Monday, March 18, 2024

Compost (Day 57)

After the Gardeners Gathering on Saturday and my planning adventures on Sunday, I wanted to keep my momentum going toward getting the season started off well. For me, as much as I of course need to plan around when and what to plant, everything begins and ends with soil. If you've got good soil, your errors in the rest can be more easily forgiven. If you don't have great soil, everything else needs to be perfect, and then you still have room for error.

And while biodiversity is absolutely important, I think good compost can also provide a strong boost. And since I consider myself something of a macrophage, I decided to give our compost piles a turn this morning.

I was pleasantly surprised to run into two of the other gardeners from our community garden who were also at the Gathering; in fact, they were presenters. We spent about twenty minutes running down the ways in which the city had changed and was changing, but as one of them said, we keep at it anyway because that's just how we're moved. Amen (and I don't say that lightly).

I surveyed our plot, and I was surprised again that we had fewer permanent landmark than I'd remembered. I did try to remove two "weed trees", but I think I'm going to need heavier equipment as well as a clear plan if I don't want to disrupt our lavender and saffron too much. Good. This makes it easier for me to plan where to place things.

 

Yeah, I know, this would be more impressive with a Before version, but I'm still proud
 

I spent the next 75 minutes (or so) moving compost from one bin to another, moving woody/stemmy things to one side, and moving matter from our staging area into our compost bins. It was work, and I *really* need to work out today so I can compensate for such uneven movements, but it was also fun and rewarding. Even the staging area, the first stop where our gardeners dump their unwanted plants and sometimes food, had really good looking soil under the woodiness.

I'll go back in a couple of weeks and do this again (if my husband doesn't beat to it; he's a little territorial about the compost). But whoever does it, we'll have good compost to help strengthen our soil--and grow food.

Deb in the City

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Stepping out of my comfort zone (Day 56)

Every year, I really do try to be a better gardener, but like so many, by the time the beginning of July rolls around, I'm spent, especially because of my duties as a co-coordinator. This year, I wanted to try to get ahead of everything, so I finally decided to be organized and went through the seed packets I have (this does not include the seed packets my garden partner has) and created an Excel spreadsheet a few weeks ago.

Today, inspired by yesterday's gathering, I went through the packages again to get an idea of *how* everything should be planted; I'm pretty sure that half of my problems last year were due to me cramping things in, so this year I wanted to do a better job with that. It's probably for the best

After that, I decided that I should get next level and create a calendar. Oh boy, between going between a website that listed last and first frosts and Accuweather, then cross-referencing with my spreadsheet, I spent about two hours getting in the temperature dates, when seedlings need to be started, when things need to be planted, and when things can begin to be harvested. Oh yeah, when the plot needs to be cleaned up, because otherwise we can't do anything.

Did I mention I still need another set of seed information?

Next step: go to the plot and take a picture of it as it stands now so I can figure out where things should do. My memory is good enough to hit most of the big ticket items, but since we move things around every year, I can't be sure I won't miss anything.

At least it's a break from math...?

Deb in the City

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Gardeners Gathering 2024 (Day 55)

The last frost in Boston is approximately May 1, but the gardening season gets started in March with the Gardeners Gathering. It's an event hosted by the Trustees and, since I've been attending, held at Northeastern University (my alma mater, and more importantly, accessible by T).

COVID, obviously, was a damper on the event--the organizers did a great job, but there's a limit to the community you can build via Zoom--and last year felt like it was getting its groove back. But this year felt like a party, and not the least because it opened with a tribute to Mel King, the Black state rep who in 1983 made history by making it into the run-off in the mayoral election. He did not win--for some reason, Boston's voters thought Ray Flynn was the man to lead--but King's legacy and continued work loomed large. I did not realize until after his death this year that he was also the sponsor of the 1974 legislation that made it possible for community gardens to exist in Massachusetts in the first place. Watching an old interview with him made me appreciate yet again how clearly his generation saw what the problems were and what needed to be done about it. Kudos to King for actually implementing some of those solutions. (And in this case, that will be enough to allow me to forgive him for endorsing Jill Stein for anything.)

I brought my own lunch, and thank goodness, because the program ran late due to the mayor's arrival time. Some of the sessions ended up being standing room only. Not all of them were useful--the bokashi system is just going to be too difficult to implement since I'm not on-site--but I did love the energizing session I went to at the end hosted by the youth arm of Alternatives for Community and Environment. Nice to be energized by younger people--Jesus, you start to feel like a vampire--and nice to dream a little bit about what can make things better.

My co-coordinator and friend walked out with me and my husband when it was over, and she smiled before we left. She couldn't wait to get started in the garden. Same.

Deb in the City

Friday, March 15, 2024

TikTok is so bad, only Steve Mnuchin can save it (Day 54)

I don't care about TikTok anymore than I care about Facebook or Twitter, but I do care that TikTok is being singled out for doing exactly what every other platform does. Cory Doctorow explains why the platform is as garbage as the others; worth a read

I would applaud the US Congress for trying to control TikTok if they were also trying to do it with other platforms. This is not the case. Well, of course it isn't. 

The big winners, based on what happened in India (I'd link to this, but it's from an Economist Newsletter), are going to be YouTube--sorry, Google--sorry, Alphabet and Instagram--sorry, Facebook--sorry Meta. Those services ended up eating the local services that were developed after India banned them. (India and China get into a hell of a lot more than China and the US, in case anyone was wondering.)

Fine, here we are, China should divest, yada yada...but how should we be sanguine when Steve Mnuchin, aka Trump's Treasury Secretary, is now said to be trying to buy TikTok? Are all the people who were concerned about the Chinese government getting a hold of user data and weaponizing it, that somehow wouldn't be a concern if it's Mnuchin's crowd? Uh. Huh. 

Good thing I wasn't going to use TikTok anyway.

Deb in the City

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Six down, ten to go (Day 53)

A brief update: I finished drafting the sixth installment of my saga yesterday. I'm not at the halfway point, but the character is more of an adult now, and therefore more fun to write (and edit). I tormented (and that's the nice word for it) my main character for two installments, but she's starting to find her spine again. Don't worry--she'll suffer yet again before we wrap this up, and we'll also take a little detour into history to answer questions readers will have...but not quite yet.

147,248 words. Let's see what we end up landing on.

Deb in the City

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

History versus the news (Day 52)

I don't read as much of Austin Kleon since he switched over to Substack, first because I didn't want to pay for the subscription, then because of the whole, you know, Substack and Nazis thing. But, before everyone rushed to monetize the mailing list they'd been told would insulate them from the vagaries of social media, I enjoyed a lot of his insights.

One that stands out in particular was that sometimes reading books from a generation ago (or maybe more like two decades ago) provided something we didn't get from the latest and greatest published in the last year. I've been thinking about this a lot since I read Revolutionary Spring.

I pat myself on the back a lot--I know this--but my latest source of self-congratulations is that I lean on books for information as opposed to the news, whether that be radio or print. And I think this is a good position: the trade off of not being up on the latest and greatest is that I get to explore an issue in some depth (bonus: I also have an excuse not to engage in idiotic rages on social media). 

But as much as I complain about the propagandist spin of much of our media, I can't deny that publishing is an arm of the media (and as an indie author, trust me, I know this well). And while they may ultimately produce better media artifacts, they are making decisions that are both sensitive to the moment and shape the moment. I'm not naive--I understand manuscripts aren't published simply because of their quality.

It's fair to say that the books that were published for similar reasons in previous generations, they're not playing the same role in shaping the conversation as they were then. If anything, teasing out the ways in which they formed thoughts--and how their thoughts were informed--is part of the enrichment of "news from the past", and at the same time a little easier than when you're living through the moment.

All a very long wind up to say that the Studs Terkel Radio Archive is one of the best things on the internet. Terkel was an observer with a deep memory, and he knew what was happening as it happened around him (that's unfortunately rare). As such, his conversations and insights can be mind-blowing, as well as making me snap my fingers because someone caught something so perfectly that I've noticed but never been able to put into words. Had just such a moment this morning when listening to him talk to Neil Postman--in 1974--about what was then the latest round of the Education Wars. Give it a listen, and then tool around the rest of the site for your own personal time machine.

Beats skimming for today's news.

Deb in the City

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The dead of night, thanks to allergies (Day 51)

The worst thing about not getting as much sleep as other people (at least in my home) is having to lie in bed awake for so long before I can turn on the light. I've learned through many early morning hours that, for the most part, the thoughts I have at those times are not thoughts that I should take seriously. I have no idea what the science says about it, but I imagine my thinks it should still be sleeping, and therefore processes thoughts at a level that isn't entirely rational. Because I am, actually, awake, those thoughts tend to look like the worst possible version of my fears and insecurities. Perhaps the lesson of the long, dark nights of our souls isn't that we have to unlock anything, we just have to get through it.

It is far, far better when I can do something as opposed to lying in bed, staring into the dark, waiting for sleep to return, which it almost never does. I do try to make use of my phone during those times, but that concentrated bright light doesn't help much when the rest of the room is dark, and I feel my already weak eyes straining that much more. I have been going into the kitchen once it hits 6 AM--that's a decent time to move around--but I think I'm going to have to start at 5:30 AM. 

Last night saw me wake up around 3 AM, in large part because I wasn't able to work out yesterday due to my allergies. 3 AM is not the worst--it's 2 or 2:30 that makes me feel like I want to fly into the stratosphere. But usually if I can fall asleep around 9 or 9:30 PM, I can stay in bed until around 4 or 4:30 AM. (The night before I slept until 6:30 AM, which was amazing until I realized that it was because of Daylight Savings--but 5:30 isn't bad either.) I have, of course, tried to stay up later in the hopes of waking up later, but staying up until 10:30 PM doesn't buy me later sleep but less sleep--go figure. 

Clearly, I need to make sure I work out, which is why I'm pretty religious about it. But then I need to avoid eating foods that trigger any reactions, and that is harder to control as my reactions are getting a little more serious. Is this why so many people go on vegetable only diets?

Deb in the City