Garden for your Health

I swear, gardening is the best exercise. I exercise for a specific reason - to shrink my belly and stay in my clothes. If I don't see results in a week, I lose interest and eventually quit when something else comes up.

But with gardening - well, you may not see results in your physique (and I haven't) but you definitely see results in your garden. I'm happy to report that one bed is 95% Johnsongrass free. I flat ran out of steam before I could get that last little bit.

Of course, the bad part is that this leaves my compost pile (and I do mean pile) exposed to the view of anyone driving down the alley (see completely off topic rant below). Mr. Gaia decided that the boxes our salad comes in decompose, so we should compost them. We store the compost in them in the kitchen and when they get full or stinky (or fruitflies) we just take the whole thing to the pile and leave it there. Now, in theory, this is a good idea. In practice? Yeah. The plastic (made from veggie starch, supposedly) doesn't decompose in anything resembling a halfway timely manner. So my compost pile looks extremely trashy. So I foresee a few days with a garden fork mashing and crushing and somehow making them hide.

Okay, now for my completely off topic rant. People are such assholes. Apparently the people on the corner are moving out or moving in. The CORNER - which means they can park any number of places. They decide to park a huge minivan (and really, it was the biggest minivan I have ever seen) about 2 feet from the curb and about six inches encroaching on our alley, on the other side, they parked a truck, so you had to pull all the way into the traffic lane, no driving on the shoulder to merge into traffic. I literally could not see around it to get out of my alley this morning. I tried inching out and almost got hit many, many times. I could see a huge group of people on the other side of the moving van (in the driveway), so I roll down my window and yell, very loudly, "Could you please help me get out, you're blocking the sightlines". They ignored me. I yelled louder, I see feet turn toward my car and then I hear laughter. Assholes. I should have called the cops. I ended up having to back down the alley to my driveway (there was one a little closer than my house, but not enough for me to be rude enough to use their driveway) and then go down the alley the other way and get caught in traffic there. I started out being early for work, I ended up late, this added about 7 minutes to my 7 minute commute.

And the kicker? We have trash cans to serve 4 homes. They filled their can and now have filled our can. I actually saw him wheeling a kitchen can down the alley looking for a can he could use. Now, we're pretty loose with our cans, if one is full, sure you can add a bag or two to another can, but you just don't fill it up. You just don't. When Mr. Gaia took our one small bag out (it was starting to smell) he had to walk down 2 trash cans to find one empty enough to put it in. So, they fill our garbage cans and they block our alley. I hope they are moving out because if they are moving in, this does not bode well.