A gradual thaw

This winter has been perhaps the most bleak, dreary, cold, miserable season of my life in so many ways. I don't say this lightly, considering that I once lived in a northern valley, where the wind would suck the warmth out of every nook and cranny. Where snowfall was recorded in feet, and roads would freeze with black ice in seconds. No - not even then was there a time that I remember this exhausting daily pursuit of simply surviving the darkness.

In the fall, we planted some carrots and lettuce as an experiment to see if they would take on the cold weather and flourish in the spring. In our defense, we had no idea what they were in for. Like us, they suffered with the cold - hunkered down against the snow and bid their time until the days got longer, and the dark didn't seem quite so deep.

And yet, despite (or maybe because of) their struggle, they have emerged triumphant - became whole again as they surfaced to the sun to welcome a new season.

Wow.

It rained like crazy like crazy today, much to the relief of our eucalyptus tree that's been begging for water for months. I wish I would have read Stew's post about 20 minutes earlier, because then I would have known that it was also going to HAIL.

What?! Craziness. And painful, I might add. I panicked at first because all of our potted plants were outside, but they took the beating pretty well. Luckily I hadn't planted anything yet because I learned my lesson from last year. Nothing in the ground until the last week of April.

Hopefully we got a good amount of water in the rain barrel we just put in. We got it back in March at the annual county sale, but had to get gutters installed, which happened this past week. Sal assembled the barrel on Saturday and put it in place yesterday, just in time for the rain. I've got high hopes for this rain barrel - we'll let you know how it goes. It's got to be better than the bunch of random buckets we've been setting out on the first sign of an overcast sky.

So you may have noticed it's been almost a month since I've posted anything. This whole traveling thing we've been doing has taken a lot of time. Just returned from a week long CA trip and have finally caught up on work. I'll be playing blogger catch-up this week. There's exciting stuff going on around Wilmington, people!

Local eating in the news - again!

Ironically, we stopped our subscription to the Star News in order to reduce our waste. I typically check online about once a week to see if there's anything interesting going on, but I totally missed this article. Luckily, Trace kept us in the loop by posting it on Cricketbread. Very good stuff.

Do you ever have one of those weeks when life just completely slips by you? I try so hard not to have that happen - to at least step back and appreciate some part of each day just for the little moments it contains - but man, has time passed me by lately. I have not germinated, nor planted any seeds. I have not even purchased the peat pots and light rigging I need to do so. I have not added the mayonnaise making post I promised Trace (will make amends immediately). Okay, that's really it - maybe it just feels more like I'm way behind because the seed planting part encompasses a lot of work that I'm going to have to squeeze into my regular work week, since we're going to be gone the next three weekends. It's very doable, I just need to DO it.

Photo: Trace in the produce department of Tidal Creek. Published on the online version of Encore

They're heeeeere!

My order from Baker's Creek Heirloom Seeds arrived on Friday, a mere 5 days after placing my order online. That's fabulous customer service. All my selections were in stock, and they even included a free gift of Tropeana Round onions, which I can't find in their catalog, but I'm assuming must be the same as the Tropeana Lunga they have listed?

Since I basically have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to gardening (though I don't let that stop me!), I made a visit to our local library and picked up an armful of books on growing heirloom seed and the like. A couple of them ended up to be hugely helpful, so I'm going to buy them. Here are my favorites so far:

Seed Sowing and Saving: Step-by-Step Techniques for Collecting and Growing More Than 100 Vegetables, Flowers, and Herbs

Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening

The North Carolina Fruit & Vegetable Book

I'll probably go back and get another load of books and add more to this list next week. God, I love the library. And books in general. As a complete side - I also adore the Amazon feature that suggests other books you may like based on your shopping cart. Just by adding these three books to my cart I've already discovered like, five others I now want. But I'll check them out at the library first - Amazon doesn't always know what it's talking about.

Oh, one more useful thing that my mom got me for Christmas (thanks, mom!), is this garden journal. It's got weekly entry sections to record what you've planted, what the weather was like, etc. and it's got little tips and info specifically for North Carolina. I've been good about recording for the past two weeks, but then again, it's only mid-January. We'll see how long I can consistently keep it up.

Starting from scratch

I got my first ever Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Catalog in the mail a few weeks ago, and I've had a hard time putting it down. It's a gorgeous, loverly thing, filled with beautiful pictures of heirloom fruits, vegetables, and flowers - but the descriptions alone are enough to make you salivate. I swear I read every entry, poring over each category to pick THE seeds that were going to be fabulous in my garden this year.

We'll see - I'm not exactly an expert gardener. I haven't been a big seed starter up until now. I usually just get some already started little planties and stick them in the ground, hoping for the best. But this year, by golly, I am starting my garden from heirloom seeds. Choosing which ones, though was quite the process. I mean, there's got to be like, 300 varieties (okay, fact check - there are 175 - but it felt like 300) of just tomatoes. And they all have these tantalizing names like Missouri Pink Love Apple, and Cherokee Chocolate. How to decide?!! After much circling, and dog earing, and crossing out and recircling, I think I've finally got my crop. Here's what I finally decided to order:

One pack each:
- Snowball Self-Blanching Cauliflower
- Golden Bantam 8 Row Sweet Corn
- St. Valery Carrots
- Danvers 126 Half Long Carrots
- Cosmic Purple Carrots
- Amarillo Carrots
- Florida Market Eggplant
- Lincoln Sweet Peas
- Texas Early Grano 502 Onions
- Giant Noble Spinach
- Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkin
- Crookneck - Early Golden Summer Squash
- Zucchini - Black Beauty
- Arkansas Traveler Tomato (Pink)
- Roma Tomato
- Tappy's Heritage Tomato (Red)
- Principe Borghese Tomato (Red - cherry variety)
- Amish Paste Tomato
- Siletz Tomato (Red - early crop)
- Big Month Tomato (Red)
- Chadwick Cherry Tomato (Red)
- Golden Sunray Tomato (Orange)
- Golden Monarch Tomato (Yellow)
- Yellow Pear Tomato

Holy goodness. I'm seriously craving a tomato sandwich just writing this list. Hopefully the seeds I've chosen will be happy in my garden. I probably do not need, nor shall I be able to grow 11 varieties of tomatoes (or 4 varieties of carrots for that matter), but I just couldn't narrow my list down any more. It was hard enough to whittle down the options once I had selected my 20 favorites. I tried to contain myself on the other veggies as well, settling on just those that we eat the most.

I placed my order online at Baker Creek's website, which has tons of resources and also some great information about Baker Creek founder Jere Gettle and his wife Emilee. Precious. Seriously. You can also order or download your own catalog there if you like. Oooh, and there's also information on their Garden Shows and Heritage Day Festivals happening in the Spring. Lordy, the place is adorable - we're already planning a trip.

Updates later when the seeds arrive - we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.