[For a moment there was a dark thought of making soup...]

The sproutings weren’t as good as the ones I’ve sometimes found on the potatoes in the kitchen drawer, but I went with it.

I hacked them up into three-eyed chunks.

Very creepy.

Then I gathered up a nice blend of composts from my vast compost collection and stirred the mix in the wheelbarrow just like if I had gone ahead with the soup I didn’t make, except I used a shovel.

Well I was going to add photos of the compost and the pots with the little cut potatoes tucked in like half hidden Easter eggs and then topped off with more compost but really you can imagine it and the potatoes absolutely refuse to smile for the camera so here’s just the fabulous outcome: four pots, each about a quarter full of soil and home to four or five potato chunks.

And now it’s been a week or so and they are still down there under the compost and I just wonder if they will find the strength and confidence and the Potato Will to forge upward and burst into potato-plantness or if they have given up all hope and interest and are maybe just looking for exits out the bottoms of the pots.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

But, you planted potatoes too right? Are they up and green and ready to “hill up” –which is to say, to bury the new growth again in compost and see if they can do the same growing trick a second time or if instead they get discouraged and finally give up and die. (Aren’t there international laws concerning this treatment?)

In more positive vegetable news, the purple orach (Atriplex hortensis) is my new favorite salad leaf. It is the most incredible color, very Martha when mixed up with green lettuce leaves, mild flavored, and is said to self-sow and come up in the spring just in time for next year’s eating. Here is one of the plants before I planted it out in the garden and clipped off quite so many of it’s ruffly leaves but it seems to be recovering so really it is my kind of plant.

Escaping the (often hazardous) vegetable area, we move now to some more relaxed and carefree neighborhoods. Here is a bicolor azalea which I theorize is named ‘Mardi Gras’ and is just so pretty that I planted two together even though I know they get about two feet tall and wide and some day they will prove to be  too close to one another but no problem, remember I have a shovel.

I can’t get the color of this azalea to appear with screen-accuracy even though I tried all the cameras, including the iphone and my Dick Tracy ring, and editing after that. In reality (my reality) the pink is more of a peach color and not so much that color my mother painted my bedroom when I was five.

Mostly I seem to have plants with less showy blooms, because I do love the wildflowers. Here, just unfolding into flower, is something called Hooker’s fairybells which I remember the name of because the blooms flare like little skirts. Oh I shouldn’t have written that. Where is my editor!?  Anyway I love this tall (36″) perennnial shade plant, growing among the ferns and thalictrum and cyclamen.

It has a pretty cousin called Smith’s fairy lanterns, which has discreetly vertical blooms and a more unified and controlled overall shape. (Smith’s is quieter and behaves better at parties.)

These plants disappear every winter (off to the Caribbean I think) and return in the spring like a celebration, so nice. Note: they self-sow in a polite way that is no problem to the gardeners on our staff.

I know your gardens are all bursting with growth and flowers and potential fruits– unless you are Lyn in Australia in which case your gardens are shutting down for fall, such a planet we have… Anyway I will close with this shot of a Clematis montana vine which I grew from a cutting, prettily blooming on the arbor where the raspberries used to NOT grow every year so last year I ripped them out–an inspired decision.

But speaking of rhubarb the row is a huge hedge this year (maybe the third year in the current location) but now I’m thinking of moving it again in the fall, no not because I’m crazy (stop it) but because gardens do evolve and the vegetable garden has evolved into having a little line of peach trees along the north side. And one peach tree is located in the rhubarb hedge.

To be fair I will say that when we planted the peach a while ago the rhubarb was just peeking up and there was a bit of space between plants but yes, I WILL move at least part of the row next fall, but not to worry, I move rhubarb more often than some people rearrange their furniture and I rationalize (or rationalise) that  the plants benefit from a change of scenery and the challenges of growing new roots.  (We all need purpose.)

Here are the others of the peach row which you will notice are not planted in the garlic bed or etc.

Now.  The next new and exciting development in this neighborhood is a kiwi trellis, and the two new kiwi plants cutely called Fuzzy Kiwi –or Actinidia deliciosa if you prefer names that sound like a yummy disease.

And it takes two, just like people, so the tag (blue) said Male Fuzzy Kiwi (shown above) and the tag (pink) said Female Fuzzy Kiwi, and they are both doing swell, thanks very much to One Green World, a nursery where all sorts food-producing plants can be found including the most beautifully-rooted and healthy fruit trees ever. (Many of our orchard inhabitants, and the new peach trees, originated at that Oregon nursery, where it is also fun to see their electric car plugged into its charger unit outside the business office door…)

Someday I will show you the new kiwi trellis all awash in fuzzy kiwi-ness, but right now it looks quite stark and almost kiwi-free but I know you are a patient person and can wait besides you don’t have a choice, sorry.

So food production proceeds, and the tomatoes in the greenhouse are getting big while the weather continues to be chilly, just like every single other year.

I really meant to seed them later in the season this time but there was an inexplicable mix-up about the dates so that I thought it was later but then I found last year’s planting records (of course I keep records–I just lose them is all) and I discovered I had used the same planting date as last year, almost to the day.  Gardening fate is what I call that and apparently there’s no bucking it.

I’m looking around at this blog post and I don’t see any flowers. Quick, here’s a daphne.

This is called Daphne tangutica or jolly round daphne. Well yes I made up that last name but the only common name I could find was “dwarf daphne” so something had to be done, especially since it doesn’t seem to me that it’s particularly dwarf– this one is at least 3 feet tall and almost 4 feet wide.

But it has a wonderful fragrance, is very possible to shape with pruners, and it has leaves and red-orange berries in winter, overall a wonderful plant that plays well with others.

Uh-oh…

Another clematis? I think not. No room in the clematis inn.  Something for the shady fence though. Climbing hydrangea Moonlight? Cell phone search finds a post from Carolyn’s Shade Garden. Carolyn totally recommends this vine. Deal done.

I love it.

I planted it here, with lots of fence in both directions for coming seasons, shady sun one side and shady shade on the other.

But wait, there’s more–

A sudden deep subconscious undefined need demands purchase of a concrete owl. (No, I do NOT know why.)  The sweet nursery employee with a British accent cheerfully loads up the very heavy owl, along with what I now think of as Carolyn’s vine.  And except for the owl kind of sliding around in the Insight’s hatchback during sharp corners (dog being also in the back, it made him a little nervous) we got home okay and didn’t get arrested or anything, having just updated the car license stickers after a police warning about the December expiration.  (Time flies.)

Owl in his new habitat:

I know he looks a little stressed–the sweet man at the nursery suggested Prozac which I guess is what they use professionally with anxious statuary in general but I may try sprinkling on a little rum instead since that’s what I have in the medicine cabinet.

But back to the gardens.

So Alistair in Scotland once recommended the Burkwood viburnum, which I bought and almost killed through dehydration and then moved, and this year it bloomed.

The flowers are the softest pink opening fully to white and the scent is unique but wonderful like lilacs with an aftertaste of marshmallow and plums. I love it –thanks Alistair!– (I didn’t really eat it).

In case you are wondering how my pine tree bed expansion is coming along I will report that I have done nothing.

Moving on to the vegetable garden, it came to my attention that my VGBP (Vegetable Garden Beautification Project) had fallen prey to evil grasses, death and weeds, a powerful pack of adversaries.

[Oh those arrows. They got too big so I wrote on them.]

Immediately if not sooner I put on my Super Garden-Woman cape,  and I put Max’s little Super Garden-Dog cape on him too, and we decided this was a case for cardboard and sawdust, a kind of abbreviated version of lasagna gardening.

First I brought out the loss:  a Ninebark shrub that received too much sun and too little water.  RIP.

Next I shall attempt to delineate my version of the complex lasagna bed process.

Slap down a bunch of flattened cardboard while saying “take that you grassy opportunists” then toss on all the sawdust that’s been accumulating in Mr O’s shop sawdust collector machine…

…which I happen to know will remain orange all summer so then sprinkle a load of Compost Variety Mix (leaves, grass clippings, ashes)…

…which I carefully extracted from what is not just the compost pile but rather the compost district or perhaps the compost county– honestly I cannot even photograph it for you for lack of a wide angle lens plus it’s embarrassing.

Overall this layering process was disturbingly reminiscent of the “ghost tour” of York (England) I attended once, where the guide described a woman who was executed in the street by being flattened under a weighted board. (There is simply no part of life that is guilt-free, so far as I can tell.)

Out in the garden, I don’t know what the winter-grown cabbage plants have been reading but someone has convinced them to abandon normal cabbage behavior in favor of mass seed production, which I suppose is nice for their (apparent) goal of Earth domination (the cabbage apocalpyse) but utterly inadequate when it comes to my spring salads. These mutant cabbage plants (cell phone towers…?) are taller every day and each about to burst into some sort of bloom instead of any sort of cabbage head. (I don’t expect to like the flowers.)

Nice polite lettuces have come to be quite an embarrassment to the cabbages.

Now we move on to a stand of onions known far and wide (from the picket fence clear to the greenhouse) as the Great Onion Forest. It includes three varieties of happy onions who aspire only to become parts of my suppers, growing there in the shadow of the perennial herb bed, which is just beyond (chives, French sorrel, chard, Greek oregano…)

You may observe that the onions were all clipped before the Gardener planted them outside and the reason the Gardener did that is because some onion expert book-writer guy told her to and she just hopes he was right about it even though he’s been wrong before but we are not going to talk about cucumbers right now.

Next, exciting news from the Fate Department, which is where we find this report on the new accidental bean trellis.

You may sense that, once upon a time, this bean trellis had an incarnation as a farm gate…

But that was before Mr. O drove the tractor down the lane to pick up and transport a huge length of a fallen oak tree and the tree snagged the gate as it traveled past and reconfigured it to a perfect 90 degree angle thus morphing it (the gate not the tree) into the free-standing bean trellis you see here. Add to that the fact that I bought bean seeds this year. (There are no coincidences.) (ps: the gate was not in actual use as a gate before it underwent the fortuitous transformation.)

Now. That is quite enough press, or screen, about vegetables so we will move right on to the cute little maidenhair fern clump (adiantum capillus-veneris) which was languishing last year but is smiling in its handmade tufa pot (which if it looks like a mixing bowl is because it was cast in a mixing bowl).

In other news, the fruit trees are all thinking seriously of blossoms but discreetly waiting for just a bit more security, weatherwise. Only the ornamental cherry has wrecklessly, no of course I meant recklessly (with a tip of the bottle to  Kininvie), opened all flowers and I do appreciate its brave forging ahead into heaven knows what sort of next weather but of course there is no fruit at risk here.

The native trilliums are in various stages of upness, this (Trillium ovatum) one getting the prize for earliest blooms.

It is simply the time of year when everything is growing like crazy and I like to wander around the gardens and see which things I planted in the fall on top of which then-dormant spring things so that now there are lots of places with two things growing together, so interesting and kind of like attending a botanical prize fight.

Oh I suppose I will rescue the astilbe from that pushy delphinium–

Okay that’s the end of the sailing metaphor, but the part where the terrier climbed the mast was certainly exciting. (You didn’t expect ME to go up there did you? )

So yeah it’s getting Springish here. Stuff is growing. And I know there are rumors out there that I don’t actually have a garden anymore–that it all died or I live in an apartment now or possibly in my car,  so I took evidential images with the phone, the Big camera, the Little camera, my Dick Tracy camera ring…  just to clear up the gossip, which by the way is sometimes known as “what’s clicking” according to the online slang dictionary. (Where would you be if I didn’t keep you up-to-date on these things?)

Anyway here are the first flowers of my immense swath of six or eight Anemone blanda bulbs, which seem to toss up the blooms sort of like scouts to see if it’s safe for the leaves to finish growing.

The buds looked quite purple but the blooms are more blue so I am pleased and will make every effort to not kill them.

Now here is an image of what my impeccable garden notes say is Rhododendron cilipenense, sometimes called Silly Penance by those of us who initially planted it in the wrong place where it languished sadly for some years but then finally last fall we dug it up and packed it across the lawn to better light and water. Lots more blooms this year and yes they are pink, but in a nice way.

In the native Oregon plant department, the Indian Plum (Oemleria cerasiformis) has already produced its sweet-scented graceful flowers. (I have filed a Missing Persons report on the hummingbirds who are supposed to see these blooms as an OPEN sign in the window of the garden.)

Now I know you are very eager to hear how my new pine tree bed is coming along so here is a update on the sod removal. You will most certainly recall that I am excavating, hand excavating, the sod between and around two pine trees and a deadly toxic (DO NOT EAT IT) yew tree.

Here is an image (this one taken with my Dick Tracy ring camera which is also a laser, just so you know) showing the outcome on a day when the sudden mild temperatures overcame my usual finely focused sense of rationality and I madly shoveled up about a half acre of grass.

That was the easy part. By the time I had cut free the soil (soil) and hauled the clumps away, well I earned my evening beer, that’s all I can say. Plus I didn’t find even one cask of buried gold during the entire exercise, always disappointing. I have not ventured near that miserable bed again for some days now, even though it it’s only half big enough.

The Garden Inspector did come and said it was okay so far.

(This is a busy time for Max. He has Plans, huge lists of things to do outdoors.  Sure right now he is principally resting, but just so he can endure the horrific impending hard work. Preparation is everything.)

Here is the new bed looking lost in its neighborhood. I will chip away at it, enlarging it a few inches at a time–Mr O will hardly notice. (He fears lawn-lessness, even though it tends toward moss. I think he imagines crowds of people dressed in white showing up someday desiring to play croquet and finding that only three square feet of grass remain.)

This time of year you can’t work in the garden every day. Sometimes it rains, or is a special birthday. Recently I made some Jackson Pollock cookies. It was way fun flinging that chocolate around on top of the lemon icing, so therapeutic that I almost forgot all about not finding gold in the pine tree bed.

But I digress. And again…

The adorable fuzzy chickies have returned to the farm store, part of their annual migration to chickenhouses. I love how you can hear the peeping clear to that aisle where they display the hose connections and watering cans.

ps:  If you have reached Spring too be careful getting off your boat– the deck can be slippery.

Now I will be the first, or maybe the third, to admit that I do not have the world’s most vast collection of gardening experience, but I can say with confidence that a towering fir tree does not appear overnight.

This tree popped up like a mushroom, by a school where we sometimes take walks while we wait for our ninety-three-year-old relative to get a blood test or a brain scan or a twice-yearly physical exam or etc. at the clinic next door.

A giant tall fir tree, overnight.

I was uneasy; Max was intrigued.

[No he is not asleep he is squinting into the light, taking in all the tiny details just like Jimmy Stewart in  Rear Window.]

Under cover of sun, we edged closer.

I just wish you could have been there–because it was the kind of dangerous mission I know you live for. I know it. Anyway, no one came and arrested us or took us into their space ship, or if they did we don’t remember, so we got a few more fabulous evidential images.

As Robert Frost might say, “How like a tree, how very like a tree.” Except that the limbs are steel rebar and heaven knows what the “needles” are made of. Well okay plastic. And then there was some stuff stuck on the top, sending messages to the polar regions or Mars or AT&T.

We just thought, as gardeners, we should make certain that you know about this, in case these things start appearing for sale at Walmart (another reason to not shop there) or in your lessor-quality plant nurseries.

Max and I were mightily relieved to go home and poke around outside in the garden and try to forget that terrible not-tree.  Just don’t say I didn’t warn you– and search online for “cell tower trees” if you want to see more horrific pseudo-lifeforms, including palms and yes even a saguaro cactus…

Now. Just for you, a few real hellebore blooms.

They were all planted in the lawnish area so since then we have been mowing around each one of these trees, but for a year or two I’ve been thinking of removing the sod and making a curved bed to encompass the group. Then suddenly last summer the yew sprout went berserk and its growth started making me nervous.

I read about old yew trees, which can get 50 feet tall and very fat, and I wondered if this one  needed to be moved to a bigger space like maybe the center of the north pasture.  I read some more and then I did what gardeners do best: I made a list, this time of mostly wonderful relevant yew facts.

MOSTLY WONDERFUL RELEVANT YEW FACTS

1. Yew trees respond well to pruning. They can be made into bonsai trees. Or they can be pruned to resemble a whale or a chicken or a hybrid car.  “So surely,” I said to the dog, “it could be made to simply look like a smaller yew instead of a huge overgrown badly positioned yew.” (He looked skeptical but what do dogs know about pruning.)

2. Yew trees are perfect for shady understory planting–they like shade, like under pine trees.

3. Yew trees add “classicism” –which I know you will agree is a nice contrast to the Deadwood element contributed by the ponderosa pines.

4. Yew trees can live for 2000 years plus. (You see I’m not wasting my time here my dears although at some point someone else is going to have to take over the pruning.)

5. Yew tree wood is the gold standard in materials for making long bows for archery. (Post-apocalypic insurance.)

7. Yews like water while pines like dry– but that hasn’t been a problem so far and supposedly they both like ‘well-drained soil’ but are doing fine in heavy clay so why do I bother to read this stuff anyway?

8. If you are human and eat any part of a yew tree it will kill you.  Not so wonderful fact. But if you are a deer no worries. (But if you are a deer, where did you get this computer?)  Now there is ONE part of the tiny fruits which won’t kill humans but the seed within it will stop your heart, useful to remember when writing your next murder mystery. There are so many toxic garden plants:  jasmine, daphne, lily-of-the-valley, rhododendron… I have stopped being bothered by it and just vow to feed guests well so they aren’t tempted to eat the chrysanthemums. Note: I have always been neurotically careful with children and if you are a child of mine reading this well at least I didn’t let you eat the azaleas.

Next in the yew project is the sod removal (horrid hard muddy heavy part) to create a shared bed beneath the three trees, and then I can add native Oregon perennials, ferns and (possibly-toxic) shrubs to the group (fun gardeny easy happy part).

Fortunately the horrid part stands between me and the happy part or I would of course just skip to the happy.  Stay tuned.

This exciting day of seed-burying made me think that I might ambush you now with a bit of wisdom from my in-process gardening book, a reading experience which goes well with quite a lot of beer or possibly some straight whiskey. (The book does have a working title but with a four-letter word in it so today I’ll just call it my gardening book.)

Okay here we go-

HOW PLANTS DO IT
Of course plants have their own ways of making more plants. Without putting too fine a point on the issue let me just say that you should think back to your childhood and that birds and bees discussion you saw on Leave It To Beaver or some other science documentary. Really plant sex is more like bug footprints or maybe like dusting furniture than it is like real sex but plants don’t know what they’re missing so they don’t whine about it plus what they do works, seedwise, and also gives us a lot of pretty flowers.

BUY SEEDS IN ITTY BITTY QUANTITIES
If your stock portfolio is doing well or you are a member of that family who owns Walmart, why then you might want to order lots of flower seeds from a catalog. I actually did this recently to test drive a new VISA card (which is a lot like the situations above except you have to pay it back) and when I went to plant the seeds I was so impressed with how there could be only 7 seeds in a packet and most of them could be hopelessly stuck in the folds of the envelope and not come out even in the face of my normally powerfully-magical profanities.

GET YOUR FREE SEEDS IN STUPIDLY LARGE QUANTITIES
Plan B: Every summer your already-established purchased (or possibly stolen) garden plants bloom and have pathetic plant sex and then in about late summer the result will be free seeds everywhere, waiting for you, in tidy little packets that look like suitcases or hatboxes, and all you have to do is get out of your La-Z-Boy and collect them.

Not that you can just get up one Saturday morning after sleeping until ten and having your coffee and maybe a croissant or two in your jammies and then announce to the dog, “I guess I’ll gather all the seeds today from every plant I’ve grown all summer.” This will not work. Instead you must become the air traffic controller of seed pods and monitor their development from day one. It’s tricky. They can be early and blew away weeks ago or they can be late and still green at Christmas or they can be never if you mindlessly cut off every last dead bloom.

But when it goes well  it is difficult to convey the sense of treasure a gardener experiences as she gathers free ripe seeds into little carefully labeled envelopes to be nurtured the next year into vivacious new plants.

It is a teensy bit addictive, and eventually you may find you own billions of tiny nicotiana seeds, from every year for the past five seasons, and there are rooms full of jars that are all full of little envelopes that is each full of seeds, so handy–and it’s even better if you didn’t get confused and put the wrong names on the labels. (Trust me I know.)

PLANT ‘EM
A time comes, like about now, when you have endured miserable winter for some months and you wonder if you will ever again see anything but mud and dead sticks in your garden. This is the time to go to your greenhouse or to your window greenhouse or to your actual window and get some seeds started there.  (If for any reason you happen to have some grow-lights in your attic or basement well you can use those too.)

You will need small containers that can function like little plastic pots. (I use little plastic pots.) There are all kinds of packaging you can recycle for this use but egg cartons and paper cups from a good espresso café are the best because I love omelets and coffee. (You keep forgetting this is my blog.)

So you make little holes in the bottoms of the egg cartons and cups and you put about 25 cents worth of a bag of fancy potting soil in each container. Then you put in the seeds following instructions on the seed envelope…But of course if you are planting seeds that you collected yourself well then there will BE no instructions on the envelope unless it was an old AT&T billing envelope that you reused in which case maybe there’s a tiny ad, perhaps “Get a new phone right away because your friends are starting to make fun of that thing you are using.” But this doesn’t help you know how deep to plant the petunia seeds does it?

At times like this it is important to have a gardening resource library of several hundred volumes to thumb through all afternoon or alternatively to have a smart phone so you can search and find the information in maybe twenty seconds and in which case the only gardening book you need is this one I’m writing.

Now I will confess that even I, the Garden Queen of All Knowing (as I sometimes call me), even I once thought that no matter what you were planting the process was always the same: sprinkle the seeds, put soil on top of them, water, sit pot in window or on heat mat in greenhouse. But I am here to tell you that this process is only good 99.9% of the time.  Because some seeds make strange and ridiculous demands upon you:  they desire six weeks in a dark, cold refrigerator, or to be planted without being covered at all, or to be abused with a knife and then drowned in a glass of water for 24 hours. [In professional plant nursery jargon these requirements are termed the 'Red Room of Propagation' and are not often discussed in polite company.]

Some kinds of seed simply prefer to be carried over to someone else’s house and grown there for you by a person who actually knows what to do and which, in my experience, is a very workable seeding process and it also leaves quite a lot of time for watching The Walking Dead or other educational tv.

KILLING SEEDLINGS
So you’ve planted the seeds and then in a week or two or three or in some cases in six months or five years you are thrilled to notice that the world’s tiniest plants have grown in your little pot! You watch them for a few days and then you must toss most of them out.

This need to be selective with seedlings is a common source of stress for the gardener, because typically the seeds will grow like grass and result in a pot filled with maybe 75-1000 little seedlings of for example hollyhocks, when you wanted just three plants to grow by the kitchen door. This can be a terrible moral dilemma for the gardener as she tips up the pot and has to select and transplant the three who shall be allowed to live. This is not as fun as being the Rain Goddess at watering time, no it’s more like being Death Incarnate.

But if you can get beyond apologizing to each discarded seedling, which in itself is progress from the stage where you cry and perform tiny funeral rituals, then you are doing well. If after two planting seasons you are still lighting candles and humming dirges well you might need some professional help on this, or alternatively you could nurture every last seedling and then go into the staggeringly lucrative business of selling your extra plants at outdoor markets. (Hahaha.)

See, you learn stuff here.

xo L

After a while the fog and frost and damp turn oppressive. We’ve had them endlessly, with freezing temperatures and some kind of weather bureau teasing that is no longer funny. It goes like this:  “Oh yes TODAY will never thaw but TOMORROW will be a tiny bit warmer and then on WEDNESDAY we will be ten degrees better and on THURSDAY or possiby FRIDAY it will be mild and time to get outside and prune the roses.

Lies.

The days of the week change but the song remains the same as do the actual freezing dark foggy days.  Any moderation is always a mirage that dissolves as it is approached only to reform three days into the future.

But then, we heard a rumor.

This rumor came to Mr O from an actual human being who claimed that the weather at the Oregon coast was lovely and sunny. “But no,” I said, when I heard the rumor.  “Look at the phone weather app for the coast– cloudy and cold,  just like home.”

Mr O refused to believe the phone and we went anyway and there by the ocean we found a day that was beyond beautiful.

No wind, blue sky, and a sun-warmed moderate air temperature that felt wonderously mild after what we have been through.

There were other people with dogs and kids around. Some were even wading in the waves, which shows you how crazy winter can make you. It was not a summer day, but the sun and the blue water and big sky were dazzling, and somehow the waves were huge and close and grander than ever.

There was even dry sand up by the land’s edge where most of the beach houses looked vacant, although some sweet child had written “Happy Birthday Mom” in enormous letters in the sand , a message to someone up on that cliff someplace.

Mr O was so very right about the weather, and I was glad that I and the phone app had been wrong.  You might think this mature and generous of me, but really what’s the joy of being right compared with a winter picnic by the ocean, with smoked salmon and beer and sun in your eyes?  It was what the evening news might call a win-win situation and I definitely won.

Max won too.

Well I just wanted to let the Western Oregon readers know the truth about the coast weather this week (you know who you are!) and to let everyone else know that I am mentally fortified to now create in actual ink on actual paper a schedule for this year’s seed planting yes all of them and no not all at once in the same pot that would be silly.  Probably.

With brand new mental balance,

L

As you can see I still have laptop access so you might conclude that my guard is not very professional but really he does pretty well for a dog.

Like so many, I am innocent.

It was a case of seed catalogs becoming what is sometimes called an attractive nuisance.  Still, just like in the song (“Was I drunk? Was he handsome? Did momma give me hell?”)–
I don’t regret a thing.

As I sift through the pile of envelopes from Territorial Seed I remember a lot of vegetable visions which were in my mind as I looked through the paper catalog and I do wonder if there wasn’t something, maybe in the ink…

WHAT WAS I THINKING?
I see I ordered special cucumbers to pickle–while I’ve never made pickles before in my life.  And here’s something called Double Purple Orach. (What could that be?) And then there is a packet of quinoa. I do remember that one–pretty flowers and then seeds to eat.  I met up with quinoa in a rice mix I bought once. (I wonder if I ordered rice seeds too…)

Isn’t this fun? And don’t I wish I had a crew of maybe seven gardeners on staff to help me?

Plus today the flower seeds also arrived from Mail Land, but FYI there are hardly any compared to the vegetable onslaught. They do include a packet of Verbena bonariensis, something I grew once before then removed due to the voices of plant fearmongers who insisted it would be rampantly invasive. Since then I’ve heard nothing but sweet praises for this tall purple verbena, which I see is also known by the cheerful name of Purple Top Vervain.  (Note: I already grow regular ancient vervain, and it has kept my garden vampire-free for ages.)

SEMI-HONESTY
In the interest of total clarity, which I sometimes sort of care about, I will add that I even ordered some fancy red organic seed potatoes to plant, which will arrive in early spring.

Now, if you are the type of gardener who still thinks it’s all about birdsong and sunshine and big baskets of lush vegetables well this might be a good time for you to go take your medication because potato growing is not like that– potato growing is one of those things that sounds cinchy and fun but is quite a lot more like complicated and hopeless.

Undaunted, this year I have committed (which is different than having been committed) to one more effort toward growing potatoes that are findable. (Note: UN-findable potatoes are what you get when NO potatoes are produced by the ungrateful wretched spiteful mean potato plants.)

Now, I do happen to accidentally know that potatoes will grow nicely in a compost heap.

You may ask, “How does she know this?”

Well guess.

While I am not willing to indulge this arguably perverse inclination among potatoes and I am most particularly not willing to give over my compost pile to Potato Fun for months on end, it has also come to my attention that potatoes are somewhat unquestioning sorts and, eyes or not, can be tricked with relative ease.

Their gullibility has suggested a solution, together with the fact that there exists, in my life, an alarming accumulation of enormous empty pots, formerly the homes of  various of Mr O’s fruit trees.  I envision the hugest of the pots filled with compost to become the new potato condo! (But don’t think I’m done with this. There is a whole bury-them-as-they-grow thing with potatoes and I’m not facing it without you.)

REALLY TREMENDOUS SELF-DISCIPLINE
As you likely know, I have a will of steel. Or maybe cashmere. In any case I resisted buying any of the mushroom growing kits when I ordered vegetable seeds. If you have had a fabulous experience with mushroom kits please let me know right away so I can email one more order before the funds get squandered on something boring like the power bill.

PS: If all your mushrooms died I don’t need to know.