International edible gardening

Waste, rather than loss, is what I was thinking of. Food is food, organic or not; everyone needs it, some like to pay extra for theirs, others struggle to pay for enough.

That does seem like a bit of a headache unless there is enthusiastic ideation to keep it interesting.

Do you see hornworms, where you live?

No offense taken. You've nearly understood me: Mind (not gender) is not enough. Mind always wants more, thinks more thinking is a remedy... unless mind realises it can simply say Yes -- or stop and say nothing, without ceasing to exist.

 

No I do not feel that to be good, that the mind pause and stop. Well I suppose one must we wary of causing hurt by what we say - that is very true, but should keep the mind in gear.

. Man is given 'soul', or consciousness anyway, only he can understand the consequences of actions and thoughts. It is called free will and so we have to think on what actions mean, have meant. Life is so short, yet one can make terrible transgressions and have even more wrong inactions. What we have done is usually eclipsed by what we did not do that we should have done.

Life is a set piece, we all fallow its script. Infant, young childhood, young adult, adult, mature adult, elder, feeble and death. Each phase brings an entire set of feelings and duties and pleasures. I think the elder, and into the feeble, one's job is to think on ones life and society and take in what those years meant - time to atone and think of the aesthetics and travails. All life, especially as an adult, we had to make our way; and less so think on ultimate matters, and now as we are older we should think of them. The aggressive living we had done all those years are replaced by contemplative.

The reason I do not believe in euthanasia in all but the most extreme cases is we have souls so need to have what time is ours, to have the chance to the end, to get our soul right with the sins and injustices that we have left a trail of across all our past years.

I have said before that I believe in Karma and so we need to think on our actions and why and thus get some closure.

edit - forgot to mention the garden. First 2 tomatoes eaten last night! Weather rainy, very windy, cool.

 

(Rants into void....................._______------->)

Yes! Tomato horn worms! Utterly beautiful and huge and can eat more tomato leaf in a day than can be believed. I had a couple which were gone when I looked for them - and I do know how you can stare at one sitting on a bare stalk - the worm being as big as your finger - and not see it when hunting for it. I guess birds got it as a sort of breath mint after gorging on blackberries. (the worms smell strongly of tomatoes and are the exact colour of the leaf.)

But I was out trying to get another bass for my pond with no luck - the rain has the bayous running like brown rivers. Still I stopped at that tiny pond and got another 3 warmouth brim.



But look at these blackberries, Kioa! with a Euro coin on my porch railing.



Just picked these:

 

I admire your willingness to contemplate. Underuse of the mind is as unhealthy as overuse. While thoughtlessness has disastrous effect on oneself and others, it's easy to forget that the mind can agitate itself -- with no stimulus but memory. Such agitation keeps awareness suspended from the present, which is the only place where one can act, the only time we really have for making things right or better: now.

The most conscientious individuals are the ones prone to browbeat themselves over past and present, right and wrong. Some of Nature's healing qualities, for me, have to do with the fact that nature knows no morality -- only equilibrium and its absence. Nature doesn't 'care' who wins. The balance of power is changing all the time. Our lifespans aren't long enough to perceive this without discomfort. Our morality operates on a shorter timescale than the geological.

When people talk about saving the Earth, I always think that if they are serious about it, they should take the time to define the problem accurately. Earth will be here. If we mess up the human niche in this system, something else will take our place and we will go unlamented. Another example of how easy it is to see things backwards.

I do covet those blackberries. I'm down to my last jar-of-jam's worth in the freezer, and that will be that until late August at the earliest.

 

I know that very well indeed. I lived camping on extended trips growing up - the greatest amount of trip took us from Western Afghanistan to British Columbia Canada via North Africa. Then as a young man spent 5 years living out of a backpack with much time solitary in the wilderness, then another 12 years living out of the school bus, trailers, and a old motorhome, and tents, much in the wilderness, (once 6 months out of a canoe) And then have always messed with creatures, catching them, killing them, keeping them, and watching them - as well as a couple years of university/college formally studying Zoology and botany. (messed with a lot of plants too).

Anyway reading of real travelers - ones who live in wilderness places (Bates with his 11 years on the Amazon, late 1800's, AR Wallace with his years in the wilderness (the one who was almost to release his papers on evolution and take that credit from Darwin but was tardy because he was off in the wilds when he should have been putting his papers through the Royal Societies.) (the ones, who with Darwin, gave Dawkins his base to write 'The Blind Watchmaker' - his is a bleak and nihilistic existential view.)

They always write of the over laying feeling of depression the truly wild places bring on one. I believe this is from the utter coldness and inhumanity in a cloud around you. The living in the life and death circle of nature where almost all die badly, and most as infants - the knowledge that there is no aid. That if you became hurt you would perish like the beasts, un lamented or helped. Being completely separated from society totally is a coldness where one finally feels the true nature. The benevolent pantheism of how nature is represented in media is utterly different from the reality. The heated bedroom and ambulance, even someone to care, is remove from our awareness.

I have felt this coldness many times, one is aware of the rocks out in space, cold and dead, and here this mad life of struggle and eat and be eaten and you know art and justice, compassion exist too, and you think on life.

Anny Dillard talked of that extremely rare chance one may have - if one thinks on existence - where nature pulls aside the veils one by one and one can glimpse the reality under lying. And it is too much for us to really get - but there is a vastness and a coldness. One thinks of the universe, the trillions of suns, planets, comets, moons careening madly and then ourselves and this green place bursting at the seams with life, but also mostly cold - - - but for that altruistic affection, compassion, charity that man alone, with his reflecting consciousness can know.

I wonder if man justifies nature - a stalactite or giant crystal in a sealed cave that will never be seen has no beauty, it is just molecules arranged. Man brings acknowledgement and appreciation to existence and we should think of it and wonder. I happen to believe in Karma but do not understand the mechanism, and have a strong side to Christianity which is the only system that is really decent, and by its works (the free, fair, technological West, and so much of the World) it is the one which brings the best out of humans.

 

Seems like meaning can only exist in a consciousness that will assign and hold it. That's fine with me; the corollary - that there is no meaning but what we give - seems rather more invigorating than frightening, even being a sword that cuts both ways. It implies a creative freedom, maybe even a creative responsibility, within the scope of individual lives.

What do you make of Sagan's theory that human consciousness is a means for the universe to know itself?

Often when I suggest that consciousness does not require perpetual thought, it's presumed that I'm advocating the cessation of thought. What I'm driving at instead is the value of the facility to stop and start at will, to experience perception as the most receptive process possible. Maybe this is why vastness and coldness affects me as something profoundly restful. It is a ground, uncomplicated.

 

Well, I am back inside after a walk around and have to get back to work, this time lugging a good bit of stuff and putting off some carpentry I need to finish on a house - the weather is great for excuses and I took this long video, 10+ minutes when my goal was to do a two minute one; but I do not edit and have a lot to learn about brevity and video cameras and one day will manage better.

But I kind of thought a periodic walk through would show how fast the seasons move, and the garden does its thing. Not that I will ever go back and watch them later, but still they make me focus on the changes. I have enjoyed the very few videos others have posted here and wish more would too.

So here it is, 10 minutes, the good news is it could have been a lot longer only I resisted making side trips to the more obscure places I plant or go to around here.



MsK, just was going to turn off the computer off and found my last post never posted - no time to read yours, having to work.

 

Hi ho, hi ho...

 

That sounds like a Nihilistic position where there is no fixed ethics or meaning but a fluid universe of good, evil, and mostly shades of both tempered by a massive dullness; depending on who and what they happen to be about. Then 7 billion variations, each disappearing on average every 46 years. Although Sagan was having a bit of fun with his theory which presupposes a kind of universal Lamarckian/Creationist evolution.

Sounds like a kind of Borg collective, Buddhist or Hindu, where one's goal is to lose ones self into the eternal and cease to be.

No, I cannot get into the Eastern religions of wishing to cease being a self yet be eternal - I think that is a religion founded because the reality on earth was perpetual suffering of all and the escape from that was the goal. They are not kind religions, the Eastern ones, one is certainly not ones brother's keeper. They may avoid taking life but will not worry about the suffering.

I said I believed in Karma, but certainly not in a Hindu way - more of a "My name is Earl" way, with Christianity being the background.

MrsK, did you ever read CS Lewis's "That Hideous Strength"?

So rain last night and all this morning. I do want the rain to stop for a bit so I can get fishing. With the bayou like chocolate milk and flowing like a river, the brackish water around being mostly fresh, it is not worth putting the boat in, or fishing in the Gulf much. I may try for some drum (a crustacean eating fish that gets a good size and is good to eat.) who hunt by smell and do not mind low salinity. Not the fish I normally go for because so many undesirables will take a dead shrimp or crab too, so one is always having to unhook spiny and problematic fish.

So here is a gratuitous picture, because I tend to post one, and it is funny in a cosmic sort of way.

Me and my dog in my Zodiac going under London Bridge in Arizona, looking like we both are contemplating the infinite. (sold by HMG and taken stone by stone to Lake Havasu in Arizona from London, where it connects a resort island to the mainland.) I have been under it, and over it, in both places - and certainly there is some synchronicity in that, if only I could figure out what it means.

 

Mmmm... yes, except for the dullness. Why not the seven billion variations (not a rhetorical question)? There are seven billion points of view, seven million locations in time and space, at present, in various states of awareness. What bothers me about nihilism is that righteous nihilists should be self-eliminating.

If Lamarckian evolution was presupposed by Sagan, then what the universe learns about itself was predetermined... well, no. Really! Wouldn't that be circular?

One is a self while one is a self -- the only way out is through, forget about escape. 'I' is always temporary: even during one life it never stops changing. Not so much perpetual suffering as perpetual entanglement, inescapable agitation (dukkha), against which the freshness of the void is a salubrious contrast. Everything in the void, the perceiver brings with him. Bring nothing and the void's effect is restorative. Easier said than done, it's true.

Please say more about your ideas of karma; you've thought about it. I'm more interested in field-tested ideas from living minds than received wisdom from antiquity (which has its place).

When you have time I'd be interested to read your ideas on original sin as well, if you wouldn't mind writing about them. This aspect of the Lewis book seems pivotal to me.

Flora likes riding in the boat. That made me smile.

 

Arrggggggg

MrsK, I had logged on and in a bit went off to another page to look for a control board I need for an appliance - and switched to a USA IP address from the British one I was on to do business - and then back here with a different IP and wrote a entire post on Karma - hit 'post' and it asked me to log on again - so I did and the entire post was lost.

I guess if one believes in fate then it was not meant to be.......... 'The moving finger' and all that Khayyam stuff meets the high speed internet non-static IP lark. I do not have the go in me to write that all over again.

Here:



Sorry for the silly video - but I was annoyed at the lost post - and I did the back button and refresh and it did not work.

 

Feeding the fish and chickens, things really greening up and I need to get weeding the pond soon - go in and pull the weed fringe on the edges.

 

No worries, I had to laugh
We'll get around to it sometime I hope.

 

I am back inside for a big iced tea - all refrigerators here have ice makers with a water line and churn out cubes. I never used to use ice till just recently, but now every day make 2 l of weak, cheap, tea and drink it with ice - the hot weather has begun, but still nice at nights although I do use the bedroom air conditioner, a tiny window one, and rarely use the house one.

And I was picking the days blackberries. Amazing how the birds get them. The berries are red one day and black the next - and ideally would be left another day to develop sugars but that will not happen. The birds sit out there, popping down when they will, and get the ripe ones.

So this is what I have found: The Prime Jan are excellent bushes - the one in good soil anyway, the others did nothing, but the berries being normal sized are gobbled up where exposed - the thorns (technically spines) are not too bad. The Navaho are thornless and small berries - every one gobbled. But the Kioa! Over twice the size of the other berries so hard for birds to come to grips with and have to be eaten by bites when soft instead of picked and carried off - and Nasty thorns! So 90% of my berries have come from the three Kioa (now over 2 1/2 gallons, maybe 15 pounds) bushes - and they were almost dead things planted last May in the heat. (reduced from $15 a bush to $5 because the planting season was over and they were rough looking.)

Kioa is the only one to get for here - and if they grow in UK I heartily recommend them. Today only had 300g and the season is winding down, all but the Kioa almost spent and soon to be pruned, the kioa still with a smattering.

And I launched my boat today! Had to re-rig the mooring whips and do a couple things but really just waiting for dry weather because the boat fills in rain and needs bailing or it will sink - but no dry spell in sight so launched it. We need to get out fishing, the bayou stays so fresh here with all the rain we need to get to bigger water.

Finally built a foot deep planter for an Anna apple tree I bought cheap, it will go on my new hill between two blueberries - crammed in. Anna is the recommended variety for here. And planted a mysterious - broken half way down and almost leafless citrus with no indication of what it is because they only wanted a couple dollars for it - citrus are never cheap like other trees so grabbed it and it is in my cottage banana grove.

 

I've adapted to life outside the subtropics, but still like ice in some drinks, for the psychological relief it offers. A conditioned response too long in place to be forgotten. Also some drinks are less palatable without it.