Sixty Hours

• Home-cooked company lunch, courtesy of our wonderful office manager, Shamiran.
• Meetings
• Ordered a Livescribe 2GB Pulse Smartpen on Amazon.  Saw one at TechShop in a class a couple of weeks ago, very very impressed.  Read about it, compared options, pounced.
• Discovering an unexpected skill: apparently I can play bocce tolerably well, at least with friendly co-workers
• Watered our community garden bed, discovered at least one Sweet Double Red corn has set ears; helping some beans climb cornstalks (they were confused and needed a boost)
• Marvelous Indian buffet at Bombay Garden
• Sleep
• Wake, with cats
• No milk for coffee.  Bah.  Gird loins, grab keys.
• Get milk.  Get coffee.  Get more boxes from JDM.   Get lost in The Granary and acquire the makings for a really spectacular quilt that will match our bedroom.  Stop by the vet and ask about alternatives to pilling Booster, who has figured out We HateZ PillZ.  Home.  Water garden.
• Go to TechShop.  Build a Barebones (Modern Device) Arduino: apparently soldering circuitboard kits is much, much easier than PL-259 connectors and AMP serial pin connectors, which have comprised the bulk of my soldering experience previously.  Oh.  I put the socket in backwards.  Lovely board– doesn’t fry chip.  Instructor pulls chip, inserts chip other way.  Board happy.  Yay.
• Home. Shower. Dress up.  Pack an overnight bag.  Drive to SF with spouse.
• Dinner at Fog City Diner.  Overnight at Harbour Court Hotel.  Late check-in, upgraded to a suite with a view of the Bay Bridge.  A bottle of Merlot and a box of chocolates have been left for us, with a “Happy 11th Anniversary” card.   Lovely evening drinking wine, watching lights and water, celebrating.
• Up early, laugh, sleep in, check out.  Sunny walk along the water to organic and delicious brunch at Town’s End.  Must go back, often.
• Muni ride to Embarcadero, cash up, ticket up.  Ride a car that never was on the F-line: PCC in Brooklyn livery; no pre-war cars in that livery, sorry.
• Long walk uphill to Museum of Craft on Sutter Street.  Marvelous Max Kahn exhibit.  Stunning 2.5D canvas work of 1994 – present juxtaposed with flat work from the 1960’s; Kahn’s roots have borne rich, strange fruit.
• Obligatory shared single truffle from teuscher.  Raspberry Cordial.  Mmmmm.
• A brief foray into Uggs Australia to inquire after the mythical Mini Classic.  It has been discontinued and sent to the outlets.  There will be No More.  Sadness.  “Would you like me to check the outlets on my computer and see if anyone still has your size?  They’re probably discounted since we stopped making them except in kids sizes.”  Two pairs located, my size, mail ordered, for about $25 more than a single pair would have cost.  Happiness.
• Long, pleasant walk to MOMA.  Brief pause at Peet’s for refreshment.  Cool summer drink card now full, free drink next time.  Jasmine Lime tea much nicer than imagined.
• Georgia O’Keefe, Ansel Adams: Affinities.  A special exhibition, and today is free admission day.  Huzzah.  Absolutely compelling.   Took many notes.   Closed out museum.  Closed out gift shop.
• Walk back to Steuart Street.   Dinner at Ozumo.  Magnificent!  Best SF dinner I have had since I moved here in 1991.  Chocolate fondue for dessert.
• Drive home.  Return 24 hours and 15 minutes after having left.   Cuddle cats.  Feed cats.  Cuddle cats more.
• Check web comics.  Check Making Light.  Find pointer to Gunnerkrig Court; lose an hour, boom.
• Blog.
• Now, to sleep.

Things aren’t usually this busy, but it’s nice sometimes.

Shop Blog: Garden Sign Prototypes

Eighth-inch acrylic, cut on Epilog One

This prototype, with accurate info but messed-up kerning, was created Saturday at TechShop on the Epilog laser cutter. There was a laser meetup at 6pm, and a fellow doing a *completely insanely great* custom acrylic casemod had some spare red and wondered how it would look. So we ran a pair of sample signs off on it, and he kept one for reference.

Among the things I need to remember to do is embed the fonts– I found that the nifty fonts on the lab computers were not fully represented on the station that runs the Epilog. I had set the spacing for the font I chose, but the substituted font had different spacing, and I didn’t catch the error, feh. But hey, waste not, want not! I learned that while supposedly Adobe Illustrator will import to Corel Draw for cutting/rastering, I had the best results when saving in Illustrator 10 format (yow) and kind of iffy results saving as CS (vs CS4, the default). Since I was flipping the markers to maximize use of the acrylic sheet, I had used a flip on the text. The CS import version mirrored as well as flipped the text, wups.

I’m really looking forward to hitting Tap Plastics and getting material to do a full run of signs. I’ll post the .cdr files so that other interested parties can make signs. I started with one of the Epilog project file samples, but ended up altering the shape to make a wider stake, and completely changing the layout. Epilog One’s laser is getting a little finicky, according to the instructor, so I ended up with the best results by slowing the beam down beyond the recommended settings. At 600 dpi raster, the table says to use 15/90/5000 but we found 8/85/5000 to work really well. Of course, burn a hole to check– I’m thinking of making a template with a chop-mark on it in a consistent location that will raster etch and then cut itself free. That way I get a small handy object as a test pattern each time.

Why make garden markers like this? In the past decade of gardening in the Bay Area, first on my balcony, then in outdoor hydroponic pots, and finally in my backyard and community garden, I have found some cultivars that are real favorites, that I grow every year. I didn’t think I was growing much that fell into the ‘permanent sign’ category, since I try new things annually too. However, when I started laying out the files, I found that I had to stop after 20+ signs and promise to pick it up again next time I’m at the ‘Shop. Between spring, summer, and fall crops, I consistently grow about 35 – 40 varieties of veggies and salad greens, plus about another 10 – 15 experiments annually. Yow! Well, that’s why I have a garden blog too. Since I have a bed at the community garden, I figured it would be nice to label things, and I also like to have good labels at home.

BTW, sharp-eyed readers of said blog may have noticed my last update included a mention of using scrap plastic to keep young squashes off the dirt. Those ’scraps’ are really the additional run of signs. I used a piece of scrap white opaque acrylic someone left in the scrap bin with some etching on one side. The absorption rate was different enough from clear acrylic that the lettering was less deep (and white-on-white) and the pieces weren’t fully cut free from the sheet. I ended up with a nice set of scratches and some broken signs from my attempt to gracefully snap them apart. My attempts to get a contrasting substance to stick to the indented lettering while wiping off the face of the sign? FAIL. So they have become scrap for now. But from abandoned scrap to practice surface to my scrap to garden tool isn’t bad.

Sibling Rivalry in the Three Sisters Garden

Faithful readers may recall the earlier plans I published here for a Three Sisters garden of corn, squash, and beans. With my usual cheerful abandon, I ignored various bits of online advice on when and how to plant it. Consequently, things are now somewhat out of control. A normal day in my garden! W00t!

To begin with, the vines you see creeping along the edge of the garden bed actually belong to the squashes planted about halfway down the bed, not the ones that are ’supposed to’ be there. The little Black Futsu winter pumpkins don’t tolerate chilly weather as well as the robust kabocha types, so they are still dainty rosettes of fuzzy green leaves with a blossom or two, and haven’t really taken off yet. Meanwhile, the Hokkori is coming up in the outside lane to steal their thunder!

In this aptly-titled photo, we see the tomato cage trying to resist the encroachment of vigorous squash vines, kind of like trapped shoppers in a mall in a zombie movie. I came to the rescue, but it wasn’t pretty. While looking at the small squashes starting to form on the vines, I noticed that the vine giving the tomato cage the most trouble was also the one which was not breeding true to type.

This should be an ebisu-delicata hybrid “Ebicata 2007″ that I saved and am planting out. I had banana squash growing nearby, and clearly some happy-go-lucky bee went to more than one squash party on a crazy summer afternoon. I’m not a huge banana squash fan (too bland) and this is the wildest and wooliest of the vines, as well as the primary instigator in the Tomato Cage Invasion. Part of growing stuff out is knowing what to get rid of and what to keep! I trimmed the vines, and then cautiously took out the whole plant and added it to the compost bin, saving the couple of soap-bar sized squashes to eat as summer squash.

This is what they should look like, and the plant sharing that garden section, grown from the same batch of saved seed, has delivered the goods. These are about baseball and table-tennis ball sized, respectively. More where I’d expect them to be this time of year, instead of the huge one just down the row from them.

I didn’t try tracing the vine to see if the big one is from the same plant, though it could well be. This one is already at close to mature size of 8 – 10 inches across. Early adopter! I won’t pick it until it is mature, otherwise it won’t keep well. The stem will be rock-hard and brown-dry, and the rind of the squash will be tough enough that it doesn’t casually dent to a fingernail.

This kabocha is new to me, though I think I’ve enjoyed it from the farmers’ market. It’s Hokkori, a dark green kabocha offered by Oakland importer Kitazawa Seeds. They’re a great source for all kinds of awesome Asian veggies, especially freaky cool greens like chrysanthemum that I haven’t learned to eat yet. These juvenile Hokkori are grapefruit and mandarin-sized. How come nobody describes citrus fruit in kabocha terms? Maybe they do in Japan!

This Hokkori is about softball sized. One thing I did while visiting the garden to water was to wipe the dirt off the bottom of each of the little squashes and put a piece of scrap plastic under it. Otherwise the pill bugs start eating the rind where it touches the dirt. If you don’t do this, the rind stays light colored and soft where it touches the dirt. When the pill bugs finish with it, the squash looks like it survived some kind of hideous medieval plague, and at worst they break thru into the main part of the squash and ruin the whole thing.

See you on the flip side: it’s two minutes to Blogger maintenance, so I’d better finish up! Oh yeah, the sibling rivalry– the beans are getting shaded out by the kabochas. They weren’t as cold tolerant, and the kabochas went in FIRST, because I started them from seed TOO SOON. Lesson here!

Home Hydroponics: Yes, You Can!

Someone browsing my FlickR stream commented on this picture of one of last year’s hydroponic fence planters and asked, “what are the steps involved in starting an eggplant hydroponic growth system?” I wrote a quick answer, and then realized that there are probably readers of this blog who’d like to know, too!

Get yourself a pot with a water reservoir (or make your own), some substrate material (I use perlite), and figure out what you will use for nutrient solution.

I use a commercial mix from the local hydroponic store (ignore all the mixes about “Big Buds”, sigh– they are not for veggies, and they are high-nitrogen anyway so you would get more leaves than fruit). Dry mixes are best, followed by concentrated liquid mixes that you dilute. Don’t bother with a premixed solution, you are paying a lot for water!

You might be able to use a combination of conventional minerals, like dusting greensand into the medium, and some bone meal, and then using an off the shelf fertilizer like VF-111 or a concentrated fish emulsion (Alaska, Atlas). I haven’t really tried that yet, since the little container of the dry hydroponic mix I have has lasted 3 years already for me, with only a few 4-foot long planters a year and a teaspoon of mix into each weekly. As you can see, it grew some nice eggplants for me! Thai Lavender (long) and Fairy Tale (short, variegated)

I recommend reading up a bit on the net on hydroponics. It’s really pretty simple if you are doing it at home, rather than trying to automate it in a commercial greenhouse to produce bumper crops at timed intervals. Sure, if you get the mix too weak, your peppers might take an extra week or two to ripen. No big deal at home, a real big deal if you have a quarter-acre of them in hoop-row greenhouses and a contract to deliver them to some restaurant chain.

Epistemology and Art

“Two great corrugated-jello-head surfaces that mentate great together!” Hmm, ok, not the most catchy slogan ever devised. Another reason I don’t work in marketing.

TechShop open house today was great. Did a bunch more scanning of stuff from my old notebooks that either I never built or that I want to build again, but better this time. Hopped into the CNC Level 3 class, ShopBot, even though (ssh!) I haven’t had Level 1 yet. But since I signed up for it this Tuesday, it will all go together in my head, like peanut butter and chocolate. The instructor, Matt, was awesome. The classmates were awesome. In fact, we all talked so much about so many cool things that sometimes we had to drag ourselves, collectively, back into Class Mode. Machining, modeling, keyline permaculture, solar refrigerators that use wax as a liquid to run a compressor, the insanely cool LightScribe pen and notebook set (with audio!) that one classmate was using to take notes with, polarizing fresnel lenses to optimize solar power transfer while minimizing heat takeup, and more, way more.

Heraldic lion rampant, line art cleaned up in Corel. Except for the fershlugginer TOOLPATHs.

The trouble with coming home from TechShop is that my brain is still exploding long after I get home. If it’s late, like now, I have to do something to wind down, like, um, hey! Back up the scans from my USB drive, and maybe blog a little. After the ShopBot class I tried to put my new knowledge to use but got bogged down in stuff that isn’t covered in the class, like how to get my scanned line art into a form that Cut2D will like. For some reason, Gimp pulled in my scanned file as Indexed Layers which I couldn’t find a way to compress, so I couldn’t use Threshold to clean up the image from the scanned Black & White Drawing Form. I pulled the .bmp into Corel Draw instead, and was able to get what looked like decent line-art by using the Hair-thin transform. Alas, saved as a .dxf and pulled into Cut2D, I had two different sets of vectors, which partially overlapped, and a weird edge case that turned out to be parsed as a line, rather than as a toolpath. Bah. Gave up at a little after 11pm, but will be BACK AGAIN. I have So. Much. Art. Fortunately a lot of it is already scanned at 300 or even 600 dpi. I just have to learn to convert it correctly.

One of many bits of line art accumulated over years of drawing; this one in particular I'd like to make as cutout art and inlay translucent plastic or glass into.

Yes, but where’s the epistemology, I hear you say. Ah, that is the following diagram, which I rediscovered when going through one of my old notebooks that I brought to scan things from. I stayed up late a few nights with a friend in 1991 and was doing a lot of reading at the time about knowledge representation, NLP, metaprogramming, etc. This diagram was my attempt at creating something of a Unified Field Theory of the stuff I was studying (informally) at the time. I think it would take me at least an hour to explain it, probably two. I compressed a lot of info in there. Some of it may be BS, but some of it may be compression loss for those who don’t have the reconstruction set. Commentary welcome, flames less so.

In which the Author discovers transform-state diagrams, and gets carried away.

Like anyone will actually spend precious heartbeats puzzling over this diagram! Ah, the blogosphere, where all vanity is made manifest. But my brain has stopped whirring quite so noisily, and now I can go to sleep. Tomorrow: Farmer’s Market, Sunnyvale Art & Wine Fest, and I really need to transplant those Tiger’s Eye bean seedlings… AFTER I put up snail fencing.

Bloomtacular

This is the part on Sprockets where we BLOOM!!

We’ve had some chills, thrills, and most recently a little heat wave, and by now just about everything is blooming. The coriander/cilantro is going exuberantly to seed, which helps the pollinators and gives me green coriander to put in the freezer, as well as dry coriander for seed and spicing. The ‘Celeste’ sweet peas have come back for the 3rd or 4th year of self-sown glory. I tried to plant some of the lovely pink ones I seed-saved from the community garden, but no dice: all blue this year.

Fortunately, this year’s new flower experiment, Clarkia, has come to the rescue with lots of eye-popping pink and magenta. These lovely flowers get really big and bushy, and while I scattered seeds of them in a number of places, I had to weed out some of the young clarkia that started crowding out other things. I had no idea what they’d look like, really, despite the pictures on the cover of the seed packet— thought they were MUCH smaller. But I think they’ll join the regulars in my yard, along with the old standbys of sweet peas, cornflowers, and nasturtiums.

Speaking of cornflowers and nasturtiums, the side yard is doing very well. The nasturtiums, interestingly enough, seem to gradually self-select for one color, but it’s a *different* color in different parts of the yard. The ones along the side porch are almost always yellow. The ones by the fig tree by the driveway are gorgeously glowing orange and red. The scent of them at night is really stunning.   

The cornflowers self-seeded nicely in the same planter that I had them in last year, but this year I turned the planter sideways so that we could get more easily into the side yard. I was delighted that the snapdragons that I’d bought as a large potted plant last summer were successful at scattering their seed— these lovely snaps came up on their own in the planter. I moved both of my carnations, one from a pot and the other from the ground, into the self-watering planter as well, and they’re now thriving. When the cornflowers are about ready to give up, it will be time for zinnias. Meanwhile, in the snapdragon/carnation planter, some of that profuse confusion (profusion!) of greenery you see are Pepperbox Poppies (Renee’s Seeds) that are getting ready to lift up their heads. The sharp-eyed will spot some in the side-bed of clarkia above as well.

These poppies are old-fashioned corn poppies, of the type we’d get for Memorial Day every year as a plastic buttoniere sold to support veterans. I’d never seen one as a real flower until these started blooming last week. I very much hope they establish themselves along the fence by the lavender, if they can compete well enough with the borage that takes over every spring. I had four-foot-tall borage out there in March, threatening to cover the lavender. I felt bad chopping it back, but put it in the compost pile to come back to the soil.

Moving along the driveway past the little storage sheds, we come to the runner beans. Last year the Painted Lady runner beans I put at the base of one of the carport supports really took off, winding up the post and along the plastic lattice shading we have along the top. In the mild zones 7 – 9 here, runner beans will build up a nice big root mass and establish as perennials— a great permaculture foundation to build on! While I just grow them for shell beans, I’ve read that you can eat them as snap beans, use the leaves and flowers in salads, and that even the root is edible. Wish I’d known that when I dug a *humungous* runner bean root out of one of my teeny 3×3 foot beds two years ago, because growing them there shaded the whole bed. I composted it!

Of course, snails LOVE them, and will demolish young runner bean seedlings. The shoots coming up from last year’s beans were eaten down to nubs several times, and I gave up and started new ones from seed— but when the latest round of warm weather came again, there were new shoots, so now I have a double batch going up the first support, as you can see in the picture. The thicker, dark green and fuzzy shoots are from the older root.

In the middle picture, you can see the Delicata squash vine that I planted at the base of some of the supports this year. I figured, what the heck, let’s see how this works.

I’m not out of pictures by a long shot, but I’m out of oomph. Let’s close with the daylilies, thriving in the self-watering planter and clearly getting ready for a bumper crop of flowers this year. These were in regular planters last year, and never did very well, staying small. I realized they needed better moisture control than I could give them in those particular containers, so I moved half my planters from the back patio to along the side fence. The daylilies complement the neighbor’s lavender nicely. In one of the planters, I keep some space for annuals— cosmos last summer, and this spring I put in some vintage pastel stock and the lovely new ‘Sonnet’ pansies to match. They’ll go really well with the daylily colors, too. I had to pluck a LOT of snails out of that section of the planters in February and March to get those to survive, though. Apparently they’re not just an edible flower for people— slugs and snails love pansies. Just peeking up there in pink is a geranium that seeded on the ground from ones the previous neighbors had, and turned out to be JUST beyond the edge of the planters, so it got to stay.

Anti-Snail Recycling for Your Transplants

Take a 2-liter clear soda bottle, remove the label.

Cut a tall cylinder out of the middle, like a belt or a collar– a slice out of it. Optionally, smooth the edges or put clear tape over them.

Make a cut so that you have a long rectangular strip. Slit halfway from the top about a half-inch from one end, and from the bottom on the other end.

Get copper-foil sticky tape from the garden store or craft store. Make a line of the copper-foil tape the whole width of one side of the rectangle. It should cross the slits, but you can just slit it. Or tape first, then slit. Hey, this is freeform blogging here.

The tape placement should not be in the middle, it should be offset upward about an inch. Why? Because you will be setting this down into the dirt so the above-dirt portion should be what you center on.

So, now you have a freestanding plant collar that you can either use by itself, or expand to join another collar onto. The copper will keep snails and slugs from climbing it. Sinking it into the dirt around a tender seedling you’ve transplanted will keep pillbugs from trundling up and girdling your seedling until it falls over like a Paul Bunyan special. (I lost almost all of my from-seed peppers that way last year, had to go buy seedlings, bah.)

You can re-use it year after year, as I do. You can join a bunch of them up to make a little fenced area. Don’t let the copper touch the leaves of neighboring plants, they don’t like it (not sure why). Also, don’t let it touch the ground. I think how it works is that the difference in potential between the ground and the copper gives the snails a little zap.

Sure, you can put copper tape all around your raised bed, but that gets expensive fast, and doesn’t keep out the snails that are already in there, hiding down next to the edges.

This post in honor of DreamWidth’s opening day, rock on!

Spring Garden Season

It’s here, and it’s in full swing. The past month has been kind of like that song on the radio, “you’re hot and you’re cold”. We went from some early March days in shirtsleeves to a couple of weeks of cold-n-rainy, then some nice daytimes with back down the mid-40’s at night. This weekend it’s supposed to get into the mid-80’s. My lettuce is CONFUSED, I tell ya.

Things I’ve been doing, some of which may be things to think about doing in your garden:

Greens, greens, greens!

• Harvest the first crop of spinach, Catalina Baby, (outer leaves only), and hope I didn’t take too much
• Plant more spinach, this time a heat-tolerant variety, Oriental Giant (a spinach-alike, really) and a quick to mature type, Nobel 45-day.
• Harvest rainbow chard, cutting it all way back to some inner leaves. No leaf miners (yet?) this year, for which I’m grateful.

Peas on Earth, Goodwill to Munch!

• Check on your peas every couple of days– they may need a boost grabbing onto their trellising. I find myself patiently helping them grab the trellis instead of throttling each other. Hmm, sounds like kids!
• Pick the first few pea stragglers and eat them as snap peas, whether they are conventional or snap peas. Don’t let your pea plant produce full-grown seeds and then think it is done for the season.
• Dress their roots with a good layer of compost. In addition to keeping the soil moist, this helps keep it cool. Peas with cool feet will produce longer and be less prone to mildew.
• Now that the weather is getting hotter, make sure that you don’t spray the pea vines themselves when watering if you can help it, and when you water, do so with plenty of time to dry out before the heat of the day. Once mildew takes hold, it can spread pretty quick.

Strawberry Fields (and Containers) Forever

• Strawberries are flowering now; have you fertilized them since tucking them in for fall? This is a really good time. If you wait until the first crop of berries is ready, they may need a long break to absorb nutrients before putting out lots of replacement flowers.
• Mine are everbearing, which produce a berry here and there all summer, but if yours are June-bearing, it’s doubly important to fertilize as soon as they start greening up and forming flower buds. You’re only getting the one shot with the berry crop!
• Before you fertilize, especially if you’re using compost, carefully pull out all the winter-killed foliage. You don’t want rotting vegetation under that compost– the crowns need to breathe and get good air circulation. This will help prevent fungus problems.
• Be careful what you are pulling on, and either snip out the old foliage at the stem, or grab only a stem or two at a time and give a quick sharp yank. It’s too easy to pull out the crowns!
• If your strawberries are in a container, like mine, check the crowns. The soil levels drop as organic matter is used up, and you may have little strawberry castles raised up 2 or 3 inches above the soil. Fill in with enriched potting soil, or regular potting soil mixed 50% with compost. Be careful not to cover the crowns themselves– err on the side of caution, because if you cover them, you are very very likely to have fungus or mildew problems.
• Container strawberries are sensitive to minerals, too– be sure to sprinkle some greensand and bone meal or eggshell into your containers annually. Now is fine, it’s not too late at all.

Gracious, where did the time go? I guess I’ve been a bit busy in the garden lately. We haven’t even talked about the runner bean seedlings, the tomatoes and peppers, and the squashes. Next time!

Stop Watering My Coffee

Clicked on a Twitter link today, to a well-written and pleasant piece on how to retain friends and followers. I’ve got no issues with the author or the piece, but reading it got me verbalizing my uneasy feeling about Twitter and the changes I’ve seen in just the few late-adopter months that I’ve been on it.

Why does Twitter need to be about ‘growing’ or ‘keeping’ friends and followers? Has social media eclipsed the communication sphere so completely? Most of the article’s tips, and those of so many other articles on the ‘right’ way to use Twitter, assume that the context of tweeting is to keep and attract strangers as followers. “Don’t whine. Don’t post trivial banalities. Don’t be negative.”

That’s fine for strangers. However, when friends do those things, their friends reach out with supportive responses, jokes, keep-yr-chin-up notes, and other relationship strengthening responses. Sometimes even, gasp, out of band– via other services like LJ, Facebook, email, cellphone, etc.

Trying to please everyone is like diluting good strong coffee until everyone is willing to drink it black. Nobody really loves it, but they’re willing to drink it when you’re all out of cream. Homogenizing twitter into a link-sharing service with an extra 40 – 80 characters and a picture wrapped around it just makes it less usable for the rest of us.

I know the Cult of the Brand of Me is huge, but the less it takes over new social media services, the more actual adoption of those services will occur by Real Live Generic People. Optimizing the echo chamber is not helping those folks come and hang out with the rest of us.

In that spirit, I’m going to stop obsessively tagging my blog posts. Folks can find stuff via search, and it adds a whole bunch of really annoying clicks, especially since (grouch alert!) I set my default font to 14 points because I am Not a Young Thing Anymore. WP’s UI can’t compensate, and tagging & categorizing are painful. Also the left side menu buttons take the first 4 – 6 characters of every line on the top of the screen. Whining, rambling, trivializing, AND being negative. In one paragraph! Ph34r M3, I RAWK!

2009 Garden Plans

A co-worker, upon hearing I was doing garden planning, asked if I used CAD/CAM software. Nope, I told him, Powerpoint!

Usually I use graph paper, but I couldn’t find my pad and darn it, I’d been meaning to come up with a template for a while. What I really want are Square Foot Garden colorforms (remember colorforms?!)

First pass at this year’s garden plan. 2008 was a disaster since I couldn’t compensate for overcrowding with painstaking near-daily garden care: too busy at my employee job.

Note that I have already impulsively purchased two plants which are NOT IN THE PLAN, a Black Krim tomato and a Lolita summer squash. (What are they thinking, naming something that should be picked before it’s ripe, with a name like that?! If it weren’t an All-America winner, I would not have gotten it. Ugh.

Oh, um, and the tray of Early Butternut was SO CUTE and fuzzy and cotyledon-y with those little sawtooth true leaves just starting. So, um, I picied that up too, but I know just where they are going to go, in that area by the fig tree along the side. (cough)

For our community garden bed, we are planning to do mostly a 3 Sisters setup this year. I blanked at the last minute on whether the beds are 14 or 18 feet long. If they’re 12 feet, I am going to have to edit severely, but I am fairly certain they’re at least 14 feet.

We were almost the only ones growing corn at the community garden in 2008. There were maybe 3 or 4 other plots, of the 70-plus, with corn, and at least one of those was baby corn.

We’re going to go with a nice healthy anthocyanin favorite, Sweet Double Red Corn. It’s supposed to be good for fresh, parched, or flour consumption. I’m itching to try my Hopi Blue or to get some Painted Mountain Flour Corn, but let’s plant what we already have for now.

My little 4×6 corn patch last year did pretty well, but should have been spaced better. The squirrels ruined a really excessive number of ears– wish they’d finish one before trashing another. With an alleged top height of 5 feet, the Sweet Double Red should be eas(ier) to net off, unlike the 7 – 9 foot ears of the Golden Queen F1 we grew last year.

I’m happy to make the .PPT file available, as soon as I clear up the question about the CSG bed length.