No Chicken and Dumplings For Now

Well, Granny's leg seems to be healing up and she's getting around just fine, so I guess I have to cancel the plans for a sunday chicken dinner. Good thing, because Faith isn't laying at all since she was molting and the other girls take turns. Granny lays consistently, even when she's got a gimpy leg. She's my girl... good thing too because I'm usually eating egg salad on fridays during Lent instead of fish this year.

I planted Amish snap peas this weekend. They are the first seeds I got through the seed saver's exchange so I hope they do well. I got enough to plant a big enough crop to build up the seed stock for next year (if they do ok that is). Won't have a lot of extra for eating this crop but I should be able to at least put a few aside for snackage. I also got Lynch butterbeans (a pole lima bean) for my wife and I requested some Yukon Gold seed potatoes. I haven't gotten the potatoes yet, I'm hoping I get them soon. The pole beans will have to wait until the ground is nice and warm. I think I'm going to stack my old tomato cages and use them for pole bean trellises this year since I'm planning on trying the Florida weave method to stake my tomatoes instead of cages.

I've been reading about a new technique for growing potatoes in a barrel (well, new to me anyway). You take a barrel (I happen to have a couple of food grade plastic drums) and punch holes in the bottom for drainage and add some bricks, rocks or whatever to the bottom. Then you add a little bit of dirt and your seed potatoes. As the potatoes sprout and grow, you continue to cover them up with dirt until the barrel is full, and then you let them go nuts. Potatoes are actually swollen portions of the stem, so when you do this you make the potato stem the whole depth of the barrel and it will grow potatoes all along the stem. You supposedly end up with a really big yield of potatoes from a small amount of space. When it all dies back in the fall, you just dig out the potatoes, dump the dirt in the compost pile and start fresh the next year. I'm going to try this if I get my seed potatoes soon.

My turnips and radishes are starting to come up and it's almost time to put the tomatoes in the ground. I also started a new flat of pepper seeds, split up equally between sweet cherry, jupiter bell and jalapeno. Should go without saying that everything I'm planting this year is either open-pollinated or heirloom. I'm still struggling with how to best use my space and how many plants I need based on our consumption patterns. We eat TONS of peppers so I'm quite sure I'm not planting enough, but last year my pepper plants didn't do well at all so I'm trying a different bed for them this year and we'll see how it works out.

My mom really surprised me, she asked me for some of my Black Prince tomato seeds. Made me smile, because it's my favorite tomato so far. I grew them last year and fell in love with the flavor. I gave some to mom and thought that she wasn't that impressed with them but I guess I was wrong. My mom constantly surprises me like that, you'd think I could read her better after 42 years of sharing our lives but I guess I've still got a lot to learn about her!

I tried to find some little paper coin envelopes so I could separate out all the seeds I want to send her but I didn't have much luck this weekend even after scouring several stores. I plan on sending her 5 or 6 seeds of several varieties... German Pink Beefsteak, Mortgage Lifter, Red Velvet, Sprite, Black Cherry, Black Prince and Grandpa's Golfballs. That's a good mix of huge tomatoes (the ML's run a pound to a pound and a half per fruit) to the little tiny sprite grape tomatoes and everything in between flavor-wise. That way she can pick and choose what she wants to sprout and grow. I'll go looking for envelopes again this weekend. I need to get them to her soon so she can get them started and outside before the summer is over.

I've had 100% germination rate (or close enough to it that I haven't noticed) on my tomato seeds this year so I'm confident that she really only needs a few of each. It's not like she will have room to start everything anyway and this will let her experiment and figure out if she wants to concentrate on a specific type. I'm hoping she'll plant a couple plants of several different varieties and then tell me what she likes and I'll send her a big bunch of seeds for next year.