Seedling Update. 2.20.22

Seedlings are mostly doing pretty well. I scattered the rest of the New York Early heirloom onion seeds on a container. Prior germination was so poor. I did these off the warming mat. Not sure if that was better but looks like at least 20 additional plants. That should give a few for saving seeds next fall, and a few weeks worth of eating onions too.

Peppers, thyme, carnations, tiny tomato varieties.

Carnations, Rudbeckia, Echinacea

Mostly oregano, and one gallardia.

Celery, Echinacea, Rudbeckia.

The onions, scallions, shallots are on the top shelf now, no artificial light. They will be fine until I plant them outdoors after the current cold spell.

Ginger Plant Started. 2.20.22

This was a little nub on a fresh ginger from the grocery store. It was about the size of a garbanzo bean. I cut it off, let it dry a day, planted. It took a month to grow. I thought it was dead. Noticed this today.

I'll kerp it under the lights and up-pot as needed. We'll see what happens.

A Fig Tree Start and a Sweet Cherry Replacement. 2.16.22

We picked up a delivery at the big box store. They bring it out to the truck. Outside, they had some fruit trees. I've been wanting to replace a sickly sweet cherry tree, so I bought a new one and planted it. Without a replacement, the healthy sweet cherry wouldn't have a pollinator.

They also had other starts. For the price ($10) I decided it was easier to buy an already well rooted fig start than root another Hardy Chicago. Also a replacement. I bought that and planted it too. Very small, but probably OK.

That was easy. I'm don't want to expand the number of fruit trees now, these are just replacements.

Helleborus. 2.16.22

Helleborus have been blooming for a while.

Cherry Pie. 2.15.22

I bought myself a present, a marble rolling pin. Today I used it to make crust for a cherry pie.

I learned some things. Pretty good, since I started baking pies after I returned from Army service, which would be about 1978. I still have the rolling pin I bought for that, plus my mom's, plus her mom's which is birds eye maple but doesn't roll well any more because the handles are stuck. Nobody needs four rolling pins, but it adds up to about one per decade. The marble pin works very nicely. The heaviness makes it noticably easier on my back, to roll out the crust. I still need to use a pastry cloth on the rolling pin, to keep the crust from sticking. The other thing I learned is that I like flour better as thickener for tart cherry pie, compared to starch (Clear Jel). The flour seems to reduce the acidity a bit.

Not related to the pie, but I learned something else. I also made a pizza, using Roma tomato sauce that I canned last summer. The canning process requires adding lemon juice as a preservative. That makes for too sour tomato sauce for me. What I learned is, if I add about 1/4 tsp baking soda per pint of tomato sauce before spreading it on the pizza crust, it's not nearly as sour and I liked that quite a lot. That's good because then I can can more next year, which means it won't take up freezer space.