Roses ... The Queen of Flowers

With Valentine's Day coming up, the subject of roses is on our minds. This article was originally printed in the Mar/Apr '03 issue of The Essential Herbal magazine.....

ROSES…. THE QUEEN OF FLOWERS
Maggie Savory-Posselius
Sappho, the Greek poet, designated the rose (Rosa spp.) as the “Queen of Flowers” for its glorious gold stamens surrounded by delicate petals. For centuries, roses have been associated with love. Romans designated the rose as the symbol for Venus, the Love Goddess. Cupid gave Harpocrates, the God of Silence, a rose so that his mother’s loves might be kept secrets. Romans also used roses, woven in garland crowns, to be worn by brides and grooms. Even today, it is still believed by many that a rose picked on Midsummer’s Night Eve and placed between a woman’s breasts, while she sleeps will bring images of her true love in her dreams.
The first garden roses (referred to as Heirloom Roses) chronicled were the Gallicas, Rosa x alba, the damask rose, the musk rose, and R. centifolia (the cabbage rose). These roses were found in the gardens of monasteries, at the base of the Tower of London, and in most formal gardens of monarchs. For today’s gardener and herbalist, heirloom roses hold distinction among other ornamentals and herbs.
Whether the R. rubiginosa, the sweet briar rose, often found welcoming visitors into a garden where it graces arbors or fences at the garden’s entrance, or the Damask Rose, used as the focal point or defining the garden with its eight foot canes, roses will add beauty and fragrance to your garden.
Heirloom roses are relatively easy to grow. Unlike their modern counterparts, heirlooms are not susceptible to common rose diseases such as black spot and powdery mildew. Heirlooms bloom once a season, but the season can extend up to two months. And unlike many modern cultivars, heirloom roses have retained the true scent of roses, an aromatic blend of “classic rose”, nasturtium, violet, apple, lemon, clove, and tea. With little care, heirloom roses will flourish in a sunny garden. A slightly acidic, well-drained and fertile soil will allow your roses to give you years of enjoyment.
Medicinally, rose petals and flowers are used as a tea for sore throats and are ingredients in many cold syrups. Roses have antidepressant, antiseptic, antiviral, and antispasmodic qualities. Rose hips are rich in Vitamin C and are valuable as a “booster” during cold and flu season. Vitamin C is highest in concentration in fresh rose hips and decreases as the hips are dried. Perhaps harvesting fresh rose hips and immediately freezing them or making a tincture will help to preserve the Vitamin C level.
Roses and rose hips can be used as an infusion, tincture, syrup, gargle, and mouthwash. As an application for skin care, roses have been respected for their aromatic qualities. Lotions and creams made with roses are an effective application for aging, dry, or inflamed skin. Combined with Lady’s Mantle (Alchemilla vulgaris), a lotion made with rose water will help relieve vaginal itching.
Rose essential oil (Rosa damascene) has been used as an effective treatment for depression and anxiety. A few drops added to bath water can help ease depression due to grief and for treatment of insomnia. Pure rose essential oil can be costly, as it takes 60,000 petals to make one ounce of essential oil, but it is worth the expense.
Rose Hip Seed oil (Rosa mosqueta) promotes tissue regeneration and is an excellent oil for reducing wrinkles and scarring. It has proven to be an effective treatment for UV damaged skin and for skin injured during radiation treatment. Rose Hip Seed oil contains high levels of linolenic acid and beta carotene, both of which are soothing and restorative.
Whether in your garden, in your medicine cabinet, or your lotions and potions, roses can bring beauty to your life. By scent, visual appearance, or taste, roses have been proven through time to be indispensable in our lives.

For your weekend edification

Edification? Few do it better. Michael Pollan gives a talk on Ted (link). You can download it in audio, a video, or watch it online. One of his insights is completely hilarious... and intriguing. ENJOY!

Why so quiet, you ask?

It seems a little quiet around here, doesn't it? Could that be for lack of activity? Are we hibernating? Nah, nothing like that...

On Monday several of us gathered at the Int'l Gift Show in NYC. Sarah and Kara from Herbs of the Labyrinth and Radiance rode up with us on the train, and we met Rosanne from Sun Rose Aromatics there. It was lots of fun to see all the new lines being rolled out, and the Extracts show was running at the same time. We spent our time in Extracts and Hand Made. It was a wonderful change of pace! Got to see new packaging, new colors, and new products. We came away with a ton of ideas!

The Mar/Apr issue arrived and is being prepped for mailing. Another issue with 4 extra pages. Now I *know* that the title Editor should mean that I could get this thing down to the promised 32 pages each issue, and we even considered dividing the one featured article over two issues, but it just pains me to take any of the good stuff out. Besides, there's lots of advertising to make up for and we had the highest subscription and renewal rate ever (by a good bit!) between issues. Maybe we should all get a little reward for that.

Also, we're working on a new book. One of two in a series, to be exact. It is taking a lot of time, but it is going to be so worth it! The idea has been stewing for a while, and I thought it would be good - until getting started. Now I'm so excited about it I could bust! Still, we're keeping it under our hat just a little longer.

Additionally, we're getting close to the completion date on the renovation on the house, and that means getting things tied up at my brother's old house, cleaning, packing... you all know the drill. Not fun, but everything seems to be on a timetable.

By the way, while the southern part of the country was struggling with horrendous storms, we had some peculiar weather of our own.

During the afternoon, a rare February thunderstorm rolled in. Sitting in the living room, I watched the storm roll and over the house. Out the front windows, a huge double rainbow appeared, and I was able to see both the beginning and the end. The second bow isn't visible in this shot.

Later that night a severe storm appeared out of nowhere. I caught the thunderhead as it approached. 10 minutes later it was daylight again.

to Bee or not to Bee

I thought I'd better get busy and post what I've learned about beekeeping from the class I took last weekend at the Genesee County Conservation District.
First, beekeeping looks like fun. A gentle activity with a sweet reward. The bee people look like great folks to get to know - the local bee association even makes sure that if a newbie needs a mentor, you'll get a mentor. That's nice! and the Michigan Beekeepers Association president, Dave, who taught the class said he has an extra bee protection suit at home, and if we needed the experience we could go over to his place and work with him on his boxes.

Two other local beekeepers were there with Dave who answered questions and gave tips and tricks. We got to see all the equipment, the various components of the boxes, and so on. We collected a pile of catalogues and printed information and a website to read:
http://www.michiganbees.org/

The first question was about the space needed to keep bees and if there are zoning laws.
15 percent of bees in America are raised right in urban areas! Dave gave an example of a beekeeper with 14 boxes right next to his garage in a residential part of one of the small towns nearby who has been beekeeping for decades with no problem. Out of sight out of mind is the beekeepers philosophy - bees are gentle creatures who don't sting unless they are pretty well forced to. One sting might hurt you but it kills the bee. If the neighbors don't know what that box behind the fence or shrub is, why should they mind? Honey Bees, although not native, are a beneficial part of the natural world and not at all agressive like some other bees and wasps.

Dave talked about how and when to order your bees. The different breeds, how to put them in the bottom "brood chamber" box, and what to feed them until enough flowers bloom for their food.

There are three things you should consider before you invest in bee boxes:
1. Are you raising bees for pollination or honey?
2. Do you plan to harvest comb or liquid honey?
3. Know about stings - even the most careful beekeepers do get stung. Are you allergic?

We discussed the mystery of CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). Dave said the government is researching the problem very seriously with help from concerned beekeepers. It is a worldwide problem with great consequence when you figure that a third of our food comes from bee-pollinated plants.
80 percent of our bees are raised for the purpose of pollination, only 20 percent for product. Beekeepers who rent their boxes to orchards can suffer huge losses overnight when CCD happens. Each box earns $150-200 dollars, and a truckload of boxes can easily run into many thousands of dollars. An interesting factoid was that for each almond on a tree, the blossom needs to be visited 10 to 20 times!
Dave's take on the issue of CCD is that three conditions must be present, and together, to be deadly to bee colonies: food, the stress of migration, and the varroa mite. Michigan beekeepers are working to breed a stronger bee to thrive in our part of the world.

For Michigan beekeeping beginners, Dave recommended we order Italian bees from California by going in with the local club and ordering together. Your order of bees with one queen arrive at a pre-arranged time in a truck, uncooked and much happier that way.
Order in February or March for delivery in April. If you order bees too late and you get them in May you might miss getting the quantity of honey you would have gotten had you started them before the blossoms are out. Just feed your bees a sugar-water mixture until Mother Nature takes over. When the dandelions are blooming that first time in the spring, you can quit feeding the bees.

Bees are sold by the pound, and a beginner should start with a three pound order for a 10 frame box. You should mark your queen with white-out or nail polish to keep her easily identifiable. She might live 7 years, but usually the egg production declines so that beekeepers will kill and replace their queens every two years. (Worker bees only live 2-3 weeks, so the hive depends on her egg laying to replace workers.)

I won't discuss the boxes other than to say Dave recommended staying with interchangeable sizes and standard equipment. That means the 10-frame box. You can vary the depth of the extra honey boxes (on top of the two base boxes) depending on how much you think you will be happy lifting.
Bee boxes come in kits to put together, but remember "bee space" is very important so be precise. Apparently bees fill "glue" into any crevice, and if the spacing of the frames is wrong (a bee space violation!) they'll build outwards between frames and havok will ensue! Apparently in the bee's mind, an 1/8 of an inch violation is asking for trouble! These guys were all laughing about buying a couple of hive tools (it looks like a crowbar/scraper), and how important it was to have one handy. You will need it.

Set your boxes with the entrance facing east or south for warmth. In Michigan, the morning sun is especially beneficial, and there is no need to shade the hives. You can (latex) paint the hive white to make it reflective, but bees are quite capable of warming and cooling the hive. Dave wraps his boxes on two sides with black tarpaper in the winter. A tree and/or shrub windbreak on the west side of the hive is helpful. Remember wherever you put the hive, you need 15-20 feet behind the boxes for your own access.

Water is critical for cooling the summer hive. A bee will carry water to the hive and drop it between the frames to be fanned by the workers' wings to keep the hive a pleasantly humid, constant 96.3 degrees. In the winter the bees take turns on the inside of the swarm and the outside, constantly fanning their wings to keep the center of the hive a pleasant 96.3 degrees.
The water you provide shouldn't be running water, and the bees aren't picky as to whether it is crystal clear or stagnant. A birdbath, a bucket or a pool are fine. Add a handful of hay in the bucket helps the bees land. Bees do find water in dew and they can travel 3-6 miles (a 6-12 mile "bee range") but most commonly travel 1/4 to 1/2 mile.

Bees sweat wax while they're making honey. A single bee makes about 1/2 teaspoon of honey in its life. You can expect 3 pounds of honey for each pound of wax.
Honey harvest is weather dependent. A typical Michigan beekeeper can expect 70 to 100 pounds of honey a year. A gallon of honey is very dense, it weighs about 12 pounds, so you can figure out how many gallons a box will give you (and why you should order the shallow boxes for the top of the stack.)

Bees sting in clusters because the first bee's stinger will leave a scent that other bees will identify as a threat and they will attack what they think is a danger to their community. Bees are cold blooded creatures - they sense heat, not CO2 as some people think. That is why they go for your face - its warmth attracts them.
An interesting thing I'd never heard was if another insect or small animal gets in the hive, the worker bees will 'ball' around the intruder and raise the temperature with their wing flapping until the victim cooks to death!

Bees do get agressive if varmints have been disturbing the hives, so watch the corners of the boxes for signs of chewing or scratching. Set the boxes up on cement blocks in an accessible area. And if you set out carpet tack strips points up, it will discourage robber racoons and skunks who know enough to lay on their tummies to protect their tender stomach areas from the bees' stingers. Small opening chicken wire or a metal door reducer is used to protect the entrance from field mice in the fall.

When working on your boxes you should wear a sweatsuit under your heavy clothes (so the stingers can't get through the thickness), and makes sure all cuffs and collars are securely closed. Bees don't notice light colors, which is why bee suits are white. A netted hat and leather gauntlet gloves are essential. One beekeeper told us an unused fabric softener sheet in your hat will repel bees.

When you get stung, don't pull the bee off, that leaves the stinger. Scrape it sideways with a credit card to remove the stinger.
Have Benedryl on hand for swelling, and home remedies include tea bags, baking soda, the herbs plantain and comfrey.
Carry 2 epi-pens if you are allergic and don't leave them in your car (cooking destroys their effectiveness.)Shoot yourself in the rear - if you jab it into the hip you can hit your bone. Ow!



We heard a bit about the extraction of honey, and some interesting facets of marketing. For instance, you can extract the honey yourself using leased equipment from the beekeepers club, or take it to another beekeeper who will extract it for you. Your honey house (the room where you do your extraction) should be up to state dairy farm standards - washable walls, etc. Honey has high acidity so just about nothing bad will grow in it, but it must be packaged with care. Inspectors generally won't write citations for extraction but are firm about packaging: the cooker should be stainless and able to heat. You don't need a license to sell from your own property, but if you want to sell in a market or store, you'll need to follow certain labelling rules and get that $70 license. Oh yes, and it is commonly said that the state doesn't work on Saturday, whatever that means.

Dave also highly recommended ANR (Agriculture and Natural Resources) Week at Michigan State University, which you can probably Google easily. The Beekeeping Program at ANR Week is two full days from 8-5:30 (March 7 and 8). It looks very worthwhile.

Can you believe we learned all that in a couple of hours! There was more. too. But you probably want to know if I'm thinking of beekeeping.
Well right now, between having to learn so much more because I think there is more to learn, and the initial cost (I am jobless, after all)... I'll have to say, No, with regret. Maybe next year at this time, I'll have become better organized and less overextended in time and budget, and we'll make the investment. But now I can say I know where to get educated about the subject, I know where to get a deal on local honey and local bee products, and I appreciate the beauty and work of beekeeping.

A green-washed mind

First, a link in the "useful" category, for web surfing:
Another Seafood Guide
(Our oceans are being poisoned for profit. Buyer beware!)

I was just reading the following article on MiLive, the Jackson Patriot online, and have to mention something here. (I'll insert my commentary in colored font):

Locavore hysteria revisited (the word 'hysteria' in the title already makes me wonder if this is a greenwashing piece?)
Posted by lsmithso
January 29, 2008

As many of you might have heard, the Oxford University Press named "locavore" (one or eats, or attempts to eat, locally grown and produced food) as Word of the Year for 2007.
This was certainly the foodie mantra I learned in South Carolina, where my locavorism was galvanized at the hand of my boss at Charleston City Paper.
I thought I had my take on local tomatoes all figured out. (Now I have to go find out wtf she's talking about there.) Good thing James McWilliams showed up to shake me around. But, as Treehugger pointed out and Boston's NPR (as in National Propaganda Radio?) affiliate reported, there are caveats to that maxim, especially depending on where you live. (People have always moved for jobs... that is how the right to work states in the south managed to grow at Michigan's expense, isn't it? "Where you live" is a choice, now isn't it? May I suggest moving where you live for the purpose of food sustainability? or at least, learning how to eat like a native of your chosen home?)

James McWilliams is a contributing writer for the Texas Observer and currently a fellow in Yale's agrarian studies department. In this "Moveable Feast" piece, he brings thoughtful skepticism (or green washed monkey-wrenching) to the wildly popular (and I might say, rockin' explanatory journalism) go-local credos of Bill McKibben, Barbara Kingsolver and others promoting the concept of "food mileage" and all its ancillary benefits.

His main premise is that geography -- land's ability to actually provide a substantial diet for those who live on it -- is the salient issue when it comes to impact on the earth. And that, rather than focusing so ardently on food miles, we might want to put the Eat Local movement in a broader perspective of changes that accommodate everyone -- and save the planet, of course.
(I'm waiting to hear some ideas he wants us to focus on instead of food miles. {{crickets}}
I'd like to add here, that if you think the status quo is going to save the planet that 'everyone' shares, you are sadly mistaken. A focus on 'food mileage' is the legitimate concern that we should not count our food 'cheap' if it is dependent on burning carbon, carbon from oil, mostly. Burning oil to ship a leaf of lettuce 1,500 miles is killing our shared planet. It is one of many issues in the diverse realm of mindful eating.)

Some of his startling facts:
• Lincoln University in New Zealand "found that lamb raised on New Zealand's fertile pastures and shipped by boat to the U.K. consumed 688 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions per ton. By contrast, stock produced within the U.K.'s poorly adapted pastures consumed 2,849 kilograms per ton. In other words, it is four times more energy efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard."
• New Zealand's most prominent environmental research organization, the Landcare Research--Manaaki Whenua, reassessed its position on local consumption after the study was published. "Localism," two Landcare scientists wrote in late 2006, "is not always the most environmentally sound solution if more emissions are generated at other stages of the product life cycle during transport."
(I wonder what other hidden costs those ships are creating? Or maybe lamb, like bananas, should not be cheap or common. Consumers need to understand that their choosing to eat lamb is the problem. )

• McKibben's deeply researched and humanistic accounts of Eat Local victories sparkle for regions endowed with the life cycle systems to pull the victories off. For those of us poor saps stuck in locations where sustainability is a cruel joke, we can only enjoy the experience vicariously, or plan to subsist on beef jerky and well water.
(Okay, I'm missing something here. This writer lives in Michigan , right? She ought to get out more, I mean into nature, a garden, or to a farmer's market. Go over to the Student Ogranic Farm at MSU. Something! Michigan is a cornucopia!

Michigan is a wonderful place for 'foodies'! We can't economically grow coffee, tea, chocolate, olives, bananas, or citrus here, but just about anything else is being done as we speak. Barbara Kingsolver discussed that when she talked about letting the family choose one item they wouldn't be happy without. Id' have a hard time choosing between the coffee and the olives.
I know, Herb could choose to keep the olives and that would free me up to keep my fair trade shade grown coffee.
But as a matter of fact, this year I have severely cut back on buying chocolate, oranges, bananas and out of state and out of season fruit, and we have hardly missed them. Herb still needs his grapefruit and I love an occasional bag of lemons. but we are reducing our food miles by choice. And believe me, we aren't starving or eating badly.

• For environmentally concerned Americans wedded to food mile measurements, the only viable answers for reducing our dietary carbon footprint are to move to a fertile region (Kingsolver, McKibben), to live off root crops, game, and preserved food (Smith and MacKinnon), or to starve (almost Smith and McKinnon).
RUBBISH! add to that ... "Or start to make changes in our personal lives that reflect our values."
My personal take is that we subsidize "cheap" oil by waging trillion dollar bloody wars supported by an unsupportable military presence in the world (we have over 400 military bases on foreign soil.)
To heck with measuring the carbon footprint of a New Zealand lamb that a British Housewife is serving for Tuesday supper! Has anyone ever measured the carbon footprint of the American military?
Your choice is to eat or not eat that "cheap" banana shipped in from some tropical dictatorship, burning that "cheap" oil that my taxes are paying for by a subsidized war machine protection racket... instead of things I would choose to support.
This commentary will be continued on my cranky blog, in the pursuit of happiness and light...

Anybody you know?

The CSA meet up

Last night Herb and I went to a church downtown to hear about the upcoming offerings of CSA farmers in our area. It was a meeting of potential customers and hopeful growers, all intent on connecting to buy locally grown, hopefully certified organic, fresh and wholesome food by the farm supporting "subscription" method.

The manager of the Flint Farmer's Market, Dick Ramsdell, should be thanked for arranging the meeting. A few of the growers are actual vendors at the market, but he offers us all the market as a central meeting place to drop off and pick up our shares. It is wholly a thing that he thinks should be done, to introduce urban consumers who have lost contact with their food source to the actual people who make their living by producing our food, and he arranged this meeting on that principle, with or without the profit motive for the market.
He did mention that the fresh local idea is growing so well he is hearing about more vendors building hoop houses so that we can have fresh local greens in the winter soon.

I took plenty of notes, but didn't really need to, as I planned to re-subscribe to Whetham Farms' CSA considering our good experience last year. Three of my gardening friends, Mel and Bonnie and her husband Chuck, are joining, too.

There is a lot of information out there if you still need to be convinced. Some of the handouts were straight from the web:

Local Harvest has a lot of information on CSAs.

What is a CSA? is from this site in Lebanon!

Five Reasons to Buy Local is from Community Alliance With Family Farmers a good site with lots of links...

And Mr. Ramsdell recommended one of my favorite sites for loads of reading (that this city girl only discovered last year): ATTRA - National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service

Here is a list of the goods that growers were offering, just to show a bit of what we can buy fresh, and local, and (hopefully) organically grown or at least grown with as sustainable practices as possible:

vegetables, greens, pumpkins and squash, potatoes, heritage tomatoes and cucumbers
fruit, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, apples (heritage), pears, peaches, plums, grapes soon, sweet and tart cherries
flowers, gourds
honey
maple syrup
chickens, range and tractored
eggs
turkeys, heritage varieties
grassfed beef
milk soon
lambs
pork

One grower said they raise 90 varieties of vegetables.
One grower said she raises 30 to 40 varieties of heritage tomatoes.
One farmer's antique apple trees are coming into production.
One grower is offering a monthly workshop.
One grower said they have two festivals during the season.
We heard terms like sustainable, heritage, hormone free, pastured.
We heard plans and dreams and goals, some of them realized.
One farmer's land has been in the family for 5 generations!
One farmer's daughter is taking the organic farming program at Michigan State University!
There was a lot of hope for the future in that room last night.

Beware the kerfuffles of February

Posting a little poetry here to keep the interior world green. But first...

There is a kerfuffle ongoing in the gardening blogosphere, a place separate from the real world unless you are a gardener and on the computer a lot. The problem being it is February and there is always kvetching in February among gardeners.
Believe me, this is nothing new.

I used to read gardening bulletin boards in the 1980s when the internet was a baby and communication was all words no pictures, and screens were black or green and white, back in the days before the internet was a pretty place with expert digital photography all over it and even movies with sound! Gosh oh gee. How far we have progressed (she says in her old, ironic voice.)

In those days there were arguments, and flame wars over minutia and things could get ugly. I got flames on AOL for some legit advice. Minutia. I will not go into it.
I also posted the first (as far as I know) instance of a virtual online "party" to get folks talking with civility once again to each other. People who read the AOL gardening bulletin boards may remember it. There was also a virtual big dog involved who broke a lot of ice and melted hearts when he left.

In the 90s (my timeline is obscure - I can look it up for you but that exact time is not the point) some bulletin boards on big servers like AOL and Prodigy hired nice folk to mother (monitor) the flocks, and garden communities grew and leaders developed, and smart people made their own meeting places like Gardenweb and the Garden Gate and so on.
Then websites became cheap and easy, and blogs became free and even easier, and we are now at the totally diverse and decentralized place where we are today. I still discover new gold nuggets every day.

You can read forever, it's like Second Life ... a virtual world of gardening where the sun never sets and the boots never get muddy and backs never get rusty hinges. And now bloggers who feel lonely talking to their screens, or want to make communities to either limit or expand their world, or who like to get more readership and maybe earn something from their work are again changing the landscape of the virtual garden world.

Anyway, before I got off of my path, I wanted to say that the latest kerfuffle among bloggers is about something called "sharecropping" a word that you will recall derives from the once extensive practice of the poor man using another man's land to feed his family, labor his life away, and stay in lifelong debt bondage to the masters of our ownership society. A word invented by a post war return to feudalism.
How "sharecropping" was assigned to cribbing from someone else's blog is something I need to think about more - maybe you can explain it?

If you cut and paste from another person's work is it stealing, or is "imitation" (with a link OF COURSE) the sincerest form of flattery?

There are all sorts of opinions circulating and toes being stepped on and lines being drawn and I recall this happening (by happenstance) just before the 2000 election as well.
All I can say, since I am not really a joiner, even with my real life participation in gardening clubs, and I won't be kicked out of any "web ring" or blog list or anything virtually important for saying this, all I can say is...

Grow up folks, it's the internet.

Decentralization, that was the whole original concept of the internet if you recall Arapanet. You know, that thing Al Gore really did make a priority for government funding (And also recall how that got cleverly twisted by twisted people to use against him. Don't believe me? How many times did you hear people superciliously repeat, "Oh yeah, Al Gore invented the internet. He's such a liar..." If you care, figure out who the people were who invented that meme, it'll help you vote more intelligently next time if you take what those same people say with a grain of salt.)

Decentralization was supposed to make the Internet (which carries much more critical information than our virtual gardening musings) invunerable to attack by foreign powers or terrorists.

Diversity, gazillions of bits of information, that is what makes the internet an infinite gold mine for the development of our shared human intelligence and intercommunication.

We are not in high school, folks. Flame wars are for unhappy bored people, they are limiting and whiny and take up valuable time and waste our intelligence. Some people think it is a fun sport to stir things up.

we cut. we paste. we borrow. we recreate. we spread the knowledge, we build on it - if you re-format it yourself that is a bonus - if you have an idea, share it. Nothing is new, just unvisited. Nothing is sacred, just ideas that are unvisited.
Don't tell a True Gardener you can't plant a white garden, or even talk about a white garden, just because it was done before.
True Gardeners love to share cuttings, advice, dreams and schemes; they even work together for the fun of working together.

These ideas of "freely sharing" and grassroots multiplicity and diversity are being explored in the greater world: is our religion the only religion, is file sharing stealing, is privacy a dead concept, are cheap Chinese knockoffs killing the patent, is Microsoft buying Yahoo going to kill Google!
Maybe our opinions on these questions is a way of seeing how the world divides itself. So called conservative or so called liberal.

Hmm, Let me take a swing at those big questions:

One true religion: One political party's avowed branch of a small religion is in world scale not the only religion, the truest religion, or even the major religion. Please don't cram yours down my throat.
You like estate landscaping, I like a small niche garden. We're both gardeners, and we can enjoy each other's gardens without judgement over which is RIGHT.

File sharing is one way people who can't afford to buy vast libraries of music can form opinions to make wise purchases and find new (and perhaps non-corporate) artists. We do support artists we admire, once we have plowed through the loads of dreck to find them.
A garden can be grown from traded seeds or from expensive transplants, it's the art that matters.

Our privacy is robbed and data-mined and sold, and used against us, but a privacy is a goal listed in our once sacred Bill of Rights back when we were serious citizens who dreamed of democracy.
We garden bloggers share our personal information TO A POINT, but we draw lines and plant hedges. We hope readers will respect our private life in the spirit with which it is shared.

I don't shop at Wallymart. If you do, don't complain about China.
True Gardeners care about the planet, and the amazing life on it. And we try our best to act accordingly.

I heart Google. It is decentralized. It is not targeted to my preconceived beliefs and habits and data-mined preferences. MS buying Yahoo only will serve people who are afraid of being confronted by all of the new ideas that you run into out there in the great big world.
The virtual garden has it all. Have fun, learn, share.

These opinions are subject to change.
They are my opinions. If you have another way of looking at the world, write your own blog.

On this convoluted note, I cut and paste this from another blogger, but he didn't write it either and I misplaced the link (I am correctable, just write.)

The garden is rich with diversity
With plants of a hundred families
In the space between the trees
With all the colours and fragrances.
Basil, mint and lavender,
God keep my remembrance pure,
Raspberry, Apple, Rose,
God fill my heart with love,
Dill, anise, tansy,
Holy winds blow in me.
Rhododendron, zinnia,
May my prayer be beautiful
May my remembrance O God
Be as incense to thee
In the sacred grove of eternity
As I smell and remember
The ancient forest of earth.
~a Chippewa song

Post note: I want to mention here that my blogger spellcheck button has not worked for days now. Sorry if I have mispelled something, but hey, you get what you pay for, dontcha know.

Green Thumb Sunday #2

My second attempt to do a GTS post, the first time on a Sunday:

Join

Gardeners, Plant and Nature Lovers can join in every Sunday, visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Two primroses, a teacup violet outgrown it's teacup, a sweet marjoram, and a few succulents. I buy a few primroses at the grocery store every year in January to perk up the winter doldrums with their leafy greeness and crayon colored flowers. They'll be planted later in the garden and most of them come back for at least a few years and they'll bloom for me in cool moist weather.

Same with the sweet marjoram. If you keep your eye out for them, the potted herbs in the produce department go on sale occasionally. You can get your investment back if you grow a sweet marjoram or rosemary, keep it pinched to make it branch, and plant it in the garden come spring. Come Spring.

A Local Hero

Anyone who has ever brought a turfgrass sample to the Home Horticulture help window at the Genesee County Extension, or seen the sample turfgrass plots there, or who has asked for help on the Master Gardener Plant and Pest Hotline, or who has Ask(ed) a Master Gardener a gardening question at the Flint Farmer's Market or a myriad of other venues, has probably met and spoken to, or otherwise assuredly been helped by one of my local heroes, Jim.

He is a model for us all in how to grow older gracefully. Jim lives his compassion by active community volunteering. He always has a hug and an encouraging word for the rest of us.
Jim shares his wisdom by maintaining a vital interest in everything, with his dogged pursuit of continuing education, and then in his turning around and giving back his knowlege, for free, to the community.

Jim has had a setback and this note came today from Terry on the Master Gardener list-serve:

Genesee Master Gardener Volunteers:
An absolutely wonderful medical update on MG Jim Fearon's condition: Jim was taken off the respirator yesterday afternoon, and is breathing on his own, awake, alert, and talkative! He is being transferred out of intensive care late this afternoon. These are amazing developments, and his family and friends are so very thankful for your continuing thoughts and prayers!

All I can say is, stay with us, Jim. We need you here. Spring is coming and our world wouldn't be the same without you.


Jim is the handsome guy on the right in this photo:

The usual suspects: Don, Ruth, Me, Sue, Phil, Mary, and Jim.