GardenBanter.co.uk - interesting horticultural connections with a CSI episode

Howdy, Maddie here.
So I was watching a Monday night CSI (not usual, I don't always watch
"glasses on, glasses off" but rather do the New York CSI and the LV)
and it started rather normally. Young man carries his girlfiend into
the ER and there's the black lady who used to be the pathologist as
the attending doctor. That tells you how long it's been since watching
the Monday CSI's, and he's freaking that his girlfriend collapsed.
Jump forwards to the usual setting up drama, and then, horrors, she
dies and they immediately point a finger to her boyfriend..........and
about the time they are going to ream him, HE collapses. Ahhhh, maybe
a show worth watching? So I start settling in and quickly discover
that THIS time they've done their homework. They're going to track
down the last place the couple ate. From there, after a rather good
performance by someone as a high and mightly chef who insists "all OUR
produce are ORGANIC, and NOTHING HERE is contaminated don't blame US,
see this paper yadda yadda, it says we've passed the Health inspection
with a 96% so it's not US, check out the farm where we get our
stuff.
GREAT!! Now they've got me rivited. I worked food service
professionally for over 40 years, no one is more of a stickler than
myself. Add to that, more area's of expertise......they get deeper
and deeper into the story. I love where it's going. They go to the
farm where the stuff IS organic, but it's also sub-contracted out.
Intrique. hmmmmm, fingers start pointing to the truck driver who
transports the organic produce. well another area of my experience as
I had 25 years inadvertedly involved with the trucking industry. The
trucker whines that if they come down on him, he'll lose his job.
They go back to the source, and find a disgruntled farmer next door
who had been sued by a huge chemical company (can you say Monsanto
knock off???) who sued him for cross contamination and "stealing"
their patented crops because of winds. In an out of court settlement,
he'd let them have 40 acres of the 100 of his familiy's land (yeah,
he's a black man, but we have to throw in all the symbols here) . Now
they're getting deeper into plot. Turns out there are cattle grazing
above the organic farm's fields, and there is botulism from their
feces in water coming into the fields.
The complications and intricacies of the plot was awesome.
Horticulturally it was spot on. It covered things that I hope a lot
of people might have wondered if it was based on actual events.
(sometimes some of the best programs draw off of real life drama's
which was why ER did so well for so many years and other programs)
I was so inspired about this episode it almost got me to watching
Monday CSI but not quite (not until the three parter that connected
all three CSI's.......yeah, shameless drawing endeavors. Worked on me.
what can I say? Usually I'm watching PBS almost all the time.
So did anyone else see that episode? It's horticulturally oriented, so
before someone yells that I'm being off topic here, I was glad to see
how well they connected the whole ball of wax with dependencies on one
to the other.

But on a horticulturall note............somewhere in Western Tennessee
I am finding that this winter has been far from normal. My experiences
in past decades have prepared me for the unseasonable snows that
they've gotten around here. Yesterday was warm enough to get the
already blooming snow drops to stretch their heads further and open
all the way, muscari shoved up slight blue helmets out of the cold
soggy soil, and the noses of the Ivory Prince Hellebore are plumping
up fatter and fatter than the last time I checked them. I went around
the whole perimeter of the yards around our house and found more green
exclaimation points poking out of the mucky soil everywhere. I'm sure
they're plain daffodils, but at thsi stage, I'll take anything. There
are tight buds on the variegated hydrangea, all the tree peonies, and
the one foolish bud on the Korean Spice Viburnum that was silly enough
to completely open was burnt with the true winter's cold to blackened
remains.
I cut a branch of the small forsythia to force inside, and found
underneath the leaves of the kitchen porch garden, a beautiful red
cupped narcissus bend and hiding it's beauty from the last snows that
finally were washed into the saturated soils last week. So I clipped
my first flower, and brought the forsythia and narcissus inside to
enjoy. Tomorrow I will snip one little muscari and maybe cut the
straggly white crocus that were the kind I had to buy at Lowe's knows
how to frustrate.....I prefer snow crocus, but didn't have my favorite
bulbs handy to plant this last fall.
I found all the lost garden seeds for the veggie garden, and today
James and I talked about starting a fig from a branch with spaghnum
mosses and plastic baggies, gooseberries (or as he calls them,
goozegogs) trying to find boysenberries, should we try blackberry
canes? What about a strawberry patch? And if we do that, I want three
honeyberry bushes. And there's that Bramley apple he'd love to grow
here that you CAN'T find over the pond in the colonies. The shallots
are up, showing me I planted them TOO CLOSE. And so are the red
onions, and garlic. We have more moles than I've ever thought
possible, and I'm about to send for a Pine Tree Seed catalog so I can
order castor bean seeds to border the veggie garden this spring to
keep the little tillers out of the roots of our truck patch.
With as soggy as it is here, I hope desperately soon I will hear
the weeps of the peepers. I will keep you posted. Some of my sedums
are unfurling their green knuckles already, and I see more and more
signs of Spring coming each day from the little snowdrops I
deliberately tucked in helter skelter to the fat robins and shiny blue
black grackles that are in flocks of literally thousands around here.
Inside, my house plants are wowing me. I have a Jewel orchid that
made buds larger than a man's thumb and now they are blooming. And
anyone reading the written word that "the flowers aren't anything
worth bothering with" has never looked up close at them. They're
incredible!! Anyone wanting to see a resized picture of it, give me a
holler, I'll send it your way, with a memory of Old Faerie Holler to
make you smile.
Thanks for listening. Good to peek over the garden fence row.

maddie, still new at gardening in her new home in Western Tennessee
zone 7b