lindaj

Turnips and broccoli raab are up in the garden, in force. Still only one lonely snowpea so far. They could use some more water, I'm sure.

I also need to get a handle on what I'm going to do with the 15 additional varieties of herb seeds that I acquired in an herb swap last week. I'm overrun!

I intended to start seeds indoors around the Equinox, but my seed-starting shelf wasn't built yet. I finished that last week, and last night I finally planted my seeds. This is 2 weeks later than intended, but perhaps not too bad. Time will tell.

But...it's done. Done done done. Not only that, but I worked through many of my too-numerous seeds, and managed to empty 9 additional seed packets. I think a few more of the flower seed packets will be emptied when I direct-sow some more of them in the garden. Whew!

Last week, with the kind help of vibrantabyss, I got the compost bins rebuilt with sod taken up from the new garden plot, stockpiled Winter kitchen scraps, last year's late season yard waste, and what few leaves I could dredge up from the corners of the yard (no trees here).

The material available filled both of our two 32-gallon garbage can composters.

Yesterday, terse_scribe and I noticed that the volume had decreased in one of the bins, so I figured it was time for the first turning. Not surprisingly, the sunken bin was steaming in the middle. The other one was not, which is a little puzzling, since we filled both bins with the same sorts of stuff, and attempted to keep things even. Ah well.

Nonetheless, I dumped both bins into a single pile, and refilled them both with a pitchfork, alternating pitchforkfuls into each, and making sure that each got a nice dose of the high-steam parts. This should significantly improve the mix between the bins, and is probably how I'll turn it until it all compacts enough to fit into a single bin. Some of the stuff was a bit dry, so I added a bit of water (but cautiously...last year's bin was always too soggy). With any luck, this will get both bins steaming in short order.

In a very seasonal move, terse_scribe and I spent the afternoon beginning the process of expanding last year's tiny vegetable garden to a more reasonable size. Being 4.5 months pregnant makes it more difficult to do some of the heavy labor, so terse_scribe was kind enough to remove the existing sod with a garden spade, while I shook the dirt out of the sod pieces.

Thankfully, our yard (at least the part of it where we're putting the garden) has some pretty excellent soil in it. It would certainly benefit from some amendments, but the texture is very good, and there were quite a few earthworms.

It's not done, of course, but we made some good progress. The garden is on a slope, which made watering a bit of a challenge last year. We're going to try to fix this, or at least diminish this, by putting some sort of edging along the neighbor's fence and along one end, and then raking or hoeing the soil so that it's more level.

Then we'll spread amendments. I've got some aged rabbit manure, some worm castings, and (I hope) some compost from last season. I haven't decided yet if I'll try to mix these in across the whole garden in one shot, or mix them in piecemeal as I plant different sections. This might decide itself, of course, depending on how much time or energy we have at various points.

But...progress! Yay!

I went to work early and stayed at work late for ONE DAY (OK, sort of 1.5 days, since I started work early again the next day), and I didn't check the garden, and two of my zucchinis went from "not big enough to pick yet" to "too big." Not "There's no way I would eat that"-big, but bigger than ideal. Hmmph.

We also harvested the first of the grape tomatoes last night, and one Roma that had suffered from blossom end rot. I determined that the others will BER are too far gone to save, so I pulled them off the plant to let it focus its energy on the remaining healthy fruits.

Meanwhile, one of the nascent summer squashes was eaten off to a nub (which is better, perhaps, than a single bite being gone from each), and my homemade beer-in-a-yogurt-cup slug traps caught one whopper of a slug. I dumped it into the compost and refilled the traps...though I really should acquire some cheap beer for the task, rather than continuing to use the good stuff in the fridge.

We have a new ice cream maker attachment (thanks, hak42!).

We have a citrus juicer (thanks, tytso!).

We have abundant purple basil growing on the front porch (thanks, Lyman Estate Greenhouses!).

And so, what else was there to do?

Purple Basil Sorbet!

It was an experiment, to be sure. I kinda like it. I don't think terse_scribe does, though. Vivid color, heavy basil aroma, herb-y basil flavor. Not really intended as a dessert, I'm sure...probably intended as a palate cleanser. Makes me want to prepare a multi-course gourmet meal, just so that I can make use of such a thing. :-)

We got another few feet of raised bed done last weekend, and we remain on track for what we want to have finished by the end of May. We got a bit of a jump on it by deciding to curve the bed back to the wall, put in a chimenea fireplace (one of those ceramic potbelly ones on a wrought iron stand), and then start up the wall again on the other side.

It seems that a 1:1 ratio of existing soil and organic matter is the way to go for the height of beds we're building. For the first bed, I started with 1:2 soil to organic matter, and had to end with 2:1 or even 3:1 so I could fit everything back into the beds. This means the top layer has more clay in it than I'd like, and the poor little seedlings are struggling. They'll get by, though, and reach their roots down to the loose, fertile depths. The soil in the bed will also correct itself over time, I'm sure.

The leeks have started sprouting, in quantity.

Peas are still slow, as are the spinach, turnips, and radishes, but they are sprouting.

The Egyptian Walking Onions seem to love their new home, and seem to be getting bigger and taller daily. The garden sage, planted temporarily near the onions until the new herb bed is done, is putting out new growth.

Very very soon we need to plant more peas & spinach, maybe some potatoes, and maybe even a few tomatoes under walls-o-water.

Things are shaping up.

This morning I took a closer look at my other basil seedlings, and discovered that some of them are developing 3 leaves per node in the 2nd or 3rd set of true leaves, even if they began life with 2 cotyledons and 2 leaves per node. One may even have 4 leaves starting on the next node, but thus far they're too tiny to tell.

Then I went back and looked at the seedlings that were started a few weeks earlier, all of which had their growing tips pinched back on the Equinox, so the'd send out side branches. Some of them have also started producing 3 leaves per node. One, interestingly, has one 2-leaf branch and one 3-leaf branch.

In all cases, it starts as one full-sized leaf on one side, and what appears to be a "twinned" leaf on the other...the two twinned leaves are smaller on their first node, then the sizes even out over the next node or two.

I picked the brain of our plant geneticist on Tuesday, and he gave me a fair bit of info, though of course we're mostly guessing about what's really going on, and how it might play out. This was before the discovery of these latest developments.

Fascinating.

One of my Greek Mini Basil seedlings is a genetic mutation. It grew with 3 cotyledons instead of 2. After much waiting, this morning I could see, with a good deal of squinting on my part, that the true leaves are also coming in in threes.

I've found a study about sunflowers that do the same thing, which grew out 3 generations, and found it difficult to stabilize.

Also, the sunflowers stopped their 3-lobed character after 6-7 nodes (and presumably reverted to their regular bi-leafed habit).

Nonetheless, I'm sort of excited, and I'm going to try to propagate this plant if I can.

I'll post pictures if I can manage to get some.

I'll break my long LJ silence with a gardening update.

For the first time in a very long time, I have a sizeable yard and all of the sunshine I could hope for. Sadly, it's in the high desert. Nonetheless, I'm hoping to have a vegetable garden this year.

The tomato seedlings are up, though I probably planted them earlier than I should have. I'll try to keep them small and stocky until planting time. We have Romas, Marglobes, green tomatillos, and a dwarf cherry tomato called Tiny Tim that only grows 12 inches high. The Super Sweet 100s, though the same age as the others, germinated poorly, and I have only one plant so far. I'm hoping the Tiny Tims will do well year 'round under the skylights in the kitchen.

My somewhat old pepper seeds didn't germinate well, so I'm trying to germinate the remainder of them with the oft-lauded "coffee filter method." If this somehow causes them to come up, we'll be overrun. The yellow bells (a favorite of tman_mcl) are up, and seeds for Española Improved, a true local variety, have arrived. If the old jalapeños don't germinate in the coffee filter, I'll need to get more of those, because once my smoker gets here, I'm hoping for massive quantities of chipotles in the Fall.

A very kind man in Maryland decided to send me seeds for 6 additional types of tomatoes (5 heirloom, and one exceptional hybrid, some very rare), which I totally didn't need. On the one hand I'm grateful for the generosity. On the other hand, I sorta wish he hadn't. Now we're debating which of these we want to plant this year.

Even without the new tomato seeds, we'll be overrun with seedlings, because we discovered, as usual, that we didn't have the heart to thin them, and we're transplanting them instead.

I tried to propagate rosemary and oregano from cuttings. So far so good, but I can't tell you yet that they've got good root systems. It's been a few weeks, and they're not dead or wilted inside their humidity domes, so that's a good sign. I don't really know what I'll do with 6 rosemary plants and 10 oregano plants if I succeed.

My plans to start work on the rain barrel system were thwarted last weekend by a fairly significant snowstorm (the first precipitation since I arrived in this place last October)...which is unfortunate, because if I'd actually gotten the system started, I could have collected some water. This allowed me to spend some quality time with iridium and l_stboy, however, who were passing through town, and that was a good thing.

I also need to coordinate getting a load of well-aged horse manure from my coworker, who has plenty. New Mexico soil is pretty much useless as-is, and totally devoid of organic matter. Maybe this weekend.

That's not nearly everything going on in the gardening arena, not to mention other arenas, but it's probably more than enough for now.