I have now passed S1 of Deadwood along to Fanboy Joe; Patricia is working her way through S2. Bwa ha ha.
It was amazing to watch the last shuttle launch in Hi-Def.
Barbecued chicken, salad, garlic bread and pickled beets for dins last night. Tonight steak and taters, because I feel like it. The weather has been quite wet, but I’m happy about that as I have not had to water my transplants. All of the seedlings Richter’s sent me survived except for one gai lan. Nautilus3 warned me I’d need to feed the strawberries so soon I will be getting plant food.
The Luddite’s garden is an amazing collection of homemade bean poles, enormous raspberry plants, clematis, chives, strawberries in containers, and overgrown flowerbeds full of California poppies and other things I can’t recognize. He recently evicted a skunk from under the porch. He lined broken mirrors that he found in alleyways along one side of the back vegetable bed to increase the amount of light; the effect is hard to describe but I think it’s really cool, and it does work to increase the light rather dramatically.
The homemade bean poles. OMG. He deliberately pruned a pear tree to make straight branches and then cut them all down last weekend to make THE most SKOOKUM bean poles you ever saw in your life. They are bean poles for the ages.
The garden at this house is pretty nice for a rental. There are a lot of pretty flowering shrubs, and I love the ivy on the front porch, it’s one of the things that sold this apartment to me.
Tell The Luddite there is another strategy for bean poles. Grow them. After a few years a suitable bamboo patch becomes a pole factory. And since the pandas didn’t turn up (“If you build it, they will come,”) I have been harvesting bamboo and looking for things to climb on it.