To The Surbiton Manor Born

  With the planting of the peppers (8 weeks before last frost date), the 2025 garden season has begun. The biggest change from last year is the position of the greenhouse. Instead of living in my guitar room on the north side of the house, without direct sunlight and relying on just the T5 fluorescents, it is positioned instead in the office, in front of the southwest facing patio door. Natural light should be a big help. The weather this week was unseasonably warm. We hit mid-50's. It is, of course, a false spring, raising hopes only to dash them. Today, we actually have reached a 9 on the Beaufort Scale - "strong gale" force winds gusting as high as 47 mph. as the temperature plummets all day long.  Day by day, we will reach spring.  Every day is a day closer to Donald Trump's death , which is a little something to celebrate. How does this happy thought relate to gardening, you might ask? Well, that idiot's ruinous economic policies are going to drive us into re...

Next weekend the first plants (peppers) will be going into the greenhouse. This was difficult to believe last week, because we had a cold snap that was below zero for most of it. We burned through almost an entire face cord of wood. But yesterday it snapped, and today it was up over 40. I was able to work outside. So there was some urgency today to getting the greenhouse into shape to receive them.  These little cheap greenhouses are readily available. We have two of them. But they disappointed in their utility.  The biggest problem is that they go together easily, but come apart just as easily. This makes them really, really difficult to move.  Yesterday I used an epoxy that will bind plastic and metal to lock the greenhouse together, making it markedly less flimsy. Today I locked it down to a roller cart that I built. The T-5 fluorescents are fired up and wired in Last year was especially bad. I started plants on time, but I had them in my guitar room on the north side ...

  Olive T'Pring Sparklequeen - Early Warning System While we are getting more sun, our days are getting darker all the time. The plane has crashed into the mountainside, and, in the end, in spite of playing at prepping, we are not ready. And we need to throw preparedness into high gear, because things a year from now are beyond unpredictable. The current presidential administration squatting in the White House is a white supremacist Christian nationalist terror organization, and, as promised in their Evil Plot 2025, they are doing their level best to destroy everything that is good or decent in the world. I think the most obscene thing these vile criminals have inflicted thus far on the world is shutting the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) by fiat and the introduction of  a morality- free white supremacist tech bro who actually throws Hitler salutes in public. By abruptly cutting aid around the world to sick and starving people, he has let loose mass...