Pollywogs!

So we’ve been talking about planting a garden for a long time.  Always been really lackadaisical about it, planted some peppers and mostly neglected them (they still produced an amazing amount).  Planted some broccoli one year and just let it go to seed.  This year, we decided to get serious, what with the price of produce and all…we have a ton of water and sunshine, no reason we can’t grow some food!

Kelley picked up some plants at Shaffer’s Greenhouse (hopefully they didn’t use too many chemicals in growing the baby plants!).  Grabbed some hardwood planks and pieces of cardboard from the shop, a few angle brackets, some peat moss, mulch and vermiculite from Wool’s True Value, and the compost we’ve been brewing.

Laid the cardboard down underneath, and then the boards on top.  Compost on top of the cardboard, peat moss on top of the compost, vermiculite, and then planted our baby plants around May 21st.  We have a couple varieties of lettuce, peppers and tomatoes, some broccoli and parsley, and a few herbs.  After everything was planted, we placed mulch on top of the soil to help hold the moisture in the fluffy peat moss and vermiculite mixture, and I water it every morning!

Last night (and three weeks later), we harvested our first crop of lettuce, selecting a few of the largest leaves from each plant.  Locally produced and consumed, it doesn’t need tens of gallons of water for irrigation in California, gallons of petroleum in the form of fertilizers and shipping fuel around the country, and kilowatts of energy in the form of cold storage.  It doesn’t by itself make a huge difference, barely a small difference, but three hundred million small differences result in one gigantic change!

As you can see, it looks riotous and overgrown, even after taking a salad’s worth of lettuce out of the garden:

Our first salad!  Topped with store-bought carrots and broccoli, as ours is not ready yet.

With the daily watering, the lettuce wasn’t bitter, very tasty.  I placed the garden basically right next to our front door, so animals haven’t been a problem.  It gets sunshine in the morning, and then is shaded from about noon to 2PM or so by a chestnut tree, so the plants have been sheltered from the worst of the drying heat the past few weeks.  It seems actually that the high temperatures has thrown the growth into overdrive, I’m shocked every day when I water them by how much it seems to grow over a 24 hour period.

So, I strongly recommend trying this yourself if you have somewhere that gets appropriate sunshine, is easy for you to water daily, and is reasonably sheltered from roaming packs of rabbits and deer.  The material cost was very low, and all of it very common.  If you don’t compost yourself, it is possible to purchase it. I recommend purchasing material from anywhere other than a big-box as much as possible of course.

Actually building and planting the garden only took me an afternoon, there was literally nothing to it.   After that, about three minutes of watering in the morning and three minutes of harvesting before dinner daily.

I think the key to our success (and we like to joke that we have a gangrene thumb when it comes to plants) is that it has to be somewhere convienent to work on daily, and it really ought to be a square-foot garden.  The small size makes planting, weeding and watering so very much easier than a large conventional garden.

UPDATE: pics from June 30th, 2008:

Always something else to do, some excuse.  Hell, with this heat insouciance combined with sloth sounds like a grand idea…

Just finished Oryx and Crake, a very good book.  However, I think after reading two post-apocolypse Margaret Atwood books, and the delicate state of current affairs, I’m beginning to feel seriously pessimistic about our future as human beings…

Man is it hot.  We had summer in springtime, but that was a nice pleasant dry heat.  This is deep July in early June.  Went swimming in Pine Creek today and the water felt like mid July as well.

“This neck of the woods” seems to have had its cicada population emerge.  We aren’t part of the large, well known cicada cycles, but whatever cycle we are on (Brood XIV?), it came up fierce here.  Our’s aren’t making any noise, however, and when they emerge they just sorta hang out.  Apparently down the road a bit they’re making an impressive racket, but here the trees are silent.  It is sad and spooky, I feel bad for the little alien fuckers.

What is wrong with the Sycamore trees?  They’re all wilted and blighted. Hell, even one out in the Nippenose Valley is blighted, so whatever is wrong is very wide spread.  Strange and stranger…

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Here are my bookmarks:

The unkindest cut | Salon Life

I went to the usual source for village elders who are trying to solve a tough ethical problem: An article in Mothering magazine. Regina had helpfully supplied the link for me. It said that Western cultures, until the nineteenth century, had no tradition of circumcision. The Greeks and the Romans passed laws forbidding “sexual mutilation” after coming into contact with the cultures of the Middle East. It became more common during the anti-masturbation hysteria of the Victorian era. Doctors claimed that circumcision cured everything from epilepsy and tuberculosis to headaches, eczema, and bed-wetting. At this point, the article became truly interesting and relevant, if a bit didactic and terrifying. It called circumcision a “radical practice” that didn’t begin until the cold war era, “part of the same movement that pathologized and medicalized birth and actively discouraged breastfeeding.” Until the 1970s, hospitals didn’t even have to seek parental permission to perform the surgery.

Yes.  Sexual mutilation.  You’d be disgusted and outraged to hear of some barbaric tribe cutting the clits off of young girls?  As I recently wrote on reddit, “people are too crazy for you to point out just how crazy they are, the truth has to be revealed slowly and gently…”

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Read this and this.

Now, read this and this.

What do you think?  I think it is time to throw Bush and Cheney in fucking Guantanamo until they spill the beans.

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This is out of date considering the recent and happy turn of events, but still relevant in the way it forces you to view “news” in the correct perspective: a bunch of clueless dick-wads spouting garbage diarrhea:

Here’s a rule I would like every political reporter, campaign official, TV talking head, and politician in the United States to follow. Go ahead and say, if you like, that Hillary Clinton retains a serious chance of winning the Democratic nomination. If you say this, however, you must describe a set of circumstances whereby this could happen. Try not to make it sound like a fairy tale.

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You know that lady who had all the dirt on the politicians in Washington who were utilizing her services?  You know she ‘turned up dead‘ one day?  This is one of those little things that gets swept under the rug and everyone expects you to just forget and keep going about your day-to-day.  You know, sorta like the Anthrax fun after 9/11 and the reason we went to war with Iraq…

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Oh propaganda, how difficult it would be for the Bush Administration without you:

Michael Gordon, the military writer for The New York Times who contributed several false stories about Iraqi WMD in the runup to the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2002, has written several articles in the past year about Iran’s alleged training of Iraqi insurgents — or supplying them with weapons to kill Americans. He produced another major report on this subject for today’s Times – based solely on unnamed sources — which is at odds with an account from McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau…

Truth dies cold and lonely…

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I love The Daily Show.   You already know that, don’t you?  Best thing I’ve seen on TV lately (the two or three hours I’ve seen in the past couple weeks) was Jon Stewart grilling Scott McClellan over exactly what goes on inside the Bush Administration, basically arguing our case that Bush and Cheney are intentionally doing evil and harm, impeachable and prosecutiable offenses.  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

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California is the new Amsterdam:

Finding a medical marijuana distributor is shockingly easy, as Times columnist Sandy Banks noted in her recent columns on getting pot to treat arthritis. Sprinkled innocuously around L.A. County are more than 200 dispensaries that look like health food stores or pharmacies — including three just at the intersection of Fairfax and Santa Monica. To shop at these places, though, you need a doctor’s recommendation on an official form. Once you have that, no California cop can arrest you for holding up to eight ounces. That amount, I’m guessing, was based on conservative medical estimates of how much Snoop Dogg would need if he came down with glaucoma at the same time Animal Planet aired a “Meerkat Manor” marathon.

The horror, having the war on drugs emasculated like that.  What is next, legalizing prostitution?  DAMN YOU NEVADA!

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Alright.  I’m tired, and I still have a fucking shit ton of bookmarks left…maybe I’ll still be here tomorrow, I’ll try then.

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Alright.