Today's work

Garden Pics

The first bed:


The collard & lettuce seedlings after about 2 weeks:

Gardening stuff

So, John and I have built, so far, 2 of 6 raised beds (pics to follow). There are now two more tilled up spots waiting for their beds & dirt, and hopefully two more soon to follow. John is downstairs assembling all the beds, assembly-line fashion. This is the start of my 2009 record... And, let's just start with seeds - I bought a bazillion of them.


02/27/09: I started all of the ones below in the little peat-pellet greenhouses. Most of these are from Baker Creek Seed Company (www.rareseeds.com) and are heirlooms:
Purple Beauty Pepper
Quadrato d'Asti Rosso Pepper
Quadrato d'Asti Giallo Pepper
Val d'Orges Lettuce
Thai Yellow Egg Eggplant
May Queen Lettuce
Little Gem Lettuce
Tropeano Round Onion
GA Southern Collards

Notes about these: They were started in the basement and the peppers and eggplant did NOT germinate until I brought them into the house, onto a shelf over the washer/dryer, on 03/16. The collards outgrew their peat-pots, and by the time they were ready to get planted out they were root bound and could probably have been started a bit later.


03/16/09: I started these in those same peat-pot greenhouses.
Chadwick Cherry Tomato
Thai Red Turtle Egg Tomato
Riesentraube Tomato
Cherokee Purple Tomato
Gold Medal Striped Tomato
Arkansas Traveler Pink Tomato
St. Pierre Tomato
Super Choice Tomato
Quadrato d'Asti Giallo Peppers ('cause the other ones hadn't germinated, until I moved them in at around this time)


TODAY, I transplanted out from the February plantings:
Tropeana Round Onions
GA Southern Collards

And, direct-seeded out:
Early Purple Vienna Kohlrabi
Florida Broad Leaf Mustard
Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach
Cook's Custom Mix Radishes

I also planted some red and white onion sets of unknown heritage, which we'd purchased at Lowe's.

More to come!!!

How did I get here? Chapter 1

I've decided to come back to blogging to track my new activities here in Blacksburg. John and I moved here in October of 2008.

First, a bit of background. We moved here to Blacksburg, VA (best known as the home of Virginia Tech) from Lawrenceville, GA (a suburb of Atlanta). So many reasons for the move... Most of all the two hours of my life that I lost each day to traffic there. My 16 mile commute between Lawrenceville and Alpharetta took between 45 minutes and an hour and a half each way --- that's a big chunk of life to give up. We lived about an hour from downtown, so we never really took advantage of all there was to see and do in downtown Atlanta, because it was too far to try to drive home after if we went out for drinks, things getting out at midnight meant we'd have to drive another hour to get home... etc. Another huge factor was that John had been fortunate enough to find a job that allows him to work from home. Since his job is completely portable, it made the idea of relocating much less worrisome.

When we started looking at moving, we thought about all kinds of places. We wanted a place that was more accepting of our semi-liberal viewpoint. We wanted a place where we could walk to places (or take public transportation) - libraries, restaurants, whatever -- we just didn't want to be so car-bound. We wanted to be able to get to things we could enjoy and get home without having to travel 2 hours round trip. Most importantly, we wanted someplace where the traffic and commute wouldn't eat up huge portions of our lives.

For the past 3 years (2009 will be our 4th), we've made an annual trip out to the west coast to see Dave Matthews Band at the Gorge Amphitheater over Labor Day weekend. We started seeking our new hometown by looking around on the west coast as add-ons to that trip. We checked out Portland, Seattle, Bend... Nothing seemed to be the right place, and we couldn't envision picking up and moving everything based on spending one or two days in a city.

I'm the type of person who could travel with the wind and not spend too much time looking back. John is a little more structured - less of a gambler, maybe, than I am. So, after our last unsuccessful hunt for a new city ended and I began thinking about how we could solve the problem of not knowing the options well enough, a solution came to me. Why not Blacksburg? It met the criteria we were looking for - small town, we could walk to the city center (a library, restaurants, coffee shops--all within walking distance!), no traffic to speak of (the town is six miles long, end to end). Best of all, John is already intimately familiar with the city, since he spent four years of his life going to college here! I suggested it, we thought it over, and the decision was made.

The next challenge was going to be finding a job for me. Blacksburg is pretty small, so work options are limited. I began applying at Virginia Tech for a variety of positions. Then I found an up and coming company that had just the right type of work for me. I don't need to show up on everyone's feed for activities around our company, so I'll just say it's a great company and I was excited to apply. I applied and did a phone interview, and then they asked if I could come in for a face-to-face. I took a Friday off and John and I traveled in, I did the interview. I followed up a couple of weeks later only to find that someone else had been selected for the job. At this point I'd basically given up on making the move. Between the beginning of 2008 when all this had started and the time that I'd gotten the rejection from this company, the economy had tanked. I figured it was best to just stop everything, batten down the hatches and just try to ride out the economic breakdown.

"So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other."

- Barack Obama

Today at Cascade Falls

The river murmurs
wash it away, wash it away

Falling leaves whisper
hush and decay, hush and decay

Boulders hum
shape and stay, shape and stay.



Gorgeous morning at Cascade Falls in Pembroke, VA. I haven't written any poetry in years, but today made me feel connected again. I did a study in fall leaves, you can check it out here.

I have named one of the trees adjacent to our new yard "Chuck," because every so often it chucks one of its nasty, baseball-sized thick fruits to the ground. God forbid anyone (or anything!) be standing under one of them, the fruits seem like they weigh a brick.

Investigation needed on what kind of tree / fruit it is.