An Update of Sorts

How are things going?

As far as my writing goes, not so well. I don’t know what to do with this book. It starts slow, and is still slow toward the middle. Something is finally going on plotwise, but not fast enough. I am wondering if I have to start it over from scratch. It just isn’t writing right.

As far as my garden goes — we scaled it back because of the lack of sunlight in the yard — it’s now herbs and tomatoes. I don’t mind this. Now to keep the weeds out — there’s a lot of marauding wild garlic in there that buries itself so deeply you can’t pull up the roots. That’s a bit of a pain for weeding.

As far as my diet goes, I have lost 10 pounds (I think). I’m not hungry a lot of the time, which is a good thing. I think this will work well.

As far as book sales go, do you know I have a couple of books out? I have written several. They can be found at: Lauren Leach-Steffens Amazon Page.

My Seedlings

I might have mentioned before that I have a grow room in my basement to coax seeds into seedlings for the garden. I planted some early seeds on the second of February, and most of them have shown at least a little growth. I have cardoon (a relative of artichoke, except you eat the leaf stalks), mountain mint, yarrow, hyssop, lovage, lavender, and rosemary in a 72-cell seedling tray.

The lavender and rosemary are going very slowly, but both have at least one seedling up. The cardoon might need to be transplanted sooner rather than later because it’s big. I didn’t think the cardoon would come up so soon because I’ve had such bad luck with it before, but no, it popped up like the alarm clock had just gone off.

Growing seedlings helps me through a cold winter. Whether it’s the thrill of growing green things, the brightness of a room full of fluorescent grow bulbs, or the reminder that Spring will eventually arrive, it’s one of the best things for the winter blahs I’ve done.

One thing that worries me, though, is that I’m not writing. I’m burned out on writing, and have a lot of doubt about how good my writing is. But at least I have a hobby to sustain me.

Planting Seeds

I’m planting seeds for a spring herb garden today. Just a few for now; it’s early times yet for seed starting. I received some herb seeds (lots of herb seeds) from my sister for Christmas. I’m converting one particular raised bed in my neglected garden into an herb garden.

I have a grow room in my basement. The shelves were already existent; we set fluorescent lights over each of the shelves and put some heat mats in. There’s a reflective surface on the opposite wall so that the light doesn’t lose itself in a corner. It’s a near-ideal setup for starting seeds, although it could use a little cleaning up.

The challenge is going to be keeping the garden weeded. I don’t have the stamina for weeding, so it falls to my husband, who doesn’t really recognize weeds from herbs. I will mark the herbs well, so that he can find them. Wish me luck.

Brought to You by the Color Blue

A lazy Saturday

I have spent the morning looking at gardening plans — or what passes for plans for me. I have seeds growing in the basement, most of these herbs in the mint family. Orange thyme, lavender sage, winter savory, Korean giant hyssop, orange balm. Why grow what I can buy at the store? The Thai eggplant looks like it’s growing good and the cardoon looks like it’s going to take out its neighbors. One tray, however, looks like it’s going to fail on me, so no sweet violets or mitsuba.

Once upon a time, someone pointed out to me that there are very few truly blue flowers. Many are periwinkle, others are blue-violet. Some mauves are mistaken for blue. There are blue flowers, like a pure cornflower. Is this flower a pure blue? I’d say grey-blue.

Am I blue?

I feel like I should get a lot more done today than thinking about my garden. I can do nothing concrete about my garden right now; it’s too cold to break ground or plant or amend soil. I can’t even plant more seed — I’ve planted all I can until it’s basil season, during which I will plant impossible amounts of two different basils and wonder what I will do with all of it.

What I really want to do is drink affrogato and watch Instagram reels. A relaxing Saturday.

And what would that hurt? Not a thing.

Maybe the blues aren’t such a bad thing.

Writing and Growing

I am going back to my garden preparation after a couple of years of sitting out. I’m also going to keep writing if inspiration hits me (which I hope it does soon) and promoting my books on social media. And of course, work my day job (professoring). I’m going to over-commit myself, apparently.

I’m buying seeds, which is followed by cleaning my grow room and organizing planting times. Today I’ll organize planting times; later, I’ll make my husband clean the grow room. (I know that using the phrase “grow room” makes it sound like I’m growing an illegal crop, but I assure you I’m growing strictly legal eggplant.)

My strategy here is that, if I remove my focus from writing, I will find the inspiration to write something new. This has happened to me in the past, usually when I’m at my busiest time at work. It’s uncanny how often it works.

And maybe if I put my focus on writing, Richard and I will weed the garden more. I know I’m being overly optimistic. We’ll see.

Rain, I love you — now go away.

I love rain — except for today. Today I don’t like it so much.

I have so much left to do in my garden. Richard needs to rototill beds for the Three Sisters experiment (Jerusalem artichoke, squash, bean) and the moon garden (the exotic and toxic corner of my edible landscaping). I have to plant several raised beds with Chinese vegetables, weedy greens, nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, NOT deadly nightshade), and root veggies.

I can do most of the planting tomorrow afternoon if I need to, except for those new beds. If we can’t get to those today, we might be another week in the works.

Yes, I know it’s stupid to expect the weather to cooperate. But, like most humans, I do.

I guess it’s time for Plan B. Writing.

Garden update

I’ve been fighting depression again lately, and a touch of illness, but —

I get to plant things today!

I just got a plant order in from Richter’s Herbs in Canada, a combination of prosaic (Italian parsley and lavender), intriguing (nepitella, which tastes a bit like an oregano-mint) and fun (scented leaf geraniums). Most of these will go on “the hill”, a dirt-covered rip slope whose sparseness actually duplicates the origins of many of the herbs we love.

I also have to harden off my indoor seedlings so they can be planted without sun damage. Tomatoes and peppers and flowers and more herbs!

I will probably plant my roots and greens this week, which is the breathing room between end of semester and internships/online class/other things I need to do. Then I will spend an hour each morning making sure I give my plants the attention they deserve — weeding, picking produce, etc.

Some of the weeds we will eat. Lamb’s quarters taste better than spinach when cooked. I considered eating the poke sallet that keeps infringing on the shady spot I want to transform into a hosta garden, but I just can’t warm up to a green that you have to cook three times over to make it non-toxic. I’ve also not cooked dandelion greens this year — by the time I notice them, they’ve flowered, and they’re too bitter to eat.

The other thing I should mention — everything I plant is edible, one part or another. This year there will be an exception — I am putting in a moon garden by request of my husband. The moon garden will be romantic but deadly, which sounds like a stock antihero in fiction, doesn’t it?

I am hoping the summer hours and the gardening will get me out of my depression. I don’t tell you a lot about what the depression is like, so you’ll have to take my words for it. Wish me luck.

While My Garden Sleeps

While my garden sleeps, I make big plans for it. Each year I learn more about how to make it bigger and more interesting. I have always had what one calls a “green thumb”, although I’ve also had my share of mistakes.

When I was seven years old, my mom’s cousin Dale Hollenbeck brought me all the spindly, sickly plants on his shelves to try to bring back to life. By some mystery, it turned out that I could actually keep them alive. I may not have brought them back to vigor, but I could at least give them a fighting chance at a couple more years.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, as was evidenced by the time I planted a kidney bean in a peanut butter jar in the pure clay soil of our backyard. By some miracle, the bean came up — well, the stem came up, but the bean itself with its seed leaves remained in the clay. I was left with a botanical mystery — the headless chicken of the plant world, which persisted in its barely animate form.

Perhaps the most important childhood moment for me as a gardener was the discussion I had at age 14 with my neighbor and almost-grandfather, Johnny Belletini. Johnny taught me a small but extremely important lesson — all plants had names, even weeds, and even the weeds could be useful. Most importantly, he taught me about dandelion wine. This led to a very enthusiastic me running back to my house with a dandelion wine recipe in hand and forbidding my parents from mowing the lawn until I picked all the dandelion flowers for wine. (Note: there is nothing forbidding a fourteen-year-old from making dandelion wine in US statute. They just can’t drink it.) My parents and I spent four good years making wine as a result, until I left for college. But I digress.

I didn’t get back into growing plants (or winemaking, for that matter) until after I got my Ph.D., mostly because I had neither the time nor the place to garden. I dabbled in landscaping my wee rental house in Oneonta NY with shade plants because that’s all I had to work with. When I moved to Maryville and bought a house, however, my dreams of gardening blossomed (ahem) again. My taste in gardening developed.

At my first house, I had no basement, no sunny windowsills — and a taste for cottage flowers that would frame my cute little acquisition. I couldn’t find the plants I wanted at the local greenhouse. My father and I built me the world’s smallest greenhouse out of four wooden-framed storm windows, and I started seeds there every year for a while., running a cord out the back door to the chicken house heater that kept it warm. If the electricity went out, an entire crop could be ruined, and that happened at least once.

I live in a bigger house now with my husband, and this house has a full basement. In the room that used to be the coal room, the previous owner fitted it with shelves. We fitted it with shop fluorescents and grow bulbs, and I now have a grow room big enough to handle 12 seed flats.

The gardening theme at this house: Everything I plant needs to have something edible about it except for the moon garden, whose plants tend to be white-flowered, strongly scented, and toxic. Right now, I have the seed flats waiting for seeds at the right planting time. I have some seeds cold-stratifying in the basement refrigerator with some roots that I will plant in the spring. I have a piece of ginger which I hope will sprout so I can plant it for a bigger yield later this year.

As always, I have big plans for the garden as it slumbers in its February torpor.

Dreaming of Green Again

I’m starting to plan my summer garden. As anyone who gardens knows, this consists of getting glossy catalogs with beautiful and fascinating plants, ordering the seeds. planting them, and becoming disappointed that one’s results are not the same as in the catalogs. In my opinion, all catalogs should have “Your Results May Vary” in fine print next to the pictures.

I wish I had a warm greenhouse to spend the winter in. Instead, I have a magnificent grow room in the basement with shelves and fluorescent lights and heat pads. Not quite as nice as a greenhouse, but it’s mine. I sometimes worry that I’m going to have my tomato plants confiscated by DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency, for my foreign friends). I’ve already been visited by an agent of the USDA (US Department of Agriculture, for all my foreign friends), who confiscated some seeds I could have sworn were legal in the US.

I’m just beginning seed-starting season. It’s too early to start most seeds, but I have a few seeds with — well, advanced skill requirements, such as “Violets: warm stratify for 60-120 days, then cold stratify for two weeks, then plant.” I hope 60 days is enough warm stratifying, because I don’t want to have to wait till September to plant them. So the cold stratifying seeds (yucca, semi-wild rose) are in the refrigerator in dampened peat moss, the warm stratifying seeds are in the grow room, and I’m waiting a couple more weeks to plant my first seeds.

If past years are an indicator, I will have everything from abject failure to stunning success to “why the heck did I do that?” An example of the latter was the perilla that I planted in a 72-cell mini-trainer (which I will not use again, even though I’ve used them for years) –they got nine inches tall in a root ball that grew out the bottom of the one-tablespoon sized root pot, and all the roots tangled. So I had One big 72-stemmed perilla that lacked leaves on the bottom six inches of the stems and that I coiuldn’t get out of the pots. Note to self: You don’t need that much perilla. Also note to self: bigger start pots and transplanting sooner.

I’ll tell you more about the secret of my garden later.

My Garden

Hands in soil, coaxing life from dust,

I hold a secret, just one secret —

the way the light hits reminds me

of a summer evening —

hands, large hands, holding mine

for the briefest moment,

and my imagination spinning into flowers —

wild pinwheels

and concealing vines with scarlet funnels.

I couldn’t make him see the flowers,

and that’s how I could tell I was different.