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March 24, 2007

Wordy tattoo; Mp3s: Faces (early Rod Stewart); Gardening yet?

Words in skin:

A Tattoo for the Educated Man at quixoticals: a gallery of unusual things. (Yes, you can enlarge it there so it's readable by clicking on it.)

Here's a detail -- the very bottom section -- blown up.

Today, the author -- Canadian blogger Christopher Trottier -- posts More Thoughts on the Tattoo responding to commenters who find it "pretentious, contrived, and smug."

Don't miss the Motorcycle Made Out of Balloons.

Rock roots:
The Faces, Live at the Paris Theatre, London, Feb 8, 1973. Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. Free mp3 downloads of the two-disc set, at BigO, Singapore.

Early spring: Liz Donovan offers a lovely intro (Organic longing) to Joel Achenbach's WaPo column (Dirt Rich) about his hippie parents' organic gardening. Here's how Joel starts,

When I was growing up in Florida, my mom and stepdad planned to save the world through organic gardening. Go find the counterculture and make a hard left: There we were, virtuous, alternative, crunchy before crunchy was cool. We labored under a brutal sun, hacking the earth, yanking weeds, swatting bugs, beseeching the gods to let food emerge from sandy soil that only a pine tree could love. We had discovered the future, and it looked strangely like a scene out of the Old Testament.

He inspires Liz, who moved a couple of years ago from Miami to North Carolina, to confess,

I can't grow vegetables. I do OK with flowers. But somehow I just can't get plants to produce food for me, at least not in any useful quantity. (I'm great at scavenging: wild blackberries, peaches from the trees that were already growing here when we bought the place, mangos, citrus and avocados at our old South Miami house; I did manage to grow a wonderful key lime tree from seed and reap the harvest several years before leaving...)

Here, my excuse is the chiggers that keep me out of the lower field in hot weather, where there's lovely creekside loam and I've had two years of a fairly useless small garden; and the voles that eat the roots of anything I plant in the raised beds here on the hillside. I do get nice herbs, though. In Florida, wonderful things grew wild after Hurricane Andrew when the tree canopy was opened to the sun: volunteer tomatoes, delicious papayas; but I never got any vegetables I planted to do much. My earlier gardening history was similar....

Here in southern New England, winter came late -- no snow till January -- and the forecast is "...MORE SPRINGTIME ACCUMULATING SNOWFALL EXPECTED TONIGHT..." The daffodils in our raised bed are about two inches up, the soil around them in a few places disturbed yesterday by squirrels looking for tulips. Our tulip bulbs have spent the winter under wire mesh screening the squirrels can't move, and haven't poked up yet. Squirrels don't like daffodils, so we'll see far more of them than tulips next month, except in the wealthy neighborhoods, where gardening services haul in tulips already in bloom and overnight a perfect spring landscape appears.

It's still early enough here that crocus sightings are news, but I want to grow salads now in that bed, which actually looks more like a giant's coffin. Yesterday, I told my colleague Paula Constantine, a Master Gardener, about my bed, and asked if she'd planted anything yet.

No, she said, playfully chiding me for my impatience, we've barely started seeds in the greenhouses. But she frugally allowed that if I had seeds left over from last year, I could start some spinach if I were prepared to lose it to a hard frost.

Maybe I'll wait till tomorrow, see if that predicted one to three inches actually happens, or turns to rain. If it's rain, I plant.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:52 AM | Permalink