Osage Oranges Sans Seeds

I had a great time going through my Southern Exposure Seed Exchange catalog! I still have plenty of seeds left over from my seed-buying frenzy last year, but I enjoyed going back through the catalog to see the things that did well.

I was surprised by how very little did well last year. Absolute crop failures on all varieties of winter and summer squash; no melons, no corn, no sunflowers, no beans. Early expiring tomatoes, early expiring cucumbers. Almost no cabbage.

But we had some successes, and it was fun to remember that. We had beautiful greens, as long as the spring weather held. The chard planted last spring is still producing now, nine months or so later. I had nice basil, adequate parsley, more than enough drying tomatoes. And some of the flowers did well: celosia, strawflowers, globe amaranth. Other flowers were epic fails (almost no marigold, cosmos, nasturtium, zinnia), but I think the plants that were started in the greenhouse did well, and the broadcast seeds did badly.

How satisfying to have my seed order placed!

I had two little reassurances that shed light on last year. Another epic fail was the osage orange fence I attempted to establish last year. We had gathered the osage oranges, let them freeze and thaw all winter, then dribbled the sludge into a trench in the spring, hoping that we would eventually have a living hedge. Great in theory: no sprouts in practice.

I tried again this last fall, carefully gathering the osage oranges off the ground, where they fall when fully mature. Today, I went to check them, and was amazed to find only about 20 seeds total in about thirty of the fruits. Since good osage oranges can have 200 seeds apiece, these fruits were almost 6000 seeds short. No wonder I had no germination: if the fruits themselves were almost sterile, it's awfully hard to grow a hedge!

Not my fault, and I could, perhaps, have been more observant (and maybe that wasn't the problem at all): there are plenty of things to take into consideration.

Second, we had our forester come by with a plan for our woods. I was chatting with him, and he mentioned at one point that there is a band of rich farmland, just about six miles north of us, that runs east-west across the central part of the state. That band has topsoil a foot and a half deep. No wonder we've been languishing here, and nearby friends have thriving gardens. Our soil needs some help!

And that's fine. But it's another piece of the puzzle in why 2011 was such a rough year. (I had forgotten that our first composite soil test came back with a score of 3 out of 100. It doesn't get much worse than that!)

Isaiah borrowed the camera and took some great photos.

Original sheep Ashley (still not in the freezer!) and her daughter Bethlehem.

One of the skinny, incredibly productive Leghorns. They had a rough week last week, producing only about three dozen eggs all week, after the dog attack Monday. They stopped altogether for a day or two, then produced at half pace the rest of the week. I think they're approaching normal rate now, though, after a week.

The orchard, still dormant. I am tempted to prune, since I think the trees are getting ready to bloom, with the warm winter we've had ... but I didn't start yet.

And since I've tried ever so many times to get good photos of the birds, I am impressed with Isaiah's ability to capture a clear, striking image.

A very satisfying day, my 33rd birthday.

My dear in-laws sent me a cake mix, so I actually had a birthday cake on my birthday, which I haven't had for some years. I borrowed a page from Isaiah's playbook, and would like to share the underlying meaning of the cake: I am both well-rounded and not quite square.