Friday was such a nice day, sunny and warm.  I had a 9 a.m. meeting to attend.  After the meeting, I went to the election office to vote early in the upcoming primary, did some food shopping, and came home and planted some cabbage and broccoli seeds.

Having seen it done in pictures on the internet, I planted these seeds in clear plastic stacking storage drawers.  I'm not sure I did it properly - I put a 4"-deep layer of dirt in the drawers, wet the dirt, and poked the seeds into it.  Maybe I should have planted the seeds in seed-starting cells so that their roots would be less disturbed when the plants go in the garden.  We'll see what happens.  

I am ready for The Husband to get his *ss on the tractor and get the garden soil ready for planting.   At the end of the growing season last year, he ran the tiller over the garden and I planted mustard greens for a cover crop.  The greens did not do very well, and a soil test revealed the cause: there is no nitrogen in the soil, probably because we tilled about 12 tons of un-composted dry leaves into the garden plot.  We need to spread the nitrogen fertilizer I bought a couple of weeks ago, but we keep getting little rains that make the soil too wet to work.  Yesterday I had a look at the garden.  It is not standing in water, but it is pretty mushy.  I was happy to see that the tiller is hooked to the tractor, so when the soil finally gets workable, we can get right on it. 

My sister and her daughter came here for lunch yesterday.  They are both into landscape gardening and had been working in my niece's yard.  After lunch, we dug up some sedum from my flower bed for my niece to transplant to her yard.  Last week, she brought me a box full of "surprise lily" bulbs, the little reddish ones that come up in late summer.  (She lives on her ancestors' home place, where somebody, a hundred years or more ago, planted daffodils and surprise lilies, and the property is covered with them.)  There must be 200 bulbs in the box.  If I had any gumption, I could plant lilies all over this yard.  I planted a few of them yesterday after my company left, but I hope to give most of them away.

I also planted - or, rather, PREPARED to plant - a pack of lavender seeds that I bought Friday.  The package instructions amounted to "put them in dirt and give them light and water."  I have tried this method in the past, several times, without success.  So I went to the internet, which said the seeds need to be "stratified," which means they need to be exposed to cold.  The internet had several methods of doing this.  I ended up sprinkling the seeds onto a moist paper towel, putting the towel in a plastic bag, and putting it in the refrigerator.  I told my telephone to set an alarm for 10 a.m., one month from now, at which time I will put the seeds in dirt and put them under the grow lamp.  

Yesterday, The Husband and Son #1 worked on the "new" truck he bought last weekend.  They replaced the water pump and the thermostat.  They took it "around the block," which is about 5 miles, and it did not over-heat, so it appears they fixed the problem.  It's a fairly sweet ride, considering how old it is.  Son #1 may claim ownership, if he can afford to keep gas in it.