(no subject)

When I was out in California last month, a friend of mine asked "Why would you ever vote for McCain?" My response was "Because he's actually done the hard work of bipartisanship that Obama talks about doing." In today's Washington Post, columnist David Ignatius looks at Obama's record on bipartisanship and finds it disturbingly thin.

"The authentic Barack Obama? We just don't know. The level of uncertainty is too high," one Democratic senator told me last week. He noted that Obama hasn't been involved in any "transformative battles" where he might anger any of the party's interest groups. "If his voting record in the past is the real Barack Obama, then there isn't going to be any bipartisanship," this senator cautioned.

As I think I've said before, Obama needs to convince me that his brand of bipartisanship isn't just the same old "do it my way, or else" wrapped in a more elegant package. Despite his reputation, McCain actually has a legislative record of working with the other party to achieve results.

Seedling season starts...

I put in my first seedlings today, four small pots of Gala Mache, a kind of lettuce. It's a slow germinator - between 2-4 weeks - but also very cold-resistant which is why I'm starting them now; I should be able to put them in the ground well before everything else. There were a lot of seeds left over, so I put some of them directly in the ground in one of our raised beds just to see what comes up, if anything. Mache takes around 3 months (!) to totally mature, which is another reason I wanted to start them earlier than everything else. The seedlings are in my indoor greenhouse, which I've set up in the west-facing window in our guest room (and freaked out the cats, wondering why all of a sudden there's this plastic-covered thing in "their" room).

Last frost in southern Maryland is roughly around April 14th, but to be on the safe side I probably won't be putting anything other than the mache into the ground until a couple of weeks after that. That's about 8 weeks away. We're going to be trying growing cucumbers, peas, and green peppers this year as well as the tomatoes, and they all take between 1-3 weeks to germinate. So, around March 22nd or so I should be putting most of those in, hopefully around the same time the mache starts coming up.

What looks like tulips, and possibly crocus, are starting to pop up around the garden. I'm not really sure what everything is yet, since for the most part we're working with what the previous owners put in and we weren't here last year. I definitely am going to have to replace a few of the trellises once it gets warm again, since they more or less collapsed over the winter. I would like to try growing jasmine, so that's another reason to get the trellises up to par.

One other thing that I'm thinking about trying, but don't have seeds for yet, are Icelandic poppies. In our zone (7A) they should be growable, but probably not hardy enough to overwinter at all. Also, being poppies, I can't put them in the same beds as the vegetables, too toxic.