Scientific Ink

Tag: Home & Garden

  • Ann Arbor in Bloom (gratitude #21)

    It’s the time of year when everything is bursting open – while my tulips have faded, the redbud in the back has finally decided (after several years of skipping flowering and going straight to leaf, just to spite us) that it is, in fact, a redbud. We’re thrilled it has deigned to bloom in our backyard, joining a host of other redbuds planted throughout the city. The neighborhood’s Forsythia are greening up now, after their show of yellow flowers. And, perhaps the best of all, the lilac just over the fence from our deck has gone crazy with blooms.

    We have a cat, and the cat lives for being outside in the summer time, especially in the evenings. In a moment of weakness, I let him outside this evening. This means that I have been outside calling for him several times, one time I spotted him under the car in the driveway and he moved out of sight to snub my attentions. Cats!

    Likely it will take a few more trips to the deck to call into the night to convince him to join me inside. Well, at least tonight the dizzying scent of the neighbor’s lilacs are rewarding me for each otherwise fruitless visit to the back deck to call a cat who hears me and chooses not to listen. I have a special relationship with this lilac. It lives on the other side of the fence, but bends its boughs into the sunlight on our side too, and I’ve set my compost pile at its feet, nourishing it quite accidentally, because it is close to the kitchen door. So. perhaps I share just a small bit of responsibility for its the frothy blooms and the fragrance. Now if only I could get my cat inside, all would be about perfect.

  • Gardening = soil + plants + labor = home + family (gratitude #18)

    I like plants. I was a plant ecology graduate student. I memorized their names, collected their seeds, learn how botanists classify their variety, and I grew and planted some in field experiments. I have worked as a volunteer to rid a nature preserve of invasive weeds (ongoing, neverending work), and I enjoy playing in my tiny city lot garden. I have friends with amazing gardens. I visit gardens on vacation with my family. I am a member of the Matthaei Botanical Gardens here in Ann Arbor. I like plants and soil and working outdoors.

    (Georgia vs. the rest of the world, originally uploaded by romanlily.)

    What a joy to discover a gardener hidden inside my almost-5-year-old nephew. It’s not entirely a surprise. He lived within a stone’s toss of the wonderful Atlanta Botanical Garden for his first years, and we strolled his infant and toddler self through the gardens there many times.

    Last weekend, I had a great visit to my sister’s in Atlanta. They’re in a nice house on a wooded lot north of Atlanta. They’ve been there a few years now, and it’s time to make the lot their own. The four of us went to the local landscape nursery to pick out a few plants. My nephew had a great time directing us through the covered yard of flats and pots of plants. Here’s what we got:

    • some herbs for cooking – parsley, thyme, cilantro, mint, and rosemary, to be potted on the back deck
    • 2 pair gardening gloves – a pair for my nephew, a pair for my sister
    • 2 cushy kneeling pads – one for my sister, one for my nephew
    • fertilizer for acid-loving plants – to feed the azaleas and holly in my sister’s existing landscaping
    • fertilizer for the new plantings that didn’t want acid
      • marigolds, coneflower, and …another that escapes me…”lellow” and orange flowered plants
      • hostas – shade plants with nice leaf variegation for a forlorn half-circle in the front yard under the trees
    • landscape cloth
    • potting soil

    We got everything home right before dinner, and my nephew was crushed that we’d have to wait a whole night until we planted in the morning. My sister looked at him, looked at me, and said she remembered what it was like to be a kid, how hard it was to wait, maybe he and I could plant a few while she fed my niece?

    So, we put the gloves on, got out some ceramic pots and the potting soil and we picked out a few herbs to put in the deck planter. The next morning, we got up early and planted the hostas in the front yard before 9AM so that we could water them fully before the watering ban started up. Digging into the red clay soil was really different for me! Wow. My nephew enjoyed seeing the worms we dug up, and loved helping move the dirt.

    I had to fly home before we could plant the last few marigolds, the coneflower, and the other one I’ve already forgotten. My sister phoned and said that my nephew demanded they plant the last few, and this evening he held the pots tenderly while he supervised his father preparing the ground for them.

    Planting memories, planting growth. Fun to see my nephew connect to the plants, to the yard, and to one of my favorite pastimes. How nice I was able to be useful and add to their environment in my visit there.

  • And the winner is…Spiraea! (gratitude #16)

    Spirea "magic carpet" horizontal

    My friend Andy is going to laugh at me. He’s the kind of guy who collects the names of things, so he was a great help when I was in grad school and wondered about the name of, say, any plant, insect, or rock near at hand. We used to work together, and so we’d sometimes walk to lunch together, and often I’d ask him the name of a plant that I admired, but whose name just never, ever stuck with me. Spiraea. It was laughable. I’d ask him again and again to remind me, and he’d mock me, and then tell me it was, yet again, Spiraea.

    Hmmmm. I’m a slow learner sometimes. Anyway, I think he can finally rest assured that until dementia hits, I’m going to remember what spiraea looks like. You see, I just purchased three pink-flowered “magic carpet” Spiraea for the front yard (to replace the “holes” in the garden where I pulled out the euonymus), and I have my heart set on a snowmound white Spiraea for the sunny spot just behind the porch swing. It will fill in the place that DTE dug up and is now empty. Abbott’s had another white variety, but not the snowmound, so I’m waiting.

    I’m grateful for the patient advice on plant selection I got Sunday from Abbott’s Landscape Nursery, I’m grateful for Andy’s patient re-explanation of what Spiraea is (and correcting my spelling), and I’m most grateful for a glorious sunny early spring day spent out in the garden.

  • Spring is here: first BBQ, compost pickups, crocuses (gratitude #15)

    We dusted off the grill and had the first BBQ of 2008 last night. Bahamian grilled chicked from the The Barbecue! Bible. Tasty. Not quite weather for dinner outside, but getting there. Almost time to break out the outdoor table from the garage.

    I noticed all the neighbors out in their yards yesterday, picking up the winter’s collection of sticks and dead vegetation that has now appeared from under the snow. The sheer number of yardworkers was surprising, until I realized that this is the first week of compost pickup with our garbage/recycling. So, I joined in the stick, leaf, and dead stem brigade with my neighbors and our street is now extra organized and tidy, waiting for the city to get the compostable materials on Monday.

    And, the best part, is that I have buttercup-yellow crocuses in the front yard, with squadrons of daffodils, tulips, and even nonbulby friends sprouting up wanting to get in on the early spring action.

    The “extension” between my sidewalk and the street is a dead zone. DTE dug the entire thing up last summer to add a plastic gas main beside the street. The grass they seeded sprouted, but didn’t appear to have survived the winter. Then, just to make the empty ground decorative perhaps, someone did a partial donut in the mud, so I’ve got deep tire ruts in it too. Time to move my euonymus bushes from the front yard into the extension to cover the bare ground (photo shows post-move). Not yet sure what I’ll move into the spot the euonymus used to occupy, but there’s still more spring, and then summer to fool in the garden.

  • How to buy a usable alarm clock – rebuy the one you have

    Bedside table

    Our alarm clock, the Big Ben Moon Beam clock that we got as a wedding present in October, 2000, no longer snoozes. This is a problem, because at our house we’ve developed a complex system of setting the clock too early, setting the alarm too early, and then waking ourselves up by the mental calculations required to figure out if we really can hit the snooze button again (“well, the clock says 7AM, which means it is 6:40, so technically I can snooze one more time”).

    The Moon Beam has been pretty good, it starts waking us up by light, and then has an alarm bell it uses if we fail to respond to the light. It is relatively simple, a single button on top to snooze it, a switch to turn the alarm on and off, and dial controls to set the time and the alarm. The only tricky part is setting the alarm. It’s an analog clock, so the only way to set the alarm is to set the alarm hour hand to the right place. One semi-perplexing feature is that it is a 12 rather than a 24 hour clock, so I have been shocked to hear an alarm bell ringing in the evening and I have to remember to set the alarm before going to sleep. My main quibble is that it glows a little too ardently in the night-time. It’s kind of like a night-light.Alarm Clock Glows in the Dark

    I loved our clock, it’s attractive and non-complex. When I took it to the Alarming Usability event put on by the Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association last April, I thought it would be the clear winner, based on its simplicity. MiUPA set up some tables at the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum and tempted passers by into testing the usability of the clocks we had brought. We had 4 digital clocks and my dear analog, and we had folks rate the clocks before using them, try to set the alarm, and then we tested to see whether they were successful.

    The clocks were typically harder to use than visitors expected, mine included. Folks had trouble setting the alarm using the dial, and even though there were few controls, somehow they weren’t straightforward. The clock ace was a hotel manager, she’s essentially had to become an expert in decoding alarm clock interfaces for her guests. Everyone else struggled with the new alarm clocks. For more background, check out the alarming usability summary slides online (slide 23 for summary stats for this clock). I was sad to see that mine wasn’t the best.

    So, now that our Big Ben is unsnoozable, I am shopping for a replacement. I tried to shop in downtown Ann Arbor, but didn’t find an alarm clock at Acme Mercantile or Downtown Home & Garden. I looked online, and was unhappy with the digital clocks available. As an officer in MiUPA, I can’t buy an unusable alarm clock. It would be unprofessional!

    I thought back to the Alarming Usability Event, and I remember being suspicious of the conclusion that product design for alarm clocks was generally poor. Only frequent fliers are constantly bombarded by unknown alarm clocks. Those homebodies among us need to learn one clock and keep at it. So, one of my take home message from the event was that using new alarm clocks is difficult business, because they have to be learned. But, a known alarm clock is usable enough for my purposes. So, I’ve decided to eliminate the cognitive load of choosing a new alarm clock and stick to my very own Big Ben Moon Beam. I’m getting my Moonbeam from LL Bean, and while I was tempted by the blue one, I ordered the yellow. Maybe if I switch it quickly I won’t even notice it’s changed when I slap towards the ringing yellow thing’s snooze button.

  • Loving this winter sunshine (gratitude, week 8)

    What a glorious sunshiney day. My semi-elderly cat is soaking up the rays, moving from chair to chair in the dining room as the sliver of sunshine arcs across the room. He’s loving the sunshine too, flipping over now and then to “brown the other side”.

    winter sunbathing - Floyd browns the other side