Month: July 2011

The Dangerous World of Illicit and Illegal Gardens

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Okay everybody, check this one out. A woman in Michigan faces 93 days of jail time. Why? For planting a garden of course.

Long story short, the lady’s yard was destroyed for some sewer work, so she decided to build some raised-beds rather than re-do her grass. Seems very reasonable, and looks pretty nice to boot:

Unfortunately though, such gardens are apparently outlawed by city ordinance.

I know you’re probably thinking what I was thinking: there has to be more to this story. But there really doesn’t seem to be anything else (well, there is in the sense that she wouldn’t stand down, not that she should have, but you have to wonder what exactly her attitude was like). However, the weird thing is that gardens are not specifically outlawed (and why would they be?). The rule says only:

“suitable” plant material is allowed on the lawn area of residences. When local media asked city planner Kevin Rulkowski what that meant, he said suitable means “common:” lawn, nice shrubs, and flowers. However, the city ordinance does not specifically state that those are the only allowed plant materials.

So, even if she was being petty, the city was obviously being *more* petty.

This is so horrible, I don’t even know where to begin. However, I am not surprised in the least. I used to think that draconian property restrictions were the domain of fancy-pants subdivisions (where I wouldn’t want to live anyway), but I’ve recently discovered this is not the case. Who would have thought that it is nearly impossible to find vacant land in the middle of nowhere which allows you to build a tiny house? Through an endless supply of township regulations, such as minimum square footage, roof pitch angle, and land usage restrictions, such as no trailers, you have practically no say over what you do on your land.

The supposed justification for this is multi-faceted:

  1. We have to keep out the hordes of drifters.
  2. What you do on your property can bring the value of my property down. So you can’t do whatever you want on your land, because now its affecting me.
  3. You pay property tax based on what your property is worth, so if you have a crappy property but you still use the same amount of services, you’re somehow gaming the system.
These reasons are a load of crap because:
  1. Drifters? What is this, the 1950’s? This only makes sense if drifters is a euphemism for poor people or certain targeted races, which is about as illegal as it gets.
  2. So what? You always run that risk. I can build a mansion and shoot holes in it or paint it puce, or put up signs saying, “This neighborhood is full of dog-rapists” and you don’t have laws against that (although that would be less oppressive than some of the “grass length” rules I’ve seen) (and now a bunch of townships are probably enacting these laws as we speak).
  3. This one has a little merit on the surface, but if that’s really the problem, then pass laws on property tax reform. Besides, if I have crappy property that isn’t worth anything, then my punishment comes when I try to sell it and I can’t.
I think this garden story really highlights the fact that 1) your stupid rules prevent reasonable people from doing reasonable things, and 2) your rules are stupid to begin with (and possibly racist or classist) because you can’t make a rule that says, “I want to stop people from doing things that I personally don’t like.”
Link via Sara.

How well can you distinguish colors?

/ Shane / 6 Comments

This isn’t really a game, per-say, but it’s kind of interesting. Basically you just need to arrange the colors so the hue flows smoothly from left to right. Can your eye distinguish the nuances from square to square?

I got a 3 (lower is better). Apparently I have trouble with the reds, but 3 seems to be pretty good. What’s your score?

Link via Sara (who got a 4) (I’m just saying).

Quote Monday doesn’t like me

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Sara: “There’ll always be somebody who doesn’t like you.”
Me: “What? Doesn’t like me? I only met one person ever who didn’t like me, and I married her.”

::Riding in the car silently for 10 minutes::
Evie, suddenly wailing: “What if I can’t find anybody to marry??”

Really? That starts at 3 1/2 now?

Sara: “What is it?”
Me: “It looks like a stink bug to me.”
Sara: “Can you smell it?”
Me: “It’s hard to smell anything over my own stink.”

Hoverbike

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Forget the flying jet ski, bring on the hoverbike!

This thing looks pretty awesome, however, I’m not sure I would want to be sitting on it at 10,000 feet. There aren’t any videos of it in action yet (there never are, are there?), but it looks a little unsteady to me. And those giant fans…I would be worried about things getting sucked in there. Lean back a little too far…FOOMP, there goes your hat. The jet ski seems a little more commercially viable.

On the other hand, if they can get this thing working…THE FUTURE IS NOW! Let’s go scientists, we only have 4 years to get those hoverboards worked out.

Garden, 2011 Style

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I realize I have been slightly remiss in my garden posts this year. I mentioned what we had planted, but haven’t given any updates on how things are going. (Thanks for reminding me, Alexis!)

We’re midway through the growing season, and its going pretty well. So far, we have had a good crop of strawberries, lettuce, and our eternal chive plant.

As we expected, year 2 of the strawberries was much more productive than year 1. We got somewhere around 100 strawberries, and it seemed like we never failed to find more every time we went over there. Unfortunately, the ants also learned of our wonderful strawberry bounty, so we had some stiff competition for those berries. It’s actually kind of interesting; the ants locate a ripe berry and then mound up dirt all around it and sort of suck it into their home, whole. It seemed like it was going to be disastrous, but actually, the ants didn’t really get all that many berries. So we didn’t really do anything to try to control them, but it worked out okay. Maybe next year we might put some straw down so they can’t suck the berries underground. Overall, it was a very successful crop!

A few years ago we planted lettuce, and we had more than we could ever possibly use. This year is the same, however, we have one major improvement: no slugs! Our last lettuce was so sluggy, that it discouraged us from planting lettuce after that. However, this year is totally different. I don’t know why that is exactly, but there are a number of things that are different: we’re in a different location now (the other lettuce was at the old garden), we’re picking more in the heat of the day, rather than dawn or dusk, we have a different variety of lettuce, and it’s just simply a different year. The year we had the slugs really bad we had heard that everybody was having a slug problem. Maybe it was just a little more damp, who knows. Anyway, this year’s crop of lettuce has been amazingly successful, and we’ve been chowing down on some awesome salads.

Our other plants are looking good. Our tomato plants are growing out of control, and our peppers and eggplant look like they’re going to do well. Unfortunately, we did lose one tomato plant (that Mortgage Lifter I was so excited about). I’m not really sure what happened there, it just never took off. Maybe we didn’t water it enough right after we planted it. I think we were gone for a few days around that time.

We hadn’t gotten around to planting the pole beans, even though we had the poles in place for them to climb. We lost the seeds somewhere and never did find them. Finally we bought some new seeds and planted them. We were worried we were planting them late, so we used my grandma’s trick of soaking them for a few days first to get them to sprout before planting them. They are just coming up now, so hopefully we weren’t too late on that.

The only thing that didn’t grow were the sunflower seeds we planted all over the place by the train tracks and the fence in the back. We figured it would be a cheap way to spruce the whole place up. We planted two packets of seeds worth, and I don’t think a single one came up. Certainly plenty of other enormous weeds came up, so it’s not like the area is infertile. I don’t know what happened there, but it doesn’t look any worse than it did before, so I guess we’re not out much.

So, with the exception of the sunflowers and one tomato plant, everything is going well!

(By the way, I know a garden post is a little lame without pictures, but I don’t actually have any! The garden pretty much looks the same as it has the past few years, so it’s not exactly inspiring me to take pictures. I could have gone over and taken some for the post, but it just didn’t get done in time. Sorry! Maybe I’ll post some later.)