Being Thoroughly Modern Like Millie

Stepping out into the home garden with my egg timer (giving my shoulder 30 minute work outs) I glance down on the mud-room floor and see a plant label. Curious, I see it is for Hemerocallis: Red Razzmatazz. My mind remembers last fall and I head out and there in the bunch of weeds are the four varieties of day lilies. But first to mulch the pansies in the front yard. Given the option of open space for a month or pansies, my wife chose pansies.

Gardening at the school is time specific. I've got lots of onions to get into the ground, and now my potatoes are here, and what about that box of raspberries, and hey we have those pac choi seedlings. The beautiful weekend did nothing for them. Rain yesterday kept us in and made it too wet today to do much outside. We did divide up a blanket flower, so now two more areas of our flower garden will be blessed with them. I love flower buds and here is a photo I took last year...

I failed to mention in my last post that last week we had divided our yarrow and that we had carted up our water gallons filled with our winter sowing projects. Plenty of tiny seedlings, and these which were ready to be put into 6 packs...

This would be Godetia seedlings: Thoroughly Modern Millie. So there I was on break last December checking out flowers, which students had circled in seed catalogs. And yes, my wife and I had just watched the movie, so what could I do but add it to the list. The ones planted indoors sputtered which made looking down into this container even more joyful. We ended up with 18 plants which made the rain yesterday quite tolerable.

winter sowing

I am not an expert, nor too experienced at winter sowing, but this is what I can tell you. What you do is make mini-greenhouse. I take a one gallon plastic bottle, slice it nearly in half, but not all the way around the diameter. Fill the bottom with good planting medium, soak it. Plant (I do only flowers) seeds as advised on the packet. Duct tape it back together. Oh, yeah. make some holes in the bottom before you do much of anything. Seal the top, but make some slices for heat to escape and some moisture to enter. Place outside. You have created a mini-greenhouse, and the seeds lay dormant till winter eases, then inspired by spring they grow.

Last year was my first attempt....

I had some great successes (the geraniums, pansies, and dahlias come to mind) and some mighty failures. It was cool opening them up to see what had happened. I would imagine as each winter is different, each attempt will yield different results.

Today we planted a bunch, will get a list out at some point, but for now if you are interested, here is the website that got me started.

winter sowing delayed and other moments of the week

The seeds have arrived, the flowers for winter sowing chosen, the water jugs prepared.... so why then do they sit inside? The school is just a jump, skip, and a hop from Philadelphia where a record high temp was hit this week... 68 degrees. So I thought I better wait for winter to come back. It is back and hopefully next week I will be reporting that these gallon jugs are filed with seed, sealed with duct tape, and lined up on the path to the greenhouse.

Monday we made four batches of onion sage bread and one pan of lavender brownies. On the warm day the students wanted fresh air and muck. Well, maybe they didn't want the muck, but they got it as we moved our fall leaf pile onto the individual beds. Something that didn't happen at its normal time when winter came in fast this year.

After weeks of not playing much jazz in the classroom it came back in a big way this week. Maybe because I have the "post seed order not quite time to plant most of them blues." Here is Summertime from the Stan Getz CD I played for my students.

The Mighty Assistant was busy doing lovely things with some dried strawflowers and globe amaranths, which we then sold along with some heart shaped bird feeders (peanut butter, cornmeal and bird seed). Speaking of birds, here is a plug for a cool place up north of us in Milford, Pennsylvania. I have this poster from Grey Towers hanging in my classroom ...