Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Mulch to watch out for.
Yes! Now and officially this blog resides at amongtheweeds.ca as well as sungarden.wordpress.com so please use the former address when linking to me because the .ca address is a much truer representation of what’s going on in my backyard than “sungarden” will ever be. I’m north-facing and on top of that live in the “rain city” Vanouver….. I just picked that title last year when we were having a sunnier-than-average summer and I was feeling optimistic. At this moment my garden is deluged from two days of downpour, making me glad for raised beds that drain well.
On my way out to an event last night I stopped at our big box store (only in a pinch) to pick up some bags of mulch for a path my partner is building to connect our veggie-growing area and the patio. You would have thought the five yards of mulch I ordered in the fall would have been enough to meet all my needs for years to come, but of that original order we only have a half a garbage bag left. I suppose that’s to be expected when you mulch half your yard!
So, there we are, B. loading up 3 bags of chipped bark into our shopping cart and me looking around at the other mulches and soil ammenders when I realize that the bags we are about to purchase are marked “ColorFast”. As in, they are dyed and guaranteed not to fade.
Call me naive, but until that moment I had never considered the possibility that a bark mulch might be dyed in order to satisfy the aesthetic demands of consumers. Can that be environmentally sound? Would my garden still be “organic” if I put a dyed product in it?
While I recognize there are organic dyes available which might not have a huge ecological footprint, the brand we were looking at had no such guarantee on the bag and so B. quickly returned them to the shelf in favour of a non-treated bark mulch product that had “eco” in the title. Who knows how eco this product actually is…. but it does look a heck of a lot more natural… so I can probably fool myself into forgetting that it could also be toxic. This stuff isn’t going around my plants so I’m not overly fussed about it, but was again reminded of why I prefer to purchase products like these from my local garden center rather than the big box home reno stores. While the garden center may sell objectionable product, there is always more than one product to choose from, and very often an organic option available. As much as possible, I don’t want to contribute further to the contamination of groundwater and the surrounding soil.
I’m thinking if the rain holds off, this evening might be the one for scratching up the lawn and scattering our grass seed to remediate the mud pit between our patio and veggie beds. We’re away over the long weekend, so as much as possible we’re putting our yard in place as the weather allows. I’m hoping that by the end of April all the bones will be in and we’ll have moved on to planting, weeding and upkeep instead of the heavy labour we’re doing right now!
Vote for me.
New posts up at Among the Weeds. I’ve registered the domain amongtheweeds.ca and am hoping to have that up and running in the next couple of days.
But really, the occasion for this post is to request that you go over to the Canadian Gardening blog contest and “like” and/or comment on my entry there. Winner gets a regular guest blogging gig and a few hundred dollars plus some cool gardening supplies…. but in order to become a finalist I have to demonstrate that people like reading my stuff and I’m up against some real professional gardening types.
Again, this requires that you create an account here: http://bloggercontest.canadiangardening.com/login? and then log-in, and go to my post here: http://bloggercontest.canadiangardening.com/entry/ . I would ever so much appreciate a few “likes” in my favour from those of you who appreciate my writing and… well, me!
Thanks!
Peter's response.
My friend Peter gave a long comment in response to last week’s post about social awkwardness and I really appreciated both its length and insight – so I’m posting it as a blog post as well as leaving it in the comment to my other post. Hope that’s okay Peter!
Sorry for the delay, I’ve been thinking about this off and on a few days. Perhaps I can light a small candle upon this confusing sight, since I am both “that guy” and preternaturally articulate. My theory may be wingnutty, so discontinue use if irritation or contradiction occurs. Do not mix with ammonia.
These people continue to get social signals wrong because socially awkward adults are treated differently than socially awkward youngsters. If an adult violates a social norm, they do not get corrective feedback – they get social punishment without explanation. Well, sometimes they get an explanation, but it’s usually so coated in rage or derision that there’s no practical way to extract a lesson from it. I strongly suspect that well-adjusted adults do not have a well organized dialectic concerning normative behaviour, and that the less critical the behaviour is seen to be, the less it is able to be discussed. Almost anyone can discuss rationally the pros and cons of taking things that are not yours, few can discuss rationally whether that lifting of the left side of the mouth means you should move back half a pace or hold out your hand.
Imagine on a fine summer eve, you’re waiting in line to grab two beer while B grabs a table. Doofus beside you says, “Hey, odd shoulder posture you’ve got there, do you play fiddle too?” Nobody would be horrified if you replied “Yeah, I’ve NEVER played at this bar before, and you’ve never seen me on stage. Worst.Line.Ever.” followed by a withering stare, and then a lifted nose.* But what is Doofus McGone’s take-home from this in terms of how to correct and improve his small talk skills? He’s been in Van for five weeks, just asked a brilliant icebreaker question (demonstrating that he’s paying attention to more than your cleavage), and he gets a serious smackdown that shows he has done something wrong, but what? The didactic value is zero.**
Every time we say, “It’s not my job to teach people this stuff” when confronted by it, we worsen the problem. Years of therapy have shown me that social skills -can- be learned, but $LC_DEITY abandon(), it’s really hard. Really. I still suck at it, and nobody’s ever accused me of being unable to learn. If someone’s a bit behind everyone else by the time they’re perceived as an adult and lacks coherent ways of learning more, they’re fighting an uphill battle for the rest of their lives.
These men, by and large, KNOW their clumsy feet are not the impediment. What they do know is, they do small talk wrong. They’re too direct, or too obtuse, but nobody tells them which. They hold eye contact for too long or not long enough, but there’s no genuine feedback as to which it is. They stand far away from someone, they don’t keep that person’s interest. They stand closer, that person gets creeped out. Every single aspect of social convention which you (and other well adjusted adults) take for granted, such as vocal volume, ma-ai, glancing away, not asking about your dead cat… they have doubt about. The death march stare is not for you, it’s for the ten thousand women who walked away rather than say “Please give me some elbow room”.
Kudos for trying to demonstrate (practice) that socialized people engage in small talk. If you can think of a way to tell them you’d rather they engaged in small talk poorly than not at all, do so. But be prepared for bad conversation that upsets you in ways you find hard to articulate, and be prepared to do the hard work required to articulate exactly what it is that upset you. Saying “shut up” if they blunder socially just exacerbates the problem for the next lady they dance with.
* this is not meant to be a realistic portrayal of you.
** “The didactic value is zero” sounds like it could be a line from a Primus piece. But I wrote it here, first. Fact.
*** Captcha: niftiest while
Guerilla gardening @ UVIC
Speaking of lawn-free… awesome and positive action on the UVIC campus last week. If you’re in the area and want to check out their next action March 31st… their website is: http://vfnl.wordpress.com
Lawn-free living.
We eliminated another patch of our backyard lawn this weekend with an extension to our brick patio and a new bed dug in for tomatoes and flowers alongside it. Next weekend we’re planting the shade garden alongside the house, and that small patch of turf will meet it’s end as well under a layer of cardboard and mulch. That leaves a tiny strip running the length of our yard that separates the berry patch from the raised veggie garden and most of that turned into mud during our studio construction in February. We’ve decided that instead of replanting it with heavily fertilized lawn re-starter, we’re going to go with some Easy Care Lawn Cover from West Coast seeds that includes a mix of low-maintenance ground cover plantings such as daisy, rye, clover and white yarrow (which we already have in abundance in our yard).
While the latest work of the weekend is not yet at the state I want to share pictures of (it’s dismal and wet here, and although the new patio is in, everything around it is a muddy mess) you can see pictures of our fall-time lawn eradication project here.
It wasn’t like lawn eradication was my plan when we moved into this house a year ago. Not really. But as you can see from the photo-set above, it wasn’t like there was much in the way of landscaping going on in the backyard (nor the frontyard, but that is a project for another year). Not only that, but I have a serious interest in all kinds of plantings: food, flowers, perennials, herbs – and a pretty small backyard! While I confined myself to gardening the edges last summer, I realized quickly that our family pretty much confines itself to the patio space when lounging outside and otherwise the lawn serves as little more than a bathroom for our dog. Which I think is true of many houses which have a usable deck or patio, the lawn is little more than a focal point around which planted beds are arranged since it is easier and more comfortable to set up table and chairs on a level surface that connects to the house in some way.
It became obvious in any case that in order to get the growing space I craved for my many gardening goals the lawn was going to have to go under one piece at a time. We’ve thus far used both the method of covering up (newspaper, cardboard, landscape fabric, mulch) and the dig method for the smaller bed areas where we are going to be planting right into the ground. I would highly recommend the cover-up method if you are putting in raised beds or if you are able to go with compost layers, etc. in order to create a new layer of topsoil for planting in. Much easier on the back and you won’t be fighting pesky grass roots forever as the layers on top will kill the turf underneath.
I had never really thought about the environmental toll of lawns before, mostly because I have never been big into watering or fertilizing or “greening” lawns at the houses where I have lived. Not to mention my whole refusal to mow. But I guess most people aren’t like that and there are some quite shocking statistics on the environmental and financial costs of lawns out there (such as the 10,000 gallons of water every 1000 square feet of lawn takes to keep up every summer). With the arrival of Chafer Beetle in Vancouver, lawn care experts are recommending even more fertilizing, watering and pesticide spraying to keep the grubs under control…. which just seems nonsensical to me. Why lawn at all? Is it really the easiest ground cover to take care of (as my father avows) given watering restrictions, chafer beetle, dandelion seed blowing around and all the other issues that might arise?
I suppose if you’re just looking for basic soil erosion control and you don’t care if it browns during the hot months, then you’re got a pretty low-maintenance yard for those who want that. But for the true gardeners out there – it seems criminal to give up so much potential food, flower and native plant growing space over what is essentially a status symbol from days gone by.
Red Cedar 