It's the beginning of May and the garlic has finally popped up in the past few weeks after a long winter. The garlic was planted in the fall by "the Garlic Girl" as I call her. She had posted on a local garden mailing list back in the October that she lived in an apartment and was looking for yard space to plant garlic.  As I wasn't planning on using my garden boxes over the winter, I offered them up. There are a few varieties and I'm looking forward to trying them out.  

With the weather getting warmer I've been thinking about setting up my solar food dehydrator for another year.  Unfortunately it's still not warm enough in this part of the world so to keep myself busy I build this little fan add-on that I'm excited to try out on the dehydrator.

I was up very, very early due to my hotel being across the street from a Mosque and I was jolted out of my slumber by the morning call to pray. I kept meaning to log the daily prayer times to see if I could figure out the pattern but never seemed to get around to it. It does make a good alarm clock although I woke up a bit earlier then I had planned. But getting up early was good because I had a long day ahead of me, although I didn't know at the time how long it would be. My tentative plan was to go pick up the bicycle I arranged to rent for the day, bike the 15km up to the Todra Gorge, go hiking in the mountains beyond the gorge and then bike back to Tinghir. After breakfast and making a video from the roof of hotel, I stopped into a small store I had found and loaded up on water and snacks, mainly fruit but also an assortment of strange Moroccan cookies and treats.

It's difficult to explain my love of camping as even I don't fully understand it. There's just something I love about the sounds and smells of the forest, or if I'm out in the winter, the absolute silence and stillness of it all. The freshness and newness of the world when I wake in the morning after an solid sleep makes me smile and babbling brooks and crackling fires can hypnotize me for hours. Ok, so I admit I'm a "tree hugger" but I think everyone needs to connect with nature now and then to ground them. In these modern times we like to delude ourselves into thinking we don't need the natural world but we've spent way more of our history immersed in nature than we have in the artificial electronic world that surrounds us today. But don't get me wrong, I need the modern world and the social connections just as much as the next person, but I also need nature and the forest to chill me out now and then. Science has recognized this as well and there is ample research linking access to nature and improved health.

Well it's a sad day here for me as I've had to temporary shut the WindowFarm down due to an insect infestation that I just can't seem to get a handle on. I still haven't even been able to identify the insects that are munching through my Pesto factory and in fact I can barely even see them because they're so incredibly small. I can really only see them with a strong magnifying glass but even then there's not enough magnification to see them in any detail. I did borrow a small microscope from a friend a week or so ago and only then was I able to get a good look at them.