Week 2: A long day's work in the garden.

I'm being rewarded with my first big bloom on a plant I bought with no sign of flowering: a deep orange-colored flower on the Maltese Cross I planted (above).

The other plants in that bed are doing fine, growing slowly but surely.

At the end there (above), you can see the cilantro and parsley are holding their own. I think they're not liking the hot days we've had intermittently, but I spread the bed with a bit of compost and manure and cocoa bean mulch after taking these photos, so I hope that will help all the plants along.

In the front of that bed, the phlox and zinnia seeds I planted seem to slowly be peeking out:

Also pretty happy is the hydrangea plant, and beside it, the butterfly bush, below:

The purslane bed on the right is doing splendidly:

The one on the left (below) is still growing up from tiny little plants.

In that same bed, the mint is much happier:

Behind them, the eggplants are growing slowly. I saw a little purple bloom on one of them, but sadly I knocked it off after I took the photo while I was watering.

The tomatoes seem to be growing slowly. I hope the compost/manure mix and mulch will help them a lot too.

The herbs generally seem pretty happy.

The only one that really doesn't look too happy is the lemon verbena, there between the basil plants and the variegated sage above. I'm not sure what is going wrong there.

The pineapple sage and horehound above seem to be growing steadily, and the chocolate mint is thriving.

My fight with the "lawn demons" continues, though. Since they weedwhacked the best bed of mint I had, below, I surrounded that one too with a ring of rocks (below). I would have done before, but they got to me before I had a chance to, while I was in Ann Arbor at the end of the long power outage. I'm mad, but I know that the mint will come back, probably even hardier than before.


I'm taking similar precautions along the border, where I've also planted mint. Now I'm experimenting with other kinds of materials, including tree branches and broken pottery, since I'm not sure I have quite enough stones to cover every boundary clearly.

Despite their best efforts, the mint still is growing nicely there, and I don't think it will be long before I really do have a nice (edible) border covering that ugly PVC.

That other variety of mint is also thriving in the little bed at the front of the walkway:


The walkway is also improving in appearance as the purslane and that other succulent fill in a bit. Some are still pretty small, but I expect that they'll grow in time. Their older siblings are already looking nice and bushy.


And despite my having thinned it considerably, the purslane is still growing in in patches of grass where the sod is thin.

In the garden plot, I know I have some more work I ought to be doing. Things are dry, and I know they want more organic material to thrive. It's hard, though, because the mosquitoes have been so thick over there, and every time I start working the soil, they're on top of me and I have a couple dozen new bites almost immediately. The peas, especially, have been suffering.


Still, there's been some growth. The okra plants below are shooting up.

And the vines of the squash and melon plants are moving along.

The melon plants have begun to flower.

The beans are growing (below), though I think a rabbit or other critter may have gotten to one of them.

After taking the photos, I did a ton more work, adding compost/manure almost everywhere, working it into the soil where I could, and adding topsoil in some places too, and cocoa bean mulch in some. I also did a BUNCH more planting, including Oriental poppy, larkspur, sunflower, more zinnia, marigold, black-eyed Susan, purple cornflower, snapdragon, lettuce, spinach, carrot, radish, zucchini, redbud, strawberry, sweetpeas, and mixed wildflowers.

I'll update ASAP to show how things are getting along.

Wow, this narrated tour of the human heart as seen in a CT scan is pretty amazing. (Just click on the video on the left of the article.)

Considering birthday activities. The 30-mile 'fun ride' component of One Helluva Ride? The Michigan ElvisFest? Maybe a bike tour of Detroit (if their scheduling cooperates)? A nature hike at the Washtenaw County Farm Park? Something else? Of course there's also the variety of free fun things Ann Arbor businesses offer for birthday celebrations.

Dancer in the Dark

Oh, the summer storms. There are some oak trees that have been ripped right out of the ground in some spots around the area. My power was still out when I went home yesterday, so we emptied my fridge of any perishables, did a little tidying, and collected some things so I could spend a few days away from home. Oh, bother.

Many local folks don't seem to know that you can look at a frequently updated map of the Detroit Edison power company service area that gives information about the extent of the power outages in your particular zip code. It doesn't give address by address information, although you can check the status of a previously reported power problem through their "Storm Center" on their website. But the map does at least give you some information, about whether there is an outage problem or not. They update it every half hour.

What I really wanted to do (since I can't book the next flight to Cali to be with my family) was hide out at home, clean my house, work in my garden, do a little swimming, and work on my archaeology paper. But we're going to hit some barbecues this afternoon, to celebrate our status as, in the words of the wonderful Miki, "the greatest democracy in the world." Luckily my friends have a sense of irony; drinking the afternoon away at a "4th of July Proud To Be An American Imperialist BBQ and Slip and Slide Party" sounds like something I can handle, I guess.

Well, Umlud and I are off for a bike ride around A2.

Living "sturdily and Spartan-like"

Well, I spent nearly the entire day in the garden, which was exhilarating, and also a bit exhausting. I'm having a blast with it, remembering the joy of working the soil, interacting with plants, and getting a bit of exercise, sun, and fresh air.

It's also both rewarding and humbling, seeing the landscape transform with your labor, and also seeing how much depends on time, weather, and so many other factors you have no control over. And, realizing how, even if you push yourself, there's only so much you can do in a day. It cultivates a sense of acceptance of both my strengths and my limitations that feels very healthy, very connected to what I feel is fundamental to being human.

I am sitting here after my long day's work and a simple supper of fresh salad, homemade rye bread, olives, and salty Bulgarian feta cheese, and I just poured myself a cup of Moroccan-style tea made with green tea my brother carried home from Taiwan and fresh mint I clipped just moments ago in the garden. It smells positively glorious.

As far as the garden work goes, the biggest part of the labor was the process of ripping up grass and weeds out of the area of the pathway (this is what it looked like before). I was inspired to try to expand the purslane planting into this area, to see if it would cooperate as a groundcover. Given that the soil is very shallow and comprises more compost than real soil, it's not a fabulous place for planting. But since the purslane had already started cropping up there a little bit, and since the plant only develops a fairly shallow root system, I thought it might be worth a try to get more to grow between the paving stones.

I almost finished; I just have a few more weeds to pull, and I obviously need to clean off the paving stones and compost the remaining grass pullings.

Above: Here's one spot of the newly replanted purslane, which I was hunting all over the garden amidst the sad, anemic, dry grass today.

While I was at it, I also transplanted some succulents from a patch at the far end of the lawn into the entrance to the path (above), and into the bed beside it, with the Moroccan mint plant (below). I also marked this little bed (below) with stones, once again against the lawn demons.


And, also, between the bricks outlining the herb garden (above and below). I thought if they got covered a bit by succulents, perhaps it would look a bit prettier. I don't love the delineation of the space with the bricks, but it prevents misunderstandings with the lawn maintenance guys who have a tendency of getting on the riding mower and destroying everything in its path.
Finally, I also did some weeding in the purslane bed next to the steps. I think I'll harvest a portion of the largest plants already in the next week to encourage root development on the plants. And to try my new crop! Hooray . . .

Tagging web images dynamically with roll-over labels -- where's the software?

I've been wanting to edit those photos to dynamically identify the plants rather than just list them. So, I'm looking all over for simple freeware software that allows me to identify items (objects or persons) in a photograph and tag them, as is done in Facebook (much to our chagrin, sometimes, after a bad hair day gets captured). And somehow, it doesn't seem to exist. The idea is a good one, and I'm sort of amazed, given the pace of Web 2.0 development, that it isn't possible to do yet.

You can tag whole photos with thematic tags (that relate to the whole file), and you can geocode photographs to identify where they were taken on a map (the basis for the fun of Panoramio, the map features of Flickr, GoogleEarth, as well as the images connected to Googlemaps). The latter is also, obviously, a label (or, if you prefer, piece of metadata) that applies to the whole photograph. Labeling component parts still seems out of reach outside the context of applications for Facebook.

I found an Eastern European-developed software called TagHim 1.0, but it's impossible to download. Their own website has, in fact, been suspended. Perhaps it's because they spammed most software review sites with the exact same content (in noticeably non-native English), including reference to Facebook. Or, maybe they violated the terms of use for their website host. I'm not sure.

TagHim even has a YouTube video of the developer demonstrating the software with his charming Slavic accent and misspelling of "Mickey" in his process of tagging a photograph of Mickey Mouse and Pluto. It looks, effectively, like exactly what I want. Simple, free, fast, effective. What's the holdup, folks? Does anybody know anything about this?

Ice cream ball

Oh no! I want one.