Prajantr, Thoughts and Wanderings

It’s time to plan out what seeds I need for spring. Seed starting will be a little late this year as I set my house to rights, but I still plan to have my gardens. In fact, I need to do a few things in them that I didn’t get to in the fall – pruning vines and taming overgrown growth while the plants are dormant. I think I’ll spend a little time each day this week puttering in my winter-dormant gardens, getting ready for spring. It’ll be therapeutic.

Once I can work the soil, I’ll be amending my garden beds with organic material (rabbit poo). There’ll be my favorite sugar snap peas and probably string beans too. This year I’m probably going to grow carrots and zucchini, my favorite tomato varieties and some other veggies. I’m looking forward to that.

I’m debating getting a compost tumbler. I definitely believe it would be a good idea, but it is an added cost during an unexpectedly challenging year and I really don’t know if I’ll still be in the house next year. I can plan for spring, but I can’t plan for the future. Not yet.

It was a wonderful trip to San Diego last week. Of course, I’m told it rained almost every day back in NJ while we were gone, so I shouldn’t have been surprised at the state of my gardens when I returned. But I was. Honestly, who could be prepared for this?

I poop you not, people, the weeds had completely hidden my vegetable garden in a knee high carpet of verdant light green. Obviously, there wasn’t anything for it but to wade in and do battle with the weeds. Here’s was the progress by noon of Saturday. (Hey look, there’s Thai eggplant and carrots revealed!)

And by the end of Saturday I had won back my veggie garden!

Sunday was a bit more leisurely. I was able to repot quite a few plants that were desperately in need of new potting.  I was also able to pick some incredibly awesome sugar snap peas from my newly restored veggie garden as well as some nice string beans. The sugar snap peas are so much larger, sweeter and crisper than anything I’ve been able to get at the stores, even Trader Joe’s can’t match these.

The blackberry area was brimming with beautiful berries – enough for a couple of pies, really. The grapes are coming along nicely but not ready yet and the herb garden is beginning to grow in a bit more.  I’m most excited about my blood orange tree which has set quite a few oranges. I can’t wait to taste them!

*Click on the small pics to embiggen.

True, hardening off sounds a little like a sexual innuendo – in this case, it is the process of my moving seedlings outdoors so that they are hardened to the more extreme high and low temperatures of outdoors as compared to the relatively stable temperatures of indoors where they were germinated.

This weekend is perfect for moving the bigger tomato plants outside for hardening because it is overcast and the anticipated swing from high to low overnight doesn’t look to be too dramatic. There won’t be too much sun to burn leaves that are used to being under plant lights. It’s a nice intermediate time to move things outdoors.

I’m also going to move several of my tropical potted trees outdoors at this point too. The kaffir lime trees (I have four of them), the blood orange treee, the jasmine, the two fig trees and the bougainvilea.  I also have two different types of Queen of the Night cactus to put outside that have been flowering just about twice a year.

I had a gardenia tree that I absolutely love but it didn’t winter over well. I’ll put it outside in the hopes of revival but I’m not holding out much hope on that one. Gardenia seems to be one of the plants I justcan’t maintain over winter.

In the way of planting – I’m going to sow my string beans, winter bon bon squash and carrots directly in the soil this weekend too.  The bed is turned and ready, so all I have to do is mound the dirt in rows and sow my seeds. I was talking to Laura about perhaps using a single sheet of toilet paper to help my tiny carrot seeds stay where they were sowed. We’ll see how it goes.

I was out puttering in the garden beds this evening. It felt really good, even if it was just clearing away dead leaves and growth from last fall. It’s amazing how good puttering in the garden beds can make a person feel. Plus, I was able to feed some of the first shoots of parsley to the rabbits – my Italian Flat Leaf survived the winter.

I got back inside just in time for the sky to open up and thunder down on us – including hail stones the size of marbles. o_O

I’ll probably start doing a little bit of puttering in the gardens every evening so long as the weather is nice.  I do have a lot of gardens: veggie garden, herb garden, rose garden, butterfly garden, shade garden and the landscaping beds in the front of the house too. All of them need some cleaning up and some loving care. The veggie garden needs the soil turned thoroughly and another infusion of rabbit doodles.

Next weekend I’ll probably put some fertilizer spikes in the ground for the trees and evergreens. I’ll also sprinkle some fertilizer/insect repellent around the roots of the roses to keep away the aphids and mites.  Carnivorous nematodes will be added once it gets warm enough to go around and eat the evil Japanese beetle larvae and various garden pest larvae while aerating the hubby’s lawn.

I’ll keep at an eye out at the local farm stands for some pretty annuals – I love torenia and black eyed susans. Those will end up in the front landscaping beds.  I also need to do a bit of redesigning of the back bed that joins my koi pond to my rose garden…it looks a little wrong and I’d like to make it look a little nicer this spring so that it’ll grow in over the summer.

All in all, the storm has passed in the time it took me to type out this post and spring is coming in full force. I’m really happy about it.

Oh yes, it may be the middle of January but I have had my warm weather gardens in mind and will be seed starting this weekend.

Why seed start so soon? Well, I want to make sure I have strong, healthy plants to plant outdoors in my various veggie, herb and butterfly gardens. Getting a head start by starting some of my seeds early indoors is a fun way to go and cheers me up during the winter months.

As with every year, I took notice of what the boys in my household ate last summer and am adjusting my garden accordingly to have veggies that they enjoy.  The hubby especially likes fresh, raw veggies much more than cooked – so I try to grow sweet, crisp varieties of his favorites. So far, here’s the breakdown of my various gardens:

Veggie:

• Carrot Sweetness II Hybrid – first try at growing carrots in the garden. Carrots are a staple in our household for salads and sides so if I can grow them successfully I’ll be really happy.
• Sugar Snap Peas  -we all love these plump, crisp peas both in pod or shelled. Short season but I might try to sow them for a double crop, one in spring and one in fall.
• Winter Bon bon squash – tasty baked with butter and a touch of sea salt.  Awesome color too and look nifty in the garden. he hubby hates to mow the lawn around these vines though so I’ve got to get creative on how they are attached to trellises.
• Big Beef Tomatoes – hugely popular with the boys and the dogs both. The boys like em sliced on sandwiches and burgers and the dogs like to steal them off the vine and chomp away at them.
• Juliet Grape Tomatoes – grape tomatoes on steroids, honestly, they grow almost the size of plum tomatoes on our vines. The boys love them as snacks or in salads.  They’re so sweet they’re good as a summer dessert too.
• Rainbow Heirloom Tomatoes – growing for the first time for my lil sis, because she loves heirloom tomatoes with a nice nutty cheese on thinly sliced french bread.  Besides, these are very pretty tomatoes and probably tasty fresh with mozzarella too.
• Brandywine Heirloom Tomatoes – growing for the first time also and hoping to see if the boys like ‘em.
• Cucumbers – the hubby loves these for salad and I like them in asian style soup.  This variety is a bush variety that takes up little real estate in the garden.
• Hot Lemon Peppers – these were really good last year with decent medium heat and a warm lemony flavor that added a neat facet to my cooking.
• Thai peppers – of course! These are a traditional garden addition for me. Gotta cook with these.
• Thai egg plants – small, white, round egg plants that I use in my authentic Thai cooking and are great raw too.
• Thai galangha – like ginger, but not, and key for flavor in Thai cooking.
• Thai pak boong – leafy green vegetable, called water spinach in the US I think. High in iron, tasty in salads and absolutely fantastic stir fried as a dish all on its own. The rabbits like it too.

Herbs:

• Italian basil
• Thai Holy Basil
• Thai Siam Queen Basil
• Fennel – a first time growig for me, but I love the smell and flavor when cooking seafoods.
• Dill
• Italian Flat Leaf Parsley
• Rosemary
• Sage

Fruit

• Strawberries – these have done well over the last year or two and I’m actually going to have to rip out runners that crept into my veggie garden. We love the fruit and even Kaiser raids this patch for strawberries on a daily basis.
• Raspberries – doing well in the berry patch.  We should get more than a sweet handful this year.
• Blackberries – doing insanely well, these need to be trimmed back and contained.
• Mulberries – I did some merciless trimming on this tree last year so that hubby could still get under the tree to mow the lawn.  It offers nice shade a a nifty flavor of berry. IT also attracts a lot fo cute birds.
• Grapes – both the red and the white vines are looking good. I’m debating extending their trellises this year to give them more growing room. We got a lot of tasty bunches last summer.
• Cherries – awesome Rainier cherry tree right next to the rabbitry.  I love this tree.
• Lingonberries – disguised as evergreen shrubs in the front landscaping.  Cute and bearing sweet berries for us and for birds.

Butterfly Garden: I started this garden in fall of 2007 on the sunny side of the house.  It’s done well this past year and I wanted ot make some additions now that the initial plantings of perrenials have established themselves and I can see where there might be room.

• Parsley – not just for cooking, this is a great larva plant for butterfly gardening.  And it makes a nice low growing, green background for the more colorful flowers.
• Queen Ann’s Lace – Karen suggested this and I’ve always liked it since Queen Ann’s Lace is the Only flower for Anne’s hair after she had to have it cut short for dying it green in Anne of Green Gables.
• Echinacea – adding these for color, variety and because someday I might figure out how to enjoy in tea or something.
• Milkweed – because Karen was kind enough to give me seeds and I love Monarch butterflies.

One might think that something out there is telling me something.

My lone apple tree was snapped at the base and lying out in my backyard. I really don’t think Kaiser did it.

The apple trees are shipped to me young.  They take at least a year to establish themselves and then another to set fruit for me, much less grow nice and provide any kind of shade.

We only plan to stay in this house for another year or two.  So honestly, it’s not worth it to plant any more apple trees to replace them.  So I contacted Raintree Nursery and asked them to cancel my Spring order for the 2 apple trees I had on order.  I decided that it was probably a sign overall that now is not the time to be establishing my orchard.  Gotta say though, the apples my tree gave us this past fall were really great.

All in all, we hope that the house market will recover by mid-next year.  Once it does reasonably recover, although it realistically probably won’t be where it was during that boom, we will put the house back on the market again.  It could be that we don’t sell until 2010…but really, beyond what I’ve already got coming, I really shouldn’t try to establish more in my gardens. Heck, I’m starting to wonder if I should still let my roses come this spring too.