To The Surbiton Manor Born

  The Mighty Trellis There be signs o' the green outside. 50 degrees today. (Though we are looking at 5" of snow on Wednesday.) Ye first robins showed up. 'Tis March. A grueling and bitter month. Crocuses seem to be popping, though: And if I am not mistaken, tulips! Hope they hold out through the snow. The tomatoes are now in the greenhouse as well. Two varieties this year: Seed Savers "Wisconsin Chief" and Survival Seeds, "Tiny Tim" cherry tomatoes. We've had good luck with the former in the past. The photo at the top is our mighty new trellis, which, when the ground unfreezes, will be placed over two separate beds, bridging them and getting the peas/beans on one side and the pumpkins on the other. Pumpkins have had a tendency to go crazy, like the Crinoid in Dr. Who (for those who remember a blog post from a couple of years ago when they overran our deck. With the democracy being gutted as I type, it will be more important than ever to generate as...

  With the planting of the peppers (8 weeks before last frost date), the 2025 garden season has begun. The biggest change from last year is the position of the greenhouse. Instead of living in my guitar room on the north side of the house, without direct sunlight and relying on just the T5 fluorescents, it is positioned instead in the office, in front of the southwest facing patio door. Natural light should be a big help. The weather this week was unseasonably warm. We hit mid-50's. It is, of course, a false spring, raising hopes only to dash them. Today, we actually have reached a 9 on the Beaufort Scale - "strong gale" force winds gusting as high as 47 mph. as the temperature plummets all day long.  Day by day, we will reach spring.  Every day is a day closer to Donald Trump's death , which is a little something to celebrate. How does this happy thought relate to gardening, you might ask? Well, that idiot's ruinous economic policies are going to drive us into re...

Next weekend the first plants (peppers) will be going into the greenhouse. This was difficult to believe last week, because we had a cold snap that was below zero for most of it. We burned through almost an entire face cord of wood. But yesterday it snapped, and today it was up over 40. I was able to work outside. So there was some urgency today to getting the greenhouse into shape to receive them.  These little cheap greenhouses are readily available. We have two of them. But they disappointed in their utility.  The biggest problem is that they go together easily, but come apart just as easily. This makes them really, really difficult to move.  Yesterday I used an epoxy that will bind plastic and metal to lock the greenhouse together, making it markedly less flimsy. Today I locked it down to a roller cart that I built. The T-5 fluorescents are fired up and wired in Last year was especially bad. I started plants on time, but I had them in my guitar room on the north side ...

  Olive T'Pring Sparklequeen - Early Warning System While we are getting more sun, our days are getting darker all the time. The plane has crashed into the mountainside, and, in the end, in spite of playing at prepping, we are not ready. And we need to throw preparedness into high gear, because things a year from now are beyond unpredictable. The current presidential administration squatting in the White House is a white supremacist Christian nationalist terror organization, and, as promised in their Evil Plot 2025, they are doing their level best to destroy everything that is good or decent in the world. I think the most obscene thing these vile criminals have inflicted thus far on the world is shutting the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by fiat and the introduction of  a morality- free white supremacist tech bro who actually throws Hitler salutes in public. By abruptly cutting aid around the world to sick and starving people, he has let loose mass...

Zipper It's a cold sunny day today, but dark clouds are looming. It's more than the usual dread of living in the Anthropocene that darkens every joy. It seems that the imbeciles with all the guns and money are intent on making everyone's lives worse with moronic trade policies that are going to drive up food prices. This is not the right blog for trying to solve the world's problems. It's focused on the garden and self-sufficiency, which is always a good policy.  Rumor has it, today, that Colombia is about to have a 25% tariff inflicted on it. Of course, the people paying for it will be people who drink coffee. The cost will just be passed on to consumers here. This is what happens when idiots vote to put buffoons in charge.  But you can't fix stupid. Whinging won't change it.  So it is time to be practical and stock up on coffee. We've been doing this for a couple of months already, but we will be stepping it up. There are about 20 lbs. in the basement,...

  Princess Poppyseed Watson and her Magnificent Tail It is never too early to start planning. This is the indoor part of it. You can do it with your cats. In fact, I think that planning is half the fun. It is part of the process. It might be argued that too much planning removes one from the moment. As Allen Saunders put it in the January 1957 issue of Reader's Digest , and later John Lennon put it, "Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans." But the answer to this half-baked argument is that the making of plans is in fact part of the process of life, and it is worthwhile in itself, because it is more than just a mental exercise, it has practical repercussions on your future. My future involves a summer of gardening. Here are some of the things that we're going to be growing: Fresno peppers (Tasty! Just had one. We've tasted blood, and we want more !) Snow peas Pole beans Bush beans Hubbard squash Pumpkins (They can share the trellis with the bea...