Prepping Remington Garden for Winter

Last Saturday a whole crew of Hopkins students came out to help prepare the Remington Community Garden for winter.

Old stalks were pulled from the ground, new compost was added, and the site was generally cleaned up. I also cleaned out the various compost buckets in my backyard, and dumped some of the excess compost on the strawberry patch. Tried to give a worm composting buckets away for free to some of the Hopkins students, but there were no takers.

Here are some pics:

Hopkins crew helping out, asparagus fronds waving in the wind, and mural in the background

Healthy Worm Compost

Shoveling up fresh soil, and some blurry fennel seeds in front

Green tomatoes harvested! Time to make some relish or fried green tomatoes!

The bees were still going nuts on these flowers (can you find the little guy in the photo?) One of my favorite things about the garden is seeing what a haven for wildlife it is, in the heart of the city.

Lemon Mint collected to make some delicious tea

Muhammad showing off the taro root he and his wife grew. They're a root vegetable that is cooked similar to potato, apparently. Very exciting to see different types of plants!

I didn't know this, but Muhammad and his wife told me that cilantro grows all winter.


Although I'm sad that we won't have as much fresh produce at our disposal, it's kind of nice to relax a bit and settle down for the winter. Hopefully I'll bring up some red clover soon to add as a cover crop for the soil. And then I can harvest the blooms for tea!

Combat Paper

In light of the recent Fort Hood events, and in support of everyone who has been involved in the crisis of our nearly decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I am posting a link to an inspiring article by Elise Ertel, from elephantjournal.com.

Here is the link: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2009/11/art-healing-iraq-veterans/

Let's help heal our society, so that the violence that is being perpetuated in our name doesn't fester. Art is one way of releasing personal stress, and it is a great way for the community to come together in support of something positive.

Iraq Veterans Against the War is another great organization to help support returning veterans and move towards peace.

Little Nemo in Slumberland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Nemo

And now for a fun post completely unrelated to DIY.

Some of you may already be aware of another of my fascinations, a deep love for newspaper comics. Baltimore's own Comics Curmudgeon is an almost daily read for me, and Calvin and Hobbes and Krazy Kat are some of my favorite books of all time.

During my trip to New York a few weekends ago, I found a calendar in the St. Marks bookstore that completely blew my newspaper-comics-lovin' mind.

Written in 1908, these panels are more refreshing, unusual, and hilariously surreal than anything I've seen today. Not to mention the beautiful colors used, and panels that completely blow today's format of three or four horizontal little boxes out of the water.

I just love the quiet strangeness:


And Little Nemo's completely loveable assortment of sidekicks and characters.

To quote Dr. Pill, the monacled man holding a gun, "That chap with the green face is Flip. He is twenty-nine years old, but has the mind of a child of nine. We have Impie there, too. A Zulu from Nowhere and also Slivvers a well meaning bonehead who is harmless but always in the way...":




And strange storylines, like this one where Little Nemo is taken in by beautiful mermaids who are trying to escape the grasp of Flip, and instead ends up having to protect the little hobo:




The last panel of every comic is always of Little Nemo waking up from his strangely vivid dream:


Apparently Fantagraphics has several Little Nemo books, which I will hopefully be checking out soon. If you like newspaper comics, this is a definite recommend!



A real classic.

King Arthur's Almost-No-Knead Baguette

Baking isn't my strong suit. Yet. But a popular new bread baking trend has just come across my radar, and I have to say that I have seen the light. Check out this great loaf that I just made this morning!

It's all about the No Knead Bread Dough.

The loaf above was made with King Arthur's Organic Flour, and I found a great baguette recipe on their website: http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/the-almost-no-knead-baguette-recipe

This recipe takes a lot of the messy, tiring work out of making bread. Just mix together flour, yeast, salt, and water in a bowl, and let it sit overnight in your fridge.

The end result is a very fluffy bread with lots of air pockets, and a crackly, crispy crust. To quote Homer Simpson, "Gaaaaaaah."

I used a bucket from when I used to buy bulk tofu at the Asian market. Here's a photo of the dough when it's first mixed:


Then you let the dough rise for two hours. I took the opportunity to watch Barry Levinson's film "Diner" since it's been on my list of Baltimore Films to watch. Here's the dough after the movie, you can see how fluffy it is:


Then I covered the bucket with a damp cloth, put it in my fridge, and went to sleep.

The next morning I pulled off a chunk and kneaded it into a small loaf. I learned my kneading technique from a video that was posted by Baltimore's great bakery Atwater's, but unfortunately I can't find it right now...

Knowing how to knead a loaf helps with creating good air pockets in your bread. Mainly it involved pulling the dough from the outside of your ball into the center. Perhaps soon I will make a video and post it on the site!

Anyway, here is my loaf, which I let rise on top of my heater:

Heehee, this shot turned out very noir somehow. Like some desperate dame is going to come in and hire this loaf of bread to be her private eye...

In any case, I thought this loaf was going to be a failure because I only let it rise for 30 minutes, instead of an hour and a half.

Needless to say, the loaf was a lot denser than it should be, but it still turned out pretty good if I do say so myself. Can't wait to try it with the correct version.

PERFECT vehicle for the homemade blackberry jam that my neighbor traded me for some of my extra CSA vegetables. I brought out some of my local butter from Mill Valley, but this bread was so warm and chewy, I didn't even need it.


I added the coffee mug so that you can see the size of the loaf.

The best part this recipe is that you can make a huge container of pre-mixed dough and leave it in your fridge for over a week.

Just pull off a chunk of the dough and you can have a loaf of bread with half of the rising time. It's still an hour and a half of rising time, so this does require some planning, but not really that much work compared to regular bread making recipes.

I think I've just become a homemade bread convert!

Support for Baltimore's Recent Rape Victims

A few moments ago I sent an open letter to the 2640 mailing list to see if there are any events going on around the city in support of the victims of a recent series of rapes across Baltimore.

Here's the story for those of you who are unaware: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bal-md.ci.rapes03nov03,0,1765205.story

Hey Everyone,

Apologies for sending this out over the list, but I figured that if anyone had an answer to my question, you wonderful, connected, righteous folks might.

I'm curious if anyone has heard anything about any women's rights protests in light of the recent string of bus stop rapes? It just seems to me that it might be nice for women (and men) all across the city to come together in solidarity at a time like this to show our support for the victims, and to say that this kind of action in our community can't be tolerated.

I"m not thinking of anything really protest-y or overt, but I have visions perhaps of a series of god's eyes strung up at the locations of the rapes, maybe some posters, maybe a drive for women's shelters. But if there is already an event going on, it would be nice to support that. Anyone know of such a thing?

It just seems to me that something of this scope can't and shouldn't be taken as just a shocking story on the nightly news.

Thanks all! See you folks tonight.

Get Yr Revolution On Tonight

TONIGHT AT 2640 ST. PAUL 7PM

Note: As always, BaltimoreDIY sticks to the creed of individualism. To quote Richard Fariña, "Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence." Meaning, I do not affiliate directly with any specific political, cultural, or other agenda other than the BaltimoreDIY agenda.

That said, I do like to support the ideals of horizontal power structures, and more specifically local collective spaces like 2640 and the Free School, where ideas are spread and plans are laid for a more equal, just, and sustainable world.

Without further ado, here's the event description from the 2640 website:

It's been nearly ten years since the publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, one of the most influential (and controversial) texts in radical political philosophy in recent memory, a touchstone for the then thriving "anti-globalization" movement.

While the euphoria of that historical moment may have passed, the demand to think through the politics of resistance on a global scale has, if anything, become more urgent.

And for those of us who have not given up on such a project, who still believe, to invoke the watchword of years past, that "another world is possible", the continuing work of Hardt and Negri to theorize both their Power to dominate the world and our (collective) power to fight back and build alternatives remains an inspiration and a vitally necessary starting point.


We are thus exceptionally excited to welcome Michael Hardt to Baltimore for an evening of discussion on the occasion of the release of Commonwealth, the final volume in the trilogy, co-authored with Antonio Negri, that began with Empire and continued with 2004's Multitude.

This new text attempts to outline a grand synthesis between many of the most important strands of recent critical inquiry, weaving together the autonomist Marxist insistence on the defense of "the commons" together with an equally essential notion of "altermodernity" drawn from postcolonial theory and related struggles taking place at the intersections of race and gender.

And it does all this in a way which is immediately accessible to an interested reader, not restricted to the specialist or expert, not demanding years of previous reading --- one can read Commonwealth not as the end of a trilogy, but as a book that stands alone.

Ultimately, it is more an introduction rather than a conclusion, a roadmap to the depth and breadth of recent radical theory and an invitation to join (or rejoin) the continuing struggle for a better world.

Homemade Bjork

As mentioned in today's earlier post, the Bugs Bunny costume I had been hoping for all week fell through.

So at 5:30 pm on Halloween, I frantically dug through my stash of craft supplies and went for Plan B.

Roll white fabric into a tube, stuff it with a few old t-shirts, add felt details and.. voila!


A somewhat passable imitation of the Bjork swan dress!

Too bad I didn't have enough time to get my hands on a white tutu and boa for feathers. Oh well, there's always next year!

My proudest moment was the next morning after the party when my friend's roommate walked in the front door, saw the swan head on the floor, and said "Who was Bjork?"