Seedling Update

I need the salad greens in the upstairs bedroom to move outside to make room for tomatoes, but it won't stop snowing.

Basil, marjoram, arugula, chervil, summer savory. These were all planted around Valentine's Day.

Mesclun greens.

Chives, sweet peas, more arugula, and on the left, the flower R chose from the seed packet. Pink Fairy Candytuft. Isn't that what you would choose, if you were a six year old girl?

More sweet peas, reaching for the light.

The north wall has more salad greens and herbs, and way in the back, pink Evening Primrose (again, chosen by R from the rotating racks of seed packets at the nursery.) I love the lottery feeling of letting her do that. She actually picked flowers that might do very well in our garden.

We got well over a foot of heavy, wet snow on Wednesday--enough for a snow day from school. It's already melting away from the crocuses, but there is more snow coming tonight.

The snow was so wet and heavy that it damaged a lot of trees. Three big branches from the gnarled juniper that shades our back deck came crashing down. I don't know now if we should just cut it down. There would be no shade at all on the back porch.

Right before the snow came, I put up more pea trellises and planted about half the peas. I held half back to plant later. We'll see which ones do better. I sprouted them first on a paper towel, so I think they will just wait under the snow blanket and pop up when it melts. The snow was so heavy on the netting that it wrecked the trellises and I'll have to re-do them.

I did experiment with a GrowBag planted with salad greens almost 3 weeks ago, that I keep outside. The snow is melting off of it. The seedlings aren't dying, but they're not really growing either. This is only the second year we've had a garden here, so it's all a grand experiment.

I planted these tomatoes in peat pots today. I hope by the time they germinate, there will be room under the lights for them. I actually started a handful of tomatoes three weeks ago. Those are the ones I might try to set out earlier than last frost, inside a Wall-O-Water.

Daddy, Jesus & Santa

Yesterday D was off work, because he has to work all day Saturday. We went to the kids' Mass together, and then we sprung R from school. We took her out to lunch and played hooky at the movies for the afternoon. We saw the new Disney movie, "The Princess and the Frog." R had a lot of questions on the way home about falling in love, and what it means to be in love. She decided that she is in love with "three people: Daddy, Jesus and Santa."

Asparagus Lasagna

For dinner with D's family on Friday, I made asparagus lasagna with homemade noodles, in individual ramekins. I wish I had taken a picture of R making the noodles with me. She loves to crank the handle on the pasta roller.

Salad; broccoli rabe, black pepper & parmesan crostini; and soup made from the tomatoes from our garden that I canned this summer. It's topped with Greek yogurt, a sprinkle of smoked paprika, microgreens from the windowsill, and cheese toasts. Then there is the Extra-Fancy screw-top sparkling juice. I am the only champagne drinker, or I would have splurged.

And baked lemon custard for dessert, with raspberries and a geranium blossom. This custard bakes creamy on the bottom, but cakelike on the top. I couldn't figure it out until D pointed out that it bakes with a water bath that goes 3/4 of the way up the ramekins, and the cake texture starts where the water bath leaves off.

This picture is small because it's a screen grab from the video camera. The girls went into the kitchen after dinner with their juice boxes and told knock-knock jokes to each other. Here's an example of one of R's knock-knock jokes: "Knock knock. Who's there. Water bottle. Water bottle who? Charlie! Bad dog! Spray you with the water bottle!" (water squirting noises.) Oh dear. Poor Charlie, but it does work to stop him from barking at the fence and digging in the garden.

And then it was over.

Let's see what else happened during our week of spring break. Here's another picture from our morning with my walking partner Julie's kids, who love poking sticks in the river as much as R. does.

Lunch and shopping in downtown Littleton, with D's mom and his brother and family. This is R's little cousin K.

That night we all had dinner at our house. The kids piled on Grandma, and Charlie loved it.

We went to the zoo with Julie's kids.

And look who ran into at the zoo! More cousins! That was such a nice surprise. It was spring break for all the Catholic schools.

And finally, a birthday party for a school friend. It was a dress-up tea party. The foot of snow from the day before is almost melted. It was so kind of D's mom to travel all the way here and spend the week with us. We had a great time. This afternoon I raked out the backyard garden beds and got them ready for peas and carrots and beets. Back to school tomorrow.