Categories
culture life

Year Round Gardening

As I learn more and more about healthy eating – both through personal experience and study – my interest has grown in not only growing some of my own food, but also in being able to do it for as much of the year as possible. In that vein I am very interested in the possibilities presented by this idea of a below-ground greenhouse.

I’m seriously looking into whether I can make this idea work.

Categories
culture life

What’s Your Ideal?

I have been thinking a lot about my ideal living situation. It’s really something I have been exploring for years. My thinking is not confined to my own ideal, I also think about what is ideal for people generally (a pretty gray area) and about why situations that are not ideal for me are ideal for other people (which is total guesswork without some outside input).

I am considering factors such as the size of city to live in ranging from millions to tens, the proximity to amenities and services, which amenities or services are most important, the distance between houses, the culture of the neighbors (assuming you’re in a place large enough to have neighbors), the size of the house, and the size of the property.

For myself, I prefer a small community where people know each other and are tightly knit but not close-minded. The house does not need to be very large, but it must be configured in a way that is conducive to the family life that we are trying to create (it would take a whole series of posts to describe the family life we are trying to achieve). I could live on as little as a quarter acre in the right circumstances, but would be able to tolerate much more various conditions around me if I had at least 2 acres to work with. It is imperative that any living situation leave me with the opportunity to garden. I absolutely cannot live with neighbors so close that it takes less than 5 people to span the distance between separate houses.

I can easily live 2 miles from the nearest store, but I believe that 10 miles would be fine (I’ve never done that before so that’s not guaranteed). The only utilities that I must have are access to water (I don’t think I would mind a well), electricity, and an internet connection – although I would prefer a sewer system over a septic tank.

So what’s your ideal? Over the next few weeks I hope to write up the advantages and disadvantages I see in different sizes of cities as well as generic thoughts on the advantages of rural, suburban, and urban settings. Please chime in with any insights or experience you have on the benefits or drawbacks of various living situations.

Categories
life technology

Technology and Gardening

So I could be posting about national news items, but instead I spent my spare time today working on a gardening wiki. Laura wanted to keep notes on the plants that we have planted with some of the more vital statistics such as when to prune them and how well they thrive for us. I decided that a TiddlyWiki was a very good format to keep such notes because these wikis are very portable, the entire site is in a single file, and they allow you to cross reference notes and link between notes so that it becomes a very versatile note-taking system. I have actually started using TiddlyWikis for a variety of note-taking projects at home and at work.

After I got started on the project I thought it would be fun to put it on my website so that I could access it and update it from anywhere. To do that I used MiniTiddlyServer (MTS) which allows makes a server environment for TiddlyWikis. Normally they are displayable on the web but not they can’t be updated online without some help. I think that MTS is the best tool to give that help that I have seen. Admittedly I work with Sean Hess, who created MTS, but even if I didn’t know him I would consider this to be a fine piece of work. The first version of MTS that I used was only 9 files zipped up to less than 100Kb. The version I am using now is much bigger (over 500Kb – still very small) and much more powerful.

This opens up a world of future possibilities. For the present, anyone can see what I am planting in my gardens (flower and vegetable). Later I may choose to allow others to contribute to the wiki by invitation. Eventually I could choose to open parts of it up for general comment and contribution. MTS can do that kind of thing, the question is, “will I want to try it?” The answer is, “time will tell.”

Categories
life meta

Lunar Day

I enjoyed watching the full moon set this morning as I was out running. I watched as the last wisp of the moon fell behind the mountains in the west. This evening I was driving to the store with my kids and we all watched the moon rise in the east from the first tiny slice of the moon until it was fully risen. How’s that for bookends on the day.

As I came here to post on that and share with my hordes of readers that we got a new tree and many of our flowers in for this year I discovered that the spam bots had discovered my site today.

Thanks to Akismet, nobody had to suffer through anything – not the porn, the dubious pharmaceutical products, nor the offers to lose real money in virtual casinos. What surprised me was that before today only about 10 spam comments had been caught by Akismet (and none missed) and none of them were of the variety mentioned above. Tonight there were over 60 comments that had been caught by Akismet and all of them, unless my skimming missed an anomaly, were of the types listed above. This is much easier to maintain than the blacklists etc. that I was relying on two years ago.

Categories
life

Spring Again

It’s been months since I have had anything to do in the way of gardening, but now that Spring is back I got to start cleaning the flower beds with the kids and get ready to plant a few more plants to fill in the bare spots. It’s fun to see the plants from last year starting to grow again and I am excited by the large number of raspberry shoots that are coming up around the two plants we had last year. Soon we will have to start planting the vegetables again.

I had never thought about it before but yard projects in general seem to be an indicator of Spring as well. I have already put up a fence so the kids can play in the back yard without wandering into the street while Mom’s not looking. We also have some new plans for things we would like to change about the back yard -more flower garden space and probably removing the little deck next to our patio so that the babies can’t crawl under it.

There’s never a dull moment when you have a house and yard to play around with. There’s always something we can think of to make it just a little bit better. It reminds me of a house we looked at when we were trying to buy our house. The yard was amazing with all the little touches in the landscaping and the plants and garden areas. The family wanted to move so they would have a new yard to work on. Maybe that’s what will get us moving when the time comes.

Categories
life

Timing

I wrote yesterday that I had taken my garden in early in the season. Little did I know that we would get hail today which would tear apart many of the plants that I had not already pulled.

Categories
life

Gardening Problem

I face a little problem with my garden. Having extra time today, I finally got around to starting to clean out my garden. I know it’s a bit early in the season right now, but the bugs have been getting to some of my plants and I need to make some changes in preparation for next year so I’m starting early.

I started by harvesting the carrots that had not been looking promising early in the season. Now the carrots have taken off so that in many places there is virtually no dirt between the carrots. They are big and beautiful and too numerous to eat all of them soon. I pulled out the broccoli plants since I already have more broccoli than I can eat. I pulled up the potatoes. I have been wondering about them all year since I could see that the plants grew, but I could only guess at how well the potatoes were coming on. I don’t remember having much success with potatoes in our family garden when I was growing up so I was not sure what our chances would be. We got lots of potatoes – even if you don’t count the ones that got sliced by the shovel as I dug up the dirt after removing the plants to find any potatoes I had missed. We also removed all our squash plants but there was little fruit left to harvest there because we had already taken most of it in. The squash plants had been the hardest hit by our bug problem.

So what’s my gardening problem? I can’t possibly eat everything I picked today unless I learn how to store things over the winter. I know it can be done because people have lived for centuries without refrigeration or global produce shipping. The problem is I am not exactly sure how to do it since we live in an age where most people live week to week between trips to the grocery store rather than working all summer to live over the winter on the produce you saved from your harvest.

You may ask why it matters since I can always go buy food at the store. The answer is that I have a goal to one day learn how to live entirely off my garden. I hope it never becomes necessary, but I would like to have that skill so that I can better understand and appreciate our modern lifestyle. Storing the produce of my garden over the winter is one step towards that goal.

Categories
life

Discerning or Disagreeable

I have been going to conference sessions all day today and it has made me begin to question how I approach learning. I find that there are no classes where I simply absorb what is being said without finding parts where I disagree.

I think it is the responsibility of every student to consider what they are being taught so and coming to know and believe it for themselves, or where they cannot believe it they must discard it in favor of something which they can believe. If that is what I am doing, then I am sure that I am playing the part of the prudent student.

I began to wonder today if the fact that there was no class where I could accept everything was a sign that I was being either proud or picky.

For example, I was in a class on gardening and learning a lot about a specific way of gardening that is supposed to produce high yields and reduce weeding and space requirements. I liked a lot of what I had heard and I learned a lot about composting which I intend to implement, but despite all the benefits which were listed, I do not intend to implement the gardening plan as presented in the class. I found that it did not agree with my own gardening goals. I will use some principles and see if it improves my results, or cuts my costs, but I don’t want to put the work or the cash in to follow the method to the letter.

As I think about it, I believe that it is a matter of discernment and not just me being disagreeable. I am not judging the information to be bad, or faulty, but I am adapting it to my own situation and my own purposes.

Categories
life

My Gardening Hobby

During this last year, as I have been settling into my house and working on my yard, I have begun to really enjoy gardening. I did plenty of it in my childhood, but it is different now.

Back then I remember the gardening mostly for planting, roto-tilling, pulling weeds, and picking the produce. There’s nothing wrong with all those things and they are certainly a part of gardening. The difference now is that I see the gardening much differently. I have worked hard on making flower gardens and a vegetable garden in my yard and I have enjoyed taking the time to watch the life in the various plants. I love to observe how they grow. In the flower gardens I always try to make sure that things are appealing visually, but in the garden I let things grow a little more wild. That does not make for the highest yield, but I enjoy watching it more.

The bane of gardening when I was young was that the weeds seemed to grow easier than any of the plants that we planted. As I have watched my garden grow I have been entertained as I have seen some of my squash and pumpkin plants overrun the most tenacious species of my weeds.

I have also seen some other things that make me marvel at the tenacity of life. When I was getting flowers for my flower gardens I found that I really like delphiniums. We bought three varieties and planted them in our main flower garden. It was not too long before we came out one morning to find that the one we liked the best was broken off at the ground as if it had been kicked over. That was very disapponting. A few days later I was surprised to discover that there were two little shoots of a new dephinium growing out of the roots from the old one. I was just amazed at how tenaciously a plant can cling to life when I would have expected it to die. The plant has now survived two such occurances.

To top my observances off, yesterday I discovered a flower among my carrots. It was a type of flower that I can’t name right now, but I have seen it for sale in nursaries. I have no idea how it got into the carrots – we didn’t buy any and I have not seen any elsewhere, but I got a new flower for free which I have now transplanted into one of the flower gardens.

It is those kinds of random occurances that ensure that I can never tire of working in the garden and observing the growth of the plants. As a nice bonus, I get to eat the fruits of my labors (many times fresh off the vine – before it has ever come inside the house).