Pisces Moon Studio

With the gracious help of #1 son, the first batch of purchased seedlings are potted and ready. These all came from Tasteful Garden, a plant nursery near Anniston, about 60 miles east of here.

All my herbs succumbed to the heat and drought last year, so I replaced the Greek oregano, spearmint, and chocolate mint. I added a lime basil. Still want to get a lemon balm, but dill and parsley just would not grow for me last year. I killed four or five dill plants.

I got two Romaine lettuces and a couple of French sorrels. The sorrel is completely new; I’ve never even tried it but it sounded interesting.

And so far there are two types of tomatoes: Early Girl and Rutgers. I’m going to start several other, more exotic types from seed in the next few days. My reasoning is that these early tomatoes will bear by June and then go more-or-less dormant during the heat of the summer, just about the time the Heat Wave and other high-temperature plants should be beginning to fruit. We’ll see if the plan works.

Also need to start from seed: squash, peppers, and eggplants. And the Berry Bed came today, the strawberries yesterday, so those get planted this weekend.

Ack! How did it get to be spring?

After last year’s strawberry disasters (flood early in the season, then drought and heat that killed the survivors) I ordered my strawberry plants back in January to be shipped the last week of March.

Oops. Here it is the last week of March, and I don’t have a bed ready for them.

Late last week I realized this and began to panic. I picked a place for the berry bed and then started checking on renting a tiller to dig up the grass and make it ready. My husband was adamant that I was not going to run a tiller; that he and our son would do it. But they too have been so busy that there has been absolutely no time to even think about it yet.

Enter The Catalog.

Gardener’s Supply Company had this really cool raised berry bed in the catalog that arrived Saturday. Just the thing! No digging required, takes a cubic yard of soil, and can hold up to 50 plants. I can set it up by myself and get it ready for the plants. Sold! Went onto the website and ordered one. Send it 3-day express, please, because the strawberries are coming!

Ahem.

Sunday morning I got a spooky call from the Fraud Prevention department of my credit card company.

“Did you by any chance just order $1300 worth of flowers from Flowers.com?”

They denied that fraudulent charge and blocked my card. Unfortunately, that caught the order for the Berry Bed in the block as well, so when they opened today I had to call and explain what happened and make alternate payment arrangements.

Sigh. At least the credit card company realized that this was waaaaaay out of the ordinary and flagged it as suspicious.

And now my Berry Bed is on its way.

We have a new Whole Foods Market that opened in our city at the end of February. My husband and I went to visit it the first Saturday it was open, but because it was (predictably) packed to the rafters, we didn’t stay long or get much of an idea of what was there.

Today we went back. At the grand opening they’d had outdoor tables of herbs and vegetable plants from one of my favorite suppliers, The Tasteful Garden. I wanted to see if they still had them, and Dear Husband was looking for natural peanut butter. And chocolate chip cookies, but we won’t mention those.

Yes, the tables of plants were still there! We browsed outside a bit and picked up a couple of pots of flowers as well as some lime basil, some lettuce, and some fine sturdy Rutgers tomato plants. Placing these in the basket, we entered the store.

He leaned over to me and said in a low voice: “Do you get the feeling that everybody in here earns $100,000 more than we do?”

Me: “Makes me want to run right out and buy a Volvo.”

Him (snorting): “Makes me want to go buy a NASCAR t-shirt.”

This one is based on the pattern on the floor of Ely Cathedral in England, constructed by Sir Gilbert Scott during his restorations in 1870. The original labyrinth is square; I distorted the pattern to make it fit on a 4″ x 6″ postcard.