Small garden, but grand pleasure

Hmm, I should make a gardening-themed userpic.

I made some white bean minestrone last night because I'd been craving food with tomatoes in it, and soup sounded good, too. I was able to use a smidge off the basil plant, and part of the celery plant that I re-rooted from grocery store celery. I've also been able to start harvesting lettuce off of one of the re-rooted lettuce plants. So if you've ever wondered if any of those "turn these kitchen scraps back into plants!" things work, I suppose the answer is yes, although the re-rooted celery is mostly leaves and small stalks. I keep on screwing up the re-rooting of scallions, though. They should be pretty easy, but I've been negligent about changing out their water and getting them back into the dirt.

This morning I noticed that two little tomato plants have sprouted up among a couple of the other plants, most likely a product of applying worm dirt to all of the plants.

The plastic worm bin that my friend Do gave me several years back is seeming like it will be just the right size for one person's worth of kitchen scraps. I modified it from the original, adding a second tray and a whole lot of additional ventilation, so that I can rotate the two trays and add scraps to one level while the worms eat away on the other level.

With all of the recent rain, everything is green and growing. I'm going to have to find a larger container for the tomato plant fairly soon. Most likely I will just sacrifice one of my five-gallon buckets for the job.

Maybe I will have the energy and presence of mind to take a photo of things this evening.

The gardening dilemma

So, here's a photo of Emma helping me out with my dilemma:



So many packets of seeds. So very many. Nowhere to sow them any time in the near future. It's making me wonder - how do other gardeners manage their seeds? I am late in figuring this out, but clearly it makes sense to label them with the year they were acquired. What to do with older seeds, or things I don't see myself trying to grow in the future? Thoughts? I must confess that part of me is tempted to just take the entire lot and dump it into the worm bin. And yet - every packet was acquired with some sort of intention, at some point. Often, the packets remain because I only needed a small number of seeds. Other times, I never had the right space or time to plant the thing. This does not seem like a good way to garden. Too much misdirected energy.

And yet otherwise, things on the porch are looking quite happy:



Here's an exciting corner:


In the background, the bay bush that was looking dead from the frost has re-sprouted. That plant has been a tough fighter, again and again. Bonsai Bay Bush. I have more than enough bay leaves at the moment, so it will have plenty of time to keep on growing. In the foreground, a lavender plant, plus a volunteer tomato, germinated from the worm bin dirt. Sometimes I feel like the worms are bastards for not gobbling up all of the seeds from the vegetable matter I give them. But they make such tremendously good dirt, and the vegetables love it.