It's Growing

We've had 3 inches of rain in the past 24 hours in already soggy ground. But the transplants are happy and the sun's out and stuff's finally growing. Adam, our resident WWOOFer, has been on the roof today, sketching the garden in preparation for making a map of the beds. The next stage will be to number the beds (again; I'd done this some years back for the Hungarian exchange students), then he'll start on the index of plants.

He and I visited the Fort des Chartres annual Rendezvous over the weekend and checked out the 1740s garden as well as displays of native plants used as food.

I met one of the vendors, Cynthia Kay Deardorff of Theakiki River Traders, who was selling Native American heirloom seeds. I bought Seneca bear beans (beans to cook with bear, of course), and some beautiful Potawatomi lima beans. If you are interested in knowing more about the beans, email Cynthia at cindy@kaspc.com.

We drove back by way of the Great River Road and crossed back into Missouri from Illinois, taking the scenic route across the springs areas of the Ozarks (Big Spring, Mammoth Spring, Alley Spring, all in a region that is rich with native plants, echinacea and others.
We stopped at Chester, IL and visited the memorial to Elzie Segar, creator of Popeye. Gotta do those tourist things!