Accessible Gardening: #19 Practical Matters for Physically Challenged Gardeners , 1 by seacanepain

seacanepain wrote:

Thank you, Melody.

Okay, ladies, behave yourselves. There are men on this forum. lol. I’m watching my way through old episodes of NCIS and Cote de Pablo doesn’t have a thing to do with it. Nope. Not one thing. Isn’t Vladimir Putin the one who is into ice bathing?

I’ve been going through Kay’s old books to see what is worth keeping. In a 1980’s book on journalism, I saw a comment that made me think of you and your professor, TTC.

Harold Ross, one time editor of the New Yorker, was very old-school about punctuation. James Thurber didn’t like the way the sentence “The American flag is red, white, and blue” Looked on the page. He said all the commas made it look as though the flag was being rained on. Ross insisted a comma before and after was needed for clarity in some cases and gave this sentence as an example of how meaning could be misconstrued without the comma. “Please give your name, address, age, sex and housing requirements.” I’m not going to start using a comma before “and” as a rule, but Ross made a good point.

Reading that book made me realize how far and fast we’ve come in the approximately thirty years since that book was written. There is chapter after chapter on doing research for articles and the computer is barely mentioned.

That’s ironic about the song stuck in your head, TTC. Flower Children are not very popular in San Francisco at the moment. They are scape goats for the water situation or that is how it reads to me.

http://www.city-jo

Duh, can we say over-population and agribusiness that concerned itself with nothing but profit.

The situation in California is what sparked Amargia’s locavore experiment. Most out-of-season fresh food comes from California.

You can’t force land and water to do what you want and expect it to work long term. The Earth is a living system that evolved over eons. You adapt to it. It is pure megalomania to expect it to adapt to you.

Yes, almond trees will grow in California, but the land cannot support enough pollinators year-round to successfully pollinate the crop. The solution was to bring in honeybees by the truckloads while the almonds were flowering. I’ve never seen a headscarf and hoop earring on a honeybee. They aren’t gypsies who thrive on moving every few weeks. There are people who caravan honeybees from place to place across the country for crop pollination and profit. I refuse to call these people either beekeepers or apiarist. They are more like honeybee slavers and I’m not convinced it is a necessary evil. The bees fare no better than their human counterparts, the migrant farm workers. Honeybees aren’t even the most effective pollinators. They are the easiest to manage. It is probably this practice that initiated colony collapse disorder. Migrant bees are subject to more stresses and diseases. Land is not an inanimate THING. There are more life forms in a handful of soil than people in midtown Manhattan. Honeybees are not pollination machines. They are living organisms with their own agenda and very sophisticated organisms when you view the hive rather than the individual bee.

Okay, exactly how did I get started writing about bees? My mind is meandering. I’ll close for now.

(Jim)

Note from Nadi: TTC, if you like the show Chopped, I think you would like the website My Fridge Food. You list the ingredients you have on hand and the site generates recipes using those ingredients. ~Nadi~

Photos: Early Fall Flowers