7 Quick Takes Friday: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Last Sunday, several people at church commented to the kids about summer being “half over”… which it isn’t for us, since we homeschool.  In fact, it’s all over.

You know how they tell you that the population of the South didn’t really start to increase significantly until the invention of the air conditioner?  They aren’t kidding.  There are reasons for this, and August is the main one.  So, instead of listening to a month of, “But I don’t want to go outside!  *whine*  It’s too hot!” we start school at the beginning of August.  This has the lovely secondary effect of us being done with school by the beginning of May, when the weather is frequently lovely and the garden needs a ton of work.

All that being said, I offer (in homage to teachers past who seemed to love the old standby): What I did on my summer vacation, by the Political Housewyf

1.  I made an awning.  Three 2x2x8 treated pine poles, pipe strapping (DH insisted I shouldn’t screw the poles directly into the dock walls), six large screw eyes, six D-rings, a package of huge grommets, some PVC pipe and the stand from the failed patio umbrella (to hold up the fourth corner, where I couldn’t install a pole), and yards and yards of fabric (on sale!).  The D-rings stay in the grommets and hook quickly into the screw eyes.  It takes about two minutes to walk down to the dock and put it up.

And this view is part of why I haven’t gotten a whole lot of blogging done lately…

2.  I read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.  The cover has a panda with a smoking gun running away.  (If you don’t get it, you need this book!)  I loved it and discovered that some of my odd punctuation practices would be considered proper in British punctuation but not American.  Thanks to my high school English teachers (who were better at imparting grammar than enthusiasm for Shakespeare), none of the grammar rules was new to me, but the book is very funny.

Sticklers of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but you’re your misplaced apostrophe’s apostrophes’ apostrophes!  (Contrary to what some of you may think after reading my blog, I do know grammar rules… I just choose to break them upon occasion.  And I shall continue to do so. )

3.  I killed a whole lot of trees doing adoption paperwork.  Our dossier finally went to China in June, got assigned the all-important log-in date (LID) quickly, and… now we wait again.  We hope to see our LOA from China before the end of August, which then triggers- get this- even more paperwork.  But at least we got some updated photos.  (No, no photo here.  Yes, everyone else does, but “everyone else” usually has a adoption-specific website that doesn’t get into criticizing certain governmental policies.)

The good news is that I have rediscovered the joys of the Rumor Queen’s website, populated by number crunching waiting parents who, like me, want more info than the adoption agencies are usually willing to commit to.  (The agency says, “Well, it could be four to six months…” and the number crunching waiting dad says, “The average for the year, over two hundred familes, has been 74 days.”)

4.  I made sushi.  No, no raw fish (which is technically sashimi, a subset of sushi).  A trendy little sushi place in Richmond (I don’t think we’re cool enough or left-leaning enough for it, honestly) had a special one time we were in there on our way back from running adoption paperwork in DC.  They called it Kong’s Lunchbox, and it had tempura-fried banana, peanut butter, and grape jelly in a sushi roll.  The kids adored it, which is why what was supposed to be a photo of happy kids eating sushi has no sushi slices in it.

Ah, there it is, along with some tempura-fried figs and pickled ginger.  Good stuff.  (My DH informed me that the tempura-fried okra was not acceptable.  I suspect it’s because the tempura doesn’t coat heavily enough to disguise the vegetable.)  (Tempura-fried green beans are really good, too.  Start with fresh, raw ones.)

5.  I grew rice, although, really, it’s very low-maintenance, so I can’t claim much credit.  It started out tiny and pathetic.  Recently, though, I told Empress to stand behind it to show off how tall it is… except that you can’t really see her in the photo, the rice is so tall!  So, I took another shot with her in front of it.  The rice seems to take up a ton of water; I’m not keeping it full of water constantly, because of mosquitoes (I let the top of the soil dry just a bit in between floodings), but it does get watered every few days in this heat, especially since it is in a windy location (it makes the nicest swishing sound in the breeze), which could be causing it to lose water faster.  Just this morning, I found a fat, bulging part that is about to erupt into the seed head!  Woo hoo!

6.  I spent way too much at my friend Jen’s favorite local yarn store in DC, Yarn Cloud.  Yarn stores are usually nice, but this one is gorgeous!  Well-lit, easy to navigate, and the yarn is well-arranged.  What do I mean by well-arranged yarn?  Some was stacked neatly on shelves, but lots of it was hung on peg board display hooks, which encourages you to touch the yarn… which is how my bill got so big.  Once you start petting the yarn, all kinds of wonderful projects come to mind, and oh, that linen blend feels interesting and…  (If you’re on a strict budget, DON’T PET THE YARN!)  The priority right now, however, is to get the baby’s blanket on the loom: a single-ply silk blend weft on a plied silk blend warp, both in a gorgeous, deep shade of red.  Yes, photos will be forthcoming whenever I get going.

7.  I pulled my SIL’s Christmas present out again.  It’s an embroidered map of Middle Earth.  I spent more than an hour tying knots to make Mirkwood last night, and it’s nowhere near done.  (As I told her, “The forests are taking hours each, and that’s just the small ones on the fringe of the map that don’t figure in the stories.  I’m not sure I like you this much…”)  I had been avoiding it, because I couldn’t figure out how to do mountains.  I think I figured out a decent solution, but you’ll have to wait for a photo; it’s just too unfinished right now!

As always, I’ve been a bit wordy for “quick takes”, but there it is!  Go check out Jen at Conversion Diary for a weekly dose of 7 Quick Takes from her and dozens of other bloggers.

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The Spring Garden

I’m happy to say, I am finally measuring progress in something more than centimeters in the garden.

Remember those aluminum raised bed corners?  Well, I never put the end caps on (they appeared to be semi-permanent once you tapped them into the holes).  So, I used the holes.  My tea plants (which I nearly killed by ignoring the “they don’t like wind that much” line in the instructions) got a burlap wind screen.  (That’s Empress’s “cute look”, in case you couldn’t tell.)

Yes, that bed is mostly onions and bok choi… the tea plants just aren’t all that big right now and the leafy greens are.

At the other end, I used leftover deck screws to make pegs for a bean trellis.

And then there’s the lettuce patch… which has suddenly gotten completely out of control.  It will get beans on a trellis, too, which will hopefully provide enough shade to keep the lettuce from bolting longer.

That’s swiss chard in front (Bright Lights).  So pretty, you want to figure out how to eat it… but we have to eat the lettuce first.  (It’s been chicken ceasar salad every other night around here.)

And that’s it… whoa!  Under 200 words.  I must be coming down with something.

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Dirt ground into my hands- yes, life is good.

I got most of the dirt out of my fingernails (yes, I own gloves, but don’t always use them), but the cracks in my hands didn’t come completely clean.  Oh, life is good!  (and five cubic yards of compost and my raised-bed corners coming tomorrow, and a three day weekend to boot: woo hoo!)

I started turning the garden over in earnest today.  I can’t believe I thought for years that I could get away with just scratching in some composted manure from the plastic bags at Home Depot and let the roots do the rest!  Now, I double dig (two shovel depths, straight down, everywhere) and add leaves and compost every year.  (The kids got a pile of clay to make things out of.  I certainly have enough clay to play with, if I dig down far enough.)

I just finished ordering my seeds, and I have come to two conclusions:

1.  There are just too many options out there.  I received more than a dozen catalogs, but only ordered from two.  And really, do we need a hundred slicing tomatoes to choose from?  I really think a few dozen would be sufficient.  Of course, one of the catalogs I ordered from has nearly a page and a half of their catalog dedicated to various okras (Southern Exposure Seed Exchange- good for those of you who, like me, have long, hot, humid summers that stress many plants).  And I’ll be planting at least ten varieties of lettuce again (most of it not all-green, and NO iceberg! (I think they called it that because iceberg tastes like water.))  I have some leftover Florellenschluss (Flashy Troutback), and I ordered Yugoslavian Red and Revolution, but Drunken Woman was sold out… ok, maybe a few options are good.

2.  The more I pay attention to my food and seeds, the more ticked off I get.  In this particular case, the problem is F1 hybrids.  Basically, these are first generation plant crosses.  Much better than the GMO seeds (Genetically Modified, sometimes with genes that didn’t even come from plants in the first place, much less that species), but still problematic.  Why?  Because if you save seed from an F1, most of it will not have the characteristics that you chose it for.  Essentially, selling F1 hybrids forces you to buy new seeds every year.  The old heirlooms and other longer-than-one-measly-year crosses have had most of the variations bred out of them.  As I’m trying to save more seeds and avoid paying so much for seeds each year, this is becoming more important to me.

So, what’s going to be growing this year?  Some highlights:

Painted Mountain corn: eat it fresh, dry it and grind it (mmm… grits!), parch it (dry pan roasted).  It looks like the beautiful Indian Corn sold for decorations in late fall, but much more edible.  Now, if I can only protect it from the muskrats…

Lettuce!  Watching a guest about to douse his salad in Caesar dressing, I warned, “Look out; my lettuce actually has taste!”  Looking dubious (but learning he’d better listen, since he also hadn’t believed me when I walked across the deck with a basket and scissors saying, “I’m going to go get dinner,” returning with mounds of leaf lettuce), he tried a bite, then agreed that this lettuce didn’t need so much dressing to make it palatable.  Did you know that something like a third of lettuce (pre-truck farm days) in the US used to be reds?

Swiss Chard: I’m growing enough to freeze this year.  We had jambalaya tonight (a great, huge, “I’m busy digging in the garden and want leftovers for tomorrow night so I don’t have to cook” kind of dinner), and I really, really missed the chard and wished I’d put some up before the freeze killed the plants (in milder winters, they’ve gone all winter without dying back… back when I had no idea what to do with them and mostly ignored them).

Potatoes: I was going to order (at around $12 for a two pound bag) some, but decided I’d try my luck with the store varieties.  Since many stores now carry blue potatoes and the occasional fingerlings, as well as the wonderful Yukon Golds and reds, why pay $6 a pound plus extra shipping?  Why grow potatoes, you’re asking?  Southern Exposure Seed Exchange had a large warning on their potato page last year: if you eat fresh-dug potatoes, you will never want to go back to those things from the store!  They are not exaggerating: the fresh-dug ones are sweeter, creamier, cook faster, and their skins haven’t hardened up yet.

Great.  Now it’s after midnight and my mouth is watering.

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Garden Mania

It’s that time of year.

The mailbox is regularly delivering fat, glossy catalogs of vegetables with attractive names.  Beautiful photos of impossibly perfect beans, corn, tomatoes, and greens fill page after page.  Oh, yes, this is going to be a fun gardening year!

And then I remember that last year, the blasted muskrats ate every single corn stalk and a lot of the lettuce, then started hauling off entire branches of tomatoes.  Something nipped off the onions at ground level.  The squirrels ate twelve of the fourteen persimmons.

So, I am plotting.

I will be consumed for some time with said plotting.  Last year, I persuaded the DH to let me garden between the fence and the top garden wall… and then realized that I really, really did not want to clean all of that Bermuda grass out of a 52 foot by four foot swatch of lawn.  Drat; all that persuading for nothing.  After much puzzling, it occured to me that what I needed was to kill the grass, cover it in newspaper (further assuring total die-off; Bermuda grass is horribly persistent), cover that with weed blocker fabric, then place raised beds on top of that.  Finish it all off with a layer of mulch around the raised beds and some small-holed fencing in the raised beds.

All that so I can grow some unharassed corn and lettuce.  (Anybody have a recipe for stewed muskrat?)

Of course, after ordering the cool raised bed corners, killing the grass, etc., etc. … I still have to decide on which seeds to buy.  And I should have already sown peas.  And I have to haul the greenhouse out of the garage rafters.  And I have weaving, an incomplete Christmas embroidery project, and a new paperwork-intensive project (friends know, family doesn’t, because I trust my friends will be supportive).

I enjoy gardening, really.  I don’t enjoy the spring crush so much.

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7 Quick Takes Friday

 

1.  I posted an offer for anyone who wanted to participate in a weekly haiku-fest.  No takers at all, so far… Be the first!  Please?

2.  The good news from the friendly pest control people is that I don’t have nutria (they’re bigger… think Rodents of Unusual Size bigger… think “furry basketball with long rat tail known for destroying East Coast wetlands” bigger).  But I don’t have nutria, I have muskrats.  For being so much smaller the *&^%*(#!?!  things eat way too much… almost all my wheat seedlings, several tomato plants, some flowers, all the daylilies outside the fence, etc.  And they have very little fear of people.  Anybody know how to get rid of muskrats?

3.  Even the muskrats can’t eat all of Diva’s favorite flowers.  It’s called Love-in-a-Mist.  I have a range of white, pinks, and blues.  They very enthusiastically self-seed and do their thing every year.  After tons of flowers, they produce these weird green and purple striped balloon seed pods, then disappear completely until the following spring.  Really cool.

4.  I don’t believe in the prophetic power of fortune cookies, but sometimes they’re funny.  Empress got one a while back that read, “This is the month that ingenuity stands high on the list.”  Not an encouraging fortune to get for a pre-schooler; there are just way too many possibilities involved, many of them involving massive clean-ups.

5.

 

Every so often, the kids do this to the walking, stomping, roaring triceratops.  I think of her as the mom.  Yes, the small ones are chewing on her horns (proabably asking, “When’s lunch?” and yelling, “She hit me first!”).  Some days, I pick up the poor triceratops and sigh, “Yeah, that’s about what the day felt like.”  I can laugh about it right now, because today was not one of those days… and the kids are in bed.

6.  Do you ever watch those decorating shows where they do a fabulous room makeover for a really low amount of money, all because they just *happened* to find exactly what they needed either being thrown out by the neighbors or at the local thrift store for $4?  I hate those.  I mean, seriously, who throws out stuff like that?

And then I found this screen in the trash pile around the corner, under a hose and some carpet scraps.  I had to ask if they were really throwing it out.  The woman looked perplexed at why I would be so interested and kept telling me that the hinges were broken.  I kept asking if she was sure I couldn’t bring her some flowers or something out of the garden as a thank you.

7.  My red pomegrantes are blooming profusely.  I’m very excited about that; hopefully, I’ll have some fruit again this year (the tree produced two pomegranates two years ago, then didn’t even flower last year).  My white ones have never bloomed, so I am anxiously awaiting the first-ever buds’ opening… maybe tomorrow.  I think I’ve checked on them three times a day for the last four or five days.

A watched pot never boils, and all that.

For more 7 Quick Takes, visit the hostess, Jen at Conversion Diary!

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Gardening, gardening, and… um… more gardening

For the first time in years, I do not have a major yard project.  The major garden edging project is finished, the hill falling into the lake is stabilized (except for the dratted muskrats who have moved in, which I’m trying to have a more laid-back attitude about), and I have no new gardens planned.

So, for once, I’m weeding regularly and trying to get the whole vegetable garden space under cultivation.  I am going to continue to weed it and keep up this year, really!

It’s doing really well this year, partially because I actually got started on time.  SE Virginia is zone 7, and our normal last frost date is mid-April, which means that starting things six to eight weeks before that last frost date involves hauling the greenhouse down from the garage ceiling in late February.  I found a local hardware/seed store that handed out free schedules for planting in the area.  Which is a long explanation of, “I actually planted things as early as they could be planted for once.”

Thick, small lettuce.

I also blame the nuns.  I took some of my very happy, overgrown iris, and other spreading plants for the new gardens (they moved out of their old convent in the middle of the city to a quieter location several years back) of a local cloistered Poor Clare community.  “Oh, thank you, and God bless your garden!”  Ack!  Too late to stop the kind porteress, I am living with the consequences of my garden getting blessed.  (and the nuns have received several more deliveries of my extra plants, as has Brother at my parish; it’s a great way to give away large quantities of extra and/or too rapidly spreading plants)

A few weeks later, insanely fat, happy lettuce. We're eating huge salads every night and giving away bags of it... and we still can't keep up with it!

I tried a few new things last year and am expanding it this year.  I’m growing more corn (it was wonderful to eat really fresh-picked corn!) and beans (dry and green).  We’ll see if all the compost and turning everything over helped.  It’s looking good so far.

L to R, really happy potatoes, onions (surrounded by dill volunteers), wheat, and Jacob's Cattle heirloom beans.

The potatoes already look better than they did last year, after a lot less growing time.  The wheat was nipped off almost at the ground (blasted bunnies!), but came back thicker than before.  The beans are named for the Biblical story of Jacob’s father-in-law trying to cheat him out of his just pay by promising him only the spotted cattle.  Miraculously, the cattle had almost all spotted calves that spring.  So, Jacob’s Cattle beans are white with red spots.

After the weeding, it’s always important to sit down and appreciate the garden.  Without sitting and looking, you get to the point where all you see are the weeds.  It’s very discouraging.  Which is why, come August, the garden has usually fallen into a state of neglect as I, overwhelmed by endless to-do lists, retreat into the air conditioning.

It’s about the long-term goals, not just today’s problems.  I should point out that the same can be said of homeschooling, or parenting in general, or any number of things.

From where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look too bad.

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Bliss! Weeding!

I’m strange, I know; no need to tell me that considering weeding as bliss is, well, more than a little odd.

But it was bliss.

Dig out the garden gloves, haul out the lovely lime green garden bucket (I adore my Tub Trugs), and pull weeds.  Smell of wild onions when you rake kind of bliss.  Bonus of a friend with too many leaves and too much pine straw, just when I desperately need leaves to turn in for my garden beds and compost bin and pine straw for cheap mulching material.  (Thank you, Mary!)

Smell of green, growing things thinking about waking up.

Squirmy worms to gently relocate out of the area of active weeding and into the soft, turned-up tumble of just-weeded soil.

A nice, fat box full of new seeds (and a popcorn stripper) in the mail bliss.

The intoxicating smell of new books with wild, exciting titles like Homegrown Whole Grains and The Backyard Homestead kind of bliss.

Greenhouse hauled out of the garage overhead, set up, and newly equipped with an automatic heater and temperature sensor bliss.  With the bonus of those two pieces of equipment being cheaper than expected.  Oooh, rapture!

Newly-fashioned soil plugs, neatly lined up in a plastic tray in the greenhouse with packets at the end of each perfect row, promising five types of tomatoes, onions, and leeks.

The late-night whine of the table saw, as Crash and Daddy fashion a birdhouse complex for Purple Martins.

The thought that my parents, in Wisconsin, won’t even be thinking about their garden for months: priceless!

Oh, spring is so good.

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… and winter comes

As we work through Advent, the season is darkening in the Northern Hemisphere.  We are approaching not only Christmas, but the darkest night of the year.

The new Sting CD I just bought had some musings about the necessity of winter in our psyche.

Summer is lovely, but we can’t keep up that pace forever.  Winter forces us to stop, to wait.  In our modern world, we turn up the heat, put on extra clothes, and head out to work: winter, summer, rain, shine, whatever.  For most of human history, however, winter meant staying at home, scraping by on what you had harvested over the summer, thinking about the year past, and planning for the year to come.

I’ve been busy putting the garden to bed.  In southeastern Virginia, some things grow year round.  The parsley seeds that dropped in the summer are coming up in a bright green carpet, as are the carrots.  Swiss chard is perfectly happy through the winter.  But, somewhat intentionally, I am not planning a winter garden.

For starters, the year was too crazy, and I haven’t quite caught up.  More importantly, however, I need the break.  In the middle of the work, planning can be somewhat haphazard, and it always feels like stopping to plan properly is an unaffordable luxury when the weeds need pulling.  Every year, as the weather gets colder (relatively speaking- it isn’t the upper Midwest!), I’m still pulling weeds, pulling dead plants, turning the soil over, turning in leaves and compost, and layering everything over with mulch like a huge comforter.

When it’s done, the winter garden has its own beauty.  Summer is abundance, tomato plants spilling out of the tops of their cages, and a cacophony of colors and textures.  Winter is the monotony of brown pine needle mulch, bare branches, and tan garden walls.  Flat garden beds under their blanket of pinestraw replace mounds of foliage studded with vegetables.  The harvest, for good or bad, is in and stored away (no longer a source of terrible concern, in this day of 24-hour grocery stores).

And when it’s done, it’s done.  For months.  The only garden chore for at least a few months is to browse garden catalogs, daydream, and plan for next year’s garden.

This time of year, in the garden and in the Church year, is for recollection.  How did the year go?  What could have gone better?  What did I do well?  What did I do poorly?  Where was I remiss in care, in duty, in diligence?  There are fewer distractions: the garden is going to bed, and the Church calls us to come aside for a season of penance and recollection in Advent.  We prepare for the feast of Christmas.

I am unlikely to see snow, but winter comes.  And it’s good for us.

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Go to the happy place…

I’m not as doom-and-gloom as you might think from just reading my blog.  Really, I have a lot of life going on outside of politics, most of it pretty happily contented.  Which is part of why I blog: I want to see those things protected.

So, tonight, I offer some stuff that makes me happy, and I hope it makes you smile, too.

 Figs (three types), corn (mostly Indian corn, for drying and popping), tomatoes (orange and red), mung beans (five inch black pods), and the first of the red yard-long beans (burgundy, about ten inches in the baby vegetable stage).

 

 

“… they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree,
and none shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.  (Micah 4: 3-4, RSV)
 

 

The aftermath of the harvest.  Everything sorted, corn shucked and ready to hang for drying.

 

 

 

 

 

Close up of the gorgeous, deep colors!  (“Are you shooting garden p*rn in there again?!” asked the DH.)

 

 

 

 

Corn hanging from the arch between the kitchen and living room.  (Yes, my kitchen ceiling is dark blue.  I have this thing for Provence, France.  It’s a lovely area.)

 

 

 

 

Diva with her hair freshly twisted and pinned.  Just five to ten minutes of blow drying to set the twist, and the locs are good for a few more weeks of no-fuss, no-muss wear!

 

 

 

Crash was so tired, he fell asleep eating a cookie!  Even when we tried to wake him up, he still didn’t eat the cookie.  Just had too much fun, and sitting still to listen to The Hobbit wasn’t going to work that night.

 

 

The next night, for the session of “Daddy reads The Hobbit“, Empress managed to claim part of the plaid couch.  Since Hobbit is notably lacking in pictures (one every two or three chapters), she hauled her little pile of picture-filled books over to the couch.  Until I showed up with the camera, she was intensely poring over her books.  Notice the toes wiggling in happiness.

  

On a final note of geek romance, the DH was listening to a bunch of stuff on gravity, neutrinos, quarks, etc. on the Science Channel tonight.  He looked over at me and commented something about the fact that, given Newton’s laws, our two bodies were, in fact, exerting some gravitational attraction on each other.  “And since we’ve both gotten heavier, the attraction level should be remaining constant, even though we don’t sit next to each other anymore!  Aww!” he concluded (he can’t stand to have me on the same couch anymore; says I fidget too much).

I’ve never been quite so amused at having my weight pointed out…

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It’s a good time of the year…

It’s a good time of the year.  We’re starting up homeschooling again, after a month or so of summer slow-down.  (When I joked that freshly cleaned and arranged homeschool shelves looked nice and just “bursting with knowledge”, Diva replied with an enthusiastic (and not joking), “Mmm hmm!”)  The butterflies are increasing.  It’s been a lovely, mild July.  Congress is about to go on summer recess.  And, after all the hard work, the real harvest is beginning to come in.

Tonight, I harvested corn for dinner, popcorn to dry for later, tons of figs (yellowish green Italian honey figs, dark purple Negronnes, and brownish purple Celeste– most didn’t make it into the bowl), sweet orange cherry tomatoes, and the first plum tomato to not have blossom end rot and survive the mystery animal that’s biting off my tomato plants three inches off the ground!

(Anyone who tells you that gardeners are calm, nature-loving people has obviously never met a gardener who has just picked up the severed stalk of a carefully pampered tomato plant that the blasted animal didn’t even bother to eat.  Large caliber weaponry loudly obliterating all but the furry tip of its tail (whatever it is that’s vandalizing my garden) sounds pretty good at that point.  I let the fig trees get taller than I can pick so the birds get the extras up top.  I plant tons of dill and parsley I have no need of so that the swallowtail caterpillars can munch to their hearts’ content.  I have no sympathy for furry raiders.)

After dinner, I went out in the slightly cooler temperatures to check on things that needed to be dug up.  Namely, garlic and potatoes.  The summer garlic crop has been done for a while, and the potatoes didn’t survive my inept attempt at “hilling”, where you add more dirt around the base of the plant to encourage more spuds.  Oh, well; at least I got some potatoes this year!  Before, they always died an ignominious and unproductive death.

Tomorrow, I’m dragging the kids out to the garden to help sift the dirt for potatoes, since I only dug up part of a hill tonight.  I’m not sure why they’re all bumpy, but they appear edible.  Not a bad return for the investment of a couple of potatoes that sprouted in the bottom of the closet!

Yes, I used plain old Yukon Gold potatoes from the grocery store.  It’s the same way I started planting garlic.  I even planted mung beans from a package of seeds for sprouting in one of those windowsill sprout growers.  If it sprouts, it’s viable.  And usually cheaper than buying it from a seed catalog, which I tried and botched before with potatoes, leading to a rather pricey garden failure.  Now that I figured out my problem (namely, that I had overlooked really basic steps like digging/loosening up and turning over all of the soil every year), I might try some fancier potato types.

I heard on a gardening show that potatoes are not sensitive to the amount of daylight, since they come from near the equator.  Once they’ve had a cool rest, they’re ready to start growing again.  (Some crops are day-length sensitive; onions, in particular, start to fatten up based on daylight hitting a certain length, which would probably explain my continuing problems with onions that go straight to seed without forming a nice, fat, edible bulb.)  I figure I’ll take the store bought potatoes that are starting to sprout right now and plant them as soon as I have these harvested.  Maybe I can perfect my flawed hilling technique before the frosts come.

There are few things as satisfying as walking in from the garden with dirt under your fingernails and an overflowing basket, saying, “Ok, I’ve got dinner…”

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