Seedlings, Speaking, and Speaking of Seedlings

About a week ago, I had some friends over to jam some music of the generally very-loud rock variety. Coincidentally, this jam session coincided with the first emergence of the sproutlings from the first set of soilblocks. Everybody was checking out the sproutlings and somehow our conversations migrated to the whacked out and glorious scientific research of the 1970's, where researchers would subject plants to classical music or grating noise/heavy metal to see which plants would grow best. Of course, the classical music plants always grew best. Awww, the 70's.

Ultimately, we subjected my sproutlings to a similar test that evening. And ultimately, the sproutlings died because of heavy metal. Whoops. It turns out extreme low-end frequencies like those created by bass and keyboards will physically shake the soilblocks off their perch, and those soil tests and sproutlings ended up like Humpty Dumpty.

As a result, I ended up moving the seedling space from the jam room to the neighboring storage room in my basement. There's a picture of the new incubating space. Emergence has been pretty good except for some dryspots and me covering seeds that are not supposed to be covered when sprouting.

Me and my buddy, Mike went out to the farm for the first time this Spring on Wednesday. We covered a 300 square foot area with a literal ton of coffee grinds from Loop Coffeehouse and did a real cursory till. It smelled so good! My sandled feet and bare hands were stained brown. Also of note, I got my first redneck of the 2010 season. Now I just gotta cut the sleeves from my old heavy metal t-shirts for the whole package. In addition, we picked up three loads of trash while we were there, re-using the coffee grind bags. If you can't tell, my car's a total mess.

TOTALLY EXCITING NEWS! I have my first speaking engagement since this whole undertaking. It's on April 5th at Great Lakes Brewing Company. Entrepreneurs for Sustainability and Local Food Cleveland are co-sponsoring the event. It's meant to be a showcase of the Re-Imagining Cleveland project. I encourage everyone to go. You will need to RSVP at any of the sponsors' websites.