Happy Terrace Garden Time

In looking back on my last two posts, they're a bit preachy and serious; time for something lighter.  This year's garden.  Last year was our first attempt at a garden on our terrace.  This year we had learned our lessons on what plants can take our windy environment and how to best care for the plants we have.  I won't blather on- have I mentioned that when I write an instant messaging widget I'm going to call it Blather? The pictures are more interesting but a quick overview of our crops-

• We upscaled last years upside-down tomatoes in a coconut fiber basket to a bigger basket (16"), and eventually a coconut fiber cover that helps keep the moisture from being blown away.  The roots from the tomatoes grow up into the fiber, it's interesting to peak under.  
• The garlic chives from last year (in the smaller basket where the tomatoes used to be) survived inside for the winter and share the basket with chocolate peppermint, which can be a nice touch in my coffee some mornings.
• There's a golden raspberry bush, which I had never heard of before, but they grow stouter than their red raspberry cousins from my childhood that would be a bit of a monster on our terrace full grown.  
• I bought a kumquat tree last fall and we had it inside for the winter.  It had kumquats when I purchased it, which we consumed over the winter, so this is the first time I get to see them growing from flowers.
• Carnival blend carrots, which will grow as purple, red, white, yellow and orange.
• Hot cherry peppers, which have turned out to be very tolerant to the wind.
• Strawberries in an upside-down commercial bag, hung inside of a reclaimed old-school metal aquarium platform.
• In the earlier pictures is a venus flytrap, which provided garden justice to a couple of plant-eating pests, but sadly now needs to be replaced.  

Late May, the Early Days

Overview of almost everything

You can see one kumquat here, it held on since last fall when I bought the tree

Top-down view into the raspberry water bottle / greenhouse. Wasn't it cute?

Mid-June, the flowering begins (as do excited visits from bees)

And if you look just above the basket in the center, the Empire State Building.  Much better in person

Once the raspberry outgrew it, the hot cherry pepper plant spent some time in the greenhouse

The first of the tomato flowers

Rokku enjoys the garden as well

 Over time, we gave all of the plants watering spikes with their own supply of water, it got them through the hot, windy days of July while still yielding us plenty of fruits and veggies to eat.

Miscellaneous

For awhile, the venus flytrap was magical at night.  The hope was to attract bugs.

In the day, our sentry bee stood guard

 The fruiting

Isn't it beautiful?

Rokku always gets first dibs

Except on the hot peppers

Yay!

The kumquat begins to flower

The mint expands outwards

August

We've had a few tomato, garlic chive and hot cherry pepper meals from our garden at this point.

The golden raspberry has a decent number of flowers now

Little baby kumquats!

And Rokku heads off into the sunset

If you say "social media" just one more time!

As a tangentially related aside to the following rant- I'm really sick of the high percentage of "experts" I see on TV brought on to talk to me about technology, though they have zero background actually working in technology themselves.  And I'm talking about working in a capacity that creates technology, not just that they've used technology to blog or tweet before, or that they had an idea that they then hired actual technical people to implement for them.

It's too much with the social media.  Social media is just one small part of a larger culture of technology, and frankly not as earth-shaking as our "experts" would have us believe.  And if you don't believe that, go check the price of Facebook's stock.  It hardly even matters when you read this, that will likely hold true. And this is a company that gets non-stop, 24-hour, free advertising on television, radio, web sites, business cards... I could go on for awhile here.  But still you can't gain any traction in the market?

The only thing that surprised me about the Facebook stock plummet was how quickly it happened. I figured the bubble would hold for at least a couple months after the IPO. But despite the hype around the launch, corporations, and in particular publicly-owned corporations, are about profit and the Instagram purchase was just one of many cracks in the facade of Facebook's potential profitability.  Which reminds me, you should really check out The State of the Web, Spring 2012 on The Oatmeal.

But I digress, the whole Facebook thing has been nauseating and really worth an entry of it's own, but at the heart of the problem is the over-inflated sense of importance of social media in general.  Social media has it's place and people have found ingenious ways to make use of it.  But it's not the end-all, be-all of the evolution of human technology.  And let's not ignore how many relationships and I'm sure even lives have been destroyed with the help of social media.

Are you an organization struggling to figure out how to employ social media?  Maybe you don't have to; maybe there are other tools you should be investing in altogether.  Social media has become the hammer, and now everything is a nail.  As a consultant offering software development services, I've gotten some strange requests related to social media.  The funniest one was an organization who provides services to people with involvement in the criminal justice system asking if I could set up Facebook accounts for all of their clients that could be controlled and accessed by the organization.  Um, no, and more importantly, why on earth would you want to do that?

Oh yeah, and social media is not new.  I'm not sure how people have been convinced of this, but I'm sure everyone involved in the early development of Bulletin Board Systems in the late 1970s and early 80s cringes when they hear how "revolutionary" this all is.