more gardening, woodworking, mint

I finally thinned the broccoli yesterday, which turned out to be arugula, thank god. I kept pouting where's the arugula, where's the rocket? I don't need all of this damn broccoli. So as I was thinning it, I tasted a sprout and it was spicy, peppery like rocket. Sweet! I also thinned the Black Seeded Simpson which is day-glo green. That lettuce is awesome. After the two days of hard rain last week, I looked out at the garden expecting it to be a tropical paradise, unfortunately the rain tended to wash away a large part of what little top soil we had in the backyard. What I saw when I looked out was a lot of pieces of gravel. But the lettuce and spinach are still coming in strong between the rocks so we'll see what happens.

Also this week I bought a circular saw, (its a Milwaukee, I know, I'm completely wisconsincentric). Why? Well, I decided I am going to build a book shelf, and a record shelf, and a ... Okay, so the real reason, was I was reading web sites on self-sufficiency, blah, blah, blah. And this one, bizarre but strangely compelling one (The subtle way manual) said carpentry is important skill to learn if you want to survive peak oil. A few other books had also recommended this () Unfortunately once I bought the saw I figured out, oh shit, now I need a truck to haul huge pieces of wood and ply wood around, oh shit!

But I have a plan! My first project will be building shelves for our record collection out of found plywood. I came up with this after I read that 60% of landfills was discarded wood. Granted I read this in the Food not Lawns book, and kinda half seems like most of the stats in that book are pulled directly from the authors asshole. Like for instance, the author recommends getting rid of your microwave in order to save electricity, "just plan meals so that there are no leftovers." This seems to me to be the height of waste, because I've been researching electricity and microwaves use less energy to heat than either gas or electric stoves! So you'd have to cook entire meals from scratch, cook them which takes longer than reheating (a lot longer with say brown rice.) So reheating in a microwave will actually take much less energy than cooking 45 minutes on a gas stove.

So the "60% of landfills is wood" meme may be unsubstantiated, but it still seems like a good idea to use discarded plywood. Plus, I won't need a truck to haul it home, hopefully.

Also yesterday I discovered some mint growing in the huge mass of plant/rock garden a former renter left in the backyard. I love mint! Plus, the patch is far away from my garden so it won't be able to take over the rest of the garden.