A Pepper Grows in Jersey

First thing: Beth Ann posted last week, but the time stamp got screwed up, and got placed behind old posts. So check it out below if you haven't yet already! and for the record, I love sappy blogs.

Now, before I forget everything he told me, I'm going to write down the excellent tips the garden guy at Home Depot enlightened us with:

1. Water your garden in the morning. In the summer, it's coolest in the morning, and the water has a chance to settle down and stay cool. otherwise, the water will sit on top and be heated by the sun, eventually, well, boiling your roots. bad news!

2. Sprinkling black pepper in your plants will keep the neighbor cats away. that, or a $300 high-pitched sound-wave machine. Guaranteed to keep any animal at least 50 feet away from your garden. However, Basil and Olivia might never forgive us for that one.

3. Dark soil is good soil. If you throw it and it drops heavy, it's good soil. If it sort of floats, and acts dust-like, it's not so good, and you need topsoil. In general, you shouldn't need top soil if it's very dark and heavy. But every year, maybe in August, throwing a little topsoil into your garden will add (and preserve) nutrients. I was reassured we had good soil, because I brought a small sandwich baggy of our garden soil in my purse and showed him. He promptly smelled the dirt, then threw some on the floor and said, "that's good dirt."

4. Even though your soil is dark, you don't know the pH. It could be acidic. the Black Forests are almost gone from acid rain. Along with many other forests, like the rain forests in the northwest, and the redwood forests. All starting to fall apart (he used to work for national geographic, apparently). If you notice your plants aren't growing as well as you'd like, make this concoction out of protien based items in your kitchen:

-chopped banana peels
-milk
-eggs
-coffee grounds
-chopped orange peels

Mix 'em all up in a blender, and spray the mix on your top soil. It'll add much-needed nutrients for your plantees! also, adding a sprinkling of limestone pellets onto your soil will help balance pH.

5. Miracle Grow is steroids for tomatoes. and all other plants. It's like they are from Mars. Okay, they are large, but they are from another planet. They aren't real plants. Do you want to eat a mutant tomato? Use miracle grow.

Okay! That's that. So Moray, Beth Ann and I took a trip to Home Depot on rt. 440 today, and after many weird NJ misleading road signs (such as: a big sign saying "truck rt. 1/9 next left" right over the exact exit it was really refering to, not another one further down the road, as one might think when reading "NEXT left", not THIS left! yyarrr!) I'd like to give a shout out to Beth Ann and her excellent skills driving a standard shift car on a crowded Jersey truck route. with lots of retarded u-turn exits. And her ability to stay calm by waving to people in cars stalled in the opposite flow of rush-hour traffic. Anyway, we went crazy, and bought a world of seeds and plantees and garden utensils. tomorrow we will make an attempt to clean out our garden, and start growing some seeds. wish us luck. more luck than i've had inside, in any case. Although I'm actually reminded of the time Beth Ann's mom had me dog sit, and she entrusted me with some seeds to plant in her garden. I remember thinking, "Wow, I hope I know what I'm doing. I wouldn't trust me with a garden." I can't remember if they grew or not! I hope so.

Also, I will be playing piano for a small production of Cabaret up in the Bronx at Fordham College all week, if anyone is interested. It's free! And if I didn't mention it before, that restaurant I was playing piano at? well, their piano was repossesed pretty quickly after I started playing there. But luckily, Moray's brother Cameron was here in time to see the piano being played before it was reposessed. Then the next night they called me and told me. But anyway, David and I had the pleasure of playing some tunes with Cameron at a benefit concert there a few nights later (on the bartender's rented keyboard).

I will now post Cameron's reaction to the news that my Gianna's piano was reposessed.



And just in case anyone has forgotten how cute these two are: