brick o rama

(Updated: I stupidly put my travel mug into my tote bag with my camera. The mug leaked, and the camera decided that it wanted to randomly take pictures.



It also would turn itself on (sounds so dirty!) and not read the memory card. It's stopped acting up, so now I can add in the pictures that I intentionally took.)

When I was up visiting lf, we started talking about my new garden obsession and she mentioned a website that I hadn't yet visited, You Grow Girl. It is still summer vacation for me, so like other grad students, when I am not doing work, I spend a lot of time doing peripheral research. A friend of mine recently stayed up until 4 am reading about lightning. Last night, I read about a bunch of stuff on You Grow Girl, including how you can grow stuff in a bag and make compost in a cheap container.

Yesterday afternoon, I was browsing the free listings on craigslist and found a listing for free bricks. I have been wanting to make raised beds, but am too cheap to put out the money for lumber, so I have been checking out craigslist and freecycle in search of free materials. After about a week of looking, there was a listing for free bricks. I set up a meeting to pick some up today and then, just before going to bed, I found another listing for free bricks, right in grad housing. What's better than free bricks? More free bricks, nearby! I felt a little weird driving around in my pajamas to pick up free bricks at such an odd hour, but whatever. The posting went out at midnight, and before I had the chance to make it there, someone else had already taken away the cinder blocks, so there are other people who are potentially weirder than me about their free building materials.

Today, I picked up the other set of free bricks (not as nice, with some mortar attached), but there were a lot more of them. I felt less bad about not going to the gym after moving 100 bricks (not exaggerating) into and out of my car. Then I picked up a storage bin at the hardware store to make my mini composter, and I was all set. My roommate somehow did not ask me any questions as I used an exacto knife to cut air and drainage holes in my storage bin. I shredded some old newspapers that I picked up in San Francisco (Rasputin Manifesto, SF Weekly and a copy of the The Onion that I grabbed because of the headline, "Local Oafs to Spawn") and then set out to find some browns.



There's a scary area between the street and the parking lot that is basically a barren weedfest with some native plants.



I tramped out there because I had recently seen another gardener head out there with his yard waste and basically all of the plants there look brown anyway. I sized up the plants in the area and picked out a few large prickly bramble bushes that looked like barbed wire tumbleweeds, that, oddly, were strewn over the weeds, but did not appear to have grown there. Where did they come from?

Even stranger, but much more exciting was my discovery of the secret renegade tomato plant in the middle of all the weeds.



It was well-staked and so much more healthy than my rather sad tomato plants that I've already given up on and dug up. I feel like doing a stakeout to figure out whose plant it is...



At last, here is how my garden plot looked after many hours of labor.




Thus concludes what has been, quite possibly, the longest blog entry ever on the craft collective. Thank you very much.