Sustainable Gardening Blog

All the media hoopla over Father’s Day reminds me of something I recently learned about my dad from a relative. 

What I already knew is that Dad and his 3 sisters were raised by a single mother in Richmond, Virginia, but spent summers visiting relatives in the country.  And it was country stories that he loved to tell.  Like the popular menfolk custom  - and I’m not making this up - of friendly fart-making contests.  Cane-bottom chairs with the cane removed somehow helped, I seem to remember.  Oh, yeah, I come from high-class stock all right. 

But what Dad never told me was the reason the kids spent every summer in the country with relatives, which is that his mother couldn’t afford to feed them.  That would have seemed unimaginable during my lifetime except that just recently reports of food insecurity for untold Americans are reaching us, and  it’s suddenly imaginable again.  

But back to Dad.  Other Greatest Generation dads might have told hard-luck stories about surviving the Depression, but not this one.   What we heard about were his triumphs as a newspaper boy and about playing his violin for weddings and on the radio - for "good money".  I knew that his "Ed Harris Dance Band" played all the fraternity parties and paid his way through college.  And that scholarships made it possible to get a Ph.D. in psychology - way back in 1949 when it was a new and suspect field.  And that he made sure his kids didn’t have to work their way through school.

Dad died a few years back at the age of 86, but I can still wish him a Happy Father’s Day, right? 

Fun news!  Washington Post writer Adrian Higgins did a wonderful profile of GardenRant in today’s paper. He interviewed every one of us, taking notes in pencil on a reporter’s pad, but we weren’t fooled by his retro methods - he got us and gets blogging.   

Here’s my favorite part, about where I live and garden. 

She lives in a cozy house in Takoma Park with a long wooded back yard that extends to a distant stream and beyond. Old trees are festooned with bird nesting boxes and a bat house, and the rear deck is swaddled in a rambunctious hardy kiwi vine. She has just converted her front yard into a decorative vegetable garden in what we take to be an embrace of the local food movement and a reaction against the idea that the American front yard must be lawn.

Ah, so I wonder: Am I embracing the local food movement?  A little, yes, and if it can sweep this noncook away, it must have some impressive momentum going for it.  And how about reacting against lawn?  Yeah, but no more than wanting to grow something I’ve never grown before - and write about it.  Bloggers will do anything for a good post, ya know.  Okay, end of musings.

Like all gardeners, I love certain things about my garden and want others to love them, too, but when a gardening expert visits your garden in February ya have to give up the silly notion of showing off because it ain’t gonna happen.  I’m real happy with anything out there that pleases the eye and it it’s the beaten up old birdhouses "festooning" the trees, great!   Anyway, I was discovering that a nice way to spend a cold winter morning is sitting in a sunny overlooking the deck and woods below, sipping coffee, and having a nice long chat with Adrian Higgins.

There’s something more than a little broken about our old and tattered democracy when people get giddy about their vote for president counting, often for the first time.  Such is the condition of residents of ALL non-battle ground states in the general election and almost all primary voters - except this year.  Dems may be fretting about the consequences of not having wrapped everything up neat and tidy by February 2 but the supposed down side is that here in Maryland our vote matters and that’s a good thing.

Don’t miss "Cracked" in tomorrow’s Washington Post Magazine by my friend Ruben.  Unlike A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, Ruben’s story about covering DC’s crime scene as a crack addict himself is the truth. And unlike another recent story of recovery in the Post - by a self-pitying ex-university professor - his is honest.  It would also make a helluva good book.

Fellow temperate-zone sufferers of garden withdrawal, how do you cope?  What activities replace all those hours you’d like to be in the garden but can’t because of, you know, winter?  I’m looking for help here because this is the part about being a gardening addict that’s sad, really - when we can’t.  And of course it’s on top of the normal challenges to happiness that affect everyone, like short days and hostile weather. Here are my pathetic attempts to replace digging:

• Thorough immersion in podcast availability, with the help of my new Nano and the growing supply of gardening podcasts available on the web.
• Plowing through my stack of gardening magazines and books, even my nongardening books and a few New Yorkers.
• The occasional daytime movie, and lots of little red envelopes from Netflix.

See, I’m in trouble coz that’s not nearly enough.  And this year is a particularly challenging one for me because I’m heading into winter without my daily dose of laughing at power from the dynamic duo on Comedy Central - the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.  Where else can I turn for that comic/tragic perspective?

Oberlin did it again - this time being awarded the top spot by Sierra Magazine.  Again just ahead of Harvard, exactly where they’ve always wanted to be.  Congrats again, guys.

Yes, I attended my high school class’s big four-oh reunion this past weekend, and here are some preliminary observations:

• Where are all the fat people?  Or, for that matter, the bald guys?  Is the Class of ‘67 just super-fit, or are the not-so-fit just declining to show up for inspection?  I gotta say, people looked GOOD.
• The guys lined up along the dance floor to watch the women dancing solo. Some things never change.
• When a guy introduced me to his wife as "my second-grade girlfriend" I suddenly remembered how much I liked him.  We traded a few drug stories and bonded all over again.
• Lots of couples had met in high school, married, and are still together.  They even looked happy.  Go figure, and congrats to them!
• Others of us had traveled a bumpier road.  Lots of us.
• I loved hearing people scream that they’d seen me in the New York Times or on CBS.  Others screamed "OMIGOD, You wrote ‘Golden Girls’!!!!" and gee, I wish I could have just nodded and said yep, that’s me.  But no, I’m the humble garden writer, not the rich, famous TV writer.  But no matter - I love that they wanted me to be that successful and famous.  It’s great to know the old gang is cheering me on.
• To understand the context in which one classmate wore a bikini T-shirt to the event, remember we were at a fairly fancy country club and "party clothes" were specified on the invitation.  But she thought it would be a hoot to wear the tacky beach T-shirt and a hoot it certainly was.  Who says you have to act like  a grandmother just because you’re old enough to be one?
• Speaking of which, the guy I used to sneak out with at 2 a.m. to go sailing across country roads at 100 miles an hour, with no driver’s license in sight, now has 8 grandchildren.  But he’s still cute and a great dancer.  So there. 
• This being the Richmond, Virginia, left-wingers furtively huddled together and inquired in hushed voices about other lefties and with whom, on the other hand, we should avoid the subject of politics at all costs.
• A member of our 7th grade girl gang complained that we’d all been mean to her because her clothes didn’t have the right label and we confessed it was only because she was cuter than all of us, and that seemed to help.  Maybe some old wounds were healed.
• My old swimming teammate and I were bragging about our trophy-hogging performance (best relay teams in the state!) when others spoke up to remind me I was the fastest runner in our class.  Year after year, apparently.  Thanks for the memory, y’all! That’s one I hope I don’t forget.  (Though I must say it’s saddening to remember why I didn’t pursue whatever talents I might have had at running - no women’s track team existed.  This was pre-Title IX, ya know, and our "athletic" options were limited to cheerleading or twirling a baton.) 

We may all meet again 10 years from now or in just 2 years for a big 60th birthday blow-out.  I say: Why wait? 

Oberlin grads must be happy to see this - Grist Magazine reporting that it’s the fifth greenest college or university anywhere.  I know they’ll all notice it’s listed just ahead of Harvard, a spot most Obies have always considered its due on any scale, small-school pride being what it is.  Anyhoo, here’s what Grist has to say about it:

Oberlin College
Hoping to get an ober-view of energy use, faculty and students at this small liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, collaborated in 2005 to create a web-based monitoring system in some of the dorms that shows how much energy and water is being used, giving students real-time feedback that can help change their consumption habits. Last year, students worked with Cleveland-based CityWheels to create a car-sharing program on campus. The college’s Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies is housed in a pioneering green building that opened in 2000. Oberlin also boasts Ohio’s largest solar array and is transitioning to 100 percent earth-friendly cleaning products.

Sounds great and good for them (with or without my measly alumni contributions) and it’s not really a surprise, given Oberlin’s ultra-left credentials.  But I have a little story about that.

Anybody read The Road from Courain by Australian-American writer Jill Kerr Conway?  Well, her next book was True North, which covered her life in the U.S., including her 10 years as president of Smith College.  What’s of interest here is the part of True North where Conway compared two schools that were established during the 1830s, one all-women and one coed, those schools being Smith and Oberlin.

Now because Oberlin was the first coed college in the U.S. (as well as the first racially integrated one), this is a pretty big part of its pride in the world of progressive thinking.  Damn right!  And if you spend four years there you hear this history recited repeatedly, and I used to brag on it myself.  But then I read what Conway found in her research.

I have no direct quotes and I won’t be rereading the book just to find them BUT Conway found out that  women were admitted (just a couple of years after the school opened for the purpose of educating male ministers) for three purposes:

• So that female students would be available to do the darning and other domestic duties for the male students.
• So the young ministers could find suitably educated wives.
• And one more reason just as obnoxious as these two that I can’t remember, but you get the point.

Man, history can be inconvenient, can’t it?  Coz Conway just blew that whole progressive origins thing right out of the water and even had me worried that that their underground railroad history might turn out to be tainted, too.  (So far, so good on that score.)  But Conway’s point is that entire educational program was then designed for men, with women as an afterthought.  I guess I shouldn’t have been all that surprised to find these conditions when I arrived there as a freshman:

• Women had curfews; men didn’t.
• Men and women paid the same for room and board, but men had maid service in their rooms and women didn’t. 

SHOCKED?  That’s probably because you’re young and sexism wasn’t nearly as blatant by the time you came along, right?  Do tell, readers.  But now you see why I’m an equal-opportunity cynic.

Photo credit: Oberlin College.

That’s Craig Newmark speaking and he ought to know because he’s the brains and the soul behind his amazing lists.  And hearing him say that to Charlie Rose last week evoked some of my fondest memories from the good old days (the late ’60s and ’70s, if you have to ask). He said he’s often asked when he’s going to start making the really big bucks and his response is always: "Once you’re living well and maybe providing for your future, what’s the point in more money?"  So he’ll never go public and submit this culture-changing community service to the demands of Wall Street.  And the guiding principle in the creation and management of Craigslists is to treat people how he’d want to be treated himself.  I’m in love with this man.

And here’s what was all news to me - he’s really political, in the best nonpartisan way.  (By that I mean I didn’t hear him bashing Bush or other Republicans, easy targets though they are.)  No, bashing doesn’t do it for him.  He says the Craigslist communities have taught him that people are basically good and trustworthy and moderate, so he’s working with a group called OneVoice to empower the moderates in Palestine and Isreal.  After all, only 1 or 2 percent of the public are fanatics; they just make a lot more noise than anyone else.  Or in the words of Jon Stewart, we hear more from extremists because moderates have stuff to do.

Other projects he actively supports, presumably with money as well as by promoting them publically, are:

• The Sunlight Foundation, which was formed to "use the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing…Sunlight’s work is committed to helping citizens, journalists and bloggers be their own best watchdogs, both by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and websites to enable all of us to pool our intelligence in new, and yet to be imagined, ways."  Like the popular new slogan says, "Blogs are little First Amendment machines."

• "New Assignment is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.  A second aim is to figure out how to fund this work through a combination of online donations, micro-payments, traditional fundraising, syndication rights, sponsorships, advertising and any other method that does not compromise the site’s independence or reputation."

He cites other examples of the new, more pro-active media: Meet-up, Media Bistro, Daylife.  They’re part of what he calls the "Sohoblogplex."  It all sounds terribly interesting and I’ll be surfing their innards as soon as I get the chance.

Now here’s the really sticky wicket about all this.  Craigslists themselves are replacing local newspapers as the go-to publisher of classified ads and are clearly hurting these already-beleaguered institutions.  Asked about this, he doesn’t deny the charge but asserts that the near-monopolization (my word) of the media is a bigger problem, coupled with the influence of Wall Street on these now-public companies.  Okay, that’s true but it doesn’t tell us how he feels about hurting newspapers.  I wonder if the answer is that the Sunlight Foundation and New Assignment show his vision for 21st Century journalism, as defined by its essential duties of oversight and public enlightenment.

It’s all pretty revolutionary, again in the best sense.  This career programmer for IBM and a Wall Street firm just wanted to create a community service, like any of us would start a Yahoo group for our neighborhood or for local gardeners. But he had the vision and skills to create something new that’s sweeping the world and helping millions get their needs met.  Call it the Revenge of the Do-Good Nerd.

USED CRAIGSLISTS?
I’m curious about how readers have used this amazing service, so please tell me your stories.  I’ll start:

• It’s how I found the terrific Kansas City design firm that created the GardenRant logo and header.  House of Tears Design responded to a notice I posted on the Seattle List, as did about 20 others.  The others were mostly super-commercial firms in India but at least one other outstanding candidate responded - a design group in Costa Rica.
• Just recently I went List-posting to find help with my new website.  The pitch:  "Barter Garden Coaching for Website Coaching."  The most promising respondent lives 5 minutes away (in this metro area of 3 million people) and was SO on the ball I ended up hiring him for 10 or 15 hours of his time to help me - big-time.  Well, barter was already just about my favorite thing in the whole world, but this experience clenched it.

Update: this terrific story about gardening on the via using Craigslists, via Pam Penick in Austin.

Stuart Robinson, the outstanding Australian gardenblogger, has named "14 Garden Bloggers to Watch," based on their entrepreneurship and innovations.  "These are the true movers in our category and I can’t wait to see what they come up with next,"  he says.

Well, I like to keep up with what on-line gardenwriters are up to, too, and I do it by reading Stuart’s Gardening Tips ‘n’ Ideas coz I know he’s keeping up.  So thanks, Stuart, for drawing attention to some cool stuff that some cool people are up to.  Here’s what I learned from the list:

• Now I finally know where those "Green Thumb Sunday" buttons all over the blogosphere came from.  I still don’t know what it is, though, and I especially don’t understand the pay-per-post feature that Stuart complains of.  I read the link; I still don’t get it.  Use third-grade language, please.
• I’ll pass Katrina’s Little Gardeners on to my friends who teach gardening to kids, and check out Mr. Brown Thumb for myself - they’re both new to me.
• Toronto’s Beth Lawrence has a great-looking site and she does podcasts.  Hmm, maybe I can interest her in doing a little gardening video.
• To Marc at Veggie Garden Info and Kenny at Veggie Gardening Tips I have one question:  Where the hell are you?  This has to be my pet peeve about blogs, especially gardening blogs.  It matters where you are.  Why hide such an important bit of information?
• Here’s another puzzler:  How can Doug Welch have low traffic and still have 1,500 subscribers to his feed?  Don’t they count as traffic?  Okay, I’m ignorant on this point, so enlighten me.
• I’m already a fan of Angela, Hanna, Carol, Kathy and Colleen and echo their inclusion on this list.
• And I won’t pretend I wasn’t tickled to be listed myself and all I have to say is Stuart, you’re number one with me, too.  How can I forget your scooping me on the big GardenRant buy-out?  (The cleverest April Fool joke I’ve seen in decades.)

THE AUSSIE’S GOT ME MUSING

• Man, bloggers are SO on top of trends.  While publishers are begging their writers to start blogs and create platforms for themselves, bloggers are THERE, especially the bunch highlighted in this list.  They’ve got platform to spare, and I’m taking notes.

• Stuart’s list is just the latest example of the amazing generosity shown by gardenbloggers to their peers.  Print garden writers tell me it’s the same with them, so maybe it’s something about gardening itself.  And if someday a researcher proves that playing with plants and dirt makes people nicer, I won’t be surprised at all.

$$$, ANYONE?
Just mentioning Stuart’s hilarious reference to a $1.3 million buy-out of GardenRant reminds me of a good idea I once had - to turn garden writing and coaching into a second career, however modest.  And in the year since my employer went out of business and I wrote that piece, nothing has turned out the way I thought it would, but opportunities keep popping up and I keep having fun.  Only thing is, maybe I’m having too much fun.

So for the record, this blogger is for hire as a writer or editor in any medium.  And as much as I’m enjoying the little media whirlwind around me this summer, maybe it’s time I take a page from Jerry Maguire’s football-playing client and start asking people to "Show me the money."