Howdy, Maddie here. So I was watching a Monday night CSI (not usual, I don't always watch "glasses on, glasses off" but rather do the New York CSI and the LV) and it started rather normally. Young man carries his girlfiend into the ER and there's the black lady who used to be the pathologist as the attending doctor. That tells you how long it's been since watching the Monday CSI's, and he's freaking that his girlfriend collapsed. Jump forwards to the usual setting up drama, and then, horrors, she dies and they immediately point a finger to her boyfriend..........and about the time they are going to ream him, HE collapses. Ahhhh, maybe a show worth watching? So I start settling in and quickly discover that THIS time they've done their homework. They're going to track down the last place the couple ate. From there, after a rather good performance by someone as a high and mightly chef who insists "all OUR produce are ORGANIC, and NOTHING HERE is contaminated don't blame US, see this paper yadda yadda, it says we've passed the Health inspection with a 96% so it's not US, check out the farm where we get our stuff. GREAT!! Now they've got me rivited. I worked food service professionally for over 40 years, no one is more of a stickler than myself. Add to that, more area's of expertise......they get deeper and deeper into the story. I love where it's going. They go to the farm where the stuff IS organic, but it's also sub-contracted out. Intrique. hmmmmm, fingers start pointing to the truck driver who transports the organic produce. well another area of my experience as I had 25 years inadvertedly involved with the trucking industry. The trucker whines that if they come down on him, he'll lose his job. They go back to the source, and find a disgruntled farmer next door who had been sued by a huge chemical company (can you say Monsanto knock off???) who sued him for cross contamination and "stealing" their patented crops because of winds. In an out of court settlement, he'd let them have 40 acres of the 100 of his familiy's land (yeah, he's a black man, but we have to throw in all the symbols here) . Now they're getting deeper into plot. Turns out there are cattle grazing above the organic farm's fields, and there is botulism from their feces in water coming into the fields. The complications and intricacies of the plot was awesome. Horticulturally it was spot on. It covered things that I hope a lot of people might have wondered if it was based on actual events. (sometimes some of the best programs draw off of real life drama's which was why ER did so well for so many years and other programs) I was so inspired about this episode it almost got me to watching Monday CSI but not quite (not until the three parter that connected all three CSI's.......yeah, shameless drawing endeavors. Worked on me. what can I say? Usually I'm watching PBS almost all the time. So did anyone else see that episode? It's horticulturally oriented, so before someone yells that I'm being off topic here, I was glad to see how well they connected the whole ball of wax with dependencies on one to the other.
But on a horticulturall note............somewhere in Western Tennessee I am finding that this winter has been far from normal. My experiences in past decades have prepared me for the unseasonable snows that they've gotten around here. Yesterday was warm enough to get the already blooming snow drops to stretch their heads further and open all the way, muscari shoved up slight blue helmets out of the cold soggy soil, and the noses of the Ivory Prince Hellebore are plumping up fatter and fatter than the last time I checked them. I went around the whole perimeter of the yards around our house and found more green exclaimation points poking out of the mucky soil everywhere. I'm sure they're plain daffodils, but at thsi stage, I'll take anything. There are tight buds on the variegated hydrangea, all the tree peonies, and the one foolish bud on the Korean Spice Viburnum that was silly enough to completely open was burnt with the true winter's cold to blackened remains. I cut a branch of the small forsythia to force inside, and found underneath the leaves of the kitchen porch garden, a beautiful red cupped narcissus bend and hiding it's beauty from the last snows that finally were washed into the saturated soils last week. So I clipped my first flower, and brought the forsythia and narcissus inside to enjoy. Tomorrow I will snip one little muscari and maybe cut the straggly white crocus that were the kind I had to buy at Lowe's knows how to frustrate.....I prefer snow crocus, but didn't have my favorite bulbs handy to plant this last fall. I found all the lost garden seeds for the veggie garden, and today James and I talked about starting a fig from a branch with spaghnum mosses and plastic baggies, gooseberries (or as he calls them, goozegogs) trying to find boysenberries, should we try blackberry canes? What about a strawberry patch? And if we do that, I want three honeyberry bushes. And there's that Bramley apple he'd love to grow here that you CAN'T find over the pond in the colonies. The shallots are up, showing me I planted them TOO CLOSE. And so are the red onions, and garlic. We have more moles than I've ever thought possible, and I'm about to send for a Pine Tree Seed catalog so I can order castor bean seeds to border the veggie garden this spring to keep the little tillers out of the roots of our truck patch. With as soggy as it is here, I hope desperately soon I will hear the weeps of the peepers. I will keep you posted. Some of my sedums are unfurling their green knuckles already, and I see more and more signs of Spring coming each day from the little snowdrops I deliberately tucked in helter skelter to the fat robins and shiny blue black grackles that are in flocks of literally thousands around here. Inside, my house plants are wowing me. I have a Jewel orchid that made buds larger than a man's thumb and now they are blooming. And anyone reading the written word that "the flowers aren't anything worth bothering with" has never looked up close at them. They're incredible!! Anyone wanting to see a resized picture of it, give me a holler, I'll send it your way, with a memory of Old Faerie Holler to make you smile. Thanks for listening. Good to peek over the garden fence row.
maddie, still new at gardening in her new home in Western Tennessee zone 7b