Here we have April at the top and May at the bottom. Spring has sprung.
Spring, heck, summer has sprung. Twelve straight days of 80F+ highs, simply unheard-of here, while snow continues to fall on friends elsewhere. I have had to water, and water, and water, and some of the spring greens have bolted anyway. And the creek, from which I'd thought to pump a bit of irrigation, dried up over a month ahead of schedule. So it goes.
Facing north. To the left here is -- we hope -- a Three Sisters bed of beans, pumpkins, and sweet corn. To the right, greens, brassicas, alliums, peas, roots.
Facing south. To the left, potato onions, more peas. In the distance, grapes struggling to recover from a freeze. Below: discoveries, including peas and radishes, on their way to become a spring salad.
I don't do much with ornamentals, preferring to think of our food plants as the beautiful ones. But I'm having over some folks (yes, you're invited) Saturday afternoon in honor of my 64th birthday (Beatles will be playing in the background). So I thought I would grab some planters and pretend-plant them with color spots, to be re-purposed after the party as potato planters.
Son climbed down into the creek and got me a wheelbarrow load of rocks. We filled the planters to within four inches of the top.
I covered the rocks with newspaper and filled the top of the planter with potting soil.
Then planted the flowers, pot and all, hiding the pots in the soil.
There now, not drab. After the party, I'll unpot the plants and set them out in a bed near the front door. Then take the potting soil to the potting shed to make up flats of summer seeds. The rocks will go into a support crib for a fence line.
The planters will then be available for spuds. The idea was to replace the field spuds, which have been frozen down to the ground twice. But they seem to be recovering.
It's time to add mulch to the shade bed. But the greens here are a third planting, still pretty small stuff. Risa doesn't like to work hard, or bend over much, so she covers the little plants with inverted pots, handling the pots with a pair of tongs.
Now she can throw straw without worrying too much where it lands, or having to bend over and mess with misses. Toto supervises.
Oops, feet in the bed. Ignore, please. Once the mulch is down Risa lifts the pots away with the tongs ...
Many neighbors set out tomatoes last week and the destruction wreaked among those by the unexpectedly heavy freeze is awful to behold. If I had known, I might have planted far more starts and had some to give away. Might anyhow.
Tomatoes and a few other things hardening off in pots. The bin is for watering from the bottom, which helps prevent damping -- mold attacking the plants at the base of the stem. These are Stupice and Sungolds.
When the chives begin to blossom it cheers us up considerably.
The mint returns. As always it looks for greener pastures and a lot of it has to be yanked out. Ditto for nasturtiums and sunchokes. These things are welcome but they have to know their place.
The year's compost has been spread on beds and the composting area tidied up a bit. If you expand the pic a bit you may notice the newest member of the family in the gate at upper right -- Toto, a Cairn Terrier we inherited from my mom and dad, whom we lost last year.
The greens/peas/broad beans bed is doing -- okay. In this dry weather the slugs remain in hiding; however the heat has things bolting and even trying to go to seed, and it's not even summer yet. Yesterday our thermometer, in the shade, registered 88F.
A couple of days before the heat wave, a 27F morning rimed everything and the grapes and potatoes are having to start over. Even some lettuces froze to death.
Leftover material from a rhubarb harvest goes to mulching paths.
We're out of cardboard boxes, and, for the moment, rhubarb leaves, so we finish the path with grocery bags cut open and spread flat. If it's windy, watering the bags will help hold them down till the straw arrives.
Risa putting straw over the rhubarb waste and paper bags. A mulched path helps reduce moisture loss from the garden as a whole, and allows for year-round sheet composting.
Main garden. Paths are the lighter stripes, the brown stripes are beds with barn bedding and compost spread over them, mostly still awaiting planting with summer things. The grapes are in terrible shape, but will make a comeback; they will be weeded and mulched this afternoon.
Frosts and heat waves will come. The gardener must work and may hope; but it is well to take the long view of events in the natural world.
Almost May! Frost this morning, expecting 80s later in the week.
View from kitchen window. Fence has been set back up to regulate doggy's bathroom activities (it's usually there in winter for when the poultry are cleaning up the garden). Also at upper left, extension of poultry moat has returned. Now the ducks and chickens get a ringside seat as things grow -- and get to help interrupt even more slugs migrating toward the goodies.
In middle ground, center, Lacinato kale going to seed. Foreground, potatoes, knocked back by a freeze but recovering. Upper right, compost drum and the toolboxes (hers and hers, recycled mailboxes). Compost bins have been emptied onto the beds. It is definitely time to weed and mulch under the grapes! In distance, beyond the garlic and leeks, greens are up: lettuce, kale, collards, spinach, chard, cabbage, broccoli, beets, cauliflower, radishes. Carrots have as usual not germinated for us.
Apples will be skimpy for a change this year, but pears and cherries are coming on. Quince look like they will fruit for the first time. Raspberries very vigorous, blueberries languishing a bit.
So much drama! Never a dull moment in the gardens.
The green gate was found by us twenty years ago, abandoned in the blackberry patch. We spruce it up with paint every five years and it has been in constant use, hither and yon. Tee posts are a variety of sizes and heights because they, too, are salvage. They had been bent by being pulled out by tractors; well, we just bent them right back. Some old things will work well for you if you take care of them.
The term "ethics" -- along with some of its synonyms and part synonyms -- has been in trouble with materialistic biologists for the last hundred years or so. The website Resilience has recently taken a look at the reputed problem: "The relevance of the lurking inconsistency to conservation biology and steady-state economics should be evident — conservation and sustainable scale are, after all, purposes that are ruled out in a world governed only by chance."
Yes, well. I am a "neo-Darwinist" as the term is used by Herman Daly, the author of the piece, though it is properly a "designation of Weismann's theory." I think he means by it that I hold to mechanism -- chance, really -- all the way down (as with the turtles) -- which I do. Scientific evidence as we have seen it to date demands it. So am I not among those who disbelieve in "purpose," and therefore in anything that can be called "ethics," as any part of the discernible universe?
Probably. But I'm just not bothered by the contradiction. The Internet is not a real place, but it's where I spend much of my time. What I experience as purposiveness (my advocacy for energy descent, subsistence, permaculture, and right livelihood) may be quite meaningless in the realm of stars, planets, plate tectonics and the thin soup, across the globe, of genetic materials combining and recombining by chance.
Yet I will advocate for these things anyway; one of the consequences of chance has been the production of me, and of my children and my friends. Another is the emotional attachment that I have to these, as well as to my home on a street in an unincorporated town in Oregon, on this continent, in this world.
I perceive that my brain -- its thoughts and emotions -- is involved in a web of relationships that predate me, and those thoughts and those emotions imply the honoring of contracts: Here, hold the baby, I'll be right back. Later: "WTF, where's the baby?" "I dunno." "What do you mean, you don't know?" These things matter little to the Joneses eight houses away, and not at all to a blue whale, or to Mount Monadnock, but they matter to my perception and experience of myself, to the young mother who has entrusted me with her baby, and to the child itself. Consequences could build, up to and not excluding the possibility that there has been a catastrophic -- to us -- failure, the mother's failure to reproduce -- after considerable investment of time and resources, and whatever we wish to refer to as her soul.
At our scale, and in our comprehension, that's not chance. Pull the microscope far enough away -- say, a being "Q" examining our blue marble from beyond the orbit of Jupiter -- it is. Our local tragedy, from a certain distance, is not more tragic than that of a seed from a maple tree, among many thousands launched, landing on pavement and being unable to take hold in the punishing sunlight and aridity of that location.
I would argue that we have no "purposeful" business worrying about a presumed irreconcilability between chance and purpose. It can be demonstrated that the universe does not care. So, trying to persuade Congress to care may well be a fool's errand; I don't know. Personifying the universe as a raging white-bearded patriarch, or for that matter a fawning blue lady, is counterproductive; I think both are fables concocted to persuade us (if not Congress) to honor various contracts. But we and a few of those around us are all we have, really; we have arrived here by chance, will go out in a wink, and we can choose, perhaps, very little of what we do, determinism being the obverse of the coin of chance.
Yet, I am materially here. Riding the substrate of my material existence are the thoughts and emotions, epiphenomenal though they may be. I do have contracts, whatever the hell they are.
In that context I have continued to think about Buddhism and Permaculture; they are two organized ways of thinking about natural phenomena that I feel are consistent with each other. To recap: Following David Holmgren's formulation, I noted that permaculture principles spring from ethics. "Care for the earth, care for people, and fair share."
And so does Buddhism: "so, (here I take liberties) the [four] truths may be expressed: 1. Things are not quite right (between us and the universe, say): off-center. 2. This results from selfishness, the not honoring of our contracts. 3. Giving up selfishness restores the center and our usefulness in terms of honoring our contracts. 4. Here is how we fix that: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration."
These eight components of a way are easily merged or dovetailed with the currently expressed set of a dozen permaculture principles, here abbreviated to: observe and interact, catch and store energy, obtain a yield, accept feedback, accept services, produce no waste, design from patterns to details, integrate, use small solutions, value diversity, value the marginal, respond to change.
I'm not sure where these ruminations are leading me; I am by nature a syncretist and reductionist and have been very willing to lead myself by the mental nose into the philosophical ditch and then wallow there.
But I spend far more time planting peas than theorizing about them, these days.
I did do something new this week, though.
After forty-five years of studying about Buddhism -- particularly Zen Buddhism, particularly Soto Zen Buddhism -- but remaining, the whole time, diffident as to actually practicing -- I recently discovered that an old friend had gone off and studied in a monastic setting, received Dharma transmission and become ordained as a priest, and she and another priest have returned to Oregon and set up housekeeping on a lovely site in the Coast Range as a zendo/retreat center.
I visited, liked what I saw going on, and registered for a retreat (they have them the second Saturday each month). These are, in effect, one-day sesshin with a rule of silence. You can sit on a zafu, kneeling bench, chair, or if you need to lie down flat. I found I could handle the kneeling bench (Seiza posture). It goes something like this: forty minutes zazen, ten minutes kinhin, forty minutes zazen, ten minutes outdoor kinhin, forty minutes zazen, ten minutes kinhin, break, forty minutes zazen, lunch, forty minutes zazen, ten minutes kinhin, forty minutes zazen, tea, individualized bowing and prostrations and either zazen or kinhin, and at the end of the day, what seems like a self-crit session (silence over).
It was a hell of a start for someone who's been lazy about meditation for a lifetime, and I was sore for two days afterward, but profoundly grateful.
What did I learn? Nothing really new; in that amount of time, zazen is not likely to leave one feeling as if one has been struck by lightning. In fact, as I reported at the end of the day, I spent much of the morning with a song stuck in my head.
This one, if you must know:
But -- especially during kinhin -- I got that one-pointedness, grounded in the realization (for me, anyway) that ...
... while the emptiness to which Zen leads you and drops you off may well be the discovery of that universe in which whatever you do, purposively, does not come to anything ...
... nevertheless can be a good tool for carrying out the eightfold holy way. And the twelve permaculture principles ...
... assuming, of course, they're the sort of things you want to busy yourself with.
March above, April below. As you can see, not much has changed. The Lacinato kale is in bloom. Potatoes coming up, some of which have been knocked back by frost damage. Greens actually are doing well in the middle far bed, beyond the held-over leeks and peasbrush. Raspberry canes look pretty good. The orchard is blooming on schedule but sees few bees in this weather. Buckwheat has sprouted in the fallow bed but is languishing, while weeds grow apace. I've tried to mow the pasture, but as it never dries, it stays ahead of me.
I've spent a lot of time indoors. The year's supply of fats needed to be thawed and moved into a more usable form. For the ham drippings, I've come up with a system based on the ice cube storage of herbs I've seen around the Web.
The cubes freeze in a couple of hours and can be dumped into a double plastic bag or tub for retrieval by ones and twos for cooking projects. As the plastic trays become more or less permanently greasy, I simply bag them up as well and store them in the freezer until the next batch of fats comes along. The cubes are terrifically handy; just drop one in every pot of split peas, lentils, beans, or what have you, and you're good to go.
The chicken broth left over from Christmas dinner had been saved for me by someone who simply set a large bowl, with lid, full of the stuff in the freezer. I turned the bowl upside down in our biggest stock pot and set it on the wood stove, and after the audible "plop" a little while later, I retrieved the bowl.
Once the iceberg had thawed, I discovered it held the entire skeleton (less head) of the bird, with substantial meat still on it, so the broth project became a "chicken soup" project. I ladled out the contents, less bones, of the stock pot into eight-ounce recycled yogurt containers, labeled and lidded them, and set them all in the freezer. One of these, partially thawed a day ahead in the refrigerator, goes well with rice or homegrown potatoes at lunch. I add a little kale or other greens every time, at the last minute so as not to turn them into green slime.
I'm cooking potatoes daily now; not for us so much as for the chickens, who love a split, steaming spud tossed over the fence -- or ten, or twenty. The seed potatoes I have room for -- Yukons, Reds, and German Butterballs -- are in the ground, my friends got all they wanted from me last year, and there are four tubs of them left over from the winter. So I make up a stock pot full, have a lunch on the better looking ones, drain the pot, let it cool a bit, and carry out to the clamoring flock. This cuts down wonderfully on bought-in feed, along with the pumpkins and squash that got the same treatment over the winter.
Other than such activities, it's been reading, writing a little, keeping up with old friends, and finding and posting doomy stuff to Facebook and Google Plus. As a last resort, not being a television family but willing to stream things on a laptop on otherwise slow evenings, we've become enamored of old BBC garden shows and historic lifestyle studies. Example: Tales from the Green Valley -- Archaeologists and historians running a sixteenth century farm for a year. Another is Victorian Kitchen Garden -- how the walled gardens of the rich kept their tables supplied throughout the entire year without modern refrigeration (it helps to have a lot of skilled but virtually enslaved labor).
What these programs make abundantly clear is that food production without either a well-established food forest or a gigantic tractor is not for sissies. We wondered, while watching the sixteenth century, how we would have fared in such a setting, as we are now in our sixties. We concluded that we would have starved to death without younger families members shouldering the bulk of the load. The modern nuclear family is an inelastic social form. In any really serious energy/economic descent, folks who can successfully move back in together will have a decided edge.
When Beloved and I were younger, we spent a lot of time in the evenings playing Scrabble. That's been on hold awhile as our energy has ebbed and workloads increased through the nineties and oughts and into the teens -- and will stay so until she joins me in retirement, in another year -- "God willin' an' the' crick don't rise."
We taught the kids the classic board games in the Eighties and we still have those, along with many good books and some decent acoustic instruments. I feel these may actually become necessary social lubricant at some point.
My advice? If you expect to try to survive for an extended period on what can be done at home and/or locally, rediscover the ways in which you can stand to be cheek by jowl with other generations -- even when cooped up together in the incessant rains.
After coffee and breakfast, Risa lets the poultry out, checks their food and water, collects duck eggs, and waters the flats in the "greenhouse" (potting shed with glass south wall).
Besides the potting bench in the greenhouse, she keeps a "spring bench" on the north wall of the house, halfway to the garden, for hardening off. Not only is this easy on the back, it's a far piece for slugs and snails to get into the pots. Here we have peas, yellow storage onions, and assorted greens. Below is the garden kneeler, some spuds "chitting," and the planting-out tray. The flats, tray and bench are home-made. The red handle is that of the "ho-mi" or Korean hoe, Risa's trowel of choice. One hits the soil with it like swinging a hatchet, then pulls back, producing a hole that's just right for planting a three-inch pot's plug. Later in the year, for hot spells, the spring bench becomes the summer kitchen, so as not to add to the house's heat budget.
The watering can (sorry about the plastic, did not buy) is full of bruised willow twigs, which at this time of year will leach a bit of growth hormone into the water.
Risa plants the spuds down the middle of a bed she's built for, and into which she's broadcast seeds of, mangel beets, a gift from a dear friend. There's really nowhere left to put spuds, so there's a pot on the wood stove of them boiling, to give to the chickens. Her next chore is to gather up the one-dollar "garden knives" she got from Goodwill ...
... and give them a dose of red paint, which is the "garden tool" color here -- a better chance of spotting them, cleaning them up, and putting them back in storage at the end of the day.
Next, she turns her attention to the woodshed, just about her favorite thing; she brings a radio for Mozart and such. There's a cord of maple/ash out of reach behind a cord of Douglas fir on the left, which were stacked in the order they came in. She wants to split down the fir a little smaller and mix the hardwood and fir with even smaller coppice roundwood from the premises, to have an efficient mix for feeding the wood stove next winter.
Here, she's cutting up a salvaged pine branch. This is a small, cheap electric chainsaw, suitable to this size work. She also has one three times as big, made in the Sixties, which was five dollars at a garage sale, for the big stuff. She hasn't used gasoline at the woodpile in years. The pallet provides a stable platform, easy on the back. Its interior struts have been cut to form a slot for the sawbar (or bow saw if in use), and the wheelbarrow catches sawdust for the berry beds. The leftover twiggy bits of hardwood can be trimmed down and used in a wattling project she's doing. The greenery from pine and fir she uses as mulch in the berry beds, along with the sawdust. It could also be used as slope-contour swale material. She doesn't make burn piles.
Here is the coppice yard, which is part of the poultry moat along with the orchard. Fifteen years ago these two willows at right were once beanpoles that sprouted in the garden over the summer. They've been firewooded three times since. The mass of wood at the base is called the "stool." The growth is called "rods." For better firewooding, she'll reduce the growth to eight rods per stool. If you want beanpoles, wattles, and basket wood, leave the smaller shoots until you need them.
Here's a piece of bought-in fir just a little too long for the stove. If your saw makes tiny sawdust or cuts on a curve and binds, it's time to sharpen it.
Showing the slot in the pallet and the sawdust:
To end the day, Risa brings a ladder and picks Big-leaf maple flowers from the tree above the woodshed. They have a season of just under two weeks, and are good in salads, stir-fries, quiches, souffles, pancakes, breads, and soups.
After putting everything away, she'll make pan bread on the wood stove with the flowers mixed with fresh duck eggs, vegetable stock and a home-ground grain mix (barley, rye, buckwheat, cornmeal, quinoa, dried greens, acorns, walnuts). And have dinner, washed down with homebrewed Hefeweizen.
It may look like everything is still asleep out there, but things are getting organized. Over the winter the barn bedding has been mucked out twice onto the garden and covered with fresh leaves and straw. Sawdust has been produced for the blueberries and raspberries. The rhubarb is up. Most of last year's red russian kale shown here has now been dug up and some hung in the barn for the birds to play with, and some replanted in their pasture, ditto, and maybe it will survive to go to seed. I've kept one magnificent lacinato in the garden to watch through seed time. And I've divided and moved many clumps of garlic, some Egyptian onions, and chives.
In the greenhouse, there are fourteen flats of three and four inch pots. These I've been bringing out in a wooden tool caddy, randomized, a dozen at a time, hardening off, and planting in the far middle bed (Bed Number Four), just beyond the garlic patch and last year's leeks. There is a patch of peas and broadbeans. In any one spot you may find cauliflower, spinach, kale, bok choi, chard, beets, turnips, broccoli, cabbage, loose-leaf lettuce, or radishes. Three short rows, cross-bed, of carrots have been direct seeded. Bed Number Two, next door to the raspberries, has been sown to crimson clover and buckwheat, as it has been the least productive bed and we feel it needs a boost. Waiting in the wings are a second sowing of peas (sugar snap heirloom), a flat of storage onions, a flat of cilantro, some marigolds, statice, zinnias, and such.
I'm hoping to see some tomatoes come up in flats but no such luck so far. But we have a friend who does starts for a living -- we get her leftovers at a discount. Peppers, too. They come late in the season, but our soil warms slowly anyway.
White and crimson clover along with lime have been broadcast on the "someday pasture" and elsewhere. Firewooding from the coppice is an ongoing project, and I hope to do some wattling this week.
Later, perhaps much later, the flats will be sown again, with green and yellow zukes, English cukes, winter squash, pumpkins, green beans, Scarlet Runners, and anything else we can get our hands on. I'll need to train up the kiwis and hops, work on the roof, and maybe start renovating a bathroom.
When the daffodils bloom, Risa plants potatoes. Our straw-grown spuds have produced progressively smaller crops of progressively smaller potatoes over the last half decade, so this year, we're experimenting with traditional rows of hilled spuds. A bed has been dedicated to this, so that's 150 row feet.
We have a small electric Mantis tiller, which is seldom used. We're having a dry spring -- most years, tilling has been unlikely in March, but right now the soil is right for this -- precipitation is down, as we are on the edge of the drought that California and eastern Oregon will likely experience this year. The bed was fluffed up, three trenches plowed out with the edge of a hoe, spuds laid on, and soil raked over them with a rake.
These spuds are very close together, but this is rich dirt. As the plants grow, we'll pile on soil (and, yes, straw) as best we can -- potatoes form better above the seed spud than beside or below.
