The mourning doves and robins have returned, it's time to get back to that gardening grind!!!💪💪💪👊👊👊 (<- person who tries to do the least work possible when gardening)
We're in zone 5 here (or, I think we are, but zone 6 is rapidly expanding), so gardening starts indoors. The plan this year is to use up some of my old seeds. I got a bunch of packets in 2020 that I haven't finish, so they're getting to an iffy point in their shelf life. I also recently found out about seed snails and confirmed that they're not just a social media trend but have been in use for decades, so that seemed like a good way to get rid of some old bubble wrap and a big packet of White Cherry tomato seeds. Except I ended up having way more White Cherry seeds than I'd expected, and I only have so many friends I can give tomato plants to if they all germinate. Only half of the remaining packet of White Cherries went into a seed snail.
The rest are just in plastic pots that came with my houseplants, my go-tos for seed starting.
The 2026 tomato seed lineup is:
- 5 Black Beauty Beefsteak
- 3 Dwarf Stripe Micro
- 4 Amish Gold Slicer
- 8 Great White Beefsteak
- A whole lotta White Cherry
That's the end of my Black Beauty, Dwarf Stripe Micro, and Great White seed packets. I also set up a pot for a mix of borage and viola, another for some Dark Opal basil and some leftover thyme and oregano from 2020, and one more for 3 cucumber seeds. I didn't do herbs last year, so I'm trying to bring those back to the garden, as well as bring in some edible flowers.
It's a low-priority dream of mine to make gothic pasta: black tomatoes, black basil, some black carrots to sweeten the sauce, and Aurelio Voltaire playing while it all simmers. There aren't any tomatoes with black flesh (yet) (that I know of), but the black carrots have more than enough pigment to take care of that. Unfortunately, a tiny bunny ate the tops off my Black Nebula carrots last year, severely stunting their growth, so I couldn't harvest them. I figured I'd let them go to seed this year, but this does mean my carrot patch is currently occupied and I won't be able to fit many new carrots for harvesting, so I might not get my goth pasta this year. Black Beauty tomatoes have been a staple in my garden for the past several years, but I've been meaning to try a black cherry tomato and the Black Krim. Maybe next year I'll have an all-black vegetable garden.
Amish Gold Slicer tomatoes came to me as a free gift when I ordered seeds from Renaissance Farms some years ago, and I liked them so much that they've been a part of my garden since. The seeds I'm using this year are ones I collected from my own tomatoes, though, and I can't remember if I've grown these and confirmed they are proper Amish Golds or if they're crossed with something. Again, I'm about doing the least work possible in my garden, so I do jack to keep my tomatoes from cross-pollinating.
That's how I ended up with the world's saddest Black Beauty Beefsteaks in 2023.
On the bright side, it could've been ugly too
I've been thinking about making packets of tomato seeds from my garden like it's a blind bag, perhaps as a little zine freebie. The contents will be a surprise to everyone, myself included.
If all fails, the local garden club does an annual heirloom vegetable sale right when it becomes time to transplant everything outdoors. The tomatoes I got from them last year ended up being my most productive that season, but that says less about them and more about the fact that I was horribly late to getting everything in the soil.
It's still nearly 2 months until transplant time, but after a few false springs, it does look like we're getting around to real spring. I was out at a small nature preserve for the past two weekends and caught sight of a bluebird the first weekend, then hundreds of migrating sandhill cranes the next.
There was a muskrat out there last weekend too, and I've since been longing to sit out there for as long as it takes to get a decent photo of a big wet rat, as one does. We'll see if that works out.
Here's hoping that I'll photograph some cool mammals this year, like some of those featured in The Wild Wooders from the musical adaptation of The Wind in the Willows:
Imagine if Tumblr had caught wind of this sometime last decade. The weasels would've had their own dedicated fandom.
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