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I Feel Fall Coming

  ALERT! June, July and August have gone missing. The last time I posted here was in May and it was about my microgreens and sadly, shamefully, I did not follow up. In brief, the outcome was just okay. Turns out my dear husband does not care for radishes, not one iota.  But hey, that little experiment was back in May. There are days ahead to play with microgreens again, just not anytime soon. I am in full anticipation of fall. I've started broccoli seeds inside under the grow lights. I have Belstar and a fancy purple broc. They came up in 3 days. Yes, you read that right, 3 days. I'm waiting on the chives and celery to come up. I also started cumin - that's the wild card. I know nothing about growing cumin. This is probably the wrong time of year for it but if it works out, how thrilling will that be?!  As for garden plans, I have a few. I've pulled up everything that I could along the front fence. We went to the nursery and looked at Pink Muhly grass. Michael has alway
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Intro To Microgreens

  Let me start by saying I haven’t a clue what I am doing. Michael and I went to a little, and I do mean little, restaurant last week - Nixta Taqueria .  The food was beautiful and good. So, so beautiful and so very good. The tostada was delicately presented, not a way I would have ever thought I’d describe a tostada but nonetheless.  They used microgreens in several of their dishes. Now, I’ve grown bean sprouts in the past, like many decades ago but these were no bean sprouts. These were lacy and purple.  Needless to say, I had my next project.  I wanted to grow them inside as opposed to the backyard because I wanted to make them readily available for Michael. He has a late night salad after work several days a week and I always feel bad when he has to go out to the garden with a flashlight and scissors to snip this or that for his dinner.  The first thing I purchased was a grow light. It came a week before the microgreen seeds so I set it up and placed a tiny little baby basil seedli

Datura Portrait

 

The Great Sweet Potato Panic of 2021

It wasn’t so much of a panic as it was a freak out. Let me say, I actually had room for sweet potatoes this year (imagine having more garden area) and I was going to turn it into potato country. Ok, a strip. A potato strip. The only thing I was missing were potatoes.  I hadn’t been to Natural Gardener since before the Big Shutdown last year. They shuttered their shop and turned out the lights. They started opening up little by little, limited hours, restricted areas. It’s a popular nursery and I didn’t want to deal plus it’s a little ways out from home. There are plenty of other nurseries that are closer to home.  Eventually though, in April, I decided a visit to Natural Gardener could be a nice birthday outing. Ha, ha and ha. It was not. There was a 45 minute wait in the car in which we crept inch by inch just to get into the parking lot. When we did get in, most of the grounds were restricted. The thing about NG is that they have a lot of established gardens and areas that are inspir

Comfrey: For Good or For Evil?

I just can’t say. A week ago I was all about the comfrey. The things I read made it sound like it was indispensable in a permaculture setting. But that’s not really my yard. I want to pretend it’s my yard but no, I have a vegetable garden, a few fruit trees, some chickens and a compost bin.  Things I like about comfrey: it draws up minerals deep in the ground through its long taproot. It is high in nitrogen so it’s great to add to compost. The leaves are large and make a good mulch. It flowers and from the photos I’ve seen, it is an attractive plant. As an herb it has strong healing properties. Things I fear: that damn long taproot. Once it goes into the soil I may never get it out of the soil. It is invasive. It spreads.  The things I don’t like about comfrey are the things I don’t like about bamboo. You have to be committed going in. It’s why I still have Mexican petunias sitting in pots and not in the ground. Commitment scares me. I took the first step though. I took the six little

Mother’s Day

  May 9, 2021. Austin Shambhala Center 

Note To Self

My aim this gardening  season is to not only expand my garden but to be able to identify everything in it, or to at least be able to identify what seeds I have planted. To this end I have started using a little pocket garden notebook religiously. And of course, maintain this blog as a journal.  Record keeping has always seemed like a laudable act but I’ve never been able to stick to it. I go in fits and spurts and have accumulated a lot of half filled journals, each dedicated to a particular year. I will have 6, 12, maybe 20 pages filled out usually with some sort of rough grid sketch scrawled with vegetable names.  This year does seem different but I probably say that every year. But honestly, this year does seem different. I have multiple media streams, the pocket notebook, the blog and photos.  Today the plant markers that I ordered arrived and I dutifully took them to the garden and jotted down the date and name of my seedlings. They’re not quite seedlings yet, they are simply lit