I’ve been asked recently, “How does your garden grow?” Well, I’ll show you…	Right now, only half of it is actually growing. I’ve doubled the number of beds from last year, from twelve to twenty-four. Each of them is sixteen quare feet, so this gives me plenty of room. Even if I was feeding a family of thirty, this would give me plenty of room. I finished preparing the new beds yesterday, so they’re ready to plant. The other have been happily growing something or other for the last couple months (and a few of them since last Spring).
The older beds are growing their cool weather crops. Mostly, members of the Brassica genus, members of the cabbage family. These include cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. There’s also their more distant relatives, the lettuces and rutabegas (which are a cross between cabbage and turnips).		Along with those are turnips, beets, carrots, parsnips, radishes, various greens, and pansies. Did you know pansies are edible? The taste blends right in with the other greens, and there’s no prettier way to jazz up a salad bowl.
	Ordinarily, pansies wilt and die as soon as the weather heats up, especially here in Georgia. But I planted them in between the taller and leafier Brassicas , so they stay cool long past their typical prime. Last year I was harvesting pansies until the end of July. By then, there were plenty of the spicier nastertiums to take their place in the salad bowl.
We started letting the chickens out into the garden last week. I’ve never met happier chickens. They’ve been doing almost all my weeding for me, and I’ve seen them chase many a leaf hopper. They fertilize where they can, and they fight over the root grubs I’ve dug up for them. It didn’t take too long to train them what not to eat; they really loved the spinach at first. They’ll have to stay out during the next round of planting lest they find and eat all the seeds I put out.
I wondered at first how much trouble it was going to be to get them all rounded up and put back in their coop, but it turns out it was no trouble at all. As soon as the sun went down, they knew it was bedtime. They went on their own back to the coop, eager to score a coveted spot on the top step of the ladder they’re currently using for a perch. Next week I’ll build them more permanent perches, along with nesting boxes (which they won’t use for nesting until at least July).
	My garden is a purely organic garden. Everything I put in the soil has been certified organic. The seeds I used, when available (and most were), were organic. I did buy a few seedlings here and there that were raised in modern greenhouses, but they are the exception. In addition to being organic, I’ve used heirloom varieties when available. Heirloom means the seeds are traditional varieties created the old way by cross breeding. Before genetic manipulation. And the seeds they produce are true, meaning they grow into the same thing as the parent. Many crosses are either sterile, like mules (a cross between a donkey and a horse), or produce seeds that revert back to one of the parents. The picture to the left is an overhead shot of my salad bed, which is a mixture of many different heirloom greens from Seeds of Change, my favorite organic seed source, based out of New Mexico. Last year I experimented with what species I could grow here in Georgia (answer: most everything, including the Andes mountain grains quinoa and amaranth), so this year I’m playing with varieties. I don’t have one type of eggplant ready for planting, I’ve got seven. And that’s the story for most of what I’m growing.
	Creating the new beds was a lot of work. Chris helped considerably. The year had to be tilled up. The beds had to be made, by hoeing in dirt from the three-foot-wide paths into the bed areas. I mixed in soil conditioners to make beds the plants would enjoy. The white stuff is perlite, a rock similar to vermiculite. If you’ve seen white specks in potting soil for houseplants, it’s the same stuff. The rocks are like natural styrofoam. They were created by volcanic forces injecting super hot steam into the mineral, puffing it up like popcorn. It helps clay soil drain better by creating tiny pockets for the water to escape. Over 90% of the perlite in North America comes from a single tiny mine in Socorro, New Mexico, where I went to school. I’ve never heard anyone complain about the stuff, but take it from me, it’s an ecologically friendly mine. The black stuff is an organic blend of composted peanut shells (a surplus waste product here in Georgia) and aged horse manure. The plants will love it!
	The end result is raised beds (with no border material) full of the stuff plants love. I’ll add trellises made of pvc or galvanized steel along the center path for climbing plants in a few weeks. I hope to have everything planted by the end of the weekend. Then there’s naught to do but keep the plants happy and stuff ourselves silly with vegetable goodness.

Not wanting Stipe to hog the media this week, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck makes headlines of his own by roughing up an airline crew.

Dr. Richard Schultes, father of ethnobotany, died this month. I’ve read some of his writings, heard him on the radio, and was generally facinated by the man. As with everything he writes about, Steven Baum at Ethel the Blog does an excellent job discussing Dr. Schultes’ work.

I knew cats always land on their feet, but I didn’t know the same was true of giraffes. (Click on “Flying Giraffes”, then use your mouse to drag the giraffes into the sky.)

Keeping an online journal is kind of like NASA’s Voyager. But instead of sending out the Brandenburg Concertos and the structure of a DNA molecule, we send our thoughts and feelings and perceptions out into the ether for others to stumble across. And you know what? It’s just as important. What one person thinks about one little thing on one particular day is just as important as the greatest accomplishments in the history of humanity. Because it’s those little things that mean we exist in the first place, that make existence worthwhile.

Why I Write, by the Tinman.

I just biked in from home, and boy, are my legs tired! I mean it… they’re tired. It’s only fifteen miles, but it’s the first time I made the trip on bike. The first twelve miles or so, no problem. Country roads, next to no traffic, a few hills. Then I hit a major road into town (with no side roads with which to avoid it). There, the pedaling was good, but the traffic was a bit rough. But then, I crossed the river well within sight of downtown. The hills there just about did me in – I don’t think I’ll be able to make it up the other way going back tonight. I’ll just have to walk a small stretch. But I made it. It’s a big milestone for me. I’ve wanted to do this since I moved out there last spring, but kept finding all sorts of excuses. Now, I know I can make it, and I’ll try to do it a few times a week.

Michael Stipe expands on his speed bump protest sign with a letter to the editor in today’s paper.

There’s a side street in town often used as a shortcut between two major roads. I go down it often, though I’ve recently found a better shortcut. It’s a residential street than also has a private school on it. Recently, after calls from residents to take action, the city tried to calm traffic by installing giant speed bumps at several locations across the road. These are the several inches high, several feet wide, kind of speed bumps. R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe, who owns a rental house on the street, is not at all happy. Personally, I find them welcome. If you drive the speed limit, you don’t even have to slow down. But if you’re speeding, they’ll mess your car up. One morning, as I was driving through the school zone (complete with flashin yellow lights), I had a jerk in a big truck pass me doing sixty or so. This was not unusual.

Trying to change the way we buy music, the Record Store opens today in San Francisco. Their inventory is simple: a single CD, sold for $5. There’s no label, no track listing, no notion of what’s on it. The tracks are picked from a wide variety of genres from anywhere in the world. Each CD comes numbered, and you can visit their website, key in the number, and discover (a little at a time, spread over a couple weeks) more about what you’re listening to. They plan on cutting five CDs a month. No word yet if they’ll mail these things out.

When I was being recruited by colleges, I paid attention to the school’s drama program. I was going into physics, but I loved drama. The school I selected, New Mexico Tech, proudly told me that even though they were a small school filled to the brim with nerds, they still did at least one big play a year. I was even shown pictures from the recently done A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I’d already decided Tech was the place for me, but this was icing on the cake. The year I got there, they stopped doing theater. I didn’t have any trouble finding theater, though. I brought together a group of folks and did radio drama at the campus radio station. As upperclassmen, I helped found an official club whose purpose was to promote drama and writing. The “Liberal Arts Guild” we called ourselves. A spot of humanities at a nerd school. I directed our first offering, Woody Allen’s God , paired with Sartre’s No Exit. More offerings followed, including Our Town , where I got to reprise my high school senior role as “Stage Manager”. A fine community theater sprung up, and I did several shows with them, including a production of Othello that we toured to New Mexico’s four corners area. When I left school, of course the university started doing official shows again. Now, I’m glad they didn;t while I was in school, as it opened all kinds of doors for me to do my own theater the way I wanted. I probably wouldn’t be directing today had I just been a mere actor in someone else’s shows. I bring up all this because Tech is now doing a production of Into the Woods , and SChlake has lots and lots of pictures. It shouldn’t surprise me that I don’t know anyone in the cast or crew, but I was hoping to see a few familiar faces.