The Garden

For Valentine's Day, a side trip to another of my passions: the veggie garden. When one has children with a marked sensitivity to food additives, like high fructose corn syrup (and processed sugars in general) and artificial food colorings, one learns quite quickly how to either cook from scratch or medicate the kids. I'm not a big fan of unnecessary medication, but I AM a fan of good food, and I'm also cheap. I'd rather grow my own food, I'd rather sweat and rack up mosquito bites galore in the garden and have perma-dirt under my nails all Summer long than pay for second-rate food in the grocery store, especially when the food is in season.

We're having a lovely warm spell this week, tonight excepted. Tonight it's windy like crazy, blowing a good 35-40mph gusts as the cold front slams us, but even tomorrow it's still projected to be above freezing, followed by a warming trend that takes us to nearly 70F by the end of the week! The heavy wet snow we got earlier has been melting and freezing since it fell (and expanding the crack in our concrete patio, but that's another story) and waterlogging the garden bed and the pots on the patio, so today I tipped over the pots and even dug a bit in what will eventually be the garlic bed (which I never got around to planting before the frost hit). By the weekend, I should have garlic in the ground, and I will feel like a proper gardener again!

I also measured the garden bed today. I had no idea our garden was pushing 30 feet long! Only 6 feet across, but LONG! Tried to map it out on the computer but I can't get the paper big enough to suit me! Gonna have to actually use, um, bigger paper. And maybe a ruler. And a pencil. *grin*

I've got two books I'm using as inspiration for what I'm hoping to do this summer: Square Foot Gardening and How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine. The idea is to basically use the land most efficiently, both space-wise and rotation-wise (cool-weather, warm-weather, cool-weather). As much as I love our local Farmer's Market, there's still no guarantee that the food is grown organically without pesticides unless the farmers say so, and I'm, well, fussy these days.

It's still too early for me to be putting seeds into flats, but another couple weeks and I can at least start the lettuce. I had to lose a lot of beans and peas to learn to not even bother starting them before the end of March.../ but I have a window box ready to take up space in the bay window - just not the space yet, or the plans and seeds.

More garden musings will come later, but this will do for now. :-)

Climbing out of Winter

February 2nd has come and gone. Here in the DC area we had an incredible storm the night before that left us with 9" of heavy wet snow in the space of 5-6 hours. Trees and branches fell on power lines, transformers blew all over town, traffic was a nightmare. There was thundersnow, too, lightning and thunder WITH the snow that was so heavy we could barely see across the street in our well-lit neighborhood. Quite a show for Groundhog's Day, also known as Imbolc in older traditions. And no, Punxsutawny Phil did NOT see his shadow. that can only mean, on this date about 6 weeks before the Vernal Equinox, that we have 6 weeks of Winter left anyway.

Not much activity on the Zibbet shop, but that' because we've been juggling a nasty G-I thing that has laid us low, one by one. Hubby seemed to have held out, but today it's his turn, poor guy. Good thing I'm now running on all cylinders again. And I've been dyeing stuff like a crazy person the last few days.

Some scrubs for a custom order, for example. Ordered the scrubs from Sassyscrubs, which makes some really high-quality stuff - I first heard of them when a nurse friend of mine asked me to dye some flannel scrubs for her; she ordered them there and had them ship to me, and I was really impressed with the durability of the fabric and the construction. Sorry, Dharma Trading, I'm glad you have scrubs tops but by comparison they are LAME. :-\ Customer left a lot of the decision-making up to me color-wise and pattern-wise, the only guidance being "earth tones" and "not a fan of orange," so I decided to order up two tops, dye them slightly differently, and let the customer choose. The color wasn't as deep as I might have liked, which may be a function of any stain-resistance that's built into the scrubs fabric, but they're still pretty striking in their own way, so I'm pleased.

Also had a men's polo that needed some love to cover up a few minor scuff marks, so I gave it as manly a tie-dye job as I could muster, which was easy to do with all the browns I'd already mixed for the scrubs tops.

I've got more to do, more to take pictures of - gosh, it's been so long since I uploaded to my computer I found photos and videos of LAST year's DC Snowmageddon when I loaded these pics from my camera, so I have to get back in practice and stock up my shop! Hoping this will give me some momentum to be moving on with.