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!

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

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.

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.

Hacking IKEA aloe vera, and other rainy day fun

I probably shouldn't make a habit of simply reposting all the cool stuff I find on Arthur every day, but goshdarnit, this journal of "Homegrown Counterculture" has been on a roll lately--it's like a cross between Pitchfork and BoingBoing with a little Whole Earth Catalog for good measure. I was intrigued by the subject line "Repairing is the new recycling", except that I tend to stockpile broken stuff and never quite get around to repairing or recycling it. Nonetheless, I can certainly get behind the following manifesto. (Click on it for a readable version.)



Turns out the text is the work of a Dutch art and design collective called Platform 21, and judging from their various projects, they seem to have a pretty playful approach to their mission. There are a lot of artists around the world doing work along these lines lately, and I haven't really seen enough of P21's to get a good sense of how effective or thorough their particular approach may be, but I like what I see on their site. My eyes went straight for "Hacking Ikea" (2008):

Around the world, for a variety of personal motives, professional and nonprofessional designers are making individual alterations to off-the-shelf products. In the process, they pay little or no attention to a product’s original function. Some do it for fun, others out of necessity, and still others out of a critical attitude toward mass production. IKEA hacks--the appropriation, adaptation and transformation of standard IKEA products--are among the most noticeable expressions of this movement. IKEA is a very successful and consumer-friendly multinational, with a large fan base all across the Western and Asian world. But it is also a cultural entity, an economic force and an icon of global change. Therefore it is not surprising that numerous artists and designers as well as the general public, have a special relationship with IKEA. ...

Looking around my home, it's safe to say I have one of those "special relationships," too. The site contains several examples of Platform 21's members' and guest designers' mostly tongue-in-cheek "hacks," complete with IKEA-style diagrams of the specific products being recontextualized. I've included a shoutout to another one on my music blog, but you won't want to miss this satirical response to a common phenomenon:

There is no natural daylight in IKEA, though it does sell plants. They are at the end of the route, where they fulfill the role of decorations to be quickly snapped up. This annoys Frank Bruggeman, who has therefore created IKEA GARDENING: an indictment of the plant as an interior accessory, but at the same time a positive influence. It makes people aware of cultivation: plants are given space, and decorative fruits have been planted as seeds.

The closest store to me is in Southern Ontario--i.e., on the other side of a border that doesn't look kindly on international plant trafficking--so I can't rescue those sun-deprived aloes whether I want to or not. Here's Bruggeman's hack, as photographed by Leo Verger:



Not a bad setup--my favorite part, which I may well be misreading, is the apparent call to plant the potpurri mix. Free the captives of consumerism!

Appetite-spoiler alert (you have been warned)

I seem to have misread the opening line of the introduction to this post on Arthur magazine's blog and assumed that "mellow yellow" was the streetname of some cutting-edge alternaculture new energy drink mixing--you were warned, people--dandelion wine and urine. But no! Editor Jay Babcock was merely suggesting that in this earlier article by "radical ecologist, system designer, urban forager, teacher, artist and mad scientist of the living" Nance Klehm, those two liquids were discussed ... entirely separately. Klehm provides a relatively simple-sounding recipe for wine made from all those dandelions my husband always wants removed from our yard (and he's a homebrewer waiting for the hops I planted last year to take off, so he ought to be open to this latest experiment, too). She argues that the potassium-rich concoction is "one alcohol that actually helps your liver and kidneys!" (Are you listening, o intoxicated garden coach?)

A few paragraphs later, Klehm makes a compelling case for, uh, personalizing your compost with a handy source of nitrogen:

We humans pee on average a bit more than a quart a day, at a dilution rate of 1:5 (the recipe). Each one of us are producing more than two gallons of free plant fertilizer a day. Or around 750 gallons a year--which is enough fertilizer to grow 75% of an individual’s food needs for that year. ...

I can't seem to find anything about the practice in the index to Barbara Pleasant and Deborah Martin's Complete Compost Gardening Guide, but Klehm tells you everything you need to know, I suppose:

... Peeing directly into your compost pile is great. So is collecting it in a jar or a bucket and dumping it into the pile later. Not composting? Then just dilute it fresh (remember the recipe again, 1:5) with some water and use it directly on plants or let it oxidize and turn into a nitrate (i.e. leaving it out until it gets nice and dark) and then apply it undiluted. Not only is this something that has been done for ages around the world, it is still being done. Most people are just hush hush about it.

Given that several of the neighbors in my suburban neighborhood surely think I'm nuts for moving from lawn to flowerbeds, I don't see myself dropping trou in the back yard any time soon, but the jar? Hey, I'm open. (Hush, hush.)

Actually, the Klehm article is evoked in passing merely as a preface to a recent and related Op-Ed piece by Rose George in the New York Times. George is the author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, which was itself discussed in the Times here. She extends Klehm's argument with an international perspective:

Consider that since at least 135,000 urine-diversion toilets are in use in Sweden and that a Swiss aquatic institute did a six-year study of urine separation that found in its favor. In Sweden, some of the collected urine — which contains 80 percent of the nutrients in excrement — is given to farmers, with little objection. “If they can use urine and it’s cheap, they’ll use it,” said Petter Jenssen, a professor at the Agricultural University of Norway.

There's plenty more to mull over in both articles, but I'll leave the remainder of discoveries to you while I sneak off to the Little Garden Blogger's Room, bucket in hand.

Green home as dream home

I've been intrigued by wacky rogue architect Mike Reynolds and his gorgeous-looking "earthships" ever since I stumbled upon the 2007 documentary Garbage Warrior on either IFC or the Sundance Channel sometime last year. I vowed to find out more about him, but completely forgot.

Then the other day I was checking out inauguration-related programming on Al Gore's combination interactive TV station and website (I'm surprised how few people I know are aware that this exists) and caught the tail end of a "pod" (Current-speak for a short news segment, many of which are viewer-generated) devoted to Reynolds & co. I truly can't get over how enticing his eco-conscious buildings look:



As you can easily see in the image above, plants are prominently featured, not just for aesthetic purposes (though that is clearly a concern, too). Less obvious are the roles played by "graywater," rain barrels, and repurposed trash (plastic bottles, rubber tires, etc.)--once again, each element serves both function and form. Apparently there are some practical issues with these experimental homes, but I'd love to experience one of these beauties in action.