Balancing

There are a thousand different ways of looking at something like balance. Not too much exercise and not too much intellectual work. A balance between yin and yang. Ecosystem Earth is both dying and being born. To maintain a balanced mind you don't wanna be too optimistic or too pessimistic. Balance work and play. It's good to be doing things for others, but you have to balance that with taking care of yourself too.

The balance of nature is upset in many areas. A healthy, diverse community has many different types of people, plants, and animals. In a healthy soil, disease is kept somewhat in balance by the births, lives, and deaths of trillions of microbes and larger life forms. A balanced diet means eating a variety of healthy foods. To have a balanced attitude, one must pay attention to problems while looking for solutions.

What's growing at Everybody's Garden? The strawberries are done; there were only a few. Figs, apples, peaches aren't ready yet. Chives, sage, tomatoes, tomatillos, mulberry, leek, berries, fennel, lavendar, rosemary,sunflower, sunchoke (aka Jerusalem artichoke), thyme, roses done already, purple irises done, rose-of-sharon flowering, comfrey, 2 six-year old or more apricot trees have yet to yield a crop. The kids try the apples before they're ripe, so we'll see what happens this year,...

Denial of drastic environmental change having become impossible, I've got some more than thirty papaya trees started in a little oval bed under the peach trees. Papaya doesn't normally grow where winters get below freezing, but I don't think we're ever going to see a normal winter again. We may not get that cold again in this part of the world. Papaya likes to be in say the Caribbean. Hopefully we're not going to burn up, like millions in other parts of the world, and Pittsburgh will continue to pioneer new technologies to serve other parts of the planet that are becoming hotter. I don't know how tall these papaya trees will grow; they are from seeds in papaya fruit I bought in the Strip. But I had them and banana trees growing in Miami about 8 feet tall before I had to move. Where is there room to transplant some of these baby papaya trees to?

It is a continuing effort with me to convince that, just as with predator/prey relationships and how they keep epidemics of e.g. rabbits by more e.g. hawks being born having having had plenty of rabbits to eat, microbial biodiversity suppresses but does not eliminate disease - by competition and predator/prey relationships at the microbial level.

O, by the way, the only animal I've seen in the garden, other than cats or dogs, has been a couple of toads and a family of rabbits. Come visit. Everybody's welcome.