Emo plants, dog and writer

I used to write between 05:00 and 07:00 (yeah, I have a preference for military time, I guess from a previous life as a night-shift medic) weekday mornings. When EG was a baby he’d nurse at 03:00 and sleep for another 3-4 hours. I’d take 2 of those and write stuff like this. Now, he’s 8, and this is our nighttime ritual: he reads in bed while Metal Pig and I stay there with him, he falls asleep, we go to bed, and sometime in the middle of the night he is scared and needs someone to sleep in his room with him. That’s usually me. The 50-pound dogs curl up with me. It’s uncomfortable. After awhile I go back to my own bed. He joins us very early in the morning and crashes hard, waking up at 7 with a residual dream narrative like, “These flying cats are trying to pat me on the head.”

I’m fully aware how much we’ll miss these nights and mornings. But I get a little drained of energy and inspiration. And this is a blog about plants, I think, and this time of year there’s kind of a lull. Things will really heat up when I buy mushroom compost in April. Oh yeah.

Thanks to the post I mentioned earlier from the indoor vegetable garden blogger I like, I realized I could cultivate a little celery and lettuce from the ends of previously eaten heads – wait, that phrase “previously eaten heads” could be interpreted so many ways… Anyway, I can grow a lot of greens outside in March and have stuff to eat May through November. But now I got nothing, and I can’t ever grow celery anyway. So for fun I put these in water that I change daily and they did start growing from the center in about 5 days:

Here are some month-old seedlings that are good examples of how their 50-some sisters look today. I’m still not cocky though. Well I am a little, boasting that I have them and might have SO MANY I’ll have to find them homes in my friends’ gardens. My friends tell me how excited and impressed they are, which is just sad.

They are Lucid Gem, a new variety I started for the first time, Speckled Roman and Pantano Romanesco. The last two are from seeds I saved and were the most eager to germinate.

I can identify Speckled Romans from this point on without the tag because of their willow-like form. The first time I grew them I thought they were droopy and underwatered, but they are a regular-leaf plant that differs from the others by their spindly, long leaves. Do not think this is a sign of ill health. They normally drape in a way that’s almost emo, like my dog:

Author: Fire Horse

I live in Colorado with my husband Metal Pig, our son Evil Genius ("EG") and, for some reason, two Dalmatianesque dogs. One of my dreams is to show a respectable return on the investment I put into growing food in our suburban yard. We love plants but eat them too. I use grandiose terms when describing my garden, like "crops" and "nitrogen levels" but it's too small to be a farm. Maybe one day I'll hitch a miniature horse to a tiny plow and take out the turf grass in the front yard to make room for growing grains. View all posts by Fire Horse