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!

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.

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.

Seeds and roots

Okay, so it's really 1/1/09 as I write. This inaugural entry languished (practically blank) for a year in my Saved Drafts folder, and I've kept the original date to show just how long I've had the idea for a new blog. Despite these compelling arguments to the contrary, a big part of the appeal of a garden for me is that it's the first full-fledged hobby I've had since my junior high days making candles and flying model rockets. If you define a hobby as something outside of what you do for a living, then, since a big part of what I do for a living is writing, it follows that the best way to preserve the hobby-ness of gardening would be ... not to write about it ...

... Except that another big part of what I enjoy about this newfound passion is the myriad connections I find between working outside and the other aspects of my life, and writing about things has historically been one of the best means I have to think them through. A dilemma!

As I've planted, weeded, deadheaded, and composted, I've made plenty of mental notes for this hypothetical blog--just as I continue to make mental notes for this other one that was going great guns for a while, then ground to an unintentional halt in April 2008 ... to say nothing of this one I started last summer and these three others to which I sometimes contribute (as well as several more where I prefer to remain anonymous). I've collected literally dozens of bookmarked links for all of the above, and the time has come to turn those mental notes into actual blog posts.

Call it a New Year's resolution if you must, but I'm vowing to devote a few minutes every day to working on at least one of this multitude of blogs. One holdup in getting this one started has been the impulse to compose some sort of comprehensive introduction or mission statement to explain what it's about, what it's not about, and so on. But, just as I've neglected all those books recommending that I draw up a design for the garden before planting anything and have instead simply dug holes and stuck plants in them (or, to be more precise, bought plants first, left them sitting around for days or weeks, and then dug holes for them), perhaps it would work better if I just started writing here and let you figure out what I'm up to at the same that I do.

See? That's exactly the kind of metaphor I have in mind--so let's get digging.