Wintersowing

This year for the first time I am trying wintersowing, where you create mini-greenhouses out of recycled containers, sow them with cold-hardy plants like perennial flowers, and place them outside until spring.

My sweet friend Amanda is saving her filtered water jugs for me to use. You can use all kinds of containers, but gallon milk jugs are among the best. These giant water jugs are even better. You cut around the jug, about 3/4 of the way up, stopping at the back to make a hinged lid that can be lifted. Cut off the spigot and leave it open, so water can get in and evaporate out. I also made drain holes across the bottom, and a few venting holes on the side. Some wintersowing sites suggest you drill the holes or punch them out with an awl, but I found it to be easier--less likely to result in bloodletting for a clumsy person--to heat up a metal skewer in the flame of the gas stove, and use the hot metal point to poke holes.
Then you fill the bottom with moistened potting soil or seed starter mix (I used a combination of both, so it was light for germination but would nourish the seedlings as they grew,) and sow it with seeds. Most wintersowing sites suggest you close the halves of the jug with duct tape, but I found an idea I like better. You just poke a hole in the upper lid and one in the lower, and tie the them together with a twist tie, or I used garden twine. This keeps it closed in the wind, but allows a little venting on the sides. It also seems like it would be easier to check the seedlings this way. I like how the height of these containers will allow even tall seedlings to stay protected until it's time to plant them out.

Then you set the jug outside, and wait until spring. I put this jug next to a container of asters I started last week. If it's been very dry, you water the jugs through the top. This method is supposed to work especially well for plants that need a period of cold stratification, like some flowers that are perennial in Colorado. They can freeze and thaw in the soil to stratify, but there is heat and sun inside the jug and the seeds stay safe from birds until they have a chance to germinate and grow. They also don't travel around, like seeds in the open do when snow melts.

These are some of the flowers I'm planning to wintersow. I'm intrigued by this idea, of using the sun and snowmelt to grow some of your seedlings without the resources of lights and water indoors. I hope that at least some of them work. It would be a lot better than paying for flats of nursery flowers in the spring.

Let the Wild Rumpus Start

It's indoor planting time again. Last year was a very lazy year for the garden, and I'm hoping to get an early start to get back on track this year. Here are the flowers I've started under lights so far.

Bok choy, leeks and purple broccoli (I couldn't find the seed package for that). I also started little round Parisian carrots in a container just to entertain R. If they grow, we'll eat those before they can get planted out. I also started four kinds of basil.


Here are the greens I've started.

I have four windowboxes with greens in the sunny front window.

Magenta Swiss Chard.

Asian Greens Mesclun.

Part of our upstairs guest room Seedling Empire.

I even colonized a closet.
 
Impatiens finally germinated when I put them on a heat mat.
 
Tiny Johnny Jump-Up seedlings, just getting started.

Holiday Weekend Trail Walk

Overcast Sunday afternoon walk, through the messy muddy melting snow.

excerpt from "Year's End"

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within. 

                                         - Richard Wilbur 

Trail Walk January 8

A Sunday walk down the snowy trail with our neighbor friends.




It's a perfect 30 minute walk to the school playground. 

Thanksgiving 2011

I have to catch up with so many blog posts. Thanksgiving 2011 was another gorgeous, shirtsleeves day for the weather, and once again we were lucky enough to share it with our cousins. Above is my cousin J, who brought half the food and also had the brilliant idea of floating cranberries in the kids' sparkling cider glasses.
As usual, all the action was at the kids' table.


R's little cousin N, the bon vivant, makes a spirited toast to the assembled family. We asked the kids to go around the table and say what they are grateful for, and this is a picture of him raising his glass and saying, "I am grateful for all of YOU!"

Charlie celebrated in the backyard with his traditional Thanksgiving visitor, Jake the gentle Bernese Mountain Dog. After dinner, we walked down the trail to play basketball.


Little C had just slid into a bloody knee and was handling it better than most grownups would. It still makes me laugh how she looks like an angry Gypsy.
Thank God for the blessing of family, a long sunny November day to enjoy each other, and a table filled with beautiful, healthy food. And little girl cousins, born one day apart, whose pictures we have been snapping together since they were newborns.

Happy New Year!

A mezze platter to take to our friends' house tonight. Hummus, olives and crudités with homemade baked pita chips. And raw dolmades, with grape leaves I canned from our vines this summer, and a diced parsnip (instead of rice), pine nut, red pepper, avocado, lemon juice and tomato filling.

I have been reading so many "good riddance 2011" articles, about what a terrible year it has been. I work at our parish food bank, and that is where you see it. The people working two and three jobs who still can't feed their families, the hard workers who are skilled and experienced in struggling industries, who used to make a great living, but just can't find work any more. My family has so many more pressures and barely-squeaking-by times than we ever used to have. We are skating very close to the margins every month. But it still bothers me to ring out the old year with contempt. It was a good year! We had so much fun. Right in the middle of it, R turned from a shy sweet funny seven year old to a shy even sweeter and funnier eight year old.

So from a very selfish perspective, I have loved this year. The garden and D and Charlie and R, a child who is busting out all over with so much new information and excitement about life that she talks out loud in her sleep. Last night she was reading Roald Dahl's Matilda under the covers with a flashlight, and she got to the part that lists the books that four year old Matilda reads. It is such a great list that I will have to put it here:

• Great Expectations
• Nicholas Nickleby
• Oliver Twist
• Jane Eyre
• Pride and Prejudice
• Tess of D'Urbervilles
• Gone to Earth
• Kim
• The Invisible Man
• The Old Man and the Sea
• The Sound and the Fury
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Good Companions
• Brighton Rock
• Animal Farm

And with each new title R would shout out to me, muffled from under her blankets, "What is that one about? Who wrote it?" and when I explained the authors and plots of the ones I knew (all of them but Gone to Earth? The Good Companions? Brighton Rock?), she would yell out, "Could you get that for me to read?" And she knows I will, I'll add it to her giant and growing bookshelf downstairs.

You could say that it has been a pretty universally awful year for--for, I don't know what to call it. For what I think is important in culture, social justice, general quality of life for humans. For some modicum of moral responsibility that would check or temper greed, or lacking that, legal restraints imposed by a wise and ethical and considered body. A friend made me laugh last month when she blurted out "There's one for our side!" about something in the news. That's why I love this Tennyson poem so much. Let the bad of the old year die. There was tiredness and falseness in it, but "ring out wild bells, and let him die."  There was so much goodness too. Call out the bad things and work to fix them. But ring out the wild bells, against the snow!

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true . . . 

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good . . .

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Olive Bento

Black olives; apple slices; turkey pepperoni and cheddar; homemade tomato quinoa bread; green salad with tomatoes, radishes and celery; granola bar in the center.