Seeds and Starts

It hit the low fifties today in Lewiston.  I saw a meadowlark.  I went for a hike in the sunshine.  Sounds like spring, doesn't it?  Well, it is February 3rd, and while it is one of those beautiful midwinter breaks in the weather, it isn't spring yet... except it is time for seeds and starts.  The big orders of seeds arrived in various shipments over the last week.  Heirloom tomatoes, beets, shallots, beans, sunflowers, peppers, melons, squashes.  We ordered some hybrids too, but once you start into the kaleidoscope of colors in a catolog associated with heirloom veggies... it is easy to get hooked.  Check out a Seed Saver's Exchange catalog sometime, and you won't be disappointed.

Em is the Lady of the Garden around here and I am her adviser.  She lays out the plans, purchases the right starting media, determines the correct companion plants, and establishes our organic matter needs.  I cut sod, turn soil, pull weeds, and build fence.  It is a good partnership.  She will provide brains, I will provide the brawn.

We spent the afternoon working out some of the details of the garden and digging through the scrap wood pile looking for salvageable fencing.  Tonight, maybe we will sit around with the boob tube on, planting seeds in little starter pellets while the drama of Downton Abbey unfolds before us.  Yeah, now that is domestic.

A nomadic lifestyle and an agrarian one don't mix so well.  Two summers have lapsed between our last verdant garden and now.  We have moved downhill and up three Plant Hardiness Zones.  I wonder what we have forgotten about gardening and I wonder what we will have to learn about this new clime.  Later this week we are hoping to drop the Mini-HHMM with a babysitter and attend a gardening class for Lewiston growers.  Maybe we will get answers to some of our questions.  Right now, everything is fantasy.  Buckets of beets and beans.  Baskets of peppers and eggplants.  Eight foot tall sunflowers with the sun shining through bug-eaten holes in the leaves.