Historical Illustration, and Site-Related: Post Frequency

Okay, so on Sunday I posted a new thing, which I'd hoped might be a way to save me time on the short posts so I could work more on the long posts (the plant profiles and etc. which were the original point of the blog), which I like doing more than I like trying to come up with the filler pieces between them.

And then a number of you left comments saying that you wouldn't mind less-frequent posts if that meant more-frequent longer posts. I had already been having thoughts about doing something different with the posting frequency: I've been thinking for at least a year that maybe I should cut back. I mean, back when I only had 250 plants and I could get all of them watered in like three days and then have 9 to 11 days off to write, that was one thing, but now I have four times that many plants, and it takes about four times as much time to water, and I have to water pretty much every day. It's not that I can't water and write in the same day, but that doesn't leave time for anything else, and there are times when I'd like to do something else.

For reasons I'm not entirely sure I understand, whenever I've thought about posting less often, I've consistently rejected the idea, but we're coming up on a time of year when it was going to be necessary to do, one way or another.

The reason is that I'm hoping to do some selling and trading of my plants, once the weather warms enough that I can start shipping them. We've also been talking about trying to do the Farmers' Market thing this summer, which I'm not 100% convinced that that's a good idea, what with the heat and all, but it seems likely that we'll try it at least once. These things could wind up being great, but they're also all time-consuming.

I haven't done one of these in a long time, mostly because it's hard to find usable images on-line, but I enjoyed them. I think my favorite is the one with the Young Realtors' Club.
For now, I think the plan is to take a couple days off (I kinda do need it, honestly), then come back on Saturday still trying to come up with daily posts, but not to the extent that I'm posting something I don't care about just to have a post. Which I have been doing. Which may or may not have been obvious.

There are some dangers to this plan. Sometimes the posts I forced myself to do just so I'd have something to post were popular. Sometimes pushing myself to find something interesting about a topic I found boring worked, and I liked what I came up with. I tend to rework posts longer than is helpful, and having to have something to post the next day, I feel, helped me curb that tendency, so I'm a little worried that not having to have a deadline will lead both to fewer short posts and to fewer long ones. But these are problems which I hope can be dealt with, and if I really hate how things turn out with the irregular schedule, we can always go back to daily posts.

Comments? Questions? Solutions? We've got a couple days for a conversation here, if people want to have one.

Historical Illustration: Garden Center Promotion

Historical illustration: Superman's less-useful superpowers

If you haven't visited the site Superdickery, you've been missing out. It's a simple site, with a simple thesis: that Superman is a dick, which its owner tries to prove by presenting example after example of Superman acting like a dick. And there are more of those than you would think.

Plant-related pictures on the site are kind of few and far between, but there are these two:


I'm not sure this counts as landscaping exactly. I mean, it looks to me like he's just kind of firing the plants into the soil, which has got to be rough on the roots. And even if his aim is good, there's going to be leaves breaking off that'll have to be super-raked up. Or super-composted.

Super-transplanting would be a useful superpower, though. We could have used a super-transplanter in like February or March. And some super-watering would be handy now, actually.


I don't know who any of these guys are, or what happened to them, but I think purple-parka-helmet guy overstates the case a little. In what situations would the ability to make plants grow really fast save somebody's life? Maybe if there was a nuclear bomb about to be launched by some guy, and you made the bindweed in the area grow really quickly into the chamber that sets the bomb off, such that the bomb couldn't go off, then that would be superheroey. But that's kind of a stretch. I mean, on a day-to-day level, I guess being able to deflect bullets with your chest isn't terribly useful either, but boy, on those days you need it, it's really handy.

Granted that he doesn't say "save lives," he says "help people." But to me, the most obvious "help" in that case would be economic: okay, Captain Tree-Guy, you just sit over there in the corner and make the plants grow really fast, and then we'll sell them. Which is mainly only helpful for whoever owns the business in question. Perhaps I'm not being imaginative enough. Maybe this is best left as an exercise for the reader:

Assignment: Write a comic book plot in which the ability to make plants grow really fast would help people in ways which aren't strictly economic. Plot must contain at least one supervillain, one fist-fight, and one brief allusion to some sort of phlebotinum. (Warning: Link goes to tvtropes.org, which is known to have led to many wasted afternoons.) Bonus points will be awarded for plots in which the ability to grow plants fast actually saves a life.

My standard answer to the what-superpower-would-you-want-if-you-could-have-a-superpower question is, I would want total control over the weak nuclear force. Electricity's been done. Gravity (or at least flying) has been done. Magnetism has been done. Even freezing time, running time backwards, whatever: yawn city. But the weak nuclear force? Nobody even knows what it is, aside from a few physicist types. I could make things that aren't radioactive be radioactive, I could make stuff that is radioactive not be, I could possibly stop the sun from burning, change neutrons into protons (which I think gives me the power to turn tungsten to gold, and turn gold to mercury, as a side effect), perform cold fusion at will, and all kinds of cool shit that I'm just positive would be useful eventually. At the very least, being able to stop the sun from burning and control the world's gold supply would make me an awfully effective supervillain, and being a supervillain has always sounded like something I'd find fulfilling. (I've just had trouble finding funding. You know how it is.)

Spring hiatus

Primula NOID.
In December, I took four days off as an anti-burnout measure; I'm thinking that this might be a good thing to do every three months or so, so I'm going to do it again. There will, consequently, be no new posts for March 23-26; I'll be back on the 27th with something (very possibly a new plant profile, if I can settle on which plant to do and write it), and daily posts will continue until some point in late June.

Viola 'Matrix Blue Blotch.'
There are plenty of old posts listed in the sidebar, for new visitors who are interested in checking some out. Sansevieria trifasciata was good and long, and there's also the set of five profiles I did for The Breakfast Club, an idea which was cute and seemed like a good idea at the time but is unlikely to ever be repeated because it made me a little crazy. On the creative side, there's Calathea ornata, which I was never entirely satisfied with, but other people told me it was good so I guess it must have been okay. Other profiles which were better than average (or at least, profiles from which you're likely to learn something you didn't know already, not necessarily something about plants): Dizygotheca elegantissima, Hylocereus undatus, Coffea arabica, Ardisia elliptica, and Dracaena sanderiana.

Though it's not like I don't try to make them all profiles from which an interested reader might learn something. Sometimes this is harder than others.

Anyway. Failing all that, don't you have some gardening to do?

(This is the original caption given to this picture by the guy at Monkey Fluids. I tried and tried to come up with an improvement, but eventually concluded that this one is perfect as it stands.)

Another Illustration

From page 171 of the young adult classic novel, Mr. Subjunctive and the Recurring Mealybug Infestation (1968):

From the Teachers' Guide to the Mr. Subjunctive Series:

Vocabulary: mealybug, realtor, greenhouse, loft apartment

Suggested activity: print out a copy of the illustration on p. 171 and color it with crayons.

Questions for discussion:
1. Why did the Young Realtors want to kill the cacti in Mr. Subjunctive's greenhouse? How did this make Mr. Subjunctive feel?
2. What are mealybugs? What do they do?

Credits:

*The picture is, again, from Monkey Fluids. I don't know the original source.

*Loft apartment idea from my husband.

Historical Illustration

I ran across Monkey Fluids yesterday and was inspired, I guess. The humor there is a very specific kind of humor, and won't be to everybody's taste, so click the link at your own risk. This is my recaptioning of one of the pictures, which hopefully falls under fair use. I took a couple other plant / greenhouse pictures to recaption while I was there, which may be popping up from time to time.

If you don't find it funny, don't worry, there's probably nothing wrong with you. I have a pretty specific kind of humor too.