Design

The luminous tans, browns, and greens of winter are evident here. Our winters don't feature snow or ice (very often), but the colors of winter are what stand out. Broomsedge is a beautiful tawny gold, the frost-bitten cool-season grasses are a dull green, and evergreens have a color spectrum of their own. The drips and drabs of dead foliage await cleanup or decay, but remind me that the renewal of spring growth is only a couple of months away. Gardening seasons help ground me to the cycle of natural rhythms, and even sowing warm-season vegetable seeds in flats on a heating mat (on the schedule not too far off), in a couple of month's advance of the last 'average' frosts remind me that the growing season is coming.

We're well past our last frost date, and unusually warm weather has jump-started the soil temperatures, I hope. It's been exceptionally windy this week, hard on young warm-season vegetables. I've been too busy to get recently purchased transplants (Lao round green and white; Thai green-striped, Thai round green, and a variety of peppers and tomatoes) in the ground, and I didn't think the soil was warm enough, either for them. I guess I could have checked, but I was still too busy -- largely encouraging other gardeners.... The seeds for the eggplants came from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and I hope they produce some of the delicious small eggplants that we've enjoyed in SE Asia. Along with a lemon grass plant from another plant sale, I'm prepared for Asian stir-fries. I tucked eggplants and peppers into larger nursery pots, getting ready for a weekend away in the mountains, but put most of my tomatoes directly in the ground this evening. I can't say that...