Ending and Beginning

Fertilized the tomato and other seedlings with Miracle-Gro today for the first time. There’s quite a forest of them now, we have to think about thinning. Clearly, I am not a “pure” organic gardener. I believe that the benefits of “chemical” fertilizers outweigh the costs, especially when the plants are still inside. I think arguments against fertilizing vegetable seedlings you’re going to transplant to the garden are arguments for ideological purity and have little to do with practical reality.

I don’t fertilize the whole garden plot, but feeding individual heavy-feeding plants is worth the cost. I think the best way any gardener can have a better garden is to improve their garden’s soil using organic methods.

Barring emergencies, I draw the line at chemical herbicides and pesticides.

Naturally, after I used the fertilizer, DW told me that she had been planning to sell them as organic tomatoes to her employer, where she  works in the kitchen. Oh well.

I think the echinacea is starting to come up today, and there’s probably a pepper coming up. I’m not sure if the stevia is up or not. There are some seedlings in their pots, but they could be weeds.

I cut down that big elm tree I’ve been dreading today. It had about a 24″ diameter where I cut it, 4′ up (bigger lower down). It came down exactly where I wanted to, so that was good. I was a little nervous about it — that’s a lot of tree, and if I had messed it up there wouldn’t have been anything I could do about it except fix whatever it broke on the way down. You should have heard the boom when it hit the ground! We’ll get a lot of bad firewood out of it.

I want to try cutting up at least some of it with a bow saw. That makes more sense to me with lower-quality firewood — cutting it by hand means less of an investment in fossil fuel and money in the firewood.