Snow peas are so clingy... who knew?

The weather is warming up and so are the plants on my rooftop. The snow peas are finally starting to show some spirit and I wandered out to pick up a couple of tomato cages last weekend to give them something to latch onto as they grow. They weren't quite starting to fall over yet, but snow peas are a bit vine-like, and I knew that they would do better with some sort of trellis system.

What I didn't realize until I checked in on them a few days later (it was rainy for a few days after I stuck the cages in the soil so I didn't need to go outside to water the little guys) was just how clingy they were. In no time at all, the snow peas had extended little tendrils and started wrapping them around the wires of the cage!

The green onions, spinach, and bok choy are also making some serious progress. The spinach is starting to look like real spinach -- although I clearly planted some seeds too close together. Fortunately the spinach seems to be happy enough to be transplanted, so I dug up a few plants this weekend and dropped them into the snow pea planters.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how big the spinach will get, and odds are the plants are still too close together, but I can always cull some later if necessary. I'd rather have too much spinach than too little.

I had started some green onions and bok choy indoors in March, but they didn't come out that well. Either I should have moved them outdoors sooner, or the windowsill conditions just weren't good enough. Whatever the cause, I eventually gave up and direct sowed some of each outside. The onions are coming up like nobody's business.

The bok choy is still off to a slow start, but I'm holding out hope that I'll get at least a couple of good plants this season.

My biggest concern is that since almost everything that's doing well had to be direct sown outside, I may have some problems when I try to move the red peppers I'm starting indoors to the rooftop. Peppers like hot weather, so they won't go out until May or June, and they take a while to get started, so it's usually a good idea to start them indoors. But I'm not sure how hardy they'll be.

I'm also not entirely certain the snow peas will start giving me... well, snow peas before late May. My original plan had been to pull out the snow peas and put in peppers and green bush beans in May/June, but I hope I'll be able to actually harvest some veggies before that happens.

RIP Download Squad (2005 - 2011)

AOL has decided to shut down popular tech blog Download Squad. The site was launched by Weblogs Inc in 2005. It's the second time an AOL web site I wrote for has been shuttered, although this time it happened after I left the fold. My first paid blogging gig was with PVR Wire, another Weblogs Inc site. At the time PVR was shut down there was a bit of outcry, but to be honest, the site was a tiny little speck compared to Download Squad which has consistently been one of the top sources for news about desktop apps, web apps, and mobile apps over the past 6 years.

Like PVR Wire, Download Squad will likely live on in corpse form for a while. As far as I can tell, AOL never figured out a great strategy for monetizing a blog that largely covered free software, even though millions of people visited the site every month. But it will continue to bring in revenue for months and maybe years to come as long as nobody goes and changes the URL structure (again). There just won't be any new posts.

It's a shame, because Download Squad regularly attracted talented writers who were enthusiastic about discovering new apps and sharing their knowledge with the community. I learned a lot about software, writing, and working with a team of bloggers across the globe during the three years I wrote for the site.

It's also a shame because on paper, AOL's acquisition of The Huffington Post could lead to great things. While AOL was much criticized recently for "The AOL Way," and the company's Seed project for attracting freelance contributions never really took off, Arianna Huffington has stated that her goal is to move away from a model based on freelance bloggers and to hire full time bloggers and journalists who can commit more energy to their sites. Unfortunately someone must have decided that Download Squad wasn't pulling in enough traffic or revenue to justify full time staff, which is ridiculous for a site as popular as Download Squad.

While I'm not particularly interested in taking a salaried position at this point in my career, I wish AOL would have hired full time bloggers for Download Squad and many of its other properties years ago. It's always felt strange to expect bloggers to pour their heart and soul into their work for $10 or $15 per post. Writing for Download Squad was one of the most difficult blogging gigs around, because it required not just coming up with an on-the-spot opinion about some article you read, but downloading and installing software, testing it out to see if it lives up to its promise, and writing a mini-review in roughly 150 to 500 words (with occasional room for longer feature reports).But Download Squad bloggers worked remarkably hard at their jobs despite the relatively poor pay right up until they received a letter yesterday letting them know that their services were no longer required.

I eventually left Download Squad because I wanted to start my own software blog at Mobiputing.com, and it looks like I got out at the right time. But it's still sad to see the web site go. Working with the team at Download Squad was probably the best freelance gig I've ever had.

Fortunately my friend and colleague Lee Mathews, who has been an editor for Download Squad for the last few years as well as a contributor to Liliputing for the past few years has agreed to begin posting more regularly at Liliputing as well as Mobiputing.


Update: Hey look! Lee, Seb, Erez, Vlad, and Mathew have already put together a new site called Browser Scene! While you might not think there'd be all that much to say about web browsers day after day, you'd be surprised. Browsers are our portal to this thing called the web and new developments are taking place all the time. I also wouldn't be surprised to see the guys branch out into covering web apps, which honestly made up more of Download Squad's coverage than actual downloads for the last few years.

There's definitely an important lesson about choosing a name for your web sit in there somewhere. While DLS staffers have been covering web apps, mobile apps, and internet news as well as downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers over the past few years, I think a fair number of people got the wrong idea about the site based on the name. Anyway, check out Browser Scene. It's pretty cool!

It's not easy being green

So it turns out that growing food on the roof of a Philadelphia rowhouse in March may be tougher than I thought. while all the experts agreed that it was time to put out the snow peas, spinach, and some other cold weather seeds and seedlings in March, things got off to a rough start on the rooftop.

The spinach was supposed to take 5-10 days to germinate, but it was nearly three weeks before I started to see any growth. And while the snow peas peeked up through the soil rather quickly, all they did was peek. The plants seemed to hold steady for a few weeks with little to no growth.

My best guess is that it's awfully cold and windy on the rooftop and there's not a lot of protection. I moved the plants closer to a wall, which may or may not be helping. This week has been very warm, which I'm pretty sure is the biggest reason things are starting to look a bit greener on the rooftop. The snow pea plants are starting to open up and show their leaves, and I now have a handful of spinach saplings starting to say hello.

I also tried covering the plants at night on colder evenings, but I don't think I did this regularly enough to tell if it made much difference. 

The seeds I started indoors, are another story. Fearing that the outdoor snow peas might not make it, I started a couple of plants in seed trays and then took them outside where each one promptly died. That's not surprising, since snow peas are known to dislike transplanting. But I think the bigger problem is that I let them grow too large indoors. They were all stem and few leaves thanks to not enough light, nutrition, and other factors.

I had also been growing garlic chives, bunching onions, and bok choy indoors. The first time I tried transplanting some onions outdoors, they died almost instantly. So I let the plants hang out in the seed trays for a few more weeks... which I'm pretty sure was way too long.

Yesterday I went to transplant some of the onions into larger pots, and I noticed that almost all of the roots had dug through the bottom of the tray searching desperately for space. I don't have a lot of hope for their survival now.

The bok choy had similar problems. I think I may have successfully salvaged a few plants by putting them in larger pots -- but I think my best chance at getting bok choy to grow properly is just to seed it directly outside. 

It may be that I just need to resign myself to the idea that the growing season on my rooftop starts in April, not March. But practice makes perfect, and I'll probably try starting some other plants in seed trays as the season progresses. Hopefully by the time next year comes around I'll have a firm enough grasp on how to get plants started indoors to at least get started in mid-March if not early in the month.

I still have high hopes for the sweet peppers I started in a seed tray recently. These guys are younger than the doomed onions and bok choy plants, and so I think I moved them into larger plants at just the right time. I just hope they don't grow too big indoors, because I won't be putting them out on the roof until mid-May.


Practice makes perfect and I haven't given up on starting some items indoors and moving them outdoors. But while the weather was in the 70s yesterday afternoon I took some time to throw some onion and bok choy

Groupon vs. LivingSocial

After spending the past 10+ years as a radio and online journalist, I'm about to have my work published in print for the first time. Laptop Magazine asked me to research and write an article comparing Groupon and LivingSocial, the two largest daily deals sites. The article will hit newsstands next month, but it's already available to read online.

I spoke with representatives from each company and tracked the deals each company offered in Philadelphia and other regions for a couple of weeks and tried to write up a fair comparison of the services including mobile apps, customer protection, group buying incentives and other features. What's nice is that you don't actually have to choose one or the other, because bargain hunters can register for as many sites of this type as they like. But if you've been wondering what sets Groupon and LivingSocial apart from one another, I'm pretty sure we've come up with a more comprehensive comparison than you'll find anywhere else.

Sure, I've written close to 3 million words on Liliputing and Mobiputing alone, not to mention all the writing I've done at Download Squad, TV Squad, PVR Wire, WHYY, NPR, and elsewhere. But there's something special about actually seeing your name on a printed piece of paper that still feels special. Unfortunately I still have to wait until mid-May to see that happen. I guess there's still something special about the web too: It's a lot easier to publish things quickly online.