For a while I kept up with the tempo of writing one blog post a week. Occasionally I'd pull ahead and have a few posts written and queued up to be automatically published. Occasionally I'd fall behind and go a few weeks between posts. I haven't been writing at all for a while now, since pretty much exactly when I started using Twitter. I post there as @thebiologistisn. (Twitter handles are limited to fifteen characters, so I had to make do.) I only have a certain amount of time in a day to play online and lately that hasn't been writing for the blog.
I've been accumulating ideas and half-baked concepts for posts, but I just haven't found the motivation to sit for the few to several hours it takes to write a full post. It doesn't help that my after-work time has been pretty full with house and yard tasks.
Two years ago I built an effective deer fence. It kept them out and let me garden in peace. Last year our vegetable gardens were nearly wiped out by rabbits, that ran right through the deer-fence. They hadn't been an issue the year before, probably because we had a family of Cooper's Hawks in the yard to keep them under control. We had lots of rabbits around this year, so I couldn't plant anything they would eat until I had built some fences that would keep them out.
The garden at right got its fence done first. I then planted a nice patch of carrots and strawberries. The garden already had onions and siberian irises I'd planted the fall before. Rabbits don't like those, so those plants survived even without protection. The onions are potato onions I grew from seed. Two of the seedlings thrived (at left), while several others either died through the winter or didn't thrive this year. The carrots are all from breeding projects. The near half are the third generation plants and the far half are second generation plants.
The rabbit fence for the second garden took a while longer to get built. It is now populated with a diverse collection of tomatoes from various breeding projects I'm working on. Theres also a small group of tomatilloes that I've been selecting for intense purple pigment. All these plants were put in the ground much later than would be ideal, so hopefully they will mature sufficiently to produce fruit this season. Next year I won't have to build fences, so things will get moving sooner.
One of the central rules I started this blog with was that I wouldn't write about my job. While I was in grad school, I didn't talk about my research. Since I've been out of grad school, I haven't talked about whatever work it is I'm doing now. This rule was intended to make it clear this blog is entirely my own and doesn't represent anyone else or any organization.
Now that I've got some more free time, there might just be blog posts coming at a slightly higher rate. Since I'm no longer in grad school, nor working in academia, I will probably start to have some posts about computational biology projects I've been working on. I might even have a few posts by guest bloggers. We shall see how this goes.
I've been accumulating ideas and half-baked concepts for posts, but I just haven't found the motivation to sit for the few to several hours it takes to write a full post. It doesn't help that my after-work time has been pretty full with house and yard tasks.
The rabbit fence for the second garden took a while longer to get built. It is now populated with a diverse collection of tomatoes from various breeding projects I'm working on. Theres also a small group of tomatilloes that I've been selecting for intense purple pigment. All these plants were put in the ground much later than would be ideal, so hopefully they will mature sufficiently to produce fruit this season. Next year I won't have to build fences, so things will get moving sooner.
One of the central rules I started this blog with was that I wouldn't write about my job. While I was in grad school, I didn't talk about my research. Since I've been out of grad school, I haven't talked about whatever work it is I'm doing now. This rule was intended to make it clear this blog is entirely my own and doesn't represent anyone else or any organization.
Now that I've got some more free time, there might just be blog posts coming at a slightly higher rate. Since I'm no longer in grad school, nor working in academia, I will probably start to have some posts about computational biology projects I've been working on. I might even have a few posts by guest bloggers. We shall see how this goes.
