Awake

The dogs got me up. So I ate breakfast and now I feel awake. I'm going to go with it because it'll make getting up early tomorrow easier. I'm making some Orange Pekoe tea. I really like the orange pekoe. I guess I have expensive tea tastes! Well, maybe I have versatile tea tastes. I like Lipton and Bigelow just as well! I also really like my orange teapot. I got it in North Carolina when we went to visit BIL and his wife. There's a store called A Southern Season. It has all sorts of neat things and I got my teapot there. It is orange and I love orange but the best thing about it is that the holes from the body to the spout are small enough that the tea leaves won't go through it. I hate picking tea leaves out of my cup. I still prefer the convenience of bagged tea but when I have time, the looseleaf with the teapot is nice.

I got my first seed catalog for 2010. It's from Vermont Bean Seed Company. I have a thing for dried beans. I'll go to the store and get a bag of all the different dry beans (except garbanzo. I hate garbanzo.) and dump them into this big glass thing I have. Then we have mixed bean soup. It is yummy. I would love to grow my mixed bean soup at home with all the heirloom and traditional beans. The only problem is that I can't grow them all together and also save seed because they'll cross pollinate. I will have to grow a whole bunch of one kind each year and just rotate I guess.

Guess what just happened; I poured my tea and got a couple of leaves in it! Gotta love the law of irony.

I was just looking at the Seed Savers Exchange Catalog and it says I need to separate my bean varieties by at least 25' but preferably 100' to keep them from cross pollinating. I could grow one variety in the front yard and one in back! Ooh! And maybe a crop of one in the beginning of the season and one at the end. Bush beans have a shorter life span than pole beans so I could theoretically have two crops. That makes 4 kinds of dry bush beans each year. Cool!

I've been trying to plan my garden. This year I have a ton more seeds than ever before thanks to the seed swap I did. It's hard to pick what to grow in my limited space. In the spring I'm going to grow lettuce, cabbage, peas, and radishes. I didn't like radishes growing up but tastes change and I'm willing to try them again. Also, DH has never had one and I think he might like the spicy hot flavor of them. Besides, they're really good as companion plants. I have a book called Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte. She was from southern OK and was an amazing gardener and she put all her knowledge about companion planting veggies in this book. It is very useful.

Sometime this winter when it's warmish I'm going to put up a fence of sorts around my garden. Tuvok really likes to be in the garden and I can't have him in there smushing all my plants. So I've got some 1x1s and some garden twine. I have some cotton thread and thin metal wire when the twine runs out. I'm going to make a fence with that and grow the vining plants up the fence. In the spring I'm going to sucession plant peas all around the fence. When the first side of peas is done, I can start in with my summer vines. The big issue for me right now is how to make a gate. Theoretically, I can stick a 4x4 in the ground and hang something on it with hinges. But how deep of a hole do I need? Can I get away without concrete in the hole? I need to do more research.

Another issue is how many tomatoes to I want to make room for? I'd like to leave at least 3 feet between each plant because they need lots of breathing room to do well. You can put shorter plants between them but hardly anything I want to grow is short enough. Oh wait. The watermelon is short enough. Ok, so now space is the only issue. The corn and okra are going to take up most of the room between them. Then there's the bell peppers and eggplants. They like to grow with okra. I need a bigger garden. Next year maybe. I wish I had lots of energy so I could do all this right away.

I think I'm done thinking for a while! My brain hurts. :^)