Bottle and Food Trees

Both here and in my writing blog Criminal Mischief I've mentioned the Blue Bottle Tree, both the novel in progress, and the actual tree above, which is my own rendition of one. It was for looks only and, alas, it is no more. It is not a wise thing to use a dead peach tree for this, as they tend to rot just below the ground. I removed other dead peach trees on the property by simply pushing them over by hand and then it hit me. DUH! The blue bottle tree is in the same boat! I'm surprised it survived the high winds we've had lately. I removed the bottles and it only took the lightest of pushes to topple the tree. I'm glad I saved the bottles. I mean, the blue wine bottles are nice enough, but there are a few collector type bottles in the bunch. Traditionally the blue bottle trees I've known from childhood were on dead fig trees, which must be more durable at root level. Lately I've seen several manufactured steel pipe trees for the purpose. I don't know. I'll think about it. I have the picture, anyway.


Besides all that we've been planting live trees here at Earth Song Retreat. In the past month we've planted three pecan trees, three peach, two apple, one pear, all in the new orchard along the contours. Plus, along the back yard fence I've planted asparagus, artichoke, raspberry, blackberry, and grapes.

Last weekend the City of Bastrop, with Apache Nurseries, gave away free trees to residents in the area who lost trees last summer to either drought or fire. I was busy at Sherwood Forest Faire (opening weekend), but I broke away long enough to get in the looooooong line for free trees. It took about an hour and a half to finally get up to the site and they had cut back to two trees per household. There was a fair selection, mostly shade trees. Mindful of our food forest plan, I selected two Texas Persimmon trees. I don't really have much experience with these, but I do know they bear fruit and are drought tolerant, so they'll do! I haven't selected a site to plant them yet, but recent rains (YAY!) have the ground a bit muddy for planting anyway. In fact, a good bit of yesterday was spent unsticking the pickup from a muddy patch.


Part of today was spent pruning existing fruit trees.


Two of the three graywater tubs have been set in the ground. We are still looking for the third one. With a bit of drier digging conditions we can begin on the wicking beds. All of this is going on around the efforts out at Sherwood.


Never boring!

A New Tool: Music and Snowflakes

    I sometimes use an add-on toolbar for my Firefox browser called "Instant Writing Resources Toolbar". (The home page for it is here.) It has some interesting tools on it, though I admit some are more diversions than anything. One useful thing that it does have is a radio tuner to listen to online radio. I often enjoy having background music as I write. The playlist I use in my computer for that tends to be somewhat new age and ambient music. Gentle music without words is what I prefer. I also sometimes use the online players like iTunes radio tuner, Pandora radio, Fire.fm and so on. I think my favorite for this is Pandora. It more easily lets me customize my own stations to listen to, I've used it for a couple of years now and have already gotten several dozen stations there. My tastes can be pretty diverse sometimes. If I'm not writing, I enjoy blues, folk, and, in fact, almost any other type of music you can think of.
    Okay, rap is out, and there is very little country I like, but bits and pieces of everything from Edith Piaf to Outkast, Raul Malo to Jason Mraz.
    One of the stations on the Writing Resources Toolbar is for a station called "Writers FM with Karl Moore." Occasionally I listen in to writer's interviews there. Today he was talking to  Randy Ingermanson about his "Snowflake" method of writing. Randy has a website explaining it here.
    It looks interesting. I admit I haven't delved far into it yet. He's also selling a software he developed to use the method, but he readily explains the basics, and it seems usable anywhere.
    Check it out.
    He also wrote the book below.