Rambling: Blah de blah

Um.

We went to a theater event, as we tend to, and talked to various members of the theater staff, and as usual after such events I had a sustained spasm of creative jealousy. Creative jealousy tends to make me stop, rather than ramp up, my creative efforts. I'm trying to keep it from doing that.

Said creative efforts remain unfocused. 

In the garden realm, I've received my Blacktail Mountain watermelon, my Armenian cucumber, and my Bountful bush bean, seeds. I was pleased to read that watermelons are a desert plant and are suitable for dryfarming. Who knew? Other websites are encouraging about cucumbers as well. 

I don't know if snap beans are a good choice for dry farming or not. When I check Gardening Without Irrigation by Steve Solomon, he's distinctly unenthusiastic about bush beans, saying that they have "puny roots'. He recommends pole beans instead. But building supports is one of the things that I am not doing this year. So no pole beans.

We're growing Blue Lake bush beans, even if we have to irrigate them.  But it might also be good to grow several other kinds of bush beans, as a test, in either the "freak vegetables" or "more vegetables" rows, and just watch to see if they live or die. If they all fail the same way, that tells me something. If they have varying responses, that tells me something else.  I could grow, oh, five blocks, two kinds per block, nine (wait, no, six) plants of each kind. Ten kinds of beans. That should produce some decent preliminary results.

Of course, there are other experiments I'd like to run. I want to taste some dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes, to see if they're as glorious as rumored. Yes, Early Girl--it's supposed to be one of the best, or perhaps the best, tomato for dry farming, despite the fact that I don't like its corporate parents. Joe Schirmer from Dirty Girl Produce is supposed to be working on an open-pollinated version, which would free it from that parentage. But Googling tells me that seeds aren't available yet, only a very small number of starts if you're in the right place at the right time.

I keep debating growing Sun Gold tomatoes, too, despite the fact that the two or three times we grew them, we didn't eat them, because we're too darn lazy to pick all those itty bitty things. I must restrain myself.

Another candidate for space in the Freak/Other Vegetable rows is zucchini, probably Costata Romanesco.  I have no use for the squash themselves; I want to eat the blossoms. But maybe friends would want the squash. Or the ducks. Not our ducks. Friends' ducks.

Quack.

Yes, I am sober. I'm just writing in a slightly more free-associationish way than usual.

In sewing, I'm working on my Liberty Shirt pattern. I already did a narrow shoulder adjustment and shortened the sleeves to be three-quarter length instead of too-long length. I'm planning to do a forward shoulder adjustment and lengthen the body. And after that, I may make an alternative sleeve with an inverted pleat, just as an experiment, to see if it gives me more arm movement or looks good or both. Starting at the sleeve cap and gathered in again at the "cuff". The shoulder would be much like the sleeve on the dress on this page, but the sleeve would be three-quarter length.

Writing? I had an idea, one that I'm chewing over. But otherwise, this blog is the extent of the writing.

That is all.