raised beds & lil' asparagi

Last year I bought some asparagus... and now this little lone baby spear popped up. If that's the only one that grows, I can't imagine eating it... there will have to be some sort of sacrificial ceremony involved.



I like seeing who else is sprouting... or blooming.



The big news is:

This weekend I constructed my last two raised garden beds...



The wood is cedar. Contents include: soil, lime, peatmoss, "homemade" compost, etc. Still need to prep a little, start seedlings, and then it's on. I'm really hoping I can have some eggplant-related success.



I finally found a use for these old sun and moon metal pieces (hose guides on the corners)...

Look who survived the winter

Carrots & potatoes



I've come to the understanding that carrots can turn into monsters if left to their own devices.



Lettuce



Mint

I have some more exciting gardening news to share... but in an attempt to give this blog a spring rebirth, I'll save that for next time. Stay tuned.

Snow Patches

Took Patches out today to look at the snow.



I'm so behind with updating this blog, sometimes I think I will and then I think, oh it's so outdated anyway. But I'll never start, unless I restart, so here goes. Something.

Garden Makeover - Part 1

So, finally after much hemming and hawing and investigating and considering, I decided to go ahead and try to make raised garden beds.

That's instead of 1) keeping the unruly garden as is. and 2) purchasing the beds or a kit.

Supposedly cedar will last 5+ years, and it seems it's the most common material besides composite. I couldn't find anything affordable in terms 2-inch width planks, so I went ahead with 1-inch wide.

I got two 12-ft boards and had one cut in half and the other cut in 4ths. (Thanks to my brother for giving me the wood, already cut, for my birthday). So the beds will be 3 ft by 6. I've only made one so far, but now that the garden makeover has started, I really want to go ahead and do more. I'm thinking three would be good.



I sort of followed some directions I found online, and more or less just built a wooden frame. I used wood screws, some (pine?) wood blocks for reinforcement. Tools included the power drill. Oh yeah, and the level. I'm so prone to do things haphazardly but I figured it's better to start it out level than deal with a slope down the road.




I bought 2 bags of 3-cu ft of garden soil and 2 bags of 40 lb top soil and a big cube of sphagnum moss (which was not at all the texture I expected). I also lined the bed with newspaper and included some compost and other additives. I have a general idea of the cost of the materials for all this... and it's not cheap... though certainly less expensive than purchasing the beds ready made. I had been putting this off for a while now, so I figured I'd just go with it.

This was all very labor intensive so I'm very achy now, but still want to do more ASAP.

The other thing about the garden makeover is the idea to do twice as well, with half as much. That should be my general life goal... maybe? At any rate, I "disassembled" an entire half of the garden, took away the landscaping timbers, weeded, gathered up what mulch was left. I transplanted a bunch of carrots out of the retired garden area and into the mostly full-of soil-and goodies raised bed. I hope they'll do OK. We shall see.

And then I planted grass seed in that space. For some reason planting grass seems like some overly important deal to me. I'm not sure why. But I'm hoping it grows! I didn't have any hay to put on top... but I followed the directions on the bag, used lawn fertilizer and watered it.

I'm looking forward to the garden being smaller, more manageable, more attractive and hopefully the raised beds will make watering easier and more efficient (that's supposed to be one of their advantages).

Now I'm thinking I should have taken a "before" photo to show off the "after" when this makeover is complete. Let me just say the garden had really gone wrong in so many ways, this has to be a vast improvement.

Bizarre Market! & Referring to a Donkey

Bizarre Market!

The 2nd Annual Jonny Z Festival + Bizarre Market is this Sat., August 8th.

12pm-5pm
200 Block of Shields Ave.
(Between Grove & Hanover)

I'm planning to attend/vend and will have some repeat odds and ends, including Cats in Space, Seed Packet Notebooks and other stuff, pretty much just like last year.

Art 180's current events page has more details.

In other project news, I recently made a sculpy figurine of an angel donkey for a friend at work whose friend's donkey had passed away.

Unpainted it was weird and fleshy:



Then painted, it was cuter:







I had to use a photograph (generic internet donkey) as a reference. It got me thinking about needing "references" in that way. Not that I'm great at drawing cats, but somehow cats have become semi-embedded in my consciousness, anatomy-wise, and I don't HAVE to have a reference to avoid absolutely ridiculous results. Whereas, even though in my mind, I totally know what a horse or a mouse looks like, if I try to draw one without a visual reference, it will just be goofy as all get out.

It would be fun, maybe, to draw a series of things using references vs. not using references, and see how off I am. I actually sort of like the silly result vs. the serious, but I know it's laughable.

I'm wondering what affects the mind to the point that something is memorized visually and you know what it looks like, yet can't get it out of your head and onto paper properly. And what switches that to something which can be translated outwardly... just practice, or time, or staring a lot at things?

Maybe I should have been a kid who traced things more. I never really traced anything.

Where Are You, #733?

The other week I watched the 1000 Journals movie (now available on Netflix). I remember when I heard the book had come out and the film existed, but then I totally forgot about it.

I got involved with 1000journals, back in the old days when I was joining all sorts of random and to-be-stalled projects on nervousness.org. Those were the days when I was first getting an inkling how the internet could lead you in all these directions, and possibly even result in inspiration to do and make things in "real life."

I like seeing how one idea, site, fad... ends up morphing into so many other things. Now there's the 1001 Journals Project, which is apparently an offshoot made of personal journals of a possibly infinite number, going out in much the same way the 1000 Journals did.

* * *

So, part of a big question of the film was: what has happened to all of the 1000 journals besides the ones that someguy has received back or tracked down?

And I, in particular, wonder Where are You, #733?

Here's #733



For some reason I was on a mermaid kick at the time.

Journal #733 was one that I received in 2002, after it first traveled to Texas and I think France. I'm feeling some nostalgia and weirdness thinking back to those days. I had the book and some friends added some great one-of-a-kind stuff to it and then I think I got antsy and pestery for a bit, and then I sent it on.

Last seen in Hollywood, and the last tracking entry states "it was stolen in the spirit of..."

* * *

And... NEW, in Patches-approved linkage:
Babushka Jewellery Design recently posted a cute Kitsy kitsy post on cat related items, and included us.

マットサイエンティスト Maddosaienteisuto

A month or so ago I got a note from someone at etsy, saying the Japanese magazine Mono was asking for high res photos of some of my freakish animals. I sent on the goods and heard nothing until I got an email showing me pdfs of the published version.

Lots of etsy folk are included in the issue, as well as other online shops with mostly bizarro stuff.

It's Mono Magazine, issue 6/2/2009, (the translation "thing magazine" or "stuff magazine" works here as far as I can gather).





And here's my blurb, from page 72.

I was especially having trouble translating the long katakana word that was included, マットサイエンティスト, because I'm pretty bad with long katakana words, and easily give up because my brain just can't handle it. I was thinking it said something about "design taste", because I was reading "dosaien teisuto" out of it, but I knew that wasn't actually making any sense based on the characters. And also I'm not sure of the proper romanization with some little characters added to others.

So I emailed K-chan and here's her translation (she also she told me she bought 2 copies and will send me one, which is super cool):

The body is a spider, and the head is a cow(ox?).
Here comes an eccentric monster, which is probably
created by a mad scientist.

So, yeah, マットサイエンティスト　　Maddosaienteisuto = Mad Scientist. I guess I'm honored to essentially be referred to as a Mad Scientist in a Japanese magazine of which K says: "It's a very popular magazine, especially with men."

Now that I might get some Japanese customers to my etsy shop, I really ought to do some shopkeeping: lots of my stuff has expired and I've been totally neglecting everything. I haven't made a flipbook in months, (not sure I feel like doing it at all, production-wise) and am realizing more and more I'm liking the conceptual part a lot more than the labor-intensive part. What to do, what to do...?

* * *

In other news, related to mad scientists, or more like one furry mad genius....

Patches totally taught herself how to turn the knob on her automatic feeder. This is the feeder that actually came (off eBay) missing the part (dome over the timer) which now I realize was very valuable. I kept noticing the time was off, and was thinking the battery was being funky, but then one day I heard the knob gear turning (it's rather loud - click click click) and I went down there and there she was----turning it! I've been wondering how hard she thought this over (for months?) before figuring it out, and if at one point something happened and she was like "Aha! Now I get it." It's a little frightening.

This is like living with the rats of Nimh.

After one low-quality failed attempt to secure the situation with a rubber band and shoddy plastic basket, I got out the real tools (including the power drill, and it was serious business).



Materials/techniques include: half a plastic Christmas ornament thingy, drilled holes, eye screw (clipped and bent), wire, a washer.

I hope this holds up. If she gets into it now, she's getting nominated for some kind of cat intelligence prize.