Port Potager

Alas! Hydie , our last betta fish, died her fishy death the week before Christmas. She was buried at sea (which she reached via the City of Newburyport's direct line). We can't be long without one, though, so meet our new addition: This is Marigold, named, as they always are for a flower. Specifically, the type of marigold with reddish outer petals: Tiegan thought her (ok, his) body looked like the orange center and the tail like the outer petals. Marigold looked significantly more orange in the store, but here at home she looks more pink. Perhaps we should have named her Apple Blossom instead. Oh, well. Anyway, in just a couple weeks it will be time to start some seeds indoors for the spring planting, and aquarium water fertilizer is extremely useful for that. Thanks, Marigold!

Hydie is our new betta fish: Hydie is short for Hydrangea, since she is part blue and part pink. You know, like a hydrangea bush: Hydie is the latest in a noble line of betta fish that includes Iris (I and II), Lily, Fern, Chrysanthemum, and Poppy (I and II). Turns out that those fish are pretty useful farm animals in their own right, since they provide some excellent fertilizer for seedlings early in the season and the roses in mid-late summer. 

So far, the aquarium water fertilizer seems to be doing the seedlings a lot of good: This is just a day or two after I gave the broccoli and cabbage a teaspoonful of diluted aquarium water, and the results have been pretty impressive. You can see in the broccoli seedlings above that the real leaves are much bigger than they were before I fertilized, if you compare it to this photo taken the day I was working on the aquarium water thing: Ok, so I admit that this picture is taken from farther away than the first one, but if you click on it to enlarge, it's pretty clear how much smaller these seedlings are before they got the magic aquarium water treatment. If I were more scientific, I would be measuring and taking daily pictures from the exact same distance, but I'm not. Maybe that would be a good science project for one of the kids next year. Anyway, the point is that, so far, that tiny bit of fertilizer is working out. Maybe by next weekend I will need t...

Last weekend I started some tomatillo seeds. These plants get big and bushy and are quite prolific, so we only have three plants in our garden plan. I planted three seeds each in three yogurt cups to hedge our bets: They are in a black cake pan to try to give them some extra heat, since tomatillos need really warm temperatures to germinate — even at 75-80 degrees, it can take two weeks for the seeds to sprout. Nothing is going on yet, but that's not surprising since our indoor temps are likely around 65 degrees, and maybe 70 in that window on a sunny day. These seeds aren't exactly new (maybe three seasons old?), but we store them very carefully in an airtight container in the back of the refrigerator, and that has served us well for saving seeds in the past. Hopefully this is just a matter of being patient for another week or so.  The rest of the seedlings are doing well. The leeks we started two weeks ago have sprouted and are stretching up to the sun: T...