Let It Rain

Rain today.  Rain yesterday, probably rain overnight and into tomorrow.  Too wet to even hike out to the garden, so we're staying inside and watching YouTube videos.  

Like this one:

Enjoy.

Life and Death on Video

On the one hand, this sounds very cool, indeed.

On the other hand, putting a $159.95 piece of equipment in the back yard is just asking for trouble.

  The Timelapse Garden Video Camera.
This is the camera that makes a timelapse video of your garden to show you the development of individual specimens or entire areas over a period of time. It can focus as close as 20" away to illustrate petal growth or, with its wide 54" field of view, it can capture perennials as they grow to conceal your spent spring bulb foliage. The camera takes a picture at one of six pre-determined intervals (five seconds to 24 hours) and combines them into a single 1280 x 1024 resolution AVI movie file for easy playback on a computer.

Details live here.

More stuff to worry about

We don't bother much with the political side of food and agriculture policy at the Garden Constant.  Generally, the seasons turn unimpeded by the diktats and ukases of government, although every now and then some decision made far away filters down to our level.

When that happens, it's awfully hard to figure out what is going on, since people line up on either side and project their apocalyptic fantasies regardless of what the proposed policy would actually do.  We've noticed this more and more since the change in the Mandate of Heaven, and we present an example in the form of a bill now before Congress.

Depending on who you ask, the Food Safety Modernization Act (HR 875) will either criminalize back yard gardening and organic farming, or will correct serious deficiencies in the safety of our nation's food supply.  We've read the bill, and as far as we can tell, some of what is being said in this video is true.  Some of it isn't.  Since most of what legislatures at all levels do eventually comes out as "take your money and run your life", we have to say, we're a little suspicious.   

On the other hand, the Mother Earth News doesn't seem terribly worried about the text of the bill, and neither does the Cornucopia Institute.  In fact, we noted the following comment on one of the forums at Seed Savers Exchange, which is where we get most of our seeds:

Originally Posted by paulf  
Help me out a little. I have gone through the bill several times and I don't seem to find anything related to seed banks being outlawed; or that seeds are considered food or that seeds are in any part of the bill.

paulf:  I see several parts I don't care for, but not all that much that threatens me or my garden or SSE for that matter. Help my non-legal mind find those parts. We can't fight against something we really don't understand. Give me the sections and the parts so I can read them.

WI LO M:  It's not there. 90% of what is claimed to be there isn't there. It's the Lord of the Flies factor combined with Chicken Little to become the Myth of the Week. It's about as dangerous to us as the Y2K thing was. But to be safe, get some tinfoil and make a hat. Then you'll be OK! 
   
Well, that's helpful.  We couldn't find those parts either, but we've had a bad feeling about the rule-making process ever since that business about Madalyn Murray O'Hair and the FCC.

It's an Uday and Qusay moment.

Sumer Is Icumen In (more or less)

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;
Ne swik þu nauer nu.
Pes:
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

Good fences...something, something

We haven't been paying close attention to the fence at the back of the Garden Constant lately.  For one thing, it's been more or less standing where it was when we moved in.  For another, the city hasn't been hassling us about it.  More likely, we don't like to poke around too closely at the installations and fixtures at our house because there's usually some fantastically expensive problem needing to be fixed just lurking below the surface.

When it became clear that the tree growing up between the fence boards was not going away and would eventually cause the entire fence to tip over into the alley, it was time to act.  The first step was to remove the existing boards so that the tree could be removed.  What we found was about what we expected:  The boards had become spongy and snapped off at the bottom rail or split lengthwise around the nails.

This left us with a gap in the fence of about six or eight feet, which we plan to fill with welded wire attached to a steel fence post set between the two existing wood fence posts.  The wire fence will be covered with some kind of vining plant (probably a gourd, or morning glory or English ivy) to screen the back yard until we can get a line of trees started.

"I love the smell of Wal-Mart in the morning."

The first signs of spring have arrived on the edges of the Flint Hills.  The smoke from range burning season clearing over the shortgrass prairie to reveal the austere beauty of the emerging flowers, the nightly light shows to the west as the season's thunderstorms roll down from the Front Range.

In our town, the progress of the year has its own markers.  The "slap-slap, slap-slap" of flip-flops, the emergence of tattoos as the fat guys ditch their shirts, and our favorite, the appearance of the garden supply tents at the local retailers.

The average date of the last frost in these parts comes in about the middle of April, but it was 6º on this date in 1955, and in 1907 there was snow on the ground on May 3.  The weather seers foretell a high of 58º today, with a low of around 40º overnight, with snow coming on Saturday.  Probably too soon to do anything but wait for this years seeds to come in, and wait for the seeds to come up in the peat pots and the origami newspaper boxes.

Which brings us to the scene at one of our town's Wal-Marts.  This was the scene a few days ago, where the inventory is expected any day now for the spring garden rush.  Since that inventory consists largely of plants, with selection of wheelbarrows and bags of soil amendments, there hasn't been much to see.  

On the one hand, the selection is pretty thin, but on the other hand, you can't beat the prices.

The Just and the Unjust

Our text for today comes from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verse 45, wherein it saith:

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

The rainy season began more or less on schedule this year with an overnight downpour through Monday morning.  A brief interval of sunshine, broken by dingy cumulus cloudsmarched ahead of the next cold front to pass through, bringing temperatures in the mid-30s and the prospect of subfreezing lows tonight.

A flash flood warning is in effect for several of the surrounding counties, and a 15-year-old girl in El Dorado met her end early this morning when her car skidded off the road and submerged in a drainage ditch.  Rollover accidents abound.

What this means for the Garden Constant is a confirmation of our decision not to be lulled into that false sense of security and begin planting last week.  Temperatures around 80º in the first week of March are uncommon but not unheard of, and are often followed by the early April or mid-May blizzard.  The National Weather Service tells us to expect a 90% probability of a threshold low temperature of 36º on April 15.  (Similar data for most of the country lives here.)

Dad, who lives about 45 minutes south of the City on the Edge of Dreams, doesn't plan to do any planting until April 11, but then, he does his planting by the moon.  The next full moon is on April 9, almost a week before the last frost date, and three days before the seeds go in, but filial piety takes precedence.

The Garden Constant is based (more or less) on the Square Foot Gardening system developed by Mel Bartholemew.  Our beds are set up in three-square units, rather than individual squares, since we built them from 12-foot-long boards taken from the roof of a garage we tore down a few years ago. Before the rains came, we swept up the leaves from the paths between the squares and spread wood ash onto growing mixture.  We then turned over the mixture in one (count 'em!), one, square before getting too pooped out to continue.

Our return to the soil the following day was frustrated by the rain, which made the growing medium (since it's not exactly soil, we're at a loss for what to call it) all sticky and unworkable.  More vermiculite and peat moss will fix that problem.