Monday, April 13, 2015

Garden Countdown

Today was Laundry Day! Hooray!

Actually, I dislike laundry enough that Laundry Day is really Laundry Half-Week because I never do laundry so it piles up to the point where it takes several days to get through it.  So it's Laudry Day Two, actually. That's how I spent my afternoon, washing and hanging and folding laundry. Fun, right?

While I did laundry, I also soaked the garden beds again. I feel like we're getting a late start to planting, but the plant nurseries are still filled with early cool season plants like chard and kale. They have tomatoes, of course, because people who garden are crazy and would probably buy tomato plants in the dead of winter if they could find them for sale.  So of course, that's what Dave and I mostly bought on our jaunt to the nursery today: tomato plants. We bought maybe six kinds of tomato plants? And we also bought peppers, lots of types of peppers, including one variety of jalapeno with a name that Dave thought was funny, "Mucho Nacho." We also picked up a six pack of Italian basil and a bunch of other single pots of herbs like cilantro, lemon verbena, pineapple mint, and who knows what else.

Oh! And we bought a couple of six-packs of pansies, including a kind of dark maroon pansy with frilly petals. I'd never seen those before. And we got snapdragons and impatiens, too, I think. I forget.

We also picked up a new rake and a sprinkler. It's gardening season!

After our little nursery run, we came home and immediately began dinner. We had planned on tacos tonight, so while Dave made salsa with our onions, jalapenos, tomatoes, and cilantro, I cooked up some Quorn crumbles with a mix of things intended to recreate a low-salt taco seasoning. (Tonight, I tossed in onion, garlic, roasted garlic powder, oregano, cumin, nutritional yeast, cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, pepper, smoked paprika, celery seed, vegetarian Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and Better than Bouillon low-sodium vegetable broth. It was not bad, though I wish I could just buy a low- or no-sodium packet of taco seasoning instead of having to go all mad scientist.) I shredded some cabbage, grated some cheddar cheese, Dave set the table, and we were in business!  The taco business!

After dinner, I did some dishes and started another load of laundry. (Our tiny washing machine hooks up to the kitchen sink, so it gets to be a little bit of a dance, water-wise.) Then I went and sat outside for awhile, chatting with Dave about what and when we should start planting. (We have some nights in the low 30s coming up this week, and I don't want to risk a frost getting our little babies.) When we came in, Dave got out his clarinet and I sat down to watch an episode of Bob's Burgers. We paused to sort through our old seeds. Why in the world did we ever think we'd need so many packets of radish and beet seeds? Ay yi yi.

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