Growing Weird

OK.  Let me state this right up front:  This article isn't about the way that people seem to get strange as they grow older, although that seems true enough to me.  It's about using limited gardening real estate to grow all those strange and unusual edibles that you either can't buy in the supermarket or that cost you an arm and a leg if you can find them.

This was sort of an epiphany I had a few years back when my wife casually remarked that I was probably spending more money to grow veggies than it would cost to buy them at the store.  After I thought about it for awhile I realized she was right.  I was growing the same tomatoes that the local farmers were and when mine were ripe, so were the ones the farmers were growing.  So I could buy them cheaper at the market at that time than what it had cost me to grow them.  I tried to rationalize by using the old argument that “homegrown always tastes better”.  I really do believe that, but still, it really doesn't make sense to spend fifty bucks to grow ten dollars worth of tomatoes.

Finally I decided that the thing to do was to not waste my limited gardening space growing stuff that I could buy cheaper at the local supermarket, at least when they are in season locally.  Instead I decided to grow things that I couldn't find locally or that were expensive to buy.  Cause the thing is, it doesn't cost anymore to grow those little fingerling potatoes than it does to grow big ones, but because the supply is less than the demand, your local produce department charges you more for them. 

Here are some of the weird veggies that I grow.

Dinosaur kale

Dinosaur kale is called that because it has kind of a prehistoric look.  It is also called Tuscan kale, apparently because it grows wild there.  In any case, it usually costs more at the supermarket or farmers market than plain old curly kale.  Depending upon your taste, it is either better, worse or just different from garden variety kale.  Where I live you can grow it year round if it is in a place where the blast furnace Texas afternoon sun doesn't hit it.  I like the taste better than regular kale.  My wife doesn't.  But since I'm the family gardener, I grow it.

Of course every gardener grows tomatoes.  There is a big variety to choose from and you can buy most of them at your neighborhood market.  There are the ginormous beefsteak tomatoes that are big enough to cover a dinner plate, or at least a dessert plate, but, IMHO, don't really taste all that good.  There are the old standby slicing tomatoes that never have much taste when you buy them and not much more when you grow them.  Then there is a plethora of “heirloom” tomatoes (many of which have been developed in the last ten years or so) that have weird shapes and come in a variety of colors.  Most of them are pretty tasty when you grow them and not too bad even when you buy them. 

Matt's Wild Cherry tomato

These days a lot of people like to buy “cherry” or “grape” tomatoes, so called because of their size more than anything else.  They too come in a variety of shapes and colors.  I don't usually grow the beefsteaks or the plain old slicing tomatoes (though I did try a couple of varieties of them this year because Ellie asked me to) but I do grow the “heirlooms” because they are pretty expensive, even when they are in season locally.  In truth, though, you can buy most of the heirlooms locally for about what it costs you to grow them.  Most heirlooms are what is called indeterminate tomatoes.  That means that they have big vines that take up a lot of space and they produce a few tomatoes at a time over the life of the plant.  So they take up a lot of real estate and they don't produce much.  They are also more susceptible to insects and disease than the more or less tasteless commercial slicing tomatoes, so sometimes they don't produce anything at all before the vines succumb to the ravishes of bugs and damp weather.  I do grow a variety of small garden tomatoes though.  They are real viney too, but they are more prolific producers than the larger tomatoes and they seem to handle disease better.  I grow red ones, white ones, and one called “Chocolate Cherry”, but my favorite this year is “Matt's Wild Cherry” which, despite it's name, is more the size of a currant tomato than a cherry.  That is, it is really small, only about one-quarter to three-eighths of an inch in diameter.  It's hard to find currant-sized tomatoes in the store and they are usually expensive when you do find them.

Fairy Tale eggplant

 My wife and I like Mediterranean food and one of the main components of a lot of Mediterranean dishes is eggplant.  For years I grew the sort of traditional big, dark purple eggplant like Black Beauty.  After awhile I switched to Ichiban because we like to slice them up on pizza and the long shape of Japanese eggplant lends itself to that more than the big purple ones.  This year I grew one called Fairy Tale, which produces clusters of small white and purple fruits.  These are hard to find in the store and, consequently, they cost more than the traditional eggplant.  They are easy to grow, though, and the plants are small so they can be grown in a container.



I like different colors and sizes of  veggies even when the taste is pretty much the same as the more traditional varieties.  One seed vendor I buy from is Renee's Garden.  I like the fact that they package multiple varieties of the same type of seed in a single packet.  This year I planted their patty pan squash trio and also their tricolor zucchini. 

Carnival Blend carrots

 I planted the multiple colored carrots from Botanical Interests in this picture and kind of forgot that that was the variety I had planted.  So I was pleasantly surprised when I harvested them and ended up with a rainbow of colors.  They pretty much all tasted the same and some of them turned orange when they were cooked, but they looked pretty when they were harvested.

Easter Egg radishes

I'm looking forward to planting these Ferry-Morse Easter Egg radishes as soon as the weather cools off enough to plant them.  Yeah, I know they will probably all taste the same, but with these guys it's all about presentation.

There are other veggies that can add a lot of variety to your menu without a lot of cost.  I plant some of them in the landscape beds because they also add beauty to the landscape.  Two of my favorite plants for doing that are Bright Lights chard and Rhubarb chard.  They are both colorful and showy.





 So the next time you are in the mood to do a little gardening, try growing weird.  It's fun, and tasty too.

Don't Ya Just Hate It?

Every now and then my pet peeve level reaches the point where it boils over the top and runs out of my head like some kind of acid.  My skin starts to itch and burn and the only cure is to share the misery.  So, in order to get the vitriol level back to something that's tolerable, you're gonna get to hear a few of my unfavorite things.

Here's one that always annoys me.  Right now I'm reading a novel called Mortal Fear by Greg Iles, who is normally one of my favorite mystery/suspense author's.  However, this book was written some time ago and Iles made a mistake here that makes the story a little less readable to me.  The book isn't really a period piece or anything like that.  It is set in the here and now, which for this book was nearly ten years ago.  The problem is that the technology that is prominently featured in the storyline is the technology that was extant, and the author seems to think was cutting edge, at the time the book was written.  I'm sure that was a couple of years before it was published and that was nearly ten years ago.  Having earned my bread and butter in the high tech industry for decades before I retired, I know that most of the things that Iles goes into excruciating detail to explain and constantly talks about in the novel were not really that extraordinary at that time.  In fact, some of them were at best passe and in some cases nearly obsolete when the book hit the stands.  Of course now that makes them about as current as rotary telephones.  I hate it when authors do that because it dates what would otherwise be a timeless story.

I mean, if I was reading a Sherlock Holmes story or picking up some noir fiction like The Maltese Falcon, I would want to have the feel of the period.  When I choose to read something that is supposed to be contemporary fiction I want it to sound like it is happening today.  Of course I realize that when Doyle wrote the Holmes stuff and Hammett wrote about Sam Spade they were writing in their present and that's what gives their work the feel it has today.  Still, it would be really easy to write a good suspense novel like Mortal Fear in a way that would make it seem fresh no matter when you first encountered it and there are a lot of authors who do that, whether consciously or subconsciously I don't know, but it sure does make the book a more interesting read when you don't trip over all that out of date stuff.

One of my other major annoyances these days is Facebook.  There's probably some generational thing going on here to begin with, since it is always annoying to see someone young enough to be your grandkid that is rich enough to buy Rhode Island and didn't really pay the dues to get that kind of money.  I think it's more than that though.  First of all, I'm basically an anti-social person except when it comes to family.  So the whole concept of a social network clashes with my personality (such as it is).  I only got on FB because a lot of my relatives are on it and that's the only way I can communicate with them these days.  I'm kind of a private person (I know, I know: this blog will live in some archive forever and anyone will be able to read it, but at least it isn't broadcast to the world, unless I take steps to make it so.) and don't really like everyone knowing what I am doing at every moment.  Some people do, though, and use Facebook and Twitter to live their lives like they were the subjects of The Ed Show or something like that.  I don't even watch those kinds of so called reality shows on TV, so I really don't want to know that my FB friends are sitting in an Oh Boy at the local farmer's market or spilling Starbucks all over themselves on their way to have their hair done or whatever; and I don't want to see a lot of links to articles about how some serial killer found Jesus in prison and is now running a mini storage and home for unwed mothers on the mean streets of Weehawken. 

So when one of my FB friends starts to post a lot of stuff I don't want to read, I set the FB subscription for them to only show me "important" posts.  Here's the problem with that: it is Facebook that decides what is important and what is not.  And they don't appear to want to tell you how they do that.  So sometimes I see posts from friends FB apparently thinks are important but I do not.  Worse than that, sometimes I don't see posts from friends whose subscriptions I have set to show me all of their stuff.  So it seems that FB has decided to consider some posts unimportant even though I haven't asked it to.  And that is damn annoying.

FB does have it's good points though.  These days when people want to resend cartoons and jokes or whatever to everyone they know, they do it with FB rather than email.  So you don't have to download some humungous file before you realize that you really didn't want to look at that picture after all.  That's a plus.

OK, so here's another thing that is annoying:  USAToday had this article the other day about the "dangers" of taking calcium substitutes.  Apparently my father-in-law read it and got all upset thinking that his kids were going to have heart attacks because they take calcium substitutes.  However, if you read that article, you will see that the alleged results were claimed by someone on the basis of one study.  There is no mention in the article about who did the study nor is there any claim that the same results have been reported from other independent studies.  In addition, there is no information about the dosage of calcium supplements that were taken by the people in the study, the amount of time they took them, the breakdown of heart attack deaths by age group, amount of dosage, length of time taken or anything else that would amount to real data. 

It is pseudo-science articles like this that are one of my pet peeves.  It is certainly possible that there is really a danger here, but you can't tell it from that article.  I never pay any heed to articles like that because they pretty much just do a lot of hand-waving and don't really say anything.  IMHOP it is much better to get health information from a source like Science in the Public Interest's Nutrition Action Healthletter which does objective reporting, delivers real facts and names names.  CSPI's newsletter will tell you if a study has been independently confirmed or not.  Their articles also contain an analysis of the situation that spells out the implications.  So, e.g., if the CSPI newsletter reported on the study mentioned in USAToday and, if it appeared to the authors that there was something real there, they might suggest cutting back on calcium supplements until independent studies either confirmed or refuted the results from the initial study.  So I give the USAToday article a thumbs down.

Well, that's enough whining for one day.  I'll try to be a little more upbeat on my next post.  And more timely too.

Ellie Opens the Adventure Book

It has been awhile since Ellie has opened the adventure book, so we have been overdue for a little excursion.  Anyone who knows her is aware of the fact that Ellie likes to stretch her birthday celebration out over a month or so.  She does that with holidays too.  So, since Mother's Day is this month, Ellie decided to start celebrating at the first of May and I'm pretty sure the celebration is going to go all month long.

This past week we took a trip to the area around Canton, Texas.  Canton is known throughout the state for First Monday Trade Days.  This is sort of a big flea market that is held once a month.  OK, it's not really on the first Monday of the month.  It's held on the Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday before the first Monday.  And it is really big.  The grounds cover about 100 acres.  Some of it is under roof inside pole buildings and such.  A lot of it (the more flea markety stuff) is outdoors.  More on the Trade Days later.

We headed up on the Wednesday before the Trade Days because we wanted to be able to get to the Trade Days as soon as it opened on Thursday.  We first went to Athens, which is a quaint little town about 25 miles from Canton.  It was about lunch time when we got there so we stopped at the Sweet Pea Bistro and Espresso Bar on the square for a light lunch before starting our rambles.  We had mainly come to Athens to see the  East Texas Arboretum and Botanical Garden.

This place covers 100 acres just outside of Athens.  It was a hot, muggy day so we decided not to trek through the woods to see the arboretum proper.  We just spent an hour or so walking through the grounds of the botanical garden and checking out an old homestead that is on the property.  I was interested to see that the Henderson County Master Gardeners Association has a demonstration garden in the botanical garden area.

After we saw everything that we wanted to see in Athens, we checked into our motel.  We had decided not to stay in Canton because we thought that the rates for motels close to the Trade Days grounds would probably be pretty high.  So we stayed in a little town called Mabank, which is about twenty miles from Canton. 

The motel was comfortable although we almost didn't stay there because when we pulled into the parking lot we saw that the whole front was covered by chimney swift nests and there must have been a couple of hundred of them swirling about overhead catching mosquitoes and letting fly with their digested remains on every car in the lot.  The desk clerk told us that the motel is only a couple of years old and when it was built the birds moved from the nearby freeway underpass to the front of the hotel.  They must have liked it because they're still there.

Mabank is close to Cedar Creek Lake, a large reservoir that supplies water to Fort Worth and surrounding areas.  When the lake was built, about fifty years ago, a number of towns sprang up around  it.  One of them is Gun Barrel City, which is just south of Mabank.  Gun Barrel City is a bit larger than Mabank and the strip of highway that runs from Gun Barrel City to Seven Points (which used to be called Gun Barrel Road, hence the name of the town) is the location of most of the restaurants in the area.  A large part of the road is really a causeway that runs across several very small islands in the lake.

At suppertime we cruised the road and settled on a place called the Cedar Isle Restaurant and Club for dinner.  The Cedar Isle that the restaurant sits on looks to be about the size of the place we used to have in the country.  So the restaurant is pretty much entirely surrounded by the lake.  There is a large outside eating area with a great view of the lake and several islands that the state has reserved as wild bird sanctuaries.  It was pretty cool to sit out there and watch pelicans, cormorants and other water birds while we ate dinner.  Lou Somethingorother, the restaurant owner, stopped by our table to ask how we liked our food so we had the chance to hear some of the history of the lake and the area from him.  The beer was cold, the food wasn't bad and the ambiance was great, so we enjoyed our dinner in Gun Barrel City.

Early the next morning we headed up to Canton to check out the Trade Days.  We've been to a lot these sort of things over the years but this one is the biggest flea market we have ever experienced.  There are a lot of buildings which mostly seem to have craft and gift shop stuff in them although some have antiques as well.  There are also food vendors in the buildings.  We had lunch at a great crepe place in the food court area.  The only problem with it was that there weren't enough tables.  So we had to sit on chairs and try to eat our meal on our laps, which was pretty difficult.  I was surprised at the number of people there, given the fact that it was Thursday and the word is that only 70% of the vendors are there on that day. 

The outside area at the Trade Days grounds is the home of about a bajillion flea market vendors selling mostly “American Pickers” type stuff as well as new gloves and things like that.  The place is so big that you can rent grocery carts, scooters and such to hold your purchases and help you get around.  We spent the morning there shopping and having lunch.  Ellie bought a few things but after about four hours she said that everything was starting to look the same to her.  So we packed up her purchases and went back to Mabank.

There isn't a  lot in Mabank but one of the things that is there is Shorty's Soda Shop.  It's a cool little place that is fixed up like a 1940's soda fountain.  Ellie liked it as soon as we walked in because she has our kitchen decorated like an old-fashioned diner and Shorty's is decorated the same way.  I had a sundae and Ellie had a soda while she schmoozed with the owner and told her about our kitchen decorations.  When the woman at Shorty's found out that we often visited in Amish country, she told us about a Mennonite store in Kemp, a small town a few miles from Mabank.  So after we finished our ice cream we headed to Kemp to check out the Heritage Market and Bakery. 

I have to admit that shopping there was a lot like shopping in Amish country.  In fact, many of the brands of pickles, jellies and the like were the very same that we have bought in Amish stores in Ohio.  Since I am the king of condiments I bought a couple of different kinds of relish.  Ellie stocked up on some cooking supplies and lotion.  Then we headed south to another little town called Malakoff where we did some antique shopping before heading back up to Gun Barrel City for dinner.

When we got to Gun Barrel City we decided that it was time to hit a chain restaurant instead of one of our usual one off choices.  So we stoked up on a hearty dinner at Chili's and called it a day.

We decided to skip the free breakfast at the hotel the next morning because it had filled up overnight with lots of noisy First Monday shoppers.  So we headed out early and stopped at the Denny's in Gun Barrel City for breakfast.  Then we headed home.

I guess Ellie couldn't quite back off the extended Mother's Day celebration, though, because the next morning we got out and about early and went to the local farmer's market where we bought a few veggies, sipped hand-squeezed juice drinks and listened to some free live music.  Then, since it was Cinco de Mayo, we stopped by our favorite neighborhood Tex-Mex place for some mole enchiladas and chalupa compuestos.  All in all it was a good start to Ellie's marathon Mother's Day celebration.

Stuff

It seems like these days everyone wants to tell you what to do with your stuff.  Stop snickering.  I'm talking about all of the things you accumulate over the course of your lifetime.  OK, I'm not talking about hangups, compulsions, phobias and stuff like that.  I mean the kind of stuff that fills closets, garages, basements (for those lucky enough to have 'em), the drawer under the kitchen phone, that cabinet in the corner under the counter that's so damn awkward to get to and places like that. 

There is more than one TV show on the subject, a veritable plethora (I love that word.  In fact, I like it so much I'm gonna use it again: plethora) of websites devoted to clutter and hoarding and even a How to Get Rid of Clutter for Dummies book or at least an article on the subject on their website.  On top of that everyone from USA Today to the Mayo Clinic is more than happy to tell you how all that stuff you have stashed away reveals your hidden neuroses and psychoses (or is it psychosises?  Whatever).  If you believe all those articles, websites, TV shows and what have you, you can even hire a professional de-clutterer who will relieve you of not only your OCD but also your stuff and probably sell it all to an antique dealer for a tidy sum to boot. 

Personally I see all of this as some kind of evil plot, probably hatched by the “simplify your life” or feng shui people; all of whom, I am convinced, own stock in the aforementioned antique stores.  The way I see it is that you have spent your entire life accumulating your stuff, and you have saved it because “it might come in hand some day”.  Right?  Yeah, you know it is.  So why in the world would you get rid of it just because somebody (who, incidentally, is making money by telling you to divest yourself of your stuff) tells you to throw it away?  Nooo!  I'm not buying that line.  If you have a place to store your stuff, I can see no earthly reason to start getting rid of it.  Bad things happen when you do that.

I can tell you don't believe me.  You've watched too many episodes of Hoarders in the last year or so and you think it's just my neuroses talking here.  I see that an example or two is in order.  Just like getting rid of stuff that you've had for years, this might be painful.  All children under twelve should probably leave the room at this point.

Example number 1:

 A few years back my wife talked me into getting rid of this credit card that I had had since almost before I started shaving.  I loved that card.  There was no limit on it and, despite propaganda from myriad competitors, it was accepted everywhere I wanted to use it. (I love that word myriad too, but I won't use it again here because some treats lose their appeal if you have them all the time.  I think this is one of them.) Despite my love for that card, my wife didn't like it because she thought the annual fee was too high.  So she let me know how much better off financially she thought we would be if we just got rid of that card.  After several years of hearing how the card was driving us into bankruptcy, and while my attention was temporarily diverted by a particularly engrossing episode of The Big Bang Theory, I agreed to cancel the card.  Bad things started happening right away.  The first thing was that the card issuer was devastated.  I started getting emails and teary phone calls from them offering to do anything I wanted if I would just take them back.  Eventually they began to threaten suicide.  It was traumatic as hell.  I almost had to go into analysis.  Apparently my other card issuers heard about my callous attitude and raised my interest rates in sympathy for their spurned competitor.  The final blow came when Clark Howard told me that the absolutely worst thing you can do to your credit rating is to drop the card you have held the longest.  Sigh.  I can't talk about this one anymore.

Example 2:  

My wife likes to decorate.  And redecorate.  And redecorate again.  I realize this is an affliction that many women are cursed with.  I certainly know women who take pictures of their decorations so that, when they redecorate, and redecorate again, they don't reproduce some decorating detail that they have used in the past.  All of this decorating takes a lot of, well, decorator items.  My wife tends to mix and match them and also to continually add to them.  So we have devoted an entire walk-in closet to decorations.  It's pretty big.  I'm not saying we used to keep a pool table and gym equipment in there or anything like that, but it's close to that size.  Awhile back it was sort of approaching the capacity where, if it was a hardfile, the operating system would start suggesting that things that hadn't been accessed in the last lifetime or so be archived in a salt mine.  So Ellie decided to reorganize the closet and, in the process, she identified a truckload or two of items that she wanted to donate to a local thrift store where many of them had been bought in the first place.  A week or two later she came home from that thrift store with some decorator items she had just picked up.  Usually she likes to show me her bargains but this time she was kind of quiet about them.  So I asked her to show me what she'd bought and, you guessed it, a couple of those items were things she had donated the week before.  After she saw them in the store she realized that she really didn't want to part with them.

Example 3:  

A few years back I saw this article about a woman who was selling murals that were entirely made from bottle caps.  Laugh if you want to, but she was getting tens of thousands of dollars from them.  Now, being a dedicated beer drinker, and a person who likes variety and drinks myriad brands and types of beer (damn! I used that word again.), I decided that I could probably make some terrific murals if I would just save my bottle tops.  So I did.  For years.  And ended up with bags and bags of them.  One day Ellie was on one of her “simplifying” kicks and cleaning out closets and things.  I was so traumatized I had just saved my fourth bottle cap of the afternoon so when she suggested that I get rid of the lawn and leaf bags full of bottle caps I had stored in the linen closet and the commode that had been sitting in the garage since I replaced it a few years ago, I reluctantly agreed.  However, I had a devilish plan to sort of hang onto them and pass along some hoarding wisdom to my descendants at the same time.  So I suggested that we give them to our granddaughter for art projects.  We did that and in short order she presented us with this great piece of art she had made with some of the bottle caps.  I think her next project is going to be a mural on the side of the house.  OK.  I realize that nothing bad actually happened in this example, but I didn't get to make my murals so that's sort of bad.  Or maybe not.  I don't know.

I could go on here with lots more examples, but I won't 'cause I'm sure you get the message.  I believe in holding onto your stuff as long as you have a place to store it.  In fact, the lack of a place to store it really isn't a problem.  When my mom passed away my wife and I inherited her coffee table, which turned out to be in pristine condition.  Know why?  Because Mom never met a TV Guide or Reader's Digest she didn't like.  She didn't have any bookshelves to spare, but the coffee table was sturdy enough to hold every one of those rags she had gotten since Arthur Godfrey's spat with Julius LaRosa.  Mom knew how to hoard things.  And she passed that on to her kids 'cause that's how you learn.  So take my advice:  Keep your stuff.  You never know when it will come in handy.

Rattlers in the Rosemary

OK.  I know it's been a month or so since the last time I wrote an article for this blog.  I don't have any excuse except the fact that I've been so busy that I just couldn't get up the gumption to write when I finally did get some free time. Hopefully that's going to change now.

See, the thing is that I suddenly got thrust into the position of Chief High Muckety Muck for the local master gardeners' demonstration garden.  The MGs had a spring garden fair the last day of March and that event included a plant sale, which is the only fund raising event that was planned for this year.  So it was a big deal.  Part of that deal was to get the demonstration garden in good shape so that the folks attending the fair would enjoy strolling through it and asking questions of the Master Gardeners.  So I've been putting in a lot of time getting ready for the fair over the last three months and in March that time went up exponentially.  The fair went off pretty well, though, and the garden looks good, so now I can take a breather and get on with my life.  Which is why I'm kicking back with a True Blond and writing this blog entry.

The only glitch in the garden fair, at least from my perspective, happened while I was taking a break and grabbing a bite to eat with Ellie.  I had just gulped down a chopped beef sandwich from the local 4-H kids and was working my way through a chocolate chip cookie when one of the veggie garden folks came in and asked me if I had brought any tools with me. I told him that I had a trowel and some pruners in my truck if he needed them but he said that he didn't think they would work and he was looking for a hoe.  I asked him what he needed it for and he told me that there was a snake in the herb garden.  I decided that I had better head out there to see what we had.  The veggie crew guy, who happens to be a retired chaplain with a biblical name that I'll just call Peter, grabbed a cultivating hoe from the MG store and followed me out. 

When we got to the herb garden I could see right away that we had a problem because, instead of the garter snake that I expected to see, there was about a three-foot Western Diamond Back rattler coiled up on the rosemary bush.  People were all crowded around with their cell phones out trying to see how close they could get to take a picture and everyone had an opinion about what to do, most of which boiled down either to killing it humanely (however that might be; lethal injection, maybe? I don't know) or just to “let it be because it isn't hurting anyone” (not right now maybe, but a diamond back packs enough venom to kill a child and make a grown man lose a leg, and judging by the buzz that came from him now and then, he wasn't feeling too friendly).

So I told Peter to extend the extendable cultivating hoe he had and we'd try to dispatch the rattler.  When he said “It is extended”, I knew we were in trouble.  A rattlesnake can strike out as far as half it's body length.  I estimated that that meant that the one we had could reach out about 18 inches, which isn't real far, but they can move very fast so he could get to us and strike before we got a chance to deliver the coup de gras.  It looked to me as though the old saw about discretion being the better part of valor applied here.  So I asked Peter to keep an eye on the serpent while I went inside the ag office and called Animal Control.

It turns out that Animal Control doesn't work on Saturdays, even in cases where there is a lethal snake wandering around among two or three hundred mostly recent arrivals from outside central Texas, of which about half were kids who didn't know any better than to stay away from a rattler and the other half were adults with phone cameras who were just as snake savvy.  So I finally got dispatch to send out a deputy to take care of the problem.  She asked that someone wait out by the road to show the deputy where the snake was and I told her I would do that.

After asking Peter to keep an eye on the snake I walked up to the road to wait for the posse.  I waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.  Eventually Ellie found me there and told me that she would wait for the policia while I went back to the herb garden to help Peter wrangle the rattler.

Eventually not one, but three, cops showed up.  Of course by this time the snake was nowhere to be seen.  So we used some looong bamboo poles to lift up the bushes under which it could hide, with the deputies standing by ready to dispatch the critter as soon as it showed its triangular head.  After five or ten minutes of this there was no sign of the rattler. So we started jamming the poles into the sage and other shrubs to see if we could make the darn thing mad enough to betray its location.  No luck.  The #$%^&* varmint was way too smart for that. 

Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, we gave up and just used the bamboo poles to make sort of a border around the bed and posted a couple “Keep Out” signs.  For the rest of the afternoon I was pretty nervous because I was sure the snake had gotten out of the herb garden and someone would step on it and get bit.  I guess it must have gone to ground, though, because there was no sign of it for the rest of the day.

That was my big day and the culmination of an intense month of gardening.  Now it's over and I'm back.  So watch this space.

Stuff and Other Nonsense

It seems like everywhere I look these days, whether it's the newspaper, TV shows, the AARP magazine or whatever, someone tells me that I should “down-size and simplify”.  As far as I can tell what these people are really saying is that, when a person reaches a certain age, he should get rid of all his stuff.  Not just the obsolete stuff, oh no.  The objective here seems to be to move out of your roomy, comfortable house and move into some little box with no storage and get rid of all your past history in the process.  Well, I say a big “pthuupfth!” to that.

It has taken me a heck of a long time to accumulate all my stuff and I'm damned if I'm going to give it up.  I say, keep that house, even if there are only one or two of you living in it these days; and, as long as you have a place to store it, keep your stuff too.  You fought long and hard for all that junk and you deserve to enjoy it, even if you haven't pulled it out of the attic in fifteen years.  In fact, if you don't have room to store all your stuff, do as I do and recycle it.

I have to confess that I actually have down-sized and got rid of some stuff over the last decode or so.  When my wife and I lived on a few acres in the country I was in hillbilly heaven.  I had lots of stuff stashed all over that little piece of pastoral paradise.  As a matter of fact, we moved onto a place where somebody had already put some stuff by in anticipation of our arrival.  When we began to explore the property after we moved in we discovered that one of the previous owners had abandoned a car and a pickup truck in the ravine behind the near hayfield.  Instant spare parts!  How can you beat that?  A little further along the ravine was sort of a dump spot where I found a set of old box springs.  Just the thing to use to smooth the acre-and-a-half veggie garden after I had tilled it.  I just dragged it behind the riding mower and it worked like a charm.

That's really the crux of what I'm getting at here.  You can recycle and re-purpose almost anything and get some use out of it.  The way I see it, that beats dumping it in the landfill or donating it to Goodwill or some other place that will sell it for a profit to somebody more creative who will get that usage.  Of course, sometimes it isn't clear up front what something can be used for.  You have to sort of look for the hidden use the way a wood carver looks for the shape inside a chunk of oak. 

For example, when our daughter and son-in-law got married we inherited our daughter's bedroom suite, which she had taken with her when she moved out of our house and no longer wanted.  We didn't really need another bedroom suite, but we did need an armoire for the guest room.  So I removed a few drawers and sawed out the supports and “Viola!”, we had an armoire.  Let's see one of those simplifiers do that!

I'm not sure where my attitude about hanging onto stuff comes from.  I do come from a long line of hillbilly tinkerers, though, and I'm sure that has something to do with it.  I was also into the “back to the land”, “grow your own”, “make it do, use it up, wear it out” thing back in the 60's and 70's and I suppose a lot of that has stuck with me into my dotage.

Gardening has given me a lot of re-purposing and re-use opportunities.  I had one of those happen just this week. 

 About six months ago I was offered a slew of bricks if I would just haul them away from my next-door neighbor's backyard.  So I made a zillion trips with the garden cart and hauled thebricks over to our backyard with vague notions of building a walk with them.  To date that hasn't happened but this week my wife noticed that some of the fingerling potatoes we had bought last week had begun to sprout. 

So she asked her private master gardener to plant them so we could grow our own.  The problem was that we have a really small veggie garden bed and I had already made plans for it.  What to do?  As I was pondering that question my eye fell on that big old stack of bricks.  So I used them to construct a planter for the potatoes that will let me pull a couple of bricks out of the side every so often to harvest a few spuds without disturbing the whole bed.  Couldn't do that if I wasn't a pack rat.  OK, I could, but I would have had to spend a lot of money I don't have and, if we had down-sized to a condo or something, I wouldn't have had a place to build the doggone thing.

I do a lot of container gardening.  That is a re-purposer's dream.  I have planted flowers, herbs and veggies in an old barbecue smoker, roasting pans, tires, wash tubs, cookie jars, pots, pans and about any other thing you can think of that will hold dirt and plants.  The plants in the low, circular planter in the picture above are in the water pan of an old smoker.  Usually my old girl doesn't complain about the things I use as planters.  In fact, she has begun to get into the act.  The wagon planter in the picture below was her idea. 

We did have a battle of wills a while back over an old toilet that I replaced a couple of years ago.  It sat in the garage for over a year until my wife finally convinced me that it wouldn't fit in with the rest of the garden decor.  So I guess there are some things that can't be re-used.  You never know, though.  So “pthuupfth!” to down-sizing.  I”m staying put and keeping my stuff.

This 'n' That

It's been over two weeks since I've posted to this blog.  So much for my New Year's resolution about posting an article at least once a week.  I sort of have an excuse though.  The past couple of months have been kind of hectic around the Grizzled Galoot household and something had to give.

Most of the reason I've been so busy has to do with the Dark Side of Volunteering (you'll just have to imagine the spooky music and hockey mask and stuff). There is an old saying that goes something like “In any organization twenty percent of the people do eighty percent of the work.”  There's another that says “Never do a bad thing well.”  My experience has been that both of these old saws apply doubly in volunteer organizations (and maybe in Tennessee; it is the volunteer state, after all).  In any case, there was sort of a shake up in the local Master Gardener organization and the old galoot ended up being the chair of not one, but two committees.  So now I find myself spending a great deal of time on something that used to be a spare time hobby but is rapidly becoming a lot more like work.  The main difference is that I used to get paid a fair amount of money when it was work.  Now that it is a volunteer activity I just get to feel good about helping people.  Yeah, that'll be the day.

So Ellie and I have had to cut back on our adventures a bit.  We've been learning, though, to combine the hobby turned work with adventure book stuff.  So last weekend we made a 250-mile round trip to check out something called a keyhole garden.

Keyhole gardens are pretty cool.  They were developed to allow the folks in African nations with poor soil and low rainfall to grow food to feed themselves and their families.  I am all about growing your own, and central Texas has poor soil and low rainfall, so the keyhole garden thing really appealed to me.  In addition, they are usually made from recycled and scrap materials and Ellie and I are both into recycling, so we both liked that.  Finally, keyhole gardens are raised beds that are three to four feet high, which makes them easy for us old folks to work with.  So that's a big plus for me.

What you do with a keyhole garden, and the reason it has that name, is that you stack stones or bricks or whatever, up to form a six-foot diameter circle about three or four feet high, but you put a notch in one side.  So from the top it looks kind of like a keyhole.  In the very center you build a sort of chimney about a foot in diameter out of whatever you have.  In the Aftrican keyhole gardens they use sticks, but most of them in the US use chicken wire.  The key point here is that the chimney is a little higher than the top of the garden and it has to be made out of something that will let water leak through the sides.

After the enclosure and chimney are built you start filling the area inside the enclosure (but not inside the chimney) with anything that will compost.  That could be straw, leaves, old newspapers, the pages out of old phone books or what have you.  You put it down in layers and wet it real well as it is laid down.  When you get to within a foot of the top, you put in dirt mixed with compost or dry leaves or any organic matter that is already decayed.  Then you fill the chimney with compost material up to at least the level of the top of the dirt.

You plant your plants or seeds in the ring of dirt and once a day you put two gallons of water in the chimney.  You also throw any vegetable table scraps or garden refuse into the chimney.  The plants' roots will grow toward the chimney because that's where the water is and they will get fed by the decaying compost in the chimney.  I don't know if this works, but since I'm chairman of the master gardener demonstration garden committee, I'm going to build one and find out.

So while Ellie and I were in this little town checking out the keyhole garden we found a little Czech bakery/market/deli and ate lunch there.  We also loaded up on kolaches and other goodies.  Then we tooled around through the countryside looking for other potential day trip destinations.  All in all it was a fun day, even though it was kind of a small day and not really a big deal.

As we age and as my time gets occupied by things like the master gardener stuff, my old girl and I are beginning to appreciate those small moments and to be on the lookout for opportunities to share them.  For instance, yesterday we were in the little town where we usually walk the park.  We couldn't walk, because my wife has had some recent surgery and wasn't up to walking just yet, and anyway we were really there because of some MG business.  However, we realized that it is near Valentine Day and that means that Dairy Queen is making Choco-cherry-love blizzards.  So, even though we usually try to eat healthy, we stopped by the local DQ to pick up a couple.  Then we went down to the park and watched the ducks and geese while we ate our blizzards in the car.  It was sort of an early Valentine Day outing.  A small moment, to be sure, but we enjoyed it.

Despite spending so much time with the master gardener demonstration garden I have managed to find a few moments to do some home gardening as well.  My garden looks pretty pitiful right now but the mesclun is doing great.  We just had some in a salad along with some fish tacos for dinner last night and it was really tasty. 

This is the time of year in central Texas when the weather is pretty unpredictable.  We have had some unseasonably warm days when the high was up around 90 degrees but last night it was so cold that it froze the water in the birdbath.  So I have been using row cover over a lot of the winter veggies, both to protect the tender ones from the cold and also to keep the insects off of the plants.  That is one of the downsides of gardening in a place with a mild winter climate:  The bugs and varmints never die.  They just sort of hibernate on the cold days and come out to kick back and eat your veggies when the weather warms up.  I guess this is sort of like a winter resort for them.  I'm surprised there aren't Shiner Bock bottles littering the garden.  So the row cover helps to fend them off and save a few veggies for us.

Watch this space and I'll let you know how the keyhole garden comes out; and enjoy those small moments.  Sometimes they are the best times of all.

Live Long and Prosper

The first time I heard Leonard Nimoy say the words in the title of this post I thought it was someone trying to sell me long-term care insurance or a condo in Florida.  No I guess that was Captain Kirk, and it was hotel rooms in Baja rather than condos.

Anyway I guess living long and prospering is something we'd all like to do.  I don't worry too much about prospering but I've been thinking a lot lately of lifespans, the things people do to try to lengthen them and the things to which long-lived people attribute their longevity. 

Maybe it's because I whined at my wife a few days ago about leaving the upstairs bathroom window open when it got down to nearly forty degrees that night.  She said that her dad always keeps the window open at night and he claims the fresh air is one of the things that has helped him make it into his nineties. To strengthen her argument she pointed out that the next-door neighbors always have their bedroom window open, even if it snows.  I have to admit that that's true, but they're usually out only when it's dark and probably aren't even in the room when it gets that cold in the middle of the night.  I think they're vampires or something.  Judging by the contents of their recycle bin on trash pickup day they drink a lot of red wine and I've heard that's a sign.  Besides, they're younger than we are.  So I'm not buying the fresh air – longevity connection.

The things that people assert have made them live longer than average or that some proclaim will make you live longer are sometimes pretty bizarre.  I read  an article about a 72-year-old Japanese broadcaster ,  Shiro Suzuki, who loves the game, Resident Evil, and believes it is responsible for his lifespan which, frankly, doesn't seem all that long to me.  I read another article that claimed that rich people live longer.  That one I can believe.  At least, I think that those with more money than average can probably have the best medical support and that seems as though it would make you live longer.  As soon as I think about that, though, several celebrities and other rich people who died young come to mind.  I guess Steve Jobs is the latest example.  So maybe that “rich live longer” thing doesn't pan out either.

A lot of people assert that your diet is what makes the difference.  I guess that's sort of a “you are as old as what you eat” philosophy.  I kind of like this article from Scientific American  that is just one of many that claim positive results for drinking alcohol.  Of course most folks aren't content just to drink in order to prolong their lives.  Other food groups play a part in this too.  In some cultures this emphasis on eating right in order to achieve happiness and long life starts out with the first meal of the new year. At least that's what I got from this article from the west side of the Pacific.  I'm not sure that works here on the gulf coast though.  Quite a few people on this side of the pond seem to follow diets like the Mediterranean diet or the South Beach diet or whatever, and some of them adamantly oppose anything that doesn't fit their dietary convictions, as this Sydney Morning Herald story about Loma Linda, California demonstrates.  Interesting that the decision of a relatively small town in the US could become international news, but that just shows you how much faith people put in diets as a vehicle to make them live long.  I have older relatives that get these ideas about nutrition from articles in the paper or wherever and then make dietary changes based on them without ever trying to determine if they are true or not.  So my wife and I hear “I never eat beef” or “I never eat anything from outside the US” or “I have shrimp and grits for breakfast everyday” and the folks that tell us that are sure that that is what has made them live so long.  I'm not buying it.

There is no dearth of studies that claim to provide the answer on how to live long and prosper.  This story in the LA Times which starts out talking about Betty White lays out the findings of a study that has been underway since 1921.  A slightly different set of guidelines can be found in this article  about a group that has divided the world into sort of longevity zones.  I guess if you don't live in any of those places then you better start whipping through that bucket list right now.

I'm not an authority on aging, gracefully or otherwise.  I'm just someone who realizes that there has been a lot more road pass under the tires than there is left to travel; but I kind of like the viewpoint of the 104-year-old woman interviewed for this article.  Her parents both died in their sixties so she discounts the “it's all in the genes” theory of long life and, when it comes to the “I never drank, smoked or chewed” theory her response is that she did it all.  She never followed any particular diet but just ate “plain food” and didn't take any more medicines than she absolutely had to.

That fits in real well with what I have always suspected and have mentioned more than once in this blog:  It all boils down to balance.  I'm surely no expert but I think if a person gets a reasonable amount of exercise, eats a balanced diet and keeps his mind occupied that's about all he can do to live a long and happy life; and I suspect that if you make it into your nineties you don't even care about prospering.  Well, that's my two cents worth anyway.

What!?

I recently read an article about a person who won a contest to see who could make the best map of the United States.  That made me wonder who in the world uses hard copy maps these days.  I mean, it seems as though everyone I know either uses a handheld GPS or  a GPS application on their smart phone to get them from here to there.  If they don't do that then they use Google Maps or something like that.  I don't know anyone who uses hard copy maps.  Well, except for Ellie and me anyway.  We do carry hard copy maps with us when we travel, but that's only to justify the money we spend for our AAA membership.  Mostly they just sit in the map pocket of the car while we use Tess, our name for our GPS, to show us the way to go home.

Maps aren't the only paper goods that are rapidly becoming obsolete because of technology.  Look at books, for example.  “What!?” you say, “I don't read books anymore.  I either get audio books on CDs to play in the car while I'm behind the wheel or I read e-books on my Kindle, Nook, Ipad or whatever.”  Which is precisely my freaking point:  I'm about the only person I know who reads actual books made of paper and filled with printed words and silverfish.  New technology has just about replaced them. 

Another area where the printed word has disappeared is user manuals.  Did you get one with your last cell phone?  I bet not.  You probably had to go to the manufacturer's website and download a pdf file before you could figure out how the damn thing works.  That's even the case with computers and their many peripherals.  You're in serious trouble if you buy a new computer and don't know how to hook it up to the great user guide server in the cloud.  You're not gonna get any printed help.  You'll just have to call the Geek Squad.  If, that is, you can find their number without looking it up on the internet or a Yellow Pages CD.

It seems like all the folks who provide you with goods and services of any kind are pushing you away from paper too.  Recently one of my service providers, who always sent me a nice invoice and pre-printed envelope so I could send them a check for services rendered, started sending me emails with a pdf of my invoice attached.  So now I have to use my ink (which costs so much that I don't even print photos with it; I send them to Walgreens, electronically, of course) and my envelope to send in the check for the service I'm paying for.  I'm sure that before long they'll want me to pay electronically too.

Even the government is getting into the act.  Try sending in your income tax return on paper.  Sure, you can do it, but they give you a little disclaimer to let you know that they're going to drag their feet if you do.  And they want to deposit the check directly into your bank account instead of sending it in the mail like they used to.  I'm thinking they could go a long way toward solving the employment crises if they didn't eliminate jobs by using all this electronic communication instead of paper!  No wonder the post office is in big trouble.  Even the government doesn't use them to correspond with you.  In fact, even the freaking post office tries to get you to buy your postage online.  Hello!  I think I see why they need to close post offices all over the country.  And I'm beginning to understand all this business about going postal.

Of course I realize that all this is really nothing new.  Technology has been replacing old forms of things with new ones ever since the first cave man realized that he would get a better spear point by putting a broken piece of bone on the end of the stick he used to skewer rabbits or his neighbors or whatever.  Still, I find myself holding on to the old forms of things for as long as I can, even when I've replaced them with the newer, faster, sexier version.  For one thing it seems as though as soon as I donate the old stuff to some charity it shows up in a thrift shop or antique store where my wife buys it as a decorator item for three times what we paid when we bought it new.  Maybe that guy that spent two years making the best map of the US had the right idea after all.  He'll probably sell copies of it to people who hang it on the wall of their office where it will be ignored while they use Google Maps or their Iphone to plan their next trip.  Oh well, I guess that's progress.