Container Garden, the Beginning: Seed to Seedling in 48 Hours

Now that Mother Nature has stopped being such a bitch all winter long, and gone back to acting more like a proper and friendlier lady, I'm pretty excited about getting my container garden growing. The weather has been crazy fantastic here, earlier in the season than is usual for a streak of 80-degree days, the upside of global warming. Yay, greenhouse gases!

So anyhow, last Tuesday I got busy repurposing some of my collection of done-with yogurt cups for starter seeding what (hopefully) will end up good eats later on. I suppose I could have just gone ahead planting them in their final resting places; I've got the containers set up and ready to go, it just seemed overwhelming such tiny seeds in such giant buckets! Also it allows me to bring them in overnight if need be, since the Great Mother still occasionally relapses into being spiteful and frosty this early on.

As it is typical of me, once I got everything seeded I felt let down afterward, with just so many cups-o'-dirt to show for it. No wonder why way back when I used to do the common sort of gardening (the less creative, stuck-straight-in-the-ground kind), I always opted for starter plants over seed whenever I could; I need instant gratification, terrifically impatient about most everything, and all I had there were some throwaways filled up with muck.

It didn't help much that the flipside of the packets said I'd have to wait anywhere from 7 to 14 days for the seeds to germinate. Whatever, par for the course, such a long time to sit tight, twiddling green thumbs. So imagine my surprise when less than 48 hours later, Thursday morning, behold... smidgens of green from the iceberg lettuce, and by early that afternoon, also a couple of cucumber nubbins! By Friday, three days in, the zucchini started taking a stab at daylight.

Of course I am happy about it, actually growing stuff already, but how come so quickly? All I can think to attribute it to is the amazing dirt I dug up for planting, from in the wood behind my home nearby the creek running through it. The regular soil closer to the house is way too clayish; I tried it earlier, and all I managed from that experiment is making too many brick paperweights. I can't afford buying any good stuff, nor even the not-so-good, being literally "dirt poor" for now, but that out back looked so black and rich I figured I'd shovel it up.

I'm supposing it's mostly natural compost, really, what with so many fallen leaves, motley foliage and whole trees, all rotted over umpteen years, plus the cow and horse shit down there, too, nature's smörgåsbord. A bacteria buffet, a fungal feast, a crawler's canteen, and most importantly, free black gold for me! Judging from such pronto results, I can only hope that this bodes well for continued growth and production, but only time will tell. So far, the rest of the fruit and veg hasn't caught on, but I can be more patient with them, now that I've been appeased for awhile with some already sprouted, closer to ready for their big boy buckets!

Cheap laughs, Fruitty and Igny

The grocery store's dollar aisle! Gotta love it. From one endcap to the other, all the various and sundry foodstuffs with those yellow $1 (or 2/$1 even better!) tabs stuck in the slots underneath. Where this all comes from, I have no idea, everything there is a step below the regular store brands, even.

So I bought this here box of cereal, conspicuously a Froot Loops knock-off of sorts, without bothering to pay much more attention than that it was just a buck. Cheap counts to me, it's a good thing linguistic prescription not so much... I didn't notice until only a couple of days ago that I had bought myself some Fruitty Wheels! To tell you the truth, they weren't even so very one-T fruity as far as taste goes, doubling up letters can hardly compensate for that.

Then I noticed that cool skater dude also on the box. At least I first thought he was a skater except that he has no wheels, so I think he's maybe supposed to be milk-surfing or something instead. With arguably nonessential knee pads and elbow pads, gloves, too, but I reckon safety precautions can't be overdone.

It says his name is Igny, by the way. Igny. I had to Google that before I made too much fun of it, and so far as I can tell the kid's only namesakes are some assorted French towns. According to the Fruitty Wheels box, Igny is a "product of Argentina", so very transnational is the Pampa brand's target market.

Toucan Sam has nothing to worry his pretty avian head about, that's for sure. Fruitty Wheels are a hinky cereal, I can't tell exactly why they suck so bad. But hey, at least I'm only out a single for it, and I'm not disinclined to pay for an occasional amusement no matter how mingy I might be. Clearly it doesn't take an awful lot to amuse me, whatever. I don't get out much.

Plastic Bag, the Movie

I went to the grocery store last Sunday and, once again, forgot to take along my ChicoBag. Probably its dinky, handy size stuffed up inside itself is what makes me forget about it sometimes; I should probably keep it prominently undid somewhere to remember, because I feel bad whenever I leave it behind.

That sounds like a plug, but it's really not. I simply don't like using the plastic bags from the store, any reusable would do fine by me; I just happen to have the ChicoBag is all. I had intended to shop on the cheap at the bestest store in the world Aldi, but winter crapped on us last weekend and Aldi is some 20 miles or so away, I opted going to the only store here in town instead.

I swear to God, this particular chain of stores must own stock in some sort of plastics affair, because they totally outdo themselves how many bags they can use up! Pathetic, it is, and I was a part of that on Sunday, probably skewing higher the already boggling stats: 60,000 plastic bags used in the U.S. every five seconds, more than 100,000 marine animals killed off every year, not to mention the unbelievable resources used up just to make the things.

The Odessa store alone might very well be solely responsible for that Pacific Ocean vortex thingy, I could imagine. Yeah, my bad, and I'll try to do better remembering the next time. I do lots of stuff that's not so planet-friendly, I'm sure, but I try my best doing whatever I can, and after watching this movie I think I'll do better remembering my ChicoBag hereafter.

Plastic Bag, the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and then discarded it, trying to grasp its purpose in the world. Eventually it winds up in the ocean, a promised nirvana where it will settle among its own kind, letting go the memory of its maker...