Celebrating the big five-oh this weekend. What better way than with the best Talking Heads cover ever (Once In A Lifetime):
For the purist, the original video:
The big five-oh (same as it every was)
Blog
Water garden repair
I’ve got a backlog of pictures from last weekend to get out over the next few days. My major accomplishment Sunday was repairing the water garden. The warm winter was easy on the fish. (The spring-fed pool was frozen over only maybe a dozen nights all season.) But the freezing and thawing heaved the surrounding soil and sent a lot of the edging stones into the water. It was a real mess:
I straightened things out as best I could, hauled out the whiskey-barrel liner with the mini-water lilies, and trimmed the dead foliage off the potted emergents. But I’ve got to dig up or buy some flat stones and rebuild the edges or this is only going to get worse.
The ugly pile with the pond liner scraps in the background is going to be my ‘mud man’ sculpture. More on that project as it evolves.
Garden Footwear Review
While I decide whether or not to take GardenRant up on their very kind offer of free Sloggers, I thought it best if I review what I already have. Being ‘green’, I want to make sure that I’m not engaged in mindless consumerism or becoming a slave to the gardening fashionistas.
| Aldo Sandals | Fake ‘Merrells’ | K-Mart Sneaks | |
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| Description: | Son’s locker room wear during ’01-’02 hoops season | Impulse buy from Walmart clearance bin circa 2003. |
6 months of office attire before called for garden duty |
| Price: | No clue | $12 | $19 |
| Off/On: | No bending involved. | Requires finger at the heal standing on one foot. |
Requires socks, knots — what a hassle. |
| ‘Puttering’: | Perfect | OK | Too much work to put on |
| Shoveling: | Ouch | Light digging | Pogo in tight soil |
| Mowing: | Too slick | Eh | Perfect |
| Snow: | Dusting to 1″ | Up to 3″ | Up to 6″ |
| Temperature: | > 25F | > 10F with socks | Down to -10F |
| Smell factor: | Funky but cleans up nicely | Amorphophallus in flower | Biohazard |
| Other uses: | Walking the dogs, ‘visiting Quito’ | Considered evening wear in Ithaca | Rodent repellent |
‘Tree Sculpture’ Burns in Collegetown Fire
See Cornell Daily Sun article. Apparently, damage was minor.
Wankers.
More on this installation. Keep following the links back to my first post to see why I’m so emotionally attached to this work.
Update: Patrick sent me a link to this short audio slide show of his installation in Bluffton, S.C.
Pollinator troubles and botanical illiteracy
There’s a diary over at DailyKos about a Beltway gathering going on looking at Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).
It will be interesting to see what they come up with. But what caught my eye was the writer talking about how a third of the U.S. diet — particularly the tasty crops — depend on pollinators. One crop singled out was asparagus.
Can you think of any crop less dependent on pollinators than asparagus? Oy. I’m glad there is growing concern about pollinator problems. But please don’t compromise your credibility by telling everyone that our asparagus is threatened by CCD.