Friday, December 18, 2009

Seeds

Back in November I placed an order for seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I frequent their i dig my garden forum, and had read about Ozark Razorback cowpeas. I *knew* that I had to grow some in my vegetable garden that I am planning and hurried to get them before they sold out. I got in the order yesterday and it gave me gardening withdrawal. I have been poring through other sites looking for the rest of the seeds that I want, and it really taxes my self-control. I know that it is very important to start with a small and manageable area and crop expectation. I don't even have the garden built yet, so I need to be realistic about what to plan.

My main goal was to have a salsa garden this coming year, but my attention wandered and I got a few other things. I grew some Blaushokker peas (they have blue pods) one year in North Carolina and I found some blue podded peas in their catalog. I also love okra, but it's hard to find it that isn't tough already in the store so I picked out some Alabama Red Okra. Since I'm growing Arkansas Traveler tomatoes and Tennessee Beauty strawberries, I thought it would be fun to have a plant that is named after every state that we have lived in. I think for Virginia I might get some Carwile's Virginia peanuts, and there is Carolina Wonder sweet pepper. That leaves me needing Minnesota...not sure what I'll do about that one. :)

I can tell that I'm going to have to rein myself in on a daily basis!

ETA: When I was trying to think of seeds for Minnesota it occured to me that I could grow some sunflowers. Minnesota is one of the main producers of sunflower seeds, and I remember seeing huge fields of them when I was growing up there. Maybe that's what I'll do. :)

Saturday, December 05, 2009

Snow!

We got between 1-2 inches of snow last night. The Gnomeslayer woke up at about 6:30 this morning, much to my protesting. I went ahead and got up and got her ready to go outside. Snow here tends to melt off within a few hours so I wanted to get her out while it was still on the ground. She wasn't too impressed with it. She kicked the grass for a bit and patted it with her mittens, but she didn't like it being cold. We went out to the back yard and I was showing her how to make snowballs. We were scraping snow off of the fire pit blocks, unfortunately there was bird poo under the snow and it got all over our gloves. So I called it quits and we went inside. :)

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Cotton

One of the things that I find so interesting about Alabama is seeing the cotton fields when they are ready to harvest. It's almost like seeing drifts of snow. It was especially dramatic seeing the white cotton fields with the fall colors in the trees behind them.

We got our first heavy frost last night. I could hardly get it scraped off of the car this morning. Looks like winter is finally here, booo!