Gay Smith jar

Here's another sweet little soda fired jar by Gay Smith.

Yesterday was cooking, doctors appointment, seed starting and dealing with sub-contractors - needless to say - another "no studio" day. Today I should be able to get a half a day in the studio this afternoon. We're expecting the snow to start around noon, so Jim is going out right after breakfast to do some shopping and other chores and I'll hold the fort with the carpenters, painter and electrician. I was up at 5:00am, got the dogs out for their morning walk, had tea and tackled email. Afterward I mixed up more seed starting soil and prepped a few planters and after breakfast I'll plant some kale, shallots and lettuce.

I started my indoor seed planting yesterday -got onion, parsley, artichoke, leek,scallions, basil and celery planted. Other than what I'll plant today, that will be it till next month when I start some of the other warmer loving veggies like tomatoes, peppers,etc. I find that basil does well as an indoor plant in a sunny window. Luckily I have a greenhouse window in the kitchen with herbs like oregano, thyme, parsley and basil. In fact, I need to pinch and re-pot those few basil plants and get them into a bigger pot. Before I had the greenhouse window I could grow a lot of basil in a single, 5 gallon bucket in front of a sunny window and that supplied us with fresh basil through the winter.

I'm contemplating making a blueberry pie while I'm housebound this morning, if my frozen berries from July are still good.

If I have time after dinner, I'll go through my stash of flower seeds and see if there are any perennial seeds that I can start now. I harvested some day lily seeds last fall, so I might just start them. The problem is figuring out where I'll put all these seedlings once they sprout and are big ready to graduate to bigger pots. I only have 4 sets of grow lights in the basement which are currently being used for outdoor plants I'm over wintering .In the next month or so I may have to move some of those to the studio and squeeze them around the citrus and other tropical trees and shrubs that were too big to move into the basement for the winter. Otherwise I'll have to buy another fixture and more grow lights.

Time to get started on that "to do" list of the day.

Till later,
June