dirtsunrainredux

Making Tracks

2008-02-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

The weather is fantastic today. Sunny and around freezing, not cold enough to make going outdoors unpleasant, but not warm enough to ponder rearranging the garden shed.

The yard has been a busy place today and the snow has recorded it all.

A course-correcting Jack Russell and basketball.

A cousin on the way to hockey practice.

A rabbit that stopped quickly and moved on.

Everyone ends up under the bird feeders sooner or later.

Piglet tracks a crow. She hates them.

Speaking of making tracks, this will be my last blog post for the next couple of weeks. I'm headed to Georgia to do some work on another project and get my living situation sorted out. I'll probably lend a hand with my friend Jon's garden and get some plants started for my restaurant's container garden while I'm down there so there may be sporadic posts.

I'll keep track of everyone's blogs via Google Reader and participate when I can. To those of you with seeds started, good luck and to those of you South of the Equator, good harvest!

My Valentine

2008-02-13T22:33:00.000-08:00

Here's my Valentine to you dear readers, specifically the head of St. Valentine. I can't believe I'm dragging out the vacation pictures again. What's worse is I took the picture so I'd have something to post four months later. Click on the picture for a better view.

Blog Filler

2008-02-12T09:52:00.000-08:00

There isn't much to blog about garden-wise when the temperatures have dipped into the single digits. I don't want to think about the wind chill factor. It's just cold people.

The house was built in the 80's and is well insulated, has double-glazed windows and a brand new furnace. This is all good stuff, but it also has these aluminum framed sliding glass doors which transmit the cold very efficiently. If it gets cold enough, the moisture in the air will condense on the frames and you get frost and ice. Yes, the doors are going to be replaced at some point, just not this week.

There was a bit of a problem with the plumbing last week, the WC in the basement wasn't flushing properly and I had a plumber out. apparently there was some sort of blockage down the line just before the vent stack and hydrogen sulfide gas was collecting in the pipes and bubbling up. What a great day, bitterly cold outside and the house reeking of rotten eggs. Fun for everyone! It gets better. The previous owner of the house covered the clean-out with the front deck. I was out in the snow with my circular saw making an access in the deck.

Late January, early February are eagerly awaited around here. Forget football, it's DOG SHOW SEASON! The AKC/Eukanuba, The Westminister AND The Puppy Bowl all happen within two weeks of each other. Roughly twelve hours of dogs, dogs and more dogs on the teevee.

Which means twelve hours of Piglet jumping around and barking at the dogs on the teevee. One of these days she's going to knock it right off the stand and I'll be forced to buy a wall-mounted plasma flat screen .

Coverage of the AKC/Eukanuba was great, the Puppy Bowl on Super Bowl Sunday is always a winner (Sadly there's been an outbreak of parvo and at least four of the puppies have died), so it was a huge disappointment when The Westminster's live telecast sucked. Too much talking, not enough dogs and just when the Terrier Group was starting, the program ended and coverage was shifted to another channel that isn't part of the eighty billion in my cable package.

Something To Rant About

2008-02-10T11:14:00.000-08:00

I spent my teenage years at Ground Zero for 1970's Environmentalism. Marin County, California had a mixture of hippies and affluent Progressives who preached recycling and water conservation long before it was fashionable. The water conservation part was a no-brainer, Marin County had a prolonged drought in the late seventies and flushing your toilet until it was absolutely necessary was a major faux pas.

Marin County is still pretty crunchy, but nothing like the seventies. There are McMansions in Bolinas, a town that used to remove the signage along the back roads so tourists couldn't find the place. For what it's worth, Bolinas was where we got all our good pot when we were teens.

Anyway, all this exposure to Hippies, Yuppies and proto-Eco Politics has had an effect on the rest of my life. You don't rub elbows with the likes of Stewart Brand , Werner Erhard and Jerry Garcia when you're kid and not come away with something to show for it. In my case it was disdain for hippies; I spent High School in a motorcycle jacket and green hair, but I made sure to separate my trash and take my cotton net bags to the market.

"Get to the point" you're muttering, I am, I am.

Scrolling through the NY Times today (electronic edition, not dead tree, thank you!) I read an interesting article, that hit on one of my pet peeves; Suburbs. In the interest of balance, I live in a suburban setting and have for most of my life so I'm a hypocrite AND a qualified critic.

My problem with suburbs are pretty universal. Inefficient usage of land, destruction of wildlife habitat, chemical drenched lawns, lack of pedestrian infrastructure.. The list goes on and on. The classic suburb is over-reliant on cars, breeds hideous strip malls and consumes massive amounts of resources to prop up an ersatz "Country" lifestyle.

The suburb's most dubious achievement is the Gated Community with it's attendant HOA. The Home Owner's Association is a great idea in theory, property values are protected, common spaces are maintained and amenities are made possible. The problem is that HOAs often get taken over by the more Totalitarian-minded residents and things like vegetable gardens, compost piles and clotheslines are ruled out as blights.

The point of my rant is this: If you're going to live outside the city, why would you abandon the very things that make the country-side so attractive? Why bulldoze woods and replace it with acres of golf course-like lawns that your job in the city won't give you the time to maintain on your own? Why, oh why do you find neat rows of tomatoes and clothes drying in the sun so offensive?

In many cases, that zero lot line McMansion plopped down in developments with twee names like "Northpointe at Creek Run" used to be an actual farm, with actual crops and animals and presumably land values got to a point that the original owners were resigned to cashing out.
Farmers who hold out may eventually find themselves in court for so-called "quality of life" issues like odors and escaped livestock. I'm not going to mince any words here, anyone who moves next door to a farm and starts bitching about the operation deserves to be buried in the annual out-put of manure from said farm.

Marin County saw the writing on the wall over twenty years ago. The mostly agricultural western half of the county was being eyed as prime development land and the ranchers and farmers banded together with environmentalists to form The Marin Agricultural Land Trust.
The sprawl that exploded into the East and South Bay Area in the 1980's could have easily happened in the coastal hills of Marin if it weren't for MALT. I am not anti-growth and I will defend anyone's right to live where they choose, but farms and ranches have a greater value to society than a gated enclave full of mock Tudors, lit up at night like casinos with punched-in landscaping.

As a suburbanite, I try to practice what I preach. I grow a considerable amount of my own food in my yard. I compost my leaves and lawn clippings, keep my car trips to a minimum and sort my trash religiously. I need to make a better effort at harvesting rainwater and diverting my grey water. I gave up on the lawn a long time ago and if it weren't for the size of the lot, I would have gotten rid of the lawn tractor. Obviously, I'm not living a completely green life. My business is closely tied to suburb-dwellers, but I'm making an effort to balance my own use of resources.

In a perfect world, we would all be carbon-neutral and self-sustaining, but that lack of perfection shouldn't deter us from trying. We don't have to replace every light bulb in the house all at once or turn the whole lawn over to food production, but we can set goals for ourselves and our communities to lessen our impact and edge closer to a greener suburb.

I Wish I Were Making This Up II

2008-02-08T14:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was my birthday, something I don't make a huge fuss over, but the piece of mail in the picture above arrived with a couple of birthday cards. They say the years between 40 and 50 can be rough, but was this really necessary? To make matters worse, the man in the picture vaguely resembles me.

The Perfect Storm

2008-02-07T13:02:00.000-08:00

A combination of work, a new cookbook, a video game and good weather have conspired to drag my attention from posting, a Perfect Storm of distraction.

To begin with, a friend and I are doing a consulting for a caffe north of Atlanta. The owners are very nice and the business is good, but it could be better and we're fine tuning the menu and operation. Its difficult to do business long-distance so I'll have to head down there some time at the end of the month, but in the meantime there are recipes to test, drawings to pore over and paint chips litter my desk.

The weather was uncommonly good at the beginning of the week and I spent an entire day collecting fallen branches and pulling weeds in the garden. The Winter has been unusually warm (I get the feeling this is the new normal). The Lake hasn't frozen over and there are already goslings on some of the ponds. It felt nice to get out and do some work on the garden, despite the muddy lawn and I'm having a hard time accepting that the garden will probably lie fallow this year unless someone in the family wants to maintain it.

I'm looking for a place to do my gardening in Georgia, but I don't think I'll be gardening on the same scale for a season; however there is no way in hell I'm going without home-grown tomatoes and herbs, fear not!

I've also been in the kitchen a lot, trying out pizza recipes which seems like a win/win situation, but as I get older I'm getting more lactose intolerant. The Gelato Binge of 2007 in Rome was probably my last hurrah as a dairy eater. This sucks because I love cheese and gelato. Lots of chewing pizza and spitting it out going on in my kitchen this week.

I've also got a new cookbook that I'm dying to get into. 1080 Recipes by Simone and Ines Ortega, a bruiser of a book that covers most of Spain's cuisine. I guess the best way to describe it is that its Spain's Joy of Cooking, like it's Italian cousin, The Silver Spoon. The reviews I've read have been mixed, but its a handsome book with beautiful illustrations and color photographs. I have one complaint: The photographs are stitched into the book on much smaller pages and I don't see them surviving the level of abuse I dish out to my books.

The biggest distraction lately is Tiger Woods 2008. I couldn't find this game for months and after looking in three different cities at many many stores I finally scored it. I guess everyone that got a Wii around Christmas was my competition. I don't even LIKE golf, but I'm hooked on this game. There's worse ways to spend the long, dark nights in Winter I suppose, but my video golf game is ruining my video tennis game. I'm a dork, right?

Synchronicity

2008-01-29T09:37:00.000-08:00

I was just answering a comment in the last post about Jeph's bird feeders drawing predators and something caught my eye outside. The picture sucks and you'll have to zoom to barely see what's circled, but in short; a coyote just traipsed through the neighborhood in broad daylight.

Bad news for Piglet who's all of twelve pounds. I was working on a house in Woodside, California about fifteen years ago and my employer's Jack Russell Terrier, Martha was taken by a coyote in about the time it took to let her out the back door. Piglet is going to lose some of her freedom to roam for a while. (she has an electronic fence that circles the property).

I don't want to write any "a dingo et mah baby" posts. *shudder*

I Wish I Were Making This Up

2008-01-28T16:52:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to take pictures of this, but it is so damn odd I had to report it. Yes, odder than keeping a falcon's head in the freezer. I know... Hard to imagine.

Those of you who live in climates with four discernible seasons are familiar with snow, the shoveling of snow and what needs shoveling. Some of you will even be versed in the use of a snow blower and will really get a kick out of this.

My neighbor spent the better part of yesterday afternoon running his snow blower over his front and side yards. Not his driveway, walkways etc. His lawn. He cleared the freaking snow from his lawn! This isn't the first time he's done it either. If you've never had to clear snow I can only explain that using a snow blower to clear your lawn makes as much sense as pushing your car to work. The only thing you could do that was more useless than clearing your lawn of snow with a snow blower would be to do the same thing with a shovel.

Not only will you waste a lot of time, make a lot of noise and waste some gasoline, you will also expose your lawn to the elements, drying the soil out and possibly killing the roots. If the ground is still soft, you will tear up turf, put ruts in the lawn and possibly suck yard debris into the snow blower. Worst of all, your mean neighbor will blog about your idiocy and then trade snarky comments about you with his mean blog friends.

The Hunter Becomes The Hunted

2008-01-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

I told you things would be back to normal around here. The little dramas that go on in the garden unobserved continue.

I noticed a patch of disturbed snow near one of the feeding stations yesterday. There were feathers laying around and it looked like there was quite a struggle.

The strange thing is most of the feathers were large and striped, something I associate with the various hawks and falcons that harass the sparrows, jays, cardinals, etc. that visit the yard. I neither encourage or discourage the raptors, they just are and everyone has to eat, right?

In this case, one of the larger hawks seems to have caught a smaller falcon off guard and made a meal of it. Further investigation of what was left of the falcon leads me to believe that it was an older bird as one of it's eyes looked to have cataracts.

It sounds a bit creepy, but I'm going to keep the head frozen and lay it on the grass in a safe spot when the weather warms up. The ants and other insects will pick the skull clean and I'll add the skull to my collection of bones, stones and other curios dug up in the garden.

The Reveal

2008-01-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

It's a bit anti-climactic, but in short; Dirt Sun Rain is moving South to Johns Creek, Georgia.

I've been puttering around the garden here in Pennsylvania for the past five years in a state of semi-retirement and while satisfying and healthy it's a life I'm meant to be living about fifteen years from now.

I still have some things to prove to myself business-wise and my priorities for what I want when my working life is over have changed. I want to expatriate to Europe at some point and that takes money. Money I can't pull together here in quiet suburban Pennsylvania.

I've signed some agreements, taken meetings and spoken with well over fifty people in the past week and I'm going back into the wine and restaurant business.

I'm not shilling for my business on this blog, it will always be about what I like to do and grow, but I'm going to be forced to find a way to integrate my passion for growing my own food into my business. My living situation will change and I'm on the search for a patch of land where I can grub around in the dirt and let the dogs run amok.

Meanwhile, there's tons of things to do here to get the garden ready for the next season and life goes on as usual