Good day to you all on this last Tuesday in November.  How fast this year has been passing by.  I know I say that all too often.  The 2013 gardening season has already started.  I got the first of the garden catalogs last Saturday.  It is from a company I hadn't heard of before but they had a lot of intriguing seeds.  Has anyone out there dealt with Pinetree before?  I will take another look in about five weeks when I put together my seed orders.  By then I should have the new Burpee, Baker Creek, Schumway, and other usual venders.  I will need new seeds because I got rid of the few that were more than three years old.  I keep a record of how well the seeds germinate and noticed that several had less that 50% germination rates and two didn't germinate at all.  I figure that means I need new seeds.  I usually keep my extras in the fridge but this winter I put them in a the freezer for off season storage.

This has been a strange year for me and my garden.  I don't know if I was depressed by the extended heat or the extended and way too irritating political silly season but I really haven't been as enthusiastic(?), energetic(?), whatever.  It isn't as if the garden failed.  I got twenty pounds of stewed tomatoes out and lots of cherry tomatoes.  We had home grown kale, spinach, and lettuce.  I harvested and dried stevia, oregano, sage, basil, patchouli, marjoram, lemon balm, tarragon, and savory.  My slicing tomatoes didn't produce well but that was because of the heat.  The corn didn't do well but that was an experiment I had no real expectations of.  The variety (Ruby Queen) really didn't like containers--it grew but not well and didn't produce much.  I noticed that Burpee has a new variety specially bred for containers.  I might try it next year.  Oh, yes--there will be a next year in the gardens.

Chris In Paris says half of Americans would rather skip Christmas.  I would a gladly skip Christmas as it has become--the buying frenzy, the constant exhortations to spend money you don't have on people who probably won't be happy whatever you give them, the competitive displays of garish decorations, etc., etc.  Christmas (or Solstice, or Kwanza, or Hanukkah--your preference) are fine.  But CHRISTMAS has metastasized into a cancerous merchandising mass that subsumes everything between Labor Day and New Years.  Most of us don't have any real holidays any more--merely buying opportunities.  And retail workers are doubly screwed--they get neither holiday nor time to buy--they are too busy selling to the rest of us.