Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Broccoli is Alive


This picture was taken March 29. So much for "40 days to Maturity!" on the cauliflower (it is supposed to be an early-maturing hybrid). It sounded too good to be true. The bed seems no worse for wear for the near drowning last week. More fertilizer spreading this afternoon. We got more rain today, and I got home too late to dig, so I spread it out, at least. Must dig next few evenings. Planting season is very, very busy. Some days I really do not like working away from home and at home. I just cannot do it all as well as I would like. But I can try, and I'll sleep well when I finally crawl into bed tonight.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Spreading Fertilizer and Planting Borage


I'm trying to pre-empt the cabbage worm invasion by planting borage in the broccoli/cauliflower plot and inspecting the leaves for eggs periodically. We'll see how it works.
I'm also preparing the bed for the Big Corn Planting, April 11. Lots of "organic" fertilizer and some Miracle-Gro Garden Soil going in (needs some improvement, being a thin layer of topsoil over solid clay, with rocks and debris from 80 years of continuous habitation). I even found several child's marbles in the bed when I dug it last year and the year before. Found another marble this year. I'm going to dig it soft, dig in the amendments, and hope the corn grows high. Incorporating the stalks and the bean vines I hope to interplant with them should go a long way toward alleviating the thin-soil problem- just in time to revert it to lawn so we can sell the house when I graduate. C'est la vie.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

Tomato Seedlings


Look at these! These are Arkansas Traveler seedlings from saved seeds, from a tomato I grew last year. This is cool! I always thought seeds were something you just had to buy every year, that you could not save them for reasons I never considered deeply. Now I know that the cycle can be repeated.



These are Japanese Black Trifele seedlings. They're supposed to be Russian purple-brick colored pear-shaped tomatoes. I bought the seeds this year from Baker Seed company. they're supposed to be heavy producers. We'll see how they do in my yard.

Gardening is an adventure. These plants will acclimate outdoors for a week (unless we get a cold snap or another deluge), then go in the ground next week-end. We are blessed.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

What Do The Slugs Know That I Do Not?

I put out beer bait tonight for the slugs. There are very, very few out there! I've caught maybe a dozen, and I looked at the usual hangouts- almost none! Where are they? I captured 2,499 of them by the end of  last night- have most of them headed for less hazardous pastures? Is it too cold and windy? Is it going to frost, and they're staying sheltered? It makes me nervous to see a marked change in habits of an animal or group of animals, because they can sense things we cannot. We'll see in the AM.

Rainy Season

This is my broccoli bed on March 7. I'll take more pics of it next week, after I see if the plants can survive the deluge.
I looked at my garden journal for last year, and in the 9 days leading up to April 6, we got over a foot of rain. This year, we've had about 4 inches of rain so far in the last 4 days, according to the National Weather Service. I looked out my window yesterday to a scary sight- it looked like I was trying to grow broccoli in a rice paddy! The clay subsoil was turning our backyard into a pond. The flower beds are slightly raised and the brick walls have drainage holes, so they were OK, but the middle bed was not. I remembered a tiny trench I dug last year leading away from the bed, choked with leaves. I re-dug the parts filled in by the fall bed-dig and dug the leaves out of the other part. The yard has a gentle southerly slope toward a small sidewalk that funnels water to a neighbor's driveway. By later in the day the soil was sodden, but water was no longer pooled around the plants. The driveways in our neighborhood are all shaped to catch runoff from the yards and funnel it to the city drains. It is a neat system, as long as we do not get many inches of rain in a short period. Then it backfires and we get street flooding from the excess runoff. I'm thinking some household cisterns and catchment ponds might help. If each of us had a cistern holding a few thousand gallons of runoff water (maybe where a septic system would be if we did not have city sewer) for watering grass or gardens in the dry season, and if there were catchment ponds on the public lands and in common areas of residential developments (many here do have these, because the outlying areas of Memphis, where the growth is, are often on low-lying ground), maybe the flash flooding (it is here and gone in a few hours) wouldn't be so bad. 
I need to get out there and work. My borage and nasturtium plants really need to go in the ground. I may just transplant them to individual containers, and try for next weekend (planned to be the Big Planting Week-end), because the ground is just too wet. We got more rain last night, and even more is forecast for Monday night, Tuesday, and Thursday. Spring!

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Hot (Pepper) Science

The April 2009 issue of Smithsonian magazine has a wonderful article about a young scientist named Joshua Tewksbury this month. He studies capsicums, the pepper plants ranging from tame bell peppers to cayennes to naga jalokias. He explores the forests of Bolivia looking for wild capsicums, to see how they evolved in hotness and how the capsaicin benefits the plants in the wild. This one is worth the price of the magazine, if you're into peppers at all. Cool stuff.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Slimed!

I have now officially caught over 2000 slugs (2028- yes, I counted all of them!) in the backyard (4 from the poor dying lemon-tree pot on the porch) in the past week. On 3/22 I caught 432! I was really grossed out by that. Some of them were large, but most were tiny.
I have discovered that slugs have some really interesting habits. Last night in the rain, they were climbing the outside walls of the garage looking for shelter, and moving faster than usual in that quest. Tonight, a cool but dry evening, they were lounging at ease on dead leaves and bricks, and a cabbage seedling. . 
You might think I was recatching the same ones over and over, but I'm dropping them in soapy water in a plastic container with a screw top, and screwing the top down tightly. They aren't getting out alive. These are new slugs nightly. I don't count those that get away.
I'm going to buy some beer this week-end for the baiting. Hand catching is gross (some of them exude slick slime, others sticky slime, so your catching hand gets awfully slimy and dirty), and time-consuming, so I hope the baiting will be effective, too. The mulching with various natural prickly things really didn't seem to make much difference, except as a basic barrier. The picking off seems to be doing better.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Spring Planting Approacheth


Rosalind Creasy wrote a book in the 80s called Cooking from the Garden. I highly recommend it. I got it from the library. It does not appear to be in print now. She wrote in the chapter about Native American gardens that they traditionally planted their corn when "the dogwood blossoms changed from beige to white or the wild plums were in bloom". A plum tree in the neighborhood bloomed before our last snowfall, so I'm not depending on it, but I have read that a dogwood tree can be a pretty reliable gauge of soil temperature. Here is the current bloom stage of our backyard tree. It will be planting time soon!

Monday, March 23, 2009

I Love Spring!

The windows are open. The trees are blushing lavender and pink and yellow-green. The mockingbirds are singing and fighting full-throttle. The tomato seedlings are looking strong. Even my saved banana pepper seeds have decided to germinate. I don't like working in an environment where you can NEVER open the windows. Even when I worked in a school with no windows, the janitors would open the hall end doors, and teachers left their fire doors open, to allow the breezes to blow the stale air of an overcrowded school out and fresh spring in. Then the fire marshall and middle school shooting aftermath stopped the air flow. 
Here at home, despite the barred windows, we can enjoy the day by letting the breezes blow through the house. And blow they do- I read a paper about Southern house design before the days of air conditioning. The author stated that Southern homes were often built with a "dogtrot", or 2 small structures connected by a bit of roofing, in which the hot kitchen with its huge fireplace was separated from the rest of the house. In our house, the "dogtrot" evolved into a main hall that runs the length of the rear of the house, with the kitchen on one side and bedrooms on the other. The authors of the paper stated that wind velocities in dogtrots (and later in houses with interior halls oriented with windows to take advantage of prevailing winds) were 2-3 times those outdoors. Ventilation was a necessity for good health then, and it is now, too. Thank God for open-window days! Sorry to quote something I cannot cite, but I can't find the paper now. 

Sunday, March 22, 2009

A Budding Cell Biologist Looks at Genetically Modified Plants

I don't trust them, to put it bluntly, but not because of some paranoia about the companies (though Monsanto has a rather horrible history) or the genes themselves. It's the unknown technicalities that make me question the swift spread in the market and the wide-open development of GM crop plants. Most of the engineering thus far has been done for Roundup readiness, inserting a gene so the crop plants don't die when doused with an herbicide. What vector is used? Is glyphosate itself used for the selection, or are antibiotic resistance genes in the vector? And how do they select for Bt expression?
Now they are talking about inserting up to 8 genes in upcoming varieties, for everything from drought tolerance to decreased nitrogen use to higher yield. For one thing, decreased nitrogen use (to build proteins) and higher yields (requiring more protein to make seeds or fruit) contradict each other unless some other part of the plant is weakened- making stems or roots less likely to hold up the plant during storms, perhaps? The more genes you try to incorporate into an organism, the more fragile it gets, at least in cell culture and mouse work. The modified organism often requires special nutrient supplementation, and a special germ-free environment, or it dies.
 I'd much rather look for rust resistance in traditionally bred plants than insert genes for it, thus disrupting some important function in the plant that I didn't know about, which does not become significant except in times of stress not encountered in test plots. It might take less time than selection by farmers (or not) to genetically modify a plant, but greater risks persist. What if most farmers choose to grow these new engineered seeds, only to find that they are horribly dependent on a narrow temperature and humidity window, need lots of chemical supplementation, and cannot deal with the normal soil microbiota in some climate regions?This would be typical of lab-engineered cell culture lines (animal and bacterial in my experience) and animals. Are the plants different? What if the pollen spreads indiscriminately and contaminates previously productive varieties, making them frail, too?  
These are the questions in my mind, and the reason I'm leaning more and more toward traditional, "open-pollinated" varieties.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Rediscovering "Peasant Food"

If you go back far enough, your ancestors probably lived on pretty simple fare- beans, grains, vegetables, fruit, and whatever meat could be had and cured. The meat may have been common or rare, depending on their circumstances. The diet of the very wealthy- white flour, abundant meats and fats, and plenty of sweets- has become our everyday fare now in America, but it hasn't been that way for very long.
All the nutritional research in the world seems to indicate that Daniel and his friends were right, that a "peasant diet" in which vegetables and whole grains predominate is much better for health than the rich fare of the king's table. It doesn't require a nutrition degree, or a pantry full of rare and expensive ingredients, to cook like they did. Dried beans, brown rice, and some veggie seeds (or frozen vegetables or a big head of cabbage and a bag of potatoes) are dirt cheap. Add a few herbs in pots, and a bit of meat to flavor the pot (or not), and you've got it. It's not elitist, or racist, or any other form of "-ist" a partisan would try to bring to the discussion. 
A hunk of cornbread and a bowl of soup on a cool and rainy day can be beautiful. 
Once in a while you have to rhapsodize about lunch.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Time to Help a Neighbor

As I was out hunting slugs this evening (I had caught 40 to that point- eventually caught 145!), I heard my neighbor arrive home, and comment over her phone about the difficulty she was having unloading her trunk. We talked, and I helped her unload some sale bags of mulch from the "local" big box store. She did not help me hunt slugs, but I don't blame anyone for not wanting to join that fun, crouching in the dirt with a flashlight picking up slimy gastropods.
It's that time of year, when the trees bloom, the grass greens, the birds nest, and everyone mulches and plants and waters in the new growth. Lend a hand, and the whole neighborhood will be better for it. Helpfulness and tidiness of yard tend to be contagious. Even if "property values" have declined in your area, keeping things neat, clean, and attractive-looking will help you continue to value your property for what it is- a shelter from the storm, a warm nook in the cold, a shady spot in the heat, and a place to call home for a while. 

Thursday, March 19, 2009

A Friendly Beast


As a break from the non-stop slugfest (caught 70 more this morning before dawn, mostly tiny ones), here's a picture of a much friendlier backyard companion, on a huge, but neglected rosemary bush in the neighborhood. It is blooming, and a bee showed up to take advantage. Click on the picture and look. Already covered with pollen! That is one hard-working bee. I hope she has lots of friends (or her queen has lots of babies) to help pollinate my garden this summer. I would like to learn beekeeping someday.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Active Hunting

My wonderful husband decided to help me with the slug-repelling efforts this evening by generating sawdust for use as a dessicant. I sprinkled it liberally around the plants, but found some slugs going right over it later in the evening. Sad.  I decided to rake back the leaf mulch as much as possible and bag it to expose the soil. Glad I did, though I'm not done yet. On the center bed the leaves were piled several inches thick in places, so I was "raking" with a pitchfork. 
I went out after dark to do a little slug hunting. A little? In 50 minutes I caught 110 slugs, mostly tiny. Part of that time was indoors waiting to swap out the rechargeable battery on the flashlight. I'm lucky (or not) that they were climbing onto the cool, moist brick surfaces outside. I probably just captured the less intelligent ones. I'm going to try to go out before dawn and get more. Maybe I can "overfish" the backyard and turn them into  "endangered species" back there. We can pray.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Man the Barricades!


I found another casualty out there this morning- an oak leaf lettuce seedling (supposedly not as attractive to slugs as other lettuces) mercilessly licked to a wilted nub. A trail of slime led through a gap in the eggshells, away from the scene of the crime. A dastardly deed, done under the cover of darkness. I decided to get out the Big Guns.
Not the pesticides- there aren't any except the baits, and poisoned slugs will poison birds and mammals as well. I'd like to avoid that, so I read up on Alternative Mulching Materials. Pine cones and prickly seed pods looked good, and were readily available on sidewalks around the neighborhood. I scavenged, then returned to build little walls around all the kinds of plants attacked so far, and scattered seed pods in the other beds for good measure. Hope they do some good.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Slug Hunter II: Return of the Slime


Wouldn't that just make the perfect title for a gardener-oriented horror film? We picked up the tarpaulin this evening after a very enjoyable walk in the late-afternoon sunshine to discover MORE SLUGS. So I went slug hunting again, just on the tarp, and caught a few dozen. Not kidding. It's enough to really creep you out about going into the back yard, especially considering an agricultural website I viewed yesterday, that said you only see about 5% of your population of slugs above ground. OY. Here is a very good website for identifying your slugs, if you are so inclined:

http://www.uky.edu/Ag/CritterFiles/casefile/slugs/slugs.html

I found that we have 3 or 4 species back there, at least. A few are pictured for your enjoyment. That's my index finger, for scaling purposes. We have black field slugs, marsh slugs, and European Three-banded garden slugs. I just clean em up. Hope you can, too. I managed to grow some pretty healthy lettuce last year, so there is hope. Mulch with crushed eggshells, pine needles, ashes, sawdust, or other irritating stuff. If you wouldn't want to be barefoot in it, it'll probably irritate the slugs, too. Have fun, and hope we don't make any horror films.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

How to Catch Slugs

Today is a cool, bright-cloudy day after days of rain. Everything is damp. It is ideal slug weather. Usually they lay low during the day, so as not to get fried by the sun. But today is cool and cloudy enough for them to be out and about. My husband lifted the plastic tarpaulin he had used to shelter one of my garden beds during the recent cold snap, which was left out to dry on the unplanted end of the bed, and noticed a few slugs underneath after church today. I noticed that I had a few less lettuce seedlings. I decided to go slug hunting after lunch.
Materials needed:
Tarp that has been resting on one end of the garden bed for a few days, preferably very wet with bits of mud on it
a jar or bottle with an alcoholic liquid in it (beer works), with a lid
one not-so-squeamish person
Procedure:
1. Use about 1/4 cup of liquid, or less. You may need to use the rest of the beer to strengthen your nerve for this activity, if you are squeamish. I do not drink alcohol, but was happy to find a good use for cheap beer. The purchase, if done wisely, can support the local economy.
2. Examine the tarp closely for slugs. Some may be dark brown. Others will be light tan or gray with brown lines on them. They may be only a few millimeters, or up to a few centimeters long, and they round up when frightened.
3. Pick off the slugs (scooping with a dead leaf can be effective if you do not want to touch them), and drop them in the liquid. They will die quickly. And if you like beer, you can think of them as dying happily.
I used beer in small containers placed outside overnight in problem areas as slug bait last year, and caught quite a few, but not nearly as many as I did today. Discard the liquid as you deem appropriate, by tossing the container, composting the slimy devils, or whatever you choose to do. It will be nasty.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Repotting Tomato Plants

I'm a week ahead of schedule on the tomato plants, but they were getting a bit crowded in their beginning container. I selected 4 of the strongest plants (tallest, best looking leaves, not spindly, stood up when watered instead of falling over) of each type and transplanted to larger pots. They're in the windows of the sun porch, where they will continue to grow until they are moved outdoors for acclimation before planting in their cages. Only two will actually be planted per cage, with one going to maturity if they grow like they did last year. I like tomato cages made of fencing wire because they support the plant without using yards and yards of twine to try to tie it up, and you can get your hand through the holes in the fencing (choose a roll with large enough holes) to harvest the tomatoes. We had 4-ft fencing last year, and the tomato plants spilled over onto the ground eventually. We may make taller cages this year. Cages keep even indeterminate plants relatively compact and stable. And they do well, if deeply staked, even in really windy conditions.
The seed I saved from last year germinated quite well. It is exciting to save seed and see the next generation grow. Life is good.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Herbs


I am going to try to grow more herbs this year. I had success last year with basil (still lots of it in the freezer) and rosemary, and some oregano volunteered from the year before. This year I'm adding borage.  It is pictured germinating here. If you look closely, you can see the hairs on the leaves. It is supposed to have cucumber-tasting edible blue flowers, and be good for tomatoes, and be attractive to bees while repelling hornworms and cabbage worms. Sounds like a winner to me. I'm also planting thyme as a front border (and oregano, if it comes up, and some mint, with a buried pot around the roots) in my amaranth-sunflower-red okra bed. I want it to be so decorative that people do not recognize it readily as a food garden. We shall see. Gardening is a fun experiment.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

The Thursday Question

The weather here in Memphis stayed in the mid-to-upper 30s with rain, Thank God. We'll uncover everything tomorrow, when temps are definitely going up again into the 40s. I hope the orchards and farms to the north are OK, too.
Since we've been married, I've done the grocery shopping on Friday night on the way home from work or on Saturday morning early, when the farmer's market is open. So Thursday is the Compile a Menu night- examine the weekly ads, examine the pantry, Ask the Question (Do you want anything specific to eat next week?), and make the list. Sometimes I am inspired by an online recipe or a book from the library to make a particular dish. At other times I use dishes we both like (minestrone, vegetarian chili, roast chicken and vegetables followed by Other Chicken Dishes, oven-baked cereal-encrusted catfish, etc.) and pull from the "standards".  It is our routine, and it works to keep things simple and predictable.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Winter Strikes Back

We have a 100% chance of wintry mix tomorrow, 70% chance freezing rain tonight. I had another long day at work, so Husband kindly covered all my baby plants with buckets and tarps, and put the top on my rudimentary cold frame. The temperature is due to hover around freezing for about 36 hours. Hope those little guys can take the dark for that long. 
It is currently 43 degrees F out there- could one hope for it to stay that warm with winds from the Northeast? Dare we hope for local tree fruit this year? I pray for the trees tonight. Let's all pray hard.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The Grace of God and the Gift of Medication

Got me through this day. I had the busiest day at work ever, with two time-course experiments and a setup for a dose response experiment(we do those a lot- in cell culture with cell lines from adult tissues, so nobody and no thing is harmed). With the horrid way I felt yesterday (non-stop sneezing, a full box of tissues gone, energy gone and dragging), there was no way I could have gotten through today on my own strength. Enter the Grace of God and the gift of pseudoephedrine hydrochloride. I could breathe, and I thanked God all afternoon for the privilege, and the amazing way my feet kept moving. I was working with my boss, who showed me that many of the lab practices I had been shown by others (some even written in the protocols) were wrong. 
Isn't that just the Christian life in a nutshell? You work for a year, sometimes a lifetime, and find out you've been doing it all wrong! You can dig in and defend yourself, or you can admit the problems and your fault in them, face the music, and enjoy the relief of a chance to do it again. You may fail another round, and get to repent even more deeply, or you may finally get a bit of the prize ahead. But the humiliation comes first. That is important.

Monday, March 9, 2009

A "World View" and the World System

People tend to use faddish catch-phrases to define themselves, or the people they wish to caricature. It is a natural human tendency, going back to Adam naming the animals in Genesis, for people to place things and other people in categories.
The problem arises when these categories or their characteristics are false. For example, I grew up in a relatively poor family. We had food, clothes, shelter, electricity, and indoor plumbing (fabulous wealth in some parts of the world). My parents taught me that "debt" was a four-letter word, and that work was done for more than money (to help others most importantly, or to obtain things we needed, or sometimes just for whatever Dad brought home from a side job. God would provide.).  
I assumed that others were taught this too, and while businessfolk might need an initial loan to start, once they reached profitability they would become the lenders for others. I have seen family businesses grow and prosper the extended family based on this model. Older folks often bless the younger this way. I thought taking out loans for payroll was a sign of business failure.
But now all our economic woes are blamed on a lack of "liquidity". It seems the businesses we deemed safest, the banks and insurance companies, did not stick to this model. They borrowed from Peter to pay Paul, then insured the debt for a fee. They created money out of thin air, and the bits and bytes of imaginary profit are disappearing.
My world-view is dreadfully old-fashioned. It does not fit well in a secular culture. A person at work told me that people will take advantage of those who go out to serve. So be it. God has a way of finding the people I need to help, and putting me in places of service. He who cheats me cheats my Boss, and deals with Him someday. I just hope I can still be of service when we find out trading bits of green paper is not all it's cracked up to be.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Home Sick

Today I'm home convalescing instead of exposing people at church to the malaise going around at work. On the couch, in sweats, wanting to make a soothing, non-acidic soup to get past my right tonsil, yet wanting to stay on the couch. No talking today, which  can be tough for a female. Box of Kleenex and herbal tea and laptop and me. It's actually good to let yourself be sick once in a while, to slow down and appreciate breathing for the gift it is. Must make the soup, though. the bad thing about always cooking from scratch is that you always have to cook. The canned stuff just won't work after a while. I'll just scrub up and boil some potatoes with onions and garlic and herbs and add soup veggies. Back to the gardening tomorrow.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

And We're Off! (but just by a little bit)


The broccoli, cauliflower, marigolds to hopefully protect them from the *@@!!%! cabbage bugs, and some chard are pictured. They went in the ground today.
The green onions and beets went in a rudimentary cold frame, with the lid off for most of this week. The carrots, lettuce, and radishes also went in the side bed. The sugar snap peas are already there. Now to see what survives transplanting... it is all experimental.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Mockingbirds

The Mockingbird is the Tennessee state bird. It is also an interesting, intelligent creature that can imitate any number of things it has heard in its songs, hence the name. When I was teaching in the portable classroom, there was a mockingbird on top of a light pole out there every morning as I arrived except in the direst of weather, most of the year, saluting the sun with brilliant song. It was an uplifting sight.  It even did a jumping, flying dance in the spring. Sometimes when two birds meet, it can be hard to tell whether they are courting or getting ready to fight- they do a bit of a stylized dance. In the air, they can be miniature fighter jets, bombing for the eyes of any cat in the open when their young are fledging. The cats stay under the bushes or the eaves of the house for safety.
Tonight the mockingbirds were singing to the dusk as we were walking home from the cafe. One sounded like it had picked up a few tunes from the zoo. I've heard one imitate a car alarm with startling fidelity. They are fun birds.
Imagine if you will a cobalt dusk evening, the air redolent of sweet flowering trees, petals against the darkening sky, the birds singing, and your loved one nearby. Does it get any better? Praise God for the good things in life.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Snap Peas are Finally Planted!

Six of the eight seeds germinated. They were getting tall, and I was getting nervous that it might not warm up enough to plant them. Never fear, Tennessee weather is here! I planted them today because we have a sequence of several upcoming days of mild weather, and they won't suffer. The toilet-paper-roll pots start to decay early- these were seriously moldy when I took them out of the OJ carton to put them in the ground. I ripped them up one side to allow the plant roots to escape more easily (though the root of one plant was growing through the wet cardboard), then stuck them in a hole dug with a long, narrow hand trowel. After the January digging and the snow, I barely had to dig. The supports for the plants (to get them to the wooden fence) pushed easily into the soft soil. First plants in, about a month earlier than last year! Maybe they'll have time to mature before it gets too hot this year.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Back to GWC- and Booker T. Washington

So what did Carver recommend for one-horse farmers to eat? What they could produce for themselves, in their climate, with the tools they had. Back then, the dreadful sharecropping system  (curiously, they called it a "mortgage system") was in full effect (and some of my direct ancestors were caught in it as well as their African-American neighbors). A tenant agreed to grow a crop on an owner's land, giving the owner some of the crop in exchange for the privilege. Sounds OK, but the land owner often charged the penniless tenant rent for a shack or cabin, and provided food, seeds, fertilizer, and necessities from a plantation store, on credit so exorbitant that most went deeper and deeper in debt until they finally gave up and abandoned the bargain to start over elsewhere. There was no motivation to conserve or better the soil, and people lived in genuine misery, desperately planting increasingly impoverished soils from fencepost to fencepost with a "cash crop", trying to pay their debts. Debt-induced poverty is nothing new.
Carver proposed a solution that sounds simple, but Booker T. Washington's book, Working with the Hands, has many testimonies to its effectiveness. Stop borrowing. Grow your own food. When you sell your crop, don't splurge on cheap buggies or expensive Saturday nights in town. Buy seed for legumes to enrich the soil in winter. Dig up muck from the swamp or leaf mold from the woods to fertilize. Use this year's money to build next year's crop, and save for a rainy day. Soon you'll be able to buy a little land of your own. Washington and Carver actively promoted this agenda through the Tuskegee Institute. With a few changes for our different occupations, it could be applied well today.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

I Like My Muck Boots


Picture this. You're picking up your child from a suburban, overcrowded middle school for an orthodontics appointment. A torrential rain starts falling. At class change time, a strange, hooded figure in a school-bus yellow, tarpaulin-like poncho and the pictured boots comes to the side door with a group of students, carrying 2 5-gallon buckets with a few spare umbrellas for the next class.
That was me. Yes, they laughed, but my feet were dry! I bought these boots at the Mart years ago when I taught in a portable classroom (i.e. a room on cinderblocks), across a driveway from the main building. That driveway turned into a small creek when it rained. I needed foot protection. These boots also serve well in snowy conditions, because they fit over my shoes and have better traction than my shoes do. Cheap, but functional. I like them, even though they make my already large feet look immense. I have a firm foundation.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Different People See Different Things

 As we were walking around yesterday, enjoying the weather and taking pictures, my husband looked at our roof- no melting yet. The neighbor's roof had water pouring down and a lot of the snow gone. "See," he said, "we have better attic insulation than they do. Their second story is right up next to the roof. They are heating the roof to melt the snow." I never would have thought of that reason for snow melt on their light gray roof and none on our black one. That's why it is good to be married to someone with an engineering mindset- he can sometimes see things in a tremendously different and delightful way that explains so many things for me. And now I know another sign to observe good attic insulation.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

A Tennessee Blizzard, The Day After




Here are some shots from this morning, after the storm passed. The snow has melted from most of the roads, some of the sidewalks, and the south-facing yards today. It was a glorious morning to don our boots and enjoy the sights in the neighborhood. It was not safe to drive early, but by evening you could go out reasonably safely. This was a pretty deep snow for us.