A Little Ray of Sunshine

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

It's a tomato!

There is a tomato turning purple in my window. I think it will finish before we move. Most of the green tomatos are still fairly small. We have a lot of moving experience with the weeping fig tree, which is a foot and a half shorter than the tomato, and moving big plants is a nuisence. They get damaged. Ah, well. It's a shame, but also inevitable.
I picked up some plants at a local nursery, though they weren't grown there, they were all shipped in from elsewhere. Utah, for the most part, according to their tags. Since my seeds are in a box over a hundred miles away, I wasn't able to start many plants, just some flowers I had seeds for laying around. (Yes, I know, I'm not organized at all.) So I bought some paste type tomatos and some banana peppers. I think bananas taste better than bells. I also bought a bunch of herbs. I think this may actually be cheaper than starting them from seed, the single plants were less than a seed pack, and I only need one of each sort. Then, because plants are addicting and my cyclomen has stopped blooming for now (It's been blooming contiuneously since last fall, it needed a break I think) I got an appleblossem geranium and a six-pack of coleus. I didn't really want six coleus, just one, but they only came in six-packs. I did get five different color patterns out of the pack, though. I like my varigated spiders, my weeping fig, my bosten fern, my catctii and my palm well, but they aren't colorful. Only the spiders even make a pretension of color. I have two types, white edged leaves and white centered leaves.
My big oragano has died back, mostly, but I see little stems coming up from the base. It must be the season for plant renewal. My big mint is a bit on the stragley side.
I transplanted all my new baby plants yesterday, in spite of quite nasty wind, and a good thing I did: the wind is worse today. I think the road will blow away, and our current landlord will have no trouble removing the old shingles to put on a new roof if they ever get around to it: I'd be surprised if even as many as half the shingles are still on it.
The landlord has done nothing as far as repairs, which is irritating but not terribly surprising. I really am frusterated over the broken window in the boys' room. If it were not one pane of a double pane I would have to make a nuisence of myself to get it fixed. As it is, we are moving Friday, so we will deal with it until then. The boys know not to touch the window.
We will bring the rest of our stuff up sometime around the end of the month and be all settled in . . . someday. Hopefully we will be done moving for a while at this point, but we never know.
I'm hoping the greenhouse gets finished before the first snow in the fall! My dad has some old tempered glass panels and plexiglas he says we can have (this is the depression-child saving syndrome, and he's feeling justified and Mom is feeling put-upon), the glass dates from my parents' remodel of their place in '87 when they bought it, the plexi is a little newer, probably about '89 or '90, salvaged from remodling at my dad's workplace, but has been stored out of direct sun so hopefully is usable. But all together it probably won't cover as much as half the surface. The tempered is going on the roof, since it is supposed to be hail-proof, but it's not nearly enough to cover the whole thing.
We are very blessed to have found this rental: there are none listed in the paper this week. This one was never listed at all, word of mouth sufficed. It is a very good time to be a landlord here: this house will be vacent for exactly one night: the previous tenent is moving out Thursday. This poses a bit of a problem: she has two dogs (very nice dogs, but they still shed) and the carpets must be cleaned somehow. We'll find out if she took care of it or not Friday morning, I guess, and if not, then I'll have to handle it. The landlord will, in that case, give us a rent credit for the cost of cleaning them. Most of it is not carpeted, just the bedrooms and a bit of the living area, the rest is hard wood.