Ah the Economy... And the Angry White Men Who Control It

Bye, bye. Thanks for all the prosperity/crash. You've got yours so, really, don't bother about us. Us working class - lower middle class they used to say - well, we don't need much. And by much I mean, food, shelter, clothing, etc. We won't mind working well into our 70s despite how much we save. That is if we can maintain the healthcare to stay alive into our 70s! Hahahahahahahaha.... awwwww, shucks. Well, you all take care now. No, no, I'm serious, you go on a holiday or something. Have you been to Rome? It is a great city. Naw, naw, you've done enough. And when you think about it, you've really been thorough. In fact, we'll still be feeling the residual effects of your 'economy' for years to come. You deserve to float around on a yacht in the Mediterranian Sea with a beautiful girl (who's with you only for the money and yes that orgasm was faked) - ooop! Did I say that out loud? It was just a bit of fun. Like that funny thing you all did, tapping the phones, yeah yeah like a reverse crank call... yeah, good fun that....

Ah well, see ya. Oh you're around through the end of the year... you could leave a little early, I'm sure no one would mind... you have what? Oh, a few other things to destroy first, the enviornment, last few banks want to make sure they've.... right, totally under.

OK. Oh and angry white men who've been running our lives (into the ground) my name is Citizen, not consummer. You never got that right.

Lawn saga

Here it is, the cool season in the desert. Well, cool-ish. Compared to the rest of the country this is spring. Great for vegetable gardening - I've got peas coming and beets, cabbage, lettuces, parsnips, even strawberries from seed coming up. But the lawn saga is what I really wanted to update.

This morning I went to a desert landscaping seminar hosted by the Water District. I had the chance to speak with someone in the landscaping department from my city and he told me there is "no alternative to the bermuda/rye grass overseed cunundrum". What I have is cool weather drought resistent fescue - not, as he pointed out, heat resistent. "It is sure to look awful in the height of summer" he said categorically. Well, true, but not that bad. As I pointed out there is no one actually on the grass in the summer and so the need for it dwindles as the heat rises. So, the fact that it looks bad becomes solely an aesthetic concern. And frankly, even the Bermuda summer grass looks bad, patchy, brown, whereas the tall fescue I have actually goes bald in spots. Not the most attractive but it was a far sight easier to reseed than having to kill off another type of grass and then coax new grass up. The hoops I went through to get the lush green water conserving grass I now have - which was basically fertilizing, manureur and some nitrogen addition, throw on some seeds and water like heck - is a lot less than what my own gardener and gardeners went through around town to 'overseed'.

By the time September and the end to the drastic heat came about I had a lot of bald spots in the lawn but I must say the middle - where we have the graded gully (for flood reasons - doesn't happen often but better safe than sorry) and the rotor sprinklers overlap was thick, lush and deep green all summer no matter what the heat. This grass loves company. There more there is the more there will be. If it starts to give in to the desert it goes rapidly until the balding meets a densly packed patch of thick blades, then it will stop.

So the idea this year is to reseed the cuss out of my lawn until I can get it as densly packed as the soil will stand... and then when summer comes, hang on.

Consumption Begins

Last evening commenced what is the official start of the consumption/candy/overeating season in America. I was heartened to know that my son's school teaches a little something about day of the dead - I think it's important to know why holidays came about as much as it is to celebrate them earnestly. But I was a little taken aback at the renewed emphasis on candy.

Here's the thing. Everyone wants to feel generous, that they've given a little something, been festive and lightened someone's day but when everyone is doing it, and to such an extreme it becomes too much... and meaningless... and worse for children, expected.

When I was a child I walked through miles of snow... just kidding, hate to bring up that old device but I think it may be relevant... when I was a child you went door to door on Halloween - that was the only way to get candy - and you got exactly one piece of candy per house. One. Uno. Not even dos... maybe if you happened to hit a house late and they had too much left over they didn't wish to themselves consumme. But one. If you wanted more candy you had to hit more doors, walk farther... and be costumed!

But this year there and for many years I have noticed, since having my own children, that there is candy everywhere. Not only can you get candy at the mall, the museum, the store, everywhere you happen to land at on or about Halloween, but you also get a handfull of candy at each door when trick or treating! We hit exactly our block, roughly 20 houses, and the kids could no longer hold their buckets so full of the stuff were they. And then when they took over the answering the door and doling out the treats they were giving great handfuls to the kids at the door (not to mention many, many uncostumed teens! oi). I had to stop them and tell them to give only two per kid - which I thought, my age showing here no doubt, was pretty generous - to their confused and 'if you say so, mama' looks.

And then today there was candy offered up at every stop. At school there were treats given, several to a bag so that the ancillary take alone was probably as much at the trick or treating portion. In kindergarten last year my son was as likely to get a pencil or eraser as candy bar which I thought pretty responsible. And whatever happened to the cupcake? Is an on the spot treat not enough anymore? Why does there have to be a takeaway prize too to the school party?

And all this consumption and giving, what does it do really? Fills our colons and bloodstreams with excess sugar (oh come on parents, you know you're in your kids' stash), our landfills with wrappers and plastic, our dollar bins with discounted more the days and weeks after, our fat cells with stored energy, too much to burn off in one day. But what in terms of goodwill or connection is it giving us? Our lives are still lived on the surface, we still know very little about our neighbors, we spend lives in private little familial cliques in front of TVs. It's 'fun' for the kids, but what is the message in the final analysis, to expect gifts?

And Christmas is right around the corner.

An Update

OK, so admittedly, I was told by several gardening professionals that I would "not be happy" with my choice of grass... And now, of course, I see why. There are patches of bleak brownness giving way back to the desert and growing, just as the edged of clearcut rainforest give way to desert. But that part that is well watered and dense looks just lovely. And true enough it has taken quite a lot of water to keep it going during the torrid hot days of summer here in the desert. I suspect the proponents of the rotator type watering system somewhat exaggerated their wetting power. The patches that succumbed first to the desert were those that are on the edges of the rotators and probably do not get the volume of water the lovely green middle does. But I am still committed to my thick blades of deep green grass, even if I have to baby them along! I mean, seriously, can a kid pick up a bug with a wimpy thin yellowish-green blade of Bermuda grass or the fussy rye grass that gets reseeded come fall out here? I bought a 15lb bag of seed and have started to experiment with timing and temperature.

I did get a chance to use some of my compost on my reseeding experimentation. I is nice and black, just like northern soil. Note to self: Be careful not to shred those fake credit cards that come in the mail with credit offers - they don't biodegrade! At least not in months in the compost bin. I have several strips here and there in my grass! Nor do pistashio shells, peanut shells ace but pistachio, nope. And even though all the books suggest one put egg shells in one's bin they do not totally disappear. They are like little smiling teeth all over the reseeding patches of lawn. They'll keep feeding the soil - plants need calcium too come to find out - but if you are an aesthetic gardener maybe you should just bury them. Me, I kind of like the messy. Particularly since I live in the land of perfection - paradise - beauty - pick your adjective. The neat, tidy, sunshiny, paradisey goodness of this desert does get a little relentless. Seriously, 350 days of sunshine is just a little bit of crazy-making. I know why people want to move to the rough hewn hi-desert....

I digress. But I have many plantings that are really loving this climate - a thriving scilla violacea (that our baby-gal picked out herself), pachypodiums doing fine though a little sunburnt, adenium droopy but haven't figured out why yet, even the orange tree that isn't supposed to like this weather is pretty lush. I right killed a fockea edulis though. Perhaps I'll try again when I have some sort of bushy tree or shrub to put it under. Oh and I got a tiny little palo borracho tree - only 12 inches high - which I thought I killed which is doing really well. Jose, the gardener who does all the things I cannot, like putting in irrigation and trees - said "Isn't it going to be messy when it gets big and push up the wall with its roots" "Yeah, but I won't be around in 50 years, so why should I care!" Seriously, it will get too big for the yard and I promise that when we move I'll have it removed... but I am soooooooo looking forward to its butter colored flowers... in 4, 5, 6 years maybe!

Grass Update

Last weekend the kids and I took our first batch of compost, mixed it in with some topsoil and spread it on the brown spots on the lawn. Fingers crossed.

I've been told that this is a 'self-healing' type of fescue and I have seen evidence of that. The thing is the ground needs to stay moist for the grass to thrive. This happens naturally (and as I found out yesterday too well when humidity is high) by letting the grass stay a bit longish, 2 1/2 to 3 inches in the hot season. But once a dead patch develops it can spread because, of course, there is nothing covering the soil any longer to keep it moist. You could cover it with mulch or soil amendment (as we did with our compost) and hope that at the very least it won't spread. I'm seeing a few little stalks of green so I remain hopeful that this grass that everyone looked at me funny and swore they didn't think it could be grown in the desert (because no one they knew had done it before) will eventually thrive.

Add to the Annals of WTF??!!

We went to the great outdoors this weekend. Took advantage of the 20 degrees cooler temps in our local mountains.

We like this campground, only about 30 miles from the desert and have been there several times for day trips, once before to camp. When we arrived there were apparently several groups taking advantage of the 100 plus spaces, group spaces and the trailhead to a mountain biking loop. We were pretty lucky to get there early on Friday and get a spot. Pretty crowded but still not full.

As we set up though we began to notice the big daddies of camping arriving - Trailersaurus. Or in the plural, Trailersauri.

So here is the question: If you need to have lighting, a bed to sleep on, a kitchen to cook in, a TV, a VERY loud stereo system, a roll up door in the back with plenty of storage for your ATV and/or ALL of your children's bikes and motorized scooters and probably a full bathroom with shower while you are IN the woods, what are you in the woods for again? Isn't there a very lovely bed and breakfast just up the road that you could drive the car you are towing behind your Trailersaurus to and save thousands of gallons of gas in the process? And can you give the generator a rest for christs sake! That thing is loud.

Peace. That is what we are here in nature for! Not to listen to your generator running all day and to the country and western you just can't live without for one flipping day! We're in the wilderness people! For God's sake put the iPod down and smell the pine trees!!!

So Far, So Good

Lawn Implementation 2008 is, so far, going fine. We have had patches of brown and a few large chunks that completely died. But Jose came by to see what was going on, adjusted the pressure of the sprinklers, and the time. That, along with about a week of spring-like temperatures, and the lawn took off. Not all brown completely gone but green is starting to peek through in most of the problem patches. But apparently most of it was doing great because we even got mushrooms! Backed off on watering a bit and we seem to have reached a happy medium for this time of year. In 3 weeks or so we will adjust again.

So, 3 weeks in. We thought it would struggle, so skeptical were so many garden experts I'd asked out here about this particular kind of sod. But in fact, we had to buy a lawn mower weeks ahead of when we planned and have cut it twice!

And you know, it looks very pretty. It is a deep, dark green with beefy blades - unlike the almost translucent, skinny blades that most summer lawns in the desert sport. I am wondering why no one had tried this before? I seem to be met with skepticism and surprise by every garden enthusiast and professional I talk to about my lawn. "What kind of grass again? Never heard of it. Who sells it?" Even the lady at the sod company when I made my order had to double check that I was calling the right office and ordering the right product. It is so unheard of here, that of the dozen or so people I have spoken to about it, not one has heard of growing this type of sod in the desert.

Perhaps more accomplished gardeners than I have tried and failed and everyone knows something I don't. We have, afterall, only just reached 100 degree temps for days in a row. The brutality of summer is not yet here. But then if they have never heard of it...? Maybe I am a trailblazer. Maybe I will see my foolish ways when the 120s arrive. Who knows. But so far, so good!