Snowbirds of the Greenhouse

 The windows of the house are now packed with plants, and I was going to overwinter the Chicago hardy fig, the Brazilian begonia and the little copper leaf begonias in the south-facing cellar windows, which are about a foot tall with a good deep ledge where the stone foundation meets them. But after I carried the copper leaf begonias through the coal bin to their window and shoe-horned the Brazilian into the space above the workbench, between the furnace pipes and the window glass, I felt like one of those sadistic men who keeps abducted girls locked in their cellar for decades. So I moved all the cellar plants to the greenhouse, where I now have a strong inducement to caulk and plastic the old windows and make the place more habitable. Like soon, because we are expecting overnight lows in the 20s already later this week.

Giant Shallots!

This past spring I cut way back on my habitual excessive planting, but I did plant a bunch of little top-bulbs made by some shallots that were suffered to grow in the same piece of ground for…oh, I don’t know how many years…without being harvested. I had the raised bed space and they were around, so what the heck.

Well. This is what happens when you plant top-bulbs in a raised bed: giant shallots. Thus has my vice and ignominy revealed itself to be The One True Path of Shallots.

The best part is that I forgot about the previously forgotten shallots (do you see a pattern emerging?), so when I went to pull that bed of huge onion leaves that was mysteriously thriving out there in the garden, great was my surprise and delight to find these fat fellows there by the dozen.