Lettuce Gone Wild!

So here’s the latest word from my home garden. True to every plant’s mission to be fruitful and multiply, two of the Romaine lettuce plants have bolted, which means they’ve produced seeds and are trying to reproduce. For us lettuce-eaters, that means the leaves have become quite bitter and unpleasant to eat. (There’s a good explanation of bolting at essortment.com if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty.) Taking the cue, I pulled most of the stems from a few lettuce plants, which renders them largely unable to produce much anything but small leaves, and pulled the bolted plants entirely and tossed them in the compost heap. I’m going to do a fall planting soon anyway, so it’s good to make some space. We’ve gotten a lot of food from those plants, too, so it’s not a great sacrifice to lose a few.

Also, our banana pepper plant has produced a total of four peppers. Being new to the banana pepper plant, I picked one when it was still pretty bright yellow, and not unexpectedly found it to be incredibly hot in the mouth. I let the other three go. Tonight we harvested the remaining three, giving one to a neighbor and keeping the other two for dinner. We sliced and used one on a “bagel pizza,” which was especially flavorful with the additon of sliced plum tomatoes and homegrown basil. The other one went into our salads, which had homegrown Romaine and Cobb lettuce, onions from a local farmers market, and a natural poppyseed dressing. (We didn’t make the dressing.)

If you have any ability to garden at home, I really encourage you to try it. Even if it’s just a balcony or an unused patch of empty turf, a lot can be done with it. If you need help, just let me know. There’s nothing like tasting food you grew yourself. I can even taste this garden in the lettuce and the peppers. There’s a French term, gout de terroir, or better yet the German word bodengeschamck, which refers to the special flavor that the grapes (or in the case the lettuce and peppers) picked up from the earth that they grew in. It’s in everything I’ve grown here, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever bought at a supermarket.

Two questions for Phil Landowski

Mr. Landowski is a candidate for the state assembly. He is running as a Democrat against incument Rep. Christine Sinicki.

[August 25: I have endorsed Rep. Sinicki. She deserves your vote on September 9.]

My two questions for you, Mr. Landowski, are:

1. Are you a member of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin? If so, for how long have you been a member of the party? If you are not a member of that party, do you belong to any other political parties?

2. You have worked very hard to skirt being affiliated with the group Clean Sweep Wisconsin. But you are now on record as having received an in-kind contribution from Clean Sweep Wisconsin. Now that you have received an in-kind contribution from Clean Sweep Wisconsin, will you now admit that you are affiliated with that group and support its goals?

I appreciate your response.

See Also: Dan Bice’s valiant attempt to extract information from either Tom Reynolds or Phil Landowski. There’s some important information in there that I didn’t touch on and neither man wanted to reveal.

Final count on tonight’s harvest from the community garden

94 purple beans!

31 snow peas,

20 turnips, mostly smaller ones,

12 radishes, mostly smaller ones as well.

8 yellow plum tomatoes — free from a garden store that was looking to get rid of them.
Wow.

Update: Pictures!

About six pounds of veggies harvested tonight! That's a turnip with all the leaves.

The veggies, neatly arranged on the countertop.

So I made a Milwaukee group on this bicycling website…

Indeed, there is now a Milwaukee group on the GasFreeCommute.com. As of 9:00 on Wednesday night, our five members have logged a total of 124 miles. What’s cool about this is that all of us found the site through an article over on OnMilwaukee.com, and the other four members joined since I posted a comment to that article. Thanks, guys! And mad props to Julie Lawrence for writing the article!

GasFreeCommute.com does seem to have just shed the “under construction” animated GIFs. So far we can’t add fractional (decimal) distances, and the Group function is limited solely to being able to create and/or join a group. But there’s no way to communicate with the other group members. I can’t do that even as group creator. If we wanted to organize a group ride or some other function, that will have to happen through different channels. Hopefully they’ll get that added soon.

Earlier tonight, my daughter and I biked to Bella’s on KK for dinner, and then were about to bike over to our community garden plot to do a harvest. Coming out of Bella’s, we discovered that my bike had a flat tire! Thanksfully, the garden was less than a mile away, and Stacie came to our rescue and drove both daughter and 10+ pound harvest home in safety. I managed to limp back on the flat tire, and made it home all right. It’s almost ironic that we biked to dinner, biked to the garden to harvest the food we had grown (cue the angels and Al Gore singing), but the automobile played a vital role in the end. Life’s like that.

“The Left is loving this,” a conservative blogger claims

That we (the presumptive Left) “love” the fact that a man entered a place of worship and gunned down two innocent people, wounded several more, and perhaps permanently traumatized dozens of children.

You are sorely mistaken if that is what you believe.

Update: Could it be, we’ve started a bit of dialog? I hope so.

Mulching, community, and community gardening

The Urban Homestead, a book I’ve previously mentioned on this blog, is the book that I give credit for really getting me started in urban gardening. I’m reluctant to call it “urban farming” just yet, as I’m not growing all that much food, certainly not enough to live off of. But it’s been one of the most rewarding undertakings that I’ve ever done. One thing I like about The Urban Homestead is that rather than saying, “Oh, you should do this, as it’s the cool lefty thing to do,” or ruminating about the demise of the ruling capitalist forces (the very sort of thing that I cannot stand) , it approaches urban farming in a way that says, “Hey, this is really cool! Check this out!” Some of the details are a little light, but in this age of The Internets and The Google, dozens of sources of questionable merit are a few clicks away.

But I digress.

Between a strip of land that our landlady tilled and a community garden plot, so far I have harvested about five pounds of lettuces, and equal amounts of radishes and turnips. Tomorrow my daughter and I will go to the community garden to harvest snow peas and purple beans. I know there’s at least one turnip lurking in the bed there. And all of this stuff is just light years beyond anything I’ve bought at any grocery store. Plus, when I bring something in from the garden, there’s no plastic wrap to deal with, and no styrofoam to dispose of. Just a little dirt, and some plant scraps that can go back outside to become compost — future dirt.

I think mulching — a tip gleaned from The Urban Homestead — really made the difference for the gardens this year. Two bags of cedar mulch helped the vegetables in our plot grew wildly, and we had little to no trouble with bugs or weeds. During the brief dry weeks, our garden was still slightly moist even when the other un-mulch-covered plots were cracking and dry. I’m going to take advantage of a friend’s front yard garden to plant some more beans, radishes, and lettuces.

While I love noshing on pickings straight from the garden, I’ve found a whole community of people in Milwaukee and the Milwaukee area who are really into this stuff. As an roving evangelist (shareware and Linux were two of my past causes), I know I can take this one far as food prices rise and people become more interested in where their food comes from. Plus, the garden has made so much food that I’ve had to give away much of the lettuce, radishes, and turnips. My friends and neighbors have all received super-high quality and truly organic food, for free. There’s selling for profit, and then there’s building community. For now, I’m a lot more interested in building community through gardening than in making money from it. Some things are important. And in Milwaukee, we need strong communities just as much as we need well-paying jobs. But if you can’t eat, you can’t work. Which comes first, then? Truly a chicken-egg situation, albeit one I’ve never before considered.

Was an apparent “hatred for the liberal movement” responsible for the killings at the UU church?

A very thorough BBC News story on the shotgun deaths in Knoxville, Tennessee quotes the Knoxville Police Chief Sterling Owen as saying that they had found a letter in Jim Adkisson’s car in which he described his feelings.” While it may be easy to say that his revulsion for “liberals” (whoever they are) was the reason he committed murder, according to the BBC’s coverage, it wasn’t the only reason. Quoting the Beeb:

“It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement,” Chief Owen said.

“It appears that the church had received some publicity in the recent past regarding its liberal stance on things and that is at least one of the issues we believe caused that church to be selected.”

The Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church describes itself on its website as working for social change since the 1950s, including desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women’s rights and gay rights.

So it’s not just that he thought “the liberals” were evil, but actual problems in his life, some of which have been advanced by the neoliberal positions advocated by both former President Clinton and current White House resident George W. Bush. Although Bush has inflicted a unique for of right-wing hegemony upon the world, his trade policies are strictly neoliberal. At risk of becoming too linguistic, I would argue that Bush’s neoliberal globalization policies have more than anything helped place people like accused killer Jim Adkisson in worse conditions in terms of their economic outlook. “Free trade” deals have a lot of strings attached to them, many of them invisible to all but the most highly trained specialists. In short, they send jobs overseas while leaving nothing here but freighterfuls of cheap plastic crap. Note that both former President Clinton and future former President Bush were behind these schemes. It was Clinton who signed NAFTA, and Bush who signed CAFTA. Despite the right’s endless labeling of Clinton as a “liberal,” both Clinton and the right’s main man Rush Limbaugh strongly supported NAFTA. Their support for CAFTA may have been somewhat muted, but that treaty passed with about 80% of the Republicans voting in favor. Whether another layer of our national sovereignty went away with the signing of that bill has yet to be seen.

Getting off of trade for a moment, let us look at what else may have led to Mr. Adkisson’s horrible act. Some of the responsibility for it lay strictly with the right, in particular those who spread the lie that all liberals are atheists and hate the Christian God. Witness Ann Coulter’s “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” There she is on to cover, looking ostensibly sexy and preaching her flavor of truthiness at the same time. Coulter, always the master of generalizations, dismisses “liberalism” as being “a religion, and would like to believe that it reveals “the Left’s attacks on our Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Yet Unitarianism is rooted in the very Judeo-Christian values that Coulter alleges “liberalism” attempts to dispel. I am saying that she is totally incorrect in her assertion that “the Left” or “liberals” seek to remove religion from America. Furthermore, I bet you dollars to doughnuts that screed was one of the things that got Mr. Adkisson so fired with anger and rage up that he took it upon himself to inflict the ultimate punishment the most liberal icon he could find in Knoxville, the Unitarian church.

What is the Right’s answer to this? What do they say their role in it was? Do they (you) see themselves (yourselves) as having one? I believe it is long past time to reexamine the rhetoric from all sides (there’s more than two sides to any story) and advance the discussion on more civilized terms.

Tragedy at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church

While I skirt around most discussions of religion, my thoughts tonight are with the congregation at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. Quoting WATE-TV, it was there that “Jim D. Adkisson, 58, of Powell, TN is accused of opening fire with a 12 gauge shotgun during a Sunday morning service at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Church. Eight people were left injured and two people died.” At least two of the church members tackled Adkisson and restrained him until law enforcement arrived. I hope he gets an extra-long sentence for doing this random slaughter during a children’s performance. That has to have been about the worst possible time for him to perform this heartless act.

The Bay View Compass is online at last

While the Bay View neighborhood has had a strong community for many decades, the monthly newspaper The Bay View Compass has helped make that community even stronger. Locally owned and operated papers like The Compass provide an additional foundation for the community that cannot be found through most any other online or offline media source in this day and age when murder and weather is our only news. Instead, we have articles written by our friends, our neighbors, and even our children, stories that make it Milwaukee’s “best little newspaper.” These include Mike Timm’s excellent two-part story on doing business in Bay View, which examined both successful and unsuccessful business ventures and spoke with their owners about their shops.

Other articles that come to mind are about Bay View’s former pigeon racing club—some hints of which still are visible (not pigeons); Jay Bullock’s column about being a teacher at an MPS school (welcome to BVHS!); and the column Historic Bay View, which I find especially valuable as an amateur historian and proud citizen of Bay View. And people seem to dig the column that I write, “On The Street,” for which “I wander around Bay View, accost strangers, take their question and have them answer a picture.” [sic.]

Writing for the Compass has made me a part of our community, for which I am grateful. I often get friendly waves from people who recognize me as “that guy who writes for the Compass.” Perhaps the only person around here who doesn’t read it is the stranger who was standing at the counter of my Favorite Local Coffee Shop™ in Bay View. When he overheard me say something about the paper, he quipped “The Compass? No one reads that.” Squelching my righteous indignity, I calmly replied, “A lot of people do. And I write for it.”

He didn’t have much to say to that. He paid for his stuff and shuffled on his way out. Of course it was some two minutes after that encounter when I realized I shoulda told him if he did read the Compass, he would have learned how much cheaper it is to shop at the new Woodmans in Oak Creek than, say, at a Pick ‘n Save. I’m sure that had nothing to do with the fact that Roundys mysteriously exorcised all publication save for the Shepherd Express from their stores a few months ago. But we’re back now, so all’s well.

Like any good Milwaukeean who knows that there’s no true ending to a story, have you seen the paper I write for, The Bay View Compass? It’s a great paper that I’m proud to be a part of. If you come down Bay View way (or better still, live here), you can find a free copy of the Compass on the first of each month at over 200 locations from North Avenue in Milwaukee south to College Avenue in Cudahy.” And it’s now online at bayviewcompass.com.

Extra Bonus Fun Trick: Do a Google search for the phrase murder and weather is our only news. Examine the results. Then do another search, adding the word Pailhead to the beginning of the search phrase. Consult the song lyrics that come up. I think this serves as an oblique way of proving my point about most TV and radio news.

Also: Mad props to Illusory Tenant for seeing what’s most certainly not related, despite whatever WordPress says is true.

More small but significant garden harvests

From our home garden came another half-pound of radishes, romaine and Bibb lettuces, and from our community garden, we got a number of big turnips! It’s quite cool, but as my daughter and I struggled to free the turnips from the ground, it occurred to me that I don’t know exactly what to do with them. Chop them up and put them in a salad? Surely, there’s more that could be done. I’ll find out! It should be fun to explore the possibilities.

Turnips! (And car keys for scale)

The purple beans from our community garden plot are not quite ready yet. In a week or two I think they’ll be ready to harvest. Pea pods are growing quite nicely there as well. While the tomatoes we planted earlier in the season are doing all right, the late additions don’t seem to be doing so well. But they did get planted a bit too late. But hey, they were free! Ditto the melons. A bit more direct light and they might actually have been something.