Congratulations...

Congratulations...

Congratulations and best wishes to Ben. Today he wraps up his assignment in Dasmarinas and prepares for an extended tour of South East Asia.

Twenty-seven months wrapping up this week. I can hardly believe it.

Uncomplicated pleasures...

Uncomplicated pleasures...

Eating

• Homemade pesto on linguine (thanks Ralph)
  
• A glass of Concha y Toro
  
• Homemade applesauce, and
  
• Green beans, fresh (I mean FRESH) from the garden
  
• Mozart quartets on the stereo
  
• After the thunderstorm
  

Sigh.

Slightly more complicated pleasures:

• 17 Quarts of homemade applesauce in the freezer
• Relaxing after my fourth week of yoga class

Maybe my sights are too low, but can it be any better than this?

Umm... maybe a little dish of ice cream when the wine is gone.

Yep, Better than a crocus...

Yep, Better than a crocus...

Remember back in mid-March when I posted a photo of tiny sprout and claimed it was better than a crocus?

Tonight I harvested the first handful of my garlic crop. I'm tickled. Aren't they beautiful? This is maybe a third of the crop. The rest looks like it still has some browning to do. Maybe I need to plant more next year.

Does anyone know - do you also eat the hard part that grows out the top?

Otherwise my garden is not doing all that great. I followed the advice of the Square Foot Gardener when I put my garden in. He claims to have figured out the magic formula for dirt, so you can just buy all the components at a garden center and instantly grow a stupendous garden. 'Cept it doesn't work. I followed his recipe to a tee - and everything is stunted and takes forever to get going. I'd blame it on the weather, except I biked past Wilmer's victory garden and where I have about eight inches of winter squash vine and a couple of blossums, he has a couple dozen eight inch long squash. Where I have a couple of golf-ball sized tomatoes on spindly bushes, he is growing great mounds of plants and I'm sure he has watermelon sized tomatoes about ready to ripen.

So I'm loading my boxes with compost every chance I get to build for next year. And the year after. I need to go raid the buggy lots around town and let that stuff mellow for some fertilizer in the fall.

Wendell Berry says you can't break stuff into it's component parts and think you can match the mystery of something as complex and wonderful as soil. I'm proving him right.

I've been a negligent blogger in recent weeks. Nobody seems to be complaining. Maybe it's the weather.

We the people...

We the people...

Thomas Friedman has a column today on the Clean Energy Bill that just passed House. He includes this great line:

Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.

And speaking of civil disobedience - the New Yorker had a great piece recently on James Hansen. In addition to being the top climate scientist in NASA, he is a grandfather who wants a livable world for his grand kids. He was arrested recently for protesting at a coal mining field.