free the trees.....

this week all started with a message on a video i had posted on you tube from TheBrassHole where he gave me encouragement on my root flare...this lead me, through him to The Dirt Doctor and a wondraful video on root flare.....

so i have spent the past few days recovering the root flare on the trees i live with.....i did have some good ones but i also had some trees whose root flare needed liberating. i have a large douglas fir i fear may be a goner. i'm not sure it was the covering of the root flare to blame but it sure could be......

i have been obsessed with the root flare...(video here)..and working so hard i fall into bed, wake up a bit sore, and go back at it.....but hey i'm not complaining.....the garden show is becoming magnificent......


and a minute in my new favorite chair....

shifting paradigms

just finished reading a piece over at Life After the Oil Crash by James Howard Kunstler, who always gets my attention with his work. he runs thru a short checklist of where we are and then eloquently sums up our psyche and sends me off in the pursuit of our new future.

...........All these epochal discontinuities present themselves, for the moment, as a season of muted "hope" and general apathy. The days are suddenly mild. We've resumed old and happy habits of grilling meat outdoors and motoring to those remaining places that were not blanketed with franchised food huts and discount malls. We have a new, charming president with an appealing family. Newly-minted dollars are flowing to the "shovel-ready." The new bad news is less bad than the old bad news (or seems to be). And the year just past has been such a bummer that our hard-wired human nature tells us that good things must be just around the corner.

Personally, I think a lot of good things await us, but not the ones we're expecting -- not a return to buying slurpees on credit cards. It will be very salutary to leave behind the junk empire we've accumulated and move into an epoch of quality and purpose. For the moment, though, our hopes reside elsewhere.

full post

yeah spring!!!!

a beautiful spring day in the garden....the montmorency cherry looks promising...Mmmmm...and the mutsu apple is blooming..love that apple!! ..and every year i try to capture the beauty of the "grace seebrook" rhody.