Good morning, All.  Cool again and cloudy.  The weather people say we may get rain.  I will wait till this afternoon and decide then if I need to water anything.  Nothing much planned that absolutely has to be done today.  Some time this morning I will run the tomatoes I stewed up yesterday through the blender to make a smooth sauce and then freeze it.  We should get three pint freezer bags out of the batch.  I saw a bunch of peppers that I can take and freeze.  Things are definitely winding down.  Again someone (or Someone) flipped a switch and suddenly we went from high summer to early fall.  Most of the news anchors have been groaning over the change.  They much preferred the warmer weather.

Hi, Kay.  Yeah, I did have a productive day.  I usually do even if I often don't get everything I planned on doing done.  I read a little article a bit ago (not sure where or who wrote it) where the author noted that jobs may be scarce but there is always work.  I was never one of those people who thought that if they retired or for some other reason had to live without a job to go to they would shrivel up and die.  I could and always did find some work for my hands and mind.  I am amazed sometimes remembering how little money I made in most of the jobs I held and how much less satisfaction I got out of them.  Right now I can think with a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure of the plants I raised, the food I have harvested and preserved, and how much I will enjoy the fruits of my labor over the winter.  I haven't had a job for about four years now but I have engaged in satisfying work.

I did not watch the Repthuglican 'debate' last night.  From what I have heard so far I didn't miss anything. No new ideas and plenty of attacks.  I am debating about watching Obama tonight.  So far the leaks indicate more of nothing new.  These boys (and girls) of which ever party remind me of the heavily armed macho men in science fiction films who keep firing away with guns that have already failed to stop the monster.  They have nothing else in their arsenal so they simply keep blazing away hoping to get lucky with their brains clearly in neutral.

Red Tape Chronicles posted this article this morning.  I have read and seen stories for the last several years about 'freegans' and others who live by dumpster diving.  What amazes me about this kind of story isn't so much the ingenuity of the dumpster diver but the waste of our industrial food system.  The industrial system of production is hardwired to over produce.  But wasting food--that is simply criminal.

I found this rather superficial story on MSNBC.  All the authors have done is put some new numbers on the phenomenon of over priced American medicine.  To suggest that we pay more for medical care because we have become used to paying a lot for the services is just a little ridiculous.  That is not an explanation.  I notice that they don't mention that many (if not most) doctors come out of medical school with a $500k+ debt in addition to their diploma.  Nor the fact that medicine is dominated by high tech toys that simply beg to be used, and used, and used whether they are really helpful in any given situation or not.  I will let you fill in what ever other contributory factors you would like.

As you all probably have figured out I enjoy reading about the odd techniques people use in their gardens.  Here is one interesting way to make a self-watering living wall out of 2 liter soda bottles.

Good morning to you all. Very cool this morning and we expect the high will be in the very low 80s. Nice and comfortable. I thought I would show a little of what we are getting out of the container gardens. The first picture shows the Zavory peppers. These are among the earliest of them to ripen and there are a lot more on the plants. Small (only about 2 to 2 1/2 inches long) with a bit of a kick and an interesting over all flavor. We used the first two in the first batch of stewed tomatoes. I definitely plant to plant these next year. This is a new hybrid Burpee introduced this year.

All of these came out of the garden either today or yesterday. At the far left are the same three Zavory peppers I showed above and below them is the first of the False Alarm. Those are a very mild jalepeno style pepper. Good flavor without much of the bite. I have grown these for three years now and been very happy with them. Another Burpee hybrid. The white blob at the top is the last of the Dragon's Egg cucumbers. Planted for the first time this year, I will definitely plant them again. Small (about the size of a turkey or goose egg when fully developed), thin skinned and sweet. Mom doesn't care much for cucumbers for the most part but she likes these. Wonderful in salads and we have three pint baggies of the spicy pickles from them. The seeds for these came from Bakers Creek which specializes in heirloom varieties. The red tomatoes are Brandywine an heirloom variety. This is the third year I have planted this variety and this is the best harvest so far. The yellow are Big Rainbow, another heirloom. It is delightfully sweet. Also the third year for this variety. I got the seeds for both from Burpee. The green tomatoes are a mix of Brandywine and Rainbow I picked accidentally while trying to clean up the vines.
These are the Giant Marconi peppers. It is a new variety for me. I got the plant from the local Home Depot and was really surprised at the variety of tomato and pepper plants they carried. The peppers are about 10 inches and were bred to be grilled. We don't grill but the flavor works very well fried with potatoes or put into omelets. Usually you harvest these green but they surprised me. Actually, we really like the flavor of the red ones better than the green. I will keep this variety in mind for rotation in my gardens.

Today I hope to start getting some of the transplanting done. The lemon verbena and rosemary are not hardy for this area so they have to come inside. I need to get the ground cherries out. This was another new plant for me. I got the seeds as a freebee with my seed order from Baker Creek (I think--it may have been Jung's also) so I planted them out of curiosity. According to the descriptions (on line and on the package) the size made the plant an ideal candidate for a container garden--about 2 feet tall with a two foot spread. The fruit does have a slight strawberry flavor--and, for me, the emphasis is on slight. If I want a strawberry flavor I can plant strawberries. So I won't be planting these again. I will be planting strawberries and I found a small blueberry that grows only 2 feet tall with a 2 foot spread. I will put those in instead. That's all for today.

Good morning to you all out there. Still under the weather with this bronchitis. At least it seems to be breaking. Mom is much better and I am about 4 days behind her in the recovery process. She felt well enough to make up the last batch of tomatoes as sauce for freezing. I trimmed the tomatoes again and pulled the melons. Neither of us really liked the flavor so I won't be putting them in again. They sounded perfect for a small container garden since the fruit was only 1 to 2 lbs a maturity. That part was right on the money as was the description of the very strong aromatic smell. Unfortunately, the flavor was the deal breaker. I found a whole bunch of small beans developing so we may get a nice batch for the freezer. And with a couple more cucumbers almost ready to pick I need to think about pickling. One of my books has an interesting recipe for freezer pickling small batches. That may be interesting. Anyone out there done anything like that? Another of my books say that freezing reduces the potency of spices used in pickling. Anyone have any experience or information on that?

Thanks, Lois and Kay, for the good wishes and energy. You lift my spirits. And I love the roses, Lois. Thanks again.

Russ' Filtered News has a very good editorial cartoon on Rick Perry's "Texas Miracle."

Good morning, again, everyone. I thought I would share some more pictures of the gardens. These are some of my favorites of this year. First up--the Vietnamese Multicolor pepper. It has some beautiful purple developing on the leaves and the peppers (when they come) will range from light green to cream to lavender to red. And they can be picked at any stage. They are supposed to be mildly hot. It is a beautiful plant and has a very different growth habit from the peppers I usually grow. I will show some of those another time.

This is the lemon verbena. I haven't grown this herb for many years and had a very hard time finding it. I have only one source in the area. I also forgot how tall these grow--4 to 6 feet. Therefore, it has its own pot and, since it isn't hardy in my growing zone, it will spend the winter inside. I also need to keep it pruned to a short height. I may also try to prune the roots as well to control the height.

And look at this--the first little tomato!! This is on the yellow cherry. Since I first found this one several more have appeared on a couple of the other tomatoes. I am so looking forward to the first slicers that get large enough for fried green tomatoes and then the first that ripen. Any we can't eat we will sauce and freeze.

And here is my new stevia. I tried growing from seed and had no luck at all. I also tried growing from cuttings with the same lack of success. As long as I can get seedlings I will grow it that way. Right now I have two local sources and it seems to be popular with local gardeners. We love it for hot or iced tea and it works well fresh or dried. The white below is a collar made from a gallon vinegar jug to support the plant and keep it from spreading over the lavender and other plants.

This is my spearmint--another herb I haven't grown for many years. This is another plant that needs its own pot because it is very invasive and spreads from the roots. I have to start pruning it back and drying the leaves. For the fall I plan to split it, put it into smaller containers to sink into the larger containers to overwinter. It is hardy in this zone and I plant to mulch the beds and cover them with plastic tents. The last time I did anything like that I had large raised garden beds and I lived in Colorado. I wonder how the plants will do here in large containers.

This is a ginger mint. I loved the variegated color and bought it on impulse. It is also a very invasive and needs its own pot--a large pot. This is another plant that is hardy in this zone and I hope to overwinter it in the gardens like the spearmint. I don't know how strong the flavor is yet.

Good morning to you all. A bit foggy with the possibility of a few more showers this morning before the sun moves in this afternoon. We will be going out to see what is at our city farmer's market a bit later. Our favorite one hasn't opened yet but, if I remember rightly, it opened later toward the first of July. They usually have the first local corn. I saw a couple of plants in the gardens that will need to be moved. They simply aren't happy where they are. But most plants are doing very well.

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As ou can see, I didn't get back to the blog yesterday. It is now Sunday and we now have some cloud cover that moved in after a brief appearance of the sun. We are on the edge of the clouds as usual. It should burn off or move off later today. The entire week is supposed to stay in the 70s. We can handle that. I am getting some of the little gardening chores done a bit at a time. It is too cool to spend much time out there at the moment but the temperature is rising and should move into the 70 in the next couple of hours. I found several little tomatoes on three of the plants. I have pruned and tied up only about one-third of my plants so far. The have grown so much over the last few days. All of the plants have.

We did visit the farmers' market yesterday. It has grown over the years and should get bigger as the season progresses and after the downtown park that will be its final home is finished in August. I was looking for some new plants to replace the roses in the fence holders but I didn't find anything really suitable. I will go back to Home Depot Tuesday.

I have been avoiding most of the broadcast news lately. Yesterday after the second repeat of the asinine coverage of the Weiner 'story' and the idiocy of the spectators at the Casey Anthony trial I put on Syfy even though we had seen everything at least once. My complaints: the constant repetition without any new information, the hyping of rather mundane stories, the uncritical presentation of political opinion, and the spotlighting of sanctimonious political whores who adopt what ever position they think will benefit them at the time.

I agree, Lois. Nature has been and is giving us a beating. How long? If this is a shift from a normal, cyclical warm spell to a normal, cyclical cold spell it can last several hundred years. The last shift came around 1300 and lasted to the early decades of the 1800s. Thanks to a combination of famine (due to crop failures), epidemics (primarily bubonic plague but including other diseases), and warfare (the Hundred Years' War began around 1345 and lasted till 1453) the population of Europe dropped by about 50% in 100 years. If it is something even more catastrophic thanks to the effects of human action--no one knows. I remember an interesting statement from the PBS film 'Black Blizzard' about the Dust Bowl. Agricultural practices introduced in the 1870s which quickly spread across the Great Plains changed the weather patterns over the area deepening the drought. In other words, man's economic activity had a detrimental effect for the weather humans living in the area depended on. Those who claim that puny man cannot affect something like weather, or climate, or the atmosphere, or the oceans because they are simply too big simply have a selective acquaintance with history.

Chris Martensen has an interesting essay this morning. The first item that attracted my attention was his description of our modern economy as requiring infinitely expanding credit. Nothing can expand infinitely except in pure mathematics. The physical world has limits. The second item I found fascinating was his graph of the growth of the U.S. credit market since 1970. It has doubled 5 times in 40 years. The pattern is a nice parabola that mirrors the ideal exponential curve. As I looked at it I was reminded of the problem of trying to accelerate past the speed of light. As you get closer to that limit the energy you put into the effort produces less and less result. I would guess, as Martensen concludes, that all of the efforts made to increase the amount of cash available to lend has bumped up against the same phenomenon--no matter how much we put in the result will be disappointingly small. And something else comes to mind: if business and industry has no real expectation of resumed growth on the scale of the recent past, will they have any real interest in increasing payrolls? I think not. And all of the talk of reduced regulation and reduced taxes is just that--talk. I am quite sure that all of the industries and businesses lobbying for those 'reforms' are quite honest on one level: such measures would improve their bottom lines. But their promises of new jobs is nothing more than self-serving hot air.

Good morning to you all on this cool and wet Friday. More thunder storms rumbled through last night and we expect more later today and overnight. At least I won't have to water anything until Monday at the earliest. Everything out there is growing like the proverbial weeds. I will have to harvest most of my herbs. Several tomatoes need pruning. The squash need to be trained through the trellis which needs some low cross bars to attach the plants to. I may need to do the same with the melons. I can't believe the number of blossoms on the tomatoes and more of the peppers are blooming also. I guess I will definitely start those seeds as early next year as I did this year (late February.) (Update: We have sun!!)

Hey, Lois, I am glad you're back blogging again. I forgot all about the cookies and cache. I haven't had much of a problem with that for a long time.

I have been reading about this for a couple of months now. The drought that made such a spectacular appearance in Russia last year seems to have moved west. Add that to the report yesterday that the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture reported drastic reductions in the number of acres planted in corn, the projection of the number of acres of corn that will be harvested (actually more than the the reduced number of planted acres would suggest), and in the projected number of bushels to be harvested. CNN noted the story but most of the talking heads remarked on how 'bullish' the report was for the commodity market which saw the corn (and other commodity) prices bump up. 'Bullish' for investors but higher costs for the rest of us. Elaine at Elaine's Place had this link that illustrates some of the problem. Note the drought from Texas to Georgia/Florida. But also consider that the floods that hit several areas came at just the wrong time and the ground won't be dry enough to plant till it is too late to plant corn.

Karoli at Crooks & Lawyers has this little piece which reminds me of the conclusion: while the press focused on one 'dick' they were ignoring what another bunch of 'dicks' were doing; and that may have been the purpose behind spending so much time, ink, and hot air on such aninconsequential matter.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalist answers the question I had yesterday about the real effect of the decision by the Treasury to delay the incentive payments to three too-big-to-fail banks over their abysmal performance with respect to the HAMP program. I thought it would amount something indistinguishable to nothing. I was right. Her comments are wonderfully, justifiably sarcastic.

Tom Philipot at Grist had this take on the dismal, depressing, (choose your adjective) employment numbers for May. That more than half of the jobs created last month resulted from McDonald's hiring push places the data onto an all new level of disheartening, dismaying, (choose your adjective) data.

Good morning to you all on this rainy Thursday morning. The thunderstorms moved in overnight with a major drop in temperature. The high for today arrived sometime very early this morning and the temp is supposed to settle around 60 for the day. I will enjoy the relief from the heat while I can. Given how wet it is I won't be doing anything in the gardens today. I was relieved to see that all of the plants on the fence are still on the fence. Considering how the wind howled last night I wasn't sure they would be. The only ones I really worried about were the roses. They are in small, lighter pots. I think I will put something else on the fence and keep the roses down where they will have more protection. After nursing two back to health and blooming I don't want to lose them to a wind driven topple out of the fence racks. Oh, I almost forgot--almost all of my tomatoes are blooming and one actually has a little tomato growing. I noticed that the acorn squash has gotten big enough that I need to put the low rungs of my trellis in so I can start training the plants to grow up the trellis. Also I have to trim a couple of low branches off the tomatoes. They resemble little trees now but trimming away the lower branches leaves some space and sun for lower growing plants.

I just had an interesting thought (to me anyway). I see a strong resemblance between some of the arguments on the economy and those on the issue of climate change. Consider this item from Huffington Post which quotes Austan Goolsbee saying that we have no economic crisis and one months' down data doesn't mean anything. Then think of the number of times climate change critics insist that the latest nasty weather event doesn't mean anything and there is no climate change (with which climate change proponents would agree). What is the parallel you ask? Well, each is rejecting the selected event (a monthly worsening in the labor statistics or a sudden severe weather incident) and then proceeding to use it to reject the broader trend. I could agree that each item by itself is no indicator of a trend. That would be like trying to describe a line by a single point--a meaningless exercise in futility. However, a large number of similar incidents (or points) starts to describe a meaningful trend (or line). I don't think there have been many years over the last twenty when I (and others) haven't commented on how very odd the weather was. Most of those twenty years recorded average temps among the highest in history as well as other weather anomalies. Twenty points are much better indicators of the direction of a line than one. The situation is a bit messier with the economy but there are interesting indicators. We have the second recession in a decade that has been described as 'jobless.' We have thirty years of statistics showing that wages have basically stagnated. We have thirty years of statistics showing the concentration of wealth in the top 10% and even more strikingly in the top 1%. The talking heads tell us that inflation is low or non-existent and we shake our heads and wonder who is doing their shopping. We have a bunch of Pollyannas telling us "don't worry and be happy" because this or that piddling little data point doesn't mean anything and that we don't have to do anything because there simply is no crisis out there. There is an old saying that describes a committee as the only living organism with six or more legs and no brain. That makes a society the largest committee around and ours is worst of all.

CNN just had a news flash that the Federal Government is going to withhold a subsidy from three banks, including Wells Fargo and JP Morgan, because of their poor performance in the mortgage modification program. That is nice--maybe even a good start. But the talking heads asked a question that I would like to know the answer to--how much of a hit is this really?

I think the kids had this one right and it is really too bad the parents had to get bent out of shape.

Good morning to everyone out there. I agree, Kay. The sooner all this snow melts the better and I have my fingers crossed that we don't get a spring blizzard. You are so right--they have happened all too often in my lifetime. We often talk about moving somewhere else where we wouldn't have to worry about snow and cold. But all the areas we think of have their own drawbacks--like hurricane season down south or tornado season southwest of us. We figure we will take the devil we know best and make do.

It was a productive weekend on the non-blogging front. I finished the last two of the great-grandmother's jacket figures. I will post pictures once they are washed and pressed. I started a little cross-stitch table topper that has languished in the not-yet-started bin for the last decade. I don't know anymore which of us bought it originally but it needs to get done. I transplanted my lavender, sage, and one of the basil. I don't know if the lavender and basil will make it to the time I can put it into the gardens. We'll see. Later this week I need to transplant the other basils and the stevia which are doing well but do need larger pots. I couldn't do these with the others because the potting soil was frozen at the bottom of the bag. It should have thawed out by now. And I have four ground cherry seeds started. Those are about the smallest seeds I have ever seen--maybe a third the size of a tomato. I need to review my plans and see how many of each plant I want to start and when. I have often said over this winter that we have been hibernating--usually when we had bad weather that required a change in our normal shopping pattern. But I wonder if I haven't been hibernating in another sense as well--I got very little needlework done over the winter. Now that seems to be picking up.

Your comment, Kay, on whether we used up all our outrage in the 60s struck a chord because I have read it more frequently lately. A number of bloggers who remember and may have participated in the demonstrations then are wondering about the lack of vigorous protests now. I don't know if anyone has a good answer. But then, as I look at the news, I can't tell anymore when protests are real and when they have been manufactured. Reporters looking at the so-called Tea Party Movement found that a number of the associated Tea Party organizations are shells and have no more than a name only presence. A significant part of the opposition to government policies seem to come from the 'astroturf' fringe rather than the true grassroots. How much of the protest energy has been co-opted?

Taking a different view on the topic, Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By contrasts the revolution in Egypt (still very young and fragile) and its promise of democracy to the United States which is in the process of losing its democracy. Instead of one Hosni Mubarak stealing our lives and livelihoods we have a cabal of moneyed interests intent on doing the same. She wonders if the kind of demonstrations we have seen in Egypt (and saw thirty years ago against a war in Asia and for civil rights at home) will come again when we are driven by the corporate run kleptocracy into similar poverty. I have heard that notion frequently in the coverage of the Egyptian protest--the Egyptians protested, many pundits claimed, because they had nothing left to loose. Well, the Egyptian middle class (small as it is) also joined the protest and they still had a great deal to lose, comparatively. Perhaps they were faced with the prospect of a slow but definite decline into poverty or the possibility of a successful revolution that might preserve their prosperity and provide a foundation for a better life in the future. That reminds me of the dilemma of our Founding Fathers. They were men of position, influence and property whose future under continued and strengthened British rule would only decline. They rolled the revolutionary dice and, although we wound up with an independent republic with strong democratic tendencies, many of them lost what they had. Some recovered. Some went on to greater fame and fortune. Many did not. The key wasn't a population so poor they had nothing left to lose but a group who were willing to risk what they had. Now-a-days we have a lot of people who are only too happy to suggest that we have to sacrifice to stabilize our economic situation but the sacrifices they demand are always made by someone else. The big banks and financial institutions are too big to fail (and too big to be accountable for their frauds). The wealthy are too important to tax. The big corporations demand tax cuts to create jobs and expect that no one will be so impolite to not that they have been off-shoring jobs with gusto for the past several decades.

Good morning to you all. There wasn't much to comment on yesterday. The Bears playoff game dominated our news and I think most sports 'news' is a waste of time. The loss is dominating this morning's news--an even bigger waste. Oh, well, that's entertainment.

It is still cold with periodic snow or other precipitation. Some areas south of us are expecting ice. Hopefully, we will miss that. But I notice that I am not the only one in the blogosphere keeping warm perusing the seed catalogs and planning the spring planting. My seed orders came in so I sat myself down and actually planned what I will plant and where I will put it. I checked out the plans yesterday to make sure I had a place for everything I had on my list and made a couple of minor tweaks to the plans. What's on the agenda, you ask?

Well, peppers, of course. I decided not to put in any sweet peppers this year. The farm markets are full of those. Top on the list is the False Alarm (very mild jalapeno style hybrid) and Zavory (mild habanero hybrid) both from Burpee. I added the Vietnamese Multi-color hot from Baker Creek (an heirloom variety). All are small and I want to pickle some as well as freeze a batch. The False Alarm has been reliably prolific over the last two years.

Then, tomatoes, and absolute must. I still have Fresh Salsa ) (Burpee hybridseeds so I will continue with them. They did the best of all the tomatoes last year and produced heavily. The Brandywine and Big Rainbow (heirlooms) didn't do nearly so well thanks to the heat wave that hit just as they were blooming and the sun damage didn't help either. I will start them and the peppers early under plastic tents and I plan to provide shade from the worst of the sun.

I will continue growing stevia, thai basil, lavender, and sage but will add marjoram, rosemary, oregano, and sweet basil.

I have a number of new categories this year: the Tigger melon, Dragon's Egg cucumber, Blue Lake pole beans, and Aunt Molly's ground cherry. These are all heirloom varieties from Burpee (beans) and Baker Creek (mellon and cucumber). The ground cherry was a gift packet from Jung with our order of the little greenhouse and a total surprise. I am very interested in how it will turn out.

Greens will include Bull's Blood beets, spinach and three varieties of lettuce. Actually, there are more varieties of lettuce because I will be planting the Heatwave mix from Burpee for the middle of the season. These didn't do well last year but I hope the results will be different this time. We do like our salads.

For pure decoration I am putting in the dwarf marigolds again along with Love-in-a-Mist, Black Peony poppy, and Teddy Bear sunflowers.

Though I love looking at the seed catalogs I find my enthusiasm often outruns my garden capacity. Everything looks and sounds wonderful. But I have a very small space so many of my choices are restricted to what plants that may fit in well in that space. The melons produce small fruit and I have several large pots that can be fitted with a trellis. And I have some pots that, I think, are big enough for the poppy and sunflower both of which grow to 4 ft.

On to other things. I don't find this New York Times story all that surprising though the time line does raise my eyebrows a bit. The story started unraveling about five years before the housing crisis hit. The rot in the mortgage industry is pervasive and cleaning it up will take a long while. The first step has to be a social attitude adjustment on two points. Ordinary Americans can't think of homes as 'investments' the way stocks are investments and count on them for a windfall return. Second, homeownership is not for everyone as it has been touted for the last thirty years. The we have to clean up the mortgage servicers and banking industry but not by turning the whole thing over to the big banks as some recent articles have claimed representatives of the industry are lobbying for the government to do.

I am not all that surprised by this Reuter's story either although I notice that not much attention has been paid to the issue over here. We heard about Sarkozy's visit to the U.S. but not much at all about his agenda. Nor have we heard much about the rise in food prices world wide or about the increase in the commodities that lie beneath the rising cost of food. It is interesting that Sarkozy wants to go after 'speculators' and he may have a point in doing so. But speculation in the commodities market may be a smaller part of the problem than he thinks. We all heard about the heat wave in Russia last summer but only snippets about the Russian Government's ban on wheat exports which put a serious hurt on their major customers, including Egypt and Indonesia. We have heard about the floods in Australia which has devastated Queensland and is now proceeding into Victoria. But think about this--it is early fall down there and what ever crops were growing there are gone. We have heard absolutely nothing about the floods in Indonesia and Sri Lanka which have put a severe crimp in rice production or about the severe winter in Vietnam which has killed, reportedly, some 10k buffalo with the numbers rising. Southwestern China, a major grain growing region, suffered a severe multi-year drought followed by massive flooding and now severe winter snows and freezing. I haven't read a final tally for the American wheat and corn crop but both are down and reserves are at a multi-decade low while the Canadian wheat farmers took a big hit on the heat wave that hit there. Weather, it seems to me, may be a much bigger problem than speculators. Michael Klare at tomdispatch has a good post this morning which puts the whole issue in a very nicely balanced perspective. Speculation is only one leg of a very wobbly three legged stool supporting global commodities--decreased production (due to nasty weather or increased production costs) and increased global demand being the other two.

Good Morning, Everyone.  Even though we are expecting spotty showers with possible thundershowers for the rest of the week, I am feeling pretty good.  One of my little sugar snap pea plants has actually put out a bud.  Am I anticipating?  Oh, yeah!!!

Is this another (maybe) sign of the times?  The Washington Post has an article on a new web site that will help the consumer haggle with those merchants listed with the site on the price of the goods offered.  I know the economy is bad when I see an uptick in the stories about bartering in the mainstream media.  This simply adds a 21st century twist to the phenomenon.

I got a kick out of this blog from Texifornia.  Have trouble getting plants to survive in your containers.  Try putting in plastic plants.  The artificial foliage protects the seedlings until they are large enough to make it on their own at which you can take the plastic out.  It makes sense.  I am doing the same with my plastic canopies and milk jug cloches.

Foreign Policy In Focus has a new entry that is interesting: "Capitalist Pigs."  I have said often that globalization has downsides that we never hear about as our media and politicians generally ignore them.  Put this beside the story that "60 Minutes" featured about the aftermath of the 'partnership' between American oil companies and one of the government owned South American oil companies in the Amazon and see the similarities. We got a large part of the oil, the government of that country got the money, and the people living in the area were left with the toxic waste.  That triad is also repeated in Nigeria with more violent results.  But we seldom hear about this aspect of globalization.

This article on MSNBC asks if the election is really 'just about the economy, stupid.'  The arguments laid out reveal the weaknesses of the arguments about whether the economy is in recession, depression, or humming along just fine, thank you.  Too much relies on 'official' or government sources which have been manipulated over the last few decades to give a better picture than honest data would.  Several bloggers have noted that the data released by the government shows lower unemployment, lower inflation, and better economic growth than it would if the data the government choses to ignore were considered.  The article reinforces the old notion that if one's neighbor has economic pain we are in a slight down turn but if you experience the pain we are in a world of hurt.  My dad always said that figures don't lie but liars figure.  We have a lot of liars figuring and have had for a long time.

Kelly the Culinarian has started a list of lessons she learned from her season gardening in containers.  Her conclusions parallel mine.  We are keeping our egg cartons to start seeds in beginning in around March 1.  We are putting aside various containers that margarine and other foods come in to transplant the seedlings into as the get bigger.  We already know not to harden plants before early to mid May.  We are looking for larger containers for the tomato plants.  Our largest pots were much too small.  We are also keeping and drying egg shells to crush and add in next year.  This year's tomatoes were so much better than last year's (and so much better tasting those in the supermarket) that we are very enthusiastic about expanding our gardening to include more veggies next season.

BobOak at DailyKos has a rant I can relate to.  America has become a nation not of whiners as Phil Gramm would have it but of clerks selling goods made elsewhere to other American clerks selling other goods made in other elsewheres. I have thought for many years now that our once-home-grown big corporations are no longer really American in any meaningful sense.  They operate on a global scale and their loyalties are only to their bottom line.  Any advertising to the contrary is merely self-serving nonsense.  And our politicians, of both parties, have let them get away with it usually mouthing platitudes about  'free trade' or 'free markets.'  He asks a very cogent question: "Is that the America we want, a place where the most predatory, sociopathic, me first, fuck you members of our society are deemed the winners?  Is this some sort of reality game show, but with real consequences?  How many more will be booted off the Island?"

I did not remember that in 2001 the Bush Administration cancelled the Clinton rules reducing the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water.  Thanks to Archcrone at The Crone Speaks for remembering and providing a link.  This is a timely reminder given the news stories last night that link arsenic levels to Type 2 diabetes. It is also interesting that the Clinton administration wanted to set the level at 10 ppm even though the Environmental Protection Agency suggested only 5 ppm.  both were considerably lower than the 50 ppm established in the 1940s.  

Several posts in the past I noted that I am a news junkie.  However, I also am a junkie who doesn't subscribe or otherwise buy any newspaper at all.  Mom and I stopped getting the Sunday papers (Chicago Tribune for me and Northwest Indiana Times for her) when we became unhappy with the coverage.  It wasn't worth getting out on a Sunday morning and driving to the store and forking over $4 for the two papers, and then having to throw away all that paper afterward.  This little blog from Eric Boehlert at Media Matters illustrates our disenchantment with the mainstream media whether print or broadcast.  Living within 50 miles of Chicago we, of course, got bombarded with the broadcast coverage of Jesse Jackson whispering that he wanted to emasculate Barak Obama.  We saw NO coverage of Senator McCain's comments concerning Social Security.  It seems that Senator McCain not only doesn't know much about economics; he doesn't know much about history either.  Surely such abysmal ignorance is relevant when voters judge the 'qualifications' of candidates to be President.

Going through my usual blogs this morning I noticed that Entitled To Know and AARP both carried updates concerning the votes Tuesday evening overriding President Bush's veto (of late Tuesday afternoon) of the Medicare bill eliminating the 10.6% cut in payments to physicians providing care for Medicare recipients.  The over ride votes passed, if I am reading the figures right, by larger margins that the original legislation.  It may be my imagination but it appears to me that the President and his cronys are increasingly desperate to secure as much increase to his constituents' (read the energy, finance, and insurance sectors) bottom lines as possible before he leaves office.  You know, just in case his pet successor doesn't win the election in November.  By the way, to continue the comments of the last paragraph, the veto override did not make the mainstream media. At least not yet.

Yesterday we finally experienced our second 90 degree day here.  Today and tomorrow are expected to hit at least the mid 90s.  We finally turned on our air conditioner for the today.  We decided that we will put it on about 11 each day and leave it on until between 5 or 6 in the evening.  We never have run it much.  We set the thermostat to 70  in the winter, only because the temperatures away from where ever the sensor is stays about 68-9.  Summer thermostat settings are 78.  We are always amazed by how early and how often our neighbors heat or air conditioning runs.  Each year we figure out how to refine how we use both the air and heat.  As a result our bills have remained the same or, in a couple of years, actually went down.

I had to move my tomato plants around because our little patio is like an oven.  even though most of the pots are light colored they still absorb a lot of heat and the plants looked a bit wilted.  The picture at the top are the plants as of a couple of weeks ago.  They are doing much better than the ones we planted last year.  I think the pots are still too small and next year we are going to put only two plants into a large 30 gallon tub we found.  I had to put foil on one because we converted a clear plastic container to planter and the dark soil in the container absorbs way too much heat.  This is something else we plan to refine over time.