Planning for the spring

All the seed catalogs have started coming in already, but there's still a month and a half before I can start planting anything. This is the long, dark teatime of the gardener's soul.

But, on the up-side, my horehound and marshmallow are surviving in their pots, and my Meyer lemon tree is getting leaves again. It looked quite strange for a while with three green lemons and no leaves. It needs a better location, but that's the best window in the house. It also needs to be re-potted. Maybe in the spring when I can do that all outside. Our living room is much too small to deal with all that dirt. I'll have to wait until we get our new house to plant out the horehound. Or, maybe I could start a new plant and give this one away. It's a perennial, so it would make a pretty, low shrub in someone's garden. I don't want to leave it here, as the people who buy the place are 99.99999% unlikely to appreciate it.

I've found a whole new genre of YouTube channels- British people who vlog about their allotments. It's adorable, and makes me yearn for a milder climate. Putting in potatoes on the first of April? That would be insanity in Southern Ontario. I also learned a better method for growing leeks- use a dibber to make a 6" hole and place the small plant inside with the first leaves poking out the top. Don't fill it in, just water it. The hole will gradually fill in on its own and leave room for the stem to get nice and big. I'll have to try that this year.




Actually, I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately. I started re-watching the BBC Victorian farm, found the one on Victorian Pharmacies (which was fabulous), and then found the one on the Wartime farm. I learned so much history from those. I had trouble doing anything else until I had watched them all. I also found an earlier BBC production from 1993 called Wartime kitchen and garden which had covered a couple of the same topics, but wasn't as in-depth in the history. It was more practical (in fact I learned the proper way to tie onions onto a string for storage, which was helpful). Another handy trick I learned from both the wartime shows was how to use a 'hay box', which is a form of non-electric slow cooker- you take a sturdy box (made out of wood for structural integrity), line it with hay, and take you half-cooked dish (pot roast, soup, whatever cooks in one pot with a lid), and place it inside the box nestled in the hay. Cover the top with a pillow and then the lid of the box and let sit for a few hours until you're ready to eat. I'd like to try that sometime. Yet another crazy project to make my husband shake his head :)