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Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Thinning.

Today I had to be really, really mean.

Poor little babies never got a chance. It's not THEIR fault they weren't the biggest, or were growing in the very corners of their compartments, or were in a spot where I'd accidentally dropped seven other seeds instead of the usual three per square. I'M SORRY, BABY TOMATO PLANTS.

Here's the tray of the WINNERS, who have made it to the next level in our exciting competition and who now have a chance at being transplanted to a sunny beautiful raised bed in glorious downtown Bootjack, California:

The peppers aren't quite ready for thinning, but their sad day is coming soon, I'm afraid:

Stay tuned for further heartless adventures in botanical eugenics, coming soon to a gardening blog near you.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Sprouts!

This year again I was really surprised at how quickly things sprouted in my seedling trays. I peered in at them on Monday and there was nothing. Wednesday, this:

Tomatoes and basil! Mmm, think of the future pizza! :)

(the peppers are making a much smaller showing but they're starting to come up too.)

Saturday, March 21, 2009

GARDEN. Yay!

Oh how I have MISSED doing garden posts. I didn't even realize how much until I was taking pictures for this post today. If nothing else it gives me something to post about each week, right?

(Really I've done SO MUCH STUFF in the last three weeks. Among other things, we took a week-long trip to Arizona and I typed up this really detailed and nice trip diary and took a zillion pictures and now I'm thinking that it's all pretty boring to everyone but us so I don't think I'll blog about it. Some of the pictures are in my photostream and others will be appearing as I process them. We had a FABULOUS time. Amazing. Wonderful. Delightful. Also, we had our fifteenth wedding anniversary just the day before yesterday. Fifteen years is a long time to be this happy. ALSO the day before yesterday, I took the kids on a flower-observing hike to Hite Cove to look at the river canyon's A-MAZ-ING display of poppies, and took some pictures that I really like, many of which are likewise in my photostream. Also I have a laptop. ALSO also school is going very nicely for me and for the kids. But I'm not going to write about any of that stuff. On with the garden pictures.)

IT HAS BEGUN. Let's see, today I planted:

• peppers -- three kinds:
  
  • corno di toro russo, which sounded so good I couldn't resist it from the catalog;
    
  • orange bell which I did last year and LOVED, and
    
  • pepperoncini even though I hadn't planned to do them again until I found out from the picture in the catalog that I had picked mine before they got ripe; they're supposed to be red. So of course I HAD to try again.
• tomatoes -- also three kinds:
  
  • Chadwick Cherry, which were HUGELY successful last year and now my mouth is watering,
    
  • Illinois Beauty, supposed to be, um, hardy and tasty? I forget, and
    
  • Sioux, which are supposed to tolerate our hot summers really well.
• wild strawberries

• and basil.
  

I think that's all.

One of my many projects this weekend was to make my first attempt at a bed mulched with spread-out newspaper and wood chips. Claire had some onions and a couple of Jerusalem artichokes she'd started in cups at a 4-H meeting, and they needed to be planted out, so they became my guinea pigs yesterday.

For Christmas I asked for gift certificates for the local feed store so that I could buy myself some bareroot trees in January. I did get enough to do this (thank you Mom and Dad!) but I didn't buy the trees until yesterday (the first day of, um, SPRING, which is kind of late to be doing this project but I think it'll be OK). I planted a Fuji apple and a Harcot apricot in our garden, because it's fenced to keep the deer away. It's my hope that by the time they become a shade/root issue (this year they won't take up any more space than a couple of pumpkin mounds would) we'll have expanded our garden anyway. Of course, that was our rationale when we put our chest freezer in my tiny little makeshift hothouse-porch-thing -- we were going to make me a greenhouse by spring. Oops.

In non-vegetable-related planting news:

We have a whole bunch of little pine trees that are, um, doomed, because they are growing at the edge of our little woods, where they create a fire ladder that endangers our woods and therefore our house. We hope to transplant a lot of them elsewhere -- anyone want some little pine trees? Claire wanted one for a Christmas tree for her room last fall, and since they have to go anyway we potted one up in our biggest pot and she decorated it and kept it on her desk. By some kind of miracle, it actually survived. After Christmas we kind of kept forgetting to replant it outside, although we did move it from her desk to our porch. Yesterday we finally took it out and planted it by the driveway, where, assuming it continues to miraculously survive, it can grow as tall as it wants to. (I think. Did I put it under a power line? I'll have to check.)

Lastly, some more Christmas presents from my parents that finally got put to use yesterday:

Dad did the woodwork, Mom selected and lettered the verses (some of which are just AMAZINGLY apropos, don't you think?), and finally on the first day of spring, three months after I got them, I planted flowers in them.

EDITED TO ADD: Mary pointed out that it's hard to read the lettering on the boxes, so here's the text: Boxes beside door: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever." -- Isaiah 40:8 and "The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind, and God saw that it was good." (This one is more hopeful than humorous.) Window boxes: Petunia bed: For the sun rises with a scorching wind, and withers the grass and the flower falls off, and the beauty of its appearance is destroyed; so the rich man in the midst of his pursuits will fade away." (Good thing we're not rich, but I don't think this is good news for the petunias.) Pansies 1: "Consider the lilies, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, but I tell you even Solomon in all his glory did not clothe himself like one of these." (again, hopeful.) Kitchen window with pansies: "So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth."

All in all, this has been a fantastic way to spend the first weekend of spring. Yay! :)

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Books for February. ON TIME even. How shocking!

I actually read several books that were new to me this month. I didn't write everything down as I went along, so I hope I'm not forgetting anything.

1. Last Light, Dawn Light, Night Light, and True Light -- Terri Blackstock -- overall, 3.5
   
   
   
   • This is a Christian fiction series that was recommended to me by a friend. Like most Christian fiction, the writing is not... excellent. And unlike some Christian fiction, these are Very Christian, so if you're of a different persuasion you might not be terribly interested. However, I found the plots and the premise of the series really compelling, enough so that the slightly weak writing style -- and it's not terrible, it's just not great; think of a level between, say, Harlequin and LaHaye -- wasn't a deal-breaker. Blackstock tells the story over the course of four novels of a community that's plunged into darkness and chaos by an astronomical event that behaves like an EMP. (if you don't know what an EMP is, you might need to go to Survivalist Freak school -- or Google, whichever floats your boat -- for a few minutes and come back.) There was nothing in the books that my husband and I and most of our real-life friends haven't already considered and planned for, but -- and this is what I liked best about the series, to be honest -- for the millions of people who go through life completely dependent on technological gadgets (she typed on her laptop), not thinking about any potential life-altering disasters beyond a sick babysitter or a fender-bender, this series is a real eye-opener. What do you do if absolutely nothing electronic -- nothing with a circuit board in it -- ever works again? What will your neighborhood do? What will your city be like? What becomes important then? What would be important now if something on that scale might possibly someday happen? What if it's not that exact disaster but one of a different brand? All interesting questions, all things that I have heard previously-oblivious people discussing after reading this series.
     
     As novels, as I've said, these are readable books. The plots get a little more contrived in each episode, and are less centered on the disaster that forms the backbone of the story and more on the kind of drama that could occur anywhere under any circumstances, but the pace is good and most of the dialogue doesn't stand out -- which dialogue shouldn't, because if it does it's almost always because it's bad. My favorites of the four books were probably the first and the last -- the first for Survival Freak School reasons, and the last because the story in that one really will break your heart and make you think about your faith in God in new ways.
     
     Verdict: If you are a Christian or you don't mind overt Christian fiction, do read these, unless you REALLY can't stand better-than-mediocre-but-not-amazing writing.
   
   




2. The Breakdown Lane -- Jacqueline Mitchard -- 4.5
   
   
   
   • You may have read Jacqueline Mitchard before; I will never forget sitting in our library, the first time I'd gone to the library alone since LT's birth two years earlier, and read nearly the entirety of The Deep End Of The Ocean in one bleary-eyed sitting. I really, REALLY like Jacqueline Mitchard, Oprah endorsement and all. (Whatever I may think of the woman, her politics, or her show, she does frequently pick good writers.) The Breakdown Lane, which is actually a few years old, did not disappoint. The thing about Mitchard's books, at least the ones I've read, is that they take extraordinary circumstances and find the ordinary life in among the drama. Here she tells the story of the end of a marriage: one of the seven original plots, right? But this is not your ordinary divorce: after twenty years, a husband tells his wife that he's going to take a little 'sabbatical" from the family, and takes off to live, incommunicado, in a commune. Meanwhile, his ballerina/advice-columnist wife is left at home with a seriously depleted savings account, a newly-raging case of multiple sclerosis, a rock of a fifteen-year-old son with learning disabilities who steps up to care for the family by, among other things, taking over his mother's column, a self-centered fourteen-year-old daughter, and a toddler. This sounds like the makings of a pity-party trainwreck, but that's absolutely not what this novel becomes. (Nor is it a saccharine Anthem to the Human Spirit, which would almost be worse.) Mitchard's prose is intricate and grand and everything in between; her story is at once completely original and as old as sin; her characters are the rare type who are so real and beautiful and lovable and flawed that you are actually mad that you can't hope to run into them somewhere and tell them what you think of them. (I absolutely loved 15-year-old Gabe and his cool head and his alternative education; I also really liked Matt, who comes into the story rather late. But really, everyone's brilliantly done down to the two-year-old.) Please do yourself the favor of reading this. (Thank you, Rosina, for telling me about it.)