Before I get started I wanted to thank everyone for their kind comments and help on my Oak ribbed socks and my weirdo toe issue. My plan is to frog the toe and move on with my life. Turkish cast on - here I come!

End of knitting content! You have been warned!


What you see here is my newly built grow light system. Last night I went to Home Depot and found this "plant" light for my grow light. I originally had bought two clip lights and some flourescent light bulbs to put in them, but started to doubt myself after the 55th time boyfriend said "are you sure that will work?" Since the bulbs didn't say "plant" or "grow" anywhere on them, I decided to hunt a little more. I found this kit amongst the other flourescent lights - that being nowhere near the nursery. Go figure.
However, the kit only contained the fixture and the bulb, no frame or thing to attach to. When I got home, I showed this to boyfriend and he kindly, and quickly I might add, rigged this little baby up for me. Isn't that sweet? What I was thinking was far more complex and too cumbersome, plus I was (and still am) icky sicky, so I wasn't going to get it done anytime soon. Now it is all done, and all I need to do is plant. Which is what that thing underneath is for. It's a 72 plant flat with a little peat moss disc in each cup. All you do is soak the disc in some water and it expands to fit the cup. Simply make a little hole, with say a pencil, and put the seed, or two, in and cover. Cover the flat loosely, turn on the light (with the timer to keep it on 16 hours a day - also purchased at Home Depot) and you're done until they sprout. Just keep them watered.

So what am I planting you ask? Well have a looksee <------------ Those are almost all the seeds that I bought. I picked up two more packets last night of ones I couldn't find at the nursery. Two cucumbers, one pickle and one slicing. In the picture we have (starting from the top left) zucchini, cherry tomatoes(sugar golds), Brandywine Heirloom tomatoes, Unicorn hybrid sweet peppers, tomatillos (which I know nothing about). Second row starting at the left: Masterpeice cucumbers - which I may not plant because I got the bush variety that I wanted and these might be vines, romano tomatoes, Sugar pod peas, Tyee spinach, Olympia Spinach and buttercrunch lettuce.

And then there's these flowers. Boyfriend came with me to the nursery, and he can be dangerous there since he likes his lawn and he likes his gadgets, however, he spotted these flowers that he liked and and gave them to me. The observant among you will notice that these seeds say FREE! They were supposed to be free with the purchase of 2 Thompson & Morgan seeds, which I bought, and when we got to the register I somehow owed over $8,000,000. Do not adjust your monitor, that is the actual amount. Apparently my FREE! seeds cost over 7 million dollars. Quite a deal, dontcha' think?

Anywho, I know this seems like an insane amount of crops, but it's not as bad as it looks when you realize that the peas, lettuce and spinach are cold weather crops that I should have put in the garden last weekend(oops), and the lettuce/spinach is one head per seed. You have to keep planting lettuce to keep growing it (except looseleaf varieties, of which I have none). I'm also planning on making tomato paste and crushed tomatoes to can, hence the large amount of crops there. I think most of these are indeterminate (meaning they keep producing until the weather changes - as opposed to determinate which produces a crop once a plant, once a season, all at once) which will make canning both harder and easier. I won't be able to bushels at a time, but we're talking about a small kitchen a probably canning 7 quarts at a time. There's no factory capability here ;) So indeterminate might keep me sane (er).

So that's where my gardening sits. I'm splitting my time between gardening and knitting lately so the knitting is slow, but both are keeping me equally sane. Well....at least out of the crazy house, that is.

If you got this far, thanks for reading! =) Have a Happy Wednesday!