OH MY GOSH!
I apparently succeeded in creating new lemon life! Two outta three ain’t bad!
(I had four blooms but for some reason one just dropped without blooming. The other three bloomed… and I did a little Meyer Lemon mojo bee dance with them and a little paintbrush and well, 2 outta 3 succeeded in welcoming my meddling with Mother Nature!
I’m so excited! I’m gonna be a plant grandma!
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I had a little time on Saturday before we went out playing bluegrass up in Michigan, so I spent the time going through my seed stash! Oh, I’m getting so ready to plant but it’s still a good while till then. So I thought, why not go through my stash and render down some of the seed pods and such I gathered from the dried flowers in fall.
I saved some pods from this one Siberian Iris I really love… and some flowers called Goat’s Beard that I think are pretty cool. And some purple coneflower and a BUNCH of zinnias! I carefully separated them out, and then eased them out of their flower pods and heads. It was kind of slow and laborious, but yet it was like working in some sort of laboratory or maybe at some Shaker community… I remember reading that many of the Shaker communities of the northeast were some of the first major seed sellers in the US. It felt kind of neat to just carefully sort out the little seeds and find packs of them gathering in some little glassine envelopes I got last year just for this purpose.
Of the veggie crop, I saved a couple small packs of a special tomato that we accidentally cross bred! We’re calling it a Moby Tear Drop Tomato and we went through the process of saving the seeds… letting them soak in water and then scum up for a while, then drained the water and dried them carefully. Tomato seed saving is kinda weird. Google it if you’d like a little better explaination! (g) I wish I had taken some pictures, but it was kinda yucky looking. You see, tomatoes need to “rot” first in their seedy gunky jelly and then you dry them.
There is a lady that sells pumpkins and Indian corn around Halloween and we always love her wares. I read in one of the books I delight in, that it’s always a great thing to save the seeds of your local favorites and that if they grow well for others, they will grow nicely for you. So I think I’ll try that this year. We saved a handful of seeds from all the pumpkins we bought, mainly because we had a terrible time growing our own. We have some little cute pie pumpkins and some nice medium carving sorts and even some of the white ghost pumpkins. I also saved about 200 kernels of this beautiful Indian corn. I don’t know if they will grow or not, but I took a few of each seed and layered it in some moist paper towels to see if they will sprout. I would think that in a few days, I should have some germination attempts. Maybe not, but I’m going to give it a try. If that doesn’t work, I’ll probably try a pot with dirt and see if anything sprouts! This is my first attempt to save seeds from both flowers and veggies, so who knows!
It was still a fun afternoon and I got a bunch of packs of seeds! I also went through and sorted my commercial packs, and labeled them by year. I think I have plenty of seeds for our coming garden, and I hope dearly it’s out at the farm. Still waiting to hear about the rural loan application, though it’s only been a week! Still, the homestead is still available, and waiting for us. We know it. We hope so.
I think in a few evenings I will sit down and watch a movie or two and make my carrot seed tapes. Last year we did that and it was SO wonderful. Yeah it takes a while to sit and glue all those little seeds to a strip of toliet paper, but it’s so much easier to do in your comfy chair watching a flick, then hunched over the beds, thinning…. and I think they grow better, too! They don’t get disturbed by the thinning process, they just grow up lovely like! In a few evenings, you can make rolls of carrot and radish tapes!
About two weeks ago, we had a plumbing emergency. No, the pipes didn’t freeze, but we had an old piece of pipe that broke when we bumped into it, when cleaning. One of those things. It was very brittle and just cracked.
It was a bit of a drag, no doubt. When we went to cut out the broken piece, it cracked further down and under the belly of the Moby and in 12 degree weather, and with a bad cold, it was a sure mess. But it’s all replaced now, and everything is fine.
However, there was one thing that I noticed right away.
Once again, we ended up making 6 trips back and forth to the hardware store!!! 6 trips! Honest.
And mainly because we were ill-prepared and only bought one piece at a time. Which in the end was so silly, because the little PVC connections are like 20 and 30 cents each. A piece of replacement pipe was 3 dollars. And it was on the 4th trip that I began to think about the household systems in our homes and how crazy this was to have to keep making trips back and forth.
So on the 5th trip, I picked up a little cheap tool box. $3. And I also got 4 each of the various connections. It cost me $8 total. And I now have everything I need to make an emergency repair of any sort. I have everything in the box now. The connections, the cutters, the contact cement and the extra pipe. And with a big paint marker we wrote PLUMBING on the top and one side.
And you know what? I think I’m going to make a few other boxes too! Like a ELECTRICAL one. And a DECORATING one to hold like a tack hammer and nails and hanging stuff. And a PAINTING PREP one with a a couple scrapers, and some putty knives and wall putty, etc.
We have two big tool boxes, but they are heavy and filled with a bunch of stuff, just hard to use. And it doesn’t help that they are buried in the back of the shed and hard to get to. I really like the idea of a few specialized boxes where all the tools that just apply to that task group resides. So that when you want to hang a new picture, you just grab the right box and poof! All the stuff you need is in there.
I’m actually thinking of making a pet one! Haha… we have all these odds and ends of pet stuff, brushes, and lotions, potions and odds and ends. That would be good too. I really like the idea of a place for everything and everything in it’s place. Been working that in many areas of my life, but it NEVER occurred to me to do it with home repair. In fact, I’m thinking kitchen stuff too… like a box for cookie cutters and decorating! Or how about a box for canning supplies! I’m on a roll!
Well, right now, I just have my plumbing box. And I like it! I wish we had it BEFORE all the trips! Just think of the time and gas we would have saved!!!
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