I know what this country needs

I made my own tomato cage today out of 6 ft wooden stakes. Seems sturdy, the Brandywine it now supports seems happy. One down, 11 to go. I hope the rest go faster now that I have the basic design. I had never used an electric saw before. Now I have visions of all the garden structures I can make out of sawed and nailed wood.

Tomatoes, like many garden plants, need support. Sure, they'll grow and bear fruit without support, but they'll sprawl all over the ground, making them difficult to water and more likely to rot. They need the support early in life - doing it while they're more than a couple of feet tall leads to damage.

If I took the same approach to my young tomatoes as George Bush's approach to children's health insurance, I would have fewer and less healthy mature fruit. The president argues that making publicly funded health insurance to available to more low-income children (there are more than 8-9 million of them) and their families will make people drop their private insurance to get on the dole. Here's what he said a few days ago in Cleveland:

The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room. ... [T]he reason I emphasize private insurance, the best health care plan -- the best health care policy is one that emphasizes private health. In other words, the opposite of that would be government control of health care.

And there's a debate in Washington, D.C. over this. It's going to be manifested here shortly by whether or not we ought to expand what's called S-CHIP. S-CHIP is a program designed to help poor children get insurance. I'm for it. But now there are plans to expand S-CHIP to include families ... In other words, the program is going beyond the initial intent of helping poor children. It's now aiming at encouraging more people to get on government health care. That's what that is. It's a way to encourage people to transfer from the private sector to government health care plans.

It's debatable to what extent this will happen since the idea behind expanding eligibility is to reach families without private health insurance. It could result in some folks leaving private insurers, but those will mainly be people who are having a hard time affording health insurance.

In the garden today

I started setting up drip irrigation for the tomatoes - they're getting all the love right now. It was too hot to do much else. The plants were droopy and so was I. It isn't usually this hot here in July - the sun feels particularly broiling. Or maybe it's just me and my changing body (i.e, hormones).

Rocky you met your match

If only it were true. There's one spot in my Fatali pepper patch that is a dead zone. I plant a Fatali, it dies. I replace it, it dies. Couldn't figure it out until one morning I found a warm, steaming pile of raccoon offering. Guess he was peeing there and pooing in the oak half barrel. I took away his number one number two spot when I emptied and turned over the rotting half barrel. In retaliation, he began making larger deposits in the Fatali patch.

For the last two years, raccoons have been eating my Mammoth sunflower heads. I tried raccoon repellant which only turned the sunflower leaves black and made them more irrestible than ever to the bandits. This year I planted Teddy Bears which don't seem to appeal to ol' Rocky and friends.

Twas a gopher who chewed my morning glory's roots, causing it to all but die. There are a few living tendrils I have coaxed up the trellis. I will tend them in hopes the morning glory will get better as soon as it is able. The gophers have never eaten the morning glory roots before this year when I planted all the peppers and tomatoes in gopher baskets. Again, I suspect retaliation.

In the garden today

More like, in the garden center today. I only bought stakes to make tomato supports and a gopher basket to replant the morning glory into. But I admired many plants, especially Annie's Annuals. While it's great to browse the aisles of four-inch pots of unusual sunflowers, lupines, and poppies, perusing the web site is also rewarding. You can browse by plant type or color and search by sixteen types of plants, color, water and sun requirements, and annual or perennial. So, if I want more purple perennial flowers, I can get a pageful. Lots of pictures to moon over.

Now I better get started making those tomato supports. And setting up the drip irrigation.

Plant your love and let it grow

When a plant is ailing, it usually involves the roots. Blossom end rot on tomatoes and peppers comes from insufficient uptake of calcium. Even if there's plenty of calcium in the soil, the roots can still have trouble getting it to the rest of the plant if you've over watered or watering has been too sporadic. Foliar applications of calcium just don't work. The different kinds of wilt come from a soil-born disease that is transmitted by the roots. All you can do is not compost the plants and not plant the same thing in that place again - and plant wilt resistant varieties next time. I'm now trying to determine why my 5-year old morning glory suddenly died after gloriously returning each spring. It did so this year and then passed on. I suspect a gopher. There's so much going on beneath the surface that affects the garden's health. Most problems require you address the root cause.

My good friend Bill is big on working for fundamental change - the only kind that will prevent annihilation and, in his words, "create a civilization in which all people have the opportunity to live happy, fulfilled, empowered, and actualized lives." Count me in. We need to change where we're heading or we're likely to end up there. His blog is Mutual Empowerment for Fundamental Change. Making this kind of change is a tall order, but it's within our reach, Bill says, if we use what we now know about behavior change.

Bill also told me about a network of researchers, thinkers, and doers who want to eliminate humiliating practices in the world. I've often thought humiliation to be a form of violence. If you experience humiliation in your formative years, it's hard to grow into a healthy and whole human being. Not impossible, but harder than if you experienced an abundance of love, nurturing, kindness, and encouragement. This group says, "Our work is inspired by universal values such as humility, mutual respect, caring and compassion, and a sense of shared planetary rights and responsibilities." Their site is called "Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies."

In the garden today

There's an organization in my town, the Grey Bears, that delivers bags of fresh produce each week to seniors. My neighbor -- the one who know the history of my inherited plants - gets more green onions than she can use from the Bears. She tried planting them to grow mature onions and it seems to be working. When she got more than she could plant, she gave me a few bunches. I planted them today - I'll let you know how it goes.

I also planted even more peppers and then put some out front as give aways. Two out of seven went to new homes. There are still Fresno and Jalapeno seedlings in pots that I have to squeeze in somewhere. Harvested more snow peas and a magnificent head of lettuce. I am aching to plant carrots, but I need to gopher proof first.

Them 'ol U.S. Blues

Today is my least favorite holiday. It combines two things I don't like, explosives and drunks. The self-righteous, even rabid, patriotism is also a turn off. I love the ideal of independence. Also the spirit of revolution to free people from tyranny. There's lots that is good about the founding fathers crafting the Declaration of Independence. Thoughtful, intelligent people creating a new form of government based on laws and equality.

However, when they held the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, they really did mean "men," that is, white men. Not women, not Indian and Black males who were not considered men. I suppose we can excuse that way of thinking as a product of a less-enlightened time. Yet it's still hard to get around the fact that this new, independent United States of America was a land already inhabited by people, like the Iroquois with their own laws and form of highly functional democratic government.

Independence is a freeing concept. Not having to depend on anyone for anything. On your own, out from under another's thumb. Growing a garden makes me feel sort of independent - it gives me some sense of security, foodwise. But there are many things I eat and use that I don't or can't produce in the backyard. I depend on others for fuel, tools, bread, clothes, and so on. It's OK, it doesn't hurt me or make me less secure. True freedom and security come from interdependence more than independence. That's how nature works. Everything and everyone is connected. We need each other, so we ought to try to get along.

In the garden today

As I watered the corn, a curious hummingbird came within a foot of me to inspect the spray. The corn plants are all different heights, and some of the seeds didn't germinate. So I planted some more. This will make for even greater disparity in heights. I hope it makes for a longer, continuous harvest of those sweet, sweet ears.

The occasional boom of bombs bursting in mid-air startled the other birds and set off every dog on the block. And it's hot - true Fourth of July weather. The lettuce and peas are hanging in there - they are fainting by the end of the day though. Even the sweet peas that "they" say won't grow in the heat are flourishing. Living here on the central coast of California, I can ignore what "they" say with impunity.

I went to a neighborhood potluck today - my next door neighbor had made a delicious pie with the plums hanging from the branch of my tree that reached into her yard. Happy Interdependence Day