Monday, Apr. 09, 2012 - 3:55 p.m.

Dragged my mom on a walk up to campus. She was complaining 3 blocks in but I managed to get her to the far side of campus and halfway back. She needs more exercise, for a number of reasons, but I probably won't get her to agree to that trek again anytime soon. Which is a pity, because left to her own devices, she will not push herself.

As you know, I have a dilemma with where to plant my tomatoes, chiles, and squash. I am too cheap to go and buy planters (I'd have to get 4! Even if I got the cheap plastic ones, that'd be like $60!). So I think I may take a page from the sculptor Steven Siegel's book (or large pile of loose papers, as the case may be), and make a raised bed using layers of cardboard for the walls. We still have all the cardboard from the move. We keep talking about selling the boxes, which if we did would probably net us enough to buy planters, but a) it's been 7 months now and we haven't, so I have no reason to believe we ever will, and b) my idea may turn out to be awesome. Or at least entertaining to me. They don't need to be too big, so there may still be boxes left to sell when I'm done. Or maybe I should just use junk mail. We also have not shredded any junk mail since we moved in.

That's not a half bad idea...

(The thing I find so seductive about landscape/environmental art is how it's improvised from materials on hand. All it takes is open eyes, imagination, and some time, and you can make something lovely.)

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