Recently in some comments, the old, doddering DFH commenter known here as Bring It On was whining about his overly cautious concern and discomfort with New Ideas, again, and telling younger, prettier people like me that We Wuz Wrong, and our newfangled notions about garden beds were Dangerous to America. Now, he’s always saying something similar about my political ideas, but rarely do I get a chance to not only know I’m right and he’s wrong, but prove it with photos.
Heh. Today is that day. I have two words for you, Oldster: One. Week. That’s how long the plants I’m going to show you have been in their raised, grass clipping-infused beds. And it’s been a brutal winter, and dry as a bone spring. And I didn’t cheat: these have not received even the organic fertilizer I bought. Nope, this is just my method, about a 1/2 week of sunshine, my love, and the blessing of the Goddess. Look upon them and weep, you doubting, doddering, doltish Dylan wannabe, you.
Some of what I’m going to show you is more than a year old, some are perennials, some are annuals, some are big-box bought, and likely genetically engineered, some are home grown from heirloom seed. Some are in deep shade, some are in full sun. All were planted with the method I described to you in my previous garden post, and all have only been moving for the last week, or in the case of the perennials, the last month. Which for this part of the country this time of year, is actually exceptional. I had stuff coming up and blooming in April as well, I’m sorry I didn’t post on that more. But, if I may puff my chest this morning, no one else in my ’hood has anything close to the bloom/spread I’ve got right now; other than bulbs most people are still looking at little green shoots and leaves and not much else. Standard Warning: lots of big pics, so slow going for you dial up people.
These ferns got moved into an area that receives about 1-2 hours of light a day. Ferns always do well in the shade, but I confess I was sort of amazed by how fast they came up and uncurled. Ferns are like sprinters: once they get going, they explode with speed and performance. They also “walk,” that is, if you plant one in one year, the next year you’ll get 2 or 4 somewhere near the original, and more and more over a wider spread each year. They are also close to unkillable. I’ve found ferns pushing up from beds I deeply tilled, covered with organic material 2ft deep, etc. And gawd, aren’t they beautiful? Again let me stress that if you have a shady, “nothing will grow here” area, Ferns are your answer. Heh, I lifted this (I think they’re called) corm, put it in a raised bed, killed 1/2 it’s roots…and then it froze in a snap freeze for two days. And my babies are still comin on Strong! Eat your heart out, Republican neighbor who spends 0000$ on a pro landscaping service next door. She’s still waiting for hers to appear. Read more
Good Morning! It’s a beautiful day here, sunny and bright, sunrise was wonderful to see this morning. I thought I’d make up for the prolonged lack of blogging with some photos. Warning: big pics, so this will likely load slowly for you dial up folks.
Friends and family gather for the funeral of Alvin Thomas on March 17. Thomas returned to New Orleans from Katrina-induced exile in Charlotte, N.C., and was living in his parents’ flood-damaged home. Home From Katrina Exile, Man Who Lived Alone Died Alone Read more
The first thing you’ll need when starting seeds is a suitable place to do it. In order to start seed successfully, you must meet the environmental requirements for initial germination and subsequent growth of the plants until they reach the stage when they are ready for transplanting. A well designed rack or other area will meet the needs of correct temperature to start germination, and sufficient light and space to stimulate healthy growth.
Hey y’all. Sorry to be dark so much recently, but it’s that time of year and I’ve been ramping up for Major Labor under the sun and stars. I want to build something like this, but prettier. That’s my rub with growing houses- it’s so spendy to make them look nice. I’m house-vain like that, I guess. Still, I don’t want an ugly plastic shack on my lawn. At the same time, using recycled and reclaimed materials really appeals to me/my wallet.
Feeling snooty? I’m realizing just how snooty the gardening classes can be. But in this country at least, that’s going to change. Can you eat that 40$ cultivar, honey?
They may or may not be snooty, but they are pretty hardcore about their plants: I was over at Monticello the other day and gosh! You can see how a grrl could love Jefferson, what a whiz with plants he was! And speaking of things to look at, anyone know any good sites for garden design? With lots of pics? Most places I’ve come across are only trying to sell me a book or magazine and that’s not what I want/can afford. Oh, yes- I am very, very disappointed with all of you. Medium is the best we can do? Fuck. That’s pathetic.
Sorry again for the short and infrequent posting, but this is what happens in an economy where some of us are realizing it makes a lot of sense to have a plot that will provide…oh, let’s avoid polemic and hysteria this morning and just say 30% of my diet. Read more
“A deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests – paying, for the first time, for their upkeep as “utilities” that provide vital services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation. Read more
Across the world, we are encouraged to turn out all our lights for one hour starting at 8 pm.
Across America, I suspect that many will instead be watching the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournment. Tough to play basketball in the dark. Imagine if they had scheduled Earth Hour up against American Idol. Forget it!
So, as Earth Day goes to Earth Hour, I hope that basketball fans will at least take the time for the next “effort” to stop global warming - the “Earth Moment Of Silence.”
From the accompanying article:
Satellite images show the runaway disintegration of a 160-square-mile chunk in western Antarctica that started Feb. 28. It was the edge of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and had been there for perhaps 1,500 years.
British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan attributed the melting to rising sea temperature due to global warming.
Scientists said that while they were not concerned about a rise in sea level from the latest event, it was a sign of worsening global warming. Read more
It’s an exciting race to see which will be the first to salute the return of the Sun. Very much so for me; I put in ~150 new bulbs last fall and I’m just dying to see how they turn out.
This is likely one of the Hyacinths. I swear, it’s putting up 1-3mm a day, all week so far. Read more
So the Japanese are forcing whale meat on kids, calling it “traditional foods week” in schools. Nevermind that the Japanese rejected whalemeat as too poisoned previously, or that Norway tells pregnant women to avoid it. This is what people will do for ideology: kill the endangered to poison their own children.
This is your deep thought for the day, and something to keep in mind when thinking about the Villagers.
Busy day today, but I wanted to confess to you all my new obsession. I won’t be able to garden for long months yet, and the need to do something with my hands (get your mind out of the gutter) has driven me to explore a new craft/art form. Also, poverty. If you like to craft but can’t afford all those expensive supplies, you can do some amazing things with some cement, paint, and broken shards of glass, clay or pebbles.
Recycling has to become a Way of Life for us. We have to learn to live the truth that everything we throw away has an “energy cost” as well as a landfill cost. Read more
This doesn’t surprise me at all, indeed, I would name it a “feature” and not a “bug.” Democracy Now!
A startling new report has predicted the subprime mortgage crisis will cause people of color to lose up to $213 billion, leading to the greatest loss of wealth in modern U.S. history. The figure appears in a new report from United for a Fair Economy called “Foreclosed: The State of the Dream 2008.” The group accuses mortgage lenders of deliberately targeting the poor and people of color with high-cost loans.
Predatory lending is as old as 40 Acres and a Mule. Poor people are the easiest to scam when it comes to complex financial vehicles, and I would like more bloggers to speak about this angle of “how we got this crisis.”
It’s pretty clear that greed, willful ignorance, Bushist “logic” and a criminal lack of regulation brought about the mortgage crisis. But so too did racism- again and again I’ve read of poor and brown and black people conned into believing they could afford mortgages when they couldn’t. Now this report confirms this endemic of racist lending practices. Want to impress me, Obama, Hillary? Speak about this angle of the mess one of you will be cleaning up soon.
From this morning (Jan. 24 2008) National Park Service Morning Report:
Everglades National Park (FL)
Rangers Remove Python From Visitor’s Car
On Tuesday, January 15th, visitor Ron DeLong stopped his car on the main park road in order to watch a crawling, six-foot-long, exotic Burmese python. As DeLong stepped out of his Ford Explorer, the python began crawling underneath the vehicle and into its engine compartment.
DeLong attempted to grab the python with the curved end of his walking cane, but was unable to stop it.
After several failed attempts to remove the snake, DeLong decided to drive 15 miles to the main entrance station for assistance. When ranger Willie Lopez, wildlife biologist Skip Snow, biologist’s assistant Alex Wolf and firefighter Henry Delvalle checked the Explorer, they found its hood open, with only the tail end of the python visible – the rest of the snake was coiled around various parts of the engine and undercarriage.
Several attempts were made to pull it out through the top of the engine, but failed because the snake tightened its hold on the car. The four responders then discussed their options.
WASHINGTON — Ten years ago, a Canadian icebreaker was parked in an ice pack 300 miles north of Pt. Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point in the United States, and allowed to drift so scientists could study the Arctic environment and global warming’s effect on it. The icebreaker drifted with the ice for a year and more than 1,800 miles as researchers tracked changes in the Arctic ice pack.
Top-secret U.S. spy satellites were among those tracking the icebreaker. With the approval of a little-noticed government body known as the Civil Applications Committee, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency released nearly 60 photos to scientists.
The committee, under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Geological Survey, reviews civilian requests for classified reconnaissance information and makes recommendations to the intelligence community, which has the final say about what gets declassified. Such intelligence data can be helpful to scientists studying everything from volcanoes, forest fires, earthquakes and landslides to climate change, hurricanes, flooding and pollution.
Now, however, the Bush administration plans to abolish the committee and create a office in the Department of Homeland Security to review such requests and others from law enforcement agencies. Read more
BBC News is reporting that a French company has developed a pollution-free car which runs on compressed air. India’s Tata Motors has the car under production and it may be on sale in Europe and India by the end of the year.
The air car, also known as the Mini-CAT or City Cat, can be refueled in minutes from an air compressor at specially equipped gas stations and can go 200 km on a 1.5 euro fill-up — roughly 125 miles for $3. The top speed will be almost 70 mph and the cost of the vehicle as low as $7000. Read more
While Democrats are off proving that only Republicans can use a “hold” effectively, here’s what a sober, actually serious mind has to say about what’s coming:
Stiglizt-
The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine.
But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.
The administration that won’t testify, won’t preserve or release records, and won’t adhere to any other form of accountability (after all, it’s “the new era of responsibility”), explains that benchmarks are unacceptable things to the Bushies, even when it’s literally the end of the world:
“Once numbers appear in the text, it predetermines the outcome,” said chief U.S. negotiator Harlan Watson.
Really long, but worth it. Bottom line: America has lost the War on Drugs, in every effective measure of those words. You knew that, of course, but what fascinated me about this piece was that despite the moderate, non-foily tone, it’s impossible not to come away with the conclusion that our drug policy is directed by complete idiots or corrupt players or both. More radically minded people like me will point out that a big chunk of the failure must be the result of endemic corruption, but even without that, the shift is complete. The time when we can hopefully and unabashedly speak about drug policy reform is here, even if the media has yet to realize that fact. It’s because there are three groups of people in this country, and one of them is finally in the majority.
The first, and largest, are those who believe it is time for sensible drug policy reform, from top to bottom. That group includes not only dope-smoking hippies and Rave-tripping teens, but experienced law enforcement officials and conservative politicians. One of many choice quotes from the article:
“What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still,” says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. “The other guys were learning just as we were learning,” Coleman says. “We had this hubris.” Read more
Just got in from one of those “public’s opportunity to comment on an ongoing government action” thingees, and I’m both uplifted and disheartened. Uplifted to realize how many people really do care enough to show up for a boring, unsexy three hour gov’t hearing, and to speak out for the environment. Disheartened to realize that corporations really do run our government, no matter how much we want to believe otherwise. Mining is a “hot” news topic these days, and this post is being filed away for a future ’I told you so’ moment I have no doubt we’ll someday have over the mine in question. It won’t surprise you at all to hear that essentially, it’s yet another case of short term corporate profit winning out over logic, common sense, science, popular will, and long term environmental concerns. And economic concerns, as that is understood to affect all, and not a few, people in this state.
Here’s the deal: a pristine, and undeveloped (except logging decades ago) area of northern Michigan is the target, and a very bad company wants to put in a sulfide mine. The supporting view is that it will “bring jobs and tax revenue to Michigan.” But that isn’t really grounded in fact, and the citizens of this state know it. Too bad one of the bureaucrats told me that he didn’t really care and that the mine would likely go in anyway. Read more
Greenspan, who wrote in his memoir that “the Iraq War is largely about oil,” said in a Washington Post interview that while securing global oil supplies was “not the administration’s motive,” he had presented the White House before the 2003 invasion with the case for why removing the then-Iraqi leader was important for the global economy.
“I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive,” Greenspan said in the interview conducted on Saturday. “I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, ’Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?’ I would say it was essential.”
Let’s hear it for the power of the human subconscious, which enabled Bush to invade a country without any awareness of his mission’s main purpose!
It was essential to steal the oil from a sovereign nation. It wasn’t, however, essential to make large and urgent investments in renewable energy. What good would it do us to develop a lucrative new industry, save the environment, and reduce our reliance on Middle East oil? None at all, you dirty hippie dumbass.
Thank God it was Greenspan protecting the long-term strength of the dollar: Read more
The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the “white power structure” had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the “higher powers” of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was “the silver-lining scenario.”
The best-known writer to come from the Ninth Ward is Kalamu ya Salaam. A poet, playwright, and civil-rights activist, Salaam used to go by the name of Val Ferdinand. When I told Salaam what I was hearing in New Iberia and Houston, he laughed, but not dismissively. He said, “The real question is why not?” He recalled that in 1927, in the midst of the worst flooding of the Mississippi River in recorded history, the white city fathers of New Orleans—the men of the Louisiana Club, the Boston Club, and the Pickwick Club—won permission from the federal government to dynamite the Caernarvon levee, downriver from the city, to keep their interests dry. But destroying the levee also insured that the surrounding poorer St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes would flood. Thousands of the trappers who lived there lost their homes and their livelihoods. The promise of compensation was never fulfilled. That, plus the persistent rumors of what may or may not have happened during Hurricane Betsy, Salaam said, has had a lingering effect. “So when I heard on TV that there was a breach at the Seventeenth Street levee, I figured they’d done it again,” he said. “Or, let’s just say, I didn’t automatically assume that it was accidental.”
The genius of the Conservative Movement has been not to wait for disaster, but to create it—and profit from it. As we shall see.
We’re all niggers now, eh?
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For you CTers out there, and those of you who are merely foily, what you are about to read connects the dots better than anything I’ve read yet (via the utterly essential and lingerifiqueAvedon, the Goddess-like being who puts the aggravation in aggregation). Jane Smiley reviews Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine (which I must read at once), and summarizes Klein’s thesis.* I’m going to fair-use a lot of it here: Read more
commenter known here as Bring It On was whining about his overly cautious concern and discomfort with New Ideas, again, and telling younger, prettier people like me that We Wuz Wrong, and our newfangled notions about garden beds were Dangerous to America. Now, he’s always saying something similar about my political ideas, but rarely do I get a chance to not only know I’m right and he’s wrong, but prove it with photos. 
