Ice crystals

While the snow yesterday wasn't deep enough to hide the junk and turn things into a thing of beauty, a few days ago we had a hard freeze when the air was very moist, and the resulting frost had huge ice crystals that hung onto things until quite a ways into the day.

I wish the sun had been out; it would have made it all sparkly!

New article!

New article up at the Examiner, a review of the book "Monet's Passion", about the artist's gardens and instructions for using his design techniques in your own garden:http://www.examiner.com/gardening-in-spokane/monet-s-passion-garden-book-review

New article up at the Examiner, on naturalizing bulbs!
http://www.examiner.com/gardening-in-spokane/naturalizing-bulbs

New article

New article up over at the Examiner, on overwintering carrots! Have fresh carrots all winter!http://www.examiner.com/gardening-in-spokane/overwintering-carrots-spokane

Harvest

Have spent the last few days harvesting vegetables. The nights have been down in the 20s, and they keep threatening us with snow, even down at our altitude, and we *did* learn something after last year’s epic of hacking carrots out of frozen soil. So we have a house full of buckets of potatoes, carrots, parsnips and onions. No big onions, mind you, as we never have luck getting them to make bulbs, but lots and lots of what are basically glorified green onions. I did find some radishes we’d missed; they are the size of baseballs. I left them out there as I hate to think what their texture would be like! We still have to get the kale, kohlrabi, cabbage and a little bit of broccoli in but that shouldn’t take very long. The tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse are still producing, but it won’t be long before it gets too cold in there, too.

We also have a large box of catnip stems drying, which of course the cats won’t stay out of. They don’t seem to understand the term ‘deferred gratification’. I don’t care; less for me to pick off the stems and put away!

Now to see if I can take advantage of the return to standard time and continue to get up ‘an hour earlier’ or if I’ll follow my nocturnal pattern and slowly slide to getting up later as usual.

Oh, I made bloomers! They were supposed to be made for Steamcon, but that fell by the wayside. They’re nice for sitting around in the evening, with stripey thigh highs. They’re black cotton with white lace at the bottom of the legs. Did you expect any other combination from me?

New article

New article at the Examiner, on growing pumpkins!http://www.examiner.com/gardening-in-spokane/growing-great-pumpkins

Dear Cats;

Please stop taking the gladiola bulbs out of their buckets and batting them around the floor. I had them separated by color, and would prefer to keep them that way. I do not trust your design talents when it comes to mixing colors.

Yours,

The Human