Guerilla gardening

I like to stay true to my live-off the land roots - minus manual labor of hauling 5 gallon drinking water jugs to the house before we had plumbing and the winter activity of pulling sleds full of frozen clothes, washed in town and brought home to dry.  But my other "roots" are in worlds lush with green growing things, like the tomatoes that self-seeded in our compost pile on Saipan, or the huge arcs of peas I could walk under in my parent's garden in Alaska.  In Portland, I try to mantain as small a carbon-footprint as possible by gardening, recycling, and reusing as much  and here I try to do the same.  Here are some of my projects:   My simple 5 gallon-bucket compost system --->

                                          My tomatoes, grown from seed, produced a good amount of salad-fixings.   These cosmos and other flowers, which I grew from seeds I brought from the US, brighten up the patio. Next to them are spinach and lettuce.   

Here are some of my other urban garden techniques:                                           Compost central: 5 gallon buckets hold our food scraps

I've been intrigued by compost-tea for awhile, so this year I decided to make my own. 

     The plastic bag holds compost, and the water I pour into the top filters through the compost out the hole in the bottom, where I collect it to use on the plants.  

    I've just wrested a small section of ground from the grass and planted radishes and more lettuce - we only have 90 more days here, so I think this will be the last crop I can sow from seed.  Then it's back to Portland, just in time to work on prepping for a winter garden.   

    

Piropos, or what not to pay attention to

    When I lived in Ecuador, piropos were as common as the street dogs are here in Mexico (and just as clean).  So common, in fact, that upon my return to the US I felt invisible walking down the street (where was my constant comment brigade?)  I had become perhaps too accustomed to the "Hey mamacita"-type comments from boys on the street.  But here in Mexico, either I've gotten too old for piropos or, as my local friends have told me, they are simply not that common, especially in the city.  So I hardly registered at first tonight's piropo, delivered in a rush of words by a man wearing a shiny blue warm-up jacket and carrying in one hand a plate of food wrapped in aluminum foil. 

     "How are you pretty," I heard, and I wasn't sure at first if I should reply "Pretty fine, thanks," or "Prettier than you."  He was moving so fast down the street (perhaps worried I'd give him a kick in in his culo) that really I couldn't have developed any sort of answer, which is the best response always to a piropo!  

    But where do these men get the idea that it is flattering to have random strangers tell you things like the second piropo I heard (the street brigade was on a roll tonight!), a shouted comment from a quickly moving vehicle: "Missi I love you!"  Now perhaps there was a woman named Missi somewhere in the 2 block radius that I just couldn't see, but I doubt it.  Where do people learn words like "missy"?  And why the shouting out the window?  My male friends who are reading this, perhaps you can comment! 

    Perhaps I should teach an anti-piropo unit in English class, which would include phrases like "Let's have coffee," or "Do you have a business card?" in order to teach proper introductory phrases to my male students.  These would be phrases they could use without needing to move quickly down the sidewalk or in a rapidly moving vehicle, and might be more effective than the "I loooooove you" yelled from across the street.  Who knows? It could be a whole new era of intercultural communication.