An old lady can do it

This year, we have tried something new by making shades and awnings from burlap. The sacking we buy from a nearby coffee shop for fifty cents a bag. A single bag, cut open down the sides, and pinned to laths at each end with 1/2" staples and a couple of screws, makes a simple and surprisingly attractive window shade, which can be hung from existing curtain rod mounts, as here, or from three inch wallboard screws driven into the window frame or just above it. The shade can be folded in half to cover half the window, or rolled up to rest atop its mounting to uncover the window completely. It seems to admit about ten to fifteen percent of the light into the room. You can see through it to the world outside, if you stand close, yet you have complete privacy. Fits a window of about three by four feet, or can be cut down to fit something smaller. Not bad for fifty cents!

If you attach the bag to the outside of the window instead, or even better, for the south side of the house, one on the outside and one on the inside, you will cut quite a lot of heat gain. Makes for a rather dark room, but we find we are twenty degrees (F) or more cooler inside, than out.

We didn't attach outside shades, choosing instead to dry-soap the window screens for additional reflectivity.

You can also stretch a bag between two laths mounted on wall brackets, to make an instant solar awning, or, better yet for the south wall, stitch together as many bags as it takes to shade the entire wall.

The awning shown is a little sloppy, but that's me; I am sloppy. Besides, I was working alone on a windy day. Not the best plan. Too much light is striking the upper wall; on the other hand, the gap between the wall and the burlaps allows wind to pass through without tearing up the awning, and, as summer progresses, the shadow will creep upwards as the angle of the sunlight tips away from the near-vertical.

Not visible in the photo is a length of seventeen-gauge wire, anchoring the end laths and running underneath the outer edges of the burlaps from end to end. At the anchor points the wire, which is doubled there, is tensioned with a stick to pull the whole thing tighter, much as one would tension end posts on a run of fence.

This forty-foot awning cost less than ten dollars to make and the project took a little over two hours. If an old lady can do it, you can do it, okay?

Blessed shade

A northern-hemisphere July scorcher -- 93F. Daughter and Last Son were here; she pulling weeds and working on her tan and he down in the creek cutting beanpoles from knotweed, piling the twigs and leaves for me to mow and add to the compost. I pulled up the bed of fava beans to take around to the clothesline for drying, to see about saving seed.

We took a lot of breaks. I poured water in my straw hat and put it on, dripping, for each new (short) shift.

A garden snail-hunter friend, bereft of the shade of the favas, slithered off to pastures new.

There were quite a few elephant garlic and volunteer potatoes in the bed, as well. I braided the garlic and brought in the spuds, which are enough to last for weeks. The plan is for part of this bed and the one next to it to be enclosed this fall in a polytunnel greenhouse, 10'X30', for wintering-over cold-weather vegetables more securely.

Though it's awfully hard to think about winter right now.

To the left of the favas is the kale plant that I kept for seed and hung up last week; it's about ready to pick over for its more than a thousand pods. I'm sure I don't know what I'm doing, but I don't mind. It's my entertainment...

After hanging favas I worked with last son for awhile, stripping knotweed stems.

"What would you plant over here on this side of the creek, if you were farming it?" I asked.

"Oh, that's easy. Hops."

"Hops?!"

"Yeah." Oh, my, he looks interested.

"All the hops I've ever heard of involve cables, telephone poles and tall ladders and crews of a zillion pickers. Aren't there economy-of-scale problems?"

"No, they do it different in Bavaria, more like a vineyard. I think. And brewers buy small batches as well as large. It can be a specialty."

"Well, do ya want we should look into that?"

"Sure."

We might get him back out into the country yet.

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes. "Want to take another break? I want you to try that Hefeweizen Sis brought."

"With my waistline?"

He grinned. "What about mine?"

"That's different."

"Okay, I'll just pour you a little glass."

We crossed the bridge, passed the sun-sizzling favas, and stepped into the blessed shade of the front porch.

Heat wave...

We're at around 90 in the afternoons at our place this week, with a killer drying wind, but the well is in good shape yet so I left the drip hoses going all night in the six beds in the lower garden, and gave everything else a dewing from the hand-watering hose as the sun went down and the long twilight set in. Beloved changed out all the pools for the ducks and geese, and the chicken water. We are at 44 degees north, and at this time of the year you have enough daylight for this kind of thing to last you till ten p.m.

The house is handling it well, better than ever before. The maple trees are finally tall enough to help some, there's more insulation, the south face of the roof now has a coat of white paint, beans are climbing the south wall, and there are awnings of burlap, and burlap shades, on the windows. I'm often seeing 65F on the inside thermometer when it's 85 outside, with no A.C. and no fans running. Usually we only have to start up the fans when it reaches 94 or more outside for three days running, which gives too much heat gain even for this house.

The grass seed growers, up the road, are baling their straw in gigantic bales that must weigh six hundred pounds each. The sunshine reflecting from the unbaled windrows defeats my sunglasses and I have to look away as I go by. There are mirages on the fields and pavements. It reminds me of my Georgia childhood.

:::

From the report I left at One Green Generation (The Growing Challenge):

Lately there is a lull in planting. A few potatoes in gaps. We have peas, lettuce, bok choi, radishes, turnips, kale, cabbages (red and white), Jerusalem artichokes, 6 kinds of tomatoes, eggplants, zukes, delicatas, butternuts, punkins, garlic, elephant garlic, turnips, green beans, runner beans, favas, yellow corn, white corn, rhubarb, nasturtuims, white onions, red onions, Egyptian onions, leeks, red potatoes, golden potatoes, strawberries, white grapes, red seedless grapes, parsley, cilantro, basil mustard, broccoli, collards, rosemary, marjoram, spearmint, peppermint, chives. There will be apples on two of the six apple trees and a scattering of plums. Cherries did well this year, pears are ok; there will be a lot of blackberries judging by the blossoms. Most of the pears, cherries, nectarines, figs and quince are too young to bear yet.

What we harvested last week: Elephant garlic, onions, peas, chard, mustard, lettuce, spinach, strawberries, basil, chives. One rooster. A lot of Japanese knotweed for beanpoles and compost.

I chose one kale plant to go to seed, and oh, my, did it! It's hanging up now in a maple tree to dry the pods, and there are THOUSANDS of them. I've selected some of the favas to save, and will save some peas, French beans, runner beans, potatoes and tomato seeds. All of these we have done before, except the kale, and the favas, which are a learning experience. We're still working full time, so there is only so much we can try.

Favas come in an eating size and a green-manure size and we have a lot of the latter as that was what we were given. They are good to eat but hard to harvest. What I have learned: cut them from the stem with scissors, close to the first bean. Rest the pods in a basket for a day so the pods will deflate a little. Steam to blanch. Rinse to cool. Now when you squeeze the other end (like a toothpaste tube) the beans should slide out of each pod easily, ready to freeze, steam, fry, or what have you.

I've built a solar dryer and we have hundreds of canning jars but most of what we have put up so far this year has gone into the freezer -- some choice greens, peas, and, umm -- lots of chicken and chicken broth.

We rely a lot on things that self-replicate or are perennial. The Egyptian onions, elephant garlic, Jerusalem artichoke, nasturtiums, chives, parsley, rhubarb and blackberries pretty much take care of themselves. And the orchard just gets better every year. Also, a lot of our flowers are bulbs and can be divided, or seed themselves readily: daffodils, tulips, irises, flags, English bluebells, forget-me-nots, digitalis, poppies, sweet williams, lupine, sweet peas. And then there are the lilacs, which are so big they shade the house.

Ours is not the easiest site because rains are too heavy 3/4 of the year and entirely absent 1/4, nights are too cold, the season is short, there's too much wind, plenty of pests, incredible weeds, we only have a limited water supply when it's NEEDED, and we're a bit north-aspected, so the ground seems like it has some kind of permafrost thingy going on.

But we seem to do ok, as do many of our neighbors. The wind dies down a little after sunset, and we go sit with a glass of mint tea by the grape vines as the moon comes up, watching bats fluttering around the big oak tree.

There are worse ways of growing old.

Conundrum

So, I worked as a parking lot attendant for two days at a sustainability conference, and the strain on my sense of irony was ... monumental.

Yes, people need to know how to make goat cheese, or beer, or do raw milk, or convert engines to run on veggie oil, or treat mild illnesses from the herb garden, but ... to drive all the way from Eugene, or Corvallis, or Roseburg, or Seattle, to learn these things on a small farm in the middle of nowhere, and then drive back? Yeesh!

Yes, I biked, but I live 2 miles down the road. Hardly anyone else did, and considering the distance from town, and the state of the road shoulders, and all the mojo-pickups with dual wheels sweeping those road shoulders at 70 miles an hour in 55 mile an hour zones, not biking was, yet again, the wise choice for most.

The railroad goes by right in front of the farm, though, and twice I watched the Coast Starlight go by, right in front of us. How hard, really, could it be, to have a charterable consist of self-propelled railcars to make the fourteen mile journey with two carloads of festival attenders? The tracks were empty across the road except for about fifteen minutes total, out of the twelve hours or so that I stood there, and this is a mainline.

A century ago, in fact, this was exactly how it was done. A hundred church picnickers would hire a train to get them out into the countryside, and at the end of the day, bring them back again. Nowadays, it seems, this can only be done on abandoned rails repurposed for tourists, at a steep price. But perhaps changes are in the wind.

I can't find it now but there was an article recently that noted that the litigious and grumptious relationship between petroleum-based cars and their manufacturers, and the oil companies (on the one hand) and bicycle commuters and makers of things like three-wheeled electric cars and Segways (on the other) is not that bicycles and such are too slow, but that the standards for convenient travel, geared toward the capabilities of internal combustion engines, are too fast. The context was the continual wrangle over bike lanes; the author felt the whole street should be safe for powering down.

I do think there is something to that. If lead-acid based systems are the only ones that will be available to us peons (those with less than $40,000 to spend on a car or truck) in the foreseeable future, then 25 mph speed limits are the only way to ensure our entry into any post-oil Great Automotive Commuter Society.

Perhaps next year the event organizers will consider chartering a bus to their event and organizing a group bike ride with a support van. Veggie-diesel support van, of course. With a hint of lavender in the exhaust.
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Why the sea is boiling hot

I volunteered at the Sustainable Life festival down the road at Wise Acres Farm today; their better known event, the Herb Fest, draws gargantuan crowds, whereas this one (so far) has been somewhat sparsely attended, but it's the first year for it, and I think it will do well when it is better known and people can plan ahead to attend. There are workshops, lectures, farm tours, herb tours, and networking opportunities, and the people involved are knowledgeable and kindly. I'm looking forward to tomorrow, and planning to carry more sunscreen and water!

Last Son came along, and with him, after my shift, I attended a lecture-demonstration of a veggie diesel truck, a farm tour with stops at gardens, an orchard, compost piles, chicken shed, chicken tractor, and a goat dairy. We then spent the afternoon at the workshop of his choice, a hands-on beer-making session. An aficionado of Belgian beers, he appreciated the training but confided to me later that he could have done without all the talk of herb beers (!) -- he's a very basic guy.

Feeling woozy in the afternoon heat and wind, with a fairly stout sample of fennel-lavender beer, or some such thing, in my tummy, I wandered off, thinking to take a nap, and in the herb garden found an elderly woman in a steel-and-canvas glider, swinging gently back and forth in the shade, watching several huge koi in a small pond. She patted the seat beside her, and I sat down and introduced myself, and we "talked of many things/Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--/Of cabbages--and kings--/And why the sea is boiling hot--/And whether pigs have wings."

She seemed to have memory issues; as do I, increasingly. I hope to have them with such grace, should I reach to her years.

:::

for Independence Days,

1. Plant something - A few potatoes in gaps. Sunflowers.

2. Harvest something - Elephant garlic, onions, peas, chard, mustard, lettuce, spinach, strawberries, basil, chives. One rooster. A lot of Japanese knotweed for beanpoles and compost.

3. Preserve something - chicken, broth.

4. Reduce waste - Making more compost from knotweed and grass clippings, and beanpoles from knotweed.

5. Preparation and Storage - Assembled a new wheelbarrow.

6. Build Community Food Systems - selling duck eggs; Sustainable Life Festival volunteer.

7. Eat the Food - From frozen: plum sauce, used to make reconstituted plum juice. From poultry: duck eggs, chicken eggs; fresh chicken liver with eggs and chives. From storage: rolled oats, potatoes, home-dried runner beans and French beans. From garden: Elephant garlic, onions, kale, chard, dandelions, peas, lettuce, spinach, chard, strawberries, mint, basil, chives, still mostly peas.

The volunteering has kept me away from much of this and before that was the illness (which is not over). Hope to have a much better IDC report after the 4th of July weekend!

Ready to harvest

The fava beans are at their prime. They were planted in October, and wintered over without row cover. Sometimes they were knocked down by a freeze or buried in snow, but always came through. This is the first time we have really tried them, and we're impressed!

Daughter wants to come down and put in a day, and unfortunately I'll be gone most of the available date. She asked what to do; well, just doing the favas would take more than a day!
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Watching my toes

South wall: comfrey, tomatoes, fig trees (saplings),
onion, strawberries, nasturtiums, eggplant. The sticks are
for beans, which are just now finding them.
The awnings are burlap bags suspended from laths.

As some of you may know, I came down with a nasty infection and was bedridden for a bit while the miracle drugs did their thing. Doctors think there may also be a kidney stone involved. Daughter and Young Man looked in on me with Youngest Son, then a few days later, when I had a relapse, Son spent the night again, showing me one of his favorite anime series, Planetes, on a small TV at the foot of my bed. By then I was getting better, so I rose up and fed him a pancake breakfast and we chatted over coffee for a good two hours. Nice. I sent him away with clean laundry, a bag of fresh peas, and a loaf of bread.

"What's in it?"

"Kale, garlic, oats, whole wheat, spelt, rye; that sort of thing."

"Awesome!"

Hey, it's lovely to have a 25-year-old who says your bread is awesome! He may even think so ...

Where was Beloved all this time, you ask?

Wisconsin.

Family stuff.

She's missed the whole thing, as usual, the gad-about.

Ah, blessed rain. It's not coming down in sheets, like the stuff my eastern friends are contending with (I would read their blogs, but I'm afraid I might get soaked), but just right for cutting my farm work day in half and looking into a few other things for a bit.

I'm resting right now from the mowing, mulching, top dressing, tomato tying, and harvesting that went on before the rains settled in. And, if I admit it, from the illness. I'm able to do these things but at a sedate pace. When I'm flat on my back like this, I grab the laptop and plop it on my belly, to blog or upload or check the latest from Sharon or Greenpa or whomever. If I didn't have a computer, though, I'd get by.

There's umm, reading.

Or just watching my toes wiggle down there at the other end of me.

And out of the corner of my eye, through the window, I see the yearling deer going by, along the fence. Aha, one of them discloses he is not a doe. He has those Bambi bumps above his eyebrows.

So serious looking.

And in the foreground, the eternal chicken races; hen in front, Chanticleer huffing along, gaining steadily from behind. Yeesh, get a room!

:::

'K, a report for Independence Days:

1. Plant something - Walking onions self-planting.

2. Harvest something - Elephant garlic, onions, peas, kale, chard, lettuce, spinach, turnip greens, strawberries, basil, chives. One chicken. Pie cherries. have been tying up tomatoes, laying down mulch, turning compost, setting bean poles and watering, more than harvesting.

3. Preserve something - Froze peas, cherries, chicken, broth.

4. Reduce waste - Making more compost from knotweed and grass clippings, and beanpoles from knotweed.

5. Preparation and Storage - Hung up some dried mint. Bought extra drip hoses and my next straw garden hat -- the one I've used for the last decade is finally beginning to crumble -- sigh.

6. Build Community Food Systems - selling duck eggs; having people over to harvest excess veggies and talking with them about our yard-to-garden method.

7. Eat the Food - From frozen: plum sauce, pear sauce, peas. From poultry: duck eggs, chicken eggs; fresh chicken liver with eggs and chives. From storage: rolled oats, whole wheat flour, spelt flour, rye flour, sunflower seeds, potatoes, home-dried runner beans. From garden: Elephant garlic, onions, kale, chard, dandelions, peas, lettuce, spinach, chard, fava beans, turnip greens, pie cherries, strawberries, mint, basil, rosemary, marjoram, chives, leeks. But mostly peas. As John Seymour used to say, you can never have enough peas.

Fair is beautiful

Urgently recommended reading:

Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation
by Dmitri Orlov

Social collapse, with its consequences, is no only not unthinkable, says Mr. Orlov, but a fairly common occurrence. So there is a morality that is proper to it, and which can inform our response to crisis and chaos better than we may have been led to believe.

Basically, his argument draws from Law of the Sea regarding lifeboats in storms at sea. If it is necessary to lighten the load, everyone draws straws. In the inquest, the judges will find no blame. If anyone pulls rank to stay on the lifeboat, that person will be found guilty of murder.

Fair is beautiful. Unfair is ... well, think about the debate over torture. How's that going? Figured out who your friends are, yet?

This will help us to understand clearly what is happening when the media discusses the saving of banks, or the insurance companies, gigantic mortgages on gigantic homes, etc., while the poor, all over the world, are going out, faster and faster, like candles in the rising wind.

So, relax.

Be generous with the people around you. Do not be always thinking about money, which is mostly designed for siphoning resources away from your life, your family, your community, your locality to ... somewhere else. Give gifts; things that you have made by hand, useful hand tools or timely knowledge. Hug your sweetie. Cherish your children and your neighbors' children. Walk about; watch sunrises and sunsets. Greet passersby. Grow things. Learn and teach seed saving. Make repairs. Teach. If you are a healer, or musical, or dance, or perform, do those things, in exchange or freely. Work, as soon as you can and as best you can, outside the "formal" economy. Rely on your strength and ingenuity, and then when that is gone, rest and contemplate.

"What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?"