Well, ok - more like Bonnie's Windowsill.
Don't know what hit me. Never had much of a green thumb, but one afternoon I was making a big pot of my favorite clean-out-the-fridge soup & instead of just chucking the seeds from the acorn squash & cutting up the garlic that had wandered to the back of the produce drawer and started to sprout as I usually would, I pulled out the pots (I failed geraniums 101 - some friends gave me a half-dozen, and simply couldn't bring myself to not water them, which I'm told you have to do rather assiduously with geraniums, they like it dry), stuck some of the squash seeds in the dirt, and put the garlic in a wine glass with some water.
Now, as you can see, my wine glass runneth over. And I think EVERY single squash seed I planted sprouted. Couldn't believe it when they started coming up - it was like, nothing happened for a week and then some, then all the sudden, pop pop pop pop pop, up they all started to come! If I'd known that was going to happen, I wouldn't have planted so many.
Tonight I did some thinning (boy, that felt brutal - but I had something like 2 dozzen seedlings split among 3 pots, I put a few in other pots but I don't think a private, non-farmer type individual needs 2 dozen squash plants, plus I only had so many pots & so much windowsill so some had to go) & transplanting. Now the garlic is in pots. Doing a little internet reading I see I'm doing it all bass-ackwards with the garlic, you're supposed to plant them early in the winter, outside, so they sit dormant all winter, and it's the cold that triggers the individual cloves to start splitting once the ground warms up & they start to grow. Tomorrow I need to get little stakes for them because the little squashlets ARE starting to flop over just as Claire said they would.
Jeeze. Would you listen to me? Like I NEEDED another hobby! I don't understand how people have time for those TV thingamajigs.
I guess that between too much reading of Claire's Garden - fun reading about her planning for Spring, how thoroughly I enjoyed that nice day of gardening at Sebago last fall, and the fact that I'm dating a guy who actually considered being a forestry major at one point in his life & really likes gardening (although he hasn't really got one right now) the idea has been planted (ha ha) that growing things might be fun.
Other than that - hey, look, it snowed for real!
Ah, just kidding - that was from last February's blizzard. Here was todays:
Today we just had a light powdering - but it is reassuring to get some little taste of winter. I'm a big fan of warm weather, but I do like to get one or two good snows. So far this winter, I think we'd only had 2 snowfalls. One was so short that if you blinked at the wrong moment, you missed it entirely, and I don't know if it even got recorded. The other one was a little longer but didn't stick.
Today's was just enough to make it at least feel like now we're having a proper winter.
I found myself thinking during my long solo paddle this weekend - I wonder if the Hudson will even get into the business it usually gets into in the spring where the tides get overwhelmed by the snowmelt & the currents feel like one long, long ebb? One that speeds up & slows down on the tidal cycle, but never quite flows north.
Always made for sweet circumnavigation timing - the usual timing required starting out by paddling south to the Battery with the flood rising against you, but in the spring, that runoff effect ended up helping you out a lot on that leg. At 26 miles, it still wasn't a float trip, but if you were used to doing it the regular way, it FELT kinda floaty!
Won't see that this year.
Jamaica Bay will have a new set of spring rhythms for me to learn, though. I'm looking forward to that - the spring migration, the return of the seasonal paddlers and sailors (I'm particularly looking forward to the last, bringing, as it will when the water warms up in June, the chance to learn to sail a little boat) - and oh yes, gardening...and I better make nice with the gardening committee...maybe that way I can actually have somewhere to move at least a couple of these squash plants if I can actually keep 'em going until the spring!
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