Seed Starting, Day 16

The house was a little warmer these last couple of days, and the seedlings are responding energetically. The zinnias in the back are several inches tall, and the tomatoes and the basil are developing their first true leaves -- which in the case of the lemon basil seem to be of a yellowish hue. Two of my four peppers (Container sweet pepper, "Pizza My Heart") have come up; one is barely visible in the second row back, three cells from the right. So I've got a pretty full house here. This is just a seed-starting tray with very small cells, so I'll need to start transplanting everything to larger individual pots in the next few days. This array of plants will look much more impressive then.

Reflecting Pool at Sunset

I thought, and Rob Hardy seems to agree, that this photograph, which appeared in Sunday's arboretum walk collage, deserves individual attention. This was taken from the wooden footbridge just inside the entrance to the lower arb (that is, Carleton College's Cowling Arboretum) near the tennis courts, looking southwest. The sun is still casting an idyllic glow on the soccer fields beyond the trees, while this calm area of the little tributary of the Cannon River created a perfect mirror for the happenstance symmetry of the silhouetted trees. If you click on the photo to see the full-size version, you'll feel you are there in the scene.

Evening Walk in the Carleton Arb

My eight-year-old companion and I enjoyed our first arb walk of the season together this evening -- crossing the wooden bridge into the lower arb and following the trail past the tennis courts, along the Cannon River, veering away from the river into mixed woodland and restored prairie, and around past the edge of an area that had recently undergone a controlled burn. A highlight was seeing some deer. Henry saw one doe that I didn't see, and then we saw two as we passed the same area on the way back. One leaped away, showing its white tail, but the other doe froze in place for quite a long time, allowing us to admire her large ears (below, in the center of the photo). Above, I'm trying out one of Picasa's collage features, which I just discovered. You can click on it to see the entire collage larger. I'd appreciate feedback on whether you think collages like this make a good blog feature.

Pondful of Mergansers

On my way out to the Estensen farm today for one of the Goods for Good garage sales, I noticed quite a number of what were clearly not mallards on the first of the ponds off Woodley below Mayflower Hill. I pulled a U-ie and parked on the edge of the grass. I saw at least two male-female pairs of hooded mergansers (one such pair above and another below) and a whole bunch of females hanging out together (second photo below).


I'm always quite taken with the impressive white-patched crests of the males and the fluffy crests of the females, and I was impressed to see so many. Click on the photos for greater detail.

Ahhhhh, Laundry on the Line

Behold (at right) the money-in-the-bank, feel-good, hold-your-head-high, green investment of the season: a new set of clothespins. Sun and wind do the work, and you get the chance to get outside and do something that feels like real, useful activity. If you're lucky enough to have even a small backyard, you can use a line or a rotary-style drying rack.

Hanging laundry out to dry makes your clothes smell good and saves electricity (and gas, if you have a gas dryer). To combat that "stiff as a board" quality that line-dried laundry can sometimes have, try tumbling the laundry on the air-only setting of your dryer for just a few minutes, either before or after hanging it out to dry.

For some more tips on saving energy, money and CO2 emissions by using a clothesline, plus information on advocacy against homeowners' associations and ordinances that ban outdoor clotheslines, visit Project Laundrylist.

Addendum: Since posting this, I've been thinking about statistics quoted on several of the sites I looked at: that the average household does well over 400 loads of laundry per year, or 7-8 loads per week, or about 1.4 loads a day. Even when I was living in a household of five, which has got to be larger than the average household these days, I doubt we often did more than 4 or 5 loads a week, and often less. Granted, I've always had fairly large-capacity machines, but we got by with one or two loads of darks (one sturdy, one delicate) a week, a load of light-colored delicates, one big load of whites every week or so, and a load of pinks and reds about every 2-3 weeks (maybe more often when the girls were little). That about did it. Some things obviously need to be washed after a single use; others don't, necessarily: towels, for example; jeans, for another, unless they get dirty. Some things -- sweaters worn over shirts, for example -- might just need washing a couple of times a season, and they'll look nice longer, too, since they won't get pilled up so soon. Part of greening up our lives may involve some contemplation of our occasionally excessive standards of cleanliness.