gardening, Media, Nature, Uncategorized

Too Much of a Good Thing

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Two years ago, husband and I bought cow pots (containers made from cow manure), in which to start our vegetable seedlings. It certainly made sense, since they were advertised to fertilize the plants while they were getting started. Then the plants could be put  in the garden pot and all, so they would continue to be  fertilized as they grew outside.

They sure didn’t work the way the ads said they would. We had the most pitiful seedlings the last two years.  (It didn’t help that last year the cat ate all the pepper seedlings before we could get them in the ground.) The seedlings started out fine, but  6 weeks after of germination their growth came to a stand still as the roots made contact with the pot, and they languished until we got them out of the pots and into the ground.  It dawned on us that the manure that made up the pots was too rich and “hot” for the seedlings to tolerate. We should have known, since we put composted manure on the garden in the fall so it has a chance to really rot and cool down over the winter.  The cow pots were too much of a good thing. This year we used plastic pots to start the seedlings, and they are the best we have ever started.

When have you experienced too much of a good thing?  When has a product (or person) not lived up you your expectations?

30 thoughts on “Too Much of a Good Thing”

  1. Good morning! We are in the MPLS airport. We have a nice, long layover until our flight leaves for Atlanta. I hate running from one gate to the next and barely making a flight, so this time we have doesn’t seem like too much of a good thing.

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        2. Savannah is a good place to be if you plan on playing hooky. But since you’ve made the effort to be at the conference, I suspect you’ll probably attend as many sessions as you can tolerate. Try to have some fun, though.

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  2. Well, the obvious one here would be winter, but I won’t mention that.

    Lately there have been a lot of wonder films and other events, so that when combined with weekly evening commitments – the calendar is getting fuller than I like. But I hate to miss anything…
    Hoping I can get to BBC on Sunday at Caroline’s, but it will depend on the weather.

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      1. Last night we saw a documentary called Weapons of the Spirit – “tells the story of the conspiracy of goodness of a mountain community in France that defied the Nazis and took in and saved” 3500 Jews, including the film maker and his parents. Part of the nascent “sanctuary” movement here in Winona…

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        2. Isn’t McDormand great, even in a small part? The writing for that film was so good, as for example in the creation of her character. Their relationship is like no other relationship I’ve seen in any film. Sam and Bunny have hurt each other badly in the past, yet they are still fond of each other and mean to get along if they can. It was touching to hear Bunny admit that she had been difficult to live with as she was “tightly wound.”

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  3. This time of year I’ll gonwith hard boiled eggs. Daughter likes to dye Easter eggs – plain old Paas will do, but there will be eggs. And there needs must be more than a dozen. This year we did a dozen and a half – some years we have done two dozen. That’s a lot of hard boiled eggs for three people to consume…

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    2. This is an issue at our house as well. We both like to die the eggs and then we have lots of them around the house. We’ve made deviled eggs twice and I’m thinking there will be some egg salad made this weekend.

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  4. Timely post. Yesterday I started a “tutorial” with an acquaintance to help her get to know the ropes of Lightroom, the photography software I use, so she can organize her photos, of which she has many. I told her to have ready 10-25 photos ready to import into LR – and she had ready all the photos she took on a recent weekend away, all 823 of them. Now if I have a pretty long day of shooting or am in a particularly beautiful spot, I may have 100 or so photos for the day and I feel like that’s plenty to sort through and deal with. And I end up with several that look similar to each other. But she carries this to a whole new level. I might have 5-10 similar photos of the same subject; she will have 30-50. Or more. Now multiply that out by many, many years of her taking photos at basketball games, events, her dogs, and nature and wildlife and realize that the photos are here, there, and everywhere on her computer and you get an idea of how many thousands of unorganized photos we’re looking at.

    I have a pretty simple system for organizing my photos in LIghtroom; it works very well and I never get confused and am always able to find what I want. As far as I’m concerned, the system will work as well for 100,000 photos as it will for 100 photos. But she wants to make it more complex “because that’s how my brain works.” I try to explain to her that if she trusts Lightroom to do its job and she does her job with keywording and stuff, she can keep it simple but she thinks she knows better. If she insists on making it more complicated than necessary – for instance, keeping the photos in 50 folders with 30 subfolders and sub-sub folders in each folder, instead of keeping them in 1-10 folders with no subfolders, I will have to tell her that I can’t help her anymore because I’ll be too confused.

    My way or the highway. More is not necessarily better in this case.

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      1. She has this idea that because she has way more photos than I do that it means she needs to make it a more complex system to handle all of the photos. She does not. She can use the exact system I use, it will just have more photos in it. And it will work fine.

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  5. When YA was in Middle School I decided I wanted to try a CSA one summer. I knew there were just two of us but I’d heard so many stories about people who had shared csa’s and come to blows over who got this many raspberries and who got that many blueberries that I decided we would just take a whole CSA for the summer and I would just deal with it. Well one CSA for two people is too much- I’m just telling you. My entire summer was taken up by that CSA, finding recipes ( especially for all the greens) and dealing with how much stuff we had. Freezing and canning took up a lot of my time.

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    1. We shared a CSA share with a friend for a couple years. We even tried a half share. The weeks of beets and beet greens are still seered into my brain…even with four adults between my friend’s house and ours there was an excess some weeks. I gave up. We simply do not consume enough produce to have it be worthwhile.

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      1. And of course for you and me, Anna, there are so many good farmers markets with produce all summer long a CSA doesn’t really make that much sense.

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        1. That’s what I’ve determined too. I did a CSA one year back when the kids were still all at home and the produce was delicious and there was lots of variety. Therein lay the problem. Certain veggies were more popular than others but because of the vast variety in each week’s box, the popular green beans didn’t necessarily feed all of us, while we had too much of the less popular or less familiar veggies. The next year I tried a different CSA that seemed to focus more on the basics. After several weeks of lots and lots of onions and carrots I determined it was better to just go to the farmers market. There are only so many onions we could eat and, frankly, fresh-from-the-garden carrots and onions are not the most exciting things to get directly from the farmer.

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  6. Too much of a good thing? Never. People living up to my expectation? Very rarely. That’s not their problem; it’s mine. In this phase of life, I’m trying really hard to just have no expectations at all.

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