Golden Years Gardening

     As we age, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weaker...when it comes to gardening. 

     Our enjoyment of growing fruit, flowers and vegetables seems to increase as the years fly by. Maybe it's because we've come to better appreciate how nature works; maybe it's because we enjoy doing things closer to home; or, maybe it's because plants don't talk back. 

     Whatever the reason, one thing is for certain: we don't bend down into a flower bed, lift bags of fertilizer and pull weeds as easily as we used to. As a result, we know that a few hours working briskly in the yard may result in an evening of moving slower.
   
    Here are some tips for implementing an easy-care garden for the Golden Years, advice that can be summed up in three words: automate, elevate and eliminate.

• Automate. Provide your garden with an automatic watering system. The efficiency of an automated sprinkler or drip irrigation system protects your plants from the summertime heat when you're away from home. And, a good drip system reduces water usage, unwanted weed growth and plant diseases. Install low-voltage night lighting, equipped with sensors, to automatically come on at sunset throughout the yard.

• Elevate. Build raised planters for your flowering plants and vegetables. Not only do raised beds reduce the amount of stooping and kneeling that are a necessary part of gardening, raised beds provide better drainage for plants that don't like "wet feet". Built of wood, concrete or brick, a raised bed, 18-24 inches high, gives you a place to sit while weeding, pruning or harvesting. Make the raised beds any length you desire; but keep the width less than four feet across for ease of reaching into the middle of the bed. And lining the bottom of these beds with quarter-inch mesh hardware cloth will keep gophers from sampling the fruits of your labor.

• Eliminate. Why waste time fretting over a habitually under performing perennial, shrub or tree? If it is growing awkwardly or is consistently pest infested despite your best efforts, bring out the chipper/shredder. Dig it out, chop it up and get another plant that will do better. Better yet, have someone else do the digging and chopping. 

Although the attempt to totally eradicate weeds is an exercise in futility, adding three or four inches of mulch, such as a walk-on bark, can dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend pulling weeds.

Cutting Edge? More like, "Crash and Burn Edge"

This post has little to do with gardening. But it has everything to do with getting you more "yard time" and less time dealing with vexing indoor computer issues. In particular, the time consuming hassles of updating the heart of your computer, the operating system. Be it a PC or a Mac, it is not uncommon for early adapters to operating system upgrades to go through computer hell: updating printer drivers, getting older programs to work properly, searching for missing files, making sense of new folders, labeled in gibberish.

This rant comes from the folks at Magic Mouse, makers of a fine, easy to use layout program, Discus. Originally Discus was intended as a CD labeling program. Now, it is much more. It simplifies photo and text manipulation to the point that those of us who are clumsy at programs such as Photoshop Elements can easily create photo laden documents with a few clicks and drags of the mouse. I use it frequently for designing my garden handouts, such as this (Hey, I never said I had any artistic design talent. I just want to do the basics!).

The folks at Magic Mouse recently sent out an e-mail to their customers talking about a flurry of tech support inquiries they had received in recent weeks about compatibility with Macintosh OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard); Windows users calling about Quicktime issues if they install I-Tunes 9; and, (compatibility) information about the upcoming Windows 7 system. 

But what they also included is great advice that applies to all computer owners, especially those who are quick to purchase the latest operating systems, WAIT:



"We are old hands at computers, going back to the punch card era, and can state with authority that if you value your time and would like to avoid unnecessary  frustration in your life, we recommend that you NOT UPGRADE TO ANY NEW OPERATING  SYSTEM UNTIL SIX MONTHS HAVE PASSED.  

The trusting people who recently purchased Apple's Snow Leopard and immediately installed it were greeted with hundreds of terrible bugs.  It was reckless of Apple not to test their system more
thoroughly before releasing it to millions of paying customers.

When you immediately upgrade to a major new operating system version you are basically volunteering to be an unpaid tester for the supplier.  Unlike bran muffins, fresh operating system versions are not better;  they are more like wine, which benefits from age.  

Operating systems are among the most complex projects  ever attempted with hundreds if not thousands of man-years of work inside, and every major system shipping today went out the door with tens of thousands of known defects.  

Both Apple and Microsoft have a bug tracking system and the
managers at Apple and Microsoft know full well that their products are riddled with defects but market forces dictate that they ship on a fixed calendar schedule regardless of the consequences to the customer. If they waited until the product was flawless it would never ship at all.

Approximately 35% of the laptops containing Vista were downgraded to XP.  And this is after an entire year of Vista on the street.

There are two places you can be in the computer world - the bleeding edge and the trailing edge, and we recommend to all our customers to buy proven hardware technologies that are least two years old and try to stay behind in operating systems until you start to hit problems because you are too far behind.  

When  you stay behind a bit you enjoy low prices, complete reliability, and lots of technical help."

Now, back to the garden...and its own bugs.