Welcome to Building Up the Garden

For many years, I had small containers on my apartment balcony filled with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. They didn't always produce a lot - it didn't help that my balcony faced North and didn't get the intense six hours of sun most of the plants required - but I was still able to grow something.

Last year (around this time), I moved into my first house. Part of my excitement in having a house was creating a garden. I had once growing up. My parents always planted tons of kitchen herbs, tomatoes, and flowers. My dad always insisted on having tomatoes in the garden.

Part of my chores growing up was weeding the garden. By my late teens, I finally decided to add my own plants to take care of. I planted carrots, bush beans, and peppers. I don't know why I picked bush beans as I didn't like them (at the time), but they were so easy and fun to grow. I ended up giving them away to my coworkers at the cafe I worked at over the summer. The carrots always ended up looking hilarious - Virginia's soil is heavy with clay which isn't as forgiving as other soil compositions for straight carrots. The peppers and tomatoes were fine.

Since then, I've always had some kind of plant with me. My first indoor plant was a gifted Christmas cactus (that finally died on it's trip from New Jersey back to Virginia), followed by a rosemary plant - that died a lot sooner (rosemary doesn't do well in pots). Then I ended up with a King Tut papyrus and spider plant. These two are still going strong.

I started trying to seriously grow herbs and vegetables again when I moved back to Virginia and had a balcony (my places in New Jersey didn't have outdoor space) and Maryland's apartment was very shady. The results of a north facing balcony garden was mixed. I have a sage plant that's lasted almost six years now.

Last year, as a house warming, I was gifted several large planters I could have on my deck. As I wasn't prepared to start a garden in my yard (and there were already plants in the sectioned off areas that I didn't want to mess with), I chose to container garden on my deck. 

Results, again, were mixed.

My backyard is north facing with lots of trees - specifically a beautiful Japanese maple that takes up a good quarter of the yard. The sun it gets is okay on part of the deck, but not perfect. Also the weather was horrendous last year and I lost a good chunk of my plants to extreme weather conditions. 

However, I was able to get some peas, bush beans, tomatoes, lettuce, and herbs. So far the strawberries have returned this year (I have to fight the birds for them) and my thyme was able to overwinter without a problem. I did lose the parsley, though, and the jury is out on my rosemary and lavender in the front bed. 

This year, I added a raised bed outside my shed. I've planted a larger tomato plant, a banana pepper plant, and a "lunch box sweet" pepper plant. As companions, I added marigolds, cucumbers, and a row of carrots. 

So far the weather has been okay. We did have a late frost (after it being in the freaking 90s in early April). However, the plants I recently purchased at the Leesburg Plant and Flower Festival have been doing well. 

For those of you not in the Northern Virginia area (and for those who are, but aren't aware), Leesburg has an annual Plant and Flower Festival in mid-April. It takes up the main historic part of the town with tons of venders and activities. They even have a spot for where kids can do crafts. I like going because I can often find plants that are specifically cultivated for the Virginia climate and find some native plants. 

However, the native plant garden is a future AJ project. 

With Earth Day being on a Wednesday this year, the Leesburg Plant and Flower Festival was the weekend prior, while the Fairfax County Earth Day celebration was this past Saturday. I finally went to the Earth Day celebration as it was advertised on Meetup by my local chapter of the Sierra Club. They had a nice booth set up. 

Fairfax County seems to have fun with their Earth Day celebrations. There were tons of trucks and busses to touch - the usual fire engines and farm vehicles along with a city bus and garbage truck. The kids were having a blast climbing all over. They also had a rock wall, animals from the Fairfax County farm on Frying Pan Road, and lots of educational booths. I learned a few things about native insects and invasive clams and crayfish. 

There were also a lot of fun food trucks. 

Some of the booths were giving out seed "bombs" for people to plant at home. I picked up a milkweed plant after verifying that it was a native milkweed - non-natives will happily take over everything if given the change. I hope to plant it soon and see some monarch butterflies this year (if not future years). It'll be the start of my native garden.

Well now you've read an entire blog post where I gush about plants. I still have several indoor only plants and a few I keep indoors in the winter and outside during the summer, but some of that is changing.

See, some plants are toxic to our furry friends and I just adopted a cat. I'm currently moving these plants to places she isn't allowed and will either rehome them or find better places for them to stay away from her little claws. My house is also a lily free zone since they are especially dangerous to cats. I didn't have to worry about these plants with my last cat as she was completely uninterested in anything that was the color green (including catnip), but I'm taking no chances with my new kitty.

I'll give you an update on her in one of my future posts. 

Until next week. 

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you all like hearing from me.

Welcome Everything is Tuberculosis

The series of ridiculous events continued throughout March. Mercury was in retrograde for most of it, so maybe that's why I felt like a mess. The mix of  "confusion, delays, and disruptions in communication, travel, and decision-making" (see link from Farmer's Almanac above) wasn't helped by how busy I've been.

But now it's Easter! It's April! It's Spring!

So what do I want to write about? Tuberculosis. 

In mid-March, I finished John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis. The book itself isn't just the history of the disease, but a biography of a young man named Henry who has Tuberculosis (henceforth shorted to TB) in Sierra Leone. John met Henry on a trip to Sierra Leone while they were visiting a TB hospital. Initially thinking Henry was the child of one of the doctors or nurses, John soon learned that Henry had a unique strand of TB that couldn't be treated with first or second line standard treatments. Unless Henry was approved for a new, experimental drug, his survival chances were slim to none.

I likely learned about TB from the 1990s History Channel series "Haunted History". The show took viewers to different cities and locations around the United States, United Kingdom, and parts of the Caribbean to teach history through ghost stories. TB was often one of the causes of death that wasn't violent in the show.

Of course, I learned more about TB once my history classes started focusing on the Victorian period and my English classes had us study poetry. John Keats and the Brontë sisters were well known victims of the disease, but I had no idea that George Orwell or Dashiell Hammett had also died because of TB. They lived well into the mid-twentieth century.

It wasn't until I watched an episode of "Crossing Jordan" that I learned that TB was still around. I thought it had gone the way of Small Pox. I thought it was a disease of the past that could never show up in modern society. Most TB sanitariums were the setting of ghost hunting events, not places that still took in patients. 

A few years after seeing that episode, I'm getting ready to go to college. As part of the preparations I need to get a few extra vaccines and be tested for TB. It wasn't a medical test I was familiar with. The doctor basically gave me a shallow shot and told me that if a bubble formed on my skin in the next few days, to come back as quickly as possible. False positives could also occur if the injected area was irritated or rubbed too much. I spent the next few days hyper aware of this tiny patch of skin. 

I tested negative by the way. 

TB is also a lot older than I thought. John Green explains that it has existed as long as humans have. There are mummies that have been discovered with signs of TB infections. I thought TB was a newer disease, like AIDs. 

Lungs aren't the only organ TB can infect. It can jump to the kidneys, liver, bones, skin, among other location. And TB can lay dormant in a person for years before it becomes active, which is when it becomes deadly. 

Because people didn't understand how diseases like TB spread for a long time, superstitions and incorrect assumptions became the norm. During the Victorian era, many doctors thought it was a genetic disease because it often quickly killed off entire families. Upper classes seemed to assume that the lower classes couldn't be infected with TB and it was only a wealthy and creative person's disease. 

Obviously they were wrong. Anyone can get TB. It's spread from droplets expelled by a person when they cough or spit. 

TB even caused a vampire scare in New England in the late 1800s. Mercy Brown had been the first member of her family to die of TB. However, instead of accepting the TB diagnosis, her family began to suspect that she was actually a vampire, stealing the "life force" of her family. As more members of her family died, her father and other members of the community, decided to dig up her body. It didn't look like it had decomposed at all and there was blood in her heart. Clearly, that meant she was the one causing her family to fall ill and die. Her father removed her heart and liver, burned them, then turned the ashes into a tonic for Mercy's sick brother to drink. 

The brother died two months later...from TB.

I'm not going to tell you how the book ends. If you want to learn Henry's fate, you should pick up a copy to read for yourself. I got mine out from the library.

What I will tell you, is that Henry's TB progressed into a treatment resistant strain for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is because when he was first diagnosed as a little kid his first line treatment was continually interrupted. Sierra Leone's health care system was already over burdened before the civil war broke out in the early 2000s. Further complicating Henry's treatment was his low socioeconomic status and his father's distrust of medical advice. At one point, Henry's father even stopped him from taking his medication and took him to a faith healer instead. 

In addition to Henry's worsening illness, he also had to deal with the social stigma of having TB. In the century since TB provided a coveted look for poets and creatives to romanticize, it became stigmatized as a disease that only poor people suffer from. People didn't want to approach him or his mother (she also had TB, but responded to first line treatment).

It was the interruptions to Henry's treatment that caused the TB to mutate so that the disease could no longer be treated with the standard medications. It evolved, like many diseases do, until all known treatments were ineffective. 

One of the many reasons doctors tell you to take your anti-biotic medicine until the prescription is finished even if you feel better, is because of mutating diseases. There are now tons of diseases that used to be easy to treat, but now are resistant to standard care - many are bacterial. Viruses are also prone to these mutations. The reason we need flu shots every year is because of how quickly the flu vaccine mutates. 

Many diseases that were once thought to be "extinct" in the United States are suddenly coming back. My parents used to tell stories about measles and mumps, they knew at least one person who had gone deaf because of the common childhood disease. I never had the measles or mumps because I got a vaccine when I was really little. My parents didn't want me to suffer from a disease they knew could be deadly or, at the very least, have serious life changing side effects. 

On that note. Please check out Everything is Tuberculosis and listen to your doctors about what's best for your health and the community's health.

Oh and Happy Easter. I hope the bunny left some chocolate for you.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y'all like hearing from me.

Until next week.