That, folks, is a picture of tomatoes. Yes, I know: duh.
But wait: I picked them yesterday. (!!) They were growing on the tomato plants I brought indoors in October. (!!!) (Yes, the same aphid-infested items I've written of here.) Save for one tiny (even tinier than these) specimen that I simply ate two days ago (it was delicious), these are the first harvest from last summer’s hail-devastated plants. (!!!!)
Posted in Indoor Gardening, Tomatoes
(Scroll to the bottom for today's bit on Black History Month.)
I find myself today at TruckFlix.com, a website for truck drivers. Interesting. Of course, it is compost that has led me here, albeit via a circuitous route. Here’s a sort of overview of the process: Compost, yard-waste, garbage, landfills, municipal solid waste, cities, New York City.
Put it all together and you get the question, What does New York City do with its garbage?
The answer is that it exports it by truck and rail to Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Jersey, and Virginia, besides sending a fair amount upstate.
Something I’ve learned while digging through the garbage recently: nothing is straightforward, and some of the stories are so ludicrous, so intricate and unlikely, that it’s hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. Toronto, for instance, has been sued by no fewer than three First Peoples (the Oneida, the Chippewa, and the Munsee) over its newly purchased Green Lane Landfill site. And that’s just the tip of that particular garbage pile.
Posted in Composting, Environment
(Scroll to the bottom for today's story in honor of Black History Month. It's not a happy one, but it matters. I've removed the video clip at the end of that section as it downloaded too slowly for some computers.)
WARNING: This post contains graphic photographs of pests on leaves.
Our December report on the aphids infesting the Manic Gardener’s indoor tomatoes has continued to fascinate viewers everywhere, so we recently sent a crew for a follow-up story. The unfortunate events surrounding this interview have been vastly exaggerated, leading to the promulgation of false information across the web. (The Manic did not lift up our camera-man bodily and throw him out of the house, though she may have tried.)
We are happy to inform you that our EFG (Exposing False Gardeners) personnel sustained only minor injuries. The camera, we regret to report, was destroyed and all visual footage lost save these few photographs. (Final results from the lab indicate that it was the bricks, not the orange juice, that did the damage.) Fortunately, the audio survived, so we are able to offer you the transcript below. We hope that this clears up all misunderstandings.
EFG has no plans to return to the home of the Manic Gardener in the foreseeable future.
At last report, the woman known as the "Manic Gardener" was holding off a SWAT team with a combination of unripe tomatoes and pure invective. As one team member was heard to say, "The mouth on that woman!"
Here is part of that fateful interview:
Source: the WebGallery at Fryar's website, pearlfryar.com
There’s a new garden on my must-see list: the gardens of Pearl Fryar, in Bishopville, South Carolina, where he creates such unlikely and beautiful topiaries as those above—and below.
I should mention that I’d never heard of Pearl Fryar until the Garden Monkey linked to GardenHistoryGirl’s post about him a month back. And she’s not the only garden blogger to write about him, either; Tales of the Microbial Laboratory included a post over a year ago, around when the documentary, A Man Named Pearl came out. (You can see the trailer here.)
Posted in Landscaping
Several posts back I mentioned in passing that compost can help fix arsenic in soil, and it seems reasonable to explain what the hell I was on about there. To "fix" arsenic is get it to bond with other, stable molecules so that it can neither leach from the soil into the water supply, nor migrate into your vegetables, and thence into you.
I got onto this originally because the news articles about the great Tennessee coal ash spill of '08 kept mentioning arsenic. Arsenic, I learned, occurs in several different forms, but the one that turns up most commonly in coal ash is arsenate(V), the same form that leaches into soil from telephone poles and fences treated with copper chromate arsenate (CCA).
And yes, at least one recent study conducted at the University of Florida found that when carrots and lettuce are grown in soil that's contaminated by CCA, both vegetables absorbed less arsenic when the soil received plentiful treatments of compost.
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