Le Week-End

Good, busy weekend. Spent a bunch of time with Everyone on Friday night just sort of hanging out, got some gardening done Saturday and want to do more, had a lovely date with the Juggler Saturday night in which we tried to go down to the boat but it was occupied (next time!) and spent a wonderful afternoon with _greenwitch_ doing plantish stuff.

There's definitely something to be said for having lots of people in your life and doing justy a couple of things with each person in the areas where you mesh well. There are things to be said for doing things other ways, too, but hanging out at home with Estrellada, or chatting with Mouse, or doing garden stuff with _greenwitch_ is really, really nice. There's none of that explaining/hesitation business, you can just jump right in and do it.

Anyhow. Came home from the phodo sale with... five tiny japanese maples, for fun and profit. Well, for bonsai and container growing. They're seedlings, and I'm very curious as to how they'll turn out.

I freaked out last night over the strike, but it seems to not be happening so that's good. If it happens my income drops to approximately $200 per month, which doesn't cover rent, unless I find another job.

This'll be a busy week, workwise, but since I work so often over by Macdonald I can get to UBC to hang out at Wreck beach pretty easily in the late afternoons. I hope we get some good solid rain and then some good solid sun.

I fell in love with a very intriguing japanese maple at Gardenworks yesterday. I may not be able to afford him, but will consider hard and see. Do I look like a japanese maple collector to you? Why do these things happen to me? ;>

David Hunter garden centre doesn't know what rootstocks their Ranier cherries are on, and they're out of Stella. Those are the two I want to get. *sigh* Will need to call today to talk to the knowledgeable owner, who may know.

The rats are healthy and happy, particularly the boys. They're so much shinier and energetic than when I got them, I think I've definitely done something good and right in giving them a home. Yay!

There's an Otherspace marathon from Friday to Monday. I have a bit of work Monday and possibly some Friday morning, but I'm wondering whether I should try for it. A roleplay marathon is one where, at the end of the time, they give an award to the person who's 1) roleplayed the most during that time and 2) who, as of the end of the marathon, has been online roleplaying the longest. I can't pull four days or whichever of roleplay, but maybe 24 hours. I haven't done anything like that in forever.

I think that's it for now. I have a book to read, and I also need to learn to propagate camellias and get some work done. Be well.

Argh, and Permaculture.

Week's just starting and I'm exhausted. Need to continue to spend time with friends + sleep, somehow.

I'm reading the book /Gaia's Garden/ which I've borrowed from _greenwitch_. It's an incredible book. There's something completely, utterly fascinating about the science of garden ecology, which may or may not exist under that name; something is done to the garden, generally for a particular purpose, and it has a number of effects including sometimes the desired one. Gardening ecology seems to only be beginning to become a science (ack, an evil sentence!), possibly because it's so very complicated and not necessarily intuitive. There are so many things that depend on so many other things that stack in huge chains and spirals of interdependency, and it's easy for us to miss those and do one thing or another thing without knowing how many of those chains we're impacting.

I'm not saying that all gardeners need to be scientists, or anything. I'm saying that it's much more interesting to me to know as much of what's going on in the garden as possible (what lives in the soil? Why? How does this or that plant or fertiliser effect those things? What to they do? What if I mulch with hay? What if I mulch with black plastic? How do different kinds of tree root in the soil, or uptake nutrients and water? How does that harmonize with different kinds of shrubs or plants? Etc, etc, etc).

I don't think it's great science not to know about these interdependencies, and I know that not nearly enough research has been done on the topic. Talk about an unexplored field! But, I'm rambling. Gaia's Garden, ignore the title, just read the book, _greenwitch_ has it as does the Vancouver public library. Ignore any of the moralising if you like, just pay attention to the ecology info.

Further: deep fried mars bars on the drive are wonderful. I can eat half of one per week. Anyone want the other half next week?