Briar helpfully alerted me to a potential friend carefully crossing the back fence today! What a magnificent neighbor. Turns out a few peach flowers survived. The ones with dropped petals are quite striking with pale tips over maroon backgrounds!I believe this is the annual (?) Cardamine sp from nearby seeded into the prickly pear planter. Abby has kindly identified this as a human-introduced species Armeria serpyllifolia, thyme-leaved sandwort. It isn’t from North American originally but doesn’t seem to dramatically disturb the landscape. This one may be an introduced chickweed. But a fuzzy one, not Stellaria media. More baby inland sea oat seedlings in a second pot!myMultiple baby native Rosa sp from Fannin Co TX. Thanks Mom!This seems big enough to be the persimmon I actually planted??Seedlings in false gaura pot, but not sure they look right. Oklahoma penstemon given to me by a kind fellow Norman citizen!Maybe smartweed amongst the Chenopodium. We shall see. A Datura maybe?? The label fell out of this pot. Anybody recognize this seed?I am informed the mustard leaf garnish is from garden and that the soup contains poblanos from last year from the freezer.
The experiment of minimal seedling disturbance is going well. Only the tomatillos (both varieties) are really too too leggy but I think we didn’t get them to the good strong light soon enough. We added soil up to the base of leaves on everyone.
I was putting some books on my desk shelf this evening when in my peripheral vision I noticed more purple plant growing light visible than should be. I keep a towel over it to protect our eyes. I examined the gap in the cover more closely and realized Shackleton was curled up contentedly on the heating pad, which is set to a cozy 85 degrees F. There’s even a bit of dust (spilled potting soil). Shackleton napping peacefully with the last unsprouted pepper pot, bathed in a purple glow. Busted, buddy. The nice thing about this tray is that I can slide it out to check on seedlings AND clever cats. He did a big back arching stretch of casual innocence. Shackleton emerges from his vacation tray, complete with unnecessary UV exposure. 🙄Paula moved Shacks back to his actual cat heating pad on the couch. I put a bunch of empty pots in the tray with the one seedling pot and put more up in front of the towel-curtain, as well as a series of inconvenient containers. Hopefully this will persuade Shacks to stick to his heated bed or at least clogging up our amplifier with his hair.
Shackleton and Tuqu are eager to assist in examination of seedlings. Three varieties of peppers have sprouted! This kind of help is why they (the plants, not the cats) are going immediately to the cat free guest room.The Chimayó seedling has extremely fuzzy roots! Maybe because there was humidity trapped by the yogurt container lids? I have removed the lids now so they can get air flow to prevent damping off.
Experimenting with deep pots and shallow soil. These are yogurt containers. Since peppers and ground cherries can grow roots from the stem, as the plants grow I plant to add more soil. This hopefully reducing the number of repotting events that need to occur.
We thought it was supposed to rain today, so yesterday we picked up all the tomato cages and put all the vegetable debris in the city compost pile. (I don’t know that ours gets hot enough to kill any diseases.). We piled the dead marigolds on the bed where we’ll put peppers next year. We put some sugar pea seeds there to see if the debris will shelter them. We took the plastic off the greens so they could get rain. We put cilantro seeds everywhere and carrot seeds among the greens. For Thanksgiving, Paula started our Corrientes cowpeas soaking. The Turkey is from Paula’s aunt and uncle in Texas where they raise some. All the veggies in the beans are from the farm share except garden poblanos. Wes used some store apples and store ham as flavors. But otherwise the veggies are all our garden or the farm share!
Shackleton inspected sweet peppers as I brought them in on a red tray. The long skinny red peppers are Corbaci sweet peppers. The round dark purple peppers are Purple Beauty sweet peppers.
Tonight contains garden onions. The Brussels sprouts in the left side are topped with sweet Corbaci peppers from the garden. Paula made a bean and potato chunky soup. The giant beans are Royal Corona beans, a type of runner bean, which came in our first Bean Club shipment.