Open Post and Garden/Cat Update, August 2022

[kimberlysteele]

Please feel free to comment on anything and everything but keep in mind I delete profanity worse than the b word.

Baby oak is getting larger!  I planted coneflowers and borage around him.

Rose of Sharon -- I pruned both of mine very hard this year and multiple times.  It has lots of buds.  Hopefully next month's photos will feature blooms.

Daylily garden with Russian sage in the background and a raspberry bush in the foreground.  Last year I made raspberry cordial -- raspberry juice boiled with sugar and vodka.  Probably will do the same this year.  It makes a great Christmas gift.


Tommy the neighborhood kitty.


This year's tomatoes, planted alongside calendula, parsley, and dill.


Borage trying to do a hostile takeover of the lettuce patch.



Hostas, fern, Eastern cedar, coneflower, ferns, catmint, and grasses.  


Shadow Shadilay.

Ashley Amore giving the Bette Davis eyes because he wants food.

Comments

I hope you don't mind if I post this here too

[mr_nobody1967]

I finally got myself a Dreamwidth account, so now I can, I hope, post a working hyperlink to this video of Gonzalo Lira discussing the rise of all-cause mortality and the decline of birth-rates since the introduction of the Covid "vaccines".

Composting question

[(Anonymous)]

Hello, Kimberly and fellow readers. I am a new gardener and have a question about composting, inspired by a post from methylethyl over at Ecosophia. She talked about a method of planting melons (dig a hole, deposit something rich in nitrogen and probably gross, etc). I can't do regular composting where I live because it would draw bears, mice, and other critters. So I'm wondering if I could do a modified version of methylethyl's planting technique using things that won't be attractive to critters.

I'm thinking of digging into my raised garden beds and containers this fall and mixing in:
- Eggshells
- Coffee grounds
- Fallen tree leaves
- Maybe a little wood ash?

I don't know what the soil needs in particular. What do you guys think? Does anyone have experience with this kind of composting? So far this year my squash and cucumbers have done really well, scallions and lettuce are ok, tomatoes not very happy. Most of the herbs didn't survive at all. The wildflower seed I scattered around the edge of the lawn didn't take either.

Kimberly, congratulations on your baby oak : )

PJ Puca

Where's Cedric?

[jpc_w]

Where is everybody's favourite cedar treelet?

Also, how is Momma doing?

Benjamin Goodman, died from the J&J quaxxine, only 32 years old

[kimberlysteele]

https://twitter.com/be_Nice1976/status/1553378775953555456

[(Anonymous)]

Hey Kimberly,

What a lovely garden you have! Our apple tree has just gone wild with the apples, which means lots of apple juice, but also lots of wasps...
Borage does love to invade vegetables patches and herb gardens, but the bees really love it, so it gets a free pass from me.

Anyway, as this is an open post, at the risk of being "that guy", here are a couple of interesting things I've come across in the past week.

- The hollow moon theory. Basically, for a number of reasons, our moon is very strange. It shouldn't be so big (by a factor of 10 times), it shouldn't have the orbit it does (in the sense of no other object in the solar system has the same totally circular orbit), it is less dense than it should be, yet also much, much harder (as the meteorite impact craters on its surface are remarkably shallow compared to what you'd expect - almost like there's a toughened shell with a hollow core). Its material composition is unusual (very high in metals), and definitely not the same as Earth's (meaning that the main 2 theories of how it came to exist can be discounted, and the other main one, that Earth captured it in its own orbit is highly unlikely, as our planet doesn't have enough mass, and doing so would have de-stabilised our own orbit). It also may be older than the Earty, and even the sun (though measuring rock ages is not a precise science) and undergoes a 'resonance' phenomenon if impacted, where sound waves propagate down to about 15 miles deep, then spread out and the whole moon "rings like a bell" for up to 3 hours. Again, not something a solid object does, and there is no known or theorised mechanism for a hollow planet/planetoid to be created naturally.
Oh, and many cultures have folk legends of a time before the moon, and its arrival causing tidal waves and earthquakes.
2 eminent Soviet astrophysicists posited that the moon is an artificial satellite which was placed in our orbit for unknown reasons around 100 000 years ago, and they were obviously laughed out of town, but so far no one has been able to prove any of their theory wrong...

- The Black Eye club. If you search for this, you'll find pages of images of famous people (film stars, politicians, musicians) with a very prominent black eye. They always have an excuse like falling down the stairs or being hit by a baseball, but if you then search for something like "Boxer black eye" or "MMA black eye", you can see the difference - it doesn't look like blunt force trauma. In fact, it looks more like the swelling that results when someone's eye is removed, then put back in its socket. One theory for this is that something is attached either to the optic nerve or directly inserted into the brain itself through the eye socket. Either way, it's pretty creepy and the number of people affected seems to go beyond coincidence - I haven't had a black eye since I was at school, and aside from friends and colleagues who do martial arts, only very, very rarely see black eyes on adults.

And finally, your cat in the last picture looks like Toothless the dragon! :D Very cute.

Have a good weekend.

Mr. Crow

[nebulous_realms]

Hey Kimberly! Your garden looks amazing! I have a community garden plot - first time I have plants in actual soil - and it looks to be doing pretty decently for a first-timer. Although I should have invested in a better cage for my roma tomato plant, as it leaning precariously to one side! And I probably could have added some fertilizer to the soil before I transplanted all of my crops, but it's alright. I'll do better next year.

I wanted to ask - you mentioned previously an app you use for connecting conservatives to each other in their local area. Didn't it have some truncated form of the word "Liberty" in there? I'm not strongly conservative at all, but I'm looking to meet more people in my area and think the app could broaden my outreach for new friends beyond meetup events in the major metro area, which largely expose me to the more liberal populace.