Just. You know. Dormant.
The story of my life is that I make plans, I get part way through plans, I get distracted by life, and lo and behold, a couple of years go by before I remember my original plans. Sort of an attenuated ADD.
Yeah. Here we are again.
I have hoops, but no hoop houses as of yet. However, I have a new friend who is Not An Enabler. She's something far more dangerous and delightful to have around. She is an actual real live Instigator. She is the sort of person who hears of your plans and says: "How wonderful! When do you want help putting that together? Is two months from now doable?" And before you know it, you've scheduled a hoop-raising for mid-July. Which, of course, you ignore until mid-June and think, wait a minute. Having a hoop-raising means having people over who are expecting to raise hoops which means I need to have the layout done and that means I need to clean the yard omgomgomgomg!!1!!
Cleaning the yard, around here at least, does not mean picking up the lawn toys and digging up the stray dandelion. It means finally disposing of those tree limbs I cut down three months ago and burying them, scraping the weeds off and burying them, and building the GooseHow so that visitors don't have to deal with wandering geese. My geese are not intemperate, but they do leave offerings around that I wouldn't want anybody to step in, especially when guests are there to help me put up awkwardly shaped projects.
So naturally I played with my soil blockers today. It's a more productive hobby than playing yet another Big Fish Game, and has the added bonus of being an incentive to get geese penned, as they will eat any seedling they set their beady little eyes on. Keeping plants alive until they produce something useful to a human is not a goose's concern.
I like my soil blockers. Heck, I love my soil blockers, even as I ruefully acknowledge a few limitations. They're best when they have a misting situation. 3/4" soil blocks don't take a heck of a long time to dry out, taking that just-barely-sprouted seed with it. 2" soil blocks split very easily under the demanding root system of a winter squash, and while they can handle a bottom-up soaking better than the little blocks, too much water and you have dissolving lumps of potting mixture. I'm still working on my pacing via the watering situation. Still, I have to say that I love the blocks better than working with plastic pots. If the soil block is damaged it can be recycled either back into the potting mix or into the garden for soil amendments. Plastic pots just gather in sad black drifts until I get around to tossing them. I'll stick with the blocks for now, with an eye toward convincing my nearest and dearest that a 4" soil blocker would be a very appreciated birthday, anniversary, Mom's Day, Xmas, or arbor day gift.
I also threw caution to the winds and decided that now was the perfect time to plant something, anything, no matter what time now happened to be. I know this is crazy and likely to land me with a whole bunch of out-of-season planting issues, but I also know that I have spent my whole life fussing to the point of immobility about getting things wrong. Of course I'm going to get things wrong, but if I don't get in the habit of at least trying to do them, nothing will get done at all. At least if I'm in motion, I'll get better at hitting targets. So I have tomatoes started in mid-June, and I've also sprouted dandelions (they're edible for both me and geese and they reseed crazy, so bonus), as well as some elderly California Poppy seeds and grocery store red lentils. I like the look of the lentil plants so far. Whether they produce or not at this point is moot - we'll get to productive after practice - but the plant is very pretty so far.
Here's to Inspiration, Enablers, and Instigators, without which I would never have half the fun I'm having now.
