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July 2, 2018 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

Blossom bags

What do seed savers have in common with wedding party planners?

They both use a lot of wedding-favor bags:

One of the important parts of seed-saving is making sure you are saving the seeds that you want. Which means controlling pollination, so that the seeds you want are bred from the plants you want. To do this, you have to isolate flowers for the fruits you want to save, to prevent accidental crossing through bees, other pollinating insects, or (in some cases), air movement.

Tomatoes are natural inbreeders – they almost always self-pollinate. In fact, in most cases the flower gets pollinated before it even opens. Natural air movement shakes pollen from the stamens onto the female stigma inside the flower bud, and pollination happens before the bud opens. Except in greenhouses, there’s going to be enough wind to pollinate your tomatoes. (Greenhouses actually have to install fans to make sure there’s enough air motion.)

However, if you are deliberately breeding tomatoes, “almost” isn’t good enough – you want to make sure that your plant lines stay pure, and that your crosses are what you think they are. And if your tomato plants are growing in an area with lots of pollinating insects, there’s actually a decent chance that a stray bee or other insect will apply pollen where it shouldn’t. Since we’ve deliberately made our yard a haven for bees and other pollinators, I want to make sure my lines stay pure. Thus, the blossom bags.

My blossom bags are made out of organza, with a drawstring at the bottom. The organza lets light and air through (preventing rot), while keeping out pollinators and other insects. You can buy 3″ x 4″ blossom bags at Seed Savers Exchange for 50 cents each…

…or you can look at them and say, “Hmm, those look awfully familiar!” and buy a 100-pack of wedding-favor organza bags on Amazon, for about 8 cents each.

So now much of the garden looks like this:

Container full of Fuzzy Mix tomato plants with blossom bags

Meanwhile, some of the Fruity Mix tomatoes got ahead of me and are well on the way to ripe fruit:

These won’t be saved for seed, but that means I get to eat them!! What a wonderfully tasty silver lining.

I’m surprised that the Fruity Mix tomatoes are so large – I remember Fruity Mix as being a currant tomato, which are supposed to top out around 1/2″ – really tiny. These are more the size of a small cherry tomato. But I’m not complaining! It will make picking them a lot easier. Currant tomatoes taste delicious but are so small that they’re really only suited to casual grazing.

And the presentation? Still cranking away. 75% of the slide text drafted, need to finish that and add photos. It’s turning out to be a “deeper” presentation than I had expected. Because it’s not just about critique, it’s about the entire way you relate to, and evaluate, your work/skills/interests. People tend to think of critique as something you do at the end of a project, either by yourself or formally with a group of people, where you review your work, talk about all the flaws in the work, and resolve to do better next time. In fact, critique (or “evaluation,” which is what I call it in my book) is something you should do almost continuously throughout the course of making a piece. And it’s not about the negatives – quite the reverse. Evaluating your work isn’t about finding everything that’s wrong; it’s about finding the things that are right, the things that you like. Because those are the things you build on. You can get good work by fixing flaws, but to get great work, you need to find the strengths of the piece and make them powerful.

There’s a lot more to the presentation, but I gotta get back to work! (Especially before my two owners wake up from their midmorning nap and start bugging me about doing my One Job. Fortunately we’re growing catnip in the garden, so perhaps I can distract them with some heavy drugs. Hey, when you’re a mere human, you have to be tricky!)

June 27, 2018 by Tien Chiu 7 Comments

The importance of good nutrition, and the uselessness of arguing with cats

I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been dealing with a series of cascading crises. It started with the tomato plague. I noticed that some of the tomatoes weren’t growing well, and were developing purplish veins on their leaves. Within a week or so, most of the tomato plants were developing purple veins and looking very unhappy. I showed pictures to a tomato expert and to the local Master Gardener’s program, and they agreed that it was probably tomato spotted wilt virus. Which is (a) deadly, (b) contagious, and (c) untreatable.

This would only have been seriously annoying, except that about 3/4 of my plants were the two nearly-extinct varieties that I was trying to preserve. Because I believe in hedging bets, I had given about ten plants to two friends, but there were closer to forty tomato plants in the middle of my plague-stricken garden.

So I took immediate action, and spent four days moving the apparently-uninfected tomatoes to a friend’s back yard, 30 miles away, and transplanting them into new containers.

Meanwhile, I had sent the photos to my friend Linda, who happens to be married to my ex. Rob (who is an expert botanist, among many other things) thought it might be a nutritional deficiency – magnesium or iron, possibly coupled with waterlogged soil in the bottom of the self-watering pots. Mike had also suspected a nutritional deficiency. So what the heck, right? The plants were already infected, so I had nothing to lose. I mixed up some Miracle Gro liquid fertilizer (which contains iron) and watered one of the stricken tomatoes with it.

Here’s what it looked like on the 11th:

Clearly dying, right?

Well, here’s what it looked like just one week after adding the fertilizer/iron supplement:

Tomato 7 days after iron/magnesium supplement applied

Yes, that’s right. Seven days!

So then I mixed up a lot more iron/magnesium supplement and watered it in. Five days later, all the tomatoes were looking normal and growing like mad. WOW. I had no idea that nutrient deficiencies could be that dramatic!

So yay! Crisis with a happy ending. The tomato plants are way behind where they should be at this stage, but I should be able to get fruits out of them, and that’s the only thing I care about this year – collecting seeds to keep the varieties going. And they are starting to flower!

The Fuzzy Mix are still adorable. Here’s one that’s flowering:

And here’s a slightly bigger one:

I was a bit concerned that they were flowering at such a small size, so I emailed Tim Peters, the breeder. He said that Fuzzy Mix is a determinate dwarf tomato! Which means it will stay small. And the fruits should be red and yellow striped. I can’t wait to see the ripe tomatoes – the plants are pretty now, but stick on a bunch of red and yellow striped tomatoes? Gorgeous. The perfect decorative tomato plant for people with limited space and a desire for pretty plants and tomatoes. Tim is a genius.

The Fruity Mix plants look much more like conventional tomatoes:

The wonderful thing about Fruity Mix is the incredible flavor of its tiny tomatoes, which unfortunately can’t be experienced all that well on a website. When the tomatoes are ripe, I’ll post one on Facebook so you can all taste it there. 😉

The rest of the time has been spent running around after other major crises – the latest one derailed me for nearly a week, which of course caused other things to become crises. Like the 90-minute lecture I’m scheduled to present in 11 days, which I had planned to write last week and which of course didn’t get done, turning it into this week’s crisis. I have the outline for it…does that count? 😉

So why am I working on this blog post? Well, the art of procrastination has a long and (uh, sort of) honorable history, and I needed a break. This was made clear to me a short while ago when someone came by and informed me that it was time for me to do my One Job, which (in this case) was giving him a belly rub.

“Fritz, I’m busy!” said the human.

“How can you possibly be busy?” said the cat. “Whatever you’re doing is not your One Job, and is therefore totally trivial, irrelevant and useless. So do your One Job! Because I want a belly rub.”

“But I’m busy! Go away, I’ll give you a belly rub later.” said the human, scritching his head and then going back to work.

“Okay, fine,” said the big black furry thing, jumping up onto the desk:

“I can’t see, Fritz! Get down!” complained the human.

“Okay, sure!” said Fritz:

“Fritz, how can I type when you’re sitting where my keyboard goes?” complained the frustrated human.

“Well, it’s only fair,” replied Fritz. “If I can’t get what I want, you shouldn’t be able to get what you want, either.”

“Okay, fine,” said the human. “I’ll just wait for you to get bored and go away.”

“Okay, said Fritz,”we’ll see who caves first.” And lay down for a nice long nap:

He got his belly rub, of course.

(Human vs. cat: cat always wins. Cat thinks human is really stupid for not having figured this out by now.)

Anyway, that made me realize I needed a break, so I wrote this much-delayed blog post. Now I need to get back to work…except that I see another cat coming by to inform me that it’s time to do my One Job.

Sigh…such is the life of a human cat-slave.

(Fortunately, I’m sure I’ll get my slide deck done in time. I know what I want to say, I just need to write it all down and add photos…if the cats will let me. Maybe I need two self-driving mice…)

June 14, 2018 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Cat meets self-driving mouse

In November 2014, I helped fund a Kickstarter project to develop Mousr, an autonomous mouse (the cat toy kind). I didn’t seriously expect that the project would succeed in producing a non-lame cat toy, but what the heck, it sounded interesting, so I contributed enough to get one.

(I was hoping it would get me out of my One Job, which is entertaining Tigress in the mornings. We play “chase the birdie” with the feather toy every morning, but because we play on a big padded cat playground, aka our bed, we don’t play until after Mike gets up. Predictably, we have arrived at a situation where 2.5 nanoseconds after Mike gets up, there is a cat in my study glaring at me and meowing loudly and continuously to explain that it is time to play and why am I not doing my One Job, unworthy human?? While I am generally cheerful about my state of abject servitude (I mean, why else would anyone have cats?), it can occasionally be frustrating to get interrupted in the middle of something by a cat who knows her rights and is demanding to play NOW!! Especially since she won’t shut up until she gets what she wants, even if it means meowing for fifteen minutes straight.)

We’ve tried all sorts of automated cat toys but she’s never been interested in a toy unless there is a human on the other end.

Well, 3.6 years went by, punctuated by occasional updates from the Mousr designers, but the end result is impressive: Tigress likes it! She’s fascinated and will play with it. Which is amazing since she generally yawns at automated cat toys.

Fritz, whose cat toy philosophy is “I’m a lover, not a hunter,” is not as impressed but will also play with it, especially once Tigress stops monopolizing it. Also very unusual!

Alas, while the cats find Mousr intriguing and fun, it is still not as fun as hunting a toy that has a human at the other end. (Probably because inconveniencing a human is half the fun.) So 30 seconds after we turned off Mousr, Tigress was bugging me (loudly and continuously) about playing with her.

So, while the autonomous robot mouse is a hit, no worries: No humans were automated out of their One Job by the self-driving mouse!

Here’s a video of Tigress meeting Mousr:

And if you want a Mousr of your very own? Trundle over to Petronics to order one. Warning: they’re not cheap. But they are cool. (I got mine for less because I backed the Kickstarter. And they even threw in the deluxe 5-tail bundle, which includes the catnip tail!)

June 11, 2018 by Tien Chiu 5 Comments

Pictures of 1000 dye samples are now online!

A quick note to let y’all know: I’ve posted 1000 of my 1500 dye samples on my website, along with an extensive write-up about my dye process. The other 500 samples are still being photographed, but they should be up later this week.

Here’s the link to the master page:

Dye Sample Project

Please spread the word! It was a LOT of work photographing everything, color-correcting the images, and writing/posting the documentation for the samples. I did it because I thought others might find them useful – so please let others know they’re there!

June 2, 2018 by Tien Chiu 18 Comments

Choose your outrage wisely

Last week, I decided to read social media only once a day, so I wouldn’t have twenty strangers’ voices in my head while trying to create.

Yesterday, I went one step further. I installed the FB Purity browser extension, and set it to filter out all posts containing the words “Trump,” “Republican,” and “Democrat”.

Presto! The political vitriol that was dominating my news feed is almost entirely gone,and I can read about the cool stuff my friends are doing/seeing/writing again.

Do I feel bad about “sticking my head in the sand” about vitally important information? Don’t I feel the need to stay up on current events?

Nope. Here’s why.

First, the world contains an infinite number of horrible things. Child abuse, environmental destruction, animal cruelty, pharmaceutical greed, excruciating poverty, rape, drug addiction – any of those should provoke outrage in any decent person. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These are all terrible issues; they need to be addressed.

But not by me. Nor, for the most part, do I want to hear about them, unless one of my friends needs me to listen.

This is not because I don’t care. Quite the reverse. I don’t want to hear about them because I do care. I agree that these things are horrible. And hearing about them makes me angry.

Anger is a funny thing. It can be a powerful force for good, or it can be horrendously destructive. If anger prods you to action, you can change the world. But living in a state of continuous outrage – as Facebook encourages you to do – can quickly lead to feeling overwhelmed and helpless. And that can lead to hate.

I spent a lot of time in my twenties volunteering with organizations that worked with sexual abuse, rape, and domestic violence survivors. Every day, I would hear about a different horror. There was the woman whose fiancé had deliberately infected her with AIDS, then abandoned her. Another woman had been sexually abused and beaten by her entire family; when she went to a priest to ask for help, the priest molested her, too. The domestic violence survivor whose husband had battered her until her jaw collapsed and all her teeth fell out. The other survivor whose husband, a doctor, not only broke her bones, but wouldn’t let her use birth control because he enjoyed performing abortions on her.

The outrage I felt – every day – was so intense, so horrifying, that I had to find some way to come to terms with it. Because these atrocities were happening every single day, to thousands of innocent people, and I felt totally helpless in the face of all those stories. It’s one thing to know intellectually that terrible things happen; it’s another to look into the eyes of someone who has been beaten, abused, or raped, and hear her tell the story of her assault. It becomes personal, visceral.

I struggled hard with this. How do you hear this over and over without dying of outrage? How can you hear all these stories of cruelty, torture, and abuse without starting to hate?

Then one of my fellow volunteers told me the starfish story:

A man was walking along a beach, picking up starfish stranded by the tide and flinging them back into the ocean, one by one.

Another beachcomber walked by, and, seeing what the man was doing, said, “Why are you doing that? There are thousands of starfish washed up on this beach, and thousands more will wash up in the next tide! You’ll never make any difference!”

The man stopped and thought for a moment. Then he reached down, picked up another starfish, and threw it into the ocean.

“Made a difference to that one,” he said.

And that, to me, is the answer to outrage. Surviving outrage requires focusing not on the terrible things you can’t change, but on the positive steps you can take to improve the situation. I can’t stop all domestic violence, but I can tell the woman in front of me that she does not deserve abuse, and that her partner’s violence will almost certainly get worse. And I can connect her to resources. I can make a difference in her life.

But listening to all those horrifying stories without taking positive action doesn’t work. If you do that, you will drown in a sea of outrage. That doesn’t help you, and it doesn’t help the world. The only thing that helps the world is the positive actions you take.

That’s why I’m not interested in reading all the outrage on Facebook. It isn’t that I don’t care about these issues; it’s that I don’t have the time/energy/money to take positive action on them. My volunteer resources right now are entirely devoted to supporting the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. I’m the President of the Board there, which is a great privilege, but also a great responsibility. About half my time/attention is consistently focused on the Museum. So I’m maxed out. Any additional outrage won’t prompt me to positive action; it’s just going to make me feel angry, stressed, and helpless.

No, I don’t want to hear about the latest outrage. Not because I don’t care, but because I do care – but I’m not in a position to change things. The only thing that hearing about the latest outrage will do is make me angry, and further destroy my creative life.

So I’m opting out.

Outrage is great if it prods you to action. But choose your outrage wisely.