A Good Lot

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • A Seedy Story

    I grew up reading about strawberries and cream, a delectable treat reserved for super special occasions. Enid Blyton, of course, could make boiled eggs sound grand, but the tantalizing descriptions of strawberries and cream stayed with me over the years. Never having seen, much less tasted an actual strawberry before I came to the United…

  • Under Attack

    It NEVER ends – snails, slugs, earwigs, aphids, mites, spittle bugs, leafminers, powdery mildew, sooty mildew … I’ve fought against all of these and then some this year alone. Some battles were lost, some won, all are eternal. Since no one ever posts pictures of this sort of ugliness in their gardens, I often feel like a lonely warrior fighting a losing…

  • A Fruitful Year

    Visitors to my garden from other places are most enamored with the sight of perfectly ripe fruit hanging delectably within reach, a common sight in Bay Area backyards in the older neighborhoods. We already had a mature large lemon tree (variety unknown) and a dwarf clementine tree in our backyard when we moved in. We have since added…

  • New Fruit Trees

    Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! I had the day off today and spent a good part of it puttering about in the garden. The garden is just coming to life again – shoots from bulbs are poking their conical tips out of the ground, the honeysuckle I worried was dead has buds slowly opening…

  • What does the gardener do in January – Part 1

    Even with the unseasonably warm and sunny days we have been having here in the San Francisco Bay Area, while the rest of the country is experiencing another Ice Age, January is an idle month for gardeners – days are too short and cold, it’s too soon to know which of last year’s plantings have…

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