Saturday, June 13, 2009

I can see my house from here!

I found an amazing bit of free software called Google Earth, which has a sort of ominous ring to it. I'ts an interactive model of the earth composed of sattelite images. And for most of the US, their pretty sharp pictures too. Some larger cities have a feature called street view, which zooms down to ground level and then displays panoramic photos of the surrounding view. Also you can turn on a button that shows where, for example, a video clip was shot. If I took a movie of my trip to Niagra Falls, I can mark that on the map for all the world to see, and they can watch my movie on YouTube.
At some level, it gives me concerns about privacy rights and purpose and power of technology. But at the same time it was just amazing that the whole dar thing worked, and worked well! It's a lot of fun but it'd be real easy to lose yourself looking at maps for a few days.
You are now here:
I found out about a lot of this while looking at someones map of their yard showing a garden layout. The folks at Path to Freedom are well aware of the amazingness of Google Earth and you can see their front yard gadens as well as watch interviews with the family, right from the map. The work their doing is at least as amazing as the software so you can check them out also.

CS

The real garden






THIS is cool. I've never had a garden before. My mother always had flower and occasionaly veggie gardens as far as I can remember. One of my first memories is of planting corn (which as I recall, was eaten by racoons. Darn racoons...). My wife has a strawberry garden but my only significant contribution was turning over the dirt at the begining.

We've talked about putting in a garden, and we're going to put in a good one this year untill we decided to put me in college. No time for both we said. Then one day my neighbor was asking about the strawberries and said something on the lines of "Hey I've got seeds and plants, you want some?" It wasn't exactly a nudge from God in my mind but I said yes and picked up a few other seeds and went to work.
I love it. Of course I don't really know what I'm doing. A can generally tell a weed from a good plant, and I know dry dirt means dead plants, but really just winging it.

But now I've got a few little square of corn, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, chives, and flowers coming up. Everymorning, whether it needs it or not, I tend my little patch of dirt. And to confirm to me that miracles do happen and God loves us, the little plants are growing strong.

Beginings

Welcome to A Potato Garden. I hope I can use this to share what my family and I are up to with family, friends, and guests. I'm something of a hermit and have difficulty keeping intouch with even those very close to me.
Also I've learned a lot from some other blogs, maybe you have too. It'd be great to think that someone could be helped by my somewhat eclectic interests.

So enjoy, and take care!

CS