Seeds, Plantings and German Board Games

The first seed catalog arrived around Thanksgiving. Since that festive date, as more are delivered, the inside of the house now has totem piles of nursery offerings scattered throughout. I’m sure the seedsman and seedswoman must agonize as to when to mail out a catalog. Too early and it is disregarded as hopelessly out of season. Too late and the grower is out of funds. The non-gardener thinks of gardening in May when the farmer’s markets open, or perhaps not at all. But here we are a week into winter and a few days shy of the New Year and seeds and plantings on our mind.

On the kitchen table lie two baggies, one contains marigold seeds and the other basil seeds, gifts of the Fuja boys a few valleys over. We joined them last night for a nice dinner of a peppery and delicious turnip soup, accompanied by tasty fresh brewed farmhouse style ale. And then we retired to their music room and played a bizarrely entertaining board game called Agricola. Trust me, if you play, make sure to get someone who has played before to explain the rules. Fortunately their brother from Chicago was in for the holidays and shepherded us through the evening. A bit overwhelming for the novice, but we had a great time, particularly Cindy who won the game.

And as we left Tim gifted us the aforementioned seeds. Russ and I discussed our impending receipt of olive trees. In either a spectacular act of optimism or gloom we are both going to make small plantings of some olive tree varieties that can grow one planting zone to the south. Optimistic is our thinking that even if they die back every few years, a harvest of olives every three to five years can’t be a bad thing. Gloom, because the climate is so inconsistent, and likely to become more so, that a planting of olive trees might just be the outlier of a new planet. But at $10 a pop for the whips we figured the risk was low.

Last weekend Cindy, while perusing Craigslist, found a listing from a nursery in Georgia that specialized in Southern heirloom apples. A wonderful listing of varieties I had only read about in Creighton Lee Calhoun’s classic work. So without hesitation we ordered a Brushy Mountain Limbertwig, Black Limbertwig, Buckingham, Magnum Bonum and Original Winesap. We back ordered a Horse and a Hall. These will be planted below the hazelnut grove in their own orchard, some distance away from the main apple orchard.

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The wrap-up

  • Year-end housekeeping: This coming year, now that the alphabet is complete, I will continue posting a piece each Sunday-ish. I will also start a twelve part piece on farm tools to be published once a month. And each month I’ll be posting a few farm pictures as part of a year-long scrapbook of life on our farm. Hard for me to believe the blog is entering its fourteenth year!

 

  • Reading this weekend: William Cobbett’s, Advice to a Lover; an 1829 pamphlet by one of my favorite writers on gardening and agrarianism. This is a pamphlet where he lays out for the young man how to find an appropriate mate.

I would not suggest any of you take his advice seriously. Indeed it would be hard to find a woman today who would measure up to his list of qualities of what she must possess. But his wonderfully opinionated prose is priceless,

“There are few things so disgusting as a guzzling woman. A gourmandizing one is bad enough; but one who tips off the liquor with an appetite, and exclaims, “Good! Good!” by a smack of her lips, is fit for nothing but the brothel.”

Everyone enjoy their New Year, stay safe, and by all means, avoid those guzzling women.