Be joyful though you have considered all the facts
Set 2 traps with peanut butter. Waited 1 night. Found 3 mice. Amie and I released them 1 mile away.
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Resowed all the seeds (onion, celeriac, lettuces, spinaches and chards). Lovage, Common Mint and Pennyroyal are germinating well. The celery also escaped and I can now call them seedlings.
Amie and I spent the whole day at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. They had special kids’ activities – crafting, a scavenger hunt, a Chinese lion dance demonstration – for the holiday week. We took our time, sauntering from one activity to the other, taking frequent snack breaks, only stopping at those art works that caught her eye.
Here Amie is sketching a ceramic horse. She was very careful about the knees – one of which had to be lengthened so the horse could “nibble at it” as in the original. I love the way she drew the saddle.
Here we plonked down in front of one of the Melendez still lives. We first looked at all of them and she chose the cauliflower. We discussed the painting, how one thing is in front of the other, but when she started drawing she started left to right, the metal flask first (notice the line of light), then the pewter bowl. Then she found she had too little room for the cauliflower, but that was okay since she doesn’t like cauliflower anyway. The large brown blotch on top is actually the background, which she says she’ll fill in “later” (not going to happen).
One of the tasks in the scavenger hunt was sketching this Babylonian lion with the help of a grid. That grid really threw her off.
In the same room we found the oldest art work in the museum: a vessel in the shape of a hare from neolithic times. She was intrigued by its age and insisted on drawing it and annotating the drawing. For its age, I asked to write 8 first, then add a 0, another one, and another one. “It is so old it is very delicate and you can’t reach through the glass to reach it” (sigh of relief from Mama here) “and because it is so old it is also very tired.”
We kept the Create a Creature with clay for last. I’m afraid Mama had to get her hands dirty as well: she had to make that turtle.
My growth chart now looks like this:
Yes, that’s a 
x 7. Horrible, this early in the game! The spinaches, lettuces and chards that had germinated were eaten by a mouse!
That sets us back by only (?) a week, but I must say it was quite upsetting to come into the basement and find only stems sheared of all those beautiful little leaves.
I guess that means we have mice in the basement and I need to trap them. I’ll get some traps tomorrow. The celery is under cover, so it’s safe, and the onions don’t seem to be very popular.
Our friends left a couple of hours ago after a wonderful time filled with chatting, cooking, eating, and a huge snowball fight. We’ll return to our usual programming tomorrow.
Friends are coming to visit for a couple of days, and I doubt I will have the time, or the inclination, to interrupt the fun we always have to post here. But before I go, a few notes:
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Turns out that the bobcat I heard a couple of weeks ago was most likely a fisher cat. My neighbor saw one crossing the street this morning and immediately fired off an email to let me know. And it clicked, because Suldog had raised this possibility in his comment to my post. Apparently fishers make that haunting sound during mating season, though they’re also know to make it when they’re trapped or attacking. No bobcat, then, but pretty wild anyway!
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I’ve signed two petitions in the last two days.
There’s a Food Revolution and I’m on it!
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I totally missed the “Focus on Feeders,” which the Mass Audubon Society organized this year on 6 and 7 February. But I am thinking about sending one or two photos to their amateur photo contest. Here’s a selection (click for larger):
They are: Black-Capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, Downy and Hairy Woodpecker side-by-side, female Northern Cardinal and Red-Breasted Woodpecker (photo taken yesterday).
I like the first two because of their wintry atmosphere: the birds seem cloaked in the snow-laden sky. The Grosbeak was such an exception at my feeders, and I love the color of his breast. The Hairy Woodpecker (the large one) is so darn ugly; even his eye looks scruffy! But it was great to see the two kinds side by side. The female Cardinal gives us such a stern look, and look at the soft colors of her belly. And that last picture is just so vivid.
Do you have any favorites?
Amie has taken to writing me letters – she’s been watching My Neighbor Totoro, in which the oldest girl writes letters to her mother. I can’t come anywhere near her when she is writing. “Don’t look!” she says – not aware, perhaps, that I can hear her perfectly as she sounds out what she is spelling!
(Dear Mama I had an exciting day how are your days)
(Dear Mama I love you are you okay I am okay thank you for the message love Amie)
(Dear Mama I am at the airplane woops I am at the school had to hop off the airplane)
As you can see she is using invented spelling and I am letting her, though in my responses I of course use the American English spelling, and I take the opportunity to discuss some words. In her first note, for instance, she wrote “deer Mama”. In the second and third one she had corrected it to “dear”.
What a treat this is! I stick the notes in my journal, and she keeps mine in a special box.
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Today is the Valentine’s party at Amie’s preschool. We got the dreaded note on Monday: “Please have your child bring 20 Valentine’s cards to school on Friday.” So all of this week we worked on the cards, handmade entirely out of scrap paper. Last year I’d say I did 75% of the work, this year only about 30%. Next year, I told her, she’d be responsible 100%. Amie also made cards for her teachers, and she wrote their names on the back: Meree (Mary), Soosin and Soosin, and Raylee. Of course I forgot to take a picture, just like last year.
Happy Valentine’s Party Day!
Lots of herbs have to be started early. So I started them:
Luckily most of these (not the *) germinate at temperatures around 60F, so they don’t take up space on the heat mat.
It’s great to know, this time around, that the beds are ready, for all of them. All my herbs last year were stuck in pots and, though I did get to harvest the culinary ones, they never really thrived.
I put the Echinacea seeds into the freezer to stratify them. If I sow them in warm soil in 3 or so weeks, they’ll break dormancy and germinate, I hope.
In the interest of record keeping, I started the following growth chart (IN and OUT means sowed inside, or direct seeded outside):
Let’s see if I can keep this kind of record keeping up. If so, think of how colorful it will be in a few months! I’ll see if I can make it a public document, so you can see the updated one at any time.
The first of that big snowstorm assailing the East Coast has flurried in, and so did the flocks of birds. I’ve noticed that the regulars – the flocks of snowbirds, sparrows, finches and mourning doves, and the lone cardinals and blue jays – come out to the feeder when it starts snowing. Maybe it is something about filling the belly before it all gets covered?
Today, though, the largest flock by far was made up of Robins. They flew in en masse right before the snow started falling. About two dozen of them foraged in the leaves and straw, and ate the berries off the bushes near the feeder.
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The seeds are safe and snug in the basement. My hands are itching to tuck some more in, but I am going to stagger sowing this year. Let’s see how long I can manage to hold off!
Of course we could also stagger eating. At least the lettuces and spinach, no? Mm…
It took me three hours to wash all the plugs and containers from last year. Or should I say, another three hours? I had washed them at the end of last season, but storing them on the screened-in porch turned out to be not a good idea. So I washed and scrubbed in a bucket of water, dipped into a bucket of water+chlorine, rinsed in a bucket of water, dipped into a fresh bucket of water+chlorine (really don’t want pathogens in that tiny, contained micro-climate that will soon house most of my vegetable garden of 2010!), and rinsed in fresh water again. Let drip.
This is the collection of recycled containers – there are more than it seems from the pictures:
With the 50 or so peat pots left over from last year, I think I’ll be all set. I do love those green containers that mushrooms come in: they’re strong, the right depth, and because they’re rectangular, they waste less space in the rectangular setup. 8 of them snugly fit one flat.
I did have to buy two new heavy-duty reservoir trays, which at $10 a pop will have to last me many, many years. The ones from last year are so leaky. They were the flimsy plastic kind that comes with the plug sheets, and got banged around quite a bit, from rack to bench to hardening-off area to garden, and back. So I won’t be using them for bottom-watering my seedlings, only of holding the seedlings on the light rack. I was thinking of punching holes into the leakiest ones and planting large batches of lettuce in them.
I installed the heat mat plus thermostat on the bottom shelf (the heat will rise and warm up the rest of the rack), but I won’t be using it yet: all the seedlings so far like my basement’s temperature (a constant 56F).
Here’s a wishlist for my potting area:
And what went in?
If my last frost date is 3 May (according to NOAA, there’s 50% chance of a later date at 32F; you can find this info here), then I’m sowing 13 weeks (oops) 12 weeks before the last frost date (BLFD). A bit early, I know, but I’ve got season extenders. I’m growing in raised beds (always a bit warmer, earlier), and I’ll be warming the soil in those beds with black plastic, and they’ll be covered with a hoop house and/or cold frames and/or extra row cover.
The first seven batches (those in italics) are so hardy, they will already have moved out by the time most seedlings need starting (6-8 weeks BLFD). Some of them are actually so fast-growing, they might even be ready to eat by then!
Spinach, in 4 weeks? Dare I dream it?
I’m ready to start sowing in my basement light setup. I checked it and everything still works. I just received the first batch of seeds from Fedco. We also found a great deal for a 4-flat heat mat with thermostat, so jumped on it – and that has arrived as well. I bought my seedling starter (I splurged on a huge bag of Country Cottage Seed Starter). So here’s the plan for this weekend:
INDOORS: start seedlings in basement
I also need to figure out how to make seedling flats. I don’t feel like using those plastic plugs anymore (except for those seedlings that really enjoy their own space). I’ve saved up a lot of plastic containers, but I am thinking I might build some flats out of scrap wood, maybe making them so I can easily remove the sides when it’s transplanting time…
OUTDOORS: prepare Spring Garden
The weather is cold (28F max) and gray, but there’s no snow or rain. I’m wrapping up to do some outdoor work as well. Here’s a map (made with Plangarden) of the early spring garden (click on it for a slightly larger image):
I also want to walk the property and take some serious measurements so I can start placing the pond, the channel that will take the rainwater runoff from our roof there, the chicken coop, the studio, the beehive, and take some decisions about potentially getting some more trees removed.
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In the image, hardy crops that will be ready for harvesting when most Summer crops go in are in in bright blue (after last year’s bolting incident, I’m planning on freezing a lot of spinach this time!). Crops in darker blue are already in there (mostly overwintered in the hoop house). Crops in light green go in early as well (favas, peas and carrots), but they will stay in throughout the summer. Crops in pink are also longer term (brassicas) or succession crops (more lettuce, etc.), but their beds aren’t ready yet.
I have two of these maps: one for Early Spring, one for Late Spring/Summer, each with most of the crops I want to grow fitted in. I’d love to show them, but I need to find a better platform to show them along with my spreadsheet.
