My Life

Whenever I hear someone pining for a moss garden because it’s low-maintenance I wonder about the source of that tidbit of misinformation.  Coz I’ve seen too many photos of gardeners in Japanese moss gardens down on their hands and knees using tweezers to pry weeds out of the moss without damaging it.   And heard that mosses typically need even moisture and are rendered dead by periods of drought.  And so on. 

So I have a mixed reaction to this article about moss, which touts its success in creating "drama".  But here are some really useful highlights from it:

• There are about 1,200 species of moss native to North  America, some of which actually prefer sun and alkaline soil.
• In this area mosses generally prefer shade, acidic soil and most importantly, "moisture is the key to success".
• You can kill stuff if you aren’t really careful about applying all that aluminium sulfate needed to acidify your soil.
• And then there’s weeds.  "In the case of moss, getting rid of them is a painstaking process.  Count on plucking seedlings from the moss on a regular basis to maintain a rich carpet-like appearance."

I told ya!  The article recommends Oregon State for more info about this very cool-looking (though hardly sustainable) plant.

Photo credit.

{ 11 comments }

To the people who live here, inaugurations are a big annoyance if you don’t like the incoming adminstration or a very cool thing AND a big annoyance if you do.  So there you have it - for locals life is all screwed up for a week or so.  But waaay more than for the Carter and Clinton inaugurations I’ve seen, nobody I know minds a bit.  Euphoria’s breaking out all over the damn place.

Inauguration Day Plans

For us the conversation starter of choice for the last 10 weeks has been to ask each other whether and HOW we were going downtown on the big day, and local newscasters can’t get enough of it, either.  Almost daily we hear alarming new crowd estimates and the prediction that it’ll take us four to five hour to get home via public transportation. The Porta-Potty-to-human ratio is announced and we calculate the outer limits of our bladder control.  We hint at invitations to stay with close-in friends, or to use their parade-route office as a home base for the day.

Then this week we learned that all the bridges into D.C. would be closed, leaving Virginians creepily isolated from the North, and we all feel a bit under attack.  And the big open question - the weather - is now a known factor and the news is not good.  Could be worse, sure, but the expected HIGH on Tuesday is 31, and it’ll be in the low 20s when people gather on the mall and along the parade route…to wait for hours.

So after 9 weeks of scheming and dithering about my own plans for the day, the answer is:  I’ll gather in a nice church hall near my house to hang out with like-minded friends and neighbors.  We’ll eat, drink, and watch the whole thing on a big screen.  PERFECT!

Dems from Other Places

So I say let the out-of-towners take my place downtown that day - God bless ‘em!  They go to a lot of trouble and expense to get here, and lucky me gets to see a few of them that I know.  In the gardening world that includes one gardenblogger - Mary Ann Newcomer the Idaho Gardener - and my new friend at Gardeners Supply Company in Vermont - Maree Gaetani.

Photo:  On Tuesday some lucky people will be standing on the balcony of the Newseum where I was last month when I took this picture, and they’ll have a pretty awesome view of the parade.

{ 3 comments }

Seen on a Georgia bumper

A family wedding took me deep into the belly of the South - to South Carolina. Not exactly battleground territory.   Conservative enough that it DID cross my mind someone might see my bumper stickers and slash my tires or otherwise vent their anger at my politics.  Then to my surprise, THIS car brought out my own inner tire-slasher.  Gathering photographic evidence proved satisfying enough, as did high-tailing it home.

Also of note were billboards for “The World’s Largest Tobacco Outlet!!” and more than one smoke-filled restaurant, still.  And topless truck stops right there along I-95.

But that’s all minor stuff compared to Spanish moss, magnolias, 75-degree sea air and family.  Especially the bride, who belted out “Me and Bobby McGee” accompanied by the awesome Bee Bop Hoedown Band out of Roanoke, Virginia.  

{ 19 comments }

Can you tell something about a politician by the way he treats the little people?  Sometimes.  And in the case of Joe Biden, I think so.  He arrived in the Senate just a year after I began working as a "court" reporter for their committees, sitting just below the dais at hearings or alongside the senators at their business sessions, traveling with them to field hearings.

Still, senators talking to me directly was a rare occurrence, and in their defense, their schedules are crazy and these meetings aren’t exactly social events.  (Traveling offers much more contact, of course, like the time I was introduced to a Wisconsin senator in his living room, him standing there in his bathrobe, then barnstormed across the state in a tiny plane with him and 2 staffers.)  Occasionally someone would ask me about a book I was reading, and Dale Bumpers always did that, and he clearly enjoyed book talk.  Others would comment on what I was reading with undisguised surprise that it was more challenging reading than a Danielle Steele paperback.

And the mean old racist warrior Jesse Helms surprised the hell out of me with his courtly jumping up to pull out my chair, every single time.  I’d rather have equal rights anytime, but it’s cool seeing a politician pay a little attention when there’s no political gain in doing so, right?

My Worst Behavior Toward the Help Award goes not to any senator but to the young staffers handling the details of committee hearings - the self-important but well-dressed keepers of the realm that I had to interact with the most.  Ugh.  And through my 30+ years working for Senate and House  committees, as a group the most courteous people and winning my Best Behavior Award are members of the military - all branches, all levels, from the Joint Chiefs on down.

But what about Joe Biden, Obama’s pick for Veep?  His committee assignments and mine always seemed in sync, so I’ve seen a whole lot of him in action, and he was my top choice among the many Democratic contenders this year - because of his impressive performance as a lawmaker.  That’s what my head tells me; my gut remembers him as the least imperious, friendliest politician I’ve ever had the pleasure to chat with.  And those bagels he was giving out to the media throngs outside his house all week?  They reminded me of the time he and I were chatting, waiting for his subcommittee hearing to start, when he pulled his lunch out of a brown bag and offered me half.  I’ve always been a sucker for people who feed me.

{ 27 comments }

Being interviewed by other gardening bloggers is so much fun, I just keep saying yes.  Recently it’s been to  Robin Wedewer, of Bumblebeeblog and now the National Gardening Examiner, and to Stuart Robinson, everyone’s favorite Australian gardener and author of Gardening Tips ‘n’ Ideas and the gardenblog directory on steroids, Blotanical.

• Robin’s interview is here on Examiner.com.

• And Stuart’s is here on Gardening Tips ‘n’ Ideas.
  

{ 1 comment }

As I told Christopher C of Clyde, NC, when it comes to blogging memes I’m a virgin (no jokes, please).  But because he "tagged" the GardenRanters in a nice way and practically begged us for a little more information about ourselves, I promised him I’d play.  And while this meme calls for 6 "random" things about the blogger, I notice that participants list 6 potentially interesting things because truly random things might be how many toothbrushes they own and similarly forgettable details, so to hell with that.  Anyhoo, here goes.

1.  For readers who’ve noticed me asking about every social event "Will there be dancing?" here’s the story behind that.  It started, as it does for so many girls, with ballet, tap and "modern jazz" but then progressed to swing, Cajun, Zydeco, Texas two-step, contra, squares, Appalachian clogging, African, assorted ballroom, and other categories I may be forgetting, and Israeli folk dancing could be in my future for all I know.   I used to write about "participatory dance" for DanceView Magazine.

2.  I also used to be an adventurous world traveler but trekking in Nepal - in January no less - and then touring India ALONE cured me of that particular obsession.  Now I’m a total homebody.

3.  To prove the point, my only sibling has lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for 7 years now and I’ve only visited once.

4.  I did have ONE terrific business trip -  to work at the World Court in The Hague, after which I spent a fun-filled weekend in Amsterdam on my own dime (thus staying in a $12/nite flophouse).

5.  In my career as a court reporter in D.C. I’ve had lots of boring assignments and a few really juicy ones involving famous people, important events or scandal.   Want some names?  Okay - Monica Lewinsky, Bill Cosby, Claus von Bulow and Liv Ullman come to mind.

6.  Warning to parents of preteens and teens: This story could keep you up at night.  At 12 or 13 I routinely climbed out my bedroom window to joy-ride across the countryside with a bunch of neighborhood hellions, but never got caught.  My dad found out about it decades later from my sister and was FURIOUS. 

There, I think I’ve answered the meme without getting in trouble with anyone or telling on any of my husbands.

{ 10 comments }

Big news on the second-career front!  A promising new website called OrganicGardener.com has hired me to write short but meaty articles for them, and the operative word here is "hired".  We online writers get awfully frustrated by all the requests to republish our work FOR FREE, which is still lots better than all the crawlers that steal our work outright, so it’s a breath of fresh air to hear from business people willing and able to look for quality and then PAY FOR IT!  (I know, very old-school, but a formula that seems to still work.)

Organic Gardener’s plan is to post new articles by yours truly once or twice a week, and here are my first two:

• On the Virtues of Clover… and Hard-Weeding  
• The Truth about Organic Fertilizers 

{ 6 comments }

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? 

{ 3 comments }

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.

{ 2 comments }