Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Oh, my aching head

There's nothing quite like an Easter hangover -- all that chocolate, all that excitement, all that having to deal with relatives. Agh. Fortunately I had an after-relative Easter party to go to and we all had a wonderful time. But now it's the Wednesday-after-the-Sunday-before and my head is pounding with the mom of all caffeine withdrawal headaches and I've had too much chocolate and the kids have had too much chocolate and I swear the Farmers Market is beginning to look like vegetable heaven...and it's obviously time to get away from the processed stuff and back into the garden.

Oh, that's right. It doesn't exist yet. Despite all of my posturing and preening and carrying on I haven't put so much as shovel to ground. I always thought I would have more time to turn earth that I obviously did. Spring has sprung and it is officially scramble time.

It wasn't too bad until yesterday. I had planted a whole slew of tomatoes and they were coming up trumps...until the night it got down to 29 degrees for a couple of hours. 165 tomato seedlings, gone with the frost. Three survived that fateful night and a couple have sprouted since, but five whole tomato seedlings doth not a gardening frenzy trigger. BUT....

...and it's a big BUT...

a friend's belated Christmas present came in Monday and it was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. I didn't have a pot big enough to house it until I see her again. Drat, drat, double drat, I wish I'd known in advance, so now I have to haul myself down to the local home improvement center to find something to house this monster. And that wasn't a problem. I found the pot, it's big enough, I can afford it, and then the Banshees uttered that fateful phrase: Mom, can we go into the nursery?

Note to self: next time, say NO.

Because this time, they had what looked to be a fresh shipment of heirloom tomatoes at 99 cents a plant. I came home with eleven* of them -- Brandywine and Black Krim and Cherokee Purple and Legend, Marglobe, Caspian Pink, Green Zebra, Mr. Stripey, Stupice, and Mortgage Lifter. None of these is on my seed list, by the way. Ohhh boy. I'm going to be reseeding the tomatoes I lost, but with the advent of the H&E crowd I have to have a garden put together now. Oy. Oh well, it's lovely weather for blisters....

update: MB wanted one that I thought we had but didn't, so we went back today and picked up Orange Oxheart. That makes it an official dozen heirlooms. Yikes!

2 comments:

Bobbisox said...

I am glad you got the tomatoes to egg you on to get that garden in gear. I still didn't plant my seeds.

Bobbi said...

Let's have a garden and duckie update!!!!