Hello internet!
My old look sucked rocks. So I did a new one 🙂

I still need to get FlickrRSS working. Anyone know how to do that?

And something wonky is going on with the ‘view single post’ layout that I’ve no idea how to fix. It’s only on the most recent post. If you click on the header to this post, you’ll see what I mean. (Unless of course, I’ve fixed it by the time you read this, in which it’s too late to play this game.)

But other than that. I like it! The header has the paperwhites in my window. Aren’t they pretty? I wish spring was here already. In a way, I have tricked mother nature. I have FORCED these bulbs into blooming BEFORE THEY’RE BIOLOGICAL/ NATURE CLOCK TELLS THEM TOO. Yes, that’s me. The dominatrix of the botanical world. GROVEL BEFORE ME, BULBS! I will refridgerate you and then plant and place you in a sunny spot and YOU WILL BLOOM OR FEEL MY WRATH. DO NOT ANGER THE AMY OR I CHAIN YOU UP AND SPANK YOU OR AT THE VERY LEAST, DENY YOU WATER.

Ahem.

So, new look! Carry on!

-AMY! RAWRRR! … err, i mean, amy 🙂

UPDATE: I fixed the wonkiness on the single post view! Yay me!

So, there has been an odd smell floating around our living room for a while now. For a while I thought there was an old, wet diaper hiding somewhere, like under the couch. Close inspection proved that to be wrong.

Then I decided it wasn’t a “diaper” smell, just a “old wet” smell. I disassembled our cool mist humidifier, pitched the filter thinking it was mildewy, and emptied out the base. Still, the smell hovered.

Usually, I’m the one to complain of weird smells. I inherited my mother’s keen sense of smell, who can sniff out ANYTHING as if it were a wet St. Bernard. But even James’s nose was with me on this weird wet smell. I started to worry about leaking pipes in the walls, but there aren’t any water pipes where the smell was eminating. Maybe the outside hose spigot? Nope, it was closer to the front door.

Finally, last night we figured it out. PLANTS!!! In the fall, I took cuttings from the impatiens in my garden cultivated them in pots indoors. I’ve also forced quite a few bulbs (which are really doing spectacularly). I’ve taken pictures, but haven’t gotten them off the camera yet (maybe I’ll have to do that before posting this post). Anyway, one of the forcing methods I tried out was using those glass marble things that you use in floral arrangements, stuffing a bulb or two down in them, and then adding water juuuuuust to the tippy rooty bottom of the bulb. I had 2 glasses done up this way. They were not doing nearly as well as the ones I had planted in actual pots. With dirt. Anyway, I had actually THOUGHT maybe it was these bulbs, but when I stuck my nose in there, I could NOT SMELL THE SMELL! So I figured it wasn’t that, and moved on.

But it WAS THE BULBS! AND NOT JUST THEM! I beleive I have over-watered my potted impatiens and they have developed root rot. First, last night, in an effort to determine whether or not it WAS the plant items that had the smell, we moved them from the windows in the family room to the top of the fridge (this was to prevent forest fires kitty damage). It become evident that it was definitely the plants, as minutes after they were moved, the smell was in the kitchen!

So I took the bulbs out of the marbles/beady/glass/water thingee and oh boy did it stink. Rinsed out the marbles well, though I see a bath in cloroxy water in their future. This morning, I thought, “hey, I’m going to take some of these into my office!” and picked out an impatiens pot that I had stuck some tulip bulbs in as well.

All day long, that nasty wet ROTTING ROOTS smell has been plaguing me. We all already know that my delicate little nose can’t seem to take any instrusive smells, and now after smelling this damn plant all day, my nose is all stuffed up and red from the constant blowing. I even relegated the plant to the top of my little hutch/shelves thingee on my desk, but the web diaper smell drifts down anyway.

So I spent some time at lunch looking up root rot and proper soil and watering techniques and tonight when I go home, I shall re-pot my plants using proper potting soil (I think most of what I used was just from the ground outside, a big no-no) that has been pasteurized (Pasteurization! Not Just For Dairy!) in clean, sterilized containers and hopefully my plants will be happy and healthy and the nasty wet-smell will GO AWAY BECAUSE I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Seriously. At least James could smell it this time. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m going crazy with the things I smell and rant about only to hear him say, “What? I don’t smell anything.” *honks as he inhales* “What? There isn’t any smell.” Grrrr.

It could be worse.

OR EVEN WORSE!

OK, I’ll stop with the links, lest I get all mimi smartypants on your ass.

AHHH! I LINKED AGAIN!

Ok, done now.

So, while I’m talking about plants, one of the handy things I did when I was home with Jocelyn in all her sickness, was put up a shelf in her closet. However, I didn’t have enough brackets that the back of the bracket packet called for so that called for a trip to Lowes.

Well.. RIGHT in front of the entrance… was a beautiful standup of SEEDS. My eyes glazed over, my tongue started hanging out, the drool machine started that would put any teething 4 month old to shame. Jocelyn, Ethan and I had such fun picking out some seeds to plant that now I just can’t wait until I can GET GOING! I have grand plans for the garden this year. We bought some green bean, cherry tomato, rosemary, and BROCOLI seeds! On arriving home, I discovered that I already had rosemary, what I need is SAGE! My basil seeds have also gone AWOL, so I need some of those as well. I also bought two pots designed to be the final living space for the herbs – I’ll start them out in smaller thingees* though.

* I’m still learning all this farmer of the earth lingo. You knew what I meant.

The outside is going to be fun, though I need to figure out what is going to go where. We have a deck now and that means I can put in some more beds, which means some grass is going to need to come up, and some soil is going to need amending, and aerating, and some plants in front need to be moved in back and I have to decide where to put the vegetables and where to put the flowers and I want to get a raspberry bush too, because won’t the jam be oh so yummy? and I sure would like a rototiller but that’s probably overkill but OH I JUST CAN’T WAIT!

Luckily, I don’t have to wait until spring, I can start indoors with my little seeds in flats.

As long as I don’t overwater them and use the right media*!

* Look. I used the term “media.” Bet you were impressed. Really, that just means whatever it’s growing in. Me learn gooooood.

It is going to be busy this weekend. I have Bunko tonight, a date with my husband Saturday night, with just the two of us, and poker with this guy and some of his work buddies on Sunday.

SHOE MONEY TO-NIGHT! (or, ahem.. sunday night)

– amy lines up angels on a head of a pin

This weekend I really needed to finish my fall gardening. First of all, I don’t want to forget about my bulbs and then wonder like I did last spring, “Hmm, why aren’t my bulbs coming up?” only to find the bag of them still in the garage where I tossed them. I bought 2 bags of bulbs, 1 bag of 50 tulips, and 1 bag of 50 narcissus. I also still had a flat of pansies to go in. The other three flats of pansies I put in 2-3 weeks ago. Why didn’t I do the whole job then? Because I just love my impatiens, and I wanted the pansies to go where they already were.

Let me back up. To this spring.

I am a novice, know-nothing, BEGINNER gardener. I would say that this year is my first foray into the world of earth. Armed with my “Flower Gardening 1-2-3″ book from Home Depot and all the info on the internet, I took $80 bucks I made from my spring yard sale, and went to Lowes and went all willy nilly buying cool looking stuff.

Let’s see, in the annuals dept I bought purple petunias and pink impatiens. Then I bought a whole mess of perennials: 6 hostas, 3 daylilies, 1 purple butterfly bush, 2 columbines and 2 creeping phlox. With no plan whatsoever, I just planted them wherever I thought they’d look pretty. I have foundation plantings which consist of boxwoods, and evergreen shrubby thingees. Oh, I also have a tree next to our front walk, which despite having the worst infestation of japanese beetles ever KNOWN this summer, is the best looking tree on the block. Behind it is a bush which grows some dark berries of some sort, and there’s another tree off the corner of our house. That’s all the builder gave us.

So, determined to have a pretty yard at this house (the old house we threw down mulch when we felt like it and that was about it). I bought a truck full of plants, and then stopped by a local shop and arranged for 9 cubic yards of mulch to be dumped on the road in front of our house. Yes, NINE cubic yards. I don’t think I have to tell you, even though it will come at the end of the story, it was way way too much.

Anyway, now, some of these plants came from different outings, and were already in the ground before the other plants and mulch were purchased. Three hostas I grouped at the end of the house inside some surrounding boxwood shrubs. One I put right in front of our porch in between 2 boxwood shrubs, and the remaining 2 I put under the gorgeous, though water sucking tree near the entrance of our courtyard. The day lilies I had planted super willy nilly – just wherever I thought they’d look good, with no regard to spacing at all. I can’t remember where 2 of them were, but one was right behind the hosta in front of the porch — no way those two plants should have been in that spot, it was tiny. Anyway, so in those first planting experiences, I realized that underneath the 1/16″ of top soil and other 1/2” of mulch our builder had so graciously put down, our natural Virginia soil was pretty much clay. Nasty, clumping clay that occasionally had a palette of BLUEishness (it’s a word) that led me to beleive that our builder had probably had the occasional bag of cement bust open in the area. Luckily, the clay compacted ground was releived with the ever-present stones, rocks, and Mt. Rainier, which when struck, had to be dug out of the beds. There were plenty of building materials found as well. Let’s just say, our soil sucks rocks. Literally.

So that was part of the reason I wanted so much mulch. I knew it was going to be more than we needed (though how much more, I had no idea), but it was OK, because I wanted to build these beds up as much as I could so that as the mulch broke down, it would become GOOD dirt, and plenty of it, and I wouldn’t have to try to dig through the cement that is our yard. So in the spring, James and I had a busy couple weekends putting down the mulch, planting all the plants, and then BAGGING up the mulch that we didn’t need and couldn’t give away.

And now here it is, fall – time to look over how everything did and try to assess what next year will be like. It’s funny how some plants were bought at the same time, planted in different spots, and one doubled in size while the other stayed the same. The hostas were like that. The three grouped together really took off, while the 2 under the tree stayed the same, and the other crowded in with the daylily did moderately well. I relocated those three to our isolated tree off the corner of the house, just planted them around the base. The mulch is piled up pretty high, so there should be good drainage for them. The daylilies that were scattered around willy nilly, I transplanted into a grouping together as well. Which leaves me looking at our boxwood shrubs. I just really don’t like them that much. Maybe if our builder had planted them in a row to give a more unified hedge feel, they’d be ok, but as they are, peppered around the beds, they don’t work for me. My first plan was to move some of them to fill in the gaps in front of the front porch, and I even moved one of them a week or two ago to that end, but as I contemplated finishing the job this past weekend, I wasn’t sure if I liked that plan either. Maybe I could just trash them all. Down with boxwoods! That’d be my motto. Then my neighbor Ricky suggested I move them to around our deck – he’s a smart man, that one. I think that’s what I’ll be doing in the spring. I swear, in the spring, I want to pull up everything and just give the ground a good rototilling to work some of the good broken down mulch into the cement-like clay, not to mention get the rocks up where I can just pick them up and toss them. I may do that (Or rather, I may get James to do it for me) in the spring.

Thinking forward to spring, I am going to not bother with petunias. They are lovely, but I don’t want to bother with any of that dead-heading. I am in love with impatiens. I’m thinking of having an all impatiens garden next year. Just have to make sure they’re well watered in the hot season, and they’re good to go.

I have been collecting seeds, though. Petunia seeds, impatiens seeds, daylilies, even the salvia that was in my hanging basket. I’ve read that impatiens never really breed very true, and the plant you get may be very different from the plant you had, when you’re dealing with seeds. Cuttings are the way to go with impatiens, and I’ve been doing a lot of cuttings. I even experimented with just taking a cutting, sticking it into a pot with potting soil, and keeping it well watered, and they’ve done fine. Bit droopy in the beginning, but they all came through. I plan on bringing them inside before the end of Oct (oh my god, where am I going to put all these? eek) and plant them again in the spring.

Anyway. I think I got quite a bit off track there — this past weekend, I finally pulled up the last of my impatiens, except for the few that were under the nice tree, which were fine, and planted the last of my pansies and about half of my bulbs. The problem with bulbs, is I’m still not quite sure what I’m going to do in the spring, so I’d hate to plant bulbs where I will eventually be planting something else. That’s just a waste of bulbs! So I limited myself to around both trees, and at the corner of the house where I knew I wasn’t going to be mucking around that much. I have a lot of bulbs left over, so… I guess I’ll see how forcing them works, even though they don’t bloom until mid-spring! (I’ve heard it works best with bulbs that bloom early spring.)

Anyway. I really need to make a plan and stick with it, methinks. That, and rent a rototiller in the spring. Oh yeah!