Yucky Day Gardening

When I got up this morning it was only 50-odd degrees and the wind was blowing ferociously out of the west. Of course it was the morning I had planned to do a little gardening before plunging into the busy rest of my day. Coffee with a girlfriend at 9. Work at the greenhouse at noon. I had a little time after getting Daniel up at 7 to putter in the yard. But the dilemma was, what to do?

So, I came up with a list of my top five favorite "Yucky Day" gardening activities.

#1. Read my latest garden magazine. Admire the pictures. Plan what I want to do next in my own garden to make it match one of those lovely pictures. Admire the recipes and check the kitchen to see if I actually have the ingredients.

#2. Move from the magazine to one of my many garden catalogues. Then I can actually figure out how much it might cost to implement my new vision, or if I could grow the ingredients for the recipes.

#3. Make a cup of chamomile or mint tea with fresh steeped herbs from my garden. OK, I don't actually have chamomile growing this year, but one of my students gave me some that she had grown. And my mint this year is chocolate mint. I haven't tried it as tea yet. I'm not actually sure what to do with it, other than feed bits of it to visiting friends and their children to enjoy their reactions.

#4. Pull on my warm red sweater, take my tea outside to a sheltered corner, and listen to the wind blow. Sitting outside, warm from my tea and my sweater feels like a manageable adventure.

#5. Play in the kitchen. Use the last of those lovely strawberries for a pie. Make a batch of strawberry-rhubarb jam. Even just chop the rhubarb so it can wait in the freezer to be a taste of spring in February.

Hopefully by the time I'm done entertaining myself in the kitchen, the weather will have cleared up and I can actually go outside and get dirty.

More later,
b