Feast or Famine

If there is one thing that gardening teaches you it’s how delicately poised we are between feast and famine. A season that started out looking like it would give us a bumper yield quickly turned to a not so great one.  The late winter and early spring rain that gave us some spectacular growth also brought killer mosquitoes and a fruit fly attack that hammered our tomatoes.  I did however with an intense program of baiting and trapping manage to save enough to get a few bottles of ketchup and enough pizza sauce to see us through the year. 

 Once the fruit fly had finished the mice attacked and clobbered the corn and the remaining tomatoes. The little devils where and still are eating everything in sight including the beans on the vine.  Again I did get enough in the freezer to see us ok for most of the year but the poor neighbors missed out on the overflow.

 Still it’s not all bad news, since the mice haven’t learned to dig yet we managed to get a decent crop of spuds. About 50 kgs from the new bed and I still have some to dig over at the neighbors in a patch that I commandeered while he wasn’t looking.

And as it seems the mice don’t like onions we ended up with a good supply of those as well. The plumcot I planted winter last has produced its first fruit which I saved from the fruit fly by bagging, so we got a taste of those.       

 

My new PV system is on site and will be up and running shortly and the drive is progressing at a slow but steady rate. It should be ready for operation well before winter arrives and should deal nicely with any amount of rain runoff we are likely to get.  I ended up fabricating another gutter form because casting one a day was just too slow. We have been sling them into place about every half dozen or so but boy are those great lumps of concrete heavy, definitely a two man and a boy job.    

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A flood of “Biblical” proportions

Pinched from a post at Watching the Deniers on the Queensland floods.
More than 4000 years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh described a universal flood that shattered the world.

The... land shattered like a... pot.
All day long the South Wind blew ...,
blowing fast, submerging the mountain in water,
overwhelming the people like an attack.
No one could see his fellow,
they could not recognize each other in the torrent.
The gods were frightened by the Flood,
and retreated, ascending to the heaven of Anu.
The gods were cowering like dogs, crouching by the outer wall.
Ishtar shrieked like a woman in childbirth,
the sweet-voiced Mistress of the Gods wailed:
'The olden days have alas turned to clay,
because I said evil things in the Assembly of the Gods!
How could I say evil things in the Assembly of the Gods,
ordering a catastrophe to destroy my people!!
No sooner have I given birth to my dear people
than they fill the sea like so many fish!'
The gods--those of the Anunnaki--were weeping with her,
the gods humbly sat weeping, sobbing with grief(?),
their lips burning, parched with thirst.
Six days and seven nights
came the wind and flood, the storm flattening the land.
When the seventh day arrived, the storm was pounding,
the flood was a war--struggling with itself like a woman
writhing (in labor).
The sea calmed, fell still, the whirlwind (and) flood stopped up.
I looked around all day long--quiet had set in
and all the human beings had turned to clay!

Who will read our poetry in four thousand years?

Who indeed, the way we are trashing the place it'll be touch and go if there is a life form that is capable of reading.
Every once in a while you run into something that smacks you right between the eyes.

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