whoops

It turns out I can only keep up with about 2/3 of my life at any given time. I have an unpleasant suspicion that this is how adulthood works for everyone. Anyway, this past week I have been keeping up with the writing part, and not so much with the gardenblogging part. So here, have a few instances of photos from the last week!

 My potato plants love life! I am looking forward to the treasure hunt part of the season.

 The oats are a perfect stalking place for a predator! They're getting close to harvest now, actually. Kind of exciting. In front of them, from this angle, you can see some onions that are blooming and whose seeds I hope to collect so I can start tiny onion sets inside and then set them out to overwinter, possibly in this very bed. (They're a pretty standard yellow cooking onion, already here when I moved in, no variety name known.)

Chard going vigorously to seed! The plants are taller than I am. The flowers are miniscule but actually smell nice if you get close enough to them. Again, I want to save seed from these, since they flourished in the garden over winter with pretty much no care whatsoever.

The first green zebra tomato! And the chard stalks in the background. By the time A is home to enjoy them, I'm hoping this guy will be ready.

So I have a mushroom farm now. Oak is traditional (and ideal) for shiitakes but other hardwoods can also be used, and somebody about a mile up the road had just cut down a big old maple and wanted people to take the wood away. H gets a share of the mushrooms when they fruit (probably next spring), because she ducked out to grab logs when I was still at the office.

The first blossoms on my jasmine! There aren't enough of them yet to make the fragrance really overwhelming, but even just these first few are wonderful. And there are several nice clusters of buds getting ready to add to them.

Tiger Eye dry shelling beans! Mulched with grass straw (as are the pumpkins and the strawberries, elsewhere). I just need to remember that all that biomass is useful, and then maybe I won't resent the lawn so much. These guys are getting started late because I wanted to stagger them with the velour fresh-eating green beans, but those might have been planted too early to really thrive. boo.

Hey speaking of beans, these are garbanzos! (And exuberant potatoes as a backdrop.) They remain a really neat crop and I'm excited to see them starting to blossom. They've just been watered in this pic, but even when they haven't, the leaves feel cool and slightly damp to the touch. They're beautiful little plants, about a foot high and self-supporting. I definitely want to grow them again.

Food, more food, more food, DO NOT EAT. This is monkshood, or wolfsbane, or aconite. (Behind it, those lush succulent leaves belong to some calla lilies.) The bed right in front of the front door says "do not touch." Because I'm apparently an antisocial socialist.

Junuary has settled in with a vengeance -- we're looking at lows under 50 the next few nights -- which is putting a damper on my plan to set out the bell peppers this weekend. But maybe once that clears up. It'll clear up eventually, right? wuff.