Cleaners, seeds and plans

Today being the day the cleaners come Chez Boud, I usually stay out and group my errands to do then. After a fruitless search for non-box-store plant nurseries, for my spring planting, my old faves apparently gone, I turned my thoughts instead to seeds.

Tried the local dollar store which I've never been in, and oh look, seeds

So for two dollars I scored eight little packets, for annuals. If you scream and point at the dreaded morning glory , here they're a harmless annual, wiped out by winter cold, not an invasive. And I love them.

I think it will be fun tending seeds, haven't done it in a while, other than basil, Italian and Thai.

Then to another store to pick up potting soil in small enough bags I can heft them.

And a lovely little coleus, haven't had one for ages, also a chive plant since my own finally stopped going last year and I do like chives.

So here's the homeward trip

And the coleus repotted and in its new home out front

The seeds will take their turn, maybe in the earth, maybe pots, TBA.

While I was out, my dear cleaning family accepted my Misfits box, which I found in the hallway, must have arrived very early

And here's the array, missing only the shrimp I'd ordered, which they'd messaged me about ahead. So my shrimp curry will be postponed, but I think I'll manage not to starve. 

Lovely dried apricots available, which I eat for breakfast, or any time, and which will be a great chutney ingredient any minute now.

About dried apricots, I found that there's a difference between dried Turkish apricots and Turkish dried apricots. 

The first are supposed to come from Turkey, and the second refer to the drying method. Turkish dried is where they're dried,  then pitted, instead of the other way round. They can and do come from California.  It results in a much juicier and tender fruit. 

I'm sure you've been living just to learn this. On the subject of dried fruit, both Gary and Handsome Son loved the maroo raisins without knowing they were anything special. So maybe the growers have a point.

In case the excitement of this post is getting too much, I am also reading a very entertaining Marie Benedict

Apparently this is a fictional account of the sisters, one of them the writer Nancy Mitford, one married the fascist Mosley among other people, another married  a Duke, one was Jessica, who famously wrote an expose of the American funeral industry and was a passionate communist, and there was Unity, close Nazi friend of Hitler. And one sister lived a quiet life as a farmer.

And there was a son who died in the Spanish civil war fighting against the forces some of his sisters supported. Interesting family in real life, so I'll see how they unfold in fiction. 

This writer evidently works in this pattern, taking famous actual people, including Agatha Christie, as her characters. It might be my summer's patio reading.

Are you up for a puzzle before I prep and put away my Misfits and do the laundry?

Here

Happy day everyone, take it easy, aka, do what I say, not what I do.