The End of A Season

The end of one season is tangled with the beginning of another.  I don’t ever really put down my trowel and walk away from the garden.  But there are times when I do a lot less that could be considered gardening.  Now with my Hippy Hot Hut (greenhouse) the lines could become blurred even more. 

Seed Starting

I usually start onions in flats in late December or the first of January and I did this year as well.  While I was starting the onions and going down and fussing with them I just couldn’t pass up making a couple of carrot and beet buckets and Monday I’ll be seeding up a few salad bowls.

My long time friend and neighbor  KathyB. has been in a contest with Vickie, a blogger from Texas, all about trapping tunneling vermin, Kathy moles and Vickie golphers.  Kathy ran out of moles to trap because they ran down the highway to here.  They even got in my greenhouse…

Look at this – a tunnel in one of my flats!  This beats all doesn’t it?!

Oh wait, it’s just a clump of seeds breaking through.  Yes, I did plant them a bit thick, but they were old, well past their “usual seed life”, I didn’t expect them to all come up. 

If I don’t use up a packet of seeds, I save them for future planting, and typical of me in just about anything, sometimes I buy way more than I need or can get to.   I thought I used up all my old seed, past or quickly approaching their usual seed life,  last year, but clearly that was a fantasy.  But this year I am determined to get down to just holding fresher seeds.  However, I was a girl raised by a Great Depression mom, I have a tough time just throwing things out.  Green moldy things out of the refrigerator is one thing but when seeds go bad they don’t smell and they don’t get furry.  Just because the packets and my gardening information say things like, “usual seed life”, well heck,  nothing is usual around here and didn’t I hear about seeds growing that were found in tombs?

The “usual” is based on percentage of germination and is based on averages.  I have found that some seed life life-times are just precautionary tales.  I’ve had seed nearly ten years old before come up at a fifty percent rate.  But, only some things and only when well stored.

Some seed, no matter what you do to store it, totally lives up to its predicted short seed-life.  Onion seed is one of those hard to hold seed. I make sure I have fresh seed but I will carry it over into a second year.  Last year I couldn’t get my mitts on certain onion varieties when I wanted to seed my flats so I ordered onion seeds in mid summer for planting this winter, technically it is old.  But I’ve got a pretty good rate going, better than nothing or getting it too late and the less than stellar germination rate could be attributed to over zealous heat mat, well the heat mat had the right temp settings, problem comes when the sun is beating on them, the heat mat doesn’t turn into a cooling mat.

In a very non-scientific way and not keeping any records to speak of other than the ones written on grey matter,  I have been running this experiment for a very long time.  About three years into being a seed buying gardener – um somewhere ’round nineteen-seventy-eight/nine.  Parsnip is another seed that doesn’t go much farther than its predicted one year seed-life, it just plain has a stinky germination rate no matter what. 

So I have and will have a few more flats this year of “will he or won’t he” seedlings as I try to cull out any old seed.  If I think I have the space to mess with it, I usually will, I’ve also been known to coddle a dying plant, its just the way I am.  Underdogs stick together I guess eh?  (Me and bad seed, me and the Seahawks, me and …..)

Pruning

Pruning season has started, sometimes I, we, Bet, don’t get to it until later in January and spread it out ’til late February sometimes March.  But I’m shooting for early this year.  If they are all pruned and ready to go, dormant spraying them can pulled off better.  I get that most places (as in cold and frozen for the whole season) are better waiting ’til nearly bud break, but in the PNW bugs and fungi nearly grow year round.  We get so much rain right around the normal time to spray that I have managed to go right past being able to spray.  I’d rather come back through the trees and spray a second time if the rain stops long enough.

Second reason I want to get them done or close to it this weekend, we have more snow predicted, a little this this weekend, a lot mid-week (usually that means we won’t get any) and I need to make sure that the trees that held onto their leaves get done first.  In November we got dumped on and it just so happened that because we had a warm wet fall many of our trees hung on to their leaves, so I was out in the night whapping the snow off of the trees.  As romantic as it was, I would prefer being inside sipping cocoa or taking a leisurely stroll in the snowy moonlight.

When I started this writing, I had one tree done.  Dirt and Bet joined me Saturday and we now have only three of the big ol’ hundred-plus year olds to do and then a few youngin’s.  The major leaf-holding trees are done, so I’m sure that means that we won’t get any snow now and everyone can blame me.

We opting for going with the whole moon sign thing this year, maybe I’ll be better at it than last year.  So no pruning today, Sunday, instead Dirt and Bet offed a couple freeloaders.  And I cleaned, expecting to process some of those freeloaders but it began to snow too much and we didn’t have the freezer supplies we thought.  But it is nice to have the freeloader numbers down some, maybe the others will try and make themselves scarce, knowin’ what’s in store for them and all.    Tomorrow Bet and I will do a little seedin’ of the salad bowls and some more perennials perhaps.  I do know that I need to cut starts of my geraniums soon so they don’t take up so much space and can get a good go of new season growth. 

Sorta like the prunin’ God does eh?  He prunes so that hopefully we have a good go at the new season of growth.  I’ve been tryin’ to keep up on daily readings and the ones that are really snipping at me are the ones out of First John.  But this post about planting seeds and prunin’ trees is long enough already and I sorta just wanna stare a the falling snow in the twilight and sip my chai tea (which I don’t usually like but that’s what this season is all about, stuff I think I don’t like mixed with the stuff I do).  Have a good rest of the evening Clever Reader, or better yet, enjoy whatever time of day this gets to you.