Howdy ya'll! Spring just keeps on coming and our neighbourhood keeps getting greener and greener. It looks fantastic, which is great because it is just in time for Marg and Phil's visit. For the non-family readers of the blog Marg and Phil are Sal's lovely folks.
We went to see Tim Flannery speak once and he said the thing about an American spring that strikes the eyes of an Australian is how green it is. Sal and I both understand what he means now. It is not GREEN it is GREEN. So green it is almost offensive. It is nice to have leafy streets, compare the view from our door step today to the picture taken at the end of January.
Our garden has begun to recover from the unusual frost that pounded it a few weeks back. The temperature has jumped sharply and all our seeds have begun to germinate.
The local council depot held "mulch madness day" today. Allow me to explain - the local council supplies leaf mulch and compost most of the year. it usually costs about $7 a cubic yard but on "mulch madness day" it is free. The community garden took advantage of this organic matter bonanza and sent Sal, myself and one of the teenagers (a lovely girl named Valencia,) off in their pickup to get some. Of course, every one else in Durham was there so we ended up in a line of pickups waiting for our load for about 30 minutes. Whilst waiting I was treated to the amusing site of Valencia teaching Sal "two-step R&B" dancing in the car park of rubbish dump.
The community garden kindly let us borrow their pickup afterwards and get a load of compost for our garden too. So I felt the need to go to the hardware store (it is was the nasty Home Depot unfortunately because our local store was closed) and spend too much money on a wheel barrow. Mmmm, hardware.
On the work front, Sal has finished classes and is trying to finish her first paper. I have canola trials to harvest and and switchgrass trials to plant..., and no equipment to harvest or plant them with! So I have been running around trying to get things organized.
In other news, I have also been told that they want to make me the leader of the project because the old leader may be leaving! My response went something like this - aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! The reason they are asking me to do the job is that there is no one else available, from things they have said to me they obviously think I am capable of doing the job, but I disagree with them. If will be interesting to see what happens.
Any way, we had a Canola Field Day last week. It received a lot of interest from farmers across the state and even the State Agriculture Commissioner was there (the equivalent of our state ag minister in Australia). He is the guy in the picture below with a blue arrow pointing at him. You can see me in the far right of the picture. The commissioner gave a bloody good speech at the field day dinner. I was impressed because he actually knew and cared about biofuels.
The canola itself is still chugging along, here is me in the canola field taking samples.
That's all for now.
This is what a Dog Wood tree looks like.
What else has been happening? Well, Sal went off on Friday to the Outer Banks to help some other Duke people with some research that I don't quite understand. The picture below is their research van. She came home after midnight on Saturday and spent Sunday looking tired and sorry for herself.
