Procrastinate I Do

Quite by accident I have learned that waiting works. Also known as procrastinating, not doing led to a small harvest of early winter turnips and radishes. This summer, not cutting the flowers from basil yielded a summer-long pollinator. Basil, not my favorite herb, did really well this year. I had three huge plants. Letting one go to seed was unknown wisdom. Bees hovered around it until frost a pollinator plant in plain site for all these many years, unloved and unheralded. I gained a lifetime supply of seeds as well. I missed planting garlic in our backyard beds this October and finally got around to planting them in late November. They missed historic rains and may do better than our off site garlic plants that quite frankly look beat-down, bedraggled, sick. Too much rain can be the kiss of death.

Oakleaf. I take them out on sunny days. 

Witness our kale plants and spinach. I had a nice bed of spinach but the Christmas rains and sodden earth from previous rains proved too much. Gone they are, in Yoda speak. The kale plants are slowly dying from too much wet. Initially twenty plants, there are now eleven. The stems rot. It is an ugly way to die. Hope sits on the kitchen window sill, however. I have small lettuces emerging. Soon every sunny window will be home to a planter of growing seedlings. Soon.

Rain! Rain! Too Much Rain!

    There can be too much rain, much as I hate to say it. The drought we had a few years back made me think I would never call "Uncle!" on rain. The collateral damage of too much of too much wet includes moldy take-over of my entire spinach bed and lettuces and halving of our kale plants. It's just ugly. The turnips are beaten down into a mushy mess. Cabbages have died too. The India mustard is barely hanging on and the Swiss Chard is a wait-n-see. Two back-to-back nights of hard frost did not help matters. Perhaps a greenhouse would help...Today we have brisk twenty mile an hour winds, warm temperatures and bright sunshine that will, hopefully, dry things out a bit.
     It is seed catalog time. Every evening I take time to study and think happy thoughts about what I will grow this Spring and Summer. So much to grow. Potatoes and tomatoes, peas and beans, more lettuce and broccoli, I am overwhelmed at the thought of so much goodness growing! Soon I'll be planting all kinds seeds in pots because time is on our side now that we've crossed over the longest day.

Turnips harvested before the five inch Christmas rain. 

2016

A new gardening year begins with seed catalogs and a wish list. This year, however, poking around on the world wide web I found that Johnny's Seeds was having a sale on lettuce seeds. Sweet! More than any other seed I wanted some Red Sails! They add color to a salad, taste good and tolerate the heat on oncoming summer. And so, before Christmas, with lettuce at it's peak in our Fall garden,

planning and purchases for our Spring garden began. Happy New Year!