7 Things, Plus One Box of Possibilities

A while back, Carol from May Dreams Gardens tagged me for a meme. I know that I've done this "Seven Things About Me" meme before, and frankly I'm not a very exciting (drama-finding, larger-than-life) person, so coming up with seven interesting things is going to be a struggle.  But I like Carol, and I really don't feel like doing anything productive right now, so I'm giving it a try. Here goes:

1.  I play a lot of volleyball.

I started playing volleyball in adult leagues a few years after I got married, and have kept playing through the years. In the summertime I play 4's, 6's and even a lower-level (upper intermediate/BB, as opposed to open/A/competitive) women's 2's league. My favorite team is my Thursday indoor competitive 6's team, though.  We have a good team (including my boyfriend Steve) and great chemistry, and I can't wait until we start playing together again next week. 

Speaking of Steve...

2.  Here's something scandalous, after all:  I'm dating a younger man. 

Okay, it's not really that scandalous.  I'm not dating Steve because he's younger... in fact, all of the guys I've dated previously have been my age or within a year older than me.  I'm dating Steve because... well, because he's Steve.  :-)  And outside of a few amusing comments from various friends, and a few cultural references from our childhoods that we have to explain to each other, I never really remember on a day-to-day basis that he's 26 and I'm 33.

 (But I have to point out--just in case Steve is reading this--that I may be older, but he has WAY more gray hairs than I do already! ;-) 

3. Speaking of gray hair, I am NOT going to be one of those women who constantly colors and touches up her hair when it turns gray.  

I hope it turns the pretty, silvery-white color that my Mom's is... but if it isn't, then I will probably just cut it short and choppy and punky, so it has some attitude.

 

4.  I have a deep love of architecture.

I seriously considered going to school for architecture, or at least art... and still wonder whether I shouldn't have done so.  Regardless, I definitely appreciate both.  And part of what I love about Cleveland is that many of its beautiful buildings were created during the Art Deco period, which is one of my favorites because it's a mashup of contrasts (like opulence and modern efficiency.)

5. I hope that I never, ever, EVER have to eat meatloaf again.

I know, this is a silly one. But once when I was a kid my Mom made me sit at the table until I ate every last bite of my meatloaf. (This, by the way, is the worst thing I can say about her... she is an amazing mother, and I consider myself extremely lucky!)  I didn't like meatloaf all that well prior to this particular evening... and after choking down numerous bites of cold, icky meatloaf amid tears, I downright hated it.  Ugh!

Luckily...

 

6.  I love cooking.

So I don't ever have to worry about having to make meatloaf for lack of recipes and ideas. My friend Jessica and I like to trade recipes, and when we get together we are known to indulge in making ridiculously gourmet epicurean feasts. During my visit to Cincinnati chronicled in the photo above, she introduced me to Jungle Jim's (heaven!) and I showed her that roasting a whole chicken is so easy that someone who makes her own delicious ice cream doesn't need to be intimidated by it at all.

Almost done with this meme!  So I'll end with one more confession:

7.  I have a secret admiration/envy of Martha Stewart.

Okay, it's probably not such a big secret given how much I read her magazines.  And people who know me and have seen my messy, eclectic house are probably laughing right now.  But I aspire to cook as well as, decorate as interestingly as, garden as efficiently as, and generally housekeep as amazingly as Ms. Martha.  Maybe some day.

And that brings us to the end of this meme... so it's time to show you the "Plus One Box of Possibilities" from the title of this post:

Apples! Steve's grandfather has a huge old apple tree in his backyard, and we stopped by there for a quick visit and some apple-picking today. I filled up the big, old (trashpicked) antique trug shown above, plus another bag... and could probably go back for the same amount again, there were so many fruits weighing down the boughs.

It's a great old tree, missing some limbs but perfect for a little climbing nonetheless. And these apples are heavenly--firm and crisp, with a really good balance of tart and sweet in the flavor. Could they be Gala? Macintosh?  Nobody has any idea: According to Steve's uncle Mike, his parents had actually purchased a crabapple tree for planting, and were surprised when it started bearing regular, full-sized apples in subsequent years.

It doesn't matter what kind they are, really... they're going to be an apple pie with walnut streusel, an apple crisp, and probably some apple-clove butter, too, by the time I get done with them. Anyone have any other all-time-favorite recipes that they would like to share? I certainly seem to have enough apples to give them all a try!

5 Random (But Garden-Related) Things

In the past few weeks I've been tagged more than once to do a Five/Six/Seven Random Things About Me meme. (I've also been given two Thinking Blogger Awards, one by meresy_g at edge effect and one by Colleen at In the Garden Online, but I'm still a bit astounded by both to do them justice in a post just yet.) One twist I've seen on these memes is that each gardener has to relate every random fact about themselves to gardening. I enjoy thinking about things like this, and so I'm playing along. Each random fact below is followed by the gardening tie in:

1. You wouldn't know this to look in my closet, but I do know an awful lot about what's going on in the fashion world. (Learn how to tie a babushka for this winter!) In fact, my friend Jess and I have a standing agreement to buy each other something from a high-end fashion house if either of us should ever happen to win the lottery. (She will probably pick out something Missoni, and I will likely choose a sexy dress from Alberta Ferretti.)

I read avidly about garden "fashion," too.... new and (sometimes) improved plant cultivars! This season I've managed to resist a lot of "hot" plants but have picked up a "designer" portulaca called 'Yubi Red,' fell hard for the orange-y leaf heuchera trend, snagged two 'Midnight Reiter' geraniums on clearance, and used a 'Red Sensation' cordyline as my (container) accesory of the year.

2. Although my hair has darkened and turned me into a brunette, I was a tanned towhead of a kid and worked the blonde/blue eyed California Girl look all through high school. Yes, I even went tanning before my junior prom... and I shudder every time I think about it.

Older and wiser, I now wear a floppy straw hat and long pants/sleeves while gardening. I also religiously slather on my favorite sunscreen: Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry Touch. It comes in SPF 55 and SPF 70! As my slightly acerbic--and wholly amusing--friend Alli says doubtfully, with a resigned shake of the head, "Well, you look like a ghost now but I suppose you'll have fabulous skin when you're 60!"

3. I have a special affinity for the water. I spent countless hours during my childhood summers swimming in my grandparents' pool and waterskiing at my family's cottage at the river. When I found out that my maternal grandfather's family came from a Welsh seaport, that felt incredibly appropriate to me. I have had multiple dreams where I have died by drowning, and yet they have never been sad or scary--they felt more like "going home." I have been skinny dipping several times (always in a natural kind of setting, never really in an overtly sexual one.) And I love nothing more than to body surf in the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

My affinity for water is one reason why I enjoy incorporating so many water-related and seaside garden plants in my dryland garden. I've posted pictures of my sea kale, crambe maritima, many times. Most recently, I added some catchfly, silene maritima, as a groundcover.

4. I used to paint and draw, and wanted to go to art school until my senior year of high school. Why I stopped producing my own pieces and destroyed most of my old work is a sordid tale of teen angst and young love (translation: it makes me look like an imbecile so I'm not telling it!) but I still have a deep love of art and devour books, museum exhibitions, art shows, and the like.

I have a sneaking suspicion that even if you deliberately abandon the regular tools of the artistic trades, art does not take its leave of you so easily. I sometimes wonder if my garden has become my canvas... but then I also wonder if I have delusions of (artistic) grandeur.

5. At one time, maybe 7 years ago, I weighed almost 80 pounds more than I do right now. I still cringe when I hear people make judgemental comments about obese people such as, "How could that person let himself get like that?" Getting "like that" certainly wasn't a conscious decision for me. I had always been athletic and mostly fit, so discovering I was overweight really surprised me. People are generally disappointed when I tell them how I lost the weight--no magic pill, liquid formula, or denying myself a taste of cheesecake if I was jonesing for it. The weight came off over the course of a year in which I concentrated on walking every day and made fruits, vegetables and whole grain foods a priority.

This is when I actually started to garden. I couldn't believe the price of "fresh" herbs in the grocery store--or how wilted they looked--and I knew how much better tomatoes tasted sun-warm and right off of the vine. In the beginning, there was "just" a veggie garden, but then an ornamental bed was created to add some color to the shady front bed of my north-facing house. At some point, I had an epiphany. Maybe mixing the edibles and the ornamentals would give me the best of both worlds: A beautiful garden that nourished both my senses and my stomach.

And thus the golden variegated lemon thyme came to live under the Japanese cutleaf maple and spills over a short retaining wall into the Japanese bloodgrass... and now the eggplants are sited where their leaves will add some chunky texture into a bed, contrast with the tall zebra grass, and compliment the purple tones in some self-sown amaranth... and so the fun (at least for me) continues...

5 Crazy Things (A Gardening Meme)

The County Clerk tagged me for a meme earlier in the week and I am just now getting around to responding. I am to list 5 Crazy Things--things so crazy, that only a gardening addict would admit to them.

I might be overly tolerant, I might just be that comfortable in my own insanity, or I might be well over the line into delusional... but I really don't think that any of my gardening behavior is all that unreasonable.

Because of this, I had to ask my boyfriend for a little help making this list. (I'm not too sure that it's a good thing that he could come up with so many contributions, but since he hasn't run out the door yet I suppose he's not completely horrified.) Here, then, is the list:

1. Gardening at Night. This is not a new idea--in fact, REM wrote a song about it in 1982--but it still gets me strange looks from the neighbors. Sometimes I do it because I'm still playing in the yard long past sundown, sometimes I do it to enjoy the garden in relative peace and quiet, and sometimes I do it to escape the heat of the day. I admit that it's much easier to do in my new house, because there's more light pollution in the city and thus less chance that I will accidentally weed out a self-seeder that I would have rather kept.

2. Keeping "all kinds of plant detrius" on the kitchen counter. It does eventually make its way to the compost bins outside, but maybe not that same day it is created. (Note to self: I really need to get one of those compost crocks to better hide said plant detrius.)

3. Trashpicking odd things for garden use. An elderly gentleman once asked me, "What in the world are you going to do with those, young lady?" as I lugged two 12in square chimney tiles to the backseat of my car. They are now snuggled into various parts of my garden, and last year sported a couple of different kinds of mint. This year, I think I'm going to put 'Matrona' sedums or 'Little Spire' perovskia there instead. (I would love to use agaves, but even the cold-hardy ones are marginal here--I can't see them surviving in that kind of exposure.)

4. Planning vacations around gardening season. Spring and fall trips, frankly, are out of the question. All I want to do is spend hours upon hours outside during those times of the year, rain or shine. When the garden is on autopilot during the heat of July? Sure, we can take a weekend away then!

5. Garden Voyeurism. I really fail to see the problem with arranging your morning and evening dog-walks around trash pickup schedules (see #3) or according to which houses/gardens you haven't checked out lately. How else are you going to know if the greyish blue house with the yellow climbing rose decided to set out huge clumps of late-flowering yellow tulips to play off of the first rose blooms again this year?

I also fail to see how asking someone to turn around and drive back down the block slowly-- so you can determine just what that gorgeous silvery plant under someone's weeping cherry tree might be--could possibly be a pain. And, frankly, I would be amused if someone pointed out to me just how nicely someone managed to fit three pennisetum setaceum 'Rubrum' into their fall landscape, set off by the acid yellow of narrow-leaf blue star (amsonia hubrichtii), as we drove by...

So there you have it. I might have a few quirks when it comes to gardening, but I'm definitely not crazy!

Seed Buying: Method and Madness

Carol over at May Dreams Gardens posed a lot of interesting questions in her recent post, titled: "Seed Buying: Method or Madness?" There were too many questions for me to answer in a mere comment--after all, I can't even keep my regular posts under two screeens--so I figured they would be best addressed here.

- Do you carefully read all of the seed catalogs sent to you and then browse the Internet to compare and contrast all the options, then decide which seeds to buy?
- Do you order seeds from more than one seed company to save on shipping or buy from whoever has the seeds you want, even if it means paying nearly the same for shipping as you do for the actual seeds?
- Do you buy seeds from ‘bricks and mortar’ stores and get whatever appeals to you as you are browsing?
- Do you buy vegetable seeds in bulk where they scoop them out of seed bins, weigh them and put them in hand-marked envelopes?

My answers to the above are: Yes, both, yes and... I wish! When I buy seeds from catalogs and Internet sites, I tend to be very careful and methodical. My credit card might eventually come out to finish off the sale, but it usually takes weeks if not months to get to that point.

I make lists, research what I might want to buy and who offers the varieties I want at the best prices (shipping included) and then whittle the lists accordingly. If there is a plant I really want to grow and I know I can't find its seed locally, I will pay up as long as its total cost is still cheaper than buying the number of those kinds of plants that I want in the spring.

In bricks and mortar garden centers, on the other hand, I can get into real trouble. The pretty pictures, the choices... really, who can resist a whole half rack of different varieties of nasturtiums? Especially when you planted only red and dark orange varieties last year, and didn't realize how charming the buttery yellow ones were until you saw their pictures on the fronts of those packets?

- Do you buy seeds for just vegetables, or just annual flowers? Do you buy seeds for perennial flowers?
- Do you only buy seeds to direct sow into the garden or do you end up with flats of seedlings in any window of the house with decent light?

In terms of buying, I buy seeds for everything--veggies, herbs, annual flowers and perennials. I haven't sown indoors or direct sown in the garden since I discovered winter sowing. I can winter sow a lot more seeds than I have room to start indoors, and I have more control over what goes where in the garden with winter sowing than I would with direct sowing.

This winter, I am winter sowing crocosmia, echinops bannaticus, 'Apricot Sprite' and 'Apache Sunset' agastaches, winter hardy sempervivum, 'Wizard Velvet Red' coleus, stipa tenuissima and nicotiana sylvestris in addition to the usual suspects for the veggie garden. I would definitely not have the money to buy all of the plants of the above that I would like to grow--another benefit of winter sowing.

- Do you list all your seeds on a spreadsheet, so you can sort the list by when you should sow them so you have a master seed plan of sorts?
- Do you determine germination percentage for old seed?

I wish that I had the discipline and organization to keep a spreadsheet, but I tend to rely more on intercranial information filing--which I admit isn't always the most reliable method. Maybe if I set up a spreadsheet this winter, however, I can do better at record-keeping this spring.

I probably will not do much in the way of determining germination percentage for old seed, though, unless you count chitting and then planting the sprouts. I never seem to have enough of old seed to just test a sample, and I would feel badly about wasting sprouted seed.

- Do you save your own seeds from year to year and exchange them with other seed savers?
- Do you buy more seeds than you could ever sow in one season?
- Do you keep all the old seeds and seed packets from year to year, scattered about in various drawers, boxes, and baskets?

I saved seeds this year for the first time, from 'Pride of Gibralter' cerinthe, digitalis parviflora, and cimicifuga/actaea. I would like to save more this year, particularly if I find some good-tasting plum tomatoes.

As far as buying more seeds than I could ever sow in one season and saving packets from year to year... yeah, guilty as charged. Check out what a wreck my seedbox is, and it was just cleaned up this fall! I donated a bunch of extras to fellow gardeners and a couple of gardening newbies. I also talked myself into throwing out seeds older than 2002--more because I figured that after 4 years it was safe to assume I would not bother planting them than because of any concerns about viability.

- Do you know what stratification and scarification are? Have you done either or both with seeds?
- Do you have a fear of seeds? Some gardeners don’t try seeds, why not?
- Do you understand seeds? I once bought seeds at a Walmart in January (Burpee Seeds) and the cashier asked me, “Do these really work? Yes, they do. “Isn’t it too cold to plant them now?” Well, yes, if you are planning to plant them outside. I don’t think this cashier grew up around anyone who gardened.

I can define the processes of stratification and scarification, and have done both. I have no fear of seeds--but then I have no fear of any aspect of life, including death.

I guess that you could say that yes, I understand seeds... but I do have to admit that I don't want them to lose all of their mystery and magic, either. I love knowing the science behind them, but would like to always appreciate the small miracle that every seed contains as well.