chaoticharvest

The first dry, sunny day in almost two weeks has finally arrived. A sure sign that winter is here is the cloudy, gray damp that covers this part of the country. Coming from Arizona’s Mohave Desert, I spent the last 30 years with clear sunny skies, even in the cold dead of January. The gloomy overcast haze of a New York winter is entirely new for me and takes a lot of getting used to! The temporary warming was enough to let me out for some last minute seed collecting around the garden. I gathered the drooping heads of the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers, an heirloom variety I brought with me from the southwest that the Hopi Indians used to use as a wool dye. I hope they had enough time to mature but after a few solid freezes they were as good as dead and not going to get much help staying on the stem. My bachelor buttons and cosmos have survived the recent cold in good spirits at least, and are producing a handful of seed pods here and there still. I also found a wildish sort of yellow coneflower along the back of the fence in with the weeds and was able to salvage a good dozen or two seed heads from that as well. Over all the effort yielded a half cup of mixed seeds for next year’s garden and a bit of a funny look from the husband who does not quite understand my seed obsession, though he is learning to live with it.