To The Surbiton Manor Born

  First Plants Started for 2022 Planting needs to start sometime for summer. Even though temperatures today were only in the single digits, and the morning started with sweeping a dusting of snow off of the driveway and the solar panels, it was time. Peppers take eternity to germinate and start, so they're getting a good head start this year.  I planted Ancho/Poblano peppers, chili peppers,"You Only Live Once" green peppers, banana peppers from seeds saved from the 2021 crop, habanero peppers, & long, red, thin cayenne peppers. 8 each. The plan is to transplant them into the bed closest to our garage, which gets hot in summer, taking the full brunt of the southwest sun.  Listened to some rock & roll while getting them started. As Nick Perry & the Underground Thieves put it, I'm  Feelin' Good .  A topic for another day will be all the different kinds of gardeners, from preppers to the gangsta' gardener, the Jesus gardeners, the Old Farmer's Alma...

  90% of our garden is in this package It struck me as I was poring over the directions on how to plant the vegetables and flowers this year just how amazing it is that just about every plant and vegetable we'll be harvesting next summer, every tomato, every squash, every cucumber, every pea, every giant sunflower, every pumpkin, every zucchini, every beet, every carrot is currently contained in a tiny packet inside this one envelope (pictured above).  It's worth noting here that planning the garden took a lot longer than I thought it would. I figured I'd snap off a draft in an afternoon. It ended up being a few afternoons spread over a few weeks.  Planning ahead is a good idea, because some of the seed providers start to run out in February. This has been our experience. I have engaged smug-mode  over buying a couple more T-5 fluorescent lights for the mini-greenhouses last summer when they were $20. They're now up to $40 a piece.  According to the plan, we're ...

  An interloper, outside my office window. It turns out that the best defense for the garden is, in fact, the chicken wire fencing that I've put around the beds. The fencing is rubbish vs. squirrels, but is enough to keep the bunnies off the young plants. I didn't get where I am today without planning. And it is never too early. Planning a garden is more arduous than you might think as the last couple of years have demonstrated. There are things you plant indoors. There are things you sow directly. There are companion plants and plants you should never plant together. Crop rotation is a must, etc. (As anybody who's planted a garden knows. Don't want to belabor the point.) What I will say is that there is nothing that can't be solved with a good spreadsheet and calendar reminders. So I've spent a lot of time over the last week or so looking closely at planting instructions, figuring out which plants to plant in which beds, which plants are getting in bed togethe...

      Obviously, it needed to be done. Note the ancient light fixture and dingy grey walls. Winter has set in, and attention here at Surbiton Manor moved indoors with us.  With a few extra days off over the holidays, I thought it would be fun to paint the lower-level bathroom. Not exactly "fun" in the traditional sense, but memory of what it feels like to "have painted" and a frustration with the dingy grey that the Hated Previous Owners (HPOs) coated the entire interior of the house in made it sound like it would eventually be fun. While that all turned out to be true, the actual process of paintING is horrible. When you are on coat 5 of white paint on a once grey door, regret sets in. Though, as the Butthole Surfers remind us on their classic album Locust Abortion Technician , " The funny thing about regret is that it's always better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done. " My usual  Before After Half a Gallon of Paint...

  A stainless steel specialized pan for popping corn is one of the best investments we've made recently.  We had got in the habit of purchasing bags of pre-popped corn. First of all, plastic bag bad. Secondly, there was the cost. $4 a sack, typically.  This was nuts. The pan cost $35. The popcorn for the pan (1/2 cup & 3 tbsp. of olive oil a batch) costs pennies in comparison. We can get the popcorn in a cardboard carton.  All in all, this is a great thing. A tasty snack, cheaper & better for you.  When I mentioned this to my dad, he said that his father & mother-in-law used to make their popcorn this way, just about every night "even after microwave popcorn came out." "Oh dear," I thought.  "So, Dad," I queried, "have you heard of ' popcorn lung ?" bronchiolitis obliterans - so called because it was discovered in factory workers in microwave popcorn packaging factories where the chemical diacetyl was floating around. Apparent...

  Tape measure indicating a whopping 18" of snow. Not a drift. The media frequently exaggerates oncoming weather, no doubt to drive "clicks." But yesterday was an exception. If anything, the weather forecasts that K. and I watched minimized the storm. Long story short, from about 1:00 in the afternoon Friday until (it sounds like) 3:00 in the morning today, we received 18" of snow here at Steepmeadow. We watched the snow pile up all afternoon. After a bit of supper and guitar practice, we cleared the driveway for the first time, trying to keep it manageable. By the time we'd reached the bottom with shovel and sturdy electric snowblower, the top was already 2" deep again. We would look up from re-running the Dr. Who Christmas Special Voyage of the Damned  to see it swirling down. The firepit looked (and still looks) like a crazed blancmange, intent on winning Wimbledon for the Scots.  Blancmange We awoke to a marshmallow world. I abandoned plans for an arm w...

  Our Bourgeois Xmas Tree It's a little weird to be a radical atheist and still celebrate Xmas, I'll grant. But family traditions are a lot of fun. In this case bringing a pretty tree into the house and adding a bunch of kitschy cornball ornaments to it and exchanging gifts with family & friends.  For years we had a plastic monstrosity that stood about 7' tall, had been inherited after more than a decade of use by Kiki's parents, and used by us for another 7 years. At last the "pre-lit" aspect of it completely died last year. We considered what to do.  What is the least environmentally horrible way to stick this bizarre fetish in your living room?  So we did some research. What we settled on was the Bourgeois Tree Experience offered by this nearby Xmas tree farm, Kruger's Christmas Trees. They have a nice statement on sustainability :  As local farmers we have developed a close connection with our land.  As global citizens we remain conscious of the e...