Earth Celebrations Hudson River Pageant: May 9th

Happy Belated Earth Day! I am getting so very excited for my upcoming earth celebration - when I will perform in a pageant to benefit the Hudson River. These pageants are always so much fun. I've been dressed up as a garden spirit by Felicia and her talented crew of volunteers about 6 or so times before, for 2 Winter Parades, 2 or 3 Spring Pageants, 1 television appearance and 1 charity event. The costumes and puppets are always so amazing!! They've been on hiatus for the past few years and I've missed it so much. I was thrilled when I got a call from them a few weeks ago requesting me to perform in this new parade for the Hudson!! And it is just even better that it will benefit my Hudson-Raritan Estuary, a cause I believe in as passionately as gardens. Afterall, we can't grow plants without clean water.

Here is a pic of me in the 13th Annual Spring Pageant back in 2003. Wow, I can hardly believe it was so long ago. I'm the Butterfly Spirit, wearing a purple costume with a yellow butterfly wing hat in the center. You can just see half of me behind the blue Water Spirit:The year after that, I was Mother Universe, the purple costume in the center of this picture below - which isn't me- but a picture of someone else in the costume another year.

I had such great time being Butterfly Spirit and Mother Universe. Though let me tell you, dancing with your arms held up to show off butterfly wings and universe symbol sleeves for over 8 hours is not easy!! Haha. Though it is well worth the next day's sore muscles.

I just found out today that they want me to be Wind Spirit this year. I've also convinced my partner to do it to! He is going to be Sun Spirit. I'm a little bit dissapointed, because although I didn't tell them, I really wanted to be a fish. I love fish. I may try to get it changed at the costume fitting next week. But either way, I know it will be amazing.

If you happen to be in the NYC area, they are always open to new volunteers. Anyone can participate! You can help them make the costumes at free workshops, or sign up to be a performer like me, or even carry a puppet or be a marshall. They is always more room for people to do something, even up to the day of the parade. Or just come out and watch the show!

You can find all the information here: http://www.earthcelebrations.com/

The Best Laid Plans...

So, I had all these previous posts with ambitious plans to plant by the moon phases, start this and that inside, blah blah blah. Well, most of it didn't happen. Haha I've just been too busy.

But tomorrow looks perfect. I'm just about to finish a project I've been writing so tomorrow will be clear for nothing but fun. The weather report is looking great- in the mid 70's and sunny. (despite what my weather widget says in the sidebar- apparently it is broken)

So tonight I want to get some seeds in water to soak them over night. I don't want to pre-soak too many, or else I'll end up like a few weeks ago planting 200 radish seeds for 2 hours straight. (good thing I like radishes!) So I'm trying to work out a good estimate here to get the right number for my space:

The measurements of the new bed these are going in: 39" x 94"

• Beets: sow 1" apart, 1/2" deep, 12" rows, thin to 2 (babies) - 4" (storage) apart

• Carrots: sow 1" apart, 1/2" deep, cover with soil lightly. keep moist. thin 10 1" apart when 1 to 2" high, then again later when they're bigger to 2" apart

• Turnips: sow 1" apart, 1/4" deep. rows 6" apart for babies, 12" for bigger ones. When seedlings 3 - 5" high, thin to 3"apart

So wow, if the bed is 94" long and they all get sowed 1" apart, that means I have to sow nearly 300 seeds tomorrow! Oh my. Well, at least I'll be getting lots of exercise!

Note: I got the planting directions above from Barbara Damrosch's "The Garden Primer". She's the wife of Eliot Coleman who wrote "Four Season Harvest". They really seem to know their stuff so I'm going by what she says.

Also, my Agribon finally arrived today!! Now I just need to get wire and make the chenille row covers as described in Eliot's book. I have about a snowball's chance in hell of getting this all done tomorrow, but, at least it's finally here!

Gardening Helps My Diet!

Maybe I should be a bit embarrased to admit this, but I'm on a diet. Just started Weight Watchers at the end of January, since in my 30's the pounds started piling on. So far so good- I've learned a lot of things I never paid any attention to in my 20's - like the fact that olive oil is crazy calories! And that two cups of pasta filling up my whole big bowl is really too much to eat at one time. Worst of all, India Pale Ale, my favorite type of beer, has the most calories of any type by far. Or, maybe equivalent to be the worst- that Chipotle Tacos, my favorite thing to eat out for lunch while I'm at work, are 16 points, a whopping 80% of my calories for the day! I guess it was all of these little things that were adding up.

In any case, the good news is it has been working - I've averaged about 1 pound lost per week for a total of 12 lbs that seem to be staying off. I don't usually feel hungry, or deprived - just making smarter choices. I hope to lose 18 more, so then I'll be at the upper limit of the healthy weight range for my height.

Anyway, what does all this have to do with gardening?!? Well, since April is National Gardening Month (Happy Gardening Month!) Weight Watchers has a few cute articles about gardening on the front page of their website.

I suppose it should be fairly obvious that gardening activities are good exercise. I guess I just didn't realize quite how good! If I weed for 20 minutes, I get 1 activity point. 35 minutes = 2. That means I can have a light beer as a reward. :-) If I plant seedlings for an hour - that's 3 points. If I do it for 2 hours straight like I did a few weeks ago while planting radishes, arugula and mustard greens it is 6 points earned- and that's a whole meal burned off!

All this time I wasn't even entering these activities into my activity tracker. Well, now I know. Just one more excuse to get out there and garden!

Activity: POINTS values for 30 minutes
Digging and spading: 1-2
Mowing the lawn with a power mower: 2-3
Planting seedlings; pruning: 1
Weeding: 1-2
Raking: 2-3
Shoveling snow: 3-4

Herbs Gone Wild

Check out these chamomiles!!! So naughty, self-seeding all over my herb garden from one little plant I bought last year! Eventually I'll have to pull out some of them, but for now I figure I might as well let them go crazy and have a good time. This year I'll just make sure to cut all of the flowers before they dry out. Which is fine, since you use the flowers to make tea anyway. I just didn't know that last year, thought they were cute, and let them stay on the plant. As you can see the result of that is like Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street for chamomile! I feel like I should throw them some beads.

In that pic you can also see the oregano is doing great. Unfortunately, the thyme & rosemary, not so much. (They're the brown stuff you probably can't see in the picture, since they blend in with the soil.)

I'm amazed at my tarragon too. Especially considering last year it was pulled completely out of the soil by some animal when it was still a tiny little plant. Luckily, I didn't give up on it and just replanted it in the soil. Now, look at it go!

Pea Update

It's been just about 32 days since I planted all those peas. I thought they were all doing pretty well. They look healthy and some are now about 3-4 inches tall.

But then I just looked at this post about the same dark-seeded early perfection peas I planted last fall. At 33 days old, last year they were WAY bigger than the ones I have now. I have them now on the same trellis, but they haven't even reached the bottom rung yet (see above), whereas the ones in the pic from last year are above the second rung and already have a few flowers!

As you can see on the right I have the sugar snaps on a bigger 6 foot tall trellis, but they haven't reached the bottom rung yet either.

I think they must just grow really slowly in the cold weather we've been having. It even snowed again yesterday morning. Just flurries, but overall this spring has been the coldest I remember in a long time. Bummer.

I planted them early because it gets so hot and humid here pretty quickly in June, and everything I read says that will kill peas. And if it takes 60 days for them to mature, that doesn't seem to leave enough time if I didn't plant them until April.

Darn! I was really looking forward to tasty peas! I really hope they grow faster once the weather warms up.

This is proving to me that I really need that Abgribon. I wanted to try a little wire hoop house type row cover setup. But the stuff is still on backorder. On March 26th they said it won't be mailed until April 10th or later. :-(

Here's a close up of the sugar snaps: