Home again

At least in theory, it's easier to put an hour a day into garden-related projects when you're actually at home. That's usually true, though my head is spinning from jetlag, so I suspect anything I do today will probably cause more harm than good. The one disappointment out there is that something ate most of our kale - what we get for not having the dogs and cats around for three weeks, I guess.

I'm looking forward to what looks like a brief thaw this week. I need to dig up some of the low-voltage lighting cable to figure out what's going on. I replaced a six-year-old transformer last month because it didn't regularly switch on and off any more, but now I seem to have some lights that won't turn on, and... We'll see. I'm also hoping to replace the incandescent bulbs in the lights with LEDs. The lights are a wonderful aid, especially when the walkway is icy, but they consume more power than I'd like. (Around 180 watts total when they're on.)

I mentioned Gaia's Garden yesterday. I think it's still the key book to read if you want to figure out how exactly this permaculture stuff is supposed to work on a scale that's easy to understand. Josh Dolan loaned me his copy when he first started working on my garden, along with a lot of other books. This was the one that stuck.

I returned his copy a long time ago, but over the past few months I kept coming up with ideas I knew I'd seen somewhere but couldn't find again. (Ducks, for instance.) Most of them come from this book, I think. I ordered a copy over the holidays and am happily re-connecting, hoping to get more of those ideas right.

(The one thing I'd love to see change in a future edition is to consider region-specific supplements, both for ideas and for the great tables in the book.)