Late Winter

I've made a complicated and thorough garden plan for the first time, loosely based on Cindy Conner's system (see Homeplace Earth on my blogroll).  I put it in a binder, along with clippings from seed catalogs and other bits of information I need at planting time.  I'm not even sure how I'm going to manage the garden this year, because my husband may be taking on a weekend job with my uncle in addition to his full-time job, and the garden plan is quite ambitious.  But, I figure it's better to plant it and not be able to handle it all, than not to plant it and end up needing it.

Seed starting has begun.  I'm trying some Imperial Star artichokes this year, but I've had very bad luck with the seed, only 10% (3 seeds) have germinated from a $5 packet of seed.  I dug a few of them out and treated them with peroxide, after reading that it helps some seeds, and replanted them.  My onions are doing much better, and I had lots more onion seed than I could use.  I just started some jicama (a type of bean whose root is a crunchy vegetable while the seeds are poisonous) and some roselle (a flower that is dried and used for tea or jelly), both tropical plants that need a long season to mature here.  All of these are experimental crops for us.  I was reluctant to buy onion seed and actually ordered it late, after my regular seed order.  My garden is usually too muddy to till before April, so I'm not sure how I'll plant them when they need to go out.  I started them a bit late, partly because of my waffling and partly on purpose, because I prefer my onions small so that I don't have to figure out what to do with a leftover half an onion when I only need a little.  Next year I want to plant onions on my hugelkultur, which will be better-drained, if we get it built this year. 

I haven't moved any seedlings out to the greenhouse yet.  I'm keeping them in the upstairs bathroom, which is the warmest and brightest room in my house, and is now available since my housemates moved out.  The new corner shower has been called into service as a chick brooder, making the room even warmer.  The greenhouse has been a bit of a disappointment.  It doesn't hold warmth at all, and a black metal barrel with 250 pounds of water (thermal mass) has done nothing appreciable to help.  We've been heating it, at significant expense, with a small electric heater, but the temperature has dropped below freezing a couple of times because the thermostat on the heater is not sensitive enough.  The only plant I can tell has been damaged by the temperatures is the lemongrass.  The citrus look terrible, but they looked terrible before they froze too.  Next year I want to build a cage and put some hens in the greenhouse and hope their body heat, and the compost heat from their bedding, helps; I also need to close up some gaps in the door, and either insulate or eliminate the raised wooden floor.

Today I attended the first of two sessions of a beekeeping class.  It left me feeling overwhelmed, with respect to all the equipment needed, the expense, the learning curve, the apparent mess involved in home-scale extraction, and the risk of being stung.  

Our microwave broke about 3 weeks ago and we've been getting along without it.  I miss it for reheating leftovers, and for warming up milk for my coffee.  I intend to replace it with another used one (it's a built-in model), but I hate buying things off Craigslist so much that I keep delaying the chore.  I might need it soon though, because I'm thinking about doing Weight Watchers again.  I did pretty well on it last spring, and then slowly put the weight back on over the rest of the year, and now I'm feeling quite fat again.  I don't want to do it, because for me it means eating frozen meals and other fake food (hence the need for the microwave) instead of real food.  For example, organic fair trade iced tea with organic fair trade sugar is better than diet soda in every way except one.  The main reason I quit WW after a couple of months last year was that I couldn't even calculate values for the foods we like to eat, especially offal.  WW was only supposed to be a stopgap anyway: my long-term weight-loss plan all along was to move back to Mexico, and now my mom has backed out of the exploratory trip we had planned.  I'm really disappointed about that, and a bit resentful.  

I've been on a bit of a spending spree and I really need to rein myself in.  I've bought lots of seeds of course, fruit trees (Cox Orange Pippin and Gold Rush apples, 2 elderberries, 2 native plums, 3 bush cherries, and a nectarine), a grape hoe, a batch of chicks, and I just ordered myself a parka - I figured it was a good time to buy one because it's been such a warm winter that they'd be cheap, and I'll need one if I'm going to have milk goats.  I've been getting by with just wool dress coats and fleece jackets, but I almost never go outside before 10:00 these days.  I rarely make truly frivolous purchases, but that's not really the same as being careful with money, is it?