Humble Garden

February in New England can be a hard month to wade through. Seed ordering and seed packet receiving frenzy is long past. Planning of planting is done. Now its just waiting for time to pass for the moment that indoor started seed can be planted. As of today Friday the 27th of Feb, the most I can plant is some herbs and eggplants that I want pamper well past the flea beetle stage.

At the moment, there is nothing more to start indoors. The snow still sits on the garden, can’t even really clean up because there is too much snow pack.

I just thought I would share a few shots of some of the things we are doing around here. Its all really low key and a lot of planning and dreaming – not too scintillating

I bought a soil blocker doodad from Johnny’s seeds and have been using it to make seed starts indoors.

You pack the form with starting soil and then plop it down in trays like below. I will be the first to say these are the not the most beautiful soil blocks!

(This was cross posted to two of my other blogs Peaknix and Nika’s Culinaria)

Recently, I came across a solar cooking wiki and a whole group of YouTube videos about how Africans are adopting parabolic solar cookers in their villages. The importance of this didn’t really sink in for me until I saw how women walk hours through elephant infested nature preserves to find wood that they poach unsustainably. They get chased by angry elephants (its THEIR home after all) and the women spend ALL DAY finding dwindling resources, leaving behind unattended or poorly attended babies and small children.