Update

Not a lot happening this week. I've been having migraine clusters this week -- one that lasted over 36 hours, followed by a day off, followed by another one that struck last night and has lingered through part of today. Bleah. So I'm not getting a lot of anything done other than just managing to keep up with Sofie and do some minimal house upkeep.

Migraines are an odd thing. I get the full aura kind, where you have big huge visual disturbances preceding the actual headache -- either bright flickering rings, blind spots, or (a new one for me this week) double vision. Yay. The visual distortions last twenty minutes and then the headache kicks in. And if you catch it early enough in the visual stage and take your prescription, you just MIGHT lessen the headache.

So it's always a race. Like last night, when I was two blocks away from home letting Sofie "take a walk" (a veeeeeery slow affair) when the blind spot hit. I actually had to pick her up, tuck her under an arm and sprint home to try to get a pill in time. I try to keep one with me but I don't always succeed. Now I'm stocking up again -- all my bags, coat pockets, etc. Because my brain is probably going to ambush me again any second.

Makes me feel like my brain isn't working right. Which, technically, it isn't. But it's a disturbing idea, that.

On other fronts, here's a little bit of quilting news. Two things in progress right now, although neither is progressing very fast. First, here's an update on the log cabin quilt -- I showed a bit of this a week or so ago, but have since finished the top. It's on the pile of stuff that needs to be quilted:



I haven't measured this but it's something like 3 x 4 feet. I'm not sure if I like what I did with the borders, echoing the log cabin design like that. But it's a finished top and it's pretty and it'll be easy to quilt.

I'm also working on getting borders on the little quilt below and finishing it up -- this is the first thing on the work pile right now. It's for MiniatureQuilter, my Internet quilting friend who sent me the beautiful pineapple quilt earlier this spring in exchange for a piece of applique from me:



So far today I put two borders on it, decided they were horrible, took them off stitch by stitch, and put on a new inner border, then decided I better take some tylenol and leave well enough alone.

It continues to be unseasonably cold here -- mid May and it's 44 degrees every morning. I've got a tray-ful of sprouted seed potatoes sitting on my dining room table waiting to be planted, not to mention a second set of tomatoes waiting to go in the ground. The tomatoes can survive, but I'm not sure about the potatoes -- the instructions say DO NOT PLANT UNTIL THE GROUND IS OVER 45 DEGREES. Which I'm sure it isn't. But they've grown nice little eyes and the eyes are turning into sprouts and they've just GOT to go in. So I guess I better get around to it by this weekend, warm enough or not.

The lilacs are blooming, finally, and all the planted tomatoes are doing fine. Both apple trees are blooming, including the one I thought I killed last year, and the herb border in the garden is doing great. The tarragon, especially, is almost knee high and just so beautiful. I'll have to make tarragon chicken soon. I planted extra chives and sage this year, and now I've got almost everything I like to cook with (rosemary, italian parsley, sage, chives, oregano, tarragon, fennel, etc) on hand in the garden. Yum.

Sorry for this sort of flat-toned entry. I still have a headache and it's the best I can do. Signing off for today...

Fun with babies -- dog groups on Flickr

Among the many things I didn't anticipate about having a kid is how much she would like Flickr. Specifically, looking at dog pictures on it. Nearly every day we spend a few minutes pulling up dog after dog from a group like Dogs! Dogs! Dogs! and laughing at their silly expressions. I can never quite predict which pictures are going to tickle her the most. Today, she thought this one was a riot -- must be the way perspective makes his nose look sooooo big.

Seattle is having it's customary February warm snap right now, with beautiful sunny days and temperatures in the 50s. Sofie and I went out this morning with her little plastic car and careened up and down the sidewalk for a while. She had a fantastic time, pushing herself along Flintstone-style with her little feet, stopping to feed handfuls of dirt and leaves to the concrete lion in front of one of our neighbors house, then hopping back on her teeny car to zoom a little further down the road. Phoenix accompanied us for the whole adventure, keeping an eye on us from various front yards. He likes to know what the kid is doing.

After she went to bed for her nap I got outside to do some much needed yard cleanup. Somehow I never really get around to that in the fall. I was surprised to find how workable the dirt is already, not all hard and wintry like I expected. Crocuses are almost up, daffodils are budding, primroses are blooming here and there, and I was excited to find about a thousand foxgloves that are on their second year cycle (meaning they'll be blooming this spring!) in the rose bed.

It's almost gardening season! The pot that had my peas in it last year has four or five little pea plants coming up, reseeded from last year's crop I guess. Later today we're going to Swansons to get some more pea seeds, the big vining kind this time rather than the small grow-them-in-a-pot ones. It's time to plant them, believe it or not, and to set up your teepee in anticipation of their little tendrils.

Sofie's loving digging in the dirt, and I have to admit I ran out on a whim the other day and got her this little set of kids' gardening tools so she can join me outside in the spring. I can just see us out there digging holes together. Or rather, me planting things and her digging them up. Whatever. As long as she learns to love the process.

End of tomato season and a recipe

Tomato season is pretty much over here in Seattle, in what seems a few weeks earlier than last year. There hasn't been a frost yet, but daytime temperatures have dipped down to the low sixties at most, often high fifties, and although we're having some gorgeous fall weather, it just isn't hot enough now for much more to ripen.

I'm okay with it. Tomato season is an intense, nearly religious experience for us here, and by the end of it, having stuffed myself on tomatoes every single day of the whole, entire summer and devoted unbelievable amounts of time and energy to buying, planting, staking, roping up, pruning, picking suckers off of, spraying, harvesting, and eating tomatoes, I'm ready for the change of seasons. The ol' circle of life. Time to buy squash and make soup out of root vegetables. I'm down with it.

I've taken the radical (for me) step of taking some of the plants down early, which I don't usually do - but most of them are done producing or nearly so, and tomato plants make up for their early season gorgeousness by becoming blighted, rotted, gnarly eyesores in the early fall. And when you have fifteen blighted, rotted, gnarly, eyesores on your front porch, it makes a statement. That statement is, "Hey, someone call the health department!" or maybe "Don't let your kids trick-or-treat at that house."

Gone are both of the Sungolds, the Taxi and Glacier, the Grushovka, and the Silvery Fir. Severely pruned back to just a few remaining branches with ripening fruit are the Dona, Black Prince, Green Zebra, and Stripey. The ones in the ground are faring better, not rotting and dying like their potted counterparts, so I've left those for now - Isis, Jaune Flamme, and Brandywine. But I don't expect much more.

I'll post tasting notes later about which ones are coming back next year and which ones aren't.

Last weekend I picked about sixty tomatoes - mostly small ones, but they filled an entire collander - and made a huge pot of one of the best pasta sauces I've ever had. So, so good. I like my pasta sauce simple - nothing fancy, not a lot of spices. We froze a couple portions to bring some joy to a cold, rainy winters day a few months hence.

Here's the simple recipe I use:

Basic Pasta Sauce

1. Seed a bunch of tomatoes by cutting them in half horizontally and swiping them out with your fingers. (Doesn't have to be perfect but the more the better - the seeds make the sauce slightly bitter.) Chop the up roughly.
   
2. Heat up a couple tablespoons (I never measure it) olive oil in a big saute pan on medium.
   
3. Slice up 2-3 onions in a rough chop and saute medium-low for a really long time, stirring occasionally - let them turn all brown and caramely over at least 45 minutes. Sprinkle with a little salt to help them break down. Patience here is the most important step.
   
4. If you want garlic, add it for the last few minutes before you put the tomatoes in and saute briefly. I use 3-4 cloves chopped up.
   
5. Add a hunk of butter (2 tb or so), melt it down into the onions, then add the tomatoes. Stir and raise the heat a little to get them started with breaking down. I often take a potato masher and smoosh them up a bit at this point, just to help make it more saucelike and less like whole pieces of tomatoes.
   
6. Add seasonings if you want them - I often use just a big hunk of dried or fresh basil and nothing else, but oregano is good and you could go nuts and add all kinds of other things -- and simmer on med-low for 45 minutes or so.
   

It'll get really soupy from all the liquid in the tomatoes, so don't feel like you need to add any broth or water. I always feel like I should at first and then am glad I didn't. You can also cook it down for longer if you want it to dry up a bit. Other recipes often add sugar, too, but with really fresh homegrown tomatoes this is really delicious.

Garden notes

Just a quick post to note how much I'm loving my little Fairytale Eggplant that's planted out front. I've always avoided trying to grow eggplants because I mentally classified them as things that can't really be grown in Seattle's semi-cool summer season. But this plant, with its short maturity date of 50 days, has done just great. I've now picked and enjoyed about nine eggplants off it and there are at least that many left to come.

Next year, I'm going to put in several of them.

I don't think I've ever had a fresh-picked eggplant before this -- and wow, what a revelation that is. They're so SWEET! So unbitter. So tender. I'm in love.

I've been bemoaning the tomato season lately -- as I mentioned yesterday, it's been chilly and un-Augusty here lately, and it's hurting the tomatoes, I'm sure of it. This is August, a time when Seattle usually goes into its desert phase of 90- to 100-degree days and no rain or clouds for the next three months. Instead, it's about 62 most of the time at the peak of the afternoon, and in the fifties at night. That's pleasant enough for people like me who hate it hot, but the tomatoes, they like it warmer than this. They're supposed to be baking in the sun right now, growing plump and fat and warm and red. And that isn't happening.

The same varieties that last year grew to eight feet tall have maxed out this year at around five feet. In my yard, anyhow. My friend Erica has giants of the same varieties, bought the same day in the same place -- so who knows. She used more fertilizer than me, and I used a weird soil mix that might have been a mistake. Next year, I'm not using the soilbuilder.

All that said, though, I'm getting lots of tomatoes, so I guess I shouldn't complain. I went out tonight to pick some sungolds and found that just about all of the other plants also had ripe tomatoes. There were literally more to pick than we could have eaten tonight, so I left about half for the next day or two. We've now had at least a few fruits from everything except the Brandywine (should be a couple more weeks), the Taxi (and it's close! just days away) and the Principe Borghese.

Today we had the very first of the Jaune Flamme, the Isis Candy, the Green Zebra, and the Black Prince. All were lovely. The only disappointment so far in the taste department are the Grushovka -- it's mushy and mealy -- and the Silvery Fir, a favorite of years' past that's just doing nothing for me this year except excelling in the mushy/mealy department too.

I hate poppies

We came home to a profusion of flowers and vegetation in the yard. In the five days we were gone, temperatures topped 80 every afternoon, and the tomatoes shot up by as much as a foot in some cases, all the roses burst into enthusiastic spills of bloom, the eggplant sent out two shy little blossoms that will someday become enchanting little violet-colored eggplants, the earliest of the early tomatoes sprouted little tiny fruit, and the big huge oriental poppies that I have such a love-hate relationship with finished the five minutes of the year in which they actually look good and started dropping their petals and flopping over with despair.


My yard is plagued with the big bright orange poppies, two feet tall and profligate as sin. Each year I pull them out by the truckload, not necessarily trying to eradicate them completely but more like just trying to keep them to a few simple clumps here and there. But the poppies outwit me every year, sending out ten, twenty, thirty new plants in all directions.


Why do I hate them so? For one, I don't like the color orange much in my garden. Does everyone have a color they just dislike in plantings? And second, they're so messy. As I said before, they look nice for a few weeks of the year, and thereafter they look like hell. About ten seconds after they bloom they turn brown. And then they just seem to rot in place. So you're left with either ugly foliage for the rest of the season or big holes when you pull them out. Ugh.


This year I ordered a few of the dark red kind, hoping to maybe displace the bright orange variety with these whose looks I prefer. All spring I've been watching them grow with anticipation, hoping they'd be beautiful and spread their little seeds with abandon. And sure enough, they bloomed while I was gone -- and you know what? They were ORANGE. Red, my foot. So off to the compost heap those little suckers are going soon.

Hot hot hot

It's 83 degrees in Seattle today. Which just makes me believe in this global warming thing even more. When I moved here ten years ago, May was pretty much a long, slow rainstorm. I wore long sleeved shirts until mid-June those first couple years. And now we're having a warm-to-hot, semi-arid spring.

I'm certain it's not raining as much this year as in years past. I have some proof of this as I keep a gardening notebook every year where I note when things first bloom, what the weather was like at the start of the season, what I planted and what of those things worked out well, etc. Mays past were filled with comments about rain and how the roses were molding and turning spotty from it.

All the little girls at Sofie's play class today were wearing cute little sundresses and big floppy hats, with their legs bare. I've seen lots of ice cream cones being consumed. When I drove home, various kids from my block were riding down a small slide into a plastic wading pool. Summer's here.

Will we like living in tropical Seattle, a decade hence? I hope so.

This year's tomatoes

So this year I got lucky -- I just happened to be at Swanson's in mid-April on the very day that they put their tomatoes out. This was about two weeks earlier than I realized they got their starts in, which might explain why I've had such trouble getting the varieties I wanted in previous years. This year, I got everything I wanted, because I was literally dogging the employee's footsteps as she was putting them out for display.

Yes, I am that person.

Several people, including my friend Kate, have been asking me what tomatoes are good to grow in Seattle. Here's what's on the plate for this season at Zalkan's Haven for Wayward Tomatoes -- and yes, there are fourteen varieties on this list.

I did, in fact, swear last year after reaching an all time high of eleven tomato plants that enough was enough and there was no way I was buying that many again. And then this year happened, and they were just so beautiful, and they smell so good (nothing smells as good as tomato leaves), and they all sounded so tasty and wonderful that I just couldn't help myself.

My justification? Having ripped an eight foot around New Zealand Flax out of my front planting bed, along with a half dead boxwood border, I now have room to put some of these in the ground, so I don't actually need fourteen pots on my front walk. I need eleven pots. Same as last year. So there.

Ok - this year's varieties, with notes:

Cherry tomatoes:

• Sungold, two plants - a repeat guest from seasons past. These are my absolute favorite cherries, and I've finally done good on my vow to buy multiple plants. Maybe this year some of them will actually make it all the way to the kitchen instead of just getting eaten right off the plant like candy. Small orange cherry tomatoes that taste like sugar, huge sprawling plants that produce like crazy - can't go wrong. Indeterminate, huge and must be staked well, 57 days. (Early! Yay! And they fruit right up until the end of the season too.)
  
  
• Isis Candy - a newcomer. Indeterminate, 67 days. You can see a picture here. I probably bought them because of the word candy in the title.
  
  
• Principe Borghese - a newcomer. One of the classic plum-shaped, sauce-makin' tomatoes. Determinate, 75 days. I have high hopes for this one - it's been on the "wanted but couldn't find" list in years past.
  

Full size:

• Silvery Fir - a repeat for several years now. I bought two but broke one in the planting process, so I'm down to one. I love these because they can be grown in a very small pot - the plant only gets about a foot high but they grow huge, baseball-sized red tomatoes that taste great. I'll probably replace the broken one in a few days and get back up to two. Determinate, 52 days.
  
  
• Dona - a repeat from two years back, but one that I've never grown out in the front yard where it's sunniest. It did ok in 2005 but I'm hoping it does lots better this year with southern exposure. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
• Taxi - this is a new one for me; bright yellow baseball-sized fruit. Determinate, 65 days.
  
  
• Brandywine - I grew this in 2004 but overwatered it and had a lot of cracking. The few fruits I got, though, were wonderful and I've always wanted to try it again. It seems to show up on everyone's list of favorite tomatoes every year. This year it's one of the brave few going in the ground. I hope the slugs don't eat it. Indeterminate, 90 days.
  
  
• Jaune Flammee - newcomer. Orange. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
• Green Zebra - repeat from last year, one of our favorites. These are sooooo beautiful - see last year's photo of these in my garden. Last year its pot was too small but it still produced gainfully. This year, it gets a barrel all to itself. Go, Zebra, go. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
• Black Prince - I've grown this before but I'm not sure which season. I always put in one of the dark, chocolate-y looking varieties. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
  Anyone still reading? If you're not a tomato nut like me I realize this is probably not so interesting.
  
  
• Grushovka - another new one for me. Just sounded cool - pink, egg-shaped fruit. Smallish plant, supposedly. Indeterminate, 75 days.
  
  
• Mr. Stripey - yay! I've been trying to get this, aka Tigerella, for years but it's always long gone before I get there. Oh man, I hope this plant does well. So pretty, so tasty. Mmmmmm. Indeterminate, 80 days.
  

What I didn't get was the Great White, last year's favorite and the most prolific producer of sauce-worthy tomatoes I've ever seen. Swanson's wasn't carrying it this year. But Seattle Tilth is, and their sale is this weekend. Can I attend another tomato sale and come home with only this one? I'm almost afraid to go.

And one final word of caution - only a few of these are repeats for me so I can't guarantee great performance in Seattle's weather. What I do know is that every year, I get somewhere around a dozen tomato plants, and five or six of them do fantastic. Those become repeats. This is my fifth tomato season, so I'm continuing the trial and error approach and discovering new varieties I can do well.

I will, of course, continue to report on how that's going. Meanwhile, my neighbors think I'm crazy as all the cages and pots go up in front of the house.

But it's worth it. Nothing like a good, home-grown tomato.

Why I love this time of year

Cherry petals covering the grass in the backyard:

Spring is here!

Happy Spring! The cherry tree out back is blooming again:



And for those of you wondering where I found the blue sky for this picture in this rainy, rainy month, I'll admit this is a picture from last year. But it looks JUST like this, I swear.

I'm looking forward to being able to keep up a little better with gardening and yardwork than I did last year - even with the baby, I think I'll be able to do more than I could when I was pregnant and unwieldy. I've been enjoying pruning the roses back (my favorite spring task) and putting in a few new plants, and thinking about what to do next.

I've also got another confession - I paid a gardening service to come in last month and do a thorough spring cleanup for me. Because I was otherwise occupied in September and October, I didn't get out and do all the "put the garden to bed" tasks I should have done in the fall, which led to an unbelievable mess out there this spring -- the wisteria in the back of the house was 20 feet high and winding all over the roof, out of reach of my highest ladder, and the bamboo grove was taking over the other corner. So I called someone, and in addition to doing those two jobs, they weeded all my beds, cleaned up my perennials, and trimmed the dogwood trees out front! So I'm starting the gardening season out without being massively behind.

No impressively huge plans for this season - I just want to take care of what's there, fix the watering issues in my rose bed, grow some tomatoes, and putter around here and there.

But it's spring! I'm so glad!

Tomatoes

I haven't posted my usual paean to tomatoes this year, aside from the post I made about planting them back in May. But I really should be bragging about them now, because my tomato crop is my only success this year; the entire rest of my yard has withered under a huge onslaught of lack of energy for watering. My strategy of putting all the tomatoes on the porch or on the front walk, though, paid off - I can't get out of the house without seeing them, and I've faithfully watered them each and every morning. And we've been eating fresh ripe tomatoes for almost a month now.

The silver first were first, as usual - I love these plants. Huge, heavy, blood red tomatoes on a tiny little plant about the size of a small boxwood. Very tasty, no end rot, and the first to ripen every year. This one is looking a little past its prime by now while the other varieties are still just ramping up:


A few shots of the others that are doing well...

Seattle's Best, which I've never grown before, is a gorgeous variety - big, perfectly round tomatoes, completely rot or blemish free, and just an easy, trouble-free plant. If they taste as good as they look, I'll be growing these every year from now on. We're a day or two away from tasting the first of these - meanwhile here's a lovely closeup of one of the fruits:


The green zebra has been great too, and we've eaten one of them. We'll be harvesting these in a few days' time - definitely on the repeater list for next year:


The great whites have been prolific but haven't really ripened yet:


And these are from the mystery variety, the one I lost the tags for. Definitely not purple calabash, as I'd suspected, since they're quite red when they ripen. Gorgeous plant, just covered in fruit, but so far every single ripened fruit has been covered in end rot. I've thrown away about nine. Hoping this knocks off soon so I can eat some of these. I'll probably never know what type it was.


Black krim - also a late ripener:


Aside from that, the Tiny Tims were a big disappointment - bad tasting and stricken by some kind of plague, the Sun Golds are lovely as always and providing tons of fruit, and the Stupice has been okay. It did produce, but it's been a scraggly plant with only a few fruits on it. I think I put it in too small of a pot, which didn't help. Super Fantastic is doing fine but won't have anything ripe for a few more weeks; it's also struggling a bit with end rot on the early fruit, which I hope clears up.

Now I just need to find someone to water them while we're at the hospital, because a lot of these will keep producing through early October.

Weed wars

One of the areas of the yard I've struggled with over the last four years is a tiny patch at the base of a rock wall across the street - it's about a foot deep and maybe 10 yards long, end to end. I put a few tulips in last year, but they came up scrawny and in so many clashing colors that it just looked terrible, and then eventually was eaten up by weeds.

This year, I was determined to plant so much stuff in there that nothing would have a chance to grow up around it. So I dug out all the old bulbs and planted about 350 new tulips. Color coordinated. And in between, I planted daylilies. The theory is that as the tulips fade, the daylilies should grow up bushy around them and cover their dying foliage, handily leaving no room for weeds in either case. And voila, I never have to weed that section again.

Too early to tell about the daylilies, but the tulips are looking phenomenal:




They were all supposed to be red and purple, actually - the second batch of the mix I bought apparently wasn't quite the same thing as the first, so I've ended up with hot pink on one side of the steps and bright red on the other. Still, though, I like it.

And a few closeups:

Purples

Took a few pictures today of happenings around the various yards:

Lavender, emerging:

Lupines, just about to bloom:

Tomato dreaming

Went out and bought this year's tomato crop yesterday - it feels a little early to put them in, but we're leaving town for two weeks and I knew that all the heirloom varieties I wanted would be long gone from the retail arena by the time I got back. This, it turns out, was true - I still missed a few I wanted, and had slim pickings on a couple others. You non-tomato growers have no idea what a ravenous crowd we are.

My gardening activities are supposed to be somewhat scaled-back this year, giving my impending motherhood. Even so, I just can't not grow tomatoes. I went to the garden center intending to just buy a few modest plants and somehow bought even more than last year. My nod to practicality, though, is that:

• I tried to buy mostly early varieties - maybe I'll get to eat a few before giving birth
• I bought several very small varieties that don't need huge cages and gigantic pots
• They all have to fit on my front porch.

That last part is the key. I'm not going to be able to handle watering things in the front and back of the house every day this summer. Plus the tomatoes on the porch (south-facing, and against a wall) did tons better than the tomatoes in the backyard last year, producing far more and more flavorful fruit.

I figure even in my eighth and ninth months I should be able to stagger out the front door and turn a hose on some pots. Right? Why do I hear the laughter of experienced mothers everywhere? Just because I'll give birth before half of them ripen? Because watering anything will be the last thing on my mind when it's hot out and I'm as big as a house?

Well you may be right. But whatever hobbies or parts of my life to date I'm willing to give up or try to do less of to have the kid, this is one annual ritual I'm hoping to hold on to.

Here's what we're growing this year:

(excuse the gigantic space here that I can find no reason for in the raw HTML and scroll down to the table below)

	Two Silvery Firs - the only one I got two of, because they're perfect for small pots. Somehow, this tiny little plant that only gets to be about a foot high grows a huge amount of full-size tomatoes, relatively early in the season. It was one of my best last year.
	Great White - How cool is this? I went back a second day to get one of these, after reading up on it a little bit. You can make white pasta sauce with these babies. You can bet I'll be doing that.
	One Stupice - a potato-leave variety I've been wanting to try for years, but which disappears with lightning speed at the tomato sales each year. This year, I was only able to get a somewhat sickly-looking speciman because again, rabid Seattle tomato-growers had cleaned them out. But I'm hoping it recovers.
	One Green Zebra - another I've been trying to buy for years and always finding empty flats of. Got one! Yay! Never tasted one, but they're supposed to be great.
	Sungold - my favorite cherry tomato. I should've gotten two but they're just such huge plants; I couldn't justify it now that I'm trying to do all my tomato gardening on the porch.
	Seattle's Best - also new for me, and one I've been trying to get for a few years. I figure with a name like that, I should give it a shot.
	Black Plum Roma - a newcomer. I'm a sucker for the "black" and "purple" varieties.
	Super Fantastic - a repeat from last year, one of the better performers. Should do even better now that it's been promoted to the porch.
	Purple Calabash - picked this up just on a whim; it's just cool. I love these lumpy, misshapen heirlooms.
	Tiny Tim - another cherry, in a very small (for tomatoes) pot. Most of my cherry tomatoes never make it into the house; I tend to eat them right off the bush.
?	Plus... one I lost the identifying tag on. I think it's a Purple Cherokee, but we'll see. It will probably be the best and best tasting, and I'll have no idea what it is. I'm sure it will haunt me for years.

Cherry tree

One last view of our now-departed cherry blossoms, from the back yard:

Garden news

Back to gardening for a moment.

First of all, we're about two seconds from having great big beautiful blooms on both our cherry and dogwood trees. Oddly enough, even though we're south-facing, most of the other trees around us have already bloomed. It's worth waiting for, though. The picture at left is the blooms on the fifty-year-old ornamental weeping cherry in our front yard.

Second, I've gotten a P-Patch! P-Patch is a local community garden program, with plots all over the city. My friend Jacki and I have been on the waiting list for two years now - there's that much demand! We're going to share a 10x10 plot in Ballard for this growing season.

Why, you may ask, do I need a P-Patch when I have two yards to play with? Well, both yards are the size of postage stamps and neither has a good place to put in a vegetable bed. I manage to eek out subsistence-level tomato growing in a few plots, but that's about all I can do here. Now I can grow all kinds of new things!

Finally, we got out today and dug out the troublesome climber rose at the old house (Kiss of Desire, photo of what it's supposed to look like here) and put in something a little more disease resistant. The KoD rose has been growing there for a few years, but (aside from reaching a nice size) has never done very well - it's been constantly plagued by one problem or another and has only produced four or five flowers a year. We dug it up and put in a Blaze, a much lower maintenance and more profusely blooming rose. It's nothing particularly unusual, more of an old standby, but I think it will do much better there.

Tip: when you plant roses, chop up two banana peels and put them at the bottom of a deep hole, then plant the rose on top. Provides all sorts of great nutrients that will help your new rose thrive. I also chop them up and dig them under existing roses every spring. Brett's fairly tolerant of the fact that spring in our house means a rotting bag of banana peels in the fridge for months at a time as I collect enough to augment twelve bushes.

This afternoon from 3-5 I go to my P-Patch orientation. I'll report back on that.

Feels like spring

We've somehow gone from almost 40 straight days of rain to an early but gorgeous spring. The last two weekends, I've been able to get out into the yard for the first time in months, to attend to all the tasks I'd been neglecting - cutting back the wisteria, pruning the roses, raking up the leftover leaves in the back, trimming back the ferns, etc.

The jonquils are in bloom:


...and the daffodils are almost a foot tall. Out front, the weeping cherry tree is filled with small pink buds.


A few weeks ago the primroses bloomed - we've only got a few:


Out back, the chives are up again -


And the hydrangeas are budding:


And one ambitious oxalis has thrown out a handful of pink flowers, just to test the weather:



And me, I'm plotting and scheming about the gardening I'm going to do this year, thumbing through the bazillion seed catalogs I've received, planning my efforts.

I love early Seattle spring.

Garden Show

Went to the Northwest Flower and Garden Show today for a few hours. Normally I take a day off and go during the week, but this year I've had a variety of things taking me away from work more than usual lately and couldn't really afford the extra vacation day, so I woke up early on a Saturday and braved the mobscene downtown. And actually it wasn't so bad - not a whole lot more crowded than the last time I went.

To be quite honest, this year I mostly went there to shop. If you love botanical-themed house goods and garden paraphernalia the way I do, the garden show is shopping heaven. I glanced at the demonstration gardens, but it was insanely crowded (as always) in there and hard to see much. Oddly enough, from what I could see every display used the same deep pink tulips - must be a trend this year! Last year's demonstration gardens seemed better to me, and there was nothing as good as last year's Tilth display - wow was that cool. So after a brief spin around there and a glance at the talk list for the day (nothing much I wanted to see), I just wandered the marketplaces, pacing myself and stopping for frequent snacks and rest breaks until I'd seen everything.

To give you a sense of scale, the garden show is so large that it took me almost five hours just to explore the markets, with snacks and lunch mixed in. Most enjoyable.

As always, the garden show just makes me feel so happy. The people there are kindred souls, most of them walking around with strange plants wrapped in newspaper and nestled in their purses or backpacks, and although it's busy and packed full, there's a nice relaxed vibe to such a gathering. It feels like nothing bad could ever happen to you there.

So, shopping results?

• Plantwise, all I bought was dahlia tubers, from the folks at Swan Island Dahlias - two beautiful dark purples for the front bed, and a few more reds and creams for the front porch. All in all, I think I got seven. They're now nestled in a cupboard in the dining room hutch, living out the next two months in a cool, dry place until it's time to plant.
  
  I'm most excited about the Thomas Edison purples - what a cool color! Also got the unfortunately named Desert Storm, a Honey Dew, a Matchmaker, a Neterbob, and one more Spartacus (which I already have growing).
  
• A fantastic metal wall hanging made from an old oil barrel - I bought one of these last year too, and went back this year hoping to find a larger one for over the fireplace. I'll post a picture soon.
  
• A few gardening books - one on pruning, one on ideas for windowboxes.
  
• A couple of basic tools - waterproof gloves and plant markers.
  
• Two gorgeous prints from Gianna Marino. You can see one of them here.

All in all, a good day. And being there inspired me to start thinking about what I'm going to grow this year, what we'll put in the front vs. the back of the house, etc. I think I'm going to transfer the tomatoes all to the front porch - they did so much better there than they did in the back of the house. It will look a little crazy, but I don't care. And the back will be so much less crowded.

Garden destruction

Seattle's gotten cold since we left - we left at the end of summer and came back to mid fall. It was 85 in Hawaii and has been a steady 51 degrees here since we returned, with all the rain we were foolishly expecting from Tropical Ennui Kenneth. My new job requires me to spend about half of my day in other buildings, which means that I'm getting rained on a lot, tromping back and forth. Bleah.

Aside from that, it's kind of nice, this chilly turn. I like how Seattle smells in the fall, and the leaves have turned nicely this year, and it's calming somehow, these seasons. I'm not sure how you get that restful fall feeling if you live somewhere like Hawaii year round where the days vary only between gorgeous and slightly-less-gorgeous. Wouldn't that get dull? Sun AGAIN?

The garden self-destructed while I was gone. A big wind storm knocked over one of my wisterias out front, a collossus that weighs about a ton and a half, killing at least one rose bush and damaging another. It was tied to a hook, but the rope holding it up must have snapped. I've got to find a better way to support it, or just take it out.

Two of the tomato pots blew over, too. They survived, but tomato season is definitely over. I'm going to take the plants out of their pots this weekend and recycle the dirt. And another tomato season comes to a close. I picked what was left - about 15 full size tomatoes. Definitely my best year ever for tomato plants. I'll post a roundup of the varieties that did especially well in the next week or two, for those of you gardening in this climate.

Now for a winter full of faux-matoes, those shapeless, hard as a rock, red balls you can buy at the store. I don't really object to their existence -- in their own way, they're kind of pleasing, if that's all you can get. All I ask is that we not CALL them tomatoes. Clearly, they bear no relation to the real thing.

I mean, c'mon.

THIS is why I do this

The snack I'm eating right now, fresh from the front and back yards:


Ah yes, THIS is why I've been obsessively planting, watering, and caring for tomatoes since May.

The cherry tomatoes have been ripening for a while. But in the past week, all the larger ones that hadn't shown any color yet have started to ripen too. We had the first Dona yesterday, a variety I've been coveting for years. It lived up to its reputation. The Husky Reds are wonderful. Silver Fir continues to churn out big huge, heavy, sweet tomatoes despite the plant itself being only about fourteen inches tall. There are a couple of Carmellos and Fantastics in the back that are just a shade shy of being completely ready yet. I can't wait to taste them.

We've also got copious amounts of basil this year - enough that Brett said last night he'd make pesto this weekend.

I love harvest time.

Rose junkies

Realized recently that I don't have any red roses - they're all pink, mostly, with a few yellows thrown in. So, knowing I must rectify this, I headed off to my favorite site and ordered:

Velvet Fragrance, red tea rose for across the street:
http://www.heirloomroses.com/cgi/browse.cgi?page=item&cat=24&item=339





Dublin Bay, red climber, to curl up the front corner of our house next year:
http://www.heirloomroses.com/cgi/browse.cgi?page=item&cat=13&item=311