sakon76

I keep forgetting to check which kind Mom's is that I use. It's a Singer. I think it's literally the same age as I am - she might have gotten it for a wedding/baby present. Or it might be a few years older. ;D Metal body, plastic pedal. I really like it because it has a slow setting. I found the modern machine Mom got when her old one had conked out but we needed to sew something kind of scary! Waaaaaaaaaah don't go so fast aaaaaaaaa! .O.O; I thought it was gonna suck my fingers in! Fortunately the old machine was fixable.

I still haven't gotten my mail-order plants. They supposedly shipped on the 9th, and I think previous orders we've gotten in a day or two. Although this was a bigger order. I had a gift certificate... ;D Don't know whether to be worried yet or not. They didn't give me a tracking number.

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The nice thing about the old metal machines is that they're nigh-infinitely fixable. The two I've gotten rid of recently were '60s-'70s Touch'N'Sews, which were plastic, and once they go, they're gone. Though granted my main machine, the Babylock, is similarly all-plastic... but I'm looking forward and seeing there'll be a day when she breaks and the cost of repair is not worth it. The metal ones, I can pretty much find an online tutorial for any of them and do it myself.

What color is your machine? Singer made the all-metal machines in black, beige/cream, green, and white, and certain of those colors winnow it down to just one or two machines it could be. My mother's always had two, a 127 treadle and a 201-2, which are both fantastic machines. She's just now starting to sew again after a long time off. I plan to encourage this by giving her run of my wall'o'fabric. God knows it'll take forever for me to use it all myself.

Ooh, plants! Flowers? Veggies? I debated ordering anything this year, even did up a spreadsheet of which company had what varieties, but I ended up just starting things from the seeds I already had.

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It's a Singer Touch-and-Sew Deluxe Zig-Zag model 620. Also says "GOLDEN" by the TaS/DZZ. Part of the top where the spool of thread is lifts up and gives the key to the lever positions for all the different stitch styles and widths. Although last time I tried one of the more heavily embroidery-like ones the thread tended to tangle pretty quickly. But the straight, zig-zag and scallop works just fine. :)

Flowers, although I'm considering ordering artichokes from the same nursery. We usually grow a handful of tomato plants, strawberries - which the slugs mostly get, and we've got some kind of...chard I think, with colorful stems.
I'm definitely worried about my Annie's Annuals order now, though, having checked at the website to find that they ship overnight for orders in CA. Yeah, we should have gotten them last Tuesday. o.o I emailed them last night. If they say they shipped it and they got confirmation of delivery then it's possible a desperate band of package thieves swiped them off our porch while we were at work. Or if it got dropped off at the wrong place...well I hope they planted the stuff even if they couldn't be bothered to find who it was supposed to go to.
Or hopefully something just fell through at their end and nothing got sent yet.

Mom informs me that Mr. Happy has begun to bloom!!! ::runs outside::He is! Eeeee! And the irises are starting to go! :D

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I think that's the same one I just gave to Goodwill. I will say this - it worked for about forty years before it stopped! Which is not a service life cut tragically short.

Artichoke plants are pretty! They get big, though. I think we're approaching gardening from opposite ends: you do primarily flowers and dabble in veggies, while I do primarily veggies (and roses) and have begun dabbling in flowers! :)

What's Mr. Happy?

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Ours hasn't seen heavy use. Probably more like sporadic use. It's hanging in there. :D

Ooh. Hmm. Yeah, pretty much. XD

Mr. Happy is an Echium hybrid. Whatever Echiums are. He's very, ahem, upright, whatever he is. Heh.
http://www.anniesannuals.com/plt_lst/lists/general/lst.gen.asp?prodid=2051&prp_let=E

Mine doesn't have the bulbous base. But maybe come winter I'm supposed to cut him back...I think I'm going to email them about that before I do it. I don't want to whack him too much... Yes, there is no way to avoid going wrong with that statement. XD Anyway, they are nice little lilac-colored flowers. He's just getting started! Woo!

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I have a second set of cams, and some feet and bobbins for T&S machines. Didn't find them until after we'd done the donation, of course. :/ Would you like them, or should I put them in the pile for the Costume College scholarship rummage sale?

And, hmm, yeah, "Mr. Happy" is an apt name! ^_^ Going to write him into Borealis, or have you already done so and I've just missed it? ~~Trimming your bush~~... ~~whacking it off~~... ~~floral circumcision~~... yeah, with a plant shaped like that, there are few ways to phrase things that don't automatically turn into innuendos. Do the flowers have much scent, or are they just for pretties?

~~And no, I am totally not looking at that link and thinking of Optimus in that other fic you're writing....~~

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Oh! That would probably be a very good idea! How much you want for 'em? I can PayPal you?

LOL! ^^;;;;; The flowers have no scent that I can detect, alas. They are quite pretty.

SNERK! Optimus can relate! Let's see, how tall is he, I wonder, in TFP? And should the proportion be similar to a human's...? XD 6/72...1/12... if he's 20 feet tall... Well, right there, Mr. Happy is theoretically going to be bigger. Even if OP is 30 feet tall. Unless his spike is extensible...................

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The no-gardening thing was how I was feeling last week! (I did get some in on Thursday during a break between storms.)

What do you have started?

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Lessee... in the ground at this point, I have onions, garlic, Swiss chard, shelling peas, snow peas, yard-long beans, radio calendula, zinnias (ivory/cherry swizzle, cactus, purity, envy, and candy cane), golden bantam corn, and tomatoes (riesentraube, bloody butcher, ananas noire, mortgage lifter, pink ponderosa, persimmon, aunt ruby's german green, amish paste, san marzano, black krim, Japanese black trifele, and sweet pea currant). Plus the herbs (oregano, thyme, dill, stevia, chives, and garlic chives), walking onions, pepino melons, a bed of strawberries, and jalepeno plants all from last year. And the volunteer borage, deer tongue lettuce, and nasturtiums.

In pots, two blueberry plants, three blackberries, three rhubarbs, some potatoes, horseradish, more strawberries, four gardenias, five fruit trees (orange, tangerine, apricot, peach, pear), a bay tree, two geraniums, a few roses, and four spider plants.

Still in the starter packs, I have a few more tomatoes, ground cherries, some fish and some yellow bell peppers, jalepenos, country gentleman corn, Boston pickling cucumbers, yellow crookneck squash, tromboncino squash, sugar baby watermelon, chanterais melon, vanilla ice melon, Minnesota midget melon, one Brussels sprout, and four rosemaries I'm trying to root. Plus maybe a few others; not sure I'm remembering all of them off the top of my head.

People who accuse me of thinking small don't know me. :)

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Daaaaang... I always feel like I'm doing a lot, until I start talking to other gardeners. LOL

Lessee... Out in the main area I have shelling peas, lettuces, carrots, radishes, arugula, one little zucchini has seed leaves starting to poke up... Back yard plater boxes have a sage and oregano that survived last year's neglect, and I just put a cilantro seedling out there. In my indoor starting area I have tomatoes (brandywine, marvel stripe, green zebra, Pompeii, superbush), peppers (bell, jalepenos, Anaheim), another cilantro, strawberries, borage, oregano, marjoram, thyme, sage, and basil.

Mom's rose tree is still growing despite being horribly unbalanced due to a botched prune job years ago... There's also the Meyer lemon tree, rosemary, and oregano at the other house.

I tried starting rosemary from seed, but it didn't work, and I have borage seeds directly sown out in the main area that haven't come up yet... I'm planning on doing summer squashes and beans, though those will be direct sown once the beds are ready. Also green onions! How can I forget them? (I haven't been able to grow the large ones, but I'm going to try over winter.

Edited Date: 2012-04-17 11:31 pm (UTC)

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Last year I was kind of burnt out; this year I'm having more interest in it.

That's a nice list of things you've got going! Gren Zebra's one of my favorite tomatoes; this year, I just didn't have seed for it, and ended up not doing an order....

The easiest way I've found to get a rosemary plant is actually to propagate it. Take a 4-6" cutting of new growth on an extant plant, strip the leaves off the bottom half, wet it and dip it in rooting hormone, and plant. Six of the six I started that way last year grew successfully; unfortunately, the four I kept all got fried by hot-weather Santa Ana winds. :/ So, back to the drawing board.

I'm having trouble getting lavender and violets to start. I've run into a tip that says to freeze lavender seeds for a couple of weeks, then plant immediately. I need to remember to try that....

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I tried doing a rooting from the rosemary at the other house, it ended up not working. Might try again... (I bought one of those gel trays that already has the rooting hormone in it.)

And I bought more seeds and seedlings yesterday while getting stuff to pot up the seedlings I started. I got one each of sweet chocolate peppers, ixtapa peppers, and black krim tomato. I really need to get to Costco for the giant planters, and to Home Depot for steer manure. LOTS of it.

Last year was a bum year for me gardening-wise... I was going back-and-forth between two houses, and then with Mom's health... Lost my blueberries. :( They fried without me watering them. Will have to replace those, and I moved their containers to a spot that's a bit less exposed.

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Darn it, if I was working Fanime this year, I'd lug one or two of my rosemaries up there for you! But alas, this year we're taking off. :/

Ixtapa peppers? Sounds interesting! I only manured one bed this year (the one I'm putting the corn in), but all the others I've been digging in about an inch of compost, some blood meal, and some bone meal. Followed by topping everything off with a couple inches of straw. So far everything seems happy.

I'm hoping that this year we can rebuild the damaged brick bed along the front of the house so I can plant stuff in it. Which will also involve finally painting the stucco along the front of the house before I plant; it's an almost perfect color match for the rest, but the caulk in the cracks shows dark. Of course, since it's along the front, Wonderful Husband doesn't want it to be too obviously food crops. He's ruled out squash and melons. I'm considering making it an acidic bed filled it with rhubarb and blueberries and whatever else goes well in there... that's not too obvious, right? :)

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