A Journal of Urban Living

It’s been a while:

• Bees – dead.  Very sad.
• Beer – kegged.  Not yet tasted.
• Garden – improved.  New boxes.  More Zoo Poo.  Tomatoes, cukes, squash, melons, beans etc.
• Chickens – not yet.

Mine lives where that cardboard “nuc box” is.  That nuc actually contains my bees:

And here’s the photographer post sting:

And here’s the proud new beekeeper:

It’s getting warmer.  The loquats are yellowing, the stone fruit have leaves, the citrus season is done, for us anyhow.  It’s time to think about the garden.  Actually, it may be a month late.  In what may be my fourth community garden in four different zones in the past seven years or so I feel like I need to relearn the planting schedule.  You can’t always start your peas on the Feast of Saint Joseph like we did when I was a child.  We actually planted them in November.

So here’s what I planted in a 50 flat container:

• 10 Tomatoes (a pack of mixed heirlom seeds from Fedco packed for the 2004! season)
• 4 Purple Beauty Sweet Peppers (from Territorial Seeds for the 2006 season when we were trying to have a purple garden)
• 3 Early Jalepenos (from Botanical Interests, packed for the 2007 season)
• 3 Sandia A Peppers (an Anaheim type from Lake Valley Seeds packed for 2007)
• 3 Swallow Eggplant (an early variety, again from Fedco for 2004)
• 3 Fairy Tale Eggplant (from Johnny’s for 2008)
• 2 Bush Delicata (2006, Territorial)
• 2 chives (the more I have the more I use, from Renee’s Garden for 2008)
• 4 Charentais Melon (from Lake Valley.  The “real” cantaloupe and no it’s not a rock melon, packed for 2005)
• 3 Shisho (Botanical Interests, 2008)
• 3 Trevisio Radicchio (Johnny’s, 2008.  I love bitter things)
• 3 Alibi Pickling Cucumbers (Territorial, 2006.  I was making cornichon with them but I can’t keep them crunchy enough.  This year we’ll use them as slicers if they come up)
• 6 Window Box Basil (Renee’s 2007.  I thought we had more seeds than that)

I like the idea of using up as many of the seeds as we can.  The Heirloom Tomato mix has been a reliable producer but at 5 years old I’m starting to worry.  And most of the mail order seeds have come from the north, be it Maine or Oregon.  We’ll see how our closer-to-tropical latitude treats anything that actually sprouts.