Planting Moon, my ass...

I missed my planting window for a bunch of items, sez the Farmer's Almanac online.  If I was on the east coast, I'd be golden.  But no, SF Bay Area is past due on some things.  (The site is beautiful in that you can plug in your zip and it'll kick up planting dates, with a reminder of when the moon is full [the unspoken rule being that plants which grow underground be planted during a waning and dark moon, and the things flourishing above ground be planted during a waxing and full moon]).

 

Not that it'll stop me from sprouting a bunch of solanums, mind you, because it won't.  When I lived in Berkeley I planted late, every season I tried my hand at tomatoes and peppers.  Planting late always meant one major harvest of radishes, too, and then maybe 1/3 as many for the second growing.  This year I have about a dozen tomatoes, as many peppers, and maybe four eggplants to try.  And I've saved some organic taters from the market with nicely developed 'eyes', to be planted as well.  It is a bit disturbing to consider how much I'm planting from the family that also brings us Deadly Nightshade, but what the heck.  ("Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?"  "Eh, how about a kitchen witch?  *cackle*")

 

I visited these guys on the weekend, because it was their first biodiversity plant sale of the year.  At Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, they make bio-intensive gardening both look and sound easy, as well as doable.  And every time I go there I pick up tips on incidental things such as growing kiwi to insulate a building from the outside (grow a male and a female if you're in doubt on a plant being self-pollinating), on how to build compost 'donuts' to maximize aeration and therefore decomposition, planting veggies in mixed groupings in order to foil insects, etc.  It's also an intentional community with yurts and no-so-effective buildings fashioned in the 1970s that are being brought up to efficiency gradually. 

 

But the plant sale...

Later on, I'll be planting red romaine lettuces, a green butterleaf of some sort, some cipollini onions, and a Pelargonium graveolens which they called a 'rose geranium' but I doubt is the mythical roseum cultivar (but hey, it still smells lovely and rosy).  I still haven't found the right place for the Lavandula viridis I got from them last summer.

 

I was going to post something deep about my cheesed-off-ness about the pesticide companies giving Michelle Obama guff over the organic garden at the White House.  Same old same old.  "You people are implying that we're EVIL and selling the public POISON and it is really HURTING our sales, damn you!"-type shit.  But then I thought... Nah, I really don't have anything to contribute to the conversation that's not already been said.  Or maybe I'm just burnt the heck out on Monsanto & Cargill, et al.  I'll try to come up with something hard-hitting later on this week.  I think the fact that these guys are breaking a cold sweat over a farking garden (albeit a high-profile one) speaks for itself right now, so why gild the constipated lily.