The Power of Color

Hello, friends.  Last week, I harvested lettuce and thyme.  The wintersown lettuce is now up, as well as spinach, marigolds, hollyhocks, scabiosa, cosmos and Hopi dye sunflowers.   The stovetop was cleaned with homemade thieves vinegar and baking soda.  Fire cider was strained, and honey added.  To use up several leftovers, vegetable soup was made for lunches, which also used our canned tomatoes, fresh cabbage and carrots, garlic and last year's frozen peas.  The dehydrated garlic was ground into powder, and another tray of garlic was dehydrated.

After talking with J about David the Good's video on the trench biochar method, he said he thought what was left in the woodstove with the ashes every time he cleaned it out was the same thing.  So I sifted the ashes out of what was in the ash bucket.  Once I get a full 5 gal bucket of the charred pieces, I'll charge it with compost tea.  I spread the ashes around fruit trees.  A dozen eggs were shared with a friend.  I made cabbage and noodles with our cabbage, and sweet potato muffins with leftover sweet potatoes and soured milk.  Laundry was hung on the line.  Face masks were hand washed and hung on the line.  On the way home from dropping recyclables off at the dump, I got gas for the push mower, then mowed the edges of the asparagus patch, around a fig tree, a persimmon seedling, and a flower bed.  Somehow, when the guys mow, these areas are almost always missed, so I wanted to start out with some clean edges.  

For a dinner, I made autumn succotash, using some of our butternut squash.  Three more containers were wintersown... butterfly weed, woad, and dyer's coreopsis.  A patch of poppies was direct seeded.  On Saturday, I powder coated lots of orders.  A flower bed was weeded, a volunteer bachelor button was transplanted, and a goji berry was pruned.  A jar of our red noodle beans was cooked in the wok, to go with mushroom gravy over jasmine rice.  The windows for the workshop were all salvaged and are different.  The two with wood frames happen to be the most visible, and were painted in spring green on the outside.  I'm planning on making flower beds beneath these two windows, and putting a flower box at one.  J finished putting all the flooring down in the workshop, and built the steps up to the porch.  The walls took some hits, so I need to mud some places before I put the second coat of paint on.  Slowly but surely, we're getting there.  

I've been thinking about color, and the power it has to soothe or excite, make us happy or sad, even make us hungry (it's said red does that).  The recent blooms are surely making me happy.  If I'd have tried, I couldn't have matched the new flannel sheets to our walls any better.  They didn't look like they were a lavender blue on my monitor, and were just named "Blue", so I was pleasantly surprised they were such a good match.  After looking at a load of laundry from the house, it made me smile to see they were hung pretty similar to the color wheel, though I wasn't aware of it at the time.  Other than the 3 containers from a few days ago, most of the wintersown plants are germinating, which is pretty exciting.  The peas are slow to germinate, with only five up.  I'll give them a little longer, then will reseed some spots.  

J has been working on the garden plan for the year.  He's going to move the trellis we grow tromboncino on, as they've grown in the same spot the past two years.  We're taking down the long PVC "house" we tried growing corn in.  I don't have anything on my calendar this coming week, and hope to spend some time working on the workshop, and in the yard and garden.  I learned a few things while reading Margaret's post about companion planting.  A few things I plan to try are planting nasturtiums in with the squash, radishes with the eggplant and possibly tomatoes, and sweet alyssum with the lettuce.  Hopefully, our garden will continue to just get better each year.  Wishing you a most colorful week, friends.