The Benefit of Communal Living

I know we don't mention them much, but we have neighbors who live on the floor below us. They started out pretty active in the yard when they moved here about a year ago, but they have been kind of keeping to themselves indoors for a while. This place can be rather deflating if you allow it to get to you. It's nice because we sort of have the yard to ourselves, but it's not cool if it's because folks aren't happy.

Well they were out and about yesterday and whoa boy did they do something sweet. What you are looking at is the brand new, house fire pit. I think the inside diameter is about two and a half feet.

What I'm really looking forward to is roasting my hot peppers over some coals before I zap them into sauce. I am curious though, is there a particular wood that I should use, or will any old log do? Hmm.

What Not To Compost

Meg shared with me an interesting fact the other day. She said that tomato plants are susceptible to somewhere around 10,000 different diseases. How accurate that number is, I couldn't say, but this doesn't detract from the fact that your tomatoes should be treated like the boy in the bubble. Okay, that is an exaggeration, but I'm not kidding you when I say that the slightest thing to go askew could spell disaster for your plants.

Since the tomato plants can potentially harbor some nasty little nasties even after they are uprooted, it is highly suggested that you do not try to compost them (translation: don't even effing think about it). So, for those of us who are lucky enough to have the space to plant more than a few tomato plants, this may lead to some questions as to what should be done with the mountain of dead plants come fall. From what we've read, there are two simple solutions: one is to bag them up and send them to the curb



and two is to torch them. As you can see we are leaning heavily towards option two, because, well, it's fire and fire's cool.