Archives for January 2015

Unfold Your Wings – Write

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“If you stand still long enough, you’ll grow wings.” from Bella Grace Magazine, D. Smith Kaich Jones

It sounds like an oxymoron, but I think it’s true. When you stand still for too long, you don’t necessarily grow roots. Sometimes you get wings.

It hit me when I read that line. I’d been in one place for so long, my pin feathers (the soft, baby kind that appear before the real flying feathers) were starting to sprout.

I was at a job with wonderful people, in a lovely office park, doing work that had been creative, fulfilling and fun. For a long time, anyway. Then things changed, as things are wont to do, and the job wasn’t as fulfilling anymore. I had come to a standstill. I had stopped writing – at least, doing any creative, fiction writing.

That’s when I felt the itch and burr and scratch of unexpected feathers, and I knew it was time to fly.

I stretched my wings and have made, to date, a rather bumpy landing. But that doesn’t mean I’m grounded. This can be a place to rest and think and figure out how to get to where I want to go next, where I really want to be.

So here goes. Unfolding my wings again.

Lynn

 

Growing Heirloom Vegetables

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How’d like to pay off your mortgage by selling tomatoes?

“Radiator Charlie,” a West Virginia radiator repairman, did it. During the Great Depression, he developed a delicious tomato that he dubbed the ‘Mortgage Lifter,’ because he sold enough plant starts–at $1 each–to pay off the $6,000 mortgage on his farm.

Not many of us can settle our debts like that anymore, but we can still grow Charlie’s tomato. It’s now considered an heirloom, and like most old-timey vegetables and fruits, it’s packed with great flavor and has lots of desirable growing characteristics, like the ability to resist many pests and diseases.

Planet Natural has a great video about the charms of heirlooms that you can view here. And thanks, PN, for recommending my book, Gardening with Heirloom Seeds, in an online article about these plants.

Ready to try some heirloom seeds? Click on for Planet Natural’s catalog.