Uprooted and transplanted

OK, OK, so I don't really update this blog any more; when I discovered Facebook 5 or 6 years ago I realized it was a much better venue for my writing for a couple of reasons. First, it's a much faster and more efficient way to express ideas (and I am seeing that Twitter may be even faster and more efficient). Second--and more important to me--I have a lot of interests, including not just gardening but music  and travel and political rants, and on and on, and I felt compelled to maintain a separate blog for each in order to do them justice, when in fact it is the interconnections between them that fascinate me the most. And third, I get a lot more feedback and a lot less spam there. (In writing this post I see that Blogger has gotten even easier to use in the many years since I last worked with it--no more tedious HTML for links!--so it's possible I will return here from time to time, but don't hold your breath. See Reason Two again.)

I still garden, though I don't write about it as much these days--mainly because when the weather is good enough to be outside working in the garden, I'd rather be there, and when the weather is crappy, I find myself hibernating.

In time my website, everythingrondoes.com, will be your one-stop shop for (as the name implies) everything I do: writing, performing, making peculiar video pieces, and so on.

I encourage you to befriend me on Facebook (as RonEhmke; let me know you found me via this blog) or follow me on Twitter (@RonEhmke). I love hearing from fellow gardeners from around the world, so don't hesitate to say hello.

PS. The "New Growth from Old Faves" links on the right side of the page refresh every day, as do the weather reports from Tonawanda, N.Y. and the daily moon updates, so the blog does stay current in its way. Feel free to continue using it as a resource!

Bugging out

No apologies and no excuses for my latest extended absence. No, it's far more important to share with you this breaking news about spiders and their not-so-tiny brains. A little something to mull over as you come across tiny arachnids amongst your houseplants, as I have been known to do.

That is all. See you in a few hours/days/weeks/months, same Spider-time, same Spider-channel.

Look who's back (sort of)

The last thing I want to do after a lengthy absence from here is end up here, so I'll spare you all excuses and apologies, as well as any promises that I will ever post more often. But I just included a link to this semi-comatose blog in a little mini-essay on WNY garden walks/tours I wrote for my day job, so I figure anyone who ends up here through that deserves to see something new.

When in fact all you're really going to find here that's new is ... this! Which is merely steering you right back here! It's an internet mobius strip as vexing as the original Planet of the Apes chronology.

Since you're here, and since we are here to discuss nocturnal gardening, allow me to put in yet another plug for the two nighttime garden walks in the greater Buffalo area: a new one in the Kenmore/Town of Tonawanda area on Saturday, July 23, 2011 and a fairly long-running one in Black Rock on Saturday, August 6. The latter I've been to before and can gladly vouch for; the Ken/Ton one sounds promising. I gather night walks are big in other parts of the country, and I'm all for 'em. (Got two words for ya, but keep 'em under your hat: Open bar!)

The hosta-riffic photo above is from the Parkside walk I wrote about in the Spree post that shamed me into writing this one; that's only a small part of a lush shade garden. For the record, I've got plenty of photos of the Black Rock night tour, and it would be mighty tempting to share some of them here ... but that would involve promising you to stay tuned, wouldn't it? The mobius strip twists yet again!

If on a winter's night a traveler ...

OK, OK, so I'm not doing so well with that renewed vow to blog on a daily basis, although I'm kind of counting posts on Facebook and entries in my offline/private journal and doing fairly well in that regard. I certainly have an ever-growing backlog of things to write about here--

--and once again, they shall all wait in order that I may execute that laziest of all blog maneuvers, the reposting of someone else's YouTube videos. I found these two this evening after accidentally stumbling upon another one by the same media artist that I really liked, set to a song by a band (er, "electronic music duo" would be more accurate) I like. That one has nothing to do with gardening, but these two do.

First, a short but sweet hommage to winter:



From there, I found this surprisingly gorgeous look at critters we don't usually think of as gorgeous:



Think of it as a sequel to a similar video I posted in an earlier Lazy Blog Entry. Part of what I love about all of these is the way they depict natural cycles normally unseen by the human eye, devoid of the standard-issue Anthropomorphising Nature Documentary Narrator. In the two videos above, the electronic music--that most notoriously "cold" of sounds (at least to some people, not me so much)--heightens that sense that something is going on here which surpasseth human understanding or involvement.

PS. If you have somehow landed here in search of useful gardening information, check out this less glamorous but still impressive demonstration of how to deal with slugs whose careers as movie stars have ended.

Carl Jung, Boy Plant Geek

In my ongoing quest to read more and watch TV less, I've been hitting a lot of bases simultaneously. I've already mentioned my first year with Henry Mitchell, but another tome I've been slowly working through for a while now is Carl Jung's 1961 semi-autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It's a truly eccentric approach to memoir, with no false advertising in its title. Hard facts are downplayed in favor of dreams about divine turds and such.

At the very end of "School Years," the chapter on Jung's boyhood, I came across this intriguing and characteristically wacky passage as our hero is pondering his future academic studies:

Plants interested me too, but not in a scientific sense. I was attracted to them for a reason I could not understand, and with a strong feeling that they ought not to be pulled up and dried. They were living beings which had meaning only so long as they were growing and flowering--a hidden, secret meaning, one of God's thoughts. They were to be regarded with awe and contemplated with philosophical wonderment. What the biologist had to say about them was interesting, but it was not the essential thing. ... How were plants related to the Christian religion or to the negation of the Will, for example? ... They obviously partook of the divine state of innocence which it was better not to disturb. By way of contrast, insects were denatured plants--flowers and fruits which had presumed to crawl about on legs or stilts and to fly around with wings like the petals of blossoms, and busied themselves preying on plants. Because of this unlawful activity they were condemned to mass executions, June bugs and caterpillars being the especial targets of such punitive expeditions. My "sympathy with all creatures" was strictly limited to warm-blooded animals. The only exceptions among the cold-blooded vertebrates were frogs and toads, because of their resemblance to human beings.

Wild! There's a lot in that paragraph to mull over. I admit I have never thought much about the role of plants in regard to the negation of the Will, for one, nor I have ever considered insects as winged flowers. Then again, I'm not a late-19th century Swiss kid with a preacher dad. On the other hand, I think he's on to something with that business about the "hidden, secret meaning" of plants. Hard to pin down--but then that's what makes it secret.

Hail and Farewell

I thought sure I had taken pictures of this poor dear during the two-plus years it was thriving. Alas, this stark snapshot of its dismal end is all I can find:



May not look like much now, but behold its humble origin story: I am pretty sure it was an impatiens (what's the singular? impatien?), but whatever it was, it was an extra seedling that I had no room for in the yard. Rather than toss it out, I potted it up. Thinking it was an annual, I assumed if I was lucky it might stick around for the summer of 2008, maybe a bit of the fall, and then croak. But no! It just kept going and going, blooming now and then throughout the winter of 08/09 and then the summer of 09. I forgot it for weeks at a time (despite the fact that one thing I have learned in my gardening phase is that the smaller the container, the more often you have to water) and still it soldiered on. Looks like I finally ignored it a wee bit too long. It's bounced back from the edge of extinction more often than I care to admit, but something tells me it's finally time to say goodbye.

At the risk of revealing myself as the hippie flake I am apparently evolving into, a part of my garden, way in the back where visitors seldom venture, is designated as a kind of cemetery for favorite plants. (Most just land in one of the more conventional compost piles.) I make up a little 20-second ceremony on the spot, then drop them onto the ground where I know they'll eventually either break down or be eaten by some undiscriminating critter.

So goodbye, Little Impatiens (Or Whatever You Were) That Could. You will be missed.

Attention, internet-savvy deer

Appearances to the contrary, this is NOT a delicious blueberry:



Please share this information with the rest of your herd.
Many thanks, and happy belated holidays,
Ron and Don

Brand new year, same old resolution

Hey, I never said I was a regular post-er. But the new year brings with it a renewed promise (to myself) to blog every day, at one site or another of the half dozen or so I have a hand (at this point, a pinky finger) in.

It's not like I haven't been accumulating months' worth of potential posts all this time. Case in point, I've spent the last year reading the appropriate month's chapter of Henry Mitchell essays, something I intend to keep doing for at least the next two years, since he has at least two more books organized by month. (Is that wording clear? The concept is, these wonderful, laugh-out-loud-funny collections of the late, legendary writer's "Earthman" columns for the Washington Post are organized into 12 chapters apiece, allowing the reader to experience them by season. "January" thus contains essays like "In Winter's Adversity, the Hardy Gardener Flourishes," while "December" wraps up with "In Gardening, Timing is Key," which anticipates the annual bloomtimes of snowdrops and other spring bulbs.) So there's plenty to read even when the action outside has slowed down. I love this as an organizing principle, and am beginning to wish more books were laid out according to the calendar. Perhaps I'd even read notoriously long ones if I had a plan to follow.

On New Year's Eve I finished On Gardening, and on New Year's Day I started One Man's Garden. They are every bit as entertaining (and sometimes actually informative) as I'd heard. In theory, I'd be sharing the many thoughts inspired by these marvelous columns as they occur to me, but no such luck, at least with book one.

Brutal honesty is best, is it not? That's one takeaway from Mitchell--he never hesitates to admit when some brilliant horticultural goal of his has failed miserably. So instead, I'll quote the last line of OG, which has a kind of New Years resolution feel to it:

The great trick, I am now sure, is to flow with the tide.

Which is exactly what I strive to do, in cyberspace, in the garden, in my library, and everywhere else. Happy 2010 to you and yours.

A lazy post, especially after so many months of dormancy, but still irresistible

Found today at the always, always delightful vintage-album-cover blog, LP Cover Lover:



In other news, can it really be five months--almost the entire gardening season--since my last post here?! Impossible! I swear I have been writing entries here nearly every day, in my mind. Watch for some of them to materialize here, soon. In the meantime, watch out for those gorillas in the misty morning garden. I hear they are especially fond of tulips.

Happy Curb Day!

I first read about today's first-ever nationwide Curb Day in the Buffalo News earlier this week and have been excited about it ever since. (This link will likely expire in a day or two.) Sounds like a terrific idea--but the kind of thing that will only work if it truly goes viral offline as well as on, so I'm doing my bit to help spread the word (at the last possible minute, granted, but better late than never).

The predicted crappy weather around here may put a damp-er (sorry) on the fun in WNY, but it's worth a try. I meant to gather up some curbworthy donations tonight and then it slipped my mind. We've got a copy machine up for grabs if the rain lets up. This all strikes me as an ideal use for what Yankees call "the hellstrip" and Louisianians refer to as "the neutral ground"--that no-man's-land between your home (reservoir of clutter that it is) and the street. Here's a chance to turn it into every-man's/person's-land.

CURB DAY BONUS LINKS:
•Nike will take your old sneakers (any brand) and transform them into material for playgrounds
•Radio Shack will recycle old rechargeable cell phone and laptop batteries
•UPS will take back all those obnoxious styrofoam packing peanuts they use.

Beetlemania

I'm not off to a very impressive start with my "One-Man Book Club" idea, in which, theoretically, I report on the garden-related books I'm reading at any given moment. I'm reading a lot of them, actually, just not making time to write about them. For instance, I finished Amy Stewart's The Earth Moved at least a month ago and then moved on to, let's see, a bit more of Rudolf Borchardt's The Passionate Gardener and the last few chapters of Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012 (that one's not explicitly about gardening, but somehow it fits in for me), and now I'm on to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Somewhere in there I read a book about Findhorn, too. If all goes according to plan, I shall comment on each of these sooner or later. And this flurry of intellectual activity will surely stop as the weather stays warmer and spend more time playing in the dirt. But back to the earthworms for a sec. Here's a passage I bookmarked to quote:

When I stand at the edge of a forest, at the base of a mountain, or in my own backyard, looking down at the soil, I feel the way I do when I look out at the ocean, where great blue whales and giant squid swim the unknown depths, where sharks hunt and sea cucumbers wave with the currents. ... The ground has its own kind of fluidity, its own hidden world, its own mysterious inhabitants. What creatures, I wonder, would rise up from the surface of the earth if I stood long enough and watched?

Entomologist Douglas Emlen has an answer to that question: the dung beetle! Previously known to me only as the star of a Kafka story, this lowly critter (who lives a good couple of inches into the soil under pretty much any and every animal's droppings) turns out to be pretty remarkable, as Emlen explains to Terry Gross on this fascinating episode of Fresh Air devoted to his life's work. Do not miss the curiously beautiful photo gallery or the video of two beetles fighting. Looking at them, I cannot help but think of a certain album cover:

A legacy of leaves

I promised more on the aftermath of my father's recent death. First, here's a recent view of his backyard. Bear in mind he didn't live at home for the last year of his life, which accounts for a little of the overgrown-jungle aesthetic, but even in his heyday Dad was into letting things grow a bit wild:



Those tall, cornlike stalks to the left are ginger, my niece's husband told me. Dad had given him a little a couple of years back, and Lynn loved the smell when it was in bloom, so he was hoping to get more on this trip. (I'm pretty sure, but not positive, that it's this edible kind and not some poisonous ornamental variety. Fingers crossed!) That request, and my own desire to get some more clippings of his mammoth "shrimp plant" (Justicia brandegeana, which used to adorn the entrance to the house where I grew up, and which grows abundantly throughout Louisiana), gave me the idea to bring back to Buffalo a few examples of my father's handiwork as a living reminder of his lifelong devotion to growing things. As I noted before, most of what Dad grew is not really that hard to find in my current neck of the woods; they're just houseplants up here.

Let's continue the tour for a moment. Here's one of my favorite parts of his front yard:



Those ferns popped up everywhere, including this unusual (to me) instance where they almost appear to be growing out of the house itself, midway up one wall:



You can find them anywhere, but they also seemed easy to transport, so I snagged a couple of smallish ferns, along with the ginger, a couple of colocasia/elephant ears (they literally grow like weeds in his yard), a bit of kalanchoe, sanseveria, and his beloved aloe vera. I figured it was mainly a conceptual gesture and I had nothing to lose if the transplants didn't survive. (Somewhere during my labors my sister walked through the yard and pointed out large amounts of poison sumac throughout the property, and then I began to worry I was bringing that with me, too.) Several of my family members expressed skepticism that you could mail plant material across the country in the age of bioterrorism, but UPS said that was not an issue at all. (Besides, nurseries do it all the time, right?) My first thought was to pack everything in plastic pots with a bit of the surrounding soil, but then I found several online resources that all suggested that bare-root is the way to go, both economically and for the health of the plants. (I'd intended to include a link here to a helpful how-to video, but I seem not to have kept the URL. But hey, you can find it yourself if you're that interested. You wrap the roots or bulbs with a moist papertowel, then wrap that inside some plastic wrap or a baggie, taking care not to cover the stalks or leaves. Long story short, it seems to work, which is to say, my specimens did not look dead when they arrived.)

UPS packed everything up for me for not much money; alas, overnighting the smallish box would have cost a whopping $200 or more, which would completely have undermined my "I have nothing to lose" mantra, so I settled for the slowest possible shipping rate: the box sat unsent in their office over the weekend, then left Louisiana on Monday and arrived in New York state on Thursday for a still-hefty 40 bucks. In retrospect, I wish I had told the UPS crew to be sure and leave the box open as long as possible, and to double check the moistness of the paper towels, but that all worked just fine. Everything has subsequently been potted, and I've got my fingers crossed that at least a few will grow again. The kalanchoe's doing best as of now, but I'm also starting to see sprouts on the elephant ears. We'll see what else happens in the fullness of time.

Funeral for a farmer

The family emergency I've referred to here as my reason for not posting more often lately was the last days and subsequent death of my father. He grew up on a wheat farm in western Kansas in the 1920s and lived through the ravages of the Great Depression smack dab in the middle of the Dust Bowl. (All the photos I have from his childhood look like they could have been shot by Dorothea Lange.) I've often credited him with instilling in me a lifelong disdain for waste and introducing me to composting back in the 1970s, when it wasn't nearly as hip and trendy as it is today, certainly not in the smallish Louisiana city where I grew up. He's also a big reason for my current interest in gardening; lord knows it gave us a lot more to talk about in our weekly phone conversations for the last few years. Even before I dove headlong into plant geekery, I was a dedicated composter for at least a dozen years, entirely in his honor.

There's a lot I'd like to say about him here, but I haven't really had the energy for it just yet. (My mother's death about 13 years ago was really traumatic, but I honestly wasn't expecting my dad's passing to take the toll it seems to be taking on me. Granted, the play I was part of at exactly the same time his health was declining was another major factor in my current lethargy.) For now I will simply relate the end of his story: when it came time to prepare a memorial service for him, I thought it would be fitting to incorporate some of the plants he'd grown in his backyard--nothing fancy, just plentiful alocasia, kalanchoe, ferns, and other tropicals that are confined to houseplant status up north. My niece's husband waded through a post-rain swamp to gather cuttings (little did I know he had nurserymen in his own family, but more on that in a later installment) and other family members assembled them in vases and other containers we found among his things. We displayed these at the funeral home, and the next day at his church.

The funeral home offered us one of those memorial cards that are a staple of Catholic funerals--not so much with Lutherans, at least not when I grew up--and rather than go with their default text, I offered to provide something more appropriate. Dad was a lifelong churchgoer, so I felt obliged to go biblical, especially after my concept for a mini-bio detailing the various stages of his life ("farmer / son / father / gardener / etc") just wasn't working. I scoured the (Bible-less) library in the guest room of my friends' home where we spent the week and found a couple of books by the German theologian and political prisoner of the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which in turn steered me to a nice image from Isaiah 61: "For as the soil makes the sprout come up and a garden causes seeds to grow, so the Sovereign Lord will make righteousness and praise spring up before all nations."

We also had plenty of input in the church service, so I made a request for the Protestant hymn "In the Garden." It's not a regular part of the Lutheran repertoire (and the pastor warned us that the congregation would be less likely to sing songs they didn't grow up with), but it worked. I'm assuming you know the song; I've got several versions on vinyl that I like more than this recording by Johnny Cash (in that stripped-down Rick Rubin phase of his), but this one does convey the unvarnished poetry of the lyrics just fine:



I loved the fact that the pastor devoted a portion of his sermon to Dad's garden--"As everyone knew who ever visited his house, Charles could grow anything," he said early on, after noting the enormous commitment it took for a young man on a farm to take on a wife with four children from a previous marriage. (There was also a spot-on joke about Dad's refusal to turn the damn air conditioner on, in the middle of a typical 100-degree, 100-percent-humidity August afternoon.) It was the kind of eulogy I'd be thrilled to be the subject of, full of personal references reflecting the two men's history together, rather than some generic boilerplate. My father was a pretty eccentric guy, when you get right down to it, and I'd like to think we celebrated his uniqueness with a pair of events as idiosyncratic and down to earth (in more ways than one) as his life had been.

Adorable yet annoying

I assure you, I shall soon resume posting here more often (warned you early on, my record is spotty at best). In the meantime, let's recall the real reason god invented the internet: to let us stumble upon and share stuff like this ...



Cute, yes, but this guy's relatives are the thugs who treated our tulip beds like a salad bar a few days ago.

Of doo-doo and Doo-Dah

I hope to be back in blogging shape again soon, but a family emergency has occupied most of my energy and time of late. Even so, I can't resist calling your attention to this wonderful reprint (repost?) of Daniel Chamberlin's profile from a 2007 Arthur of "Sodfather"/"California compost wizard" Tim Dundon. The main focus of the piece is a wild tale that, "like any good gardening story, encompasses Hollywood producers, fires, suicide, PCP injection, a nude Quaker iconoclast, standoffs with city officials and a violent pet coyote." But just as fascinating--to me, at least--is the way Chamberlin interweaves an entire scientific/socio-political history of organic farming/gardening dating back more to approximately 2400 BC. The prose is both witty and informative, as we see in this passage that explains what all those creepy crawling things are up in my compost pile:

The first stage of decomposition in composting is chemical: microscopic organisms flock to the dead thing and start to secrete enzymes that break it down on a cellular level. As bacteria, saprophytic mushrooms and other fungi eat and digest, they give off considerable heat, causing compost piles to steam and occasionally even catch fire from the trillions of tiny post-dinner bacterial farts. ...

... As the chemical decomposers make the dead organic matter a bit more malleable, the physical decomposers start to show up. Millipedes, sow bugs, springtails and snails are happy to chomp up the plants. Flies arrive bringing more bacteria to the buffet, leaving behind eggs and maggots for spiders, centipedes, mites and beetles to eat. Ants replenish the fungi, transport minerals from within and without of the pile and eat plants and insects. But the most accomplished of all the decomposers is without question the earthworm. ... These original slimy alchemists eat dirt and shit out the organic equivalent of gold: castings, also known as vermicompost. Castings enrich the soil with nitrogen, calcium, magnesium and other minerals, in addition to increasing its ability to retain water. And they attract more earthworms, too.

Speaking of alchemy, Chamberlin begins his piece elaborating a connection that has long been implicit and intuitive to me:

Alchemists were up to plenty of things, many of them having to do with relating to the natural world—and understanding its processes of transformation and transmutation—in philosophical and spiritual dimensions that transcended traditional religious thinking, both Christian and pagan, and preceded modern scientific thought. The whole “lead into gold” thing was but the most lucrative of the alchemical —or hermetic—practices in the eyes of the monarchs and rulers. Alchemy’s material prima as Peter Lamborn Wilson writes in the recent collection Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, “can be found ‘on any dung hill.’ Hermeticism changes shit into gold.”

In short, the article suggests bridges between all kinds of things I'm interested in (see the tags/labels below), and makes a perfect capper to my reading of Amy Stewart's earthworm book, which I've been intending to write more about--and which I surely will write more about when the time is right.

Spring has (sort of) sprung

Three cheers for the first day of Spring!
Pity it was still in the twenties this morning.
On the other hand, if you live in Western New York, you know not to get your hopes up.

By far the most pleasant surprise of the day was hearing a strange dripping sound outside, which grew into a loud tapping noise. The source? A woodpecker--not the sort of bird we see (or hear) every day in these parts. Good thing I'd just brought home a review copy of Robert Budliger and Gregory Kennedy's 2005 guide to Birds of New York State that had been sitting around my office for years.



Handy reference guide, although I confess I couldn't figure out which of 9 different woodpeckers I saw. I was mainly consulting the guide to find out why exactly the birds peck in the first place, and it turns out each variety has its own reason: building a nest, finding food, even flirting with the ladies. I also learned that Picoides villosus--the hairy woodpecker--has a tongue four times the length of its bill, which retracts into its mouth "in much the same way that a measuring tape is stored in its case." That may not be the one I saw, who flew to a different tree just as I was getting ready to snap a photo. Foiled again!

At a snail's pace

Talk about timing: I write about snails as a metaphor for slowing down daily life, and mere days later, Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge airs an excellent episode devoted to "Facing Time". It's packed with great segments, including a look at the Clock of the Long Now (a mechanical clock being constructed in the Nevada desert by the Long Now Foundation and designed to run for 10,000 years), an interview with Carl Honore "(the unofficial godfather of the Slowness movement"), and a conversation with anthropologist Wade Davis about the Australian aboriginal notion of "the Dreamtime."

I'm particularly drawn to this Slowness business, and sense a connection between it and this argument (run in Arthur's blog) by Douglas Rushkoff:

With any luck, the economy will never recover.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. .... If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

On the opposite end of the speed spectrum from the clock above is this item from the Blog of the Long Now about

an experiment in scale: By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a minute, the video is a self-contained timepiece. Like a specialized clock, it gives one a sense of perspective. Everything — from the formation of the Earth, to the Cambrian Explosion, to the evolution of mice and squirrels — is proportionate to everything else, displaying humankind as a blip, almost indiscernible in the layered course of history.

The video is a project of the provocatively named Seed magazine, where I also found all sorts of other cool stuff I intend to share here ... eventually.

Fun with snails

Behold the common gastropod: you may embrace him as a fellow resident of the planet, mock his glacial pace, express fear or disgust at the many ways in which his life does not resemble your own. Or do all of the above and more ...

First, though, someone might want to break it to the folks who put this clip together that his stars probably aren't "fighting":



Next, courtesy of BoingBoing, a different perspective on this lowly, slowly moving creature:


Snails Go west ! Funny TimeLapse from www.time-lapse.fr on Vimeo.

Found that one here, and in the course of trying to track it down again, I came across this "Interesting Thing of the Day" about "non-human farmers" of all sorts:

It was only recently that marsh snails (Littoraria irrorata) were added to the list of animal farmers; they are also the first in the marine world known to be fungiculturists. Marsh snails live in salt marshes and their main food is a fungus that grows on cordgrass leaves. Similar to the damselfish, they cut the cordgrass leaves to create wounds, and lay their excrement into the wounds. The excrement contains the fungal spores (like seeds) and also the nutrients for the fungus to flourish in. Although in snail colonies as many as 1,000 snails per square meter can be found, snails are non-social. Therefore, complex societal structures are not a requirement for farming.

Speaking of excrement, here--by way of an interesting blogpost I found through, you guessed it, BB--is a bit of "zombie snail" action demonstrating that nature is not always a land of rainbows and ponies (though it is a land of all sorts of symbiotic interrelationships between species). I suppose I should warn some of you that this is not for the squeamish, even though it's not that creepy.



Not scared yet? Let's not forget the Giant African Land Snails, who do sound like bad news. But on to happier matters--because that which does not kill us can be taught to deliver our mail.



That's right, I'm talking about RealSnailMail (which BB covered here). According to the BBC, it works like this:

Each snail is fitted with a tiny capsule which holds a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip. RFID allows objects to communicate over short distances. Users of the service send a message via the Real Snail Mail website which is routed to the tank at the speed of light to await collection by a snail "agent". As the three snails slowly amble around the tank, they occasionally come into range of an electronic reader, which attaches the e-mail message to the RFID chip. The electronic messages are then physically carried around the tank by the snails until one of the gastropods passes close to a second reader.
It is then forwarded over the net in the usual way. "It could be quite frustrating for some people," Vicky Isley, one of the artists told BBC News. "It's completely subverting that normal system." So far, the three snails have managed to deliver 14 messages.

The accompanying blog looks pretty cool, and it tipped me off to a "Slow Art" Exhibition during last year's SIGGRAPH. (Damn, I was just too slow in finding out about it to attend!) And here is where my sudden (er, gradual?) interest in the shelled critters moves from cheap jokes and clever puns to a pointed social critique I can really get behind:

In our digital culture, we can task simultaneously, message instantly, and prototype rapidly, but, in doing so, do we create an oasis for contemplation, or do we fuel a hunger for yet more speed? As technology colors all aspects of our world, we see the inevitable pendular response in campaigns that advocate slowness.

The Italian membership organization Cittaslow's manifesto defines criteria for slow cities, focusing on improved quality of life. Internationally, people are organizing to protect regional food systems, traditions, and cuisine as part of the Slow Food Movement. There is a return to artisanship, and a renewed focus on the local, as opposed to the global.

On the other hand, an earlier BB post established that snails can make for speedier data transfer than other life forms. Finally, if it's speed you want--or the chance to exploit a few defenseless critters yourself--behold these directions for running your very own snail race.

Thank you for your time, ladies and germs. And now I am late for work, as it has taken me far longer to post this than I had hoped.

Come out, come out, wherever you are

Everybody else I know is way past Paperwhite Season, but not here at Gardening at Night Central. I've got approximately six containers housing narcissus bulbs, started at various times throughout the winter, and they all look pretty much like this now:

Actually, this sort of late blooming is right in line with the G@Nt aesthetic, which calls for starting things way too late (at night, or in the year). And it's not a bad look, as looks go--ripe with potential. Just no payoff. Not yet, at least.

Anybody reading this have any idea what's going on? These aren't zivas but Grand Soleil D'Or tazettas, which are supposed to take longer to do their business, but still. Some of them have been at this stage for weeks; others have just reached it. Some have gotten lots of sun; others less. There's plenty of water, but not too much. In short, I've done nothing differently than in other years, when I've had more success.

The hyacinths I forced (keeping no good record of when I started their 10 weeks of cold) have also been taking their sweet time, but they're basically doing fine, and I'm getting essentially one in bloom at a time, which is pretty much what I had hoped for in the first place. The paperwhites, though, are a bloomin' mystery!

Bustin' out all over ... soon

In honor of Daylight Saving(s) Time and the eventual arrival of Spr*ng ...

The view outside the living room window:

Sure, it looks gray, but examine those branches a little closer and you find hints of things to come:

And speaking of buds, this tulip looks a little like candy corn at the moment, but all things in time:

These bedraggled yellow shoots are allium of one sort or another--either blooming, or plain old onions from last year:

I just hope these guys aren't popping up too soon; March, and even April, in Buffalo can easily bring either snow or bitter cold or both.

Speaking of DST, NPR has aired quite a few stories on the history of the phenomenon itself, possible health effects, malcontents, and the consequences of its recent move to March. Lotsa plugs for this book along the way.