Your Fall & Winter Gardening Guide

 

My, what an optimistic title!  As if I'm about to impart many wisdoms about buying and planting seeds so that you can have gorgeous flowers next spring. Veggies too!

Just this day I am in receipt of the West Coast Seed company's Fall & Winter Gardening Guide.

Here is what I grew from seed this year:

Cosmos August 28, 2012

 Here is what I planted:

sunflowers*
zinnias
morning glory
moon flowers
poppies

and I forget what all else, I get excited in April, and it was a lengthy list, but that was very long ago.

Noticeably absent, vegetables. When I think vegetable, I think farmer's market or grocery. When you have a 2 x4 patch of earth (or thereabouts) and most of it overhung by a rabid cherry tree, you don't bother with rabbit food.

Oh, I did buy some lettuce (I'm reminding myself) but this was for me budgies. When I was new to them and they to me and I was bothering to INFORM myself on the habits of these pests I read repeatedly about their love of lettuce. "Just make sure it's wet," said the sages. Parakeets like their greens to look alive.

As the birds ignored my offerings, wet or dry, and preferred decimating the hibiscus, this year I bought lettuce plants and put them in the solarium, what could be more alive? And then, more or less, carefully watered them to keep them fresh.

This did not work. Therefore, we ate the lettuce. It was not very good. Really, not.

Early in the "season" I bought a tomato plant that I can no longer show you at Wegman's for $10 (if you don't know Wegman's and have the opportunity to visit one, do so). There were approximately 10 tomatoes on it and I put it on the back steps, since that is where I have sun of sorts. All but one ripened at once. The last tomato hung in there for weeks doing nothing but desperately clinging to the mother ship.

Then one day it fell off. Plop.

Sad.

I also have rather leggy red and green basil and some struggling chives.

None of this has to do with seeds or vegetables. Tomatoes are a fruit, I believe.

?

This catalog is very nice, flip, flip, flip. OOOH rainbow blend carrots, pretty! Flip, flip. Something lushly purple called Rudolph --can't grow it anyway why bother reading about it.  OH and Nataino! This is gorgeous! What is it! Is it even edible?

There are pages of this, plus broccoli.

Then a whole section on saving your OWN seeds. I suppose I have to grow something first.

Maybe I can sprout! There's Easy Sprout and Sprout Master and the Biosta Kitchen Crop Sprouter (that sounds a little nasty). I don't eat much in the way of sprouts. Neither does the Prince, but that might be because I don't serve them. He tends to eat what I put in front of him. All of it, no matter how it tastes, which will be advantageous the day I do him in.  But that's neither here nor there.

Here are some sprouted sprouts. They look like biology class or a sex education tape.

There are other things in the catalog: Books to tell me what I'm doing wrong; Inflatable greenhouses to stick here and there; Rarefied bird seed; and bird houses like the wood duck boxes (a what?), woodpecker houses, chickadee houses, screech owl houses  (how to really irritate the neighbors), and the bat boxes, "solid color [beige, ho hum] and to Audubon's specs", these can each accomodate up to 20 bats. Personally, I kind of like seeing them hanging from the basement rafers, but if this is what they really prefer....$44.95 http://www.westcoastseeds.com/

*Sunflower photo cribbed from West Coast Seed Company website