2009 January 14 | You Grow Girl.

Seed Starting Season

Seed starting season is just around the corner. It happens every year and every year I yell to no one and everyone that I’m not ready and could I please just have another day or a week, but it comes anyways. Then again, am I ever ready for anything garden-related? From seed starting season to the first frost I am constantly begging for mercy and more time while simultaneously wishing for spring and summer to come sooner and end my winter misery.

Apparently, I can’t have it both ways. Harrumph.

I’m REALLY not ready this year. So much so that I forgot about it completely until the catalogs started to appear in my mailbox. What will I grow? More importantly where will I grow? We keep saying this is the year we move. But we can never find the right place or there is too much work to be done and moving is too big a distraction or there is some reason why I can’t move the roof garden right now. And when I look for a new place to live and garden the endless list of requirements are too impossible to meet on a budget. I need appropriate indoor space, and I need some kind of decent outdoor space whether it be in-ground or on a roof or balcony that also gets lots of light because, I’m sorry, but I have to grow my sun-loving vegetables and herbs, and apparently over the years that has become more important than the thousands of things I hate about our current apartment. So this is the year we move. For real! I swear.

But how do I make plans with such a big question mark looming?

Whether I’m ready for it or not the march towards seed starting season presses on. Just today I sent in my yearly Seeds of Diversity membership payment in response to a final, act now or you’re out you irresponsible jerk notice. Is it really time to renew already? And to make matters worse I received notice that Seedy Saturday Toronto is happening earlier than ever this year. February 28! Only a month and a bit away.

Not ready!

Botanical Interests sent me some seeds recently. When they asked what I’d like to try I laughed to myself, chuckling about how early they were. Surely I won’t be making plans or ordering seeds for ages yet? WRONG! Well, at least I know that wherever my gardens happen to be this year, I will be growing the three packets I choose, ‘Zeolights’ Calendula, ‘Ruby Streaks’ Mustard Greens, and ‘Valentine’ Mesclun Mix come hell or high water.

It’s a start….

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I don’t know the name of this flower and have never seen it before.

Do you know or have a guess?

I very much doubt that it is a native since I found it growing on the property of the resort. Regardless, it sure was reinvigorating to see blazing colour in the middle of winter’s greyness. Sigh.

Even the bee was pleasing. Life! The hundreds I saw last year and the hives I could see and hear buzzing loudly up in the cliffs…. in that context the word “pleasing” doesn’t really come to mind. I was stung walking through some bushes. Good news: I lived!

Whether or not the bee in this photo is actually a killer bee is beyond me, but I’d like to think it is. I have a small obsession with killer bees. I know they’re a small menace, but there is something almost fantastical about the idea of killer bees swarming the world and taking over. Dun, dun, dun. What can I say, I watched a lot of giant ant and flying piranha b-movies as a kid. And of course, the Wu-Tang Clan have forever made it impossible for me to think about killer bees swarming the world without thinking of them. Their exploitation of the killer bee phenomenon and what was implied in some of the over-the-top reporting of them (the “Africanized” bee) was completely BRILLIANT.

And on that note, here’s my favourite Wu-Tang song (NSFW).