The raised beds are planted and have started growing. I still have a few more rows of waxed beans to put in but otherwise everything is in. Now all that remains is keeping the local wildlife from chowing down on what’s coming up. Lately I’ve spotted a red fox on occasion short-cutting it across my lawn. With any luck he’ll keep the population of garden chompers such as woodchucks, squirrels etc down to a minimum.
Along with the tried and true peas, lettuce, carrots and potatoes, I’ve put in a row of beets and swiss chard and will watch what they do. Last year I tried some onions but apparently have no talent for growing them as they stayed the same size through the whole summer, never growing an inch. I’ve put a bush cucumber in a pot and covered it with mesh wiring to ward off hungry critters.
For flowers, I’ve planted the usual petunias and pansies. I also bought a packet of an old-fashioned climbing petunia seeds as well as some black velvet nasturtiums which I’ve sprinkled around in various corners.
Weeding is always a trick as some weeds such as goutweed, bermuda grass and zagreb coreopsis (this last one is my fault, it looked so pretty at the greenhouse but now it’s trying to eat my flower garden alive!) send out runners and propagate like crazy. If I can, I try to dig up the whole plant but if it’s mixed in with other plants I do want, then I trim back the greenery rather than risk disturbing the roots of the good plants. I allow most of the clippings to fall back into place and dump any roots I pull up underneath the pine trees.
Bumblebees which have been very scarce for at least the past five years have suddenly re-surged. I’ve been seeing the plump queens all over the place this past spring far more than I’ve encountered in quite a while, so I’m guessing last year’s nestings must have been very successful. Being sensitive to insect stings I find myself dodging a lot but it is nice to see these important pollinators returning.
As always, I keep my fingers crossed when gardening, hoping for a good year.
Nearing the end of April, crocuses and daffodils are popping up and forsythia bushes are in full bloom. You’d never know it was spring with the two inches of snow I woke up to this morning.
Thankfully it melted away by midday. This is the time of year when I pull out the old packages of seeds I bought last year (and before) to see if they will still sprout. Since I have small raised beds rather than large fields, it’s inevitable that I will have seed packets with a generous amount of seeds still left in them.
So how long do seeds remain viable? It varies, of course, depending on the species and how the seeds are stored over the winter. A cool dry place is often recommended. Most seed companies will have dates printed on the packages and on rare occasions how long the seeds will remain viable. Otherwise, it might be a good idea to write the date of purchase on the package.
When it comes to annual flowers, they are generally good from one to three years. Perennials, slightly longer, at two to four years. There’s plenty of info on the Net about vegetable seeds:
Bush & pole beans – 2 years
Broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower (along with most brassicas) – 3 to 5 five years
Carrots – 3 years
Sweet corn – 1 year
Cucumbers – 3 years
Leeks, onions – 2 to 3 years
Lettuce – 3 years
Melons – 3 years
Oriental greens – 3 years
Parsley – 2 years
Parsnips – 1 year
Peas – 2 years
Peppers – two years
Radishes – 4 years
Spinach – 1 season
Squashes – 3 to 4 years
Swiss Chard and beets – 2 years
Tomatoes – 3 years
Turnips – 4 years
These are averages and you will likely find some of your favorite seeds either don’t last as long or else far exceed the average given above.
This leads one to wonder what the oldest seed ever sprouted was. So far, it’s been a 2000 year old date palm seed found in the Middle East. Older plant material has been recovered and viable plants grown but not from their seeds, rather from genetic material recovered from inside the seeds, preserved in the permafrost in Siberia for around 31,000 years. Pretty impressive!
With the list above I know when it’s best to toss the old seed and buy new ones. Saving seed from the plants you grow is tricky. This is because many seeds offered in catalogs are F1 hybrids or first generation hybrid. This is nothing new. Farmers and plant breeders have been hybridizing flowers and vegetables long before genetic engineering came about. Crossing two different breeds of the same plant (such as tomatoes) will produce a new plant with characteristics which are combinations of the parent plants and often are more vigorous. The down side of course is that they do not breed true and seeds collected from the hybrid will revert back to one of the grandparent plants which may not have the traits you’re looking for in your favorite veggie. If you want plants which breed true, you need to purchase seed listed as ‘open pollinated’ in seed catalogs.
If you’re only interesting in growing tasty food or attractive flowers, it doesn’t really matter whether you grow F1 hybrids or open pollinated varieties. But if you’re into seed saving then you’re going to have to go with the open pollinated. As concerns about food security grow, there has been an increase in interest on how to save seed, ensuring unique varieties are preserved for future generations of growers.
Whichever choice you make, have fun growing your own fresh flowers and vegetables. Once it’s done snowing of course.
One of the first flowers to appear around my home are snowdrops beating out the crocuses by nearly a month. These rugged little plants begin poking up near the foundation of my home as soon as the snow melts back.
And sometimes even before.
The three-petaled blossoms with an inner bell are small but white with a little green chevron on the bell.
These durable flowers grow from bulbs which can be purchased online. I’ve seen them survive a surprising amount of abuse from cold weather. If they get snowed on, they just wait patiently until the snow melts off and they rise back up as if nothing had happened.
If you plant a group of bulbs, they will begin spreading. If you get too many, they can be transplanted by just digging them up once the blossom has gone by and before the leaves die back. They don’t seem to object to this. A number of years ago one of my siblings was raking vigorously where I had just planted some new bulbs. He inadvertently raked up the bulbs (they are very small) not noticing them and dumped the bulbs leaves and all into the woods. The bulbs were not fazed even slightly by this but took root and are now blooming just underneath the pine trees.
Snowdrops are always a welcome sight in late March or early April, giving that little promise to us that while spring seems slow in coming, it is here.
While working on my novel, which involves ancient gods manifesting themselves here on Earth in modern times, I’ve had occasion to rewrite some of the ancient myths which lie behind many of these gods. This is to help the divinities to make more sense to modern readers.
There have been other books which place the old gods in more modern settings. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is a good example. The gods are given contemporary garb and are in competition with newer gods. For younger readers there is the Percy Jackson series. I choose to keep the gods in their traditional roles but have their legends reflect modern discoveries. For example Ouranos (better known to snickering teens everywhere as Uranus) is an ancient Titan Who is millions of years old but in the story has already Transcended so He’s not seen in the novel, only mentioned.
Rewrites of myths are nothing new. In ancient times, such stories were originally told orally and would be altered to suit the audience listening to the tales. There was no centralized religious doctrine which would have standardized the legends.This is why you often see more than one origin for a god. Dionysus is most commonly portrayed as the son of Zeus by a mortal woman called Semele. But other stories have Him as the son of Persephone by Zeus, an origin which no doubt raised a few eyebrows as Persephone was the daughter of Zeus by Demeter Who happens to be a sister of Zeus.
Athena no longer springs full grown from the head of Zeus. Instead she is the daughter of Metis who was an earlier wife of Zeus. As a young goddess, She watches Her parents quarrel and become estranged over the War with the Titans, which Metis advised against. After Metis’s warnings are borne out by the massive disruption of global ecosystems and human societies which was the end of the Ice Age, She quits Her throne in disgust and Transcends which is when Hera becomes the new consort of Zeus.
Minor tales come in for a rewrite as well. The Graeae sisters were originally portrayed as immortal beings sharing one tooth and one eye between Them. This odd characteristic is thought by some to indicate that the single eye and tooth may have been a source of oracular powers. Since the stories have long since become detached from the cultures they were a part of, these details have lost whatever meaning they had. I rewrote the story in the following manner.
The Graeae were daughters of Ceto and Phorcys Who were sea gods. When They were born, the Graeae had Their teeth but possessed no eyes, only empty sockets. Their mother Ceto went to the god Hephaestus, asking the Master Craftsman of the gods if He would create eyes for Her children so They could see. Hephaestus crafted a set of eyes for each of the sisters and all was well for a while. But the sisters got careless with Their eyes, playfully swapping them around or juggling them. This eventually resulted in the eyes being lost or broken one by one until the Sisters had only the one eye left. When Ceto returned to Hephaestus for replacement eyes, He was infuriated over how carelessly His creations had been handled and refused to make new ones. So, to this day, the Graeae must make do with the one eye.
The gorgons have a similar jumble of tales. In one, only Medusa has the power to turn Her victims to stone, the result of having violated the sanctity of one of Athena’s temples by having sex with Poseidon, which angered Athena, Who changed the once beautiful woman into a hideous monster. Other tales have three gorgons, Stheno, Euryale and Medusa, all born hideous with snakes for hair. Of the trio, only Medusa is mortal and can be killed, though no explanation of why she was mortal was given. I amended this by writing all three were immortal, but Perseus was given the great Harpe sword by his father Zeus. The Harpe sword is portrayed as a divine weapon, able to slay divinities as well as mortals and it was this he used to destroy Medusa.
Lastly comes Odin. Legends portray Him and His brothers as having killed Ymir, a primeval androgenous being, said to be the first giant. The divine siblings then dismember Ymir and create the world with His body parts. This has been rewritten as Ymir still being an ancient giant but living in already existing world. One of His roles was leader of the Wild Hunt. When He finally Transcended, He turned over control of the Wild Hunt to Odin, Who’s been conducting it ever since. And what exactly is the Wild Hunt? Well, it’s not what you might think.
The local recycling station as well as the local food coop both have shelves dedicated for books people can drop off or pick up if they want. It’s a good way to acquire a book free of charge to add to your collection or return to the discard shelf if it doesn’t pass muster. I have gotten a pretty good number of free books to add to my collection in this way. The latest one I picked up is titled The Curiosities Of Food or The Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom by Peter Lund Simmonds. As can probably be surmised from the long title, this was a reprint of a book originally published in 1850.
The book makes for surprisingly droll reading. The author compiles an exhaustive list of all the different types of food; birds, reptiles, mammals, fish, mollusks and even insects from all over the world (as it was in his time) along with how they are cooked (or not). With a certain amount of dry humor he describes the preparation of certain dishes by locals and leaves it to you to decide if it’s actually something you want to try or not.
One anecdote he collected from someone who had gone to China described the unusual presentation of a covered dish, unusual because dishes were usually served uncovered at Chinese meals. The dish, when the lid was quickly removed, proved to contain dozens and dozens of live baby crabs which proceeded to make their escape while guests snatched them up and devoured them. The visiting gentleman was game enough to grab a few, pronouncing them ‘soft and gelatinous’ (but didn’t indicate if they tasted any good) but stopped when he got a painful claw pinch on his lip from the third. I’ll pass.
After coming across such disconcerting entries as how delicious Passenger Pigeons are and that South Africans occasionally dined on quagga steaks, I moved onto the section covering fish and came across a reference to isinglass. While I had heard the word before, I had just assumed it was some sort of glassware. Turns out, it’s actually a product made from fish.
Isinglass is a substance created from the dried swim bladders of fish. A form of collagen, it can be used as glue, but also as a clarifying agent in wine and beer. Once processed, it has no fishy flavor (which is why your beer doesn’t taste fishy) and has been used for thousands of years. In Roman times, it was used as an ingredient in patching up head wounds and street magicians would coat their feet with it before doing their fire-walking tricks. In the Middle Ages, it was used to help gold dust adhere to manuscripts being illuminated.
Vegans may wail about dried swim bladders from fish in their beer but there are alternatives, of course. Whether they are a tasty substitute or not, I’m not able to judge as I don’t drink. But that’s just a personal choice which has nothing to do with obsessing about possible animal bits in any of my food. In fact, if you read some of the information online, there’s actually not much of anything that’s totally free of insect contamination, especially with the vast amount of food processing done by agribusinesses. Read too much of this stuff and you’re likely to wind up not eating much of anything. Ignorance really is bliss in this case.
Still after reading Mr. Simmonds book, it’s apparent humans will eat pretty much anything that doesn’t eat them first. No matter what we pop into our mouths, adding extra flavor to our cuisine is important. Salt, herbs, spices, sauces, gravies get added in varying amounts to perk up a meal. In ancient Rome and around the Mediterranean, the flavoring of choice was something called garum. This is a fermented sauce made from fish parts. The production of the sauce was a reeky process, causing its makers to be banished to the edges of cities but once the sauce finished its fermentation process, its flavor became subtle and mild (and presumably not as reeky). Enthusiatically embraced by most Romans, it occupied much the same place in cookery that garlic does today.
Frankly I think I’ll pass on both but I’m probably just being fussy.
A condiment that my mother’s father was fond of was horseradish. He grew it himself and ground it up to serve as a little side dish for himself at dinnertime (no one else was willing to touch the stuff apparently). This turned out to be a recipe for disaster (of a minor sort). My grandmother was in the habit of serving mashed potatoes in a side dish as well instead of directly on the plate. One fine day my grandfather was lecturing the kids about something and eating mashed potato while he did so. My mother says at one point he mistakenly took a heaping spoonful of horseradish instead of potato. The kids all watched in fascination while he did this, no one shouting a warning to poor old Granddad. Of course, there was the inevitable explosion (*@#&, Why didn’t somebody say something?). I smell payback here somewhere, I think.