Saturday Beauty

The colors come alive with light shining through the petals

This was a very lucky shot. On a rainy afternoon, the sun finally came out from behind a cloud and illuminated this iris bloom. I love how the light brings out the saffron-like golden "beards" hanging down the side petals. Absolutely glorious!

Iris blooming in my mother's yard
Heard County, Georgia—25 April 2010

My kind of weather

Weather Channel "classic" Doppler radar
30 Mar 2012, 7:35pm EDT

Tonight in LaGrange, there's a steady rain with occasional thunder. The window next to my desk is open; I can smell the rain as the cool, fresh air flows in through the screen. Perfect evening, perfect weather.

Many people have a personal crisis when it rains. Not me. I'm delighted on wet, stormy days. Why not be happy? Water is life, after all.

Regular rain means plentiful crops, beautiful gardens, thriving wildlife. Those are reasons to be happy when the forecast calls for showers. Okay, so having to be out in it isn't fun. But eventually, you'll get home, where you can watch the rain while staying warm and dry. 

Last summer's Southeastern drought was terrible. It was heartbreaking to watch West Point Lake and other local reservoirs drop to historic lows. The crayfish in the small creek near my mother's house were nearly dried out of their home, and saved only by a couple of early-fall downpours. Animals, plants, crops, communities, you and I need precipitation more than we can ever know. Without a storm now and then, life ceases to exist.

Rain means that life continues. Now that's a reason to be thankful!

Nearly Wordless Wednesday: 3/28/12

Amazing mid-spring color

Flame-orange native azalea
Warner Robins, Georgia—April 2010

THIS JUST IN: Heirloom tomato seeds!



Very quick shipping from Maine...thanks, Pinetree Seeds!

Yesssss! The little manila envelope from Pinetree Garden Seeds was waiting when I opened the mailbox this afternoon. It took my order just three days to get here all the way from Maine. Impressive!

I have roughly 100 seeds of Mortgage Lifter, Brandywine, Druzba, and Cherokee Purple tomatoes. Between work and graduate school, I won't have a chance to pot them up until the weekend. That's all right, because it gives me time to decide where I'll put the seedling trays.

That "grape soda" smell means wisteria

It's springtime in the Deep South, and the air smells like grape soda. Not name-brand grape soda, but the cheapest-of-all-cheap-store-brands grape soda. Or maybe it smells more like year-old grape bubble gum, the wonky kind that nobody will even shoplift off the clearance rack at Big Lots.

Whatever sticky grape confection it smells like, that smell means wisteria, also known as the Other Vine That Ate the South. Say what you will about wisteria, but I always look forward to its glorious Pointillist creations draping the trees.

Greens, purples, lavenders, smokes...wisteria's got 'em all.
(LaGrange, Georgia—21 March 2012)

Just for Fun: An FP&P word map

Commonly used words and tags from FP&P in a common farmyard silhouette.
Created with Tagxedo on 23 Mar 2012.

Funny how real life and blogging life sometimes cross paths!

Working on an assignment for Information Graphics class, I stumbled upon Tagxedo, which bills itself as an online "word cloud [creator] with styles." Enter any text, URL, news story, or other document, set a few parameters, and voilà! You have a visual representation of the doc's most commonly used words. The bigger the word, the more often it appears in the original text. 

As part of my assignment submission, I used this blog's URL as the text source, and chose the rooster shape you see above. Of course, you can upload your own .jpg file to set the shape on your Tagxedo cloud.

Head over to Tagxedo to see what kind of fun you can create. If you choose to post your word clouds on your blog, I hope you'll leave the URL in the comments section so we can see what you whipped up.

Tomato dreams

On Tuesday—the same day I blogged about the Tomat-O-Match—I ordered my tomato seeds from Pinetree Garden Seeds. This Maine-based family operation offers an amazing selection of hard-to-find heirloom vegetable, herb, and flower seeds at great prices. Their mission is to help preserve old-fashioned plant varieties, and they've been doing it for nearly 40 years. Staffers test every seed before listing it in the catalog, and those catalog descriptions are often written with wry humor. All these qualities make me happy to do business with Pinetree.

After much hemming and hawing, and a consultation or 12 with the Tomat-O-Match, I settled on four old-fashioned tomatoes.

• Brandywine
• Cherokee Purple
• Druzba
• Mortgage Lifter

Why these? They're all good for fresh eating or canning, and are indeterminate (they grow and bear all season long instead of stopping in mid-summer). My gardening friends have recommended these varieties or similar ones; these tomatoes hold up pretty well to our punishing summers. They bear heavily all summer long, and sometimes until frost, putting out as many fruits as a gardener can eat. And they produce interesting-looking tomatoes in varying shades of red, maroon, pink, and purple.

My mother bought a pack of seedling pots, but I have the feeling we're going to need more than a dozen. Thank goodness I have a PotMaker and a few months' back issues of the Market Bulletin.

My seeds should arrive by the end of next week. Mom has already set aside an area in her laundry room for our seedlings and a grow light. Last month, she and my stepfather tilled a half-truckload of composted leaves into the dormant garden soil. At least 30 days lie between potting up and setting out; at least 90 lie between now and the first harvest. It will be a while yet—and the wait is worth all the trouble.

In the meantime, I'm dreaming of luscious, home-grown heirloom tomatoes.