For the last several days I’ve been wondering why my thumb hurts so much. Not the thumb itself but the squishy bit at the base of my thumb. What did I do? I couldn’t figure it out. It’s gone from hurting just a little to a near constant ache.
Then today I was planting more seeds in pots to start indoors. I planted saved seeds from fennel, Genovese basil, Tulsi (aka sacred basil but it isn’t really basil), tarragon from the free seeds box at the public library, and Ruby Parfait Celosia from Fedco Seeds. I covered the seeds in all their little pots, picked up the water spray bottle and…that’s why my thumb hurts! Mystery solved. Now that I know the cause, I can make sure I don’t hurt it worse.
Thankfully the peppers and tomatoes are all big enough now I can carefully water them with my small watering pot so that eliminates half of what I had been spraying before. Sadly though the jalapeños still have not come up. At this point I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to, which makes me sad. The original seeds I saved two years ago from jalapeños in my CSA box from Eduardo. We saved the seeds because he was leaving farming and we liked his peppers. Last year they sprouted right up and the plants were productive even if the peppers were not as hot as previously nor as large. These seeds are saved from what I grew last year. And nothing. I’m guessing that the original peppers were probably a hybrid variety and they have run out of oomph as their genetics fell apart. The plan is to buy jalapeños at the plant sale in May, and since the catalogue doesn’t say whether they are open pollinated, I won’t save seeds and will plan on buying open pollinated seeds from my favorite Minnesota seed company for next year’s garden. If that is the worst of the garden failures this year, then I’m doing alright.
Earlier in the week I thought I had a missing seed tray of angelica. I realized they weren’t on the shelf with all the other seeds. Did I not plant them? But I had a distinct memory of planting them. Briefly I had a horror that I planted them in pots with the lady’s mantle by mistake. The angelica instructions said surface sow and the seeds are tan and big enough to see, and I saw no tan seeds in the lady’s mantle pots. Where could they have gone? I was getting really anxious about it when I went outdoors yesterday to move all my cold stratifying seed pots to a sunny corner of the deck so I could start watering them regularly, when what do I spy? The angelica pot! And then I remembered that they needed some cold time and I put the pot outdoors after sowing the seeds.
One might say I am clearly juggling too many seed pots if I am losing track like that, but I am inclined to say it is the rest of my life that is interfering with my ability to keep track of all the seeds. If I didn’t have to keep track of going to work, making sure I don’t put my shirt and pants on inside out and backwards, or somehow knowing where almost all of the things that James misplaces are, then I wouldn’t have “lost” the angelica. But now it is found and my anxiety over it is gone. Time to find something else to worry about!
Like Mrs. Dashwood. She will be 9-years-old at the end of next week. She is still chugging along but clearly slowing down. She takes longer to leave the coop in the mornings, she spends more time sitting in the sun than running around scratching in the garden, and sometimes we see her just standing there gazing off into space. I will not be surprised to open the coop door one morning to find she keeled over in the night. That is preferable to her getting sick. It was so hard watching Elinor’s heart take several days to give out as she got slower and slower, panting laboriously yet valiantly trying to carry on. Mrs. Dashwood is not dead yet, and who knows, she might have months of elder chickenhood ahead of her.
Carrying on with my sourdough experiments, I baked a Danish rye bread this weekend. There are a few things that I didn’t get quite right, but it tastes delicious nonetheless.
We have passed the Vernal Equinox and I am hoping the wild weather swings might start becoming a little less wild. The days ahead this week look to be gradually warming up well above freezing with nights hovering just below or a few degrees above freezing. There are some chances of rain or snow, but hopefully it stays rain. We need the moisture. The ground is slowly thawing and we’ve had so little snow over the winter that we have been declared “abnormally dry,” and areas of the state are actually in moderate drought. Not good for farmers as we get closer to planting season. Think liquid thoughts for us!
Reading
- Books: my in progress pile is large and my TBR even larger so I am shuffling between books, stuck in “the middles” at the moment.
- News: The news this week was pretty crappy. Columbia University caved in to Trump’s demands. A court ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 million for its role in protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. And then there was that executive order dismantling the federal agency dedicated to funding library services. For more information about that and some concrete actions you can take, the American Library Association has got you covered. There is so much resistance happening y’all but most of the media is not reporting it. One thing that is getting some attention is lawyer hero Rachel Cohen who sent a strongly worded warning letter to her law firm colleagues, and when the firm caved in to Trump’s demands, she resigned.
Listening
- Podcast: Listening to the Land: Land as Mother with Satish Kumar. This was so good y’all. I have heard of Kumar before but knew nothing beyond that. Turns out he’s pretty amazing! A former Jain monk, he is closing in on 90 and still quite active. He is a peace and nuclear disarmament activist, founder and director of Schumacher College international center for ecological studies, author, and speaker. You may have heard of him because of his 1962 peace walk when he and E.P. Menon walked from India to Moscow, Paris, London, and Washington D.C.
- Podcast: Crazy Town: A Temporary Techno Stunt: Tom Murphy on Falling Out of Love with Modernity. Murphy is a professor of physics at University of California, San Diego. He talks about how he went from shooting lasers at the moon to trying to “solve” our energy predicament and falling out of love with modernity.
James’s Kitchen Wizardry
This past week James wizarded up some chickpea cutlets that we had for dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy. He also made some everything bagels. And for a sweet treat he made cookie dough. The vegan version of cookie dough is made from chickpeas so you can eat it and not feel too guilty! We make ours with hardly any sweetener, the chocolate chips are enough.
That definitely sounds like something I would do. I remember ordering and receiving some seeds that I now just can’t find. It’s super annoying.
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Heh, Anju, glad I am not alone on that. Also, I hope you find your missing seeds!
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Wow, you’ve had Mrs. Dashwood for nine years now? It doesn’t seem like it could have been that long that I’ve been enjoying your chicken stories!
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It’s hard to believe. It seems like just yesterday were worrying about our Dashwood chicks and stressing out over finishing up building the coop in time for them to move out of their basement pen. 🙂
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Oh, so sorry to hear about Mrs Dashwood! She’s been such a fixture here over the years. I’m still rooting for her to make a recovery and start getting up to all kinds of mischief in your garden as the days get warmer. But if she doesn’t, at least you’ve given her a much, much better life than 99.999% of chickens get to enjoy. And at least she has no idea what kind of craziness is going on out there beyond the confines of your garden. Thanks for highlighting the resistance to it—I think we need to hear more about that.
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Thanks Andrew! The old gal hasn’t given up yet 🙂 It’s so easy to believe there is no resistance happening but there is so much going on it’s almost getting hard to keep track of! Just because politicians and institutions are complying, doesn’t mean the rest of us are 🙂
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Wow, I relate to Mrs Dashwood. Substitute her name for ‘Litlove’ and you have a vivid portrait of my day to day life there, lol. I’m very glad you discovered the cause of your sore thumb. I am forever bruising myself with absolutely no recollection of how I did it. Do I go around bouncing off the furniture? I think I must! It drives me nuts that the mainstream media isn’t reporting the resistance to Trump, but on FB (wish it weren’t there, but never mind) several of my English/American friends are reporting everything they hear about, which I find very cheering. May this trickle of news become an avalanche!
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I’ve been frustrated by this too, but recently I started to wonder if perhaps it isn’t for the best, because all eyes are on the major media outlets and the less obvious conduits are still getting the word out and…maybe avoiding some of the persecution that would follow if reporting was broader? But I find it hard to get a sense of whether that could be part of the motivation or whether it’s cowardice and caving (which is obviously playing some sort of role)….cuz I’m just peering over the fence.
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You might be onto something there! It’s really hard to know what’s happening at the moment, between the censoring and the misinformation and all the white noise. Where we turn to for reliable information is definitely changing.
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Heh, I think we can all relate to Mrs. Dashwood. 🙂 I end up with mystery bruises too sometimes and other times when I am sure something is going to leave a bruise it doesn’t! Bodies are so weird.
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From the mystery of the throbbing thumb to the unravelling of a superpower: what scope. And clearly the real star of ALL this is Mrs. Dashwood. Does James use sourdough for bagels (did I ask this before? we’ve been gradually working on increasing our sourdough-ness for so long…I keep thinking we can add something new in, but then we slow down and experiments get delayed again heheh). Satish Kumar sounds amazing: I will have a look/listen! (The capitulation that really got to me was the law firm’s deal to provide all the pro-bono work to avoid persecution… or prosecution… or both… but, at the same time, I don’t see how any other response would have been effective. But the Columbia sitch is very disappointing too, agreed.)
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James does not use sourdough for the bagels. I’ve got a sourdough bagel recipe though I might try sometime but since James makes them great with yeast it’s hard to opt for a sourdough version instead since they take longer and keep me from making a whole loaf of bread 🙂
Sadly more law firms are caving in, but other firms are taking the administration to court and law students are refusing to interview at the firms who have capitulated. In spite of everything being such high stakes it is fascinating to see which businesses and institutions are complying and which ones are fighting and then the responses.
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Wait, so why did your thumb hurt? Was it from pulling the trigger on the spray bottle?
I got sad yesterday when I realized I’m missing all the plants coming up this spring at home 😞
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It’s the squeeze action from pulling the trigger on the bottle because the muscles beneath the thumb are contracting and releasing with each squeeze.
Sorry you are missing the spring plants at home. Get yourself to a park or garden so you can enjoy the plants where you are 🙂
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The flowers here are up and beautiful, but they’re not the ones I inherited with my house, the ones I have feelings for.
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Ah, yes Melanie, I can completely understand that!
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Bless Mrs. Dashwood! Still chugging along. She’s had a good life, and thanks for sharing funny stories about her and the others all these years. With all the craziness with my mom I really haven’t had much time yet to do gardening stuff. But I’m hoping that things slow down soon and I will be able to carve out time, because it brings me so much joy.
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Bless her fluffy butt, I’m going to miss her when her time comes. But I am glad to still be able to share things about her for at least a while longer 🙂 I hope things slow down for you soon and I hope your mom’s recovery is going well.
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So you mentioned Mrs Dashwood in that comment on April 3, and I don’t think you’ve mentioned she’s gone in later posts, so does that mean she’s still around? If so, how wonderful. And maybe the sunny weather will keep her around a bit longer yet.
Re this: “There is so much resistance happening y’all but most of the media is not reporting it”. As you might know, I write weekly to my Californian friend and we share what we are hearing. I sure Australian commentary on T, and she tells my how she’s seeing things, how it’s affecting friendships, how T’s policies are affecting her family (particularly a daughter’s job in social justice/diversity area), and the podcasts she listens to. One week she feels a little bit up and the next week, furious and down. Besides what it all means politically, living with your emotions battered about like that is just exhausting. I hope the warmth and the opportunity to get out more into the green, mitigates some of that effect for you.
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Yes, Mrs. Dashwood is still chugging along. She is doing much better now that it has warmed up, winter was hard on all of us this year!
Sounds like your CA friend and I are having similar times of it. It is exhausting but I think I’m finally managing to (mostly) keep my balance. I hope your friend is too!
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