Green Gal

I'm filled to the brim with inspiration this afternoon after a delightful chat over coffee with my friend Cain at a cool little coffee shop in downtown San Jose called Social Policy (part of the Bellano "family of coffee lovers" ). (If you live in SJ, you may have seen Cain cranking down the street on his red cargo bike hauling huge boxes of awesome stuff for Cowgirl Bike Courier !) We discussed an upcoming bike/art event he is planning, a bike-to-farms ride that I'm planning, San Jose bicycle news and issues, Viva Calle SJ promotion, and more. Last evening, I also connected with friends at my house to plan our bike-to-farms ride. We had a potluck feast of homemade, vegetarian yumminess, and then we identified next steps for turning our vision into a reality. And the night before last, I attended a bike coalition meeting where I saw plans for putting bidirectional contraflow lanes around the SJSU campus and heard the good news that the Willow Glen Road Diet has overa

A couple of weeks ago, we moved into our new place just down the way from our previous rental. We've been settling in, still sometimes discovering unpacked boxes hidden in our closets, and this weekend we turned our attention to the backyard. When we moved, we brought almost all of our plants from the previous place with us since most of them were in pots. Seeing all of the plants in a big pile made me realize how many plants I really have! It took multiple car trips to get them to the new place, and when we unloaded them, we set them on some cement along the side of the house. I rearranged them over the last couple weeks and have been watering them, but because they're on cement, they dry out much more quickly than when the plants were sitting on dirt previously. I put some of them on plant saucers or greenhouse trays, but I wanted a solution that included dirt, and I also wanted to be able to grow corn and pumpkins. What to do? Before we moved in, we had asked the land