Good morning. Hello. How are you? #661
A lot of gardening, my Livejournal turned 21, some very useful thoughts on Substack growth hacks, a transparent plea for Spotify listeners, unusually cute Jane pic.
Good morning! Hello, there, how are you this fine Thursday? Really feels like a fake week for me, sleep and overnight drives and three random days off in the middle of the week. Weirdly kind of excited to get back to work tomorrow.
I spent almost all of yesterday in the garden, managing the beast that it had become while we were away. Janet says that we had one of the strongest rainstorms she’d ever seen since she lived here, and that combined with the long, sunny, mild summer days that followed just kicked the entire garden into overdrive. It was intense! I felt like I was working my way through the jungle as I got the unruly, insane tomatoes trimmed back onto a single vine. We are talking four foot of growth in three weeks. I had a few left over tomato starts still in their dixie cups, and I left those out just on a lark, and those grew to over three feet. Just insanity. The corn is five feet tall. The cucumbers, which were little baby cukes when I left, grew to completely occupy their volume under the high hoops, taking up every inch of space. Complete absurdity.
We had some successes: Radishes as big as a turnip, the cukes, the corn, the beans, the peppers, the lettuce, the tomatoes, the herbs. We had some failures. The two grape plants I put outside the hoop house were completely eaten up to five feet high by an animal, I assume a deer. I moved to cam to be on them so I could find out. I have no idea how I’m going to grow grapes here if someone is eating all the leaves. I suppose the answer is to get them trellissed to ten, fifteen feet high, let the first five feet harden into a woody vine, and have most of the growth above where the deer can eat, but that is ugly and I am not into it.
Our Napa cabbage was competely eaten by a bug of some sort because I was not here to spran neem oil or BT on it.
Our spinach went to seed, but it was a good run of spinach before that.
None of the pollinating flower seeds I put into the two beds just outside the hoop house grew and bloomed. Did they get eaten? Bad seeds? No idea. No idea. I have anther pot of flowers over by the cukes and they are totally fine, so I think it might be the seeds. On the other hand, something (a bunny, I suspect) came and ate my entire row of sunflowers. All of them, just gone. That hurt.
The carrots needed another round of thinning and honestly I suspect the soil is too hard for them and they’re not gonna grow and I will need to add some more loose soil to that bed and try again it is just endless.
The onions are growing great, except the yellow ones that just didn’t sprout. None of the celery sprouted, no idea what’s up with that, at least last year it strouted fine.
The strawberries have no strawberries on them, but they are filling but their bed nicely, but… I don’t know. That bed has suffered significant soil compaction and needs new soil in it so I’m not sure I’m gonna put a perrinneal in there, plus they’re clearly going to need to be under row cover anyway, so why put em in the hoop house so I might just find a new place for the strawberries, again, man, why do I have so much trouble with strawberries.
Our three apple trees and two pear trees are going just great. Gonna have to figure out where those are going to go on the property soon. I am thinking out front, or perhaps down along the side of the property adjoining the neighbors. Commence spousal negotiations.
Harvested all the broccoli because it’s sumnmer and it’s done. It grew broccoli, so that was a success. It was very small. But still. Progress. Will grow another batch in the fall.
Last year’s blueberry bush is nearly fully matured and sprouting berries so it will be time to put that out in the lawn in its final place soon. Even though animals will eat the berries, but that’s okay for another year or two, I am focused on growing the bush more.
The potatoes are going great and I think it’s probably time to harvest them soon.
So, yes. All in all more success than failures. The hoop house works. I need more big protected spaces. I want to turn my entire back yard into a hoop house or large greenhouse. I’m sure my wife would love that. If I could at least double the space-under-netting, though, I would be very happy. Commence spousal negotiations.
Maybe we should have an annual “state of the garden” nuptial conference wherein I present my findings and asks in a Powerpoint Keynote presentation.
Anyway, I hacked out a large wheelbarrow full of weeds (the weeds grew five feet!) and tomato vines and composted it all with copious amounts of shredded carboard. I’m sure my compost will now grow weeds and tomatoes, but I’m not gonna be using it for another year, so I think it’ll be fine. Gonna shred a ton more cardboard to get a bunch more carbon in there to offset all this new nitrogen.
Gardening really is great compensation for missing your friends. My little green friends don’t hug me as much, but they also don’t give me COVID (three days out from the trip and still negative fingers crossed!)
An email from Spotify tells me that my old band, Rockets Burst from the Streetlamps, got nine whole listeners last month, an increase of 50%. That is hilarious. Anyway, if just 18 of you click on this Rockets link here, you can double our listener count from last month, don’t you want us to increase our streaming revenue to nearly one cent? Thank you.
I would also like to say that it is so good to have my computer back. That little M1 MacBook Air was not cutting it, and Apple silicon is great but one base-level Apple Silicon chip does not equate to 28 cores of 2.5ghz Xeon W. The craziest thing is that I was stalling out that computer just doing normal, human, work stuff. I wasn’t compressing video or anything intense, just had my browser open (with the requisite 30 tabs) and another browser, and Mail and Spotify and Evernote and Slack, Calendar, 1Password and a Scrivener file open with 900,000 words I mean that is all completely reasonable. AND it was running an external 5k monitor. What’s so hard about any of that? But yeah, so nice to be back where it doesn’t completely churn and stall because I opened another tab with a Google sheet in it or something. I missed you, old friend, you still have life in you yet.
My LiveJournal turned 21 last week, which is exciting, wow, god, I was 29 years old when I started that thing, which was hella old for LiveJournal. I miss it so much. I still post 2-3 times a year, but this GMHHAY has obviously taken over from LiveJournal. It’s a bit different of a context and format, this is public under my name, that was anonymous, that was a lot more focused on sex and drugs and rock and roll whereas this is gardening and kids and whatnot, but they both had half-assed observations about tech and tech culture, so I guess thay have that in common.
I’ve been sort of toying with the idea of slowly self-publishing (expurgated versions of) all my journals. I did some work on the teenage ones and got a decent volume out of the journals from age 16-19 or so and it was such a hilarious portrait of adolescent confusion and yearning it kind of made me think that the project had some legs. It’d be more fun if I could get Lisa to do the whole thing with me, and it would face the normal journal-publishing problems of the identity of unsusecting/unwitting third parties that is somewhat logistically difficult, but not impossible, to overcome. It’s the sort of thing I think I would enjoy doing for a year or so in retirement. Been mulling it over in my head for half a decade (or, you know, my entire life I guess). One day, one day.
Another great thing about LJ was the interests graph and the ability to find other journals to read based on an interest graph. Substack hasn’t really nailed discoverability. Recently, they added “recommendations,” wherein one substack could recommend other Substacks. A newsletter to which I occasionally contribute added me to their recommended list and it has yielded a few hundred subscriptions, and that is nice, though I can’t escape the feeling all of those people are mildly annoyed with this newsletter, even though I warn them multiple times while signing up that it is way too frequent, verbose, and devoid of an actual topic.
And just this week, they added this little “get the app” button of free advertising to the footer of the email, which I am not super into, but, you know, Substack is free for me. Reading the newsletter in the app, as opposed to in your inbox, allows Substack more ability to frame it, and recommend other newsletters, and start to get a little what we call in the biz “discoverability” (god this is a dumb profession I have). And they desperately want and need discoverability because there’s not a lot of viral-slash-organic growth between Substacks.
But thinking about LiveJournal makes me think Substack ought to go all-in on a ridiculous profile page with quizzes and interests in shit. People used to tend to those profile pages on LiveJournal like I tend to my garden. Long lists of hundreds of interests and you could click on them and you could find other LJers who had the same interest, and one of my best friends to this day is my best friend because we were the only to LJs with “stevia” as an interest.
Plus I think it’d be hilarious if Glenn Greenwald had to comment on his favorite candy bar or something, and even more hilarious if he were routinely spammed this question, and ignored it, and every day they asked him again, like Substack recommends to me every day I should make a paid tier. Man, it’d be such a bummer if GG got really annoyed by questions about candy bars that would just be awful.
Please enjoy this photo of Jane on the playground in Somerville, taken by my good friend and fellow North Carolinian transplant Professor Nick, who still carries a dedicated-use camera around, one that can produce a bokeh effect without two seconds of hemming and hawing and machine learning and you can just point and click and get a photo like this, man, real cameras are still so much better.
Also, Nick reminds me, real photograhers are so much better too.
All right justa mix today. Starting it off with Rockets, you know, self-dealing, gotta get that listener count up. New Mountain Goats, the latest band from the best musician the Boston music scene ever produced, Jake Zavraky. A classic from Electric Six, and a new destined-for-number one anthem about Crypto Boys from Salem Ilese, who doesn not capitalize her name but I can’t go for that, unless, you know, that opinion of mine is politically problematic in which case I will chuck it out the window. Melanie, because of the great Kids in the Hall skit, man new KITH is so good. So is the new Spice album. And the new Porridge Radio, even if Ivelisse disagrees with me. And an old Morphine classic cuz I’m still thinking about Mark after the trip. Enjoy.
Talk tomorrow! I am off to Walmart and CVS and the recycling center so I’m sure I will have so much exciting news to report.
I feel like we really let you down by not taking you to our down-the-street recycling center. We have both a hazardous waste shed to leave fluorescent tubes in and the really impressive mountain of cardboard. Cardboard day is incredibly fun as they weigh your car on the way in and on the way out so they can keep track of the 10 pounds I've added to the 30 foot mountain of cardboard. Good times man!