Four or More

Well... I guess I kind of fell off the posting wagon again at the end of January. I enjoyed the Snowflake Challenges that I got to, but ultimately life took over and I just haven't had the time. I've been making a concerted effort in February to cut back on some of the things I do so I can feel like I have any amount of breathing room again, with varying success. 

Enough success I had a bit of time to do some herb stuff again! So that's nice. It's garden planning season, and I got a number of new exciting things at a seed swap, so one of these days I need to sit down and plot out what's actually getting planted this year. I'm hopeful that some of the things I planted last year have overwintered successfully, but I won't know until it's warmer. I think the valerian will be fine, but the elecampane I'm worried about. It never seemed to like where I put it, so if it's survived, I may try to transplant it elsewhere to see if I can find what it prefers. The angelica is still there and arguably doing better than it did all last year - maybe it's just needed time to settle in. We'll see! 

A neighbor gave me some hops that I put in the ground a month or two ago, and I'm just starting to see it come up through the mulch. It's got a small little trellis for now, but if it does well, maybe next year we'll put in something bigger and prettier there. I'd love to get some passionflower somewhere too, and that's a climber as well. 

I'm thinking of replacing the old garden bed by the street with a few taller corrugated steels beds. The old one has been there since before we moved in and is slowly rotting away, and being practically at sidewalk-level where dogs pee all the time, I don't love the idea of harvesting from it as-is. It'll never be the best place to grow edibles, but I think if we elevated it by a couple of feet and had steel instead of wood, that would make it more reasonable. With a few pots instead of one big bed,  we could grow some of the things that like to take over without risking the rest of the garden. Oregano, lemon balm, maybe motherwort? Feverfew loves it over there, so I should probably reserve it some room, though it tends to wander and may not cooperate well with being given a designated spot. 

I keep thinking about what else I can make with the harvest I still have left from years prior. Herbs only stay good for so long, and the poor calendula in the jar is more yellow than orange at this point, so I fear it's past its prime already. Alas. This coming season I'll make oils and tinctures from it early in the season, and then save the later harvests for tea so the dried flowers last longer into the winter. Live and learn. I did finally get around to making some fresh vinegar shrub with the elderberry I got at the farmer's market last fall and froze. I'm really hoping to get some elderberry plants of my own one of these years, but I'm still debating on the best place to put it. They can get sizeable, I understand. We got the backyard clear of brambles last year, but it's still not really set up for gardening beyond that. 

In non-garden news, Discord is going the way of age verification, which means I will no longer be there. Which honestly really sucks. My most active online communities have been there, and folks seem to be struggling to figure out where to go. An herbalism server I'm in has been going round and round on different options, and though I've floated Dreamwidth a number of times when folks have expressed a desire for old-school blogging formats like LiveJournal, I don't seem to have gotten any bites on it. Baffling. It's exactly what people are saying they want, but tell them that it actually exists and they really, truly could have the platform of their dreams, and it's crickets. Oh well.

...incidentally, is anyone interested in an herbalism community here on Dreamwidth? Maybe it's an "if you build it, they will come" situation. I'm far from the most qualified person to run something like that, but seeing as I'm about to have a significant amount of my regular internet time freed up without Discord, maybe I could manage to sustain it even with my history as a chronic lurker.