Mooooooooom! Are we there yet???

Sit down and pipe down you little whippersnappers, or I will stop this car right now!!!

No, we're not there yet. NaBloPoMo still has a few days let to run, like 8. And just like last time, it is going to be a slog through to the bitter end.

/topic shift

I was reading a new blog I've picked up recently, Crazy Aunt Purl, and she has a nice post about her little garden.

Sadly, I didn't get much of a garden planted this year. No tomatoes. No cucumbers came up, although I did plant them. The lettuce has been left alone by the bunnies and the deer, amazingly, but it is just hanging out, I haven't bothered to harvest it. I planted a few beets, because I'm informed that if you pluck them young, they're sweet and delicious, but I think I missed the "young" harvest.

My herbs. Oh, sigh, my herbs. I have more oregano than I could ever use in one lifetime, but the thyme is struggling, the cilantro never came up, the parsley has some issue with aphids or disease, and the mint is taking over, while the landscapers hurt my small, precious lavender patch by heartlessly tossing a shovel-full of dark, heavy mulch on top of my wee little sprigs. By the time I managed to dig it out, irreparable damage had been done, although I am sure it will come up in fine form next year.

Bill Alexander, author of "The $64 Tomato", noted serenely that gardeners have eternal hope; if it didn't work so well this year, there's always next yet.

Yes, I hope so.

Javla eeediot

On my way home from work, I noticed two women standing on my street's sidewalk in a heavily overgrown area. What were they doing? Picking wild blackberries.

That reminded me that there's a lovely strand of blackberries in the heavily overgrown area of MY back yard.

Last summer, I noticed them while sitting on my back patio, drinking wine with a neighbor. I took the empty wine glass and filled it with the wild berries, and we ate them while finishing the bottle. They were yummy.

At my grandparent's house when I was a little girl, there were lots of wild blackberries, and I remember picking them with a cousin, putting them in bowls and dumping milk and sugar over them, eating them with a spoon.

So I thought I'd have a look-see, check out if there were ripe blackberries in my little patch. Sure enough, there were. I told DH that after dinner, I'd don long pants and sleeves (in the miserable heat, fun, yeah, sure) and pick the ripe ones. Should there be enough, I'd make a cobbler.

The reason for the long sleeves and pants? There are also bits of poison oak and sumac back there. DH is one of those folks that are highly, highly allergic to the poison plants, and he shuddered in revulsion when I announced my intentions, even with the promise of blackberry cobbler, or potential blackberry cobbler.

I reminded him that I'd picked them last year in work clothes (skirt, heels, short sleeves) with no problem. He smirked, then shuddered again. He suggested that I divest myself of my long sleeves and pants immediately upon re-entering the house, and turn on the washing machine forthwith, to destroy any possibility of him picking up the dreaded poison ivy. He is so allergic to the stuff that contact with clothing that has been worn in the vicinity of the poison plants will give him the rash.

Fair enough.

I even found shoes, real shoes, not my usual cute summer sandals to wear while in the blackberry patch.

I was quickly reminded of one of the problems of blackberry-ing: the thorns. Yow. I got stabbed once or twice, but no blood drawn, so no real problem. I kept watch for poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, but saw no evidence of it.

Then, quite suddenly, I felt a burning, piercing sensation on the inside of my left wrist, as I reached over and under to grab a few more precious berries. Reaching had pushed the sleeve of my long-sleeved shirt up near my elbow. Ooops. I yanked my hand back, inspecting for rouge spiders, mosquitoes, bees. Nothing. Not a bug in sight. But a red welt, the size of an eraser on the top of a #2 pencil, was already forming. We're talking instant. Unsure of what it was, but certain it wasn't poison ivy, I kept on picking berries, even as the spot swelled and burned and burned some more. I got similar sensations across the fingers of my right hand, jabs, but no welts there.

It wasn't until I got a third shot, again on my left wrist, that I realized what the heck was happening. When and where had I felt this before? On a walk in the woods when I was about 11. What was it? Stinging nettles.

I'd had tunnel vision for the ripe berries, and had forgotten that yes, there are plants other than the poisons that can kinda ruin your day. When I looked around, I recognized the evil plant in question, taller than I am, and reaching its painful protection over some really lovely ripe blackberries.

I had wondered why the deer that are the bane of my garden hadn't eaten the berries, why the raccoons hadn't stripped the bushes bare. That would be because they're smarter than me, and know what they should stay away from.

When I was stung as a kid, the remedy was to rub the juice from a touch-me-not plant into the sting, thereby soothing it. Touch-me-nots are also called jewelweed. They produce very pretty yellow and orange flowers, and the seed pods that form after the flowers bloom are explosive, showering seeds in all directions when you brush up against the plant. They often grow in tandem with nettles. There were plenty of touch-me-nots with the blackberries, but rubbing the juice from the hastily ripped off branch did not provide the cool relief I remember as a child.

Instead, the welts continued to swell and burn like hell, and I backed out of the blackberry patch as quickly as I could, heading for the house at a run.

I called out to DH as I came in the house; what did he remember from his Scouting days about nettles? What did he remember? That they sting. Thanks.

I turned on the kitchen faucet, and allowed cold water to run over the painful spots, which had expanded from two welts on my left arm to four, and two fingers of my right hand. The water soothed, but did not remove the sting. I stood with my hands submerged until they were nearly numb.

When I showed the welts to DH, he recoiled in horror, moving as far away from my arms as the couch would allow. I explained that nettle stings aren't contagious like the ivy, but he wasn't buying it.

Both of my sisters are more outdoors-y than me, so I called the one in New York to ask her how we'd cured it as kids. Her answer? Touch-me-nots, or wait it out. Google said the same thing, with the additional caveat that sometimes the stings fade in minutes, but sometimes they take as long as 24 hours. Great. Some species that grow in Great Brittan require the treatment of a doctor. FanTAStic. And ouch.

Not enough berries for a cobbler, either, even if I hadn't been stopped by the nettles. Ow. Seriously.

Bad pop rant, and weather randomness.

I am a pop culture junkie. When we're listing our bad habits, i.e., drinking too much caffeine, eating too much chocolate, those sorts of things, I add to my list the fact that I'll read the gossip columns, watch E!, read People magazine. Other than being part of the MTV generation, I'm not sure what fuels this. I do know that often, the antics of Brit-Brit, La Lohan, and Paris make MY life seem....well....normal. Or as normal as any of us ever is.

I don't, however, listen to commercial radio. Ever. Ev-er. I despise it. Hilariously, though, that's all DH listens to and as we're in his car together more frequently than we are in mine, often I'm subjected to large chunks of time listening to exactly the sort of crapola I can't stand; "morning zoo" types of early AM programs. The rotten afternoon-drive stuff that plays the same ten songs over, over, over, over again. Ugh.

I like all kinds of music, but there's a certain group of current pop that really bothers me. I realize that this is going to make me sound like quite the curmudgeon, but it is just so much dreck. And this will probably bring her fans out in droves to flame me, but the song is so obnoxious that I can't take it anymore! I can't stand Jordin Sparks and her awful "No Air" song that she sings with Chris Brown. I'm not even sure why I've developed a nearly irrational distaste for the song, other than its prevalence every-freaking-where.

Then I heard an Ashlee Simpson song that made me shudder.

But this phenomenon isn't limited to the music spectrum of the pop-culture world. I've read some stuff lately that I have wondered about: how did this crap get published? You know that television has been a kvetch of mine for a long, long time....there're reality shows galore that I wonder...who green-lighted this stuff? Is there some television executive genius that listens to pitches for things like "Farmer wants a wife" and says, "Right on, man, that's going to be a big hit! Let's make that show!" Really?

I'm setting completely aside the definition of 'bad' that means immoral, I'm just talking about poor quality.

In Sam's Club the other day, I picked up a cookbook by a popular television cook, one who uses a lot of butter and has a pronounced Georgia drawl. I like the show; like the cook, too. But the book remained on the shelf for one reason, and one reason alone. It has terrible readability. Not bad grammar, but bad form. I don't know how anyone ever typed it up without their word-processing program having fits; every single sentence had a word or three with the ends clipped off. Reading became readin'. Watching became watchin'. I couldn't read it, after two paragraphs I set it down and walked away. No matter how compelling the story, or what fun the recipes might be, I can't read 300 pages of "I was goin' to the store."

I think it very sad that this sort of thing slips through the cracks. We don't complain about it, we just shrug and ignore that which we don't agree with, not voting with our dollars but rather endorsing things through our terrible apathy.

Wow, what a little ray of sunshine from me, eh?

Let's talk about something else before I bring everyone to all sorts of ire.

The weather in Oh-hia-ia is nothing if not changeable. We had some unexpectedly hot days in early June, unseasonably hot. Then that disappeared into chilly days where I pulled out several warm shawls for the part of my daily commute that involves a long walk. Our late spring was surprisingly devoid of typical Midwestern thunderstorms. Grey skies aplenty, but lacking in big thunder-bumpers.

Yesterday, the date of the summer solstice (Glad Midsommar, y'all!) we had a thunder-and-lightening storm that came out of nowhere, a bruising, crashing, noisy thunderstorm. I celebrate the Swedish holiday of Midsummer here in America because I want to; in Sweden, it marks the start of their very short summer, and is a leftover from pagan rituals. Here in the US, for me, it is just an excuse to gather some friends, drink some Southern Comfort Punch, stay up far too late on the longest day of the year. Unfortunately, we greeted the Midsummer evening by having a hail storm.


Our big thunderstorms have never frightened me. I revel in a wild thunderstorm. Last night's storm came up so suddenly, though, and the hail was out of nowhere. I've been through several tornadoes, seen funnel clouds that didn't touch down (thankfully, b/c I never want to see a tornado up close and personal) but since we moved to our current residence, I've never thought that I might need to seek shelter in our closet under the stairs until last night. (We lack a basement here at Chez Arin.)

Thankfully, the storm moved along, but not without a few casualties. My carefully cultivated garden, which is teaching me patience at long last, lost a handful of tomato plants. As an inexperienced gardener, I probably have too many plants crammed into a a space that is too small for them, but I'm still bummed about the loss of even a few to something that is beyond my control.

Something is eating some of the plants, too. Marigolds, which I thought that pests disliked, clipped most efficiently. But my lettuce is unharmed. Herbs, left alone. Sunflowers, completely destroyed. What gives?

Oooo-h-eye-oooo

During football games at the Ohio State University, the marching band will play "Hang on Sloopy" and the crowd will chant the state's letters during the chorus...which herre, sounds completely ridiculous when I type that out. I guess you'd have to hear it to understand, if you've never heard it, but it goes something like this

Hang on Sloopy, Sloopy hang on
O-H-I-O
Hang on Sloopy, Sloopy, hang on
O-H-I-O

and wow, it looks even sillier with the words typed out.

(If that's not enough of a visual for you, check out the YouTube version, and you will see what insane nutcases most of the state of Ohio's residents are; there's a dance that goes along with that o-h-i-o chant.)

It has been running though my head this week (and now it will be running though YOUR head, too, you're welcome) as Ohio residents have been treated to typically heartbreaking early spring Ohio weather. Yes, end of April/beginning of May counts as early spring here. March is still winter, any way you care to look at it.

I've planted some seeds in yet another (probably vain) attempt to grow some vegetables, herbs, and flowers. I was not smart enough to plant them inside the house during the month of February as any gardener worth her salt in Ohio would have done. Expert gardener I am most assuredly NOT. No, no, instead I planted them outside on my side porch a few weekends ago, and have kept very close daily tabs on them, watching most anxiously for seedlings to appear.

Seedlings astonishingly have appeared, often in between my checking them each morning and returning from work to check them again each evening. It is beyond cool to see those little tiny things sprout. I think of everything I planted, I'm most enjoying watching the sunflowers. Because they pop out of the ground with the seed casing still attached, shedding it when the leaves begin to grow, and if it isn't the most obvious 'hey, this plant came from THAT seed' example I've ever seen, then I don't know what I would put in that category.

I even have proof!


Aren't they cute? Just so tiny, it is hard to believe that will turn in to a huge and very unusual colored sunflower. The name on the seed packet was "Chianti Hybrid" and I chose them out of all the other sunflowers (and I lurves me some sunflowers) because I've never seen any this color before, a deep burgundy wine-y sort of color. There were somewhere around 24 seeds in the packet, and they've all sprouted. Of course, that's too many for the spot I alloted to the sunflowers, so I'll have a few left over. I've got some ideas about where to stash them, but I'll probably write about that at some future point, when I am able to put the plants in the ground.

Then there's the salad mix; mesclun greens that are of a very mixed variety, and there were thousands of seeds in that packet. So many that after harvesting the first batch, I have enough to have a second crop of them. I like my mixed greens as baby greens, so they won't be in the ground long once they are planted. They need to be a bit bigger before I can do that, though.



And the happy little daisies. I choose painted daisies because they're all kinds of colors. I love shasta daises, but they're only white. These are a full spectrum of colors.

So I planted these all several weeks ago, and then...what happens? It gets cold again. We go from 70 degree days (21C) to a frost advisory for two nights in a row. The novice gardener could lose absolutely every-freaking-thing. The first night, I covered all the baby seedlings with a huge sheet, folded in half, that has been banned from my bed for having holes in it. (I guess it didn't like being washed in hot water with a lot of bleach....all of my bed linens are white, and I use bleach to kill the dust mites and other creepy-crawlies that are in EVERYONE'S bed.) The sheet protected the seedlings, even when it got wet from a typical spring heavy rain.

The next night, though, the temp was supposed to dip down even further, and as I've never managed to keep anything alive for an entire growing season, I was very worried that a sheet just wasn't going to cut it when it came to frost protection.

Not long after I planted everything, I broke the seed trays down into little individual 4-packs, because I am a complete moron. Had I left them in their original state, they would be far easier to move, but nooooo, I thought the little 4-packs were easier to handle and cute. *headdesk*

When the bitter cold weather threatened, my choices for saving the seedlings were pretty limited. I could 1) bring them inside the house or 2) take them into the garage. Bringing them in the house would mean that any little 6 or 8-legged things that had attached themselves to the plastic trays would be sharing my home. I hate bugs. Anything that has more legs than I do, I am not a fan. A huge amount of soil would be tracked through my house. Not that I'd mind cleaning it up, but it was also raining when I was doing this, and there's a good chance I would have ruined the wooden floor that DH put into the house last year as I tracked in water, the clay-like muddy soil we have in the ground and the potting soil I purchased, because of course there's potting soil spilled on the side patio, where the seedlings live.

Garage it was. Thirty trips or so later, the seedlings were lined up in a spot in the garage where they wouldn't be stepped on (or run over with the cars) and where they'd stay warm. They survived the night unscathed. (Big sigh of relief.) Score one for the girl without the green thumbs.

Then it was time to move them back outside.

Those little white sticks that identify the seedlings, because you need them until the plants are large enough to identify? I don't have one of those in every single 4-pack of plants. Which means what? The ones that haven't sprouted yet are unidentifiable if they get separated from their fellows. Of course I have them lined up in neat little rows, with the markers at the beginning and ending of each section of plants, but what happens if they get out of their orderly little rows? I'd be guessing what was in each one.

Not a disaster, unless you have OCD.

If you have OCD, then your NICE NEAT PLAN is messed up if one goes stray and it makes you want to CURL UP IN THE CORNER AND POUT.

Not that I'd know. Really.

Critters

I don't have a green thumb.

I reliably kill plants, be they house plants or herbs, ornamental flowers or practical veggies. Among the talents I possess, growing things just isn't enumerated with my sparkling wit and engaging personality.

That has never stopped me from trying to grow all sorts of things, from tomatoes to African Violets. Memorably, when I was writing for Well Fed a few summers ago, I attempted to grow tomatoes organically, and for my trouble, I was rewarded with two tomatoes (from 6 plants!) that were the size of half-dollar coins. Not exactly the results I was hoping for.

The sole exception to this rule has been bulbs that I purchased from Breck's, tulips, daffodils, and some cute daisy-esque flowers called Grecian Wildflowers. Bulbs couldn't be easier. Plant them in the fall, and come spring, they grow all by themselves. No watering. No weeding. No fertilizing.

When DH and I returned from Florida a few days ago, I was expecting to see the daffodils and tulips in full bloom, because when we left, they were just beginning to poke their heads above the ground. Hold that thought for a moment while we talk about planting some other things.

Last summer, I didn't even attempt hanging baskets, because the depression was too all-consuming, and I couldn't even think about trying to keep plants alive. By the time the meds started working for me and I was back to some semblance of humanity, the summer growing season in Oh-hia-ia was drawing to a close.

Part of the problem is that I always get started too late in the growing season. IF you want to grow your own tomatoes, peppers, herbs, what-have-you, from seeds here in the nawth, you need to start the seeds in trays in February or March in order to be able to harvest in August or September. During those dark days of winter, spring planting just isn't what I'm thinking about.

Predictably, this year is no different. I purchased a bundle of seeds this past weekend, flowers, tomatoes, herbs, cucumbers, even some assorted lettuces. I planted them this past weekend, too. I might be able to harvest the 'maters come October. Maybe.

After my seed-buying spree, I walked the yard around our house, thinking of where I want to plant things.

The sunflowers in a spot of wild overgrowth that the landscaper hacked unmercifully last fall, because it will not regain its former untamed beauty for several years, and sunflowers grow large enough to disguise that blighted spot.

The herbs will mostly go into an herb-box that has three levels and enough space to accommodate all of the herbage I find necessary for cooking: chives (which survived all by themselves despite me over the past three years) parsley, oregano (ditto on the survival of that) dill, cilantro, basil.

Violas, pansies, and dwarf viola at the front door. Daisies and Lavender, both perennials, in spots where color is needed desperately.

Cucumbers, tomatoes, and salad greens don't have a home just yet, but wherever they go, marigolds will go around them to discourage rabbits and raccoons and groundhogs and deer from eating MY food.

It was while looking around the yard that I discovered that the tulips I planted so carefully a few years back have been decimated by the local white-tailed deer population.

Did they eat the run-of-the-mill Apple Blossom Tulips, which range from pale pinks to fire-y reds, and while beautiful, are not costly?

No. No, they did not. Or at least they didn't eat ALL of the Apple Blossom Tulips.

They did, however, eat ALL of the Angelique Tulips, my most prized tulips that garner multiple compliments, and gave me much joy. Even our community's pro landscaper had asked me where they came from, and what they were, admiring them when I spoke to him last spring. As you can imagine, being complimented on growing something with my two not-green thumbs thrilled me.

I hollered and fussed a great deal when I discovered this crime of epic proportions, bitching about the deer to any and everyone that would listen. Saying I was upset about my Angeliques being eaten would be akin to saying that Mt. St. Helens was a small explosion. I hunted on Google for solutions to the cloven hoofed menaces that don't include pesticides or shotguns. (Although I'd LOVE to shoot one or two, or OK, ALL of the deer that ate my tulips, the season for the pests is over, and really, I can't see myself shooting Bambi anyway.)

My online searching led me to several kinds of products that are approved for organic gardening, but since the part of the country where I live isn't exactly the most ecologically enlightened part of the world, my inquiries to local garden centers about these various things resulted in comments from their staff along the lines of, "Lady, we don't carry any of that organic-hippy-tree-hugger crap."

Imagine my surprise, then, when I stopped to pick up seed trays at one garden center and discovered that in fact, they DO carry organic-hippy-tree-hugger crap, called Deer Stopper. Excited, I brought it home. When DH helped me unload the car, he laughed, telling me that I'd bought in to a snake-oil bonanza. I hope not! It was expensive, and I hope to be able to use it to discourage the deer from munching on everything else.

I sprayed some on the remaining Apple Blossom tulips, and then also on the new plantings, hoping to discourage the foraging pests from TOUCHING MY STUFF! Hilariously, it was while I was browsing the pest deterrent section, I found a plastic inflatable snake, very life-like, which is supposed to deter a laundry list of things. Unfortunately, we just don't have diamond-backed rattlesnakes (or any other venous snakes that I am aware of) in this part of the world, so I doubt that any of the pests would recognize the snake as a predator. Other suggested natural remedies, like wind chimes and bright light-reflecting gizzets, just won't work for me, being either a) too noisy for me to tolerate or b) too ugly to put up in my yard.

Also not enumerated among my talents is patience, a vital ingredient for any gardener. The seeds I planted, according to their packaging, will germinate and sprout in anywhere from 3 to 30 days. At that rate, I'll have plants actually in the ground by mid-May at the earliest, and early June at the latest.

On the upside, if I'm able to be patient and careful, I'll have dozens of yummy Brandywine and Hillbilly tomatoes, both heirloom varieties that grow exquisite huge tomatoes, worth waiting for.