Planting Onions

The 2011 garden season has officially started here at the Coleman household. Before I get into the garden itself, I'd like to say a little bit about one of my favorite resources. It's this book:

Following the guidelines in this book, I've learned to steer clear of the traditional method of gardening, the one that my grandparents used: row, path, row, path, row, path. The traditional method dedicated 50% of the space to walking, and that walking in between the rows of vegetables compacts the soil around the roots. A better way is to plant the vegetables in wide rows (beds) that you can reach into from at least one side so that you never have to step into it, compacting the soil. Even better: last year David worked very hard helping me to build raised beds throughout the garden. This provides better drainage and also saves stress and strain on my back.

Now on to what I did this week:
These are onion starts that I purchased from Dixondale Farms. I purchased a sample set of "intermediate day" onions. (According to their website I could grow either intermediate day or short day onions, but it looks like we are more in the intermediate day area.) The sample set consists of a white onion ("Super Star"), a yellow onion ("Candy") , and a red onion ("Red Candy Apple"). I planted 20 of each variety and passed on the extras to my neighbor for her garden. I followed the planting instructions provided by Dixondale. One thing that I didn't notice while I was preparing the soil 2 days ago but certainly did notice while I was planting the seedlings is that the ones near the edge of the bed went into damp, cool soil. That first 3-4 inches of soil doesn't get any sun yet and was noticeably cooler than the rest of the soil in the bed. The seedlings that were planted on the other side of the trench went into soil that was much warmer and drier. The tops of all of the onions are in the sun but it'll be interesting to see if there are any growing differences since the roots of half of them are in much cooler soil.

I set the onions off to one side because I plan to plant some carrots along beside them. They will develop a very nice relationship side-by-side.

This is what my garlic bed looks like today.

These are cabbage plants getting along nicely with cilantro. Sorry about the lighting. The fence casts a mean shadow.



These peas I planted last fall, in September. I've been harvesting peas from them all winter. Come spring, these will still be popping out peas left and right. What a nice head start!



This is a little artichoke starting to form on one of our artichoke plants. Peek-a-boo!

Beautiful Words

My PET scan report came to me in the mail this weekend. These are always fun to read. With that in mind, I thought I'd post the report here. These are posted as two images. If you click on each one it should bring it up to full screen so that you can read it more easily.

There are some very beautiful words in this report.

PET Scan Report from 1/19/2011

I just got a call from the (new) oncologist's office to let me know that my PET scan from 2 days ago came back all clear. Whew! I can't help but worry after one of these scans is done. And it's hard not knowing the result for days, knowing that the result is known by someone. So I am grateful that I got a call ahead of my appointment next week. So far, so good with this new oncologist.

I actually meet with him next week and will have some blood work done. The next scan should be in three months, so I can rest easy until then. Let's hope that I can have an unblemished spring and summer this year. The next couple of scans will be key. It's been 6 months since my surgery... getting through a year will be crucial and I am halfway through it. Everyone keep your fingers crossed for the next 6 months for me, please!

My Red Streaks

A couple of weeks ago while I was at the hair stylist getting my...ahem... distinguishing roots covered up I was flipping through one of those magazines in the rack. I saw a photo of Katy Perry's hair similar to this one:


I showed the photo to the stylist and commented that I thought the colors were very pretty. He told me that those were simply extensions. He said it's better to go with extensions if you want to do something like that because they are completely removable and they don't damage your hair the way a chemical process would. I kept thinking about the streaks and he said we can talk about doing something with my hair that's similar. After learning that I would have to buy a packet of hair for each color if I wanted multiple colors (and exactly how rock-star do I want to look anyway?) I decided to keep it simple and choose one color that would look good with my hair color. We narrowed it down to pink or red. When his wife held up the colors to my hair I immediately went for the red.

Here I am two weeks later:


And here:



And here:

In this photo you can see the streaks and the contrast much more when I lift up the top layers of my hair:


I will have to get used to these, and right now my scalp hurts a bit from the "beads" that are used to attach them to my own hair. But I think they really brighten my look! They will also give my hair a bit more fullness and also help absorb some of the copious oil that my head produces. If I get tired of them or decide I don't like them the extension pieces can actually be dyed my hair color and can be used just to give my hair more volume, if I choose.

My Chariot

This past week we went to Asilomar for a couple of days with some family and their friends. Asilomar is a bit spread out and you basically park and then walk everywhere. I remembered this from a previous stay there. Plus, there is a nice boardwalk along the beach as well. So, we decided to rent me a little scooter for the week. It comes apart in pieces for easier loading/unloading from the car. The heaviest piece probably weighs about 40 pounds. David developed a system and had it put together for me in no time.



It was a great decision to get it. Our room was very far from the dining hall, and uphill from it too. The walks back & forth from our room to the dining hall would have been very slow & uncomfortable without it. David took advantage of the motorized wheels too - he hopped on for a ride when he could! The scooter was very useful when we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was a bit tight and crowded there but if I was patient and assertive then I was able to eventually see the displays that interested me. One thing that I learned is that people really don't see you when you are riding a scooter. Many folks walked right in front of me when I was moving forward, and the scooter stops pretty fast but it takes a few inches. Sometimes I didn't even have that much to spare. One woman actually ran right into the back of the scooter once when I was sitting still.



The scooter gets picked up tomorrow, but it's been fun to ride.