Saturday, February 9, 2019

Some green to beat the winter blues

Nothing like some 10-below weather to make a person get spring fever. As such, I recently assembled the greenhouse in my conservatory and started some perennials.

I bought some really cheap seeds from the aptly named website, cheapseeds.com. They came fast and there's more than I'll use in my lifetime. I've been thinking about planting way more than I need and selling some seedlings, but that sounds like work. So I'll probably plant way more than I need and give them away to anyone who wants some.

This week I started purple coneflowers, blanket flowers (aka gaillardia) and foxglove.

I also ordered some black-eyed Susan seeds without realizing they are seeds you need to cold propagate. I always screw that up and don't have the patience or memory for it. I've tried it a couple times with other seeds, put them in a freezer bag of soil, throw them in the crisper of my refrigerator in the garage and forget about them until about July when I open the drawer and find a mushy mess. According to what I've read, the BES seeds need propagated for five months before planting! So if anyone would like 26,000 BES seeds, hit me up.

In that order, I received 23,000 foxglove seeds, 2,000 blanketflower seeds and 1,200 coneflower seeds for $17 and free shipping. Pretty good deal.

I really like purple coneflowers and want more of them. One of my favorite plants gets about 2 1/2 feet tall and is awesome. I'd like to move it, because a nearby bush is putting the squeeze on it, but don't want to mess it up. We'll see.

The blanketflowers (which I've always called gaillardia until now) I've had for a few years basically resemble small sunflower heads, which makes sense since they are a genus of the sunflower family. But, unlike sunflowers, they only get about 2 feet high with 3-inch blossoms.

Foxglove are new to me, but they looked good on the website. However, it seems they get pretty tall which is often a limiting factor in my area as Mr. Wind likes to howl through our little canyon and wreak havoc.. We shall see.

I also planted some basil a couple weeks ago, but I tend to grow that year round anyway. Wifey is a pesto-making machine, so I always try to keep a couple plants going for her. Happy wife, happy life.

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Hump day link-o-rama

I was going to provide some commentary and links to the the big push by a couple states to further legalize killing babies, but I doubt I'm going to change any minds on abortion and that's not what you came here for anyway.

I'll just say one thing, make one prediction: 200 years from now, hopefully sooner, historians are going to look back on our abortion culture with the same kind of horror we now look back upon the days of slavery and, before that, human sacrifice. They'll be asking: "What the hell were they thinking?"


On that somber note, here's some book burning going on in our neighboring state, presumably to stay warm, but more likely just because they're a bunch of PC dolts.

*** Literary outrages in Minnesota, with pushback from the sane
Rampant political correctness has pretty much overridden quaint notions of academic freedom in America’s educational institutions. We see the consequences all around us. But it is good to see that here and there, denizens of the academic swamp, who may be liberal but are not completely crazy, are fighting back.
And I wasn't aware of this in one of our other neighboring states:

*** When the U.S. Interned Italians in Montana, They Rioted Over Olive Oil
Nevertheless, food was serious business for the Italians at Fort Missoula, who often complained about the provisions. Unused to canned food, they claimed it was making them sick. Envious of the supposedly superior food eaten by their diabetic counterparts, internees fell victim to a “diabetes epidemic”—until the camp doctor warned them that true diabetics had to undergo uncomfortable treatment. For prisoners far from their homes and families, food mattered.
All the action seems to be going on around SD:

*** Runner kills mountain lion in self-defense after attack in Horsetooth Mountain Park west of Fort Collins
While defending himself, he told investigators that he killed the lion by suffocating it. The account was confirmed by investigators after examining the lion and upon further investigation. The man sustained serious but non-life threatening injuries.
I'm guessing a rear naked choke hold. Not to take anything away from the dude, but this was an 80-pound juvenile lion (adults get 120-180), which is slightly smaller than my Labrador retriever, Stanley. We have some pretty good wrestling matches, and I'm pretty sure I could take him if I wanted.

*** Wifey and I just finished binge watching The Punisher series. I thought it was great. Lots of killing but deep characters. I almost shed a tear at the ending.

*** I also finished a couple books that I haven't blogged about: Dean Koontz's The Crooked Staircase and Tim Dorsey's Clownfish Blues, two authors on the opposite end of the seriousness spectrum.

*** Here's some good news from the man in black.

And then there's this to maybe read about (you'll see what I did here):

*** Three Writing Rules to Disregard

It takes this guy a long time to get to them, so I'll cut to the chase. He says these rules are okay to violate:
1. Never Begin a Sentence with “And” or “But.”
2. Never Split an Infinitive.
3. Never End a Sentence with a Preposition.