Growing up in the midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, tornado drills at school were the norm for me. You could leave a classroom of 8-year-olds by themselves and, if a tornado warning were to occur, they could cover their heads and hide in door frames with flair.

This was not one of those “how to wrangle your own buffalo during a societal collapse” type things, where people go through the motions before immediately forgetting the details. Even in Schaumburg (suburban Chicago)—where a tornado had never touched down during my lifetime—tornado awareness and education was a top priority during my childhood. People took it seriously.

Except for me. Apparently, all that relentless education had the opposite of the intended effect—something about it triggered my crying-wolf meter. In addition to the relentless drills and “serious” warnings during tornado season, Chicago tests all its tornado sirens on the first Tuesday of every month—partly to make sure they work, and partly to remind citizens of what to listen for in the event of emergency. My childhood was filled with hundreds of reminders about the pending “threat” of tornadoes, but never once was there an event serious enough to warrant a trip to the basement. Or thinking about whether the building you were in even had a basement.

College was the first time I realized that other midwesterners didn’t think the way I did about tornadoes. I was a freshman at Purdue in the middle of Indiana, going to school with largely smalltown and rural kids who, by their own account, considered Lafayette to be “the big city.” (Incidentally, Purdue is where I met my now-husband Clint, who is from Kansas. Let me tell you, Internet readers, he just loves jokes about going over the rainbow.)

A stormy evening arrived in September of that freshman year in 1999—the hot, late-summer air made us all wish we didn’t choose a dorm without air conditioning. Tornado sirens were going off, and I was prepared to stick to my usual disaster plan of continuing to watch TV while heating powdered mac & cheese in the microwave. But I could tell my dorm mates and friends did not seem to be planning for such a glamorous night. Some were calling their parents, barely suppressing tears as they described a weather event outside. “The pressure just dropped so fast!” Others were gathering together backpacks—mostly made up of homework, pagers (pagers are what came before cell phones, kids), and hidden beer—for their inevitable camp-out in the dorm’s basement. It was going to be a party, they snarked, as everyone would be there.

“Are you for fucking real?” I remember thinking to myself after my floor-mates popped in and asked if I was coming to the basement. I began wondering whether it was all a big joke—some kind of hilarious, natural disaster joke that would involve the Red Cross or something. I don’t know. I went out into the hallway, expecting it to be empty so I could prove my friends insane. Instead, I was met with chaos; people were going downstairs in droves, backpacks and illegal dorm pets in tow. At that moment, I had never felt so confused about how I was supposed to interpret a tornado siren.

I didn’t end up going to the basement. I was stubborn and still perplexed at everyone else’s reaction to the weather. That night, an F1 tornado touched down on the northeast side of Lafayette with gusts of wind measuring more than 100mph. I have since learned that an F1 isn’t always “find Toto” level (unless Toto is outside in the yard), but it’s enough to tear off roofs, roll over cars, and generally make people’s hearts and wallets hurt.

Everyone I knew at the time was safe afterward. That was the good news. But I had friends from Purdue who were townies, whose family homes suffered some damage. Some eventually dropped out of school to help their families deal with the costs. As someone who was not just lucky enough to grow up without tornadoes, but also with some privilege, seeing that happen to people I knew in real life was profound. Tornadoes were not serious in my personal bubble, but they were serious for a lot of other people.

I told this story to a friend over lunch as we discussed the horrific damage caused by F5 tornadoes in Oklahoma this week. At least 24 people died and more than 200 injured. There are many, many more dealing with the complete obliteration of their homes and communities. My heart breaks for those victims in Oklahoma.

(I have to interrupt the narrative for a minute to note that CNN claims “less than one tenth of one percent” of homes in Moore, Oklahoma have basements, apparently because of a local culture of simply not having them. Such a bizarre fact about a town that exists in the middle of Tornado Alley.)

Perhaps even closer to home, I now have in-laws who also live in the middle of Tornado Alley. When Clint’s father Randy texted us with a photo of my 8-year-old sister-in-law this week, smiling and holding alarmingly large balls of hail, I chuckled with horror. Separately on Facebook, he casually posted photos that could be screencaps from the movie Twister.

“Are you ready to go camping?” Clint asked me this morning over coffee. We’re driving down to Marion, Kansas to camp on his grandparents’ farm over Memorial Day weekend; I’ve been looking forward to it for more than a year, and we’re hoping to celebrate our Vegas wedding with his family while we’re there. The farm, by the way, has no basement, but—I swear this is not a troll—a root cellar like in Wizard of Oz.

We’re bringing meat to cook over the fire and there’ll probably be guns. Guns and sunflowers and millions of beautiful stars at night that make me second guess my compulsion to live in big cities.

Hell yeah I’m ready, I told him, and made a requisite joke about dressing up like Dorothy. He gave me a semi-amused, semi-serious laugh. “Do you know how to do a tornado drill?”

Gardening season in the northern hemisphere is picking up again, and you know what that means: I’m about to become as obnoxious as possible on all social media mediums about my plants.

This one’s for the gardeners out there who are still figuring out what’s best for them and their gardens, like me. In the past, I’d always just started seeds in normal potting soil, but I kept reading that seed starter mix is better because you don’t want tiny seedlings exposed to fertilizer and other things that tend to come in potting soil just yet, so I bought some Dr. Earth seed starter mix from my favorite garden shop. I was going to start all my plants in it, but then I got the idea from a gardening forum to do some experiments to find out which mixes would be best.

I have a worm composting bin in my pantry, and I cook a lot (with tons of scraps), so I generate a good amount of vermicompost that I just store in a giant bucket all winter. People claim this stuff is awesome, not just for mixing into your garden, but also seed starting. So, I started some romanesco broccoli seeds in two 4” pots: one pot with plain seed starter mix from Dr. Earth, and one pot with a 50/50 mix of seed starter mix and my own vermicompost.

I watered them equally at the same times and gave them equal access to the same amount of light. Today, I’m 15 days in after seeding, and I have some early results to show.

I started the seeds side-by-side on a heat mat near the window. All the seeds came up on the same day (about 3 days after seeding). These photos were taken 5 days after seeding:

The sprouts in the compost mix are on the left (as they are in all the rest of these photos). At day 5, the ones in the compost mix are slightly larger/taller. The sprouts are bending because they were leaning towards the light through the window. At this point, I decided to put them underneath a 70-watt CFL bulb (actual wattage, not “equivalent”).

10 days after seeding:

As you can see, the ones on the left (compost mix) now have noticeably larger cotyledons (first leaves) and are a bit taller.

15 days:

At day 15, the seedlings in the compost mix (left) are getting pretty big and have already put out multiple true leaves (I think they’re now working on their third), while the ones in the plain seed starter mix (right) have only just begun on true leaves at all. The strongest sprout in the plain seed starter has one big true leaf and is working on a second, and the others are still just babies.

This is not a scientific experiment blah blah blah. It’s just a home gardener case study for fun and personal learning. Still, at this point, I’m basically convinced that the seed starter+compost mixture is superior to plain seed starter mix just based on these results so far. The plants in the compost mix are larger, further along, and stronger than their friends in the plain seed starter, even though they all sprouted on the same day and have been given equal access to water and light.

I plan to keep this experiment going for another couple weeks, but it’s getting time for me to thin them out, so I’m going to cut all but the largest one in the plain seed starter mix. This will put the two pots on a bit more equal-looking footing, so we’ll see how they look at day 20 and 25.

In conclusion: compost is cool. It really seems to boost seedlings when they’re young, and when you’re starting seeds indoors (like many gardeners do), you’ll usually take whatever advantage you can get in order to get things going.

In 1946, at the age of 26, Thomas Cheng left China with his wife in tow—though “Thomas” wasn’t his name back then. He had made the difficult decision to move his family to Taiwan, leaving their beloved country behind because a complete takeover by communist revolutionaries seemed imminent. 

Above: Cathy and Tom in 1946

They moved into what his wife Catherine—also not her name then—describes as a “camp.” Though it wasn’t technically a refugee camp, conditions were squalid and full of others like them who had left what would soon become Mao’s China. 

The couple lived in Taiwan for 15 years, through the aftermath of World War II. They eventually had a daughter, Jean, and another son, Steven. But even though they had servants, living conditions in Taiwan were poor. The country had already been ravaged by 50 years of Japanese occupation and was in the process of being neglected by the new revolutionaries of the Chinese government. China may have no longer been a place to raise a family, but neither was Taiwan.

Thomas’ obsession with the “beautiful country” started somewhere during that time. With WWII in the past and the United States seen as a rising world power, his fascination slowly changed from wonder into aspiration. Like many immigrants, he wanted to move his family to America on the promise of freedom and opportunity—the promise of a better life.

But America at that time was a tumultuous place, too. The government had placed strict limits on the number of Asian immigrants entering the country—in particular, the Magnuson Act targeted Chinese immigrants the most by limiting the number of entry visas to only 105 per year, when it should have been closer to 2,150 based on the algorithm the government claimed to use. As such, it was difficult for Thomas to realize his dream. He moved his family to Singapore in 1961 in hopes of establishing residency and eventually besting the anti-Chinese rules for entering the U.S.

The plan worked. After only two years, in 1963, Tom moved his family across oceans for the third time. The four of them settled in Illinois and Tom pursued a master’s degree in biotechnology from the University of Illinois. He was wildly successful and became a designer for the first Kikkoman plant ever built in the U.S.

But while Tom was busy building a better life for his family, his children had a harder time. His son, 10 years old by the time they moved to the U.S., was bullied by racism in a rapidly changing America, where a national conversation about race and civil rights had only begun to take place.

Above: Tom’s children, Steve and Jean in Mt. Prospect, Illinois 

Tom and Steve would get into passionate fights; his idealism about America continually faced off against his kids’ experiences of being foreigners plopped into American schools. Tom’s own life experience had led him to have strict expectations, including those about attitude.

In 1986, I sat at the top of the carpeted stairs in Tom’s home in suburban Chicago, spying on my grandparents’ guests playing Mah-Jong. I was five years old and too shy to speak. Instead, along with my brother, I crafted paper airplanes with secret messages written in the folds to throw out toward the Mah-Jong table before ducking behind the stairway. The guests always reacted with delight.

It was hard for me to imagine Tom, his face soft and worn at nearly 70 then, as anything but my grandfather—the man who told me stories about the Monkey King and drove me to violin rehearsals every Saturday. The man who taught me how to ride a bike, emphasized the importance of being absolutely perfect at English, did tai chi in his living room, and went mall-walking with his wife on the weekends. At that age, I could not have known the depths of his love for his country that he had to depart 40 years earlier. Every night while my parents worked late, he watched Chinese TV news over a satellite dish while my brother and I watched the Cosby Show in the next room.

It only came out after Tom’s death in December 2012, at nearly 93, that he believed in the American dream not just for himself and his family, but for every aspiring student looking for more in the U.S. It turns out that Tom and Cathy had sponsored more than 20 students to move from China and complete their studies at the University of Illinois over the years, and countless others at other universities. It was kept quiet more than 50 years until the phone calls started flooding in after his passing on December 9. One by one, the former students who benefitted from Tom’s sponsorship called to express their gratitude and condolences, thanking my grandparents for helping them achieve their own dreams in America.

Above: Thomas Cheng, 1920-2012

“Tom Cheng, the demanding project leader, is dead,” my father wrote on the day of my grandfather’s funeral in Barrington, Illinois. “Tom Cheng, the stubborn and intolerable man with whom I would argue and end up with a hoarse voice after an hour of yelling, is gone. But not really, because he is going to be recycled into the great folds of Mother Nature, when he’ll re-emerge in the spring grass and the fat earthworm, and continue his role as part of nature. And he will do that job well, I’m sure. I will look for him.”

Update: This post has been modified, mostly for factual corrections. However, some parts have been removed. Contact me for original.

Clint and I used to do these year-in-Flickr posts, but both of us fell off the wagon in the last couple years due to business. 2012 has been a rollercoaster of a year for me, but looking back through my photos, I’ve come to realize that it was still a pretty good year. I’m lucky to have had some great times with some great people, so here’s a year of my favorite photos from the eye of my iPhone camera. 

January

Clint and I went to see Jack’s Mannequin.

We went to Chinatown with my parents for my birthday/Chinese New Year.

My AMAZING FRIENDS surprised me with a cocktail hour and then dinner at Shaw’s. Shocked and humbled!

February

We made amazing food, like sun dried tomatoes on toast with spicy sopressata and Humboldt Fog.

Clint and I went on a walk along the street level of the Bloomingdale Trail in Bucktown.

Chris Foresman performed electrical work on my home.

March

In March, I ventured up on the top of the Bloomingdale Trail for the first time since we’ve been in Chicago.

We went out for Sam’s birthday and Clint & Will tried to share a giant burrito.

I saw Tim Cook introduce “the new iPad.” (iPad 3)

I went to the Chicago Flower & Garden Show and attended my first seed swap.

April

We went to Carol’s country bar for Jake’s birthday. It was the best.

I met Dan Sinker in real life.

May

I don’t even know when this photo was taken or where we were going, but apparently Clint and I were looking fabulous at some point in May.

The first hot day, we rode our bikes to Montrose Beach to hang out with the cool crowd.

June

In June, I had the special treat of being able to attend WWDC with a handful of my best Ars friends. Clint came along for the ride and worked out of the Obama SF office, while Ken and Aurich flew in for a whirlwind few days in San Francisco. Here’s Aurich and Max in the Reddit office checking out the postcard wall:

After WWDC, I visited my Grandma Rose in Fresno:

Soon thereafter, I attended the Pride parade with Cesar in Chicago.

It was only slightly crazy.

July

Most of my vegetable garden had begun producing by July. Here’s some of what I grew.

Clint and I went camping in Wisconsin after several failed attempts to go with friends. We had a great time playing board games on the iPad, hiking, and dropping our freshly grilled steaks in the dirt. 

August

I was on my favorite local PBS news show, Chicago Tonight, talking about Mat Honan’s “epic hack.”

We went to dim sum and Montrose Beach with Cesar and Matt + friends just before the two of them moved to NYC in September.

In August, Clint & I also had our first summer party at our place. We grilled some squid.

Everyone had a grand old time.

September

We had our 2012 Ars Technicon, where we also held our first staff running group one morning along the lake.

We spent our nights during Technicon doing what we do best:

October

Clint began to increasingly work like this on his weekends at home.

Chicago was beautiful, as always.

As the election drew near and other life dramas were playing out, there wasn’t much time to do anything but work hard and party hard. The OFA’s “Last Wednesday” party before the election was A+.

All I know is that we ended the night at 3am in someone’s high-rise apartment throwing paper planes off the balcony, and it was glorious.

I talked to Tim Cook in the flesh after the iPad mini unveiling. He said “hi.”

November

Election Night happened! And we all know what that means.

It was a happy night.

The Election 2012 party crew: Lee, Leah, Clint, and me.

November

We went to Wichita for Thanksgiving. I hung out with Willow.

Clint educated Willow and Zoie many times on iPhone etiquette.

Then we flew from Wichita to Las Vegas after Thanksgiving.

We got secret-married on November 24! And the world didn’t even find out about it until December 14. The best caper ever.

Then we went to Cabo San Lucas!

December

By now, we had sorta begun to video chat with Cesar and Matt, complete with lots of wine.

On a lark, we caught the Holiday Train:

On December 9, my grandfather on my dad’s side passed away. 

Cesar came back to visit from NYC, so we got some shrimp heads.

We’re leaving for NYC soon to stay with Cesar & Matt through the new year. As we move forward into 2013, I hope we can all (continue to) make efforts to come together in peace and understanding instead of fear and divisiveness. As I joked to Clint about Christmas a few weeks ago: “In lieu of gifts, please be kind and generous to your fellow man.”

To 2013!

Some of you liked my garden report from last year, so I’m back to post a new one for 2012. I can’t guarantee that I’ll address all the same items in all the same ways (Ars has trained me well to state that up front), but here are my observations looking back on the 2012 growing season:

As most of us in the US are well aware at this point, 2012 started off with insane optimism, but ended with with extreme drought conditions and broken dreams. The summer was ungodly, unusually hot for aeons on end. Because the winter had been so mild and spring was so solid, gardeners and farmers alike had been led to believe 2012 might be a record year. Sadly, that was not the case—for those same people, this growing season really sucked.

So with that frame of mind, I had to adjust my expectations. None of my yields (save for a few items, which I’ll talk about) were particularly impressive. Still, I’ve made peace with it and I had a reasonably OK season, all things considered.

I grew:

• Black krim tomatoes from self-saved seed
• Limmony tomatoes from saved seed
• Pineapple tomatoes from saved seed
• Brandywine tomatoes (Sudduth’s strain), from Tomato Grower’s Supply, first time
• Santiam tomatoes from Seeds of Change, first time
• Green zebra tomatoes, obtained from seed swap—saved from Cook County Jail grounds, first time
• Black cherry tomatoes from Baker Creek, first time
• Gardener’s Delight cherry tomatoes from Tomato Grower’s Supply, first time
• Yellow pear cherry tomatoes, saved from seed from upstairs neighbor’s plant, first time
• Ancho peppers from Seed Savers Exchange, first time
• Super Heavyweight bell peppers (hybrid) from Tomato Grower’s Supply, first time
• Purira peppers from Seeds of Change, first time
• Ichiban eggplant (old seed, unsure of origin)
• Fengyuan taiwanese eggplant from Baker Creek, first time
• Lemon cucumbers from seed swap, first time
• Little Tyke cucumbers (hybrid) from Totally Tomatoes
• Herbs: basil, greek oregano, chives, thyme, rosemary, mint, parsley, cilantro
• Dinosaur kale (old seed, unsure of origin)

Lessons learned:

In no particular order…

No more brandywine or green zebra tomatoes for now: I chose to add brandywines to my collection in 2012 because they are so highly regarded by tomato lovers. Brandywines are considered one of the gold standard tomatoes, so I wanted to know what they were like to grow. I didn’t hate them, and certainly my impression is probably affected a bit by the poor growing conditions, but I just wasn’t blown away. Yield was lower than my other plants and it just wasn’t impressive enough in flavor to make up for it. I might try this again one day when I own a fabulous modern farm, but not while I have limited space in an urban environment.

The green zebra was just pathetic. Again, probably affected by growing conditions, but I only got one (one!) smallish tomato out of this plant for the entire season. Yeah, no. Maybe on the fantasy farm.

Cherry tomatoes, where have you been all my life? Oddly, although I’ve always loved to eat and cook with cherry tomatoes, I had yet to ever dedicate much gardening space to cherry tomatoes (in the past, I’ve had maybe one cherry tomato plant, if any). This year I went with three different cherry tomatoes in the same EarthBox and I came away impressed in general with cherries. They were the only tomato plants that weren’t significantly affected by the heat and drought conditions; they just kept on trucking and gave no fucks about it. Especially the black cherry—that one is a beast. And I loved the flavor of the black cherry, which made it that much better. Very prolific and good flavor too? Yes yes yes. 

On the flipside, although I was impressed with the cherries overall, the flavor of the yellow pear was just blah and the Gardener’s Delight were kind of middle-of-the-road blah. I’d probably ditch both of these in favor of a second black cherry plant and something new for the third (eyeing Isis candy for next year). 

Anyway, the cherries had consistent and heavy yields all season, and held their shit together during the hottest times. Barely any blossom drop and things just kept on truckin’ while everything else went dormant. Loved them. I might even make more space next year for cherry tomatoes, and reduce my beefsteak tomatoes.

Home-grown ancho peppers are really hot: If you cook Mexican food, you’re likely familiar with ancho/poblano peppers as being a light-to-medium-level spicy pepper. Well, the ones I grew were smaller than the grocery store’s (no surprise there) but like ten hojillion times spicier. It knocked us on our asses. Would probably plant this again next year; I had two this year and might reduce down to one for 2013 so I can try something new. They performed well, especially in the heat. Where the tomatoes suffered, the peppers excelled.

Super Heavyweight bell peppers: I bought these on a whim because I was slightly underwhelmed with the smallish size of our heirloom bell peppers last year. I figured, “these things are supposed to be state fair sized, so surely I’ll at least get some kinda big ones, right?” Meh. The bell peppers were slightly larger than the open pollinated ones we grew last year, but not significantly so, and I couldn’t even save seed from them because they’re hybrid. Would probably not grow again; I’ll most likely switch back to one of my heirloom bell peppers from last year, which I saved seed from.

Kale is amazing: I planted kale for the first time very early in the spring; I probably started them in February or so, and planted them out in early April on our lower-level patio (which is about 30/70 sun and shade). I expected them to just be a spring planting that would die off in the heat of the summer—Kale is known for being a great cold-weather crop. But this year I learned that, as long as it can get some shade from the hot summer sun, kale is a really resilient all-weather crop. My kale produced when it was still frosting outside, it produced when it was 110 degrees outside, and it’s still producing now in late October when frost threatens again. I’m actually worried that it’ll keep producing through the winter and I won’t want to rip them out (I need to rip them out so I can re-compost the raised bed and prepare for next year). 

Additionally, I’m impressed with the kale because it grows pretty well in shade. Not a lot of things will grow in the space where I have the kale planted because there’s really not a ton of direct light, so I had to choose something that could at least tolerate it. I feel like I (accidentally) chose really well with kale, because it was perfect for that space. Where nothing else will grow, kale does well practically year-round for me.

Limmony tomatoes: even more prolific than last year. Last year, I raved about what heavy producers my limmony tomatoes were. I planted them again this year (just one plant) from seed I saved in 2011. That plant was by far the heaviest producing tomato of the non-cherries. However, it also suffered very heavily during the hottest parts of the summer. In the extreme heat, this one blossom dropped like whoa—way moreso than all my other plants. It was heartbreaking. But otherwise I was still impressed with these and will continue to grow them.

I really like things that come in both green and purple. Turns out I am just that much of a nerd.

My genovese and opal basil: 

My dino and purple kale: 

Miscellaneous:

I enjoyed the lemon cucumbers that I grew, even though my cucumbers didn’t do particularly well this year. They were delicious.

My largest tomato of the season was a pineapple tomato that weighed 1 pound, 1.7 ounces:

It’s not pretty because the weather was so brutal, but damn, that was a good tomato. And really pretty when you cut it open, too: 

I did grow some garlic this year (Korean Reds):

They did OK but the bulbs were comparatively small because they were planted in an area without a lot of light (near the kale). Not sure I’ll grow garlic again until the fantasy farm.

I like growing green onions on the windowsill in a glass of water:

I learned this trick online, I’d never done it before until now. It was really easy and enjoyable, from a sheer ease-of-execution angle. I just saved the bottoms to some green onions I bought from the grocery store and stuck them in a glass on a sunny windowsill. You can keep cutting them and they’ll grow forever.

Me, age 13, to my sixth grade teacher:

Dear Mrs. Rittmeyer,

The warmest greetings from a former student! It’s been quite a while since I’ve been in contact with you; how have things been? I hope you and your family are having nothing but good fortune this year.

The reason I felt compelled to write to you is a complicated one. I had a very close friend, who was one of my pen pals, recently commit suicide. The incident caused me a great deal of pain because I felt like I did not take advantage of the time I had before he died to become a better friend. I felt like I had lost contact with him because of my all “too busy” life and now it is too late for me to make up for it. Today then, I thought of you and about what an influential teacher you had been to me, and how I have not taken the time lately to come see you or write. And now, here I am, sitting in front of the computer thinking of words to say…

I brought back some 15-year-old backup CDs of mine from my parents’ house, and my saved letter files were there. I used to write letters to everyone because 1) it was just the beginning of the Internet for the general population at the time (early ’90s), and 2) I was already grounded and barred from the Internet for life. Typed and printed letters were my communication with the outside world for a while. This was the opening to one.

I’m a gardener. I also travel occasionally for work and pleasure. Sometimes I travel during gardening season, which means there are occasions in which I have smaller plants that can’t take care of themselves if I go away for more than a few days at a time. (My larger plants are all already in big planters, most of which are commercial self-watering planters.) 

As I was mentally preparing to cover WWDC next week, I was trying to come up with ideas for how I could keep my smaller seedlings watered for long enough to keep them alive until I get back. I often use regular plastic drinking cups for my seedlings, so I was hoping to come up with a better idea than filling up a giant bucket of water and putting the bottoms of the cups inside. (This is a recipe for disaster with our two insane cats, too.) 

Anyway, some magic happened and I came up with this idea for a self-watering plastic Solo cup for smaller seedlings. As the Ferengi say:

Step 1: Come up with idea
Step 2: ?????
Step 3: Profit!

Materials

Here’s what you need for this project. Did I mention I’m incredibly lazy? Part of the reason I even came up with this was because I didn’t want to leave the house to find a commercial solution. So everything here is basically stuff you can find around your own home, or at least I’ll offer you some alternatives.

Two big plastic cups:

Something to poke holes with. I used this:

…but you can also use a grill skewer, a knife (be careful!), or anything else that will cut holes through a plastic cup. 

If you’re using a drill, one of these things. Don’t judge the nails, bro.

The holes have to be semi-large-ish, which is why I chose a quarter-inch hole cutter for mine. If you are using some other tool, just make sure the holes are big enough so you can slip some fabric through.

One (1) rock:

A strip of scrap fabric:

Almost any fabric will work for this as long as it can get wet and retain water (that is, water doesn’t just roll off). In an ideal world, your fabric would be a polyester T-shirt material—organic materials like cotton will eventually rot after enough time in water, while polyester won’t. But let’s be honest here: you’re using supplies meant to be used for Beer Pong. You’ll probably break the cups before your fabric rots, so don’t waste too many brain cycles worrying about what kind of material you have. A strip from an old t-shirt or garage rag would work. Old jeans would work too.

Put it together

Drill two holes in the bottom of ONE of your cups. Leave the other cup alone.

This is what it looks like:

Thread your fabric strip through each hole, bridging the two holes on the inside of the cup:

Put the rock into the bottom of the virgin cup. I didn’t take a pic, but if you have a hard time understanding this one, you have bigger things to worry about.

Fill the cup with the rock with water. I recommend filling it to just above the rock. 

Then put your wicking cup (the cup with the fabric dangling out the bottom) into the cup with the rock, like so:

Make sure the fabric comes in contact with the water. When it does, it will begin wicking the water up into the inner cup. When filled with soil, the inner cup’s soil will wick water from the fabric upwards, and your plant’s roots will stay in moist soil (without much evaporation) for probably several extra days, depending on your ambient humidity levels. 

I’ve tested it and it works. 

I have been meaning to make this post for a while—and by “a while,” I mean years. Since Father’s Day is coming up and I’ll be work-traveling up until then, I figured I shouldn’t put it off any longer.

From the minuscule to the life-altering, my dad has advice on everything. Need to learn how to properly hold a handheld vacuum cleaner? He’s got you covered. Want to know the merits of using a Mac versus a PC? Have a seat. Unsure of which car to buy? Please. What is the meaning of life? Family.

My dad’s advice-giving tendencies are widely revered. Among my friends, it’s endearing. For someone like me, his kid, it (predictably) makes me crazy. My dad and I have had a complicated relationship, but as I go into my 30s, I am beginning to realize more and more which lessons ended up being true. Although I will never agree with him on the Mac versus PC thing, there was a lot of advice that was pretty smart. So, without further adieu, here are my dad’s top 3 most valuable life lessons, as judged by my 31-year-old self. 

1) Learn people’s names and use them. This is more of an aspiration than a reality for me, even today, but I recognize why this is good advice. It’s one of the key factors in relating to people, especially as adults, when we meet and begin to get to know each other. Not to get too creepy-armchair-psychologist, but using people’s names makes them like you. That’s just how it is. And when people like you, you can get a lot more done. Whether it’s in your personal life as a friendship or a professional connection (more on this in a second), there is basically no downside to making this a habit. Too bad I am really, really bad with names. 

2) Network. This will probably sound strange to some people, but my dad taught me from a pretty young age (probably starting in grade school) to network. All the time. What kind of crazy parent is pulling aside a 10-year-old advising them to get off their asses and start networking? It was good advice. I’ve been a networker my entire life and many of my relationships from when I was a lot younger—high school, university, my first couple jobs out of college—have turned into either long-term friendships or incredibly valuable professional contacts. Both of those things are great, so it’s worth it to make an effort to meet and maintain contact with people all the time. If you don’t click as BFFs immediately, it’s okay, but don’t let them drop off the radar (and don’t drop off theirs). Maintaining a friendly and semi-active relationship with a wide swath of people will only pay you back later in life many times over. 

3) Eat an obscene amount of fruits in your daily life. This one is a Steve Cheng classic. All my friends know him as the fruit dad because he’s always trotting out plates and plates full of different fruits at the drop of a hat. Show up at their house and there are at least four fruit available to snack on as we chat and fix the computer. He’s always giving fruit to people. The guy is crazy about fruit. His enthusiasm for fruit rubbed off on me (same with vegetables, but to a lesser extent until my palette matured) and I eat fruit at pretty much any opportunity. Especially as desert. Argue all you want about the sugar content in fruit, but in today’s twisted and whole-food-deprived food culture, consuming pretty much any fruit or vegetable is going to be good for your health in some way. And it’s really tasty.

There are more, but I’m cutting it off now so I can post it. (If I put it off any longer, there’s danger of falling into the Pit of Abandoned Stories.) So there you go. My dad’s life advice that is valuable to your friendships, your career, and your health. Cheers!

“Thanks to a stray email we can now confirm that Dow Constantine, King County Executive, has a penis and that Constantine used his penis to have sex with a lady. Constantine was widely believed to have a penis and to have used his penis to have sex with ladies as Constantine lives with a lady with whom he was widely believed to be having sex using his penis. However the stray email that confirmed the existence of Constantine’s penis was not written by the woman with whom Constantine lives and was widely believed to be having sex. So we can now report that King County Executive Dow Constantine, age 50, has had sex with at least two ladies in the roughly thirty-five years that he has been capable of achieving and maintaining erections to the point of ejaculation. Here’s what we don’t know: We don’t know what sort of agreement Constantine has with the lady with whom he lives. Do they have an open relationship? Are they monogamish? Does Constantine having sex with other ladies violate the terms of his agreement with the lady with whom he lives? We don’t know. Does the lady with whom Constantine lives have sex with other county executives? We don’t know. Two other things we do know: We know that there were no financial or political shenanigans. So there’s no official misconduct to report. And Constantine isn’t a Republican—that is, Constantine isn’t a member of political party that seeks to regulate the private sexual conduct of other Americans, builds campaigns around the theme of “family values,” and attacks opponents for their perceived sexual and moral failings. So there’s no hypocrisy to report either. Summing up: area man had sex with a lady and another lady might be mad at him. Or she might not. We don’t know.”

(Source: slog.thestranger.com)

Clint and I have gotten together with our good friends Cesar Torres and Matt Saba several times now for a bi-annual tamale-making, cocktail-drinking, movie-watching party. After a few times now, we have begun to really refine our recipes and techniques, but something we have continued to struggle with has been the perfect tamale masa texture. We have used various recipes ranging from the hipster foodie stuff you find on Chowhound to books from world renown Mexican cooking experts like Diana Kennedy. The tamales are always delicious, but all four of us continued to agree that we had yet to find the magic bullet recipe for masa that allows for the right balance of flavor, fattiness, fluffiness, and cooking time.

The last time the four of us got together was in December while Matt was home visiting from his year in Berlin, but I have decided to venture out on my own a couple times since then to see if I could perfect the masa ratios before the next time we’re all together again. We had watched a YouTube video by a Mexican grandma who said the secret was to add baking powder to help with the fluff. In addition to that, I had read online (corroborated with Cesar’s family elders) that whipping the lard before adding other ingredients is key. It finally hit me: you make masa like cookies. First whip the fat, then slowly incorporate the solids. 

Anyway, long story short, I think I perfected the tamale masa ratios. I’ve been hanging onto the knowledge in my brain for a couple weeks now and I fear I’m going to lose it soon, so I felt like I should document it. And why not document it here?

This is basically my/our own recipe at this point, though the base recipe is from Diana Kennedy’s Oaxacan bean tamales. 

-1 pound corn masa (from a bag)
-4 ounces of pork lard*
-roughly 4 to 4.5 teaspoons of kosher salt (or  ~3 teaspoons table salt)
-1 teaspoon baking powder
-chicken broth

Begin by making sure the lard is at least room temperature, if not a bit warmer. Use an electric mixer and whip the lard to the point where it’s beginning to form peaks; you want a lot of air in there. In a separate bowl, mix the corn masa, baking powder, and salt. After those are combined, add them slowly to the whipped lard and fold together until just combined. Use the chicken broth to add moisture as needed—I think I used somewhere between 1/2 and one cup last time I made tamales, but your needs will vary. The end texture of the masa mix should be similar to cookie dough but perhaps a bit stiffer. You don’t want it to be wetter than cookie dough though—if it is, add some more masa to stiffen it up a bit.

Soak your corn husks in warm water (or toss them in the steamer for a few minutes), then begin spreading the masa mixture in the husks. I’m not here to tell you what you should stuff your tamales with (there are plenty of options!), but I used some leftover spicy lamb and chorizo chili recently as a tamale stuffing and it came out really, really well. Other ones we have tried include pulled pork shoulder (braised in a green tomatillo sauce/liquid) and black refried beans with cheese. 

Once you’re done folding and loading up your steamer, steam the tamales on medium heat for about an hour. I have learned that, contrary to our original impression, tamales are not supposed to have to steam for 4+ hours—if they aren’t done in an hour, you have messed up the ratio of ingredients in your masa. So, steam for an hour and take one out to test the texture. The masa mixture should have firmed up to become a fluffy, delicious casing for your stuffing. If it’s still too wet, let it continue to steam for another 15 minutes and try another test. 

That’s it! If you have extra tips, let me know, but I think I’ve finally nailed this one.

* If you absolutely must substitute other fats for lard because you want to be a better vegetarian or even vegan, use butter or Crisco. (Butter for a form of animal fat that wasn’t obtained via slaughter, or Crisco for a fully vegan vegetable fat.) I can’t vow for the taste balance if you do either of these things, but those are the two fat alternatives. Do NOT use an oil that is liquid at room temperature like olive oil or canola oil. You need a fat that will act as a soft solid at room temperature if you want the ratios and texture to come out right.

On this day, January 31, 2012, I made a chunky tomato basil soup (base recipe; I made some tweaks) with heirloom tomatoes from our 2011 garden that we froze for exactly this occasion. The soup also contains chicken/duck stock that Clint and I made from scratch, dried cayenne pepper flakes from our 2010 garden, and fresh basil & thyme from our 2011-2012 indoor winter garden. 

With it, we are making grilled cheese sandwiches using bread that I made this morning. (Sadly the cheese did not come from milk originating from a cow living on my back porch.) 

If this is what obnoxious food hipsterdom tastes like, then I embrace it fully.

(In other news, I tried the Kumato tomato. It was OK. Only subtly different than a typical grocery store winter tomato—we did several blind taste tests. Definitely sweeter to the tastebuds, but not significantly more flavorful overall. Would still buy them over “normal” grocery store tomatoes if I had to choose, but only in the winter when I can’t grow my own.)

As some of you know, I do all my grocery shopping via Peapod, a “grocery store” that functions entirely on deliveries. Instead of building stores that consumers have to go to, with appropriate climate and decor and aisles for food, Peapod just maintains giant warehouses of food and employs packers to put together users’ online orders for delivery the next day. I love everything about Peapod, but this post isn’t about Peapod. That’s just the lead-in to what I’m really here to talk about.

So, I was shopping on Peapod’s website today, since Thursday is the day when all the sales turn over for the next week and I love sales. I noticed that they added a new item called the Kumato® tomato. I was immediately drawn to it, because I am (now) a tomato enthusiast who is disgusted by mealy, tasteless grocery store tomatoes that I have recently learned are not only disgusting and tasteless, but also farmed in Florida under abusive conditions—and sometimes actual slavery. But the Kumato® tomato—at least those that are available to us here in the United States—was grown in greenhouses in Canada and developed in Belgium. The description that you can find online basically claims it’s a tomato that “ripens from the inside out,” is sweeter than your typical grocery store tomato, but maintains its firmness and ship-ability so that it can still be sold in a standard grocery store.

I was intrigued, but probably not for the reasons you think (unless you know me well, in which case, it’s definitely for the reasons you think). As someone who grows many varieties of open pollinated, heirloom tomatoes every summer and has spent way too much time researching tomato biology over the last three years, I am no certified expert on tomatoes, but I am certainly well educated (if I must say so myself). I take the snobbish—if not completely valid—stance that grocery store tomatoes can never measure up in flavor to a home-grown or farmer’s market heirloom tomato, not just because of the way they are grown, but also because of the varieties offered. Grocery store tomatoes are typically the most tasteless varieties (because those are the ones that will grow under the most duress, which is how they grow them in Florida for the commercial tomato industry), but they are also picked green and then gassed in a warehouse in order to become red. Basically, when you’re buying a grocery store tomato, you’re buying the most shitty tomato variety they could find that is not even actually ripe. And you probably contributed to modern-day slavery too by buying it, but that’s another post entirely.

So, this is why I was interested in the Kumato®—because heirloom tomato growers (whether they are home gardeners or farmer’s market sellers) can’t grow in the winter, so what are you supposed to do if you want a tomato in the winter for some tacos or to make an Italian red sauce? At this point, I’m pretty much willing to consider anything I can find that tastes better than the crap the grocery stores normally offer you and doesn’t contribute to Floridian slavery, so the Kumato® had some new and intriguing things to offer. Oh, and it’s also a black variety, which is nearly unheard of in the mass market.

When you read the Kumato®’s Wikipedia page, there are several interesting claims:

Unlike other tomato varieties, seeds cannot be purchased by the general public. Syngenta[5] has stated that they will never make Kumato seeds available to the general public as the Kumato tomato is grown under a concept known as a club variety, whereby Syngenta sells seeds only to licensed growers that go through a rigorous selection process, and participation is by invitation only. Syngenta maintains ownership of the variety throughout the entire value chain from breeding to marketing, whereby selected growers must agree to follow specified cultivation protocols, and in addition pay a flat license fee per acre of greenhouse, the cost of the seed, in addition to royalties based on the volume of tomatoes produced. Typically Syngenta licenses only one large vertically integrated greenhouse producer per country that has well established relationships with grocery chains.

[…]

That said, anyone can retrieve seeds from a Kumato and grow plants for private use.

I’ve done some research into the Kumato® since I learned about it earlier today, and this is what I’ve learned.

First of all, the Kumato® that is marketed as a commercial variety is not the same as a similar variety, also referred to as the Kumato, that is available as an heirloom variety to home growers. As I suspected, the Kumato® is a patented, hybrid variety, which itself means several things. Being patented means that the company that developed it can indeed retain all the rights to its growth, and it means the last line in the Wikipedia page is factually incorrect. (I know: a Wikipedia page is factually incorrect? Stop the presses!) Not all hybrid tomato varieties are patented, and not all hybrid varieties are created by evil GMO corporations, so don’t go thinking that the hyrbid-ness makes the Kumato® evil. The reason it makes sense that it’s a hybrid is because hybrid varieties are usually genetically stronger, but generally unstable, than their open pollinated heirloom brethren. You need some of that gene strength when you’re going to grow and store tomatoes for commercial distribution, and every tomato you buy in a grocery store is a hybrid for this reason.

However, a hybrid means that the seeds are not viable. Typically if you try to save the seeds from a hybrid tomato and then plant them, the fruits that come out of your resulting plant won’t be similar to the fruit they came from at all, and may not even represent either parent of that tomato. Basically, if you manage to produce fruits at all from the seed of a hybrid tomato, they are freakish, unpredictable fruits—and it’s possible they may not even be edible, depending on what’s going on with the tomato’s genetics. So, because the Kumato® is a patented, hybrid variety of tomato, there is virtually no way that a home gardener would be able to save seed and grow their own patented Kumato® plants for private use. It’s simply not possible biologically.

There are other annoying things about how the Kumato® is marketed, and how it’s parroted among foodie blogs. (Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think the average person knows that much about tomatoes and so I don’t blame them for parroting company information. I just think it’s annoying to read the same misinformation over and over again.) For example, there is the claim that they “ripen inside out,” which is the company’s own explanation for why the skin is a dark brownish, sort-of-green, sort-of-reddish color. That is just plain craziness—there are many “black” varieties of tomatoes that have the same coloring (one of my favorites being the Black Krim, which you may remember that I have grown for several seasons now). The tomatoes don’t “ripen from the inside out” and other tomatoes don’t ripen from the outside in—that’s just the color they are, and that’s what they look like when ripe.

There’s also the claim that they are sweeter than “normal tomatoes” because of a higher fructose content, leading the reader to believe that this is some kind of super-tomato. Again, most tomatoes actually have higher fructose content than your average grocery store tomato—almost anyone with any familiarity with tomatoes would argue that grocery store tomatoes have a significantly lower than average fructose content, so it’s probable that the Kumato® has an average fructose content for a black-variety tomato hybrid. This doesn’t make them weird or even unique; it just makes them fairly normal while your average pinkish-reddish grocery store tomato is the one that is the freak.

Finally, there is the claim that the Kumato® is a “gourmet variety.” This is slightly more nuanced for me; I don’t really think it’s “gourmet” in the sense that it’s better than all tomatoes you can find, but it’s certainly better than what you can buy from a store in the dead of winter in North America. So, on one hand, it’s not better than what you could grow at home (especially since you can save seed from what you grow at home; think of those as “open source” tomatoes), but it’s probably significantly better than what you would normally get from a grocery store in terms of flavor.

So, what do I actually think of the Kumato®? I haven’t tasted them yet, but I added them to my list on Peapod for delivery this weekend. I have high hopes for a better-tasting tomato that I can have delivered in the middle of winter from a traditional grocery store that actually tastes like something and wasn’t grown and picked with shady slave labor. If it tastes even half as good as one of my summer heirlooms, I’ll consider it a win. I also plan to save seed and grow at least one this summer to see how the freaky hybrid children turn out, though I’m not counting on any real Kumato®s coming out of it.

So that’s your tomato rant for today, Thursday, January 19, 2012. This post has not been copy edited in any way whatsoever. 

My friend and colleague from Ars Technica, John Siracusa, gently reminded me last week that my Tumblr RSS feed had turned brown in NetNewsWire, signaling that I’ve already fallen behind on writing for my new blog and it was about to join dinosaur bones and MySpace as irrelevant to the kids these days. So here I am, living up to my promise to him that I would write something.

I can’t remember when I last talked about the books I had finished reading with mini book reviews attached, but I know it was too long ago. So, here I will give you one (or three) line thoughts on the books I completed recently-ish:

The 19th Wife: A random recommendation from my Grandma Rose on my mom’s side, I found this book to be completely enthralling. A semi-fictional story, semi-historical account of the origins of Mormonism, the book hops back and forth between discussion of actual historical documents and life of Ann Eliza Young (19th wife of Brigham Young) and a fictional “murder mystery” type story about a modern 19th wife. The fictional part of the book was okay; I could have done without it, but it wasn’t bad. The rest of the book was fascinating and I could not put it down. I learned more about the origins of Mormonism than I had learned in the previous 30 years of my life.

The Pot Book: This book is basically a collection of essays and interviews on the subject of cannabis (marijuana), its health effects, research on its medical benefits, US (and worldwide) legislation, social issues, and more. It’s not a continuous narrative on the topic, which can be somewhat jarring when jumping from chapter to chapter, but it’s still a highly recommended read from me. I would almost be highly skeptical of anyone who has a strong opinion on the matter (in either direction) if they had not first perused most of the studies and topics discussed in this book first.

Steve Jobs: Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. I already wrote my review of this book at Ars Technica, but let’s just say I felt it was long, dragged out, and a little disappointing when it came to the writing/editing. That’s the bad. The good is that it contains all sorts of new information from Jobs’ point of view that we would have never otherwise gotten if Jobs hadn’t hand-picked someone (in this case, Isaacson) to do this book. If you’re a collector of Apple memorabilia or history books, you’ll obviously want to add this to your collection regardless of whether it’s a great book or not.

The Art of Happiness: I bought this on a whim because I like the Dalai Lama, so why not? As it turns out, this was “co-authored” by both the Dalai Lama and a psychotherapist, Dr. Howard Cutler. And by “co-authored,” I mean it was written entirely by Cutler with sparse quotes and interviews from the Dalai Lama. I have nothing personal against Cutler, but I hate the tone of this book—to me, it makes too-obvious observations from an overly naive point of view, and the overall writing really grates on me. People seem to like this book, so I guess I’m an outlier on this one, but I really can’t recommend it.

Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education: This is one of Michael Pollan’s first books, published in 2003, which largely discusses his personal relationship with gardening and the earth and how it shaped his view of our society in that context. It’s not a particularly heavy or technical read—it’s not really “a gardener’s education” so much as it is a sort of philosophical view of what “gardening” means in our modern world—but I liked it.

Bossypants: Tina Fey’s “biography,” though it’s not so much a biography as it is a series of short stories about Tina Fey’s life (somewhat a la David Sedaris). I loved this book. That’s all there really is to say about it. The humor is dry and hilarious while the writing is also open and candid. I want everyone to read this book.

Foie Gras Wars: I actually can’t remember when I finished reading this book, but it was a while ago. I don’t care though, because I never wrote about it. Anyway, I have a tendency to be into single-subject sociological nonfiction books about food*, so it’s no surprise I was into this book. Basically, it discusses the foie gras industry, what happened in Chicago that led to its ban (and subsequent unban), what foie gras means culturally, and so on. This was one of the most fascinating food-related books I have read, in fact, and I have read good number of them. If you’re at all even marginally interested in foie gras, animal rights, or even Chicago politics, you should read this.

* Foie Gras Wars joins other books like Salt, Four Fish, Tomatoland (which I am currently reading), Banana: the fate of the fruit that changed the world, and probably a couple others that focus entirely on a single food category or item. I have another book about the “scandalous world of olive oil” on my Kindle sample list as I write this, so, you can see I have a problem here. Really, I just love food.

** Cutting out the intro to this post and the footnotes, it totaled 699 words. So, close enough.