Tuesday--

Another chilly day today but plenty of sunshine.  I saw a couple of the beans popping above the soil so I need to tie the sunflowers to the stakes.  The herbs are thriving and I will need to take a new cutting on the peppermint and spearmint over the next couple of days.  We added some of the India mustard to our salads during the last warm up and I think we will gather enough for a cooked dish soon.  The sweet potato slips arrived yesterday.  I planted them but they looked rather pathetic.  I hope they revive and thrive but next year I will wait and buy at the local garden shops.

I have often wondered how many of the people our government charged with aiding terrorist groups have been helping groups our own government has been aiding.  Reading this piece from Britain I wonder even more.

Every year Tom Englehardt writes a "graduation" speech for the new graduates.  Here is this year's--it's a pip!.

Wednesday--

Should be another pretty day.  Have some little chores in the gardens today.  I picked up some stakes for some of the smaller plants and need to get them in.  We visited the local farmers' market on its first day of this season.  I found a gold-leaf lemon thyme which needs a permanent pot.  The sunflowers are growing rapidly and are big enough to tie up to the stakes.  I put those in so that the tall mature plants will have additional support in case of high winds.  Two of my lemon verbena plants need stakes to encourage them to grow straight.

We had a lot of errands Monday and Tuesday, and an unexpected one for today.  We remarked that the lawns looked abnormal dry considering the rain we got over the last couple of days last week and the weekend.  Looking up the stats we evidently got less than we thought.  The drought monitor lists us in a short term slightly dry phase.

I wouldn't have thought about this source of nitrogen pollution in the Rocky Mountains however it does make sense.  I have seen more stories about the pollution going the other way via run-off.  But the one source I notice the author doesn't mention:  feed lots.  I remember several just outside Ft. Collins that you could smell long before you saw them.

Another good reason to buy chicken from local farmers who aren't a part of the industrial meat production machine--as if we hadn't enough reasons already.  There is something incredibly evil about this kind of a system.

The above article noted that the chicken production industry abuses its "farmers" almost as badly as it does the chickens and that Congress has consistently yielded to the industry lobbyists to defund the provisions which would protect farmers from that abuse.  Evidently, according to this article, the negative publicity has increased and, hopefully, that impasse can be broken allowing the programs to get funding.

Now this is an elegant, simple and cheap solution to a health problem.

Well, here is another once All-American company I will not willingly do business with.  I put it in the same category as Walmart and Pilgrim's Pride.