Todays Garden Tip

First, I want to thank Owen for sharing the story of his school's subsidized food program, very worthy of recognition I think. (My last post "growing food")
Today we are going to talk about starting plants from seed. I was determined to start as much as I could this year from seed. So I want to share what I have learned so far.
1- Don't over plant, it pained me so much to through out perfectly good plants that I just didn't have room for. I thought it would be easy to "offload" the excess but no, everyone has their way of doing this.
2- Don't start too early, but don't start too late. Ya I know, confusing for sure. I'm sitting here looking at snow, and more snow and cool temps that have kept my fast growing plants inside. I was really hopping to get some to the greenhouse, but it is still too cool to leave them out. Of coarse I could heat it, but that is not cost effective and my greenhouse is not quite finished so I'm stuck waiting for some warmer weather.
3- Make sure you have the time to tend to the plants. I spend about an hour every day looking after them. The onions when they pop up need help as they have trouble pulling the seed pod out of the soil. A quick snip and they do fine, they also need to be trimmed to about 3 inches till the third leaf comes. By then they need to be transplanted to deeper pots (at least 4"deep) and then trimmed to 5" to keep them from falling over.
As you can see it is involved to do this. This is my first year, but I have had the time to research everything on my number 1 tool, the iPad, and am learning quickly as I go. One thing is for sure, I'm going to have a lot of tomatoes this year, and will need to learn to can them. I plan to have a canning party and share the bounty with everyone that helps. And what a party that will be!
7 billion, canning food, and growing

Growing Food

All the valium in the world would not calm you as much as growing some food. Working with plants has to be the most unwinding and relaxing things there is to do. It takes you right away from the stresses of everyday life.
But can someone please tell me why this isn't taught in schools? If you lived with a bush tribe in Africa, as a child all you would learn about is how to gather and grow food to survive. And those children are not obese, not violent, and for the most part are healthy. It would seem that drugs is the only choice when dealing with "attention deficit disorder" when it has been shown that planting and growing things is far more effective. Mean kids, small kids, boys and girls alike all do better when they are working with plants. And lets not forget the benefits of growing fresh food in the school, many children that are poor and do not have enough to eat will benefit greatly from this.
I know their are some movements taking place where this is starting to be done, in California there are schools ripping up pavement to plant things, as it has repeatedly shown to improve moral. If you are in a position to influence these kind of things, please try to. The world would be a much calmer and better place to live.

Okay it's spring, lets grow a garden!

At the urging of my eldest daughter I am going to start giving garden tips in my column. Not that I am a professional in this field, but I do spend a whole lot of time figuring out the misdirection that exists in the wonderful world of gardening.
Last year I had great success for the most part, some failures as well but what I learned will drive me this year to grow as much food as possible in my suburban back yard. What is wonderful about this today is the raft of help that is available on the internet. I sit in front of my iPad and can find info on just about anything related to growing food. So the first and most important tool you need is an iPad.
It is my belief that raised bed gardens are the very best way to go. You have better control of the soil you use, the beds warm up faster, you can cover them easily in the event of some bad weather and the most important thing is that you do not walk on them compacting the soil. This and this alone is good enough reason to "raise your beds". Do a quick Google of raised beds and you will see hundreds and hundreds of different ideas, many of which are easy and cheap to build. Not only that but by raising the beds bending over is much easier and keeping the weeds out as well.
So start there and then we will go into more info on the hows. When you think about it, we could grow so much food right where we live that famine could be wiped out. But most of all growing food is so much fun and rewarding that it makes you wonder why we don't do more of it.

What do we really see

Can you trust your eyes? Is what you see real? Can a witness be counted on to tell the truth when it is so easy to discredit the testimony?
Many questions and not near enough answers. I was watching the history of aliens this weekend and after 2 hours of testimonies everything had an alternative explanation. And I mean everything! It made me wonder if we can trust what we see, we don't have "super vision", and our brains can perceive things that are not there. Hypnosis is not reliable as again the brain is very good at making things up. So that question came to me, "what do we really see"?
How about dark matter, this substance has been proven to exist but we cannot see it. Magicians use slight of hand and miss direction to deceive you from seeing the truth in their tricks. I could go on and on but the answer keeps alluding me, can I believe what I see? Is this how religions started? With misdirection and deep mental hypnosis did the founders of our religions just pull the wool over our eyes? And what of all the unexplained UFO sightings, are there that many people that were fooled into believing or not believing what they saw?
Like the Oracle said in the Matrix, this really cooks your noodle as to what is real, and what our brain makes up. 7 billion eye witness's and no one saw a thing!

Cleaning up

If there is anything that is true, we humans are very dirty. We through our trash everywhere, and even those of us that you would call "neat freaks" still make a lot of waste.
Some think this is our planet to dump what ever we want on it, and up to a few hundred years ago we got away with it as the garbage was compostable for the most part. But now, the garbage we are making is almost impossible to keep up with, and it doesn't biodegrade. It has to be processed, after it has been gathered and shipped to some place where they don't mind working for peanuts.
Just keeping up with our own homes is exhausting, I swear I could walk around our house and clean and pick up stuff 24/7, and still not get ahead of it. There is a never ending stream of crap that we deal with every day and no one has an answer to this. We recycle, we compost and still it only scratches the surface. I'm in waste overload and feel helpless at stopping it.
7 billion tossing their shit everywhere and counting.

Time for Relection

I think Face Book just turned the corner, in my mind, now is a good time to buy some stock. But at any rate the release of Face Book Home will be a game changer if they pull it off. They will have cut Apple off at the pass. Not that iOS is in any danger here, but Home will be very significant in blurring the market, it wont matter what brand of Android you run, the interface will be the same. This will hurt Samsung for sure, and help out some other hand set makers. In the end we will have cheaper devices to carry around. Face Book is in a position to really disrupt many start-ups and dominate like Microsoft did on the desktop. FB will dominate on the home screen of many users transitioning themselves for advertising. This is BRILIANT! Make no mistake about this, it's a real game changer for sure.
One other brilliant thing I saw today was a new direction for hacking protection. Think of this for a moment, you "let the intruder" in and give him all he wants, of coarse it will be rubbish but the intruder will not know. With a bit of good work and some time, this kind of defence will put an end to most of the hacking going on as you will never really know for sure what info you have! This too is BRILLIANT!
Don't you just love the future?
7 billion and counting

Nudge and a wink

Back-room deals are the staples that have bound us together for ever. This, of coarse should be common knowledge as pretty much everyone does these things. Making deals with each other has been the way of life since time began for humans. But what happens when you can no longer "own up" to the promises made? How can you pay your own deals if the one before you does not pay?
The case of Governments going broke is just that. The deals are all strung out and the music has stopped. Grab a chair and hope to hell the legs don't collapse! I think this is where we find ourselves as a race today. The escalator has reached the top, not much room for error. So now what, hmmm.
Is it me? I notice that most common jobs around the world pay for roughly the same level of life style. Why do we need elected officials tinkering with these things. All the deals they made " to get elected" need to be satisfied, putting strain on  the economy. This web of deals has become way to tangled, it all needs to be much more simplified. Easy to understand and in plain language. No more nudges and a wink.
7 billion and counting.