Parsley update

The old parsley is fine and plentiful.  It's not quite plentiful enough to provide us with parsley for, say tabouli (which we're having for dinner tonight) but it'll do for a garnish pretty much every night.

The new parsley is in its new pots but still distressingly producing yellow leaves.  Or rather, its old leaves go yellow distressingly.

I don't know what it is.  I wonder if the folks at the market sold me a bum plant (gasp).  

No sign of seedlings in the other pots, of course.  I should cover over the pots to make 'em greenhouse-y.  

Winter Indoor Gardening (with apologies to my father)

I did, finally, get around to re-potting the boughten parsley.  I suspect that it's an old, old plant.  It's got positively carrot-like roots beneath.  There were a few plants squished in together and growing into each other, which I ruthlessly cut apart.  There was nothing for it.  They couldn't be expected to keep going as they were.  The leaves on the sprigs were going brown at a quite alarming rate, which I took to mean that there just wasn't enough room for the roots.  

Anyway, I spread the new parsley around and as I did so, I looked at my culinary herb seeds and decided that there would be absolutely no harm in giving them a go.  So, I popped a few seeds in a few pots (including some in the parsley pots) and hopefully in a couple of months we'll have a healthy indoor garden.  

We got rid of everything but the parsley we had before now because it had acquired little friends.  I suspect the mint was really to blame.  There were insidious little webs all over the bottoms of the leaves.  Let's hope the new batch do better.   The seeds were: basil (which did amazingly well in tiny pots), coriander (which barely germinated at all when the seeds were new, so I don't know what I think will happen this time), chives (also not keen to come up), and mint (which I think took a long time, but then did come up before I neglected them and they all died).  

My plan is to put some of the annuals outside when the summer comes.  The mint is most definitely destined for the outside.  I have a dream of putting mint in the difficult little triangle to the left of our front door.  I think a nice-smelling, aggressive as all get out plant will be just right for that sad patch.  I'll even spread out some compost for it.  But not much!  I don't want its roots to break through the house foundations.  

For shame

I'm using the blog as a motivator (I hope):  I got a parsley plant on Saturday with which I intend to supplement the old one.  The old one is such a success that I'm starting to feel bad about harvesting its stalks ... only a few junior ones remain.  Anyway, I need to put the new one in a proper-sized pot (or two) and that apparently will only happen if I give myself a good kick in the pants.  

*kick*

The Nick of Time

Yesterday's industriousness came just in the nick of time.  Last night we had a generous dollop of snow.

The work of yesterday was to take this

and this (front yard)

and this (side yard)

and turn it into this (front yard)

and this (side yard).

The work of mother nature last night was to take that and turn it into this (front)

and this (side).  

The blizzard was what the weatherman calls a "classic nor'easter".  We can tell that because our front walk is cleared by the howling wind and our side walk gets a drift to make up for it.  The houses across the street got drifts on their front walks and they have beautiful (dramatic) cakes of snow all over the fronts of the houses, too.  

There is a certain magic encapsulated in those photographs which is not obvious to the casual observer, but in the days before we had blow-in insulation, snow never built up against the side of the house.  It would always melt for a few inches around the perimeter.  For me, there are few more trenchant illustrations of how wonderfully effective the insulating has been.  (Of course, the 15% reduction in our oil use is nice, too.... probably it will be an even greater reduction this winter because we've done a little more sealing and we're not keeping the house as warm as we did last year.)

The sweary one's brother came over yesterday and saw the lovely corkscrew tree trunk and was clearly appalled.  "What happened to your tree?"  We tried to explain, but I think that as a non-gardener he left perplexed.  I hope the boughs are doing good service protecting the following from the perils of the wind and snow.  I'm also hoping that the darkness will convince them (finally) to give it a rest.  There are an awful lot of little shoots popping out of the dirt.

Last, but not least, let's hope 2009 is a good year filled with good growth.