Garden Rant

The Article You Will Never Read in a Beauty Magazine

Dear Reader,

We, the editors of Beauty, Inc., your monthly guide to beauty, fashion, and the path to a better you, have some surprising news to share in this, our latest and probably last issue.  This is going to blow your mind, so settle into a comfortable chair, take a deep breath, and read on.

First, skin care products do not make you look younger. There is no way to erase wrinkles or spots, no matter what the label on the jar says.  And really, why would you want to erase the lines in your face?  We earn our wrinkles.  You know what makes you look younger?  Smiling. Stop worrying about your skin.  I mean, put some sunscreen on, but then stop worrying.

Second, you don't need any makeup.  Seriously.  Not a bit. There is no need to put shellac on your eyelashes or a paste of dubious pigments from China on your lips.  Ever wonder why it is that guys get away with looking so great without a single one of these products?  Because they just do.  And you will, too.  Really.

Third, you know how we were always telling you that buying these products was a great way to pamper yourself?  Wrong.  Turns out that buying these products was just a way to transfer some of your personal wealth to a large, anonymous corporation that doesn't care about you.  Instead, we have some really good news about what you could be doing with the money you are currently spending on perfumes, creams, and lipsticks.  Turns out that the amount of money Americans alone spend on cosmetics every year can provide clean water and sanitation to families all over the world, and the amount Americans and Europeans spend on perfume can provide reproductive health care to your sisters in impoverished countries all over the world. 

Imagine--women getting to safely deliver babies, and then have clean drinking water to keep them alive!  How's that for pampering?

We're sorry to have said the opposite for so many years.  We don't know what we were thinking.  We'd be happy to continue publishing this magazine if you'd like to continue subscribing, but the message going forward will be:   Wash your face with soap.   If it feels dry, rub on--we don't know, some coconut oil or something.  Smile a lot.  Floss your teeth. Go run around outside.  Eat some fruit.  Don't worry about going grey.  In the end, nobody cares about your hair.  They care about what you did with your life.  Go forth and do meaningful things.  This is going to be so much easier now that you're not worrying about whether you have lipstick on your teeth. 

We hope this news comes as a huge relief to you. It certainly does to us.  We'll see you next month--maybe.

Signed,

The Beauty, Inc. Editorial Staff

Why won't you ever read this letter in a beauty magazine?  Because beauty and fashion writers simply can't stay in business by telling people they don't need any of that stuff. The whole idea of beauty and fashion writing is based around the belief that we need all the stuff, and we need help deciding which stuff to buy.

Garden writers, on the other hand, can and do tell people they don't need to buy stuff.  We, and our fellow garden writers around the blogosphere, have written many times about the benefits of passalong plants and seed saving, the uselessness of any number of sprays, potions, and powders, the silliness of gadgets and expensive grow lights, and so on.

You really need almost nothing to garden.  Which is not to say that we don't all buy stuff.  Garden gloves, garden shoes, shovels and pruners, plants and bulbs and seeds.  But that's not all there is to gardening.  Far from it. There is art and sex and music and, of course, drinking. And food.  And marriages.  And politics.

To follow on Susan's post yesterday  about a long-simmering discussion about garden bloggers and sponsors, advertisers, etc, here are a few more thoughts.  If this discussion is getting tedious for you, please don't read on.

The experiment

Over the past week, Ball FloraPlant has sent me* 4 big boxes of annuals, most of them brightly colored petunias, osteospermum, verbena, calibrachoa, and other sun-loving container plants. To test, I guess—but both the amount and (to some degree) the type of plants are inappropriate for my small, mostly shaded courtyard space. I’ve used what I could, and, fortunately, I have at my disposal 11 large concrete planters that are all in fairly sunny positions. These are designed for the beautification of our neighborhood’s commercial district, and since I am the beautification chair, I am in charge of filling them. We use a professional service for our hanging baskets, but there’s not enough left in the budget to do that for the planters.

For most of them, I used a mix of homegrown seedlings raised by an Allentown resident in his basement, and they all have cannas that have been overwintered for the past ten years by another neighbor. But for one, I planted it (shown almost filled above) with the Ball offerings. There was no regard for color clashes or harmony of form. There are red petunias, fuschia petunias, bright orange marigolds, maroon verbena, bright red verbena, and pink calibrachoa. And some other stuff. I thought  a multi-colored burst would be fun; the others are more conservative.

Sorry, earth, I did not use the plantable pots—any sign that something is already in a pot could say “steal me.” Some of these planters are filled with invisible weeds that will materialize in abundance in about a month. Passers-by invariably mistake them—even when they’re filled with flowers—for  seating or garbage bins, and sometimes people just pull the plants out for fun.  They’re watered by volunteers—most of the time. I pulled a full bag of disposable needles out of this one once.

All reasons why I saw this as the ideal testing situation—thanks, Ball Floraplant!—and I’ll be reporting on their progress. Are any of you participating in public beautification projects? Frustrating, rewarding, or both?

*F.T.C.-required gift disclosure

A Raised Bed in Twenty Seconds or Less

I am not a builder of raised beds.  Pile up some compost and plant straight into it, that's what I like.  I think straw bales make a perfectly fine raised bed (and leave you with some nice compost at the end of the season for mulch).  When Fine Gardening was in town a couple of years ago, they made a video about my little straw bale garden, which you can watch here if you're not clear on the concept.

But I'm shifting some things around in my garden, and there's a spot by my kitchen door where I thought a raised bed would be nice for growing a few salad greens and herbs.  The garbage cans get dragged past this little area, and we tend to use it as a staging area for any kind of messy home improvement project we might be in the middle of.  So putting some structure around this bed seemed like a better idea than just making a mound and planting into it.

So the people at EarthEasy asked me if they could send me a raised bed to try out, and I said sure, bring it on.  It was time to get going on that little salad garden anyway.  They sent two--one for me and one for Genevieve Schmidt--and we assembled them in my garden.

 

 

The video pretty much says it all.  No hardware, just slots and pegs. The wood is untreated cedar.  They are stackable, and while you could screw in some brackets to hold the stacks together, I'm not sure it's necessary--probably the mass of the soil and plant roots, combined with the expansion of the wood as it settles in and gets wet, will be enough to keep the whole thing upright.  (Oh, and if you want to see the full length, unedited version of our assembly process, where it is much more apparent that I stood around and made Gen do all the work, go here.)

And yes!  We have not one, but two, to give away!  If you'd like a 4 x 8 raised bed from EarthEasy, you're going to have to work for it.  Poetry!  I demand poetry! A limerick, a haiku, a rhyming couplet--something!  You can do it.  Or--you could go to Gen's blog, North Coast Gardening, where she's also giving one away, and try your luck over there.)

A plant search tool I really like—so far

As advertised, it is simple. Just type in a couple key words and filter by categories like hardiness zone, exposure, and soil. What you’ll get is a list of plants, each with its needs and features and a short description, plus the nursery that provided the information. This is a consumer-oriented plant-finder, not an online research encyclopedia, and it’s by no means close to comprehensive. Yet.

Plant Lust was started by Loree Bohl (Danger Garden), Megan Hansen, and Patricia Cunningham. It’s designed to connect gardeners to plants they might want as quickly and simply as possible. So far, there are 8,000 plants, with information contributed by a handful of nurseries, mainly in Oregon, but also including Plant Delights, Annie’s Annuals, and Tidwell.

I’m more of a researcher than consumer when it comes to this kind of search—my garden is just about stuffed full—but I was enchanted to type in “boehmeria” and instantly get 3 results. It’s not a plant most will have heard of, and it reflects the high quality of the sources used here. I love the idea of a beginning gardener using this site and getting talked into buying cool perennials they will never ever find at the big box.

Plant Lust. Check it out, and tell them—and us—what you think.

I Am Totally Digging This LED Light (and you can, too!)

In spite of my recent indoor citrus tree disasters, I've been inspired to try again, thanks in part to a lovely book on growing tropical plants indoors--more about that book tomorrow.  But today, I've got a report on a new LED grow light that screws into any light fixture, making it very easy to use on indoor plants that might be, for instance, sitting right next to the sofa, not tucked away in a separate grow room where any sort of grow light will do.

This is my setup.  I've got a Meyer lemon and a Bearss lime sitting in a Food Map container, which is not really intended as an indoor plant stand--it's designed to be filled with soil and actually used as a planter--but I needed a quick way to get these plants up to window height and this worked.  (There's usually a couch in front of it, but I pulled it away to show you how the pots were situated.)  The Food Map has drainage holes in the bottom, which I covered with duct tape--but of course, the pots are sitting in trays anyway to collect water. (Those two trees are brand new, by the way, which could explain why they still look so good.  They haven't put up with much of my abuse yet.)

And here, trained on my poor, bedraggled, nearly-dead calamondin, is an LED light screwed into a regular light fixture.  This was sent to me to test by SuperBrightLEDs, which is, as you can probably tell from its name, a company that sells LED lights online.  They carry a mostly red bulb that, they say, promotes leafiness, flowering, and budding, as well as a predominantly blue one aimed at "rhizome and vegetation" growth.  I went for the red one.

The thing to point out about this light is that, during the day, it does not cast a weird red or purple glow about the room.  In this photo I can see a thin stripe of pink light on the windowsill, but if you're just standing in the room, you wouldn't even notice that.  I've put mine on a timer so it comes on after the sun is up and shuts off before the sun goes down.  Obviously, my poor calamondin would probably prefer longer hours of extra light, but I don't want a weird, purple glow coming out of my windows at odd hours.

I had the light on the two newer, healthier trees at first, and they really did respond.  I saw new growth on both of them, and I had to turn them every couple of days to keep them from growing unevenly toward the light.  Now I've given it the task of helping to rehabilitate my sad little calamondin.

And now we have one of these LED lights to give to you!  If you'd like one, post a comment and tell us what you'd use it for. Extra points for creativity and weirdness.

More Cool Stuff from the San Francisco Show

Okay, so I'm a bit late posting this, but--here are a few more cool things from the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show:

These raised bed brackets are cool-looking, but at $140 for a set of four, they're definitely a luxury and you'd want to be pretty durn sure they were going to last. Would they hold up for season after season, as the wood expands and contracts in the weather?  That would be my question.  But they did have some nifty designs.

I thought this was a neat way to make a wall interesting.

And I LOVED the giant mosquito.  Did not get the name of this artist, but the booth was full of fabulous bug art.

 

Big letters!  I love typography in the garden.  And orange.  

Pointlessly attacking dandelions

 

Join me in analyzing a new marketing campaign that's been targeting us bloggers heavily, repeatedly,  and whose attention-getting name is Coalition to Stop Dandelions (the URL is literally Stop Dandelions.com.)

Demonizing dandelions gets our attention 

How about that dandelion-slashing graphic! And the "gulp!" at the very thought of doing anything to encourage such a dasdardly plant!  And here's another good one:  "We’re sick of dandelions and their weed masquerading as a flower."  Yeah, those treacherous plants are producing flowers just to trick us into - what, liking them?

Well indeed lots of people do, increasingly, as any gardenblogger who follows the subject of eco-gardening knows.  Cooks are concocting recipes for them, Paul Tukey at SafeLawns is one of their  biggest fans, and there's even a Facebook group Stop Killing the Dandelions. They're Pretty, which I just Liked for the hell of it.

What the campaign is selling

But this just gets weirder because the campaign isn't aimed at selling herbicides at all; its goal is to sell soil tests. And the connection (supposedly) is that only with a soil test will we choose fertilizers that feed our lawn but not the dandelions.  But how they do that I still haven't figured out.

However, the most popular fertilizers are super high in nitrogen, and while they’re formulated to green-up your lawn right away when the soil is still cool, they also yellow up lawns weeks later when the soil warms up. And they fertilize EVERYTHING, which includes weed seeds that exist in every yard.

If this doesn't make sense yet, here's more from their fertilizer facts page:

Dandelions thrive off of soils high in, you guessed it, Nitrogen, and have the ability to attack areas of your lawn that are weak or bare (e.g. insufficient root systems).

If proper nutrients are applied every six to eight weeks (which can only be understood properly through a thorough soil test analysis) then turf grass will become very healthy.

About that soil test

So, what does their $20 soil test test for?  Again the answer isn't easy to find but their "sample results" show amounts for organic matter, phosphate, potassium, % K: % Mg (whatever), calcium, pH, and sodium.

Which raises a couple of big questions.  First, the result shows a phosphate reading of 62, with the "acceptable level" shown as 16-35, which you'd think would alert the customer to stop adding phosphates, that dasdardly nutrient that's ruining our waterways.  But instead, here's what the results advise: "Phosphate level is High: Phosphate levels indicated will not hamper the effects of good turf growth."  No problem!

And the recommended product (which is the whole point of the soil test, right, that it directs users to the right fertilizers?) is "CIL Golfgreen Fall", either synthetic or organic (take your pick; they sure don't care) and after some searching I finally found out that its nutrient content is 28-3-6 - high Nitrogen! 

So here's my suggestion about soil tests:  use a university lab, like the one at U.Mass. that I used.  It costs $15 and gives more information than the Stop Dandelions test.

A coalition of the selling

As a fan of coalitions, I was curious about this new one and here's what the website tells us about it:  "The Coalition to Stop Dandelions is dedicated to educating people caring for lawns and gardens about how to make a healthy lawn grow, and how to get the right soil test information that golf courses and farms have counted on for decades." And about WHO they might be we're told: "The Coalition to Stop Dandelions is a project of A Growing Necessity," whose About Us page doesn't actually tell us.

Too bad, coz it looks like an improvement

I finally got tired of following links that don't work or when they do, don't answer the questions they're supposed to answer, but my tentative conclusion is that this product MAY lead to an improvement over what some golf courses use - fertilizers that encourage top growth and weeds, plus lots of pesticides.  "This personalized nutritional management process reduced the need for reactive based products (such as pesticides) to less than 6%....amazing reduction!"  See, that much sounds good.

More bad marketing to gardenbloggers

The Stop Dandelions campaign is a nonsensical mess that's off-putting to the very people it's targeting, but it didn't need to be.  I'll bet that a random GardenRant reader could come up with a better approach than this one, created by - no surprise here - a marketing firm with no particular expertise in this area.

Photo credit.

Wicked Bugs--Get Your Signed Copy Here!

Our bookstore is now taking orders for signed copies of Wicked Bugs.  If you'd like one inscribed to that special someone, be sure to let us know that, too.  They just came in, so we're shipping now!  Details here.

LED Grow Light Goodness Can Be Yours!

Some time ago, I wrote about this LED grow light, made by Sonnylight, and promised that we'd have one to give away.  Well, that's happening--today!  Right now!  -- but it's happening over at North Coast Gardening, so you've got to get over there if you're interested in winning one.     My travel schedule has spun out of control, so I knew I wasn't going to be starting any seeds this year.  But Gen is--so when I heard she was ready to get her seeds going, I let her give the light a try.  So far, so good!

Anyway.  It's a very cool gadget.  Go hang out with Gen to find out more. 

Wicked Plants Swag--Oh, and the Exhibit, Too.

I spent last week in San Francisco at the opening of the Wicked Plants exhibit at the Conservatory of Flowers. They've been working on this thing for over a year, and although I was very eager to help make it happen, in the end my role was pretty minimal:  I supplied some text from the book for signs, gave them a species list and some suggests on how to find some of the more obscure plants, helped get contracts signed, and generally stood by, waiting to see what they'd come up with.

Last week was the big reveal. The day before the show opened, we had TV cameras in throughout the day to get some footage, and then there was a preview night reception for members.

Here's a news segment on the show:

 

And here are a few photos from opening day:

But the most exciting thing for me was, of course, the gift shop.  Wicked Plants temporary tattoos!  Beer glasses!  T-shirts!  Shot glasses!  Seeds! 

And yes, they're selling this stuff online as well.  Shop online here, and go here to check out the details on the exhibit, which runs through October.

(Oh, and warning:  The T-shirts run small.  Go up a size.)

The Garden Show Report

Thanks to everyone who is reporting in from garden shows.  I just got back from the Portland Yard, Garden, and Patio Show, which turns out to be quite a slick show at Portland's big downtown convention center.  Easily accessible by light rail, a large and comfortable space, and pretty good food by garden show standards--veggie burgers, burritos, and the like. They had a full roster of speakers, and David Hutchinson of Flora & Fauna Books came down from Seattle to sell books.

Those are the speakers and the amenities.  What about the stuff?

OMG!  Begonia luxurians, where have you been all my life? I have never been all that excited about begonias, but as Andrew Beckman, Timber's new editorial director, said, "It only takes one to get you started."  This might just be my gateway begonia.

I don't know where I would put this Arts and Crafts-inspired wooden trellis or what I would do with it, but I love it.

This little building was meant as a demo for a company that builds human-sized sheds, but I think it's perfect for my chickens. It even has wallpaper inside, which every diva hen requires.

 I don't know what to make of this.

Let us know where you're posting your garden show reports.  Here's a few that have caught our eye:

Timber reports on the Seattle show.

Susan Morrison also reports on the Seattle show.

A Seattle report from Gardening in My Rubber Boots.

More on Seattle from GardenHelp.

Susan Reimer on the Maryland show.

BlueGrass Photography with cool panaromas of the Cincinnati show.

And can I just say?  Many of these shows are REALLY working hard just to stay alive.  Advertising revenue, booth space rental, ticket sales--all hit hard in myriad ways by the economy.  It would be an act of good horticultural citizenship to make an extra effort to get out to a garden show this year, bring some friends, buy some stuff, etc. etc. We might not all go to our local garden shows every year, but in this economy, they can all use a little boost.  I know that a few shows considered sitting out 2011, but it's hard to get it going again after skipping a year.

And don't you think we all deserve at least one big garden-themed event in our community every year? Yes, the displays can get repetitive, and the vendors can be the same year after year. But I love buying plants directly from the growers at these shows, and I appreciate getting to see the speakers, some of whom are friends, and some of whom are rock stars of the gardening world who I've never actually met but love getting to see up close and in person.

 What about you?  Worthwhile, these garden shows?

Nobody messes with …

Yes. Thanks to Neatorama, I found out that there is such a thing as a plantable comic book. They contain two seed-infused sheets of paper, with either herbs (The Gardener) and wildflowers (April Showers).  The idea is to make comic books more sustainable, but it’s kind of symbolic because there are just the two sheets—the standard 24 pages would be too expensive.

Still. A cute idea and I love the graphics.

They can be found (classified under “growing kits") at Sprout Home.

Our Final Fiskars Frenzy

Gen rides off into the sunset with her toys from Fiskars.

Okay, this is it:  We have finally worked our way through the last of the tools Fiskars sent us a few weeks ago.  I have to say, this one was the most fun for me, because it's a totally new tool, something I've never tried before.  I mean, I have scissors, I have pruners, I have lopers.  So while it was cool to get to test those out, this was something I actually had to learn how to use.

So here it is, the UpRoot Weeder.  We went a little crazy with this one and we made two videos. And once again, you've got a chance to win--you can comment here, and you can go over to North Coast Gardening and comment there.  Enjoy!

 

And then we hit up a nearby lawn:

Yet Another Fiskars Adventure, Plus Buddleia Abuse

Genevieve Schmidt hates my buddleias.  I hate them too, a little bit. But there's something about those flowers. How can you not love this?

I know, I know, I know.  They're weedy, they shed, and they're total thugs.  It's frightening how much they want to grow.  I left a pile of buddleia trimmings in my garden last month--just a pile of bare sticks- and all of them sprouted new leaves, like dismembered heads that continue talking.  It was terrifying.

So Gen hates them, and I have, in fact, ripped a few of them out to make room for fruit trees.  But I was pleased that she had the opportunity to take out her aggression against my remaining buddleias in this video we did reviewing Fiskars Power Gear Lopers.

Here's our review of the lopers they sent us, and as always, comment to win a pair.  You can go to Gen's site, North Coast Gardening, as well, where she's also giving away a pair.

Next week, we'll be back with our fourth and final review, in which we get crazy with a new weeding tool.

 

Fiskars Madness Continues

First--we have a winner for last week's Cuts+More giveaway.  The scissors go to Sally, who writes,

I raise dahlias in raised fieldstone beds by a quiet pond in Northeast PA and broke my little Fiskar deadheading scissors last fall. Dinner plate dahlias were too much for them. This spring I'll be fencing my vegetable garden so the critters don't eat my tomatoes at day 89 right before I'm ready to harvest--would be great for cutting the wire for that as well!

And now, on to new business.  As you know, Fiskars sent us a bunch of stuff to test.  So this week, Gen and I share our evaluation of their Power Gear pruners. Apparently my Buff Orpington has quite a lot to say on the subject too, because at one point she stands right next to the camera and just talks her little head off.  Hopefully you find that charming.

And yes, once again, we have not one, but two of these bad boys to give away.  Comment here to win, and go over to Gen Schmidt's North Coast Gardening for another chance to win.

Fasten your seatbelts—we’re about to be hit with $6m of bulb marketing

If a freshly hatched marketing plan has anything to do with it, the words “Got bulb?” will soon be on the lips of formerly bulb-apathetic gardeners everywhere. According to an article spotted in garden industry trade mag Garden Center, a group of bulb companies affiliated with Dutch bulb industry group Anthos has asked the Woodbine agency to work its magic with their stagnating product. A three-year campaign is planned.

At least I assume bulbs are stagnating—or why would they be paying for all this brand revitalizing? Even though North America accounts for $130m worth of bulb sales annually, there must be room for growth, especially among younger gardeners who might be more apt to fill their first gardens with food crops instead of the chancy ornamentation bulbs offer, prone as they are to critter consumption or rebloom failure. And with the money spent on gardening activities declining (it decreased by 16% from 2008-9, according to the National Gardening Association), the competition between types of gardening will be fiercer.

So get ready. You are probably going to have to “like” tulips and daffodils on Facebook. And that will be just the beginning. There will also be emails. Lots and lots of emails.  Coming at ya faster than you can delete them.

Though I wonder how much of this marketing explosion we ordinary gardeners will actually see, once the agencies, social media consultants, re-branding geniuses, and garden-variety PR hacks take their cuts. I’m only partially cynical about all this. I want there to be a huge bulb blitz. I want everybody to love and want bulbs. I’m glad that the industry is trying to step up their game. But if it were up to me I would just buy enough copies of Anna Pavord's Bulb to send to everyone.

Somehow I don't think that's what they're going to do.

Fiskars Madness!

Opening a beer with my new scissors. No beer for Ladybird!

 

Last week, Genevieve Schmidt of North Coast Gardening showed up at my house with a box full of freebies from Fiskars.  We played around with them in my backyard and offered up our opinions in these here videos.  And as it turns out, Fiskars doesn't just want to give us free stuff, they want to give stuff to you, too. So here goes:

The dramatic unveiling:

 

 

And now, our extensive testing and evaluation of the first tool we tried out--their super-scissors, also known as Cuts+More.  And if this video inspires feelings of kitchen/garden scissor lust, you know what to do.  Post a comment and we'll pick a winner.  Gen is giving away a pair at North Coast Gardening as well, so you've got two shots at this one.  We'll be back next week with more. Oh, and if you want to get cozy with our new friends at Fiskars, here they are on Facebook and Twitter.

It's come to this: I'm spying on my plants

 

This has been sitting in a box in an upstairs room for about a year and a half.  You know how that happens. I finally took the PlantCam out and set it up (very easy). As some of you know, this device takes pictures at set intervals for as long as an entire growing season. It then stitches them together to create a timelapse video. You put in the batteries, set the clock, set the intervals, and switch to auto. That's all.

It's in a sturdy plastic shell, so it can be used outside in any weather. For my purposes, though, I thought I could get some quick results by documenting these hyacinths, the last to emerge from the root cellar. When I bring the tulips up next week, I’ll document them as well. 

PlantCam comes from the people (Wingscapes) who make the arguably more exciting BirdCam. And you have to wonder how useful either of these innocent devices would be for surveillance of other types. Hmmm.

Cold comfort

Seed catalog browsing is all very well, but when the temps have a “minus” in their name, seed catalogs are not enough. In addition to traveling to where flowers are always in bloom and growing bulbs indoors, I have been contemplating the possibilities of locally-grown cut flowers becoming part of my CSA allotment. We have a number of CSA choices in Western New York—this still being farm country—but one of them, Promised Land, includes a fresh flower and herb option as well as the normal 6-7 months of vegetables (there is a fruit option as well).

The flowers are perfect for me—exactly the varieties that will not thrive in a smallish, partly-shaded urban garden. They include sweet peas—I have failed numerous times with this classic—strawflower, celosia, amaranth, bupleurum, glads, even grasses. I am using the names found on the website: a charming mix of common, botanic, and misspelled.

Maybe you don’t have this problem, but—with the exception of lilies—I really hate picking flowers from the garden. I need them to stay outside, where they are scenting and decorating a summer living space. Then there is the slight possibility that some of the perennials and annuals from seedlings will not succeed with the abundance you need for casual picking. I also like the option of supporting local farmers, especially these farmers. Daniel, Jane, Ben and Pam Oles run a chemical-free operation, using cover crops, compost and crop rotation to maintain their soil. I could never hope to do so well, or grow so much. And flowers too! That anticipation alleviates the sting of the single digits. A bit. 

Great expectations

A guest rant from Joseph Tychonievich. See more of Joseph's cartoons here.

(Joseph was a popular attendee of garden bloggers' Buffa10. Many of us wanted to adopt him.)