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A Wizard a Prophet and a Giant walk into a bar

Read any good books lately? That's the way Dick used to open the Friday Morning Breakfast Club. I became a member of this wonderful little group, as everyone did, by showing up. My first visit was as the driver for Karl Hess who was their speaker on that particular Friday. I knew nothing about Karl Hess at the time and didn't have a clue that I was blithely ignoring a man with a deeply interesting life and simply trying to keep my just off shift bartender eyes open and on the road. I think I was invited to be the driver for Mr Hess both because Mary Margret his hostess had a thing for me and the local Libertarians weren't known for having running cars. (mine was a Mustang II - which was a name Ford had slapped on a car that became the Pinto so....)
 The Friday Morning Breakfast Club was a salon in the French tradition mixed with a TED talk. I was a bartender at a strip club and not exactly stretching my brain. A cup of coffee and listening to Karl inspired me to come back (in spite of the hour!) again and again for years till the group withered upon the death of Dick.
  The music is matched to the day, a cool August day with a bit of rain more of a mist really, Grateful Dead Skeletons From The Closet nothing hard just a gentle easy roll. I've followed it up with some Allman Bros both for a clever gardening tie in and to continue the jam band groove.
  I'm thinking of books because I just finished a good one yesterday and dove half way into another good one. Yesterday should and could have been a hot August day of pulling weeds and tuning the garden to Martha Stewart standards. Ah but not so, nope the iced tea, shade of the ash tree and a lounge chair trapped me early. The books kept me all day till it was time to make a late dinner.  Yeah, that is a good day in the garden!  
 The first book was Jim Dwyer's More Awesome Than Money. I've come to find that newspaper and magazine writers tend to write very readable books. (professors write crap intended to impress other professors) This was no exception. The book was the true story of the creation of Diaspora* a social media alternative to Facebook with a focus on individuals owning/controling their data. Now, I have to interject that in selecting books from the library I use a rather serendipitous method. I pick a couple of random numbers and than match the number of rows and shelves in the library loosely to those numbers and pick a few covers that attract my attention. I'm not beyond cheating in that I know the library branch I go to (and thus the rows)  pretty well and you really can't judge a book by it's cover but it stretches my reading a bit. I say all that because I can go months without catching a good one and here I caught two.
 The theme of data privacy is dear to my heart and while the book is a few years old Facebook's data issues are as topical now as they were then. Mr Dwyer did a good job of telling the story while expanding my Luddite understanding of the larger issue. I've sung the tune of privacy in past blogs and some might still think "I'm doing nothing wrong, watch me all you want - and I get discounts!". I would simply challenge you that a society that can be watched near constantly - is a society on the road to tyranny. I saw in the news the other day that Facebook is working with the largest banks to monetize their data by integrating it with the existing cloud of data Facebook already has. Oh and the genetic testing companies are selling their data to insurance companies, but don't worry there will be coupons.
 The music has changed over to Allman brothers Eat A Peach and I'll use the shift to jump over to the garden. I recall the album's title and cover art were always reputed to be a laugh about the last thing Duane Allman saw before he died in his motorcycle crash. Wikipedia says otherwise. I s'ppose we'll have to believe those smarty pants know it alls but I like the other story.
  So yeah the other reason for the musical choice is I ate my first peach from the garden this morning. Not just a peach - but God's finest glory of a peach! My little 4' high peach tree has it's first crop maybe a dozen or so. Half are small and half are baseball sized with a color that would make an artist proud - I mean truly just beauties.
  I've been checking them like a miser with his gold for ripeness each morning. Yesterday I came home from the walk with the dogs and one of the big ones was just laying there under the tree. It still felt solid so I assumed something knocked it off before it was ripe and put it in the kitchen hoping it would ripen. Boy was I wrong this morning Deb cut it up for our breakfast. The flesh was just perfect the texture of soft butter dancing on your tongue singing PEACH, PEACH, PEACH. Perhaps I am a bit too much the proud papa but it was a good peach. I'm going to have to adjust my ripeness thinking and can't wait for the nectarines. Don't count on me sharing!
 The day in the lounge chair with the iced tea didn't slow the garden down in the least. We've been eating good and healthy with nightly plates of greens and beets, carrots and onions, some broccoli and green beans and of course plates of tomato slices with mozzarella and basil. August is a fat time in the garden.
  I've been trying to work in a note about my brother Glen's "redneck aeroponics" system he described to me in our last chat. Plastic (red I presume!) Solo cups in a section of gutter pipe that are, I'm told, crushing it in growing Aji Dulce peppers. Aji Dulce are a sweet pepper that look a bit like a scotch bonnet and are apparently de rigueur for Venezuelan cooking. I haven't seen even pictures yet but I might have to make a visit to Texas to check it out.
  On a sad note our garden giant came down this last week. Our Siberian Elm was a massive 30 or 40 ft tree on our alley. It was likely planted when the house was built in '48 and was certainly among one of the first trees in the neighborhood. Something folks often forget, in Denver and it's burbs, except for a few cottonwoods along our few streams this was a treeless high plains desert. Man does change things - change is always a we'll see thing. The Elm I would have to say, with the possible exception of the generations of squirrels that have tormented me, was a good thing. Nature usually is.
 With other losses this year taking it down was a hard decision to loose an old friend. It's branches are now stacked in the wood pile which will likely last longer than this Paul Bunyon's desire to split wood. The chips will of course go on the garden with an extra helping for the mushrooms which popped this last week. The space along the alley will gradually be more usable for growing with this giant gone. I threw some cilantro and marigold seeds out there this morning just to see if they'd fill some of the bare ground. Real planting will be as I said gradual.
 I also got lucky with August being moderate in weather this year and my peas I snuck in a couple of weeks back have popped and might give me a fall crop of at least pods if not peas. With this morning's sprinkle I snuck in just a little spinach and radicchio. The spinach is with the hope that I can get some seeds to save as I'm usually waist deep in them but realized the other day I'm down to just a handful. The radicchio is one of those cool weather crops I've always heard of but I've never even tasted. I tried growing it last year in the Mennonite garden but didn't even get a sprout - so we'll see.
 I mentioned I'm halfway into a second book (again serendipity - I swear) and it is about change in gardening or more exactly agriculture. The book is Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. The Prophet is William Vogt an early environmental writer and thinker whose thoughts on carrying capacity of the planet deeply influence today's environmental movement. The Wizard is Norman Borlaug the essential farther of what came to be called the Green Revolution.
 I won't judge the book till I finish it, but finish I surely will as it is the essential crossroads of the contradictions within my own life as a gardener and a political creature. I don't grow a vegetable garden in my backyard (and now my front) without thinking about the larger issues of the environment, organic vs chemical, GMOs, CRISPER, land use, carrying capacity and just the whole schmear of important ideas. (sometimes dear Freud a carrot is more than just a carrot!) I tend to philosophically side with the logic that science and capitalism grow the pie. Yet I am deeply troubled that the primary use of GMOs has been to spray the world with a questionable chemical and shares the risk of that far beyond those who see the primary benefit. When I hear that CRISPER will likely never be used to improve the flavor of tomatoes, only their cardboard like qualities useful to McDonalds and Subway, I think it is an opportunity lost. But I know my garden won't feed the world so... stimulating read we'll see.
 Get out in your garden but don't forget to grab an iced tea and a good book. Doug A.
   

Comments

  1. Doug, I hate to admit it, but you keep getting better at this writing thing, and soon it may be Michele that is attending your book signings rather than the other way around (as if you were ever to show up at such things in the first place).
    I enjoyed reading this, and I swear that if I read enough of these, I might have to go plant something some day.
    With that, I admit my sadness to hear that you felled your Elm tree. Not because of the loss of the tree and/or the shade that it provided, but because I didn't know it was coming down. I would have talked you into letting me be a part of the endeavor if for nothing else than to talk you out of some 12' lengths of the trunk to be taken to the lumber mill down the road. As you are to the hoe and rake, I am to the saw and plane, and wood on the barren plains such as the Colorado Front Range is, well, EXPENSIVE.
    Only a fool (yes I) would move away from the forested Northeast and then take up woodworking in earnest in the Frederick, CO. In any event, if there should be any sizable lengths of that Elm remaining providing a nuisance in your alley, let me know and you might find free removal service for the asking.

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  2. I think Michele is quite safe as the writer that we know. I went direct to you with an email as my frustration with my stupidity for not thinking of you for the tree's wood wasn't PG. Ouch - Doug A.

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