My attempt at a fall garden

I have had food growing in my garden since March and I am down to my very last tomatoes and okra coming in. A few months ago, I started my fall garden. I am hoping that everything works out.

In this garden, I am currently growing Tat soi, Rouge d'hiver lettuce, Parris Island Cos, Beets, Spinach, Rainbow chard, Cilantro, and Sugar peas.


In my container garden, I am still growing a few things. My Poblano plant is finally putting out peppers. I have decided to try some Purslane and I have a pot of that growing. My hot peppers and banana peppers are coming to the seasons end. Soon, they will either come inside for the winter or wither away. Sad. But, that is how it goes. The only thing you can do is preserve some for the winter, which I have began to do. This is my first time jarring anything, but I gave it a go. Here is what I got so far:

Looming Environmental Disaster

Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices

ATLANTA, Oct. 15 — For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water.

Officials in the central North Carolina town of Siler City estimate that without rain, they are 80 days from draining the Lower Rocky River Reservoir, which supplies water for the town’s 8,200 people.

In the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has more than four million people, worst-case analyses show that the city’s main source of water, Lake Lanier, could be drained dry in 90 to 121 days.

The hard numbers have shocked the Southeast into action, even as many people wonder why things seem to have gotten so bad so quickly.

Can't say that this is a surprise. I have been aware of the drought for years. I noticed as everything got worse this year. The river just down the street was so low a few months ago that you could walk from one side to the other without being more than waste deep at the deepest point. If this trend continues, it is going to be really bad, really soon. Maybe this is what it takes to get people in the South to wake up and realize that this is why conservation and responsible use of our resources is important.

I think this guy says it best:

“I think there’s been an ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome that has been growing,” said Mark Crisp, an Atlanta-based consultant with the engineering firm C. H. Guernsey. “Because we seem to have been very, very slow in our actions to deal with an impending crisis.”

Tortured Logic

I was sick for a week and realized that I must have slept through the outrage and uprising that occurred in response to the revelation of the Torture Memos.

I must have, right? There is no way that this could have been revealed and then sizzled out without much more than a whimper, right? I know that there was probably some moral outrage vocalized by the opposition party, hell they probably even wrote a letter or threatened to investigate. But, where is the real anger? Where is the real outrage that one would expect from so-called civilized peoples when they are shown that their government has been torturing people? I have seen none. And I expect, like most real important things, this will be forgotten by next week and relegated to the memory hole along with all the other stuff that is supposed to get investigated. Until then, I will not hold my breath.

I however am going to skip the stage of blathering on about shocked moral outrage. I am not shocked and I can hardly be more outraged than I was years ago when it was painfully obvious to any honest person with a brain that our government was engaged in torture. I wrote about it on my other blog and was attacked by true believers that feigned outrage that I dare say the word torture when I had no proof. (To them, proof would be a signed statement by Bush saying that it is happening, caught on videotape so they couldn't say it was forged) People like this don't want to believe and never will.

I personally think that there aren't very many people on any political side that really, truly care. I say this because when I get to this topic, I have to stop dead in my tracks. I think, why are there any other things even being discussed? How can people put this up and then an hour later put up a post on "Guess what so and so said about X issue." How do you treat torture just like you treat any other mundane piece of information? How are those things equal? And then the very next day, poof!, it's gone. Forgotten. There is some other thing to be outraged about. Do you know what Rush, Coulter, O'Reilly, etc. said/did? The answer should be, "Who Fucking cares".

However, the people of short attention spans need their 24 hour brain-drain overload of crap information. Because, if they didn't, if these people could only slow down long enough to let any of these big issues really sink in before having something shiny dangled before them, they may have time to really think about them and they may get upset. The fact that a lot of big blogs have moved more and more to the 24 hour, big news format is depressing and counterproductive. One must wonder if their stats (ratings) are more important than actually informing anyone.

So, I am just going to let you chew on this for a while:

Your Government Tortures People

Let that sink in. Sleep on it, meditate on it, pray on it for all I care, but just really think about it.