Sunday, April 17, 2011

Spring Flower Fever!

We are right around the average last frost date in the Oklahoma City area (you can put your seedlings outside, if you've hardened them off!).  This past Thursday was also our fourth wedding anniversary, and Chad knows me so well.  Aside from sending beautiful flowers to work, he also gave me a $40 gift certificate to Lowe's intended for flowers around the house and yard.

Normally, I'd be spending it on all things related to vegetable gardening.  But this year, vegetables will be limited to a few pots, due to the fact that growing a baby and having a giant belly in late summer kinda takes some fun away from things like bending over to weed, harvest, and prune.

We were drawn to bold colors and selected a pot of red and orange daisies, petunias (a basket of deep purple, two six-packs of red and white striped), multicolored celosia, and a red variety and white variety of some low, small, slightly bushy looking flower whose name can't recall at the moment.  I got so excited about this and all of the flower pots we have (between our own and several this house's last occupants left behind), that I've been fishing through our seed stash pulling out all of the flowers and herbs that can be successfully sown outdoors around the last frost date.  It also comes to mind that we have a bare spot in our front flower bed... though I'm tempted to grow a few little baby sized heads of lettuce there instead of flowers, until the weather is too hot to easily grow lettuce.

One pot I'm particularly excited about is the one full of striped petunias.  I placed them in a circle near the rim of the pot, leaving a bare patch of soil in the middle where I seeded a burgundy okra plant.  I don't know how long the petunias will have their pretty blossoms, but if they last a good amount of time the okra will grow up above them and have a pretty little border.  (If they don't last very long, I'll just remove them to give the okra a little more room.)  It may not have enough room to really thrive and fruit in a pot, but I've been curious to see this burgundy okra plant since I first got the seeds.  I'm hoping it'll at least be healthy enough to put forth blooms.

I still really love vegetable gardening, but this is a fun change of pace for me, too.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Snow Day Seedlings!

Yesterday morning was officially a blizzard here in the Oklahoma City area (and much of the Midwest!).  Chad took a lot of pictures, all from the warm safety of the inside of our house... which is much warmer than our last one!

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Even our covered, screened in back porch was covered with snow!
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That meant that Ali, our indoor princess of a cat, got to walk in snow for the first time ever!  She's been pretty excited about it but won't stay out there freezing her paws for too long.

This doesn't keep me from thinking about warmer months.  I moved my seedlings away from the cold windowsill and decided to take a quick snap of them to share.
From bottom to top: Yellow Tumbling Tom tomatoes, Red Tumbling Tom tomatoes, globe basil, genovese basil, and Red Robin tomatoes.
Tiny Alpine strawberry seedlings in a Jiffy pot.
All of these varieties are ideal for containers, since that's pretty much all I'm going to do this year.  I'll probably also grow one larger determinate tomato plant and maybe some baby-sized lettuce varieties.  Simple is my motto this year!

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Diabetes Killed My Plants!

It's been months...  last growing season wasn't blogged my me at all.  I'm afraid I had a rather large issue that overshadowed everything.  I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in early May.

No, not type 2.  Type 1.  (I know at least one of you was like, "She must mean type 2." :p )

Yes, that's the autoimmune variety that used to be called "juvenile diabetes," which is more commonly developed in children, and which requires lifelong insulin therapy.  But at the age of 30, I got it.  I won't go into detail about that here, but you can check out the blog I've been keeping about it, Type 1 at 30, if you're curious.  The earliest post gives the story of my diagnosis.

I suppose the one other thing I'll say about that for now, because it's actually gardening related:

Diabetes killed my plants!!!

OK, really, it made me so preoccupied and focused that every last seedling I'd started died from neglect.  I had no garden, no potted plants, nothing.  Sometimes, your energy just has to be focused on other things... like learning how to survive without a properly functioning pancreas.

Oh, priorities!

But this year, I'm starting again... on a small scale because, again, I have something else demanding my energy: a baby due in August!

Oh, and we also moved to a new home, and I got a new job.  Can we possibly pack any more life changing events into these two years?

There's no way I'm going to be bending over to pull weeds as a great big pregnant lady, so I'm keeping it simple with potted plants and early-fruiting varieties.  Honestly, this is back to my favorite kind of gardening: small scale, simple, creative, container gardening.  *love*