Spring cleaning and seeding

On the countdown to Spring Equinox this Thursday, friggin wooooottttt!! Hooray Spring!


Started in on some seriously needed spring cleaning upstairs today. I haven't done squat up there cept mess it up since pretty much Thanksgiving- too much snow and cold and too lazy to deal with winter, blech. And today is chilly, but the rest of the week is supposed to be pretty nice, so better upstairs today, and into the solarium for setup for a couple days.
So today was mostly putting stuff away, stuffing all the sprawl out back into the places they came from. And I decided to set up a couple grow lights upstairs to stick the tomatoes and peppers under. Gives me a damn fine reason to keep going upstairs every day or two and keep cleaning and doing stuff up there.
I really need to pick up the plumbing fixings for the kitchen sink and bathroom shower, and just call T&C to have them come out and set up those and make sure all is well with the toilet too. I'm tired of not having proper facilities upstairs. I'm betting I will be able to find a cheap sink at the Restore, and a couple fixtures after that is pthhht. New toilet seat probably too, that toilet is icky as hell.
Why do I feel the need to call in T&C to do it when it's all stuff that's probably easy enough for us to do ourselves? Because those pipes have been pretty much untouched for three years and if something is fucked up, I want the plumber on hand right then and there to take care of it. Just like that ick with the well filter- we couldn't deal with it for good reason, was happy to have T&C take care of it and fix the pipes after busting the stupid filter off.

Tomorrow I get to sort out some of my donation seed and send a few friends off some packets of goodness. I have a few small packages to send out too, so I want to just get all of them together at once so I can take them into town on Wed- it's a super sale day at the market, and I want to pick up a couple things, and I need to drop books off at the library. 

Pretty soon I need to work in the kennel area. I want to move a fence panel around, and it's darn soon for early spring setting in and planting of early greens and peas to prep up trellising for this year.

Tuesday- totally rocking ass spring day, full of warm and sunny!! Got a lot done out in the solarium today- all three buckets of horseradish are replanted, plus an additional short and wide pot for all the little roots that will become next years big stock. Potted up the two gooseberries in litter buckets- those need to be topped off a smidge once they are moved outside. After pulling apart the horseradish buckets, I realized I kind of have to keep all that dirt together- little horsey hairs running through the stuff will likely cause weeding problems later if I just indiscriminately plant the stuff in all over the place. Good thing I picked up those two huge bags of soil mix to take care of the rest of planting. 
Got the ornamental kale, Vates Blue Curled kale, and Red Russian kale starts set up- 18 of each, using TP tubes in recycled plastic containers from greens. The ornamental kale is for around a couple tree bases, the other two are to smother in the fenceline for the current chunk of garden being worked in. I also got 18 milk jugs set up, though I only planted in four of them.

Today was rainy and not too chilly, mostly a running around day. Woke up achy as hell, and that was after a long hot shower and a massage from my love last night. Heh, spring hell on the joints is here already. Had to get off to the post office and get stuff in the mail, hit Hardings for some Wild Wednesday sales, and the hardware store for some bird supplies. Then it was mostly prepping up stuff for the freezer- got hamburger for 2.19 a pound, max 12 pounds. So yep, I picked up the max. Beef is just getting out of hand expensive, and Hardings has good stuff they grind themselves. And since we don't have fresh beef in the house a lot, I decided to make an Italian meatloaf for dinner tonight, yum!
And squee!!!! Went to water the herb pots today, and we have tiny sprouts of lovage, horehound, lemon mind, valerian, and sorrel. WOOT!!

HAPPY EQUINOX!!!!! Been mostly a planting day out here. Got the horseradish pots and gooseberry buckets outside as well as all 18 milk jugs containing marigolds, tall marigolds, wildflower mix, black eye susan, and calendula. Started 24 pots of chamomile, 3 pots each of cherry and papaya cream mixed nasturtiums, and 6 pots of milkmaid nasturtiums.
We sat down and had a seriously long and nice chat with the neighbor today, hopefully that will yield some nice results this summer.
And in light of the holiday, I'm making eggs for dinner tonight :)