Thanksgiving cactus happily blooming for the first time in our 4 years living here - they’ve finally adjusted!

Since my last set of blogs - including the big ANNOUNCEMENT entry - I’ve really enjoyed the pace slowing down a bit. The leaves are mostly raked, gardens mostly cleaned out, and flowers we want to keep going were dug up, potted and are living in the garage.

For various reasons, I decided to delay my knee replacement surgery for a year. This ended up being timely - Sue fell on a hike a few weeks ago and broke her wrist. She had surgery the next day and is recovering well. I am enjoying serving as her nurse (something she would have had issues with if I kept my early Dec knee replacement date!)

Aside from that recent drama, I’ve really embarked upon the reorganization and simplification of my seed collection with gusto. All peppers and eggplant seeds aged 10 years or more were thrown away. All tomato seeds aged 15 years or more were likewise tossed. This was not an easy thing to do, but it felt necessary. With far smaller gardens and far less seed saving, the significant seed disposal makes this refocusing of my gardening efforts seem very real. The main exception is that for now, at least, I retained the entire set of seeds that comprise the Dwarf Tomato Breeding project - the oldest of which are from 2006, hence will soon be 18 years old. The seed pruning task will be complete in another few days. I will also have a neat office for the first time in months - just in time for gardening Zooms to begin again in December.

Lots of rearrangement of my seed collection - this is still a work in progress

Up next will be fulfilling of seed requests. My aim is to get all seeds sent out by Christmas - mid January the latest depending upon the size and complexity of the requests (they are all sitting in a folder in my Gmail account). I won’t accept any additional requests until next fall, and even then, I won’t have very much seed for any but a few requests.

Once seed requests are complete, I will turn to writing and self publishing a book on the Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project. That will be quite a task, with pictures being one of the main challenges. Beyond that…we shall see, but it will likely involve dealing with all of the garden materials I’ve amassed over the years - including letters and old seed catalogs. And, of course, some gardening and hiking and kayaking will help fill 2024. We also have our first trip back to Ocracoke Island planned for May; it is our very favorite place to kayak.