fitzfabulous

Who knew squash would be the belle of the ball?

These baby pepper sprouts make me feel unsettled, as if I were looking at maggots or something equally icky.

And heirloom tomatoes - a present from my Mister’s beermaking buddy - also are coming up in an old terrarium.

My chamomile is popping up in the papaya pot, so tiny I almost missed it. Too tiny to photograph at this point — the seedlings all come out way too fuzzy.

We’re going to garden on the Y axis this year, trying to plant up and down instead of covering all our shared yard with our pots. My Mister’s dad gave us a planter last year — a pole with a flat anchor that we placed in the bottom of a large terra cotta pot, weighted with a stone and filled with dirt to the top. Then threaded two smaller pots through their holes onto the pole, tilting one all the way right, and the next one all the way left. did the same for a small pot on the top, filling all with dirt. It looks something like this.

I think we can buy a few more poles and some kind of anchor from plumbing supply, and string up more of our pots this way. Vertical gardening types believe the air circulation is better than planting flat on the X plane, and yields better, healthier plants. I’m more concerned with avoiding the irrational wrath of our sometime landlord. Plus, I want to grow as many edibles as we can in Chicago’s short growing season.

Will post photos of the planting structure when the next one’s done. Will post tutorial, also. Will do all this and more once it stops threatening snow.

The sun has shown its face in Chicago after a dreadful winter. Time to think again about the Growing. Couldn’t do it before - it was way too depressing to think about green stuff when it was still so far away.

Sunday Tribune claims it’s warm enough to start growing greens - spinach, arugula (rocket), and the heavy lifters - kale, collards and all.

O happy day! Last Saturday, while it SNOWED and SLEETED, I fired up the old pots and planted. By this past Saturday, teeny seedlings were up and flourishing in their starter homes.

Basil in a glass pickle jar.

Cherry tomatoes in plastic pretzel jars. Heirloom tomatoes in a small terrarium.

Squash, zucchini, sunflowers and cucumbers in little terra cotta pots. Squash already looks strong enough to choke me in my sleep.

Spinach, mustards, spinach mustards and beets in a long window box.

Dill, lettuce and cress in whatever was left.

I *know* it’s a while still before the plants - save the greens - can go outside. Gives us time to master hypertufa crafting so the bigger stuff will have containers to grow. And our mamas will enjoy homemade Mother’s Day fare.

And I *know* we only have containers to plant in our shared Chicago backyard. But those mama gifts will need filling, too.

There’s a thundersnow going on this afternoon, and the dreariness is almost more than I can stand. I spent lunch yesterday fetching some gorgeous plants from a charming craigslist guy about to move — a giant umbrella plant as tall as me in a lovely green pot, fleshy aloe with tall spikes, a flourishing prayer plant — good thing yesterday because today would have been too cold to drive with the umbrella plant sticking out of an open window.

Blah. So in a kitchen bursting with new green plants, I prepare for summer. I threw some awful pastel stuff into dye baths on the stove. A cotton candy pink cardigan with puffy sleeves.

The cutest dusty rose Philly Girls shirt.

A pale green knit dress I already shortened. A fantastic tube dress in a weird beige.

Into the tub! I stir as the snow falls. I check the time when the thunder claps. I will be ready when the sun shines, ready in sundresses and cardigans, in hemmed pants that fit right, in t-shirts cute enough to bike around in. It’s my inaugural Rit.

Make hay while the sun shines; make clothes while the snow keeps coming down.

In the end, Philly t-shirt a lovely darker wine color.

Both dresses a wonderful brown. But the bright pink cotton cardigan came out patchy. Reading about Rit, I think it got tangled on other stuff. Wonder if I can throw it back into the dye bath by itself tomorrow? Couldn’t hurt.

It went up into double digits this week in Chicago, up from a weekend average of 7 F. Yikes - a hibernating sort of cold. Georgie-girl was just coming out of a winter fast, tearing up a little sausage, but she’s back in now. And still, this lovely surprise popped up on the kitchen sill. An old terrarium - a Christmas gift years ago from my brother and his wife - made for an apt salad starter, catching enough sun in about four days to sprout some winter mesclun.

Speaking of green, I’m working on this top from a favorite old shirt printed with a fake-o girl band. The original white top grubbed up quickly, and the excised design had been sitting on my desk for many moons. I asked my crafty friends at Wardrobe Refashion what to do with the sleeves - whether to hem them as it, or stick the t-shirt’s sleeves back on in a puffier form.

The refashioners always know what’s best. I await their advice.

Writing about facts all the time for money made me hesitate to write for free in my spare time about my inner workings. Then 2002 called and told me to go home already; I was beginning to stink.

Writing all the time for money using my real name and accurate facts and news judgment and deadly serious (Important) topics seemed so different from spouting off about the other things I love: public records, lady turtles, growing stuff, making stuff, cooking pots of stuff, eschewing squareness and blatant consumerism, yard sales, Chicago, the Iladelph, foiled corruption, shaking it and leopard printed anything. And by different, I mean not at all the same, maybe in an OK way.

Now I get an outlet for The Fluff I’d die before writing about professionally but which occupies a lot of my brain. There’s time and space for Fluff, of course. There’s just also Important News that can be boring to sit through, but which makes for job that America needs and I kind of like. It’s that Making News Relevant, that Sitting in Court All Morning to Tell You How Many Years the Crook Got, that Digging Through Mountains of Forms and Numbers that I like a lot. It’s translating those languages for you, the taxpayer, that gets me out of bed every morning.

Enough of that already and onto the Cotton I Grew Last Summer, the little cotton plant my Mister gave me as kudos for landing a new job.