My version of ‘doing something nice for myself’ involved working in the garden. And it occurred to me that someone else might find something useful in what I had to do this spring. Through shear negligence (laziness, running out of time in the fall, pick an excuse), I ended up leaving some of the onions in the garden. It’s not that hard to do, actually – the leaves die down and if I can’t see ‘em, I don’t dig ‘em up. So, this spring, when the snow finally left (and condolences to folks out in Michigan who got snow today), I found I had a whole bunch of onions that had survived the winter and had started to sprout. Now, when onions do that (and you see that in your bag under the sink, too), the outsides get soft and rather nasty. They can also split into smaller onions. It’s sort of like having your own little onion plant factory. So, I thought perhaps other gardeners, especially some of the newer ones, might find this technique as easy and useful as I do in terms of getting onions planted in the spring if you’ve left onions in the garden over the winter.

Very carefully, with a fork or spade, dig the clump of onions as early as you can – not right after it’s defrosted, but still early in the spring. The outside is going to be mushy – it’s ok. It’s not diseased or anything. It’s just that the mother bulb (my contribution to Mother’s Day) has moved on.

When you dig it up, it will look something like this, with the sprouts and a whole lot of little white roots coming off the bottom. The roots are important. This is what will grow you whole new onions out of those sprouts.

Now, very carefully – and this all depends on how many sprouts are coming out of the bulb – put your thumb against the outside of the onion bulb and very carefully, push the end of your thumb into the mass and push away what’s left of the bulb. This will reveal the shoots and you can carefully split the sprouts apart into individual onion plants (the plot thickens, eh?). Work your way down from the green sprout end to the roots end, splitting as you go, making sure that when you split off the sprout, you have roots at the bottom end. If you break it and there are no roots, you’ve got a dandy green onion that you can use in cooking Chinese or in salads, but it won’t grow another onion. To plant the next onion plants, just dig holes as deep as the white part of the onion sprouts, put them in, cover them with dirt and firm it down. Easy.

Now, just as a side-note, let’s look at that onion sprout again. Once you’ve split it up, it will look like this. Take a closer look at the roots end of things – see that area that is whiter? That’s called ‘the growth plate’ on onions. It’s also the part of the onion with the strongest flavor. So, when you are cooking – don’t just chop the onion. Take your knife and cut INTO the bottom of the onion a little way, as if you are coring an apple, and cut that out. Then chop the rest of the onion – you’ll find that there won’t be as much crying over the onions that way.

OK — NEXT: The Squirrel.
If a squirrel could be a combination of Stephen Hawking and an Olympic high jumper, we’ve got him here at Chez Siberia. We feed birds and use bird feeders with what are amusingly referred to as ‘squirrel baffles’ and we’ve always had a lot of success with them in terms of keeping the squirrels out of the feeders. No more. This guy figured out that if he did some training and could launch himself to the upper part of the feeder pole, he’d miss the baffle entirely, get at the seeds and peanuts and never have to share with anyone. At the moment, he’s looking positively porky out there.

We’re waiting for our citation from some animal health organization because he’s had a heart attack.

Other garden stuff:

Here at Chez Siberia, now is prime rhubarb harvest time. As a matter of fact, we went from ‘just coming up’ to ‘OMG, I’ve got to get out there and cut the rhubarb’ in about a week. Crazy. And it occurred to your dear Aunty that a) a lot of people get their rhubarb earlier than we do here (no duh), and b) that a lot of people do not realize that rhubarb is like asparagus, best cut as early as you can and then don’t bother with it because the bigger it gets, the stringier and stronger it gets and is no longer worth eating unless you are looking for a whole lotta fiber in your diet. Hence the photo here of my rather stubby and grubby thumb showing you how thick this stalk of rhubarb is (which is, about an inch across). Cut your rhubarb early, when it is smaller across that 1″ (or the length of the first joint of your thumb – your choice). It’s much more tender and tasty that way.

Also, if I can offer a small piece of advice – and perhaps a cooking experiment. If you are going to be just cooking up a mess of rhubarb (spring tonic and all that), do your usual thing (wash, cut into chunks, throw into a pot with a bit of water, put on low and cook), but do not put in any sugar until you’ve cooked it.

Then, taste it first. Get a feel in your mouth for just how sour it is (it might now be as sour as you think). Then add a small amount of sugar. In that bowl in the photo, there are four stalks of rhubarb cooked down. To make it just the least bit sweet, I put in two teaspoons of honey. That’s it. Just two. So, taste your rhubarb and add a little bit of sweetener and taste again. If you need more, then add more, but don’t just dump in the sugar because the tart-sweet flavor of rhubarb is a real spring treat and one not to be missed.

And, I’m patting myself on the back because I STILL have not planted the peppers and tomatoes. The weather folks say that we’re going to have temperatures as low as 26 over the next couple of nights, which means that at Chez Siberia, that will be 18-20 degrees F, something that would just kill off tender veggies. So, they stay in the greenhouse for now. Another couple of weeks until Memorial Day won’t hurt them.

Well, your Aunt Toby, over the past (ahem, well, let’s note get into how long, shall we?).. well, we’ve tried a whole lot of different methods here at Chez Siberia, to hold over tomato seedlings until ‘more auspicious times’. In the old days, when I could get waxed paper milk cartons, I’d sink them into those (and we also at that time had three Little Siberians, so we went through a lot of milk). These days, I’m just using pots, but if you have a source of waxed paper cartons (juice will also do; just make sure you rinse them out really well and punch a couple of drainage holes in the bottom. The secret is to match the size of the pot or carton to the length of the seedling above the level of the dirt.

You are going to — mwa-ha-ha — bury them.

So, take your carton and hold it up against the seedling and mark the top of that and cut the top off. if you have appropriate sized pots, then use those.

Using a really good potting mix (if it’s light brown or fluffy, this means that it’s got TOO MUCH PEAT IN IT. So, don’t use that. If you have that already, then add compost and something like vermiculite to hold water), put a small amount in the bottom – an inch will do. Pop the seedling out of the pack and GENTLY crumble the soil at the root level. You want to free up those roots. Then carefully take off the bottom set of leaves (trust me on this one) and put the seedling into the carton or pot.

Put in some potting mix around the bottom of the seedling and firm down well. Then holding up the seedling with your other hand, fill in the rest of the pot. Your tomato seedling should be just showing the regular leaves now and the plant will form roots all along the stem under the dirt. When it’s time to plant it out, just dig a deeper hole than usual.

But, for people like your dear Aunty, who grow in ‘Zone 4 which is really Zone 2′, things are still very chancy, even for cold weather crops. We had a couple of very warm days last weekend, which put the soil temperature way up, but I knew it would not last. Since we were slated to get rain (which we did, day after day after day), I uncovered the beds that I’d put under plastic so that they’d get a good drink and then I covered them back up again to get some solar gain.

Sometimes, people ask me whether putting plastic (or glass as I’ve done before) really is worth it. Well, this morning, after running errands, I went out and took the temperature of the end of the bed that didn’t get covered with the plastic. It was 44.3 degrees F. Too cold to plant anything in. Under the plastic, it was 50.1 degrees F. Marginally ready to put in seeds for plants such as lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, Chinese cabbage and so on. I’ll give it one more week. We’re supposed to have a couple of very sunny days in the low 60-degree range, which should bring that area under the plastic into a solid mid-50 degrees which will be plenty safe for sowing those seeds.

But I’d like you to notice the difference. Not under the plastic: 44.3 degrees F. Under the plastic: 50.1 degrees F. At this point in the spring, that’s a lot of temperature difference so I have to say it is definitely worth it since I’ll be able to put in those seeds now, in April, instead of late May otherwise. So, I’ve gained 6 weeks on my growing season. Definitely worth it.

The photo at the top is of some buckwheat seeds I gave to my grandson to plant in a pot as a little activity this past week. He planted them on Tuesday. I put them into a plastic bag on top of a heating pad covered with an old towel in the green house. That photo was taken on Thursday.

48 hours, some dirt, some moisture and some heat and up they come. But wait until you see the next photo: This photo was taken on Saturday!! So, there you are – in terms of buckwheat, as long as you’ve got warmth in the soil and some moisture, they are up and running fast, which is the reputation of this plant, since the directions literally tell you that if you are not interested in growing buckwheat for seed (that is, to harvest seed for eating or saving), you need to be cutting it down and digging it into the soil in less than 6 weeks, when it will be flowering. This past week, when we had those sunny days, I sowed one whole bed under the plastic with buckwheat seeds to start the soil improvement process. That bed was created last year and we did not have proper compost to do it. We used compost from the county landfill which frankly was mostly rotted wood chips. It was awful and the tomato plants we put into it showed the lack of soil and lack of nutrients – they frankly crouched on the ground. It was a waste of time to put anything in there. I should have done then what I’m doing this spring – put in buckwheat and when it’s up, cut it down and dig it into the bed, then water well and sow more buckwheat seed. In a couple of months, I’ll have a lot better bed than I do now and I’ll be able to put something else in there in June and July, whether that is a crop of beans, or cabbage family plants for the fall.

Let’s see now. In our greenhouse (which is unheated – I use heating mats with grids over them for the seedlings to stay warm inside their huge clear plastic bags), the pepper and tomato seedlings have had to be moved to larger quarters, and I also sowed a flat of a mix of basil seeds I got from Pinetree Seeds Pinetree Garden Seeds. One of the things I especially like about this company (besides the fact that it is locally owned, not part of a conglomerate, and they offer an amazing array of vegetable seeds from all over the world) is that they offer mixes of things. I don’t have that large a garden, so buying three or four different packets of any particular thing is not cost effective for me. But we use basil in cooking a lot, so I grow a lot, and like different types for different reasons, so having a packet of a mix of basil is a great thing for me. They offer mixes of seeds for almost all of their veggies so, if you want to try something new, I recommend you take a look.

Another change this year is that our grandson is now at the age where we can start inculcating (woops – introducing him might be a better word) him about the wonders of gardening (hence the handful of buckwheat seeds in the pot of soil). I showed him a seed catalog and we went through it, identifying the various vegetables and talking about what he’d like to grow in ‘his’ garden – I figure one little 3-4 foot end of a bed will work for one tomato plant, one pepper plant, a marigold (got to have flowers in every garden, right?) and a handful of beans. I always feel that little kids get some of their best introductions to new veggies when they are in the garden and can pick, snip and pull them up by themselves. Who knows, perhaps he’ll learn to like kohlrabi and parsnips this year?

Shoveling.

Yes, I literally took out my show shovel and scraped off as much of the snow off one of the garden beds as I could. And it looked like this: The ground was frozen solid so there was no way to get anymore of that off without removing actual soil from the bed. But the thing is this: Once you’ve taken the top layer of the snow off, if there is any sun or warmth at all, the rest will melt off. and then you have dark soil. And if there is any sun at all, that will start to warm up.

I’m not kidding you. Literally within a couple of days, not only was everything melted off that bed, with the other beds to follow, but the soil in that particular bed was up to 39 degrees F. From ‘frozen solid’ to 39 degrees. And that is without any help from glass or plastic (which I put out this weekend since we are slated to have a sunny week this week. I’m pushing hard to get that bed up to 50 degrees so that I can put in seeds for lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, chard, beets and other cold-hardy crops. I’m just itching to get out there but just can’t until that soil warms up.

Other activities which keep me from going bonkers about not being able to get out and put my hands in the soil are starting seeds. About two weeks ago, I started various tomatoes (including seeds from a paste tomato that I saved in 2008 (that is not a typo, folks – tomato seeds under the right conditions (in this case, inside waxed paper inside a ziplock(tm) bag in the fridge door) will stay potent for a long time. And I think every single one of those seeds came up. I was amazed.

Now, I’ve tried all sorts of DIY methods on seed starting, including a wonderful screened table that the DH built for me in the basement where we clipped infrared lights that are used for brooding chicks underneath the screens, but in the end, the trick is:
a) You need a gentle source of heat underneath the soil and
b) You need a humid atmosphere

Once they are germinated, then you need sunlight. They took off so quickly that by the time I got time to transplant them this weekend, they had gotten too big, so I pulled together some 4″ pots and planted the seedlings up to their leaves in soil. Another thing I did, which I also advocate is that I dragged the potting mix out onto the patio into the sun, filled the pots out there and left them there in the sun for most of the day to bring the soil temperature in the bots up to at least 50. That bag of potting mix had been in the garage and it was frankly about 35 degrees. If I’d transplanted into that, I’d have killed or stunted the tomatoes for sure. As it is, they are very happy campers now. The peppers are not as far along, which is standard, though I’m not sure why peppers should take longer to germinate and take off than tomatoes do, but I have never had an experience where they have not been slow.

So, at the moment, I have a couple of garden beds which are now under plastic and hope the sunny days this week will bring them up at least into the 40s. It usually takes a couple of weeks of solid warm weather and sun to raise the soil under glass or plastic into a temperature range where I can feel reasonably secure about putting even cold-weather crop seeds into it. If I had them as seedlings, it would not be as risky, but they are easy enough to plant into the soil if it’s in the 50-degree range.

What are you planting this year? My new vegetable this year is parsnips. I had a wonderful dish of parsnip puree during the winter and I’m willing to give them a shot.

One of the products they sell is a wicked salmon burger (which is probably made out of all the trimmings left over after the fish have been made into filets). These burgers are very tasty, and made with dill and feta cheese. They are a quick and easy dinner – pull them out of the freezer, throw them into a pan on the stove or bake them in the oven, make a salad and another veg and off you go.

Seriously, they are amazingly good. Except for one thing – the amount of sodium in them would stop a horse. Since the DH and I like to watch our sodium intake (yes, your dear Aunty has entered the age when watching the sodium is an important thing), this is very upsetting because we really like those salmon burgers.

So, I threw the kitchen at Chez Siberia into complete chaos today in efforts to figure out something sort of like those salmon burgers but without using a high salt cheese (now, if you can use canned salmon to do this also, you just have to go down to the bit after I’ve worked with the fresh fish – Step 3).

To do this, you will need the following (this makes 8 burgers):
– About 1.5 pounds of salmon fillets, or an equivalent amount of canned salmon
– 1 cup Ricotta cheese, drained (I put mine in a fine sieve in the fridge first thing in the morning for a couple of hours and it worked like a charm)
– 1 Tblspoon of dried dill
– 1 tsp. oregano
– 1/4 c. of breadcrumbs (if you have flavored ones, they tend to mask the flavor of the dill a bit but it still tastes very good)

Step One: Get the skin off the salmon. This is the only somewhat tricky bit.
Holding the fillet skin down, carefully cut at one end down through the fish until you get to the skin.
Flip it over and as you see in the photo at the top, start peeling the skin away with one hand while you carefully slice away the fish from the skin. If you leave some fish on the skin, that is OK — just use your sharp knife to slice that away at the end and throw that into the bowl with the rest of the fish.

Step Two: Chop up the fish.
You can use a food processor for this, but I like to go through fish with my fingers to make sure I have not missed any bones. So, once you’ve done that, if you have a food processor, just throw the fish in, and chop it up. I just used a knife and chopped it as finely as I could. Put the chopped up fish into a big bowl.

Add the Rocottoa, the dill, the oregano and the breadcrumbs, mix it up thoroughly and start making burgers.

I used a half-cup measure and this makes a really nice burger. Remember – this is salmon and the ricotta does not shrink either so this burger will stay nice and big even after cooking. If you want to serve this on a bun (whole grain, please… or GF if you swing that way), you’ll need a regular sized bun. These burgers do not shrink in cooking.

I tried these out both baked in the oven at 375 degrees F. for 20 min. and in a frying pan with a little bit of oil, five minutes on a side. Both methods work fine with these and they tasted great. Did they taste like the commercial feta and dill ones?

No. I have to tell the truth. They don’t. They also don’t have all the sodium, either.
Just for a point of comparison:
1 cup of Ricotta Cheese: 200 mg. of sodium
1 cup of feta, crumbled: 1460 mg. of sodium

So, there you go.

Having flogged my black-white-red wardrobe into the ground over the past 5 years, I had to decide whether to stick with those colors and replace items as they bagged, sagged, and got long in the tooth. I’ve gotten a lot of wear out of all of them but a couple of items just don’t stand up and say ‘hey there’ much any longer, which is one of the problems with prints. It’s easy to get tired of them. The other thing is that your dear Aunty is getting to any age when black is not, shall we say, kind to me anymore in terms of my complexion, so I wanted to weed things out, spruce things up, and get a bit of color in my wardrobe. What I need on a daily basis is also changing – I no longer have to go into an office on a daily basis and I have a lot more casual and different activities to do. I also like to wear skirts and tops rather than dresses. So I need to think about that.

In terms of colors, I’ve got a couple of really hard and fast rules about color:

– If you don’t already love a color, adding it to the wardrobe because Pantone(tm) or someone else in the clothing industry says it’s ‘in’ is not going to be a good investment. People wear colors that they actually LIKE. Pantone(tm) says that emerald green is this year’s color (I think last year’s color was tangerine orange), but I think that’s not a color that will be kind to me, either. I like all sorts of greens, but the ones I like the best and which look best on ME are colors that have a bit of blue in them (just like the reds that look the best … are those that have a bit of blue in them). So, I’m basing my wardrobe work on teal and raspberry, two very jazzy colors but both of which have some blue.

– Over a certain age, black is draining. If you want to go in that direction, try midnight blue, which is my favorite for formalwear which usually would be black. It’s classy, unusual and it’s not black.

– Yellows are hard to wear for anyone over the age about about 15, especially yellow-greens.

My first ‘put together’ for the wardrobe is a two-piece dress made out of ponte knit, and a blouse and skirt made out of a coordinating print. With that, I get four outfits:
– Teal top and teal skirt
– Print top and print skirt together, making a dress-like look
– Teal top and print skirt
– Print top and teal skirt

This is the pattern I used for the teal top and skirt – it’s an early 60s pattern. I made the top with a plain neckline, but as you can see from the photo above, I made a scarf out of the print fabric too. I sewed on snaps on the scarf and inside the corresponding spots around the neckline of the teal top. That way, when I wear the teal top and the print skirt, I have something that ties both halves together.

Now, my next step ordinarily would be to go to the pants end of the spectrum, but I am still mulling that: teal pants or one of the coordinating colors in the print? That print has the following colors in it:
Teal
Royal Blue
Olive
Lime Green
Brown
Baby Blue

Now, I’m definitely not going to go with a print pair of pants – I don’t have any more of the fabric in any case and print pants are really not ‘me’ (well, at least I don’t think they are). My ‘matchy-matchy’ side wants me to go to teal pants, but the pragmatist in me wants to go with brown.

How do you vote?

But I can still get snagged. I still buy fabric the same way I did when I started: Grab the bolt, take it to the cutting counter, tell the cutter how much and off I go. And it hit me today when I was working on a very simple blouse that I really do need to change this, at least with places I actually walk into.

I really need to make the cutter open the fabric up so that I see the stuff I’m buying.

How many times have we started to pin and cut fabric, only to find a flaw…or a stain…or a misprint?
And there you are (cue music from “Psycho”).

Well, there are more organized methods to deal with the procedure: Open up the fabric before you even pre-treat it so that you can, maybe, get more or take it back. But most of the time we buy for the stash and then it’s all gone at the store, right? I’ve never had the luck of finding more just sitting there waiting for me.

So, here I was with the front all cut out and I went to do the back of the blouse and there’s a misprint, right where, if I kept on cutting the back pattern piece the same way, it would locate itself right in dangerous territory. How about a cartoon sign next to it with a giant arrow, right? Jeeze.

OK. So here’s the fix. The trick is to make more smaller pieces of the pattern that you can space around the fabric, so that you can miss the stain, flaw, misprint, etc. In my case, what I did was I folded the pattern vertically, matching the center ‘cut on the fold’ line to the side seam line. I cut the pattern apart where I folded it and then I marked ‘add 1/2″ here’ on both pieces where I’d cut it (because otherwise, I’ll never remember and then the back would have been too small). I also did some judicious pattern matching so that the pattern matched horizontally as well.

So, lessons for tonight: Make the cutter at the fabric store unfold the fabric so that you get a good look before they cut it. If you buy on-line, open the package immediately and do the same thing at home so that if you have to send it back for replacement, you’ve got a fighting chance the merchant still has some of that fabric. And second – if you’ve got a small ‘woops’ perhaps with some clever new style-lines cut into your pattern, you can still get what you want out of your not-so-perfect fabric.

And no matter what I did, they always spelled my name wrong but that’s another story for another time.

In any case, I was probably ordering seeds from Burpee or Parks or someone else when I was in junior high school and I was probably the only person on campus at college who was ordering grow lamps so that I could start begonia tubers in my dorm room. I guess the tip off that I was not growing dope was that I did not come back from the grocery story with a gillion rolls of aluminum foil.

In any case, I learned the joy of getting a box in the mail pretty early and that ‘Oh, it’s Christmas!!” feeling has never worn off.

So, yesterday, I got this box in the mail and as is my wont, I ripped that baby open in two seconds flat and found (as usual) that it was crammed with paper packing. I love paper packing. The only thing I love better is getting something with excelsior, which if you are old enough to know what it is, I don’t need to explain it and if you are not, it’s basically wood shavings and gives a package a delightfully old-fashioned feel and look. It is also very heavy, so companies have not used it in years but if I were to produce something very old fashioned, like handmade soaps or pottery tea sets or something like that, I’d nestle all of that stuff inside a box full of excelsior. But that is a digression.

So, what was in the box? Well, not everything I’d ordered, actually but what was missing were the potatoes and they won’t ship those until it’s almost time to plant them anyway. What was in there were packages of seeds that I’d ordered, most of which, with any luck, I’ll be able to get into the garden sooner than later since they are things like Chinese cabbage (a little bird told me that he wants to make kimchi this year and for that you need napa cabbage), kohlrabi, broccoli and so on. The other things will have to go in later plus some coleus seeds that I have to get started so that I have a good bright display in the front in the spring ( I dote on coleus).

The plastic bag is a pound and a half of buckwheat. Buckwheat? As in Buckwheat pancakes or soba noodles or things like that?

Absolutely.

Buckwheat Fagopyrum esculentum is a plant which is not a grain and is not a member of the wheat family. It does not contain any gluten at all – it’s related to such plants as sorrel and rhubarb. The first part of the name is a degradation of the old Dutch word for beech tree because of the resemblance of the seeds to beech nuts. Buckwheat is a very useful plant – it’s great for a ground cover and suppresses weeks. It also goes literally from sown in the ground to flowering in 6 weeks, so if you have a short window of time where you want to keep the ground productive, before you plant something else, buckwheat is a good plant to use. Bees love it – buckwheat honey is very dark and strongly flavored, great for baking. And the seeds are very high in protein – 18%. And the protein is not gluten, so people with allergies to wheat can still get their pancakes with buckwheat.

I got a pound and a half of this because we have a bed that we started last year that did not do well at all. The compost that we got from the township was literally 90% wood chips so the poor tomatoes in that bed crouched on the ground and just moaned all summer long. My plan, as soon as the ground warms up is to start sowing buckwheat and as soon as it flowers, digging it in. With any luck, I’ll get two crops done before I need to use that particular bed. At the same time, I’ll see if I can get hold of some composted manure to dig in. This fall, if I have any buckwheat left, I’ll get another sowing so that it’s up and growing before the frost hits because buckwheat is not frost-hardy. This won’t cure that bed’s problems — it usually takes us several growing seasons of compost, top-dressing and so on, to really improve a soil such as this one but the buckwheat will certainly be a good start.

Now, a really good exercise is to take out a piece of paper and analyze what the stylist is doing here, so you might want to watch the video again. And this time, boil it down. Here is what I got:

There are two basic print families in this grouping, plus a tie-dye effect. One is a floral with orange, peach, sort of a putty color and navy blue. The other is a geometric which I’m not sure is brown or black, but which is on a cream-colored field and has orange in it. The tie-dye is this sort of grey-blue and I’m going to just pitch that to the side because with only a top and a long skirt, the designers were just doing a bit of brand extension here; those items are not central to the collection. What are the common features of both of these prints: the orange/peach family.

In the floral print, they are working with:
Pants
a long sleeved top
a long jacket with solid lapels
a sleeveless v-neck dress

In the geometric print, they have the print made up in a couple of fabrics – what looks like a fairly stretchy knit and a very lightweight chiffon sort of thing.
The knit has been made into:
a straight skirt
an Eisenhower jacket with putty colored accents at the hem, zipper and neck.

The chiffon has been made into:
a sleeveless cut-in at the shoulders top
a handkerchief hem dress
a flouncy skirt

There are several solid colors being used here:
White: Jacket, slim skirt, and pants
Navy: Jacket
Pumpkin: Drapy pants
Cream: Sleeveless top, an embroidered top, and a flared skirt
Orange: Asymmetric sleeveless top, crochet tunic-length sweater, and a short leather jacket with a ripply edging.
Black: leather laser-cup top, and leather shorts
Putty: short zip jacket

The white, cream, navy, black and putty are neutrals – they will basically go with everything. The one “wildcard’ color is: Orange (and I’ll throw the pumpkin in that color group also).

While you are at it (and this might require another viewing of the video), please note some of the more clever things the stylist is doing that would give the customer more ways to wear things:
– He puts the floral top with the floral pants, thus producing a jumpsuit effect (without the fuss and bother of how to negotiate the bathroom issues). Then he adds a contrasting jacket to dress it up. then he switches out the contrasting jacket, adds the contrasting belt and the matching print jacket with the dark contrasting lapels. The contrasting belt and lapels makes that work.
– He uses that cream colored top in a lot of the pairings and then puts it with the matching skirt with a fancy belt to create a dress-effect.

Now, no one is going to walk into the store, stand in front of the rack with the list in front of them and pick off every single item on the list. That’s nuts. But here is what you can do: Stand in front of YOUR closet and pull everything out and arrange it on the bed (and the floor if need be, and on a rack if you have one). Set the solid colors aside and arrange those in color groups. Then take a piece of paper or some 3×5 cards and write down what you have in the solid colors. You might find that you have an amazing number of items that are the same (like, a bunch of black skirts and pants, several black jackets and so on).

Then, look at all the print things and analyze, just as we did here, what will go with what. You may find (and I think we all do this) that you have ‘orphan’ items which go with nothing and other items that go with several things. You might also find that you have things that you can’t make an outfit out of no matter what you do because the color is just too specific. Don’t throw anything away, But, as you put things back in the closet in their color groups, ask yourself the following question:

What’s the one thing I need to make this into an outfit? It might be a scarf in a print that pulls together several colors that you have in solids. Or, it might be that you need one of those solid color skirts or pants that the stylist is making use of in the video. Or, it might be a couple of belts. Make a list of those items,put it on a card in your purse so that when you go shopping, you can look for those particular items. If you are someone who sews, so much the better – you can staple scraps of fabric to the cards so that you actually have the colors with you.

Now, for the last several years, I have been working through a closet which is in black, white, and red. That is actually a very easy color grouping, but I’m a bit tired of it, and I am making myself things in the teal, brown and raspberry group. After viewing this video, I realize that I need a couple of prints to pull some things together and I will look for those now. This is not to say that what I have in the closet is wasted and needs to be sent to the charity shop. The black and white things will work very nicely. The red is outside the new grouping but can be used at other times. So we shall see how this develops.

Now, if you look at the shadow, flaring off toward the bottom center of the photograph, you will be reminded of the fact that this is mid-February and at 11:30 a.m., the sun is actually rather low in the sky. If this were May or June, by 11:30 a.m., that sun would be pretty close to right over my head (and I would not be standing out in the garden wearing my heavy coat, hat and gloves, either). My pose is not a re-enactment of Horace Greeley’s famous phrase (and I am pointing rather Northwest rather than directly west); I am pointing in the direction of the path of the sun in the summer. Because of the way our property is situated and the orientation of the garden beds, we get a rather oblique angle on the sun’s path here.

But this is merely an introduction to the issue of the door (what other insane person would stand out in the winter with a door to demonstrate this? I ask you). This is NOT a door (well, actually it IS a door). This is, you will have to imagine, a row of sunflowers, or corn, or something else rather tall. And all of which begins it’s life as a row of something rather short but which becomes something extremely tall and dense before half the summer is over. It literally becomes something LIKE a door. Dense, dark, and solid.

And which casts an extremely wide and long shadow over anything that is planted to either side of it.

Last summer, in one of those last moment fits of gardening madness, the DH decided he wanted to put sunflowers into the garden. Because we’d already planted nearly every other bed, we were left with one of the beds at the eastern end of the arrangement. To say those sunflowers dominated that garden last year is to put it mildly. On one side of the sunflowers was a brand new bed we put in last year which had tomatoes in it. Once the day was past noon, those tomatoes were basically trying to grow in the dark. Disaster. The plants crouched on the ground as if waiting to be attacked. It was like we were re-playing “Day of the Triffids” in the garden. On the other side of the sunflowers were potatoes and some cabbage family plants, which suffered in the early morning (when the sun is not terribly effective in any case up here), but which ended up doing fine because they had all the sun from noon through 8:30 when the sun dropped down behind the hill. That end of the garden did..just..fine.

So, lesson learned.

First: plan out your garden on paper. Depending on the path of the sun at YOUR house (and all other forms of shade from trees, out buildings and so on), put the tall things where they will cast their shade at the end of the day. In our case, if the DH wants to grow corn or sunflowers again, we will reserve the farthest west garden bed for him. And we will mulch and compost accordingly because corn is very greedy in that way.

Second: Start the planting according to the path of the sun — that is, plant the beds or side closest to where the sun comes up, and move in the direction of the path of the sun as it moves through the day. That way, you will end up at the end that if you want to put something tall in, or change your mind, or discover something else that is tall that you want to do (climbing beans, cucumbers on a trellis, etc.), you’ll be able to do that without shading out anything else.

Third: Stick with the plan. I cannot tell you how many times we have ended up sticking odd stuff in little out of the way spots because someone decided “Oh, joy – I have a wizard idea – let’s plant this!!” Think the whole thing through – now is as good a time as any – and stick to the plan. Much better in the long run.