distanced and ate delivery Japanese food. I might be sore tomorrow (it was about 6 hours of work), but it was a lot of fun.

Ham steak, sandwich steak, 4 flavors of lemonade, a gallon of lemonade (well, the concentrate for it), 4 flavors of kettle corn, plums, nectarines, pears, pawpaws, beef borek, spinach borek, roasted beets, extreme chocolate chip cookies, nasturtiums, basil plants, Thai chili pepper plants, a lemon verbena plant, 3 Cheese Steak handpies, 3 Mexican Street Corn handpies, an All & Oats bar, a Chocolate You're a Little Salty square, a Very Berry Doodles stack, a buttermilk cake slice, a Loaded oatmeal stack, and a chewy ginger stack.

I met up with my friend A Psuedonym To Be Decided Later, and hit the Ace Hardware for garden supplies: a trowel, gloves, some green bean seeds, 3 bags of garden soil, a bag of dehydrated cow manure, and some fall vegetable seedlings -- cauliflower, kale, chard, red cabbages, pak choi and another basil.

She and her mother have just bought a house, and while there is a backyard, the beds in it have been neglected. We spent an hour or so pulling overgrown morning glory vines and general trimming; I found 4 pots under all the vines, two of which were medium-sized strawberry planters. The beds, as it turned out, are a thin layer of bark over landscaping cloth over unpromising red clay.

We made do, scraping holes in the bark and mounding garden soil and composted manure over the seedling roots. I gave her a couple of chili pepper seedlings, a tomato seedling, and a pair of Mexican sour gherkin seedlings. I scattered my bag of crush crab-shell fertilizer over all our plantings as well, and then watered them. Hopefully some of them will do well and she'll have a small fall vegetable garden.

Then I took a quick shower, changed my clothes, and we drank from the gallon of lemonade and ate delivery salads. All in all, a productive day.

All of April was cold and rainy, and I was not getting any traction on learning when my apartment lease was going to be renewed, so I didn't start any seed for the garden.

However, I started some seeds today:
Abe Lincoln tomatoes
Fish peppers
Mexican sour gherkins
Chimayo peppers
Hatch Green (Big Jim) chiles
Hatch Red (Joe Parker) chiles

These are all from last year's seed packets, so I don't know how good the germination will be, even with the heat mat and supplemental light. But I have hopes.

And another set of jiffy pots, so I might try some more seeds -- beans and more chile peppers, maybe even melons.

Apple and apple berry strudel, fava bean spread, pita bread, greek almond cake, greek olive oil cake, pink lady apples, vegan-cheese popcorn, brown sugar popcorn, bacon-cheddar quich, buttermilk cake with caramel icing, and a wicked bar (bar cookie with chocolate chips, coconuts, butterscotch, walnuts, dried apricots and dried cranberries).

I dumped most of last year's pots into the flowerbeds this morning, and discover the soles on my Blundstone work boots have deteriorated to the point where they fell apart like rotten cardboard. Hopefully I can get new soles put on them, because the boots themselves are fine.

Made jam tonight. It's a very simple recipe.

1.2 lbs hulled and chopped strawberries
1 cup honey (in this case, Killer Bee from The Bee Folks)
1 tablespoon lime juice (Nellie and Joe's Key Lime Juice is excellent!)
5-6 sprigs of thyme (lime-scented cultivar 'Lime Green' Thymus x citriodorus')

The yield tonight was 3 half-pint jars.

I planted my three hardy kiwi plants in pots today. As they arrived as four inch tall plugs, I figure they could use the time to grow a bit. I also planted za'atar (Syrian oregano), Provencal lavender, 2 pink-flowered strawberries, a red snapdragon, spearmint, and an Italian oregano in pots.

I was going to plant some of the hot peppers, so I weeded out the larkspur which is everywhere in the one bed -- at first I was hoping it was carrots, but it's definitely larkspur and while it was nicely shading out the mint some idiot planted in the ground years ago, I don't want larkspur when I could have vegetables. And piling the pulled larkspur plants on the mint makes a good sunblock, so maybe that will help control the mint for a while, too.

However, I can't find my trowel, at least not this early in the morning. I'm going to clean off -- transplanting pots gets you covered in potting soil -- and look for it again.

At the very least, the day is comparatively cool and a bit overcast, with rain promised this evening. I've set out most of the seedlings. I want to put in the ground out in the approximate places I want to put them, to get them acclimated on a not-brutal day. I'll plant them today or tomorrow, even if I have to buy a new trowel to do so.

And at the very end, I was scattering bone meal and blood meal among the plants in pots and in the ground, and one of my neighbor's French bulldog puppy was very enthusiastic about investigating what I was doing. It probably smelled wonderfully disgusting to him.

A friend and I went to Behnke's today for the orchid clinic. My tiny phalaenopsis orchids are just grocery stores plants, but the woman running the clinic said they were in fairly good condition -- one of them had a purple-ish 'blush' which is common to healthy orchids with high anthocyanin genetics. She changed out the sphagnum moss and said that the one that had already lost its flowers might send out a new spike as it is still flowering season and it did have a terminal and axial bud visible.

So now I have more information about keeping them alive (including don't water until the sphagnum is dry and crunchy as dry Cheerios), so I hope to keep these little plants going. They're certainly a bit of bright cheer -- along with my begonia, which is on its second year -- in the end of winter.

I did pick up a few pansies and johnny-jump-ups to put in the flowerbeds. They won't survive when the summer heat comes, but they'll be a bit of color until then as well.

Also, I did actually smell a wallflower in the greenhouse. It smelled amazing, like a fruit candy!

Pink lady apples, probiotic raspberry yogurt smoothie, cream, cubalaya eggs (peewee sized, so small batch baking!), pastrami from Urban Butcher (oh nom nom nom!), onion, a head of hydroponic lettuce that I immediately stuck in a pot of dirt, and a six-pot of johnny-jump-ups for hollimichelle's front flowerbed.