puertorikenhadasinmostaza

i 

I OFFERED

 a new blog,

well is 

on the air.

IF YOU LIKE THIS 

OR YOU DID NOT

puertorikenhadasinmostaza.blogspot.com/

2010/12/isle-real-diversity.html

THE SANTURCE/SAN JUAN METRO ZONE

without BLINDFOLDS. 

ENJOY it or do not.

EMBRACE THE GARBAGE

 absence of maintenance, civility,  and ugly aesthetics

in the concrete/asphalt urban  context.

GUERRILLA UPDATES

S ome have a poor insight of their own language, vocabulary and meaning.  One obscure character writes somewhere else that I complaint. Sierra Club's Paul Bayman, Enid and others, fools and company, have also stated the same idiocy, forgetting the clear difference between criticism and complaint. If you have doubts check a paper dictionary or use the web.  

UPDATES

from arcimboldo up

My first guerrilla exercise took place here.

Tamarindus indica, looking like a y, with an Albizia, in the middle. It was planted at 5', receiving a machete cut leaving it in half, moons ago. The trunk now, is about 8" in diameter.  God willing it will reach a monumental size, but I doubt it.  It is the only survivor out of 3 planted around the same time. The others die from wet feet.

The following picture, shitty If  I may, as the majority, a lonely Cosmos from the same era, spread by seed.  However, among the weeds there are ten or twelve young ones that will carry on, self seeding as they should.

These weeds provide food to many small birds and housing material.  The concrete structure in the back, is part of the train depot. 

Moving up, a Pithelobium dulce, my favorite big tree for coastal zones. These species has appeared before in my other blogs. The one shown here is pretty young.

This space is the former San Carlos Hospital, no I did not plant this one, but looks cool, self seeding as they do, and here surrounded by garbage as many abandoned places here and there do.

The first picture on top is a friendly abandoned cat, (along 150,000 dogs), that comes between me legs every time i go to pick Cosmos seeds in the debris bed where they are coming along swell and honky dory. 

Three vines, Merremia quinquefolia, Clitoria ternatea and Canavalia maritima, from seeds, are spreading all over the concrete as if it was soil. 

Finally, I wish the best to those who drop by, foes and fans. But I strongly suggest that before expressing any displeasure at my register, tone, opinions, show some guts, do it here, then go there...as I do most of the time.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

a  film, literature critic, criticize they do

not complaint.

Besitos i abrazos...apaga i vamonoh

   

 

ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER POST

W\atching for the hundredth time Charlton Heston, fast and furious, in two wheels with four white horses, it hit me like coconut on me head in Luquillo, fecal waters beach.

All the historical manure about religion. All claiming to be the true,  based in 3 different books, one book per group,  in that region with lots of sand.  Oh, yes, if we move virtually to east or west, aboriginals have their own "truth" and other religions cooler in me view.

That BOOK, or the 3 of them, in populations without any schooling, ruling their lives.  Telling them what to eat, how to wash, how to dress, how to kill animals and cook them.


I landed mentally on the BALKANS. Reviewed the first, second, and most recent (1990) wars. You check the details if interested.  Right now, it should suffice that apparently these wars are mostly based on Islam, Catholics and Greek Orthodox followers dislike of each other.


So absurd is the animosity between these barbarians, that one ethnic group speaking the same exact language has two alphabets, the one we use and the other with upside down, sideways and backward letters. 

Their hatred is boiling down slowly, centuries of it, among neighbors like a volcano cooking the magma.  Thanks to a book, a religion, a faith.


That is the war to come, meanwhile Afghanistan, Pakistan, Irak do their thing.  I wonder how does the used weapons market operates. Run by your favorite democracy. Do they have show rooms? Do they make five thousand bucks in profits by vehicle like Ford with their 12 miles a gallon F150?

Back to the studio...The holiday went smoothly, except for a Jakarta like traffic jam at the mall in Trujillo Alto.
It was a day light nightmare. Twenty minutes of it. 300 vehicles trying to exit and enter the premises at once in both directions with room for 200.

During the family gathering, the earth shaked, rattled and roll.  Every juan left the premises some what frightened.  All except moi, since I witnessed the events saw the events of 9-11 in NY City, and I am cured. 


Why the Balkans?  Well, it seems that these peoples were the first to experience agriculture in the Neolithic.

Good enough for your humble servant.

BONUS

The 1990 Balkan War started thanks to Serbia, demanding and violating the relationship among equals to get a proportion like treatment...I know what came later...and suspect what will.

That is that....

THE MISSING LAVENDER POST

There are 3 creatures I would love to have, one Clivia, a rare South African plant here or there,  was with me during the New York exile, passing away down here some time ago...

 For many years Bao Babs, Yarrow and Lavender have being among my favorite impossible gardening dreams.  Since I have perhaps the best reference on the last one, let me share it with you.

HISTORY,CLASSIFICATION AND LAVENDER SPECIES

BRIEF HISTORY

Lavender has long been used for its cosmetic, cleansing and healing qualities, with first recorded history dating back to ancient Greek and Roman times.  Dioscorides, a Greek physician described lavenders as having twigs and hair similar to thyme, only longer.  The Greek apparently used mainly L.stoechas medicinally, making wines and vinegars from the spikes and foliage.  The Romans used it to scent their baths and relieve their aching limbs.  It may be that the Romans distinguished between L.stoechas and L.vera using the first for wine-making and the second for their exotic perfumes. However this not clear.

It is generally assumed that the Romans introduced lavender in England but it may well have been introduced earlier.  No records exist to confirm this.  During the Dark Ages, monks recorded their herbal knowledge and  lavender  thrived
in their monastery gardens.  Abbes Hildegarde (1098-1180) a learned female botanist, made a study of lavender and wrote of her findings.  Subsequently, herbalists such as Turner and Gerard (16th century) attributed lavender with an ability to heal anything from colds and headaches to limb paralysis and neurosis, as well as with use as both a tonic and a laxative.
Lavandula stoechas was referred to as 
'Sticadore' and was one of the main ingredients of  'Four Thieves vinegar' used to to combat the plague during the Middle Ages.
 The spikes of L.stoechas were still being used medicinally until the middle of the eighteenth century.  Even today in France and Spain, fresh spikes of  L. stoechas and L. dentata are suspended in water in closed bottles placed in the sun, for use as a haemostatic for cleansing wounds.

Apart from L. stoechas, it appears the Romans may also have known L. pedunculata and L dentata, but possibly included them under the name L. stoechas or other names.

This is a real wonderful book, I have had it for ten years, with once in a while reading.

To finish, let the record show that Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand, United Kingdom and USA are the most important farmers...

There are not many plants with such allure........until then.. 

taken from 

Lavenders-the growers guide

by

Virginia Mcnaughton

Timber Press

2000 

pages 43/44

a ver si apagan i os vais o apaga i vamonoh...

FAMILY MATTERS

FOUR years ago, when I started the writing, the garden collection lived in fiberglass pots. However, the essence had been around over five.  It triplicated in numbers. 

As time went by, we landed in a house seventy years old, with a quarter of the the sandy total space not covered by concrete.  Out of 15 species planted by the previous owner, perhaps 6 were adopted.


The best garden is not necessarily mine. Or what I am convinced by practice, study and experience it should be.  Urban versus country side determine often what one can do, having neighbors by the property lines or not is fundamental when deciding what to plant in Puerto Rico.


People will destroy whatever is considered a hindrance within their property without much debate. Leaves for example. Nine out of ten trees/bushes killed/destroyed/mutilated in the isle are guilty of....leaves falling.


Having written that lets get to the families in question.  The botanical inventory is not something I do just to be different. It is more. I believe this blog is a point of reference for curious people with the urge to know what is going on
here, or the Caribbean, in terms of garden/horticulture/agriculture development and practice.


That is why placing photos of pretty flowers with great care hiding the lawns is not tolerated in my headquarters.  After all, many people with nice gardens, love, enjoy, bull fighting, palms, lawns, bromeliads, and smoke, who cares?

I believe there is something weird about having two hundred species of the same thing, orchids, roses, crinums to name three. That is not a mirror of nature, but an aberration, excellent for the growth and development of pests of many types. 

The wise gardener works like an editor in reducing the whole, doing some substraction when necessary.

To show one, ten flowers from the garden constantly, except in photography blogs, is absurd. Dismembering the garden distorts, does not allow for evaluation of the installation.  Only when the watchful reader can see the evident interaction between us, Flora and Fauna he/she can pass judgment.

BETWEEN TRIOS AND QUINTETS

ACANTHACEAE

Pseuderantemum carruthersii/var carruthersii reticulatum

Asystacia gangetica

AMARYLLIDACEAE

Crinum asiaticum

Eucharis amazonica

Proiphys amboinensis

Scadoxus

APOCYNACEAE

Plumeria obtusa/rubra/rubra

lutea

CONVULVULACEAE

Ipomoea quamoclit/aegiptia/

batata

Merremia quinquefolia

  

EUPHORBIACEAE

Euphorbia pulcherrima/tirucalli/

neriifolia

Pedilanthus tithymaloides

FABACEAE

 Pithelobium dulce

Clitorea ternatea

Calliandra haemathocephalla

Bauhinia monandra

SOLANACEAE

Capsicum florescens

Datura stramonium

Cestrum diurnum

Brunfelsia pausiflorea

TURNERACEAE

Turnera/ulmiforme/diffusa/

subulata

Plants that one would never thought are related become familiar when doing this little exercise.  It is wise, and fun.

But is not guarantee of anything. Alberto Areces Mallea, Phd, could tell you one hundred things just from looking at the flower of species under his area of expertise, cacti. 

Yet, this ignorant fool regarding soil, soil analysis, inventory of flora and fauna, forest restoration protocol and procedure, destroyed 12 acres like stealing a candy from a child...Still fresh like nothing happened....

apaga i vamonoh.

Thanks to friends and foes

for the good wishes expressed

or kept quiet, during the holiday

season.

FLORA/FAUNA RULE

or mocking famous last words

from Floka Olivieri:

To die blogging is to live forever! 

SIN MOSTAZA

T he tittle is relevant since it will become a blog on its own in January 2011.

It is a mock-tribute to a group of islanders belonging to the exclusive Minga-Petraca News Blog Guild.  These pundits focus on local/international tv-printed media news.

For an intro that will do...Now the nitty gritty...Lucy Laborde is renovating the second story in her unpkempt residence.  The imported illegal/legal labor force has kept a racket for the last forty five days.

University Sagrado Corazon, the noisy, polluting, over rated institution also hires  illegal/legal laborers from La Espanhola for construction and general maintenance, with typical lack of respect to our right of silence and enjoyment of our properties.

Anita la Huerfanita, in the corner of San Agustin, street is in the same hiring bag. Illegal/legal imported garden butchers of the blower using kind.

Lucy Laborde's two houses down neighbor hired four legal/illegal painters, as well as Tito Collazo, my neighbor across the street.

Recently, some good Samaritan, native,  medicine doctor  donated 13 acres of land for some two hundred  people of which one half are illegal residents removed from some land prone to floods, a favela or chabola if you prefer. 

The government of La Espanhola, should reciprocate, take 200 guys and gals from Haiti and give them some land to build housing with sewage, water and electricity, just as ours, have done, out of their kindness.

Another thing that Spanish/French/Creole island democratic republic, could do is to improve the conditions of the slave sugar cane employees from Haiti, kept in pig sty housing, working over twelve hours, for two dollars a day.  

Where did Homeland Security go? What is the point of this post? This is my reality, I am sick of it.


How can Puerto Rico, with the intense love I feel for it, can get out of this economic chaos, if every jerk hires not for quality but for the cheapest labor available, violating elementary principles of morality.


I could care less about, political prisoners, freedom of press, expression, elections, democracy in countries where people can not read/write, with a dollar fifty a week for food, Iran, Irak, Sri Lanka, let everyjuan deal with their own. Find their solutions.


I believe that focusing on silly 'humanitarian' causes, afraid of ruffling feathers in our pathetic, irresponsible, uncivil reality is looking the other way.
Screw pueltorriquenhospalmundo and their contagious borricua japines.

sin mostaza

soon

a kick in the belly

for islanders and 

adjacent territories. 

do not miss it

apaga i vamonoh. 

NOSTALGIC MEMORIES FOR THE FUTURE

R engui dropped by yesterday.  She belongs to a generation 15 years older than my own.  I have some affection for her and enjoy her conversations, but let the record show, she could talk your ears off with stories and anecdotes with beginning but no clear end.

She is my in-law,  from Morovis City, some neck in the woods town in the concrete isle north west.  After the usual salutation, she went to chat with me darling for hours, until the afternoon got cooler and we went to monitor the north garden together.

After a few minutes, she got close enough to recognize the yellowish miniature fruit of one of my rare vines.  She grabbed one by a strange impulse, taking it to her mouth, sucking its contents, a jovial intense expression of pleasure on her face. 


Pasiones, she exclaimed, picking some more. That is the name.  I never heard,   it since I collected the seeds from a street corner in Santurce, eighteen months ago.


After my happiness to  find someone knowing the common name of a plant I had to find out in a web site, I asked the pertinent questions.


Ipomoea foetida or Pasiones, is a plant she had not seen since her childhood, over six decades ago.  Moments afterwards, another surprise...She noticed the Coral vine, Antigonon leptopus, with a similar anecdote, but this vine grew wild in her grandfather property. 


The coincidence is a little bit odd since the leptopus is also one of the first plants in my dusty memories of elementary school days.


In brief, the garden is different things for different people of different origins, ages, and backgrounds..Memories are among them....


That is that... apaga i vamonoh.



S

THE LUDOVICO ARCIMBOLDO LAWN ERRADICATION FRONT

P erhaps you are one of those progressive people belonging, a fraction  of the population not complacent, unhappy individuals unwilling to submit to peer pressure at any price, custom and use.

The time to act is here.  Or to go through
the movements as if. Turfers *, like Smokers have to be put in their place.  Fetichists, individuals, groups, institutions refusing to let the lawns go will be declared a pest by the American Psychiatrists Association.


A control group directed by your humble servant to set the example will be designated, it has to start at home.
Dave'sgarden.com, Garden Stew, Blotanists, most golf courses and Sierra Club for example.

Others will have six months to a year, after the notification, to mend their ways. Ground covers or any suitable way to substitute, eliminate the object of the crime, lawns.


Individuals with lawns in their property will be notified of their ecologically incorrect ways, by certified mail, in person/electronic mail; unless no irrigation with treated water, use of gas/oil/propane/diesel/electricity, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides in its maintenance is demonstrated.


This is an act of good faith. Just like the National Rifle Association justifies guns at home. It is not the guns killing people,
its people. After wards,  if no irrigation and so forth is proved, then you may keep the lawn, it if cut by sheep, goat or any type of push/horse mower.


You may start wondering, is AC, our hero going nuts? NO. Just setting trends, a mission. What if all this fails? There is another path, the Ludovido Technique.


Film buffs may remember the 1971, masterpiece Clockwork Orange, by Stanley Kubric.  The protagonist in the story is 'cured' of his violent, antisocial, ways through behavior modification, in this case, the aversion therapy or Ludovico's Technique.


To reverse this conditions the protagonist is subjected to a technique in which his emotional responses to violence are systematically paired with a negative stimulation in the form of nausea caused by an emetic medicine administered just before the presentation of films depicting violent and "ultra-violent" situations.**

The following, is the prescription, after any other persuasion methods have failed.

The culprits, people, not lawns, will be placed in a room with the medical treatment described above.

Films and documentaries of people walking twenty miles to fetch a gallon of water, people starving consequence of droughts, algae in the ocean/ponds killing tons of crustaceans, mussels, fish consequence of phosphates, nitrates and potasium, flora and fauna destroyed by chemicals, people gathered during a picnic the 4th of July, Labor Day, the USA Open and Tiger Adulterer Woods,  for a personal touch, will be shown.


All the scenes should be justaposed for better results. Another film Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston, could
be used as reference.  If people do not mend their ways, there will be nothing
for their grandchildren, or children or that ultra stupid repeated, common place phrase, for a better life/future.

 FROM THE EDITOR

Educated suggestions to improve this project  will be considered and evaluated.

* Addicted, infatuated with lawns

** Taken from Wikipedia

Time to go, apague y vayase.

LALEF

Ludovico Arcimboldo Lawn Erradication Front

wishes our fans and foes in every continent, isles and peninsulas

Happy Holidays

ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER POST

I check many blogs. Some daily, others once a week or monthly.  The best ones, or the ones that pull yours truly are from desert like places in USA, others from Asia and Oceania...

I wasn't until this morning that I became aware that not many can claim creating a garden in any abandoned property. I have.  

The space in the former hospital is looking great.  Over two hundred Cosmos seeds collected are evidence. The Canavalia, Agave americana, 3 Pandanus, Merremia quinquefolia in situ, still around.

Creating a drought, heat, resistant  'garden' over debris is unusual, the imagination has to be stretched to appreciate the beauty of the whole.  Monarch like butterflies said hi,  while the seed collecting.

Two thirds of the seeds were later spread in the grounds of the abandoned house next door, down the street, after sweeping and pulling out some weeds already dead by Glysophate, the only chemical allowed in concrete cracks around over the One Hundred Collection.

To end quickly I have concluded that many blogs show mostly things out of context, with great color definition and contrast, because there is probably a polluting lawn to be hid on the premises.

Focusing on this or that, allows to hide the unconscious, selfish, ecologically incorrect fact.  For example,  the gardener 'fashionista' from Barbados, mentioned recently the great pleasurable smell of mowed grass in her prairie.


Time to go...Apaga i vamonoh...

DIAGNOSTICS AND TROUBLE SHOOTING

I have stated over and over my mission with the blog/garden.  Some understand, some do not... Some readers make an effort, others can not. For those who do, this is for you.

Too many practitioners of horticulture seem to be hypnotized by flowers, bulbs, bromeliads, new items from nurseries in season or orchids to name a few.  All I see in their production is a maze of overwhelming wordy and subjective
descriptions of the animistic/hollystic kind, with certain over killing photos of this or that, with beauty as the only object of the work.

I moved away from that school. I got worn out. What is pertinent, is what your garden does for the rest of the flora/fauna around you.  

I created Caribbean Botanical Review, for this reason. To be able to  to address issues that  matter to me an a few serious gardeners. If you want to get deeper into the tittle here, move there after I finish here.

I relocated a variegated Crinum asiaticum a pink Plumeria a week ago, after monitoring and discovering signs of disease on the leaves.

Both were in the south garden grounds,  now in pots.  Vegetation patients are better observed close by, just as sick people in similar situations. The web search indicated a fungus was the probable culprit for the Crinum malady, but I found otherwise.


Today, I started to observe carefully the edges of leaves that were  cut close to the trunk.  There was a dark brown, sick looking pattern in some of these.

I decided to cut some more, and Eureka, there it was, one caterpillar/maggot. It was light brown, perhaps an inch long, located deep into the leaf base. 

I did some more cutting, getting rid of some edges with similar aspect and spraying later with Antigonum's Miracle Insect Pesticide.


Moral of the story? Anyjuan can dig a hole, plant whatever, take pretty pictures with the adequate camera, and seem  cool to the unnititiated.  Gardening is not photography and vice versa.


Let the record show that plants in general are very much like us. They have dermis, epidermis, get bacterial, viruses, fungi disease, just like us.  On top of that, some vectors causing damage to plants,  also make our life miserable with diseases, not always easy to diagnose.


In brief, knowing the botanical names of your installation and monitoring for disease will make your garden something rare, unique, easier to handle, but nothing is better than the empirical way. Scissors and searching for the culprits, with the pertinent medication.

That is that...apaga i vamonoh...

Find out the most recent member inducted in the over ONE HUNDRED COLLECTION  in Caribbean Botanical Review, not a scholastic or pedantic product from your servant 

the most humble of the bloggers down this Caribbean concrete/asphalted platform isle.

 

MEMORABLE MOMENTS

 THE  epiphany arrived like a feather not a brick, hitting me while waiting for a traffic light at a the corner of  Baldorioty de Castro Avenue and Del Parque street.

Thousands of cars moving east and west as if going to Perth from Canberra, forgetting the concrete asphalt platform isle is one hundred miles long.

People love automobiles to the extent junkies love their fix. During those brief moments with the zooming, flickering,  I thought those vehicles moving fast, stuck in traffic jams, are waves with high and low tides, regulated not by the moon, but their stupidity, following the herd: job, house, mortgage, children and lawn, during rush hour.  Let the record show that rush hour is becoming a 24 hours daily torture. Here, there and everywhere. Let Chinese/Indians beware what is in storage for them.


I was returning from Doctor's Hospital, which is not the same as the homeless corner, in Santurce, stop 20. This facility in terms of quality of service from the parking lot attendant all the way up to nurses/doctor and in betweenies, is excellent, as good as the Menonite in Cayey City.


However, there is no paradise on earth.
Out of 3 elevators 2 out of order. Slow as a mother sucker for tens/hundreds of people in a HOSPITAL, patients/visitors/employees.  I had to climb up/down five stories at least 14 times in less than 24 hours, waiting for the elevator once, during 15 minutes.

There is a waiting room with a television on a local channel in the sixth floor, serving also as a medical waste storage room, believe it or not.  While my feeble minded compatriots chit chatted endlessly, I counted the garbage guy trips, four an hour, two plastic bags at a time. Entering the waiting room, opening the storage room door, depositing, and exiting.

But for some difficult to explain reason the grossest, really ultimate manifestation of administration mental retardation is the decontamination of portable ambulance/hospital beds in a
pedestrian outdoor hall way leading to the cafeteria and hospital employees parking.


You walk on the puddles slippery painted gray concrete surface with the naked portable bed right there in front of your eyes to watch and imagine who was there previously. Why one has to witness such gross activity before going to ingest some food.  Perhaps the administrators and hospital staff believe, it is just like washing your car in the driveway?


Memorable Moments could pass away there for dramatic climax but I was pondering that this blog sometimes has only one memorable thing, the tittle and and nothing else.


Films, music, literature, art, television, gastronomy, everything that is worthy for some reason or other have been used and will...


This reminds me that in Puerto Rico there is a fake humanitarian campaign to help the 150,000 abandoned stray dogs.


I witnessed once, someone dropping a cat in a paper bag in the middle lane of a four, highway. Or some fellow dropping tens of kidnapped dogs/cats from a bridge, not necessarily with water running under.


It is a fake. My neighbors Leo Pillsbury and Elaine Pillsbury, have Chito and Justicia the cat as pets.  Both are retarded, the bipeds, the dog receives no attention, living among the turds, the piss, and I suffer the smell.  The cat a part time stray. In essence, there is as much cruelty among the stray as there is among the 'housed'.


For a misanthropist here comes the oxymoron, as some fools enjoy using that stupid word, hundreds of junkies, mentally retarded, homeless, mentally disturbed people hang out in streets, sidewalk, gutters begging for money.


I prefer dogs and animals to people, I have been very firm on that.  But philanthropists should be MORE sophisticated. A campaign for DOGS and PEOPLE simultaneously, would have shown some civility beyond the common place.


Apaga i vamonoh....






T

THEORETICAL GARDENING: AESTHETIC ELEMENTS

It has been spinning on my head for a  long while.  The time has come.  The implicit/explicit lack of aesthetics in any garden installation over this concrete/asphalt dominant scenery is brutal.  Not only for its beyond ugly, unimaginative characteristics in plant selection and installation, but for the ignorant maintenance that follows or the total lack of it in public, private, commercial or residential, botanical gardens, parks, beaches and other recreational spaces.  

To get to the point i will use the information below, with the pertinent reference at the end.

Through history, gardeners hid one from another plants, seeds and information for jealosy, Carl Linnaeus one of the greatests was no exception.

I believe there is nothing to hide, the garden, mine or yours is what it is.

LINE

The character of a line yields specific responses. Gentle slow curves and horizontal lines tend to be experienced as restful while jagged diagonals or vertical lines create more excitement and tension.

FORM

It is what is seen when first looking at a garden from a distance.  Every plant has a distinct growth habit, a unique mass and volume which develops and changes as the plant matures.  These shapes whether pyramidal, weeping columnar, spreading or round, divide and define the spaces in the garden. 

The siting of a specific plant may block a view, or open a sight-line or alter the view depending on the maturity and growth-habit or the plant open or compact, herbaceous, ever green or deciduous.  These plant qualities often change with the seasons and restructure the lines of the garden.

www.gardenaesthetics.com/DESIGN.htm

Other elements defining composition, what any garden should be: texture, scent, color, scale, sequence, emphasis, balance, variety and repetition.  All the information is in the site provided.

For a farewell I would suggest that you  look at the header picture, the first six photos in the right side, moving down to find those between Yucca manihot and Hibiscus.

My garden is in a flat surface, what is not in a fiberglass pot; is in a rectangle surrounded by concrete as you may notice now.

How you deal with your surroundings require constant observation to add and substract.  One can not really work with tromp'oleil on a flat surface, as the area I practice,  but in  one of the pictures down a hill I did. 

I would add that assymetry and symmetry are fundamental to master, understand gardening schools or styles.

I am so much into assymetry that even unconsciously, I plant in odd numbers.

It is an acquired taste after my Zen gardening fever passed away.

And it passed away because the only, pragmatic use of the Zen school, in my view,  are those spaces enclosed in walls for private enjoyment with white gravel or sand, rocks and perhaps a trio of bushes.

To finish as it is me habit, I do not think that a garden requiring 14 hours of maintenance daily, as many of this gardens with high maintenance require, every leaf clipped, stiff as hell and very orderly are cool to visit, but unless you are wealthy and got hired guns...

totally impractical.

apaga i vamonoh...

MINGA I PETRACA COLOR COMMENTS SCHOOL

As the  year comes to an end Gabriel, not Peter, the other one continue in my thoughts.  What did yours truly accomplished to deserve such visit?

Denouncing with names, dates, facts, (photos at home) the destruction of the environment in Parque Donha Ines and accomplice and administrator of the bounty, Luis Munhoz Marin Foundation?

Or the sterility demonstrated by those landscape architects in every possible imaginable space, particularly their headquarters in which they planted palm trees 4 feet from the walls? Or using a shining, soft slate pavement, slippery as hell,
for a house with  rough walls?

Or the feeble minded environmental groups and institutions such as: Arboles de Puerto Rico, Salvadores de Dunas de Isabela,  007 Recursos Naturales, Fideicomiso, Sierra Club, and the worst; Parques Nacionales. 


And the tittle? Minga i Petraca were transvestites color commenting on television news from a couple of local tv guides, Natural Enquirer kind of magazines.


They were funny.   The point is that our culture, this culture is in coma, the high/low,  but no one seems to be aware of it.  


For decades,  some easy going mediocre comedians, standing or sitting, used to read verbatim from local newspapers stupid, irrelevant 'news' twisting them to get the easy simpleton jokes dominating down this here concrete/asphalt isle.


This mentally retarded style of television,(there is more than one show) consisting on every imaginable fool or tv personality, reading from any newspaper on the air, what a feeble minded reporter with a cretin syndrome editor, as if the population was blind or could only read Braille.


Blogs are not immune to this disease.  This school of maybe, thirty blogs, (I have checked them out) buy the papers, watch local news and THEN, make beating the dead horse on the head lame comments, believing at heart they are witty, original, patriots of the third kind.

I am sick of it...But let the record show, maybe is not them, its me.  The problem is deeper. There is  a 'humor' newspaper like blog, stiff as an iron bar, calling itself that, a humorous newspaper. I will call it "La Malanga", I read and read, but can not find the humor since everyjuan else has written, spoken, commented on the dull, worn out subjects chosen to make the people passing away of nothing, l a u g h.


By the way, Minga i Petraca is available on youtube. It is a real pity that so many islanders and continental people believe any change can be made/take place doing the same drop on the stone actions.  


There is no evil lasting ten decades, 
or a body that could resist it, as the saying goes...


Now is time to go after this light comment...Lets hope some real humor invade the dark Minga i Petraca School of Blogs News Comments.

If I can laugh seriously at me self, with great difficulty,
the isle Mingas i Petracas should attempt it also, without scratching each other backs for support and laughing along in each others comments section. Buahahajaja, bilingual laugh...


Time to go. Dario apagueis la luz...

THE BEST BLOG IN PUERTO RICO

SOME fans/foes may guess what I will write about, sorry you are mistaken. The tittle does not refer to any of these: endemismotrasnochado, upinthebreadfruittree or anglospano review, all previous no longer accessible blogs from yours truly, the second best blog in Puerto Rico, USA and adyacent anglo/galic isles.

I discovered I was not the best, while searching under 'the best blog in Puerto Rico'.

That tittle was until 12 November 2010  property of Gil the Jenious aka Gil C.
Schmidt.



This blogger islander with a foreign  name wrote over 1,000 posts about our isle dominated by stupidity politics/economics/social/cultural scene and that of USA.  His sarcasm, ability, originality to insult and describe the reality he was interested in portraying had no equal.

I am a little sad he has decided not to continue,  since there are a great need of  blogs with criterion, criticism, guts and credentials. Now, I am all by me self.

But I do feel, understand and share why.  Preaching in the ocean polluted with plastics, fecal waters or the desert 24/7 is cumbersome, a sterile, futile battle.

Idiots are in charge. Sheep follow by instinct the shepherd. Unable to question, inquire.  That is what we have in Puerto Rico, USA. 

During the years, once in a while I would drop by his neck of the woods to enjoy his mastering of the English, very far in quality, beyond style, but in substance, something that I think is pertinent.

As long as I am around he will be the best blog in Puerto Rico, retired or not.  I do not mind being the second, with such example for such a long time.

From now on there are only mockable blogs to visit: Sin mostaza, 5to Poder, Prometeo or the Minga i Petraca blogging school of Puerto Rico soberanists analytical club, using local newspapers as reference. 


Apagas e iros, majos i majas..

THE YEAR OF THE TOMATOES

I do not plant tomatoes, nor do I feel necessary that in every continent, snow or desert or cool/hot latitudes, every juan believe it is cool
to place one, red, green or yellow on the blog as if there were no tomatoes in other geographic points.  I am sick of tomatoes, trellises, seeds, strings, compost, high/low beds and varieties. 

As self anointed Royal Minister or Inquiry, I beg/demand for a moratorium on tomatoes and sunflower/photos or posts, enough is enough. Try to remember that in 2011. Potatoes are accepted. Could/would you?

I planned to tittle this post: The Year of the Insects, or Insects in 2010 at Home and/or The Year in Review ll, but you noticed what happened...


At any rate the show must continue.


Probably in May I was attacked not by killer tomatoes, but by: Necatur americanus or Ancylostoma brazilensis, 
the culprits, causing Cutaneous larva migrans.  Believe me. It is a pain in the ass skin disease, caught while digging bare handed to collect some stupid fern like asparagus, Asparagus plumosus, in a spot where stray cats go to the water closet.  The plant passed away, soon after wards.  But I had to visit the dermatologist, unable to sleep, since the mother sucking insect traveled to place the eggs under my epidermis leaving the lemon in the eye burning sensation.  It was treated with ALBENZA, a product used for many infectious diseases.


I am much wiser, less humble and use gloves when digging, even in my pots when recycling the soil with my trademark, home made compost.

Which reminds me, I am caught in some difficult to define relation/interest of the literary kind, with some tones of gardening. http://barbadosfromanotherview.blogspot.com

The author, keeps also a winner blog in an obscure, distant, finicky 'blotanists' site, pretty concerned over form rather than substance. Recently, our upper north east islander heroine posted about some bearded 'fig' or barbudo, informing her fans ALL and more than was necessary about this 'banyan' tree without using the word FICUS, once.  A fig tree, Ficus carica, like an olive, Olea europaea or  grape,Vitis vinifera got fruit, believe me.  If I am mistaken, the complaint department will be opened, 9 to 5.

Finally, back in our studio, other insects made their debut in our world known blog/garden during 2010.

The strangest insect with a hammer shark head was recently noticed in a north garden wall. It scared the hell out yours truly after my affair with the cutaenous larva. It was reported in caribbean botanical review, another blog. From your favorite blogger? 

Bipalium kewense is the name. They eat slugs, earthworms and got here from faraway Asia in soil/pots from nurseries?  Check the botanical it is a rare insect, of the invasive, global kind as everything in the world is becoming, global.


A dragonfly, not ever mentioned was hanging on a wire in the north garden, appreciating the quality installation. What the hell was he/she doing besides that, without any water around?  God knows.

Final Humorous  Words

from your Host,  the Minister.

Visit the blog mentioned if you are not into fashion. There are not many proud gardeners in fashion or vice versa.

She will probably be invited to the Kate and William wedding...for tea and cookies. 

If I am becoming too frivolous, and you prefer the acerbic/abrasive register,

let me know. 

apaga i vete. 

HOT FROM THE OVEN
2 hours after this post saw the light, while 
sweeping under the Capsicum florescens i noticed black pellets on the concrete.  I move me eyes up and noticed the branches bare.  Looking more carefully I find 4 green looper caterpillars chewing the leaves on the only 2 plants I have been able to propagate in a satisfactory manner. I guess it is Murphys law or Irish luck. I cut the branches off and placed the culprits in a transparent jar to watch juat japens. Until then.

ROYAL HORTICULTURAL INQUIRY MINISTER POST

I had a dream.  Not like the other one, in Memphis,  if you get my drift. Not about intangibles.  The lord sent one of his white winged messengers special delivery to inform this humble servant that It will be me responsibility for the future, (2011), to out, as in outing, gardeners and blogs keeping lawns and palm trees, people practicing golf or participating in benefit tournaments to collect money.

Why? C02.  Organic waste, pollution, fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides, noise, spreading of disease at high speed with blowers, pesticides, diesel, gas propane and oil.  I think I covered it all, if anything was left out, let me people correct at will.

The messenger, Saint Gabriel, was brief, a little arrogant, no pity,  as in the film Constantine, but I will not pass judgment since some frail characters down these concrete-asphalted prairies have implied that I, was/am, in a totally unfair manner.

That is not all, Gabriel, the saint, not Peter,  suggested that I request/demand, (it is a matter of register/tone), that all ecologically correct gardeners with blogs sign a declaration,( particularly those from Puerto Rico, USA), with the compromise to return all lawnmowers/blowers/trimmers to be burned in a great pyre. This will take place next year to coincide with that Catholic celebration from/in Spain where everyjuan burns whatever is handy in February if not mistaken.

To sweeten the pill, I will start to post some information about gardening aesthetics or aesthetics of the garden if you prefer. What the hell is that? Do you practice it? 


In Puerto Rico, no one, not even people with college degrees, as in agronomists/landscape architects or the jerks installing/maintaining landscapes seem able to grasp it.


I warn, or caveat emptor, some fellow gardeners, this is not necessarily their fault. The feeble minded have no introspection.  When people depend on other people, this is the result.
Gardening practitioners without notions of plant propagation have only one way to get plants: in  nurseries.

But we have an issue, a little, more complicated, without any possible escape.  Not having a wide variety of plants, is not an excuse to place/plant them as in a vegetable garden, banana plantation, in the urban, rural, highway median, city parks.

One more thing, to the people in India. I just saw a documentary about FORD, yep, the car manufacturer trying to grasp a higher percentage of buyers in that peninsula.

I am still trying to recover. In the local road in Mahatmas land, a 'road' as well built as those in Puerto Rico, there were rikshas, cows, dogs, motorcycles, buses, people, carts pulled with donkeys and so forth. What the hell do this people want cars without roads?

Have they watch those documentaries about traffic jams in California, New York, Madrid? What is the point about hybrid cars? To spend more time in longer traffic jams with electricity?

What about the 100 kilometer traffic jam in China,( with 20 percent of the earth population and 7 percent of the land), lasting for ONE week?

I am sorry for them. What they need is sewage and efficient massive, public transportation. I am very afraid the USA economic highway model is not going to to work...Too many people, too many virtual cars, too little space...and no way to built 'enough' highways 24/7 for the rest of life.


time to depart...Apagad e idos....

WEEDS SAGA AND EPILOGUE

I should have thought about it but I did not.  Any discussion about wheat, barley and rye, will require to mention the other 3 powerful gastronomical staples of the whole world: corn, potatoes and rice.  Now, there is no choice.  Here they are.

After some research, considering the varieties of rice,  Oryza sativa, its origins and how it was brought and cultivated in Spain by Arabs, I suggest that you search with the botanical in Wikipedia. 

Zea mays

On his early visits to Cuba, Columbus noted that Zea mays, maize was "most tasty, boiled roasted, or ground into flour".  When he returned to Spain, his most popular exhibits from the New World proved to be a few specimen "Indians" and some handfuls of gold dust, but he seems also to have taken maize seeds with him.

With the aid of the Venetians who carried it to the Near East, the Spaniards were instrumental in distributing maize around the Mediterranean.  Less directly, they also introduced it to Asia. When Ferdinand Magellan set out in 1519 to make another attempt on Spain's behalf to reach the Spice Islands by

a westward route, he probably took maize with him.  It was known

in the Philippines soon after, and by 1555 was sufficiently important in parts of China to rate a mention in regional history o the island province of Honan.  page 247

Solanum tuberosum

As soon as Spain began to organize her shipping to carry away the wealth of the Peruvian mines, she adopted potatoes as basic ships' stores.  The plant was therefore carried to Europe, and cultivated there, very soon after the conquest of Peru.  By 1573, enough potatoes were being grown in Spain for the Hospital de la Sangre at Seville to order stocks of them at the same time as other provisions.  page 258    

Food in History

by

Reay Tannahill

Stein and Day Publishers

1973 

I have to say that gardening provides a lot of possibilities in terms of learning different ways to approach it.  As time goes by,  I realize that mine is just another, among many, some are of my liking, most are not.   What matters is the result within flora, fauna, aesthetics, effort, joy and pleasure.


apagad e idos....

 

 BONUS

A  while ago I received a message from the other, lonely, naif,  country side island gardening blog.  It requested that I do not criticize whatever.  That it was too negative. That is like asking a drop of water not to make a hole in the rock, as the saying goes.  On the second issue,
well, every other blog is optimistic. Why do ALL bloggers have to share that view on gardening, real life or the other life?

My irritation was sky hi, since the compliments received in exchange were the lame ones, about the pictures not the abrasive content.  Honestly, I do not care about the pictures. I am not a photographer. 

There  there are tens of blogs with pretty pictures and great resolution, not to mention writing styles, modes, registers more suitable for the happy, complacent, realized, with an eternal smile,  taking life as it comes, contemplative, laid back comfortably sat, in their lazy chair, people.   I am not, nor is the blog.