March 31, 2009 • 10:01 pm
A repeating effort to chronicle the odder terms people use to find my silly little blog.
Part 1 and Part 2
Today’s search term: How do you get suckers off of Tom
I know three Toms pretty well. Honestly any of them is just as likely as the other to wind up in this predicament.
As you know, I prefer that nobody who searches and finds me walks away disappointed. So… how do you get suckers off of Tom?
If the suckers are from an octopus and it is alive and you are in the water with it and Tom, you should first rejoice that its suckers found him and not you. After a moment of being thankful you should gently reach toward the octopus, avoid it’s very sharp beak, and then club it to death with your fists. The suckers will release upon death.
If the sucker is a lollipop and it is stuck to Tom you should first determine the flavor. If it appears to be yellow it’s probably lemon and that’s gross. Ignore it (and Tom) and perhaps suggest that Tom goes for a swim with the cephalopods. If it’s red, green, or purple commence with the licking of the sucker. Common wisdom says that it takes three licks to polish off a sucker, but I’m not sure that’s true. Lick until the sucker is gone and then allow Tom to dry off.
If the sucker is a person who believes in psychic powers and he or she has stuck to Tom somehow you should attempt to make some money. Tell the sucker that his/her radiant energies are out of whack and that you can correct it using reiki or magnets or crystals or bacon, but that it will cost $250. Take the money and wave your hands over the sucker and club him to death with your fists. The sucker will release upon death.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Just want to direct anybody who reads this over to Fast Grow The Weeds. Here’s a wonderfully representative post on how it felt to head into the greenhouse. Makes me want a greenhouse even more. Growing nearly all year in Michigan? Having that kind of awesome reaction walking into the greenhouse? How could you not want one!
Filed under: Uncategorized
A good solid 3 hours of cleaning and turning on Saturday leaves me with just one bed to finish. On Sunday, I got some peas in despite the pouring rain.
Saturday was gorgeous and I was able to turn/remove my “cover” crops (i.e. weeds with some lucky clover), sweep out the leaves, clean the pathways and turn the soil. The good news was that the soil seems to be in great shape. I will be adding compost shortly, but I don’t need to work as hard at amending the beds as I did last year.
Pleasant discoveries? A happy but sleepy toad. Several spiders. Worms. A missing kitchen knife. A rope. A candlestick and Mrs. Plum in the library. Oh! And garlic is indeed growing. We’ll see how many, but right now it looks like about half of what I planted last fall. Not great, but it will do.
Unpleasant discoveries? Some festering nasties, grubs and caterpillars and other looming eaters all comfortably biding their time before biting my thyme. I used the thumb-and-forefinger method of eradication. It’s a bit like popping bubblewrap. Highly satisfying for some reason.
Here is the before and after. One more bed to get ready, some trellis/tee pees to build and we’re good to go.
Filed under: Uncategorized , garden prep, raised beds
I’ve been away in California for 10 days and would now like to be called Steve Scorsese or Stephen Spielberg or Your High Holiness or skinny. So, yeah, I’m totally full of myself now. An ego the size of… the size of… the incredible mess in my garden.
Nothing brings you back down to earth (see what I did there) like the garden. It does not care that you were in California being all “mr wannabe director” and drinking wheat grass (which does nothing by the way). It does not care that you passed by several important California streets or that you saw a girl that looked like the guy who played the little kid Nicholas on Eight Is Enough. It does not care that somebody almost let you drive their Porsche or Lamborghini or whatever the hell that car was.
My particular garden only cares that it’s getting warmer and that it’s a mess and that peas should be in the ground. Weather permitting, I’ll be cleaning it out and getting peas in with the help of my son Kyle. Perhaps Sunday.
I’ll post pictures later of the ugly mess.
What’s the state of your garden? Are you still in LA waiting for your big break or have you been hard at work in the dirt?
Filed under: Uncategorized
March 23, 2009 • 11:14 am
Four or five times a year I am off having commercials shot for my company. What this means is that I fly somewhere, usually LA, and then I sit and stare at a monitor and listen to dialogue and give a thumbs up or down with an ad agency to the director/producer. What it also means is that I eat a lof eggs, pastry, meat products, candy, pretzels, and rare endangered species while other people actually work.
So when I’m not thumbs upping or downing or eating komodo dragon, I am investigating my surroundings. Sometimes those surroundings are a stinky parking lot. Sometimes they are gorgeous wildflower fields. Sometimes they are an empty warehouse or hospital.
Today… jackpot!
This house has gorgeous flower gardens front, side and back. In the backyard where we are stashed away, there is a very large chinese elm that shades the whole thing. Trellised wisteria, other… umm… flowers that I don’t know, and the most impressive grapefruit tree I’ve ever seen are off to one side of the house. Just off the driveway there is a large potting shed and a fenced garden plot.
And it’s in this garden plot that I am snooping. Not quite hands and knees yet, but I will soon move into that phase of the courtship.
There are 7 framed veggie plots. What remains (perhaps they will plant again soon) are some greens, onions, carrots, chard and an impressive afro of fennel. The soil needs some help, but so does mine.
Some of you may recall my garden snooping post from last year. I can’t kick the habit. So the question is, would you snoop as I am? It’s not like I’m going through their underwear drawers or anything… at least not yet.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Watching the 30 mile per hour winds pushing through palm tree after palm tree here in Santa Monica. They are limber things, like gymnasts, bowing and bending. 60 feet up, the collection of their leafy crowns makes a noise like birds constantly taking to flight.
Big birds too. Leaves peel and fall like feathers and drift, albeit heavily, before spinning hard to the ground.
I have never ducked away from a palm branch before, but you can bet your ass I did today. Unashamedly running from their weighted wickedness. Every man for himself! Move it kid!
Wickepedia tells me that these palms are likely California Washingtonia. I can’t believe that they stay upright, but they do. Curving sometimes so perfectly that it is as if somebody very, very strong is pulling on the largest longbow imagineable.
In any event, California Washingtonia – I salute you!
My hastening away and screaming? That’s the way I show respect.
Filed under: Uncategorized
There’s absoloutely nothing that is aesthetically pleasing about my garden. It’s like the beige office cube of the corporate world – it holds what it needs to and provides enough cover to allow you to surf websites before your boss catches you and calls you a loafer and threatens your job and makes fun of your talking Yoda doll.
So, rectangles and all, it’s what works for me. I’m not a designer and I don’t really care to try my hand at flower gardening. But I’m long overdue for working in some flowers that can help my veggies grow. If they look nice, that’s fine too.
Flowers can add some pollinator attraction. They can provide some pest repellant. And they can add some edibility. This year it’s time for nasturtiums (tasty, pretty, pollinator, pest protectors), marigolds (pest protectors, some pollinator attraction), borage (keep it under control spreads like mad… good for bees, pest protector), and cat thyme (bee attractor, cat seducer/border guard).
The Podchef covered quite a bit of options in Gastrocast 164. But since I’m a complete flower doofus, I need even more help to steer me in the right direction! What flowers work for you and why?
Filed under: Uncategorized , cat thyme, companion planting, nasturtiums
March 21, 2009 • 12:59 pm
So the fight was fought and the White House has done the right thing. For those of us who want to nitpick, there’s probably plenty of picking to be knitted. But let’s face it, this has been a long time coming and it’s a victory for gardeners. (And notably a victory that it’s not called a victory garden.)
I make no apologies for my Obama siding. Optimism and reason win. And so I believe that they saw the good sense in establishing this garden upon being presented with the idea that came from so many excellent sources. I also think it’s not a small thing for them to have established the educational/recreational idea to involve children. They seem to have chosen a decent chef. They seem to have chosen a good spot. They seem to have chosen a good organic philosophy to grow it.
And while it may never feed the heads of state at the largest dinners, it should exist as a family garden that supports an extended family who lives in the most important building within the United States. How many new gardens happen now? Probably lots. How many amateur gardeners feel affirmed, proud, inspired, righteous and hopeful?
I know of at least one and it’s me.
Now. Seriously Michelle. Plant some corn, potatoes, beans and carrots for goodness sake.
Plangarden, a very cool planning tool’s site has created a version of the garden plan for manipulation. Thanks to the Podchef for tweeting my attention to it. Check it out… very fun.
New… My Brown Thumb has a nice view of the site from Gardenrant and NY Times.
Filed under: Uncategorized , white house garden
March 19, 2009 • 10:21 am
Just because I’m in Santa Monica doesn’t mean that the plants and those who tend them aren’t busy. This friendly, helmeted broccoli germinated in the warm and comfy confines of a shelf in the furnace room of his keepers. A lovely shot and soon to be even more lovely growing into food. (Listen up caterpillars! That’s food for me and mine and not you. Keep your creepy, wispy tendrils away!)
Filed under: seed starts , broccoli seeds, broccoli sprouts
I’m kind of known for my crudeness. In my natural environment I am foul and fourteen.
And many of the things I create are also crude.
This spreadsheet for example. I decided to quickly hash it out because I wanted some help deciding when to plant all kinds of things. Putting it in this format helped me and it may help you. Go ahead. Take it. Download it and use it at your own peril! It’s not fancy, but if you know excel you’ll be able to figure out how to customize it a bit or add some crop that I don’t have included. It’s got a northern bias. You may have a southern bias. Feel free to change it, but from my perspective the northern view is always more northerly.
I used a bunch of different sources for the frost date timings. Some came from vegetable books I’ve got, some came from online, but the sources are too numerous for me to properly cite. Without question the greatest inspiration though came from Skippy’s Vegetable Garden and her planting calendar. Hers is FAR easier to use and I recommend it over mine. The only thing you can do with mine that you can’t with hers is build in your own plants and your own timings.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Composting Commentors