The Resurrection Garden

The small, brownie looking blocks on the table are actually made from peet moss, compost, green sand, and water.

We were once gardeners. What seems like many years ago. Now, after lying dormant for season upon season, our inner gardener has arisen and, with it, the desire to grow beautiful things. 

Having just moved to a new home with a sizable backyard, we now have the opportunity to start a new garden. Several trips to the local nursery later, we are ready to roll. This afternoon, I broke out my old soil block set to sow some seeds for our fall vegetable and herb garden. I first read about soil blocks from Eliot Coleman, and eagerly ordered them through Johnny's Seeds. They are a wonderful way to start seeds without plastic or peet pots. They come in several sizes, and you can actually transplant a soil block seedling to a larger soil block in a very clever, "nesting" sort of way. 

Anyway, given that it's already mid-July, we have sown the beginnings of a fall garden: red leaf lettuce, spinach, a mesclun mix, micro greens, arugula, mizuna, and bush beans. I caved and bought a surprisingly healthy looking tomato plant that I will repot later today with oregano, parsley, and basil. We have derived great inspiration and advice from a fabulous book called The Bountiful Container, by Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey. They have excellent ideas on how to grow herbs, vegetables, and fruit in containers. 

Words of Wisdom

Some advice on how to help your kid become a good writer from M. Molly Backes, via Ta-Nehisi Coates:

First of all, let her be bored. Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do. Limit her TV-watching time and her internet-playing time and take away her cell phone. Give her a whole summer of lazy mornings and dreamy afternoons. Make sure she has a library card and a comfy corner where she can curl up with a book. Give her a notebook and five bucks so she can pick out a great pen. Insist she spend time with the family. It’s even better if this time is spent in another state, a cabin in the woods, a cottage on the lake, far from her friends and people her own age. Give her some tedious chores to do. Make her mow the lawn, do the dishes by hand, paint the garage. Make her go on long walks with you and tell her you just want to listen to the sounds of the neighborhood. 
Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. Give her the freedom to fall in love with the wrong person, to lose her heart, to have it smashed and abused and broken. Occasionally be too busy to listen, be distracted by other things, have your nose in a great book, be gone with your own friends...
Let her go without writing if she wants to. Never nag her about writing, even if she’s cheerful when writing and completely unbearable when she’s not. Let her quit writing altogether if she wants to.
Let her make mistakes...
Keep her safe but not too safe, comfortable but not too comfortable, happy but not too happy...

TNC sums it up beautifully: 
Failure and boredom are underrated forces for good in this world.

Say Goodbye to Productivity

Super Mario Brothers. Online.
Oh yeah, and you get to choose non-SMB characters to play the levels. And they have the same capabilities as they do in their native games.
It's as awesome as it sounds.

Affirmation

I'm sitting here at the DMV waiting to get a new license and catching up on some reading via google reader. I was interested to see this new post on Kottke.org ( one of my favorites!) that was incredibly similar to one I recently posted about the "Rubber rooms" in NYC. Not only did it quote one of the same passages, it also referenced the This American Life episode I mentioned.
I'm not insinuating anything - I doubt very much that Jason at Kottke reads Meta-Ninja. But given that I beat their post by a few days, it made me feel good!

"...and this is my great uncle Turnip."

Richard Dawkins new book, which comes out in September, is being serialized by the Times of London. Having read most of his books, I will be ordering this one, as well. It follows on the heels of Jerry Coyne's recent publication, Why Evolution is True.
Here's a great quote from the first part of Dawkin's book:

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips . . . continue the list as long as desired. That didn’t have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn’t. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it.