Seeds for Shady Swap

Here's what I'll try to bring to the Shady Swap (assuming I can get them all packaged, eek)

Canterbury Bells
Pink Cleome
Variegated Purple Cleome (probably a bastard, if you know what I mean)
White Cleome
Small Sugar Pumpkin
Prairie Coneflowers (seeds a couple years old, never planted any so don't know viability) From a wild stock
Snow Peas, oregon sugar pods
Mustard Greens, Green Wave
Columbine (another bastard)

Might be a few others, haven't scrounged the actual seed box yet.

Sporonechinosiphobia

Never heard that word?

That would be because I made it up. It means "fear of seed starting," and I spent 20 years as a gardener in its throes.

It seems so complex--grow lights and trays and shelves. Staggered timing, potting soil, coir, soilless mix, seed starting mix. Fungus and sterilizing. Finding room. Hardening off. Damping off (one's good; one's bad). A whole new vocabulary.

But after spending a year reading about starting seeds indoors on MyFolia, I tested the waters last year with some wintersowing, and then this year jumped in with both feet, doing indoor starts on several herbs, onions, leeks, a couple of ornamentals, Brussels sprouts, parsnips and of course tomatoes. I'll wintersow (outdoor early seed starting in mini-greenhouses made from milk jugs) my vining vegetables and brassicas (greens and broccoli).

The thing about early seed starting is the green. It's hard for a non-gardener to understand the yearning for the dirt, and the need to see those shoots come out of the earth. So starting seeds allows you to get your fingers in the dirt, and to somehow feel like you've created this plants yourself, in a way that even direct sowing doesn't. Nursery starts, or what I've called "outsourcing" your seed starting, never give you the same feeling of ownership.

But these tiny sprouts are mine.

So no recipe today. Just my tiny sprouts. Because I made them.

Cold drink, cold day. Why not?

Each weekend now I put in a couple more cells of seedlings, working from the chill-tolerant early planters and the long season jump starters like leeks and herbs, towards my late-March/early April planting of the solanums. The table top is filling, and I had to raise the grow lights over the leeks, they've gotten so tall.

Outside, things are perking up as well. The snow by the back steps melted, revealing, as I had hoped, the first brave crocus sprouts. I expect there are more still hiding under their white blanket. We won't have a warm enough spell for several more days to put enough of a dent in the 12" snow cover to see them, but I know they're there, because they always are.

I have to stop myself planning summer meals. After all, I'm still at least 11 weeks from the first harvest, probably snow peas and radishes, in early May. I dream of a succession house, or a cold frame, for early fresh food during our long and agonizing lakefront spring.

This is the central schizophrenia of the gardener. You know that your plants are going to break through the thawing soil, as they have for a billion years. But in the depths of winter, with the snow burying everything familiar, you never quite believe it. You need that first brave sprout to reach through to the growing sunshine and chirp, Ah! Here we go again!

Sunshine shakes
2 scoops Vanilla ice cream
1 cup fresh-squeezed orange juice
1 cup milk

Throw it in a blender and zap it. A little taste of summer. Drink it while sitting on the radiator, because it's still awfully cold outside. Don't forget to zest the oranges before discarding the rind! Zap the zest in the microwave in 20 second bursts on 60% power until it's dry (it'll burn if you zap it in longer bursts). Save for baking and breading.