Author: reclaimer

Time to prune the roses

Why Prune?

Roses need air and sunlight to prevent disease. By pruning a rose in an urn-like shape, you promote a flow of air and give leaves more exposure to sunlight.
You prune or cut dead and small stalks during a slower blooming period, generally winter.

Tools

  • Clippers
  • Gloves
  • Small shovel

Steps

• With a small shovel, dig up soil around the bud union, the bulbous uppermost portion of the root.
• Find gray, dead stalks. Cut them out from the bud union.
• Find stalks smaller than the diameter of a pencil. Cut just on their outward-facing thorns at an angle.

A woman pruning peach roses in a garden
“Pruning the roses” painted by Raffaello Sorbi, provided by Bonhaus in the Public Domain

For more information

Click here for more on pruning from the Seattle Rose Society.

Athena, a grassroots alliance

“This is a David and Goliath story,” she said. “David took what he had and turned it into a winning strategy. We’re taking what we have — the voices of the members of our various organizations, our collective knowledge and experience and deep understanding of the economy around Big Tech, and the experience we’ve had with making this company [Amazon] shift its behavior — and trying to build a more humane economy.”

Lauren Jacobs from David Streitfeld’s NY Times article on Athena, an alliance for better practices at Amazon

Pilgrims were on an economic venture

English venture capitalists funded the pilgrims. Pilgrims had to provide material (fur, fish, forests) for seven years to return that investment. Then, capitalists gave the pilgrims a deed to the land. A deed that the Crown provided, but had no jurisdiction over.

Pilgrims had to survive and thrive to pay back the investment. They ended up incurring and capturing native land and so shrank natives’ place in the world.

For more, watch this PBS Newshour feature: Were pilgrims America’s first economic migrants?

From a profile of Roger McNamee

Much of this data [from Android] is collected even when a phone is off-line, then uploaded to Google’s servers and integrated into an archive that includes your search, Gmail, and Google Docs history. The Android platform finds information in your apps and your online activity, and often makes this information available to third parties, like advertisers. A user agreement also gives Google Assistant the right to record conversations that occur within earshot of the device’s microphone.

From Brian Barth’s New Yorker profile of Roger McNamee

Consumer Online Privacy Act before the Senate

You, in a digital age, should have the right to control your data – that is, what information is collected about you, what information might be passed on or sold to a third party, the ability to have your information deleted once it might be collected, you decide you don’t like that organization or that entity and to make sure that no discriminatory practices are used against you.

Senator Maria Cantwell (Washington) on NPR

Black and brown starlings move as one

A juvenile starling with gray and brown feathers
“Juvenile Starling” by Garry Knight shared with CC 2.0

I looked to the north as the low winter sun shone bright in the southern sky in the early morning.

A flock of starlings, two or three dozen, hopped onto a fence, jumped down on grass, and then flew off within three seconds. Most starlings were black with a iridescent shine. Some younger ones followed and joined in one collective movement.

You can pick the young out with their gray feathers.

Writing with nature

Snow-covered mountains in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee
“Clifftops” by Aviator31 shared in the Public Domain

From the spring ephemeral wildflower shows, to the spectacular winter views from the ridge trails, something astonishing is happening at some altitude of the Southern Appalachians, in every week of the year. I now build my writing around what the time and season and day are offering. I still write all the time; I just do it in those hours that make most sense, given what else life has going on at the time.

Richard Powers on writing and the environment

A calendar to link the sky and the earth

Cahokia was a pre-Columbian city laid out on a celestial grid. People who lived there created solar calendars as landmarks. Archeologists found the remains of one such calendar. It stood as a ring of wooden posts. (So, the name Woodhenge).

Wooden posts spaced in equal distance from each other in a circle on a green field. In the center is one post.
“Woodhenge Cahokia” by QuartierLatin1968 shared with CC 3.0

Through observation of the position of the sun at sunrise, the people designed it such that the sun seemed to rise from one post at one time of the year and then another later in the year. One post corresponded with the winter solstice, another the equinoxes, and another the summer solstice.

With this calendar, observers could tell when to plant and harvest crops and when to gather for festivals. With tools, human ingenuity link the sky and the earth in a productive and commonplace way.

Click here to a clip about Woodhenge from the PBS special Native America.