Alley Garden Update

Well it continues to be a fun time with our gardens. I now have two patches for veggies. We’ve eaten red potatoes, broccoli, ichiban eggplant, green pepper, green beans, jalapeno peppers, collard greens, tomatoes and cherry tomatoes from our own garden so far this year.

It’s not like it has come in any great quantity, although the potato salad at a recent family gathering was made with potatoes fresh out of the earth. The tomatoes actually have a taste to them! And it’s delicious! Honestly, every bit of it is better than store bought.

This is my tomato bed. You can see them staked up. Those beautiful squash plants with the big green leaves and yellow flowers unfortunately all got diseased and died. We think it was powdery mildew that got to them. Everyone we know that had been growing squash all got it and died. The lighter green in the foreground are green bean plants.

This is from a Rose of Sharon that got totally diseased a couple of years ago and we completely cut it back. It came back. Isn’t that a beautiful bloom?

The view out the back door onto the carport/patio.

It simply pleases me to have these gardens, and this has really surprised me - just how much pleasure I've gotten from doing this. I never thought of it that much before, but there is something to it. It helps one to get a better perspective on the world. It moves one out of the programmed industrial city culture and into the energetic, vital, natural world that our genetic blueprint grew out of. I encourage everyone to have something growing. It doesn’t have to be big, just something that grows and needs to be taken care of.

/

McCain. McSame. McBush.

Sorry that I’ve been offline lately. There’s really been too much going on, and one thing pushes out another, as Barleyman used to say, but we’ll try:

How anyone could be for John McCain I don’t know. The guy is a total lightweight. Wes Clark was right on when he said getting shot down and becoming a POW does not, in itself, qualify one for being president. Now all the pundits are blathering about him besmirching McCain’s service. Asinine! He praised McCain’s service, but said what happened to him does not ipso facto qualify him for the presidency. But since the right wing doesn’t have anything to run on, besides running the country into the dirt the past eight to thirty years they have to twist what was said to get sympathy for McCain, I guess.

I would like to see what McCain’s psychological profile says. I find it hard to believe that someone can be a POW for five years, tortured, stuck in a cage sometimes and not come out with some issues that need to be dealt with. I want to know if he has. His reputation is that he has a violent temper, serious potty mouth, and has been known to take swings at people. I guess this is quintessentially American, but it’s not what I want in the presidency.

But getting back, it’s obvious that he doesn’t know anything about economics (as he’s admitted). He’s supposed to know about foreign affairs (not!) which we’ve touched on before. About all he can do is give you that creepy smile of his and say vote for me I was a POW.

Barack Obama may not be the second coming of Christ, but he’s the best politician to come along in a very long time. At least there’s a measure of hope if Obama’s elected, none of it’s McCain, IMHO.

/