Short Story Long

As classes of all sorts get scheduled, rescheduled and postponed due to weather, and with the short days with less light, I often find January and February to be a forced pause.  Years like this convince me that I should get good at reading rain gauges and keeping track of the temperature.  It seems like we've had an usual amount of snow.  That should be good for our snow pack and seasonal runoff to fill creeks, lakes, basins, but we'll see what the spring brings.  In the meantime, I have been trying to tick off indoor chores and projects, and working on garden things.   We have started a handful of seedlings:  basil, foxgloves, verbascum, lavender, rosemary, onions and something new to us, naranjilla .  We have varying levels of success.  The naranjilla did take a long time to germinate; I think we used 11 seeds, and we currently have five seedlings, some a couple weeks older than others!  We're still 12-14 weeks out from planting and I really had my hands full last year -

I've said before  that I failed to appreciate marigolds growing up.  It's nice to have something that does so well in my garden, year after year, and draws butterflies, bees, and other pollinators.  I can't remember the last time I bought marigold seeds, these have been producing in my garden for so many seasons.  I love that they're such a rich red-orange-gold.  I might want another color this year, but I've got plenty of seeds for these!     Over Thanksgiving break, my middle kid deadheaded this whole bed and filled a bucket, so I have more than enough seeds to share this year!  I pulled a big handful apart and set them to dry on newspaper for a few days, and then put them in a jar until I had time to make a packet.   (you don't need the orange part, just the black and white)  I found a seed packet template here .  A blank template was all I needed; printed one, drew a simple outline of a marigold with fine pen, and copied it.  Each image was hand colored with