Worms, Spiders, Redwoods & Politics

Clear and 55F this morning, on its way up to 80F. Hannah and I will do some more precinct walking this morning. Then home for household chores and, with luck, time to finish the winter garden.

Interesting observation walking door-to-door in San Marino for a political campaign:

1. An amazing number of people in this affluent community are apparently not registered to vote, or don't vote regularly. On my list of registered voters, sometimes there will be one house out of four with a registered voter.

2. When the incumbent has been in a not-very-sexy community college board position for a long time, people are really interested to hear about a new candidate. We will see how that translates into votes.


The Redwood Forest

The Sequoia (giant redwood) saplings in our backyard have enjoyed the rain and cooler weather, have turned a deep green and are sending out new healthy growth. Overall, our SoCal winter is much more agreeable to them, as it is more than a little hot and dry for this coastal rainforest tree. But I am a bit sentimental about them, as I picked them up in Big Sur, one of my favorite childhood vacation and camping spots. I will have to wax eloquent one day about both the Big Sur Lodge and the Big Sur River Inn, as well as the tent camping.

Ah, see? These two little five-year-old saplings are another vehicle in my little time -machine garden. (See Night Blooming Jasmine, previous.)

As The Worm Turns

The worm bin needs to be revitalized, cleaned up, fixed up for the winter. Perhaps some castings harvested and some new bedding material added. Need to swap out either the base or the nozzle for the worm tea, but will try to outfit it with a strainer. A certain amount of the castings fall out into the tea, and run through the spigot, and cause it to work only with difficulty and eventually to jam and break. Until today I hadn't found a source for the spigot, but may have today while looking for worm bin graphics.

I will have to do an Easy Green screed on simple worm composting.

Spiders
We don't use pesticides or chemical fertilizers on the yard. So we have a lot of creatures -- the good kind and the bad kind, but mostly the good kind. We have some amazing outdoor spiders, with a body as big as the tip of a man's thumb. They spin webs that span 20 feet from a tree to the house, classic circular spider webs. On a misty morning they are fascinating. Every now and then a person will look overhead and see one of local pest-catchers working overhead. Although they are mostly benign, spiders still have an effect on one. Here is one of our big boys found the other morning.