searching through my seeds

today i thought it might be a good idea to take a gander at my seed collection, some of which i have inherited from my recent sister sophie, and maybe start thinking about how i am going to lay out my garden next year.  little did i anticipate, this task was going to be very difficult.  i opened my seed bin and what did i see staring me in the face? sophie.  ouch.  there are seed packets in here that she has collected over time from back when she was living in oregon, 8 years ago.  no doubt those seeds are probably no longer growable (is that a word?) so what do i do with them? i have no idea how to grow most of this stuff!  my first memory to surface was last winter just after christmas.  sophie had landed herself a gift certificate to a seed catalog at our family's yankee swap and we sat in our sunroom for a few hours planning out our garden for the spring.  she knew exactly where each kind of plant should go, who it's neighbors should be and what to fertilize each one with.  i feel hopeless with out her knowledge here beside me.  she always used to say to me that it's important to kill things.  if you ever want to learn how to do it right, you learn best by doing it wrong first.  at least with plants.  my issue is that i will kill the seeds that she has saved for this long.  i don't want the sophie's seeds to go to waste because of my ignorance.  maybe i'm just worrying too much.  hopefully i'll get over it before next spring.

i did it!

hooray! hooray! i planted my garlic! i only planted about half of it though.  i decided that i am going to do two batches, one that i planted today, and one that i will plant in about a week or so, or whenever i finish my soil amendments here before the winter.  the ground is so sandy here in chatham!  shayne (my landlord, friend and boss) had mulched over the sand here, so i had no idea what i was dealing with until today when i inserted my shovel and about 2 cm of mulch gave way to bright, yellow, dry, crumbly sand.  it is alright, don't panic.  i can try to fix this.  what i think i will do is keep all of the leaves falling from the trees and into my yard and put them on the garden to create a layer.  after that i will add a good 6 to 8 inch layer of compost that will be purchased from s&j or cape sand or something.  after that i think i would like to add another layer about 6 to 8 inches deep of seaweed, if the search for the good stuff ever proves fruitful for my father, our friend jeff, or myself.  so far, nothing.  maybe that will leach something into the sandy depths below before the spring.
after planting garlic, i realized that pippa was feeling extra energetic today, so i decided to take her for a long walk before i had to leave for class.  we went to lighthouse beach in chatham, there was no one there and it was very warm ad foggy, beautiful morning.  anywho, while we were walking i saw pippa rolling in something.  i called her over to me, but since she knew she was doing something she shouldn't be doing, she ran in the opposite direction.  she's pretty dumb when it comes to being caught, and i caught her in no time.  unfortunately for me, she had rolled in shit that was the same color as her fur so i didn't see it before i grabbed her.  ew.  i was so angry that i had just touched poop that i marched her into the water and scrubbed her down with sand, meanwhile my whole legs (in jeans) were getting soaked, and she was yelping and whining because i was holding her in one spot and making her go into the water up to her neck (she knows how to ham it up for a crowd).  when we got home i gave her another bath, this time with dog shampoo with the wonderful useful addition of baking soda, and now she smells squeaky clean.  i still haven't quite forgiven her.

have you ever heard of a velcro dog?

i have.  in fact, i have one.  in case you don't know what a velcro dog is, imagine a dog whose fur is made out of velcro, and in this velcro world, you are wearing fleece.  pippa lives and breaths emily.  sounds easy and wonderful, until you're in the kitchen cooking dinner or putting away the dishes and every time you turn around you step on the velcro fur dog and she yelps loud enough for someone to call the cops for animal abuse.  i am not complaining though.  i have never once thought "i wish i had never gotten this dog" because even though she is laying next to me on the couch licking her butthole (slurp, slurp, slurp...), she lights up my life.  i mean, you've seen what she looks like! how can you hate a face like that?  her one major downfall is that she chews everything.  the rug, the table leg, rocks, daffodil bulbs, bobby pins... whatever she can get her mouth on, she chews!  i have researched this problem.  the experts recommend that lots of toys be purchased and every time that she is found chewing on something wrong, take the wrong thing away and replace it with a right thing.  we do this, time after time after time.  she kind of gets it, just like she kind of gets house training (she has never once asked to be let out, but she also never pees or poops inside), and sometimes its an honest mistake (as honest as a dog's mistake can be) but it gets exhausting, always keeping an ear out for the crunch of a pencil or the pop of a flip flop strap.  this is why i'm never having kids.  if it gets harder than the laziest dog in the world, how can i possibly maintain my patience then??
so i didn't plant the garlic yet today.  it's still raining, but the garden girls showed up this morning in shayne's driveway and trooped on out to work in the orange beast, so i'm thinking the forecast holds a clearing up for the afternoon.  i will also be planting some daffodil bulbs that i saved at a planting job about a month back.  they will brighten up the entrance to our little fenced off yard in the spring like nothing else. 

here we are! who are you?

i am emily.  i live on cape cod with my boyfriend (soon to be husband), who we'll call mike, and my dog pippa.  she is my dog, not his.
 we live in a teeny tiny little itty bitty 380 square foot apartment in chatham, where i have a garden (that i call huge and my sister ruby laughs when i say that) and mike has a shop in the basement.  he does carpentry, and he spends a lot of time down there building wonderful things for me.  our apartment does not feel as small as it really is because we have maximized our space and minimized our possessions.  mike proved his handy self and screwed a beautiful piece of plywood onto the lid of a storage bin, which now sits in front of a lovely futon that was here when we moved in, where it serves as our coffee table, and a place to store our sheets and blankets.  some day he will build a rustic chest, using the screwed on plywood as the final piece for the lid, to replace the storage bin, but as of right now, we have too many projects for that one to rate.  the storage bin works just fine for us.
tomorrow when i get up, if the rain has stopped by then, i will go out into my huge garden and plant the first thing to be planted there, garlic.  woohoo! i will plant it about 2 inches deep in the sunniest spot in the whole garden, because it is the thing that i care about most that i am planning on growing.  i will hopefully be able to harvest the garlic next summer, maybe around august.  i think.  the only other meaningful thing that i am planning on growing are sunflowers.  next summer, mike and i are planning on getting married.  we have been engaged for three years now (exactly three years on christmas eve) so it is about damn time that we tied the knot.  we (by we i mean me and my sister ruby, my mother, a couple of my aunts and a handful of cousins, not me and mike) are growing the sunflowers for the fabulous event.

now is when i tell about a tragedy that occurred this past july, because there are so many times so far when i have almost written about it, but the timing has been off thus far.  my sister sophie, who was my best friend, roommate, role model, and much much more than i can say with words, was hit by a car and killed on the spot before my very eyes.  this event has shaped my life in ways that were and are unexpected and painful, yet it has inspired growth in my spirit and my emotional self.  if someone were to approach me with the option, give back all of your new personal development and in return you get to spend one more moment with sophie, i would in a heart beat.  unfortunately, this is what i'm stuck with, i'll never get that option, it's what i've got.
we had to move out of our old house and find a new smaller apartment because sophie died.  the garlic that i am going to plant in my garden was planted last season by sophie, so if i keep planting it season after season, i will always have sophie's garlic.  we are going to grow our own sunflowers because sophie was supposed to be the one to grow them for our wedding, so now the job has fallen to us.  every piece of my life has been affected by her death so my stories usually begin with that night.  this is where the new me begins.