Weekly Wide Web

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Ever wish there were some way to get inexpensive, fresh food without leaving your neighborhood?

Now through the miracle of gardening (note: not an actual miracle), you can make that wish come true, right in your own backyard. Don't have room? Then you can reserve a plot with the Community Gardens of Tucson for a scant $15 a month.

Growing your own vegetables seems like a surefire way to finally break the tyranny of the local supermarket's produce department, but if you think it's as easy as covering seeds with a bit of dirt, you might be in for a surprise. Thankfully, Gene Zonge, of the Community Gardens of Tucson, is here to show you what you'll need to do to prep your plot in this week's video.

Lush green vegetables are just a well-tended strip of land away. And by well-tended, we mean tended with a mixture of several bags of steer manure, ammonium phosphate and sulfur.

One thing we learned is that the organic alternative to some of these gardening chemicals is bat guano or chicken manure. That's right: All those bags of bat guano you've been saving in your backyard can finally be put to good use!

In other news: You've seen our TQ&A column, where each week, we ask someone a bunch of questions, and someone gives us a bunch of answers.

This week's answer-giver is Pulitzer-prize-winning author Sheryl WuDunn, who was in town last week promoting her newest book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which she co-wrote with her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. The book makes the case that the best way for countries to move out of poverty is through economic and educational equality for women.

Mari Herreras caught up with the author and has video of WuDunn speaking in Tucson, available on YouTube players everywhere.


You may want to watch the new Clint Eastwood movie Invictus, about Nelson Mandela and South Africa winning the 1995 Rugby World Cup, although you, like most Americans, know nothing about the sport. No worries; we've got you covered, even if you don't know what a scrum is. Earlier this year, we featured a video of the Tucson Lightning Women's Rugby Club at practice. Watch it at YouTube.com/TucsonWeeklyTV.


Gee. Politicians with an agenda that destroys American sovereignty? Like that could ever happen. Sarc.

—Ruler4You, in response to "Threats and Degradation" (Currents, Dec. 10).


Jim Nintzel filled us in on Congressman Raúl Grijalva's concerns about the watering down of the health-care reform package in the U.S. Senate. (You can find other details in The Skinny.)

Speaking of health care, Nintz also linked to a column by former Reagan administration adviser Bruce Bartlett, who took Arizona Congressman Trent Franks to task for opposing the Democratic health-care reform package after he supported the 2003 GOP plan that drastically expanded Medicare prescription-drug benefits with no concerns about how it would be funded.

Mari Herreras alerted readers to the upcoming homeless street count that will take place on Tuesday, Jan. 26, and let us know that kimchi might just be the new Viagra.

Irene Messina caught up with Jessica Cox, a local woman born without arms who flies airplanes. Jessica is now giving surfing a try and appeared this week on TLC documentary Born Without Arms.

Finally, artist Joe Forkan, who used to illustrate Tucson Weekly covers and did the long-running "Staggering Heights" strip before he left town to become a college professor, resurfaced on the TW blog. Check out what he's been up to—and see how you can re-live all those "Staggering Heights" strips—on The Range.