Getting Cold

This past weekend a bunch of my friends all partook in Mini-Hell. A fun fill weekend of crawling in mud that is finished by jumping in a frozen lake. I couldn't afford the time off work. However, I have been getting back into my own cold weather training. Last night when it was 21 degrees Fahrenheit  -6 Celsius  I went for my first shirtless run. For these I wear only shorts and shoes. I ran 1.75 miles in that cold. I ran down the biggest street in town at about 10 o'clock at night. I ran from my house to my girlfriends. By the time I got there I was a little worried that my fingers wouldn't work to unlock the door. I got in just fine though. After an hour or so I was warmed up again. 
Then this morning I went out again this time the thermometer read 20 F, -6.6 C, I did 2 miles to start. I wore a thin shirt that Was over at Moe's house cause my bag was irritating my hips. This time I ran from her house to my bank. 
From there I ran to where my father had left my car about another mile. The whole time I was on main roads and people were starring at me. I would see them in their cars all geared up for the cold with their heat on. Meanwhile I am half dressed booking it down the side walk. It's an empowering feeling knowing that I can face something most people do everything they can to avoid. 

I am scared.

 Over the past month I have been losing my hair. Not in a male pattern baldness way. The hair loss seems to be all over my head, with some areas that are worse than others. On both sides of my family my grandfathers had full heads of hair into their upper 80s. The pattern of hair loss that I am seeing seems to only be explainable by something being wrong with me.
Tomorrow morning I am scheduled for blood tests. I am getting my testosterone, thyroid and Complete Blood count.
I don't have much more to say about this at the moment, just feeling scared.

Sprouts!

I started sprouting about three years ago after visiting a friend of mine who was sprouting seeds in her house. She spoke to me many of the health benefits, but she had me at cancer preventing. She gave me a jar full of sprouts, some seeds, and some ideas of where to get more. Since then I have sprouted off and on. I do it more in the winter when access to good greens is harder.

 I have made my own version of the sprout jars. For the most part a sprout jar is a mason jar with a special lid that will let water pass through but not seeds and sprouts. You can buy these special lids that will fit on wide mouthed mason jars. The trouble with those lids is they are about four bucks a pop. When I really have my sprout farm going, each jar is in rotation for about two weeks. One week growing, one week eating. I start a set of jars about every three days; two or three jars at a time. That means that at any one time I can have between nine and fourteen jars going, about $60 in lids alone; not to mention the mason jars themselves, which are about $15 a dozen. Instead I made my own lids. I took the metal ring section from the mason jar lid and hot glued window screen from the hardware store for $7 a roll. I had to use two layers of the screen because the holes are just a little large for my smaller seeds. It works perfectly and I will never run out of the screen. After that I just add one to two table spoons of any sort of seed I want and begin sprouting. I won't use this space to discuss the method of sprouting cause the internet is abound with that information.

For a green future I think we should all adopt sprouting. Sprouts can be grown with out light for the first several days. They require only the equipment which I have described above and water. I use about a gallon a day to water my sprouts. However, that water could be recycled and purified and they would only need about 1/2 a cup to grow a quart jar full of sprouts. To grow sprouts with that little water would require a lot of work on behalf of the humans involved. If you are trying to grow them in a completely closed environment where water is scarce, it could be done. Whether your goal is just having a salad growing in your window or if you want to try a bio-dome experiment, sprouts are a great option.

Currently, on my shelves I have broccoli, radish, clover, and fenugreek. They are flavorful and in some cases, sort of spicy. They go great on salads as a garnish, or cooked into things like you would with spinach. Seriously, if you are still reading this you should start sprouting.

Thoughts form This Year to Next.

This year I think I learned a lot in my garden. I learned how vicious deer can be. I learned how fruitful scraps can be. I learned that sweet potatoes will grow in high rises. I learned the value of having a comfortable place to sit. I also learned the joy of good gardening with good people. That is the part that next year and in all the years of my life I want to cultivate.
Next year, I want to prepare better for the challenges laid out by the area of the community garden. I want to have a better fence that will protect my garden from deer. This year I felt I was always doing damage control from the deer. They would find a place to jump the fence and the next day I would come see the damage. Then I would scramble to find a way to disrupt their "landing zone." I found that if there was no where for them to safely jump the fence and land they wouldn't get in. However if I cleared a bed to plant or removed some junk that had been left out, in they came. Next year, I want to use fast growing tall plants to act as a second barrier to them. I am hoping if they can't see past the fence very well they will be afraid to jump in. Really, I want to have a wall of sunflowers all around my garden. This will also help with the noise from that guy who insists on rotary tilling his plot once a week.
I will also reattempt my sweet potato skyscrapers. Next year should go better since I already have a good deal of soil down at the garden. At the end of this year instead of leaving all my new soil down there to be tilled under and spread about all the other plots I hid it in the woods next to my plot. I will also get a good deal of soil from my father's compost here at my house just like at the beginning of this past year. In addition to that I can use my tactics from last year and collect some soil from the surrounding woodlands. Maybe if I am lucky I will also have a truck by then. That way I can haul some compost or soil from somewhere far off. There are some other improvements I want to make to the skyscrapers next year. I want to find a way for them to generate more of their own heat. The reason my sweet potatoes didn't work very well this year was because our summer was not hot enough. Next year could be hotter, but sweet potatoes really need Southern Georgia levels of heat to thrive. I want to try a few things to improve the heat in the skyscrapers. First, I will paint all the towers black. I don't expect this to have much effect because the tires are starting out very dark gray or black, but it should help. Second, I want to try mixing in some raw compost into the tires. I will probably try a few different methods to do this. By raw compost I mean things like grass clippings and other non-decomposed material. I will experiment; one tire Soil and the next Raw Compost switching all the way up. Or perhaps soil in the middle of the tire and Raw Compost on the outside. I will leave some skyscrapers with only soil as controls. My hope with this experiment is that as the compost decomposes in the tires it will generate heat and the plants will thrive. My concern is that the action of the decomposition will cause the sweet potatoes themselves to become sick or even die.
This year was the first time that I created a space in my garden that was purely for sitting and being comfortable and relaxed. It was also the first year that I managed to have mostly plants that I planted covering the rest of my garden. I do not think that was a coincidence. I know that there were days that going down to sit in my chair in the sun with some cider was the reason I went down.  Usually once I was down there that I also got myself to do a little weeding or watering. Next year, I want to do that in spades. I want to build a second chair for Mo. I may even build a few smaller chairs for the kids. I also want a coffee table.
Having this will help me on my way to cultivating a community for the Community Garden. However, I don't want to stop there. I have already talked with some friends about helping them to find a plot for next year. There are some other gardeners down there that are pretty social and come over to our plot and say hello. However, that is the exception not the rule. Next year I want to hold a few gatherings of all the gardeners down there. I don't know what form those gatherings will take, but I want them. I want an opportunity to talk to all the gardeners down there and to hear what they have to say. I want to know why they garden and to share why I garden with them.