Cold Climate Gardening

Who’d a thunk it? Certainly not most of the residents of Broome County. But somehow Country Home magazine decided we ranked right up there with the likes of Ithaca, NY and Madison, WI in terms of providing the means to live an eco-friendly life. Actually, it sounds like Country Home hired Sperling BestPlaces (whoever they are) to make the determination:

The Best Green Places study, which is based on data discovered by Sperling’s BestPlaces, examines 24 data metrics in 5 major categories — including air and watershed quality, mass transit usage, power usage, farmers markets, organic producers, and number of green-certified buildings — to determine which metro areas are the best places to live a green life. Sperling’s BestPlaces ranked the 379 major metropolitan areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. Over 80 percent of all U.S. residents live in these 379 metro areas.

Ever since IBM abandoned us, we’ve thought of ourselves as economically depressed.

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Over twenty years ago I gave birth to my third child. Although at first he appeared fine, he developed problems and within hours was whisked across town to the nearest neonatal intensive care facility. We had just moved to a new neighborhood and were without most of the social connections that help so much at a time like this.

Consequently, I found myself all alone in my post-partum room, while my husband followed our baby across town. Soon a roommate joined me; she’d just had her first baby. Over the next couple of days, as I lay in bed wondering about my little boy, one visitor after another arrived by my roommate’s bedside. The chatter was animated, the laughter frequent. The stack of gifts grew higher and competed with the flower arrangements for space. My nightstand was empty, and when they asked to borrow my chair, I readily agreed.

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One thing about an old house, there are lots of nooks and crannies for creatures to find their way in. It’s a fact of life. Call it sharing habitat. While we try to minimize it, there is no way we can keep everything out, especially since our house is on a stacked stone foundation and rises and falls with the freezing and thawing of the earth.

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Some photos are more interesting when cropped severely

So many people expressed admiration for the header images that I decided to put them in the Cold Climate Gardening Flickr pool. You can view them here. It is a challenge to find images that are still interesting once you cut them down to 780×140 pixels. On the other hand, some photos are more interesting when cropped severely. I think I’m getting better at finding those.

Speaking strictly as a totally biased mother, I think there are some pretty talented photographers in my family. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a high-resolution digital camera, and the willingness to go tromping in all sorts of weather. Many thanks to all my …

Popularity: 23% [?]

The trouble with that platitude is that Spring is so erratic around here that we often don’t recognize it when it comes. For the next eight weeks or so, every time we hit a spell of bad weather, we will repeat to ourselves, and each other, “Well, spring is right around the corner.” But we’re never quite sure which corner is the corner.

We all think we recognize Spring when we encounter it.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Boredom isn’t enough to motivate me to redecorate my walls or my website

“Why are you changing your design?” some of my children asked, as I was making preparations for the Big Day. I could have said, for the same reason many people re-paint their walls or buy a new dress: tired of the same old thing. But frankly, that doesn’t motivate me to redecorate my home or update my wardrobe. For me, increasing efficiency and usability was a far tastier “carrot” to compensate for the “stick” of a website overhaul.

My old design (or theme, as it’s called in WordPress circles) looked great, but wasn’t created with the most efficient code even at the time, and being old, couldn’t take advantage of the latest features of the WordPress software. Even worse, with certain operating systems running certain browsers (most notably Windows 2000 running IE), a lot of the type in the old design was so tiny it was illegible. Not good.

So late last fall I went theme shopping.

Popularity: 17% [?]