Echinacea Tennesseensis

Okay, I know I have some readers who work for the State.  I’m not asking you to out yourselves.  I’m just asking you to ask around and find out two things.

1.) If Echinacea Tennesseensis is endangered and if it only grows in Davidson, Wilson, and Rutherford counties, should willing gardeners in Davidson, Wilson, and Rutherford counties plant it in our gardens to help keep it going?

2.) If so, where can we acquire seeds?

and maybe a 3.)  I’m all excited about having a bunch of Echinacea in my garden, but should I be concerned about cross-pollination with e. tennesseensis in a way that would harmfully dilute the gene pool?

Can We Discuss Annuals for a Second?

Yes, I know it’s not Sunday, but, when it comes to discussing annuals, why should we be confined to Sundays?  Here’s my question.  An annual is a plant that grows, blooms, goes to seed and dies in a year.  A perennial is a plant that grows, blooms, goes to seed, and lives on for many years.

Now, a morning glory is technically an annual, because it grows, blooms, goes to seed, and dies all in a year.  But once you have morning glories, who ever needs to replant them?  They just reseed themselves nicely until the end of time (or so it seems).

So, how can a beginning gardener know which annuals are actually annuals that you will have to replant your damn self next year and which are annuals that, though they are dead, their children and their children’s children will live on in your garden until you kill them?

Reason Number 2 I feel So Fondly Towards the People Who Owned This House Before Me

I do think those are crocuses under the tree by the creek.  That would not be where I planted crocuses.  I planted crocuses further north along the creek in a loose line.

I have the daffodils I planted along the front ditch.  But there are daffodils everywhere in the yard.

And there are irises everywhere, though I already knew that.  And who knows what these mystery things will turn out to be.  And later on, there will be lilies, because we still had the green left from the lilies when we moved in here last year.

They left all this cool stuff all around the yard and also left space for us to add our own cool stuff.

I want so much to spend today gardening.  I don’t know how to explain it.  It’s just this body-deep ache to be outside, in the sun, with my hands in the dirt.  I hope the strawberries in the fountain work out.  I’m a little worried about drainage.  I think it’s going to be tricky to keep them wet but not too wet.  But it makes me so happy to look out my window and see the little white flowers.

I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the peas yet.  But I have my eye out.  I’m worried that the spot might not get enough sun, but there’s a trellis there, that they put up, and I trust that something grows there–or they wouldn’t have put up the trellis–and I just have to figure out what.

Whining about Wine

There is no good reason we should not be able to buy wine in grocery stores.  And, I’m sure, if you read Tennessee blogs, you’ll see lots of good reasons why we should be able to.

I would like to talk about two.

1.  Two-buck Chuck (which I believe is now up to three dollars).  This is a surprisingly yummy assortment of cheap wine you can get at Trader Joe’s in most parts of the country.  You probably get it now, when your friends smuggle it back from St. Louis.

2.  Tennessee wines.  We have some really nice wines that are locally produced.  Why shouldn’t those wines be allowed to reach as wide an audience as possible?

I’m kind of surprised that we’re even having this argument.

Why I’m Flip

Tiny Pasture is taking me and other female bloggers to task for suggesting that abortion is just another form of birth control and not the slaughtering of innocents.

And I am flip about it.  I think it’s clear why I’m flip, but let me be explicit.

I’m flip about abortion because most anti-abortion folks in this state aren’t themselves serious about ending abortion.  They always make it like if pro-choice people were just sorrier, if we just threw ourselves on the ground crying about what a great tragedy abortion is and how it’s always wrong, wrong, wrong, but sometimes we need it, pretty please, they could be moved to maybe let us have abortions when our own lives are at risk (with them getting to determine what “at risk” is) or when we’ve been raped (with them getting to decide if we’ve been “raped” enough).  But that’s not true.  There isn’t sorry enough.

And if there isn’t sorry enough, I refuse to be sorry at all.

Instead of wasting my time trying to figure out how to be sorry enough to prove to them that I need to be able to control my own body and what happens to it, I’m taking the time to look and see what these anti-abortion folks are actually doing to make sure that women who don’t want to be pregnant can keep from getting pregnant and to make sure that women who would love to have a child can successfully carry that child to term, have it, and raise it and its siblings in a safe and healthy manner.

I think you know what I see. 

From most of them–jack shit.

They don’t want abortion, but they don’t want to extend unemployment benefits so that families don’t have to chose between having another kid and having everyone eat.  They don’t want abortion, but they don’t want schools to teach kids anything but abstinence.  They don’t want abortion, but they want to pass a bunch of legislation making it as easy as possible for men to get out of paying child support.  And the worst, they don’t want abortion, you know, except when it’s their precious daughter who needs one or when it’s their wife’s life at stake, and then they want to be the exception to the rule they’d like to force the rest of us to live by.

Well, if I seem unserious about the subject, it’s because I see you for who you are–recklessly unserious about it.

You want to boss women around, but you don’t want to do anything that would actually help a woman choose to have a baby.

So, fuck it.  If you’re not going to take the problem seriously, you don’t get to dictate that I do.