Endless Summer, Endless Winter

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2010 gave us the summer that began in the first week of April and ended in the last week of November.

It has also given us the coldest winter I've seen that began the first week of December, giving most of us a taste of cryogenics. Our pool looks like it has known many ice ages.

This has give me an optimal window to work on some much needed projects indoors. For the last week I've had my nose to the grindstone working on several things. One of them being photographing a bunch of things to sell. My friends, having seen and pitied me unable to do this because of my lack of camera, came over and we had two really fun days visiting while photographing madly.

What a blessing!

I am looking forward to getting my camera back from repairs, hopefully very soon, and snapping happily away. We've got photography field trips to plan. We need a bus or something....

Now comes the real work. Organization and getting them on eBay. Not much break in the weather, so I'm good. However, the ballet is going to be soon, and we are beginning to do a lot of running around for increased rehearsals as well as set building and painting. It's a busy time.

Catalogs have begun arriving!!!! Spring is on our minds. I've been working on cuttings of whatever makes itself available. I'm going to make a nuisance of myself and begin asking people everywhere I go if I can take cuttings; keeping pruners and cutting medium in my car to ever be at the ready. Whatever I can't buy, I hope to find free to populate this place. What great memories, too. Every plant will have a pruning memory. Good thing I don't scrapbook, because THAT could end up being scary! "Aw, and little Celia Celery came from the lady that lives across from the BP. Isn't she cute?"

My focus is on food crops, but maybe one day I can have a yard, and have some foofy things as well. A lawn would be nice. I love this earth the Lord created, but the red clay heel lifts I would not miss.

I began working on learning to sew custom dress shirts for Michael, something that would actually fit those long arms, but haven't gotten very far, with Christmas and these more necessary projects in the works. Judging from our weather.... I will probably have more time to put into them for the next couple of months. I dropped by the thrift stores and found table cloths and curtains for sewing fabric. The thicker the better. I don't do well sewing flimsy stuff.

Michael is officially taller than me! Shaving, talking in that deep voice. He says stuff to me and sometimes I just break out giggling. It's going to take me a while to get used to this big voice. His hugs are getting stronger too. Gotta love that. :o)

No time at all for finishing that greenhouse. But as soon as this weather breaks, we have the supplies to finish it. While I was hoping to raise food through this winter, it would have been tough to try to learn to use it during this really cold weather, so I am not too heartbroken by the delay. I just really want it up for starting our own garden plants in February and March. I hope we get a week of mild weather for doing that.

Well, I'm off to run Michael to town for working on sets today and I'm going to continue working here at home.

Can you believe only one day left of 2010?

Wowsers!

~Faith

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Camera Broken, How Sad

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And such a gorgeous time of year, too!

I have been photographing a little bit with my son's camera, but it really lacks that VROOM of my SLR.

Usually as fall and winter come in, I am glad for the break in work. I tend to let things all go. But this year is different. Vive la différence! We do not want to be buried in work in the spring and summer the way we have been for the last couple of years, so while Michael does his school work, I am planning on and hoping to work outside every day on some sort of major project so that they are all done and ready to go in the spring.

The weather has been so beautiful lately, and he is often able to do his school work outdoors, making it easier for me to help him with tough spots. And late in the day, it is not uncommon for Michael to come and help me with things I've not been able to finish.

We've gotten quite a few things done so far. We are just getting the gardens weeded and mulched thickly. It's been a little odd, as the weather has stayed warm. But the beds are nearly empty of growth, so they are getting blanket anyhow. A few things are still growing, so some leftover bales of straw are standing by.

We really scrimped and saved to invest in 110 bales. It was a lot of green, rectangular papers with presidents for us, but when we compared it to the work we would save next year, we decided it was worth it. See ya' Andrew Jackson!

We've been doing a lot of practice with cuttings and rootings. Many failures mean we are that much closer to figuring it all out. We are learning all the ways NOT to do things. (Fist pump and tap dancing. Odd looking... but cheery.)

The next two huge projects are resetting the pool, which ended up being slightly oval in shape; and building the greenhouse. I truly hope to accomplish these two things in the next few weeks. We have free wood from a friend's scrap pile and trimmings from the neighbor's mill, so we are very excited about getting the greenhouse going.

Michael's hard work has paid off greatly. He finished an entire school year in 5 months, working double hours right through summer. He has graduated his freshmen year and is moving on to his sophomore year this week. No break from Algebra 1 to Algebra 2, but then again, sometimes it's better to not let your mind go mush in between.

Looks like we are going to have peak color, right around the end of the month. It came so late this year.

It's going to be a really nice winter!

~Faith

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Can This Garden Be Saved?

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My focus is all about reducing cost and labor in the future. I tell you what, this body is getting old, and if I don't find ways to cut corners and achieve either the same or better, I'm going to be crying "Uncle" from some hammock in a very cheap area south of the Border, trying to live on 4o bucks a month and learning to love, and I mean REALLY love, rice, beans, and naked chickens hanging from questionable tin roofs.

One of last weeks projects was to see if we can bring any of the garden in with us to live through the winter and get a head start next year. I've known that peppers are actually a perennial, in tropical climates, so they can be saved in a pot indoors. I will do that as soon as I'm done harvesting peppers.

I've been also taking pinchings and cuttings from just about everything. I have simply never been good at making them grow, but I've certainly been doing a lot of practicing this month.

Here are some failings. These little plants never thrived up there, but they were tough. It took me 4 years to kill them, but they finally died completely about year ago. So I figured it might be time to dump them out.





Do you remember the houseplant I grew so frustrated with, that we whacked it off and stuck the branches in a vase? That was 6 months ago.

Some of those branches were still alive and had grown roots.









So, not having a clue what to do with them, I laid them to rest in this pot.





And covered them up.





Then refreshed myself with a blueberry, strawberry, banana smoothie.





Since I was in a transplanting and cutting mood, this little grass-snuggling-errant from the compost bucket caught me eye.....





Nah. Don't go crazy girl!

The first week of September I planted these lemon seeds. And after about 2 weeks I had a little lemon tree!





As of today, I have a 7 tree lemon grove, and my tangerines and key limes are just about to break free from the soil that buries them, and reach for warm blue skies in Florida. Boy, are they in for a surprise.





And the ginger roots I planted are doing well!





Here are some philodendron (those are easy, except for the time I failed at that, too) I am sprouting for friends, the celery heads are doing well, and..... I'm not sure what else is there in the tiny drag-and-drop view I see. I'm going blind.





So now I'm heading down to the garden to take tomato, pepper, and eggplant cuttings. There's that evil wild amaranth with all the spikes and billions of seeds on every branch.





The tomatoes are feeling better now that the weather cooled off, but it's too late to get much from them. Next year I'll set them up a little better.





I end up with a few tries at tomatoes.









Some peppers.









And the missing giant Jalapeno made a marvelous home for the eggplant I decided to give another shot at life.









The ristras are still coloring nicely.





A special treat, a couple of latent watermelons to enjoy.





I've found my mind wandering more and more to how nice it would be to have a thermal, double-paned, glass greenhouse built all along the south side of a home, about 10 feet wide and 75 feet long. You close it off to the rest of the house, keep it toasty warm, maybe add a few grow lights, and you've got a perfect garden to grow things all year round. Nice seating areas, a fountain, yada-yada. No more of this seasonal prepping, planting, harvesting, and preserving madness. Open it up and cool it off when you can plant a small garden outside...

ah........





Minus the pool.
Maybe.

Reality calls.

~Faith

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Potting Up the Fig Cuttings

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With my trusty little two-dollar-battery-cover-keeps-falling-off calculator, I deduced that the fig cuttings had enjoyed quite enough hibernation and were ready to emerge from winter break.

I love the internet. You can find a 100 experts on one subject who will tell you 100 different ways to do something, and 900 non-experts who pose as experts, copying and pasting the same instructions on 900 different sites.

Here's one that looked plausible.





Great! I can do that! I have gobs of stored, 4-inch pots in my shelves of the tool shed, and a lovely heavy-duty platter on which I can place them for handy packing around the house as they get in the way first in one place and then the other.

Wonder of wonders. The pots are not there. Maybe I was thinking of 3-inch pots. Ah well, no matter. I can make do with those.

Then, catastrophe. My beloved, cherished, sturdy, HUGE, had-it-since-I-don't-know-when and have-no-idea-where-I-got-it-either ugly platter is missing. I mean completely gone! Those kinds of things are too big to just get up and walk away. I'd have heard it clattering across the floor!

Either someone has clandestinely stolen it, or I transported heavily laden dishes of hot food to a potluck somewhere and somehow managed to forget "my precious". (Pathetic sobbing)

I don't know if I can get over this.

On to replacement technology. Big ugly plastic bowls. I knew I bought them for some reason.





I sing to the branches, so they believe it is spring...

"The hills are alive with the sound of music..."
"I love Paris in the springtime..."
"Here comes Peter Cottontail..."





I take them out gently and carefully.





Then I cut them to little bits.





And bury them.





And your little friends, too!





Now fully buried and placed in a light room, above 70 degrees. Treat them as you would vampires. Very carefully, and without direct sunlight.





Gardeners; always burying things they love.

Then I enjoyed Yom Teruah and played with photography all day. Very non-productive, but good for the soul!

~Faith

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Celery, Ginger, and Tomato Starts for Winter.

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Yesterday, while Michael did schoolwork,





I bore refreshment to the parched grass around the house, via a battered hose and less-than-efficient sprinkler.

I have also been wanting to start ginger roots for the longest time. When I went to to juice my morning beverage, consisting of 3 apples, 2 lemons, a head of celery, and head of dark leafy greens, and a chunk of ginger root, the opportunity presented itself perfectly.

Look at this piece of ginger root, just begging to grow.





Being a little short on posh pots, I grabbed some plastic cups and gave them place of their own, to grow, to nurture, to be beautiful.









After I marked the cups and covered them, they went right next to my lemon seeds, in the sunny kitchen window.





Now, I had some celery. I have tried on a couple of occasions to grow celery from seed. I knew it would be a failure, but I wanted the learning experience to at least get to know it a little. This time I'm also trying something I've wanted to do for a while; grow them from a base which came from the store.

They may have been in the fridge too long, so these were not the best subjects for the test. But if they don't work out, more heads will be coming along.





I am also going to give growing tomatoes indoors, over the winter, a shot. I pinched some cuttings from a variety of plants in the garden last week. I would like to have renewable tomato plants each year, rather than having to buy new ones all the time.

I realize the biggest drawback will be the lack of heat, but even if I don't get fruit from them, I will have plants from which to take cuttings and starts for next spring. These are Roma, yellow pear, and cherry.





It's just about time to take the fig cuttings out of the fridge. So a trip to town to pick up a bag of potting soil is in the works today.

With Yom Teruah (Rosh Ha'Shannah), a birthday party, Bible study, and errands to do this afternoon and evening, we have got our hands full getting all our ducks in a row this morning.

If you are interested in hearing about the Lord's festival of Rosh Ha'Shannah, try this link.

Someone think of a tagline for me while I scurry off to get the house in sparkling order!

~Faith

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Fig Cuttings - August 31, 2010

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All those wonderful figs in my recent post were not from my 6 fig trees, sadly, but were from the one fig tree on the sheltered southern side of my parents' home. Mine produce sporadically, due the the location they are in.

Figs will produce two crops per year, IF your growing season is long enough and your winter is mild enough. The problem with my figs is that they have been winter killed down to the ground nearly every year, so the crop they would normally produce early in the year on last years wood does not happen. Then, the crop that would normally ripen in the fall, from the newest wood, does not have enough warm days left to finish them. The trees go into dormancy and the half-grown figs are lost.

I was lucking out pretty well the first few years they were in, but I've not gotten a crop, but for a handful, for the last three years. So I decided to do something about it. Sadly, I decided this at completely the wrong time of year!

Cuttings should be taken in spring or early summer, when growth is rampant. Now in late summer - heading into fall, I'm just begging for failure here, especially knowing I'm not the most skilled at causing cuttings to come to fruition.

However, I wanted to give it a shot. So the idea here is to convince these cuttings that winter has occurred, so that they will think spring has sprung soon after.

These leaves smell great! Can you see the little figs in there? They will never ripen before dormancy sets in.





I chose to take cuttings from the tree that is the largest every year. I figure it must have good root genetics.





Then, when I thought I was done, I realized that tree hardly had any figs on it....

So I began all over again with one of the smaller trees that had figs.





Basically I took smaller wood, some brown and some green, figuring I'd let the plant choose which it likes the best.





I trimmed off the leaves.





There are some baby figs on there, so those get trimmed off as well.





Now I'm down to just bare branches.





These and several other branches were all trimmed into varying lengths of cuttings, some 6 inches and some 24 inches. I don't know what will take the best, so I am trying them all.





These were put in a bag, labeled, and placed in the refrigerator. The necessary chill hours for figs is about 100 hours below 45 degrees.









So far they've been in there for about 5 days and they look just the same, no wilting or browning. I hope to remove them after the proper amount of time, put them into soil, and have new trees to plant in more sheltered locations on the place.

I will keep you updated on the figgy news.

~Faith

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Treasures!

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I've been promising some cherry bush cuttings for friends, and I finally got down there today to get some.

Good thing, I've just about missed the time once again. But hopefully I got them just under the wire.

I have been wanting a mulberry tree for years. Whining about them this way and that way, I call it, 'Having Mulberry Whine". The thing is, they are so tricky to get what you want. Not only are there three different basic cultivars, but each one has so many variations that it's hard to know what you are going to get.

Up until last month, I'd never even seen one, or tasted any fruit. So I was really excited to do that at my friends' home then. I had debated about taking cuttings, but hadn't done anything about it yet.

I went down to take Nanking Cherry bush cuttings - don't they look luscious? They'll stay ripe on the branch for a couple of weeks, and they are soooo good!





But I was hot. Pout, pout. Even with my umbrella to shade me. We have had this weed tree in the corner of the fruit area for years. The neighbor whacked it off once, but a new shoot came back up on our side of the fence. Though it's always been in the way, it's been out of reach of the mower, so it continued to grow.

I finally noticed that it was producing quite a bit of shade. So I parked underneath it to mess with the cuttings.





Kind of a nice shape...





As I left, I realized that it looked vaguely familiar, like I'd been discussing this tree lately. I went back, expecting to see dingly balls, like Sweet Gum trees have, only it didn't.





It had mulberries!!!

Tasty ones, too! I ate the ripe ones. Here are a few green.





Michael climbed up to retrieve a few ripe ones for sending to a friend.





We continued on cutting slips to mail off. Kiwi, gooseberry, cranberry, blackberry, as well.





I'm no expert on cuttings as yet and don't expect them to make it, but I thought it was worth a try.

We need to have someone come out and harvest gooseberries. We've still got some in the freezer from last year.









Blackberry canes, filled with promise of tasty things to come.