I've got my plants hardening off outside now.
When I'm done, I'll have a full flat of lettuce, plus basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, mint. Peppers and tomatoes will come later.
I have a lot of legacy plants; an old rose I trellised last year, a lilac, etc. Out in the main yard we have a "dwarf orchard" around the edge of dwarf variety fruit and nut trees: pear, apple, chestnut, and a cherry tree that forgot it was a dwarf tree.
I keep trying blueberries and failing but we do have raspberries.
I don't have a lot of space. The one big thing I did that increased the yield of my garden was to go to garden boxes -- basically, 2X4s with preformed metal corners that they slide into. I have two four foot square boxes for the vegetable garden. With the boxes, I can fill the whole darn thing with peat moss and add just enough topsoil so that it doesn't all blow away. Plants love it.
Another curious thing: Who's John Usher, the person the list is attributed to? That's not the owner's name. Is the list a quote from a book or article?
One thing that's also rarely noted is that it's quite possible for a used bookstore to have bigger margins than a new bookstore. Back when I worked at a new bookstore, we never got more than 40% off the cover price, so if a book cost $10, the store made $4. But at used bookstores, we bought books by the crateload from library and estate sales for as little as ten cents (like most used bookstores we also bought books from patrons, giving them 20-40% of cover price on new books, but that represented only a small minority of total stock). A decent new hardback bought at that price could sell for $5-7 dollars. The thing was, you couldn't control your stock to make allowances for popular titles or subjects as easily as you could at a new bookstore.
I worked at AVH for three years in the early nineties when I was in college. There were so many funny stories about the place! I think some of the best stories are about the cat. The cat that preceded Smoky Joe, Jupiter, developed diabetes. After taking him to the vet, Vince wondered what to do: should he have the cat put to sleep? Ultimately, he said that if everyone on the staff agreed to learn to give the cat an injection of insulin. One of the store's longtime managers, Tom, had a wry sense of humor and the most efficient injection technique on the staff. He'd snatch up the cat and have the injection finished by the time the cat could blink. One day, he followed the cat behind the counter with the loaded syringe, plucked the cat off the floor, plopped him onto the counter and BANG! Mission accomplished. One problem: a customer was in front of the counter with an armful of books. She was so startled that she yelped, dropped the books on the floor, and ran out the door.
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| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 2 |
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