Ringing in the New Year Right

When we moved to Reno in 2010 we had a 5 year plan. 

 Live, love, grow in Reno and then come home to the PNW. 

 In 2016 we realized we had overstayed our plan in Reno and we desperately wanted to move our family back to the Evergreen State. In August after we completed the legal adoption of our two sons, my husband started applying for jobs in the Seattle area.  We were three months pregnant, expecting our third son and fifth child in the middle of January.  The months went by and he got a couple of nibbles, a phone interview, but nothing solid.  Then in February two days after our son was born the call came that would signal and turning tide. A biomedical research company north of Seattle was interested in him for multiple positions.  Two weeks later they flew him up for an in person interview and a few days after he came home he received a formal offer.  We wanted as little down time between jobs as possible. He gave his current employer his two weeks notice and told his new boss he could start in three weeks. Those three weeks flew by.  We got a real estate agent and started packing up non-essentials.  The week before he left we got a curveball thrown our way.  Our adopted sons have a younger sibling, a two year old girl, and she needed a forever home.  The week my husband started his new job in Washington was the week that she started living with us full time.  From the end of April to the middle of June I was a single parent to six kids, 3 months, 2 years, 4 years, 6 years, 8 years, and 10 years old.  Me and the kids worked to sell the house and the livestock from our homestead.  We had a herd of Oberhasli dairy goats in milk, a flock of 35+ chickens and a trio of Guinea Hogs. We found homes for all our animals and a buyer for the house.  I got temporary legal custody over our future daughter #3.  Five days after the kids got out of school for the summer, we got out of Reno for good. My husband had been house hunting in the Northwest and ten days after the sale of our Reno house we were getting the keys to our new digs North of Seattle. The rest of the summer is a blur of signing the kids up for school, unpacking boxes, re-carpeting bedrooms, an emergency re-model of the kids bathroom, 4th of July, filing for permanent full-time custody, getting the new house re-sided, birthdays, establishing care with new doctors, and I'm sure I'm forgetting more.  

2016 and 2017 were about moving forward.

 Just keep moving. 

 If we stopped to really think about all the plates we had in the air we might have crumbled under the weight of reality.  After living months on top of months of just nose to the grindstone, get it done and move on, it has been hard to slow down and settle.  We are in a new city, with a blossoming family, in a new home, the kids are at a new school, we found a new church.  Its all been a lot to process.

I find myself thinking back to Junk Farm and what joy I found in that project.  Urban farming was something to delight in.  I like the bustle of city neighborhoods.  The challenge of small spaces.  I felt like part of something bigger.  I never felt alone. 

It's time to settle. 

At least for a little while. 

And what better way to do that than with a garden?  

Time for some light reading.


 

   

Will You Light My Candle?

With a lot of restraint I waited until my eggs had been incubating for five days before I candled them.  Candling for those of you that don't know is taking the eggs to a dark room and shining a small, powerful flashlight through the shell toward your eye so you can visualize growth inside the egg.  I am amazed at how nature manages to take a delicious little quail egg that could be served over some tobiko at any sushi place and change it into a baby bird in only 17 days.  Super incredible.  My eggs however, may not be super incredible, and sadly they are past the delicious yellowy-center stage too.  The thing about quail eggs is that most of them have speckly, dark shells making candling pretty difficult.  Add to that my inept eye and I didn't get much out of the candling except a fearful foreboding that my hatch rate is going to be like 3%.

I love being home with my girls, I DO, but on bad days like my quail candling they can't offer much succor.  All day I was monologueing about my waste of money in purchasing the eggs only to kill them with my lack of expertise. Questions plagued me like should I just purchase another batch and start them right now so I don't lose two weeks? or what if some do hatch and then I kill them in their first week outside the egg? or what if I do order more and then all 32 of my previous batch DO hatch?  I was driving myself bonkers!

My three year old tries to offer comfort by allowing me to read Disney Princess Adventure stories, repeatedly, and then cuddle while watching Tinkerbell movies.  I try different tactics.  Millie is engrossed in Tinkerbell as she chases thistles and flutters about Pixie Hollow with her fairy friends and I escape into my planting calendar.  I bring out the old college-rule notebook, that I filched from Adam's college leftovers, and sketch garden beds and plot out seed placement.  Somehow thinking about planting vegetables distracts me from the potential quail massacre in our guest room. 

When I complete my growing calendar a new worry begins to fester. Will there be enough variety in our forecasted diet?  How many beans can you eat before a) you get sick of them?  Or b) become too flatulent to reside indoors? 

Adam comes home and brings in the mail and a Johnny's Selected Seeds catalogue.  It's as if God is saying, "Go ahead, just get a few more things." And I imagine he is winking in that fatherly, knowing way.  I go online right after dinner and binge on seed descriptions, asking Adam what he thinks about this and then that.  This lasts about ten minutes before I get frustrated with his lack of enthusiasm for fun and different foods.  Why have boring red tomatoes when you could have orange, yellow or purple?!  "Because," he explains "tomatoes are supposed to be red." And then my great thinker goes back to watching Super Troopers.  I order a handful of vegetable packets, but not from Johnny's.  I think they are a little overpriced (probably deservedly) but since I haven't planted anything yet I can afford to be cheap.  I found the seeds I wanted from Territorial Seed Co. and gave in to my romantic notions of exotic fruit and buy a Negronne fig too.

I will take this opportunity to interrupt my clear insanity and provide a table with our proposed crops for the coming growing season:

 

Asparagus
	Mary Washington
Beans
	Blue Lake
	Gold Rush
	Kentucky Wonder
	Top Crop
	Romano Pole
Beets
	Chiogga
	Gold Rush
Broccoli
	Marathon
Cabbage
	Quick Start
Cardoon
	Cynara
Carrot
	Napoli
Chard
	Northern Lights
Corn
	Earlivee
	Painted Mountain
Cucumber
	Carolina
	Wisconsin
Eggplant
	Millionaire
Garlic
	Whole Food
Jerusalem Artichoke
	Stampede
Lettuce
	Gourmet Blend
	Greed Bib
	Green Bowl
	Italian Blend
	Romaine
Okra
	Star of David
Onion
	Guardsman Bunching
	Walla Walla Sweet
Parsnip
	Javelin
Pea
	Wando
Pepper
	Ancho magnifico
	Hot Mix
	Sweet Bell
	Surprise
Potato
	Burbank Russet
	Norland Red
Radish
	Early ScarletGlobe
Spinach
	Donkey Savoyed
Squash (Summer)
	EnterpriseStraightneck
	Tri-Color
Squash (Winter)
	Bon Bon Buttercup
	Gold Nugget
Tomato
	Early Cherry
	Heirloom Mix
	Surprise
	Trip-L

I have separate lists for Fruits and Herbs & Flowers. But even when I look at them all together I feel underwhelmed.  Am I missing something?  Will this be enough?  Will it be more than I can handle? Will these flourish?

I have officially cut myself off though, no more, no sir. This is it my complete list.
My...
Complete...
List...

Why won't these quail just fucking hatch already and give me something live to brood over instead of trying to satisfy my nesting instinct by organizing my seed packets (alphabetically) and re-organizing them (by planting dates, that makes more sense).  Ugh!  Ten days left!