Week 8: Deferred maintenance

Independence Days Report:

Plant Something: Last of the potatoes.

Harvest Something: Cauliflower, peas, lettuce, spinach, beets, bok choi, mustard, onion greens, nasturtium, chives. Eggs. The cauliflower was so spectacular that Beloved agreed to pose with one for a cauli-portrait, which was nice as I consider her super-photogenic, but she's one of those that-camera-will-steal-my-ghost people.

Preserve Something: Peas, cauliflower.

Store Something: Firewood, kindling, a lot of flattened cardboard cartons.

Manage Reserves: Finally dealing with a decade of deferred maintenance. Painted the north side of the house and am pulling defunct gutters off in preparation for re-roofing. Also wrote a check for $250 to go toward principal on the last $6,500 of our one remaining debt. What with what happened to IndyMac, it seemed the right thing to do with what little discretionary money we have.

Also under managing reserves: We don't air condition and the 95 degree days are a danger; we're not young any more. So we are managing our reserves of strength by taking siestas. If you're house painting and go indoors to lie down and cool off and feel the least bit sleepy, SLEEP. Give it ten to twenty minutes. You'll rise up ready to tackle whatever, and as the light lasts so much longer in the summer (especially north of, say, 40 degrees latitude, or south of same, in that other hemisphere) you're good until 9:30 or 10 p.m. But without the nap you could become a danger to yourself as the evening wears on. See under Learned a Skill, below.

Prepped: set up one of next year's new "raised" beds -- this one was the vinca border along the north side of the house, under the kitchen window, then on the east side around the corner to the "patio." There's a concrete walkway along the entire length of the bed, making it ideal for inclement-weather harvesting. A couple of months ago I mowed the vinca, an invasive species (and mulched fruit trees with the clippings), then smothered the bed with black plastic until we could scrape up enough cardboard.

Yesterday, we moved the potted tomatoes and potatoes, pulled off the plastic, flattened all the boxes and spread them over the bed, then distributed a bale of straw over the whole thing. This bed will be watered from time to time to encourage earthworms to move in and convert the vinca roots and cardboard into castings, and then it should be ready for use as a spring garden. Size: 4X60 feet.

Cooked Something New: have taken to cutting up bread (home baked buckwheat/rye/oats/wholewheat) as it gets a little toward -- well -- stale -- and layering it underneath the stir fried greens and hard-boiled duck eggs.

Way better than it sounds.

Really.

Worked on Local Food Systems: Selling eggs regularly. Have taken to keeping the little rice steamer handy and whenever I come in for a glass of tea or water (it's been 95 four of the last six days!) I bring in some greens or peas, blanch them in the steam, rinse, drain, and bag up in a labeled quart freezer bag and freeze, before going back to my house painting. The whole chore takes about ten minutes, combined with the tea break.

Reduced Waste: More grey water to fruit trees. Mixed two gallons of hideous pale green and pale blue paint left over from a color scheme at my mom's place that she had here, eight years ago. This resulted in a pleasant enough sort of dark olive green that I'm painting the foundation of the our house with it, to hide the robin-egg-blue that the previous homeowner had sprayed all over it.

I could never live in a robin-egg-blue house. Umm, okay, so if it was the last house in the world, sure. A cave might be nice, in that case. I have never spray painted. A roller and a brush are good enough.

Rode the bus to work all week. There were dozens of new people, and we're now into strap-hanging territory. And this town has always hated buses ...

Learned a Skill: How to use a combination folding-extension ladder, which I got for half of retail. These things can be used as fruit picking and pruning ladders and also straightened out to seventeen feet for roofing and gutter work. But it took a little puzzling out, the first time.

And: How not to use a bench vise and pipe wrench. I put too much body english into trying to salvage a galvanized 1/2" elbow that had fused onto a pipe, fell backwards over a little red wagon full of geegaws, and punctured my fanny with a wicked-looking 7" gutter nail. Not much of it got into my backside, but my pride was rather wounded. I used to be good at this stuff!

Lesson! CLEAN UP WORK SPACES ...

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Independence Days Week 7

[posted by risa]

More reporting for Sharon Astyk's Independence Days Challenge:

Plant something: it's the lull before fall garden things go in. Went to the discount grocery and found some intriguing little potatoes (they cook up yellow like Yukon Gold and taste the same but look different) in five-pound sacks that have begun to sprout, bought two sacks for seed potatoes and will put them in around other things over the next week.

Harvest Something: Peas!!!! Lettuce, spinach, garlic, beet greens, bok choi, mustard, onion greens, dandelions, Japanese knotweed (for stock feed, bean poles, mulch, and compost), nasturtium, rosemary, marjoram, chives. As always, chicken and duck eggs.

Preserve Something: Put up seven quarts of snap peas, four of greens (mostly spinach).

Store Something: More firewood, kindling, bean poles, feed sacks (to hold up insulation under house).

Manage Reserves: Hit the thrift store, found two terrific trivets, a cream dispenser, decanter, serrated butcher knife (for cutting weeds) -- $1 each. Covered the chicken house with knotweed branches to shade the poultry while we're away for the Fourth.

Prepped: Cleaned up one exterior wall to repaint.

Cooked Something New: discovered a mild kind of mustard greens that are good in the stir fries.

Worked on Local Food Systems: Selling eggs regularly. Most meals home grown (vegs, eggs, solar mint tea). Took a big bag of greens with us to our Fourth-At-The-Beach (a splurge), using them in all three meals each day, with duck eggs and some storebought red potatoes from up the road a ways (none of ours are ready yet). Joined Seed Savers (did I tell you that last week?)

Reduced Waste: Grey water to fruit trees. Composted knotweed leaves. Rode the bus.

Learned a Skill: Techno Week. I figured out the timer on the digital camera (the instructions in the manual made no sense to me). Beloved learned how to make new folders on a computer and sort and organize files. I am extremely hearing impaired, and this week I began learning to use my new Captel telephone.

Or; Learned Something New: About Spelt, Eikorn, Emmer, Kamut, Sibirisches, and Urkorn, and that we might be able to grow and harvest one of these (instead of winter wheat).

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Concerning Meat

[posted by daughter]

This weekend I went camping with my boyfriend and the latest addition to our family, a miniature pinscher named Mojo. The drive home from the beach was spectacular. Long awaited Oregon sunshine lit up the landscape. We drove by sheep, llamas, cows, and one near miss of a deer. The scenery had me thinking, how lucky we are to be surrounded by this rural atmosphere. Or are we, I wondered. The small farms we passed on the way home are a dyng breed, relics left behind of a time before. In today's world these farms are kept by hobbyists, rich retirees who have made it good and can afford to live the dream. To run a successful family farm in competition with factory farming and make a living of it is quite improbable; few can pull it off. The farms we observed on our way back to metropolis are the curtain that factory farming hides behind. Perhaps we are not so lucky after all.

Quite by coincidence after arriving home and settling in to watch some hulu (free television broadcast over the Internet, and completely legal), I stumbled onto a show titled "Thirty Days" produced by the director of the documentary Super Size Me. This particular episode was not to be missed starring an average country Joe whose hobbies included hunting deer and barbecuing who wanted to understand animal rights activists. He would be spending thirty days living with a family of six vegans, all PETA members. I cringed at the thought, here is someone truly curious about animal rights and they're saddling him with the extremest of the extreme. (PETA has some good ideas but I can not say I agree with any of their execution of said ideas. Tossing paint on people is hardly going to start a conversation about why fur is cruel). I cringed as the first few days were recorded, and as expected the woman in charge of this poor man did nothing but argue with him and confirm his suspicions that animal rights activists were crazies. Luckily our man eventually begins to understand the sensible side of animal rights through a visit to a beef farm and a chat with a scientist about vivisection. "She made sense," he said, "I can talk to anyone that's sensible." All and all I think the program was wonderful giving people a glimpse of animal cruelty without overwhelming them, just enough to get people curious.

I have been a vegetarian for over three years because I do not believe that meat is healthy. I do not believe that eating animals is wrong, however I do think that eating what they call meat at the supermarket is a first class ticket to disease and morally inexcusable. I do believe that in today's world eating meat in unnecessary because at this time we have more food than we have ever had before, and, economically, raising meat is an irresponsible use of our resources. I could never become a member of PETA and take part in over-the-top demonstrations that only convince the public that all meat free individuals are irrational. I can however eat the closest to a vegan diet as is possible, and as always vote with my dollar by buying cheese from the local farmers market. I think that people are scared to know what goes on behind the curtain, but if you are too scared to know the truth, shouldn't that say something about what you're eating? For completely uncensored footage of animal rights issues visit vegtv.com.

Time and circumstance

[posted by risa]

We have about run out of grass clippings for the year, so I have started in on the Japanese knotweed. This dretful stuff was in possession when we got here -- there is no hope of our ever getting rid of it -- more persistent than quackgrass, morning glories or even bamboo, which it resembles somewhat. The shoots are edible, but barely -- Japanese knotweed is to bamboo as Pikeminnow is to rainbow trout -- and by the time I remember to check, it's already seven feet tall and advancing another foot or more across the land, like kudzu. The roots are only a little smaller than Volkswagens, and the stuff travels underground and can come up through concrete -- which is amazing, as the stems are, even in old growth mode, amazingly fragile.

The leaves shaped a bit like aspen leaves, are large and soft and popular with sheep, which we've had here, and chickens too. I'm cropping the entire stand section by section, setting aside the stems to dry -- thoroughly -- for beanpoles first and kindling later, and the masses of leaves for mulch and compost. This is safe to do if you get to them before they go to seed --otherwise, it would be a death knell for a garden.

Beloved has continued planting, transplanting, weeding, and watering the garden, while I have been harvesting, composting, mulching, and watering the orchard. We contacted the firewood man, too, and when he said he might bring wood any time, we spent much of yesterday getting the woodshed ready for him, moving the last of last year's wood to the front porch and moving the straw bales -- eight jumbo three-twine monsters; two to the barn and six to the patio, where we arranged them like a bench facing the "dining" area. Lucky for us we did, as he brought and stacked his first load that afternoon. No one before has ever done our stacking for us, so I gave him my best choker cable, with a wire-rope loop at one end, a good twelve feet long.

Firewooders love chokers, which are extremely handy for snaking logs out of a pile. I warned him it had been through a fire and so was too rotten for real cat work, though good for his truck. He was puzzled that I knew that much about logging, but said "thank you, Ma'am" with real appreciation.

The temperature while all this was going on was approaching 97 F. To keep the house bearable -- we have no air conditioning, which at our age means we have to respect heat waves -- I tacked five tarps to the south and west sides of the house, making awnings of them by twining them to bricks set out into the poultry pasture, and built an attic fan with a salvaged squirrel cage blower attached to a piece of veneer with a hole cut into it. As the outside thermometer rose to 95, we were able to keep the inside registering a mere 78, by battening down the hatches, drawing air from underneath the house and pushing the hot air from the attic at the same time.

In this kind of heat, I find I can turn off the hot water heater, open one valve and close another, and get plenty of tolerably warm water (enough for a shower) direct from the solar collector. We could get it much hotter by putting in an outside shower, but we don't want to drain onto the ground so near the well, so that idea hasn't gone anywhere as yet.

Today we took the day off from homesteading, which was as well as we were both getting a little sore by this time, and headed for the mountains where we attended Meeting for Worship at the home of one of our friends there, followed by a potluck, and then to another friend's retirement party at a famous winery nearby.

This place, where the kitchen has been featured in a series on the Food Channel, has hundreds of thousands of grape vines in thousands of rows across the hills. The main cluster of buildings is bigger than many European castles, and occupies the top of the highest hill for miles in every direction. We felt a little self-conscious here, or rather class-conscious -- Beloved remarked that, while most of our peer group was getting educations and careers, we were homesteading in the mountains and falling steadily behind -- getting by on a tenth of the income of most of our friends -- not losing them, for sure, but losing just a little bit of their respect -- some -- and vice versa, as our goals and ideals diverged from many of theirs over the decades. But it was good to see them all, and we certainly did not turn down the Pinot Gris and fabled food.

As the band played on, and the glasses clinked, a pall of rose-tinged murk fell across the trellised hills and, crossing the sun, bled it of light until all the windows below blazed orange. Smoke from the more than eight hundred fires raging in California had reached us, perhaps drawn north by the rare lightning storm that had crackled through in the night. Time to go home -- our home, for good or ill, till time and circumstance should pry us, like a good many to the south of us, from the land.




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Week 6

Independence days post

Plant something: More potatoes, lupine, zinnias, rhubarb. Moved the last summer things from the greenhouse.

Harvest Something: Peas! Lettuce, broccoli, spinach, garlic, beet greens, bok choi, mustard, onion greens, dandelions, cat's ear, plantain, pie cherries, Japanese knotweed (for stock feed, bean poles, mulch, and compost), algae (from the creek's annual drying up, for compost).

Preserve something: Drying mint, froze spinach.

Store something: Spinach, using the Ice Cube Tray system.

Manage Reserves: Moved firewood and straw bales, made kindling ahead. Firewood began arriving, four cords.

Prepped: Mapped next year's garden, to double again over this year as from last year, Heaven-Willing-And-The-Crick-Don't-Rise. This will involve retiring the Circle Garden, so we mowed the elephant garlic border in preparation for lifting all the bulbs, then will hopefully lay out six 100 foot beds right through the orchard and move the deer fence, next winter. We could not easily mulch that much but this will give us a chance to put fava beans and buckwheat into the rotation.

Cooked Something New: Made four loaves of bread instead of the usual one or two, as inspired by Sharon Astyk. Managed time poorly, let the bread fall, but it's good even so.

Worked on Local Food Systems: 2 out of 3 meals home grown (vegs, eggs, solar mint tea).

Reduced Waste: kept all the week's pasta water to use in bread; built an attic fan using found parts, turned off electric water heater, used solar only during heat wave. Grey water to fruit trees.

Learned a skill: using Japanese knotweed (I know, but not this year, not at our age and budget -- you want to eliminate it from our place, come and give it a try).

Hundred Foot Diet (almost)

[posted by risa]

One aspect of having a lot of garden but not much time to freeze, dry, or can, is finding opportunities to eat really fresh, thereby saving labor later.

When I'm outside in spring, I always grab, whenever I think about it, a dandelion, mint leaf, onion spear, spinach, lettuce, snap peas, whenever they are within reach as I pass by. Later in the year, the obvious: plums, blackberries, grapes, (not this year), tomatoes, corn, pears, and apples, apples, apples. For a break I might sit under the hazel tree cracking filberts. Or even pick a few (very few) acorns, surprisingly good raw in small quantities (choosing acorns from trees with round-lobed as opposed to sharp-lobed leaves if I can).

Or I may take radishes, beets, parsnips, turnips, new potatoes, or Jerusalem artichokes into the house, dice up, steam briefly, add assorted greens and steam briefly again, and take my bowl outside to eat by the poultry pasture, watching the antics going on inside (it's a 3 ring circus, literally: chicken, duck, goose).

And you might be surprised by how much many of these things go well together.

The lunch shown in the picture, which was taken about 1/2 hour ago, is a case in point.

I was in a rush this morning, because I'm cutting about half my commute by driving to a park-and-ride over in the next watershed, and the bus leaves earlier than I'm really good for. So on the way out of the house, I snapped up a (used) produce bag, a red potato, two radishes (with tops), a hard-boiled duck egg, and a pair of chopsticks, and ran. Made the bus with forty seconds to spare.

At lunch, I got out this unpromising-looking combo and took it to the staff lounge. I cut up the potato and radishes, and zapped them in the staff microwave in a bowl for 99 seconds, while cutting up the greens. Then I added the shredded radish tops to the roots and zapped for 55 more seconds while peeling the egg and dicing it up. Then I took out the bowl from the microwave, tipped it into a cooler bowl, added a bit of pepper and ranch dressing that were on hand, cleaned up after myself, and went out to sit on a bench in the June sun, people-watching and munching.

Much better than one might think. I was never fond of radishes because I only knew them store-bought and raw in salads -- so I'm conditioned to think of them as bitter, not one of my preferred flavors. But homegrown, cooked (yet not overcooked!)! Revelation! Tomorrow, I'll try not to be so rushed, and work some spinach and Bok Choi into this.

And next week I get to start in on the sugar snap peas.

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Take one freebie hot water heater

[Posted by risa]

The weather kept me indoors much of the last three days. I took Friday for vacation, and spent much of it touching up interior paint, including patching cracks in the trompe 'œil floor, which has stood up surprisingly well considering. This part of the house was constructed using very cheap materials and had when we got it, angels help us, a flat roof (in permanent monsoon country). The water got in -- still does, in spite of the sloped roof we cobbled on -- and got underneath the vinyl tiles, swelled the chipboard underlayment, breaking tiles left and right. Back in the early nineties, with no money to actually fix the floor, I had the bright idea to pull up the worst tiles, fill all the holes with driveway patch, paint the whole room white, then, using the edges of the remaining tiles as guidelines, hand-paint fake terracotta tiles over the white throughout, covering it all with polyurethane at the end. Visitors have often assumed that it was in fact terracotta, which has been kind of gratifying.

Saturday and Sunday, there were enough breaks in the weather for me to take my flats of tomatoes and pok choy out for a sun break, cut some bean poles, cover the future potato patch with black plastic to kill the sod, and start work on the solar hot water heater.

This is intended to be an almost-no-investment project.

Take one freebie hot water heater, peel back half the outer skin, remove the insulation from that half, paint the exposed tank surface black, lay it on a pallet in a sunny spot, attach a couple of garden hose spigots, frame the tank in with old recycled fence boards or whatever, insulate the frame box, and cover with a freebie window. I have yet to scrounge up the needed insulation, but the system is almost ready to put into service. A washing-machine hose will go from the wellhead valve (which is inside the little house in the picture) to the inlet bibb, then a hose from the outlet bibb will run twenty-five feet over to a bibb in an elbow underneath the second bathroom. Hot water will then run from both the electric tank and the solar tank in winter, or we can cut off the hot water tank and its valve in summer, using the solar system alone. To increase summer capacity, one simply runs the washing machine hose into more and more loops of sun-exposed black hose before tying into the tank.

Beloved, a bit tired from mucking out the barn, made appropriate noises about the project, but reserved her highest praise for the sheet of black plastic over the future potato patch. We like hot water, but food we really like.

:::

Oh! And then I brought in the flats, just as a few snowflakes began to fall. And we had hot chocolate by the fire.

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Loading the transformer

[posted by risa]

Another storm front moved through. I had been home alone sick all day, trying to fight off an ear infection (these have a habit of being life threatening as I'm apparently the abode of a resistant form of strep). About four in the afternoon, the transformer out at the street went "bang," frightening the geese and plunging the house into interior darkness, just as the rains were at their wildest.

I was right in the middle of uploading A Journal of the Plague Year, so survival modes were very much on my mind. And with only about 5K to go, too (slow modem). Oh, well.

Beloved hasn't been feeling well, either, so, since I could not heat the bedroom for her return home, I thought I had better build a fire and put the kettle on, the old-fashioned way.

When these things happen, one's life is both simplified and made more complicated. Simplified because there isn't much to do: split wood, carry water, chop vegetables, trim the lamp, practice dulcimer, sleep. You can only read by lantern light for so long, and it's not enough to really see by for some chores, like mending. Splitting wood and carrying water, also, are predicated upon an economy that currently doesn't exist around here: nostalgia for the nineteenth-century ways of doing things can be a misleading exercise because, in fact, hardly anyone can afford to work for, say, five cents an hour anymore. Though we are in danger of getting back to that -- through a process of horrific attrition, thanks to a couple of hundred years of good sanitation and poor family planning policy.

Complicated because the world still thinks growth equals progress and while I'm sitting here in the dark, the cost of everything is rising fast and there's not much more my world expects from me in the way of productivity. I'm beginning to panic as I measure my remaining strength against how fast I'm supposed to run to keep up, in a direction I don't want to go. Out there somewhere are committees and a grand jury (I've been picked for duty next week) and a job that are becoming irrelevant fast, if we're not very very careful. And so far, we're not.

Most of you are maybe too young to have seen Soylent Green, yes?

I then put soup on, but Beloved would have eaten. It's symbolic more than anything. We do try to put something we have grown in every meal, and we do try to have at least one meal a day at home. OK, so I will just have a little bit....

When she came in, I was sitting in the dark with a candle and two lamps going. I had tired of practicing dulcimer, then eating, then practicing dulcimer, then eating. She put down her stuff on the counter.

"How long have we been out?"

"About an hour. They came and fixed it, and then it went bang again."

"Right, they're back, shining lights on it and scratching their heads."

"They have to be careful. A lot of wet volts can happen up there if they forget any steps."

"They won't. They're really good, getting here that fast. Our heroes."

"We seem to have them here more than anywhere. People are loading that transformer a lot."

"Well, the price of wood went up before the price of electricity. So people switched over."

"Switched, I love it." I hefted my bowl and spoon. "Soup?"

"No, I ate with the kid."

"How's he doing?"

"Really, not that bad. He wanted to go for a walk but then the rain hit and I told him I wasn't up for it with my throat, so we stayed in and watched some of his anime. He's not going to go to work in the Gardens tomorrow; too wet."

The lights came on, momentarily blinding us. The refrigerator clattered, and settled down to a hum. Civilization!

"I'll go get the mail, I still have on my coat," she said. "Are the birds in?"

"I had to chase them around in circles 'cuz it was still light out, but I think they're all Behind Closed Doors."

''Kay, thanks." She went down through the mudroom with that long farmer's gait she has.

I blew out the lamps and the candle.

Bang! went the transformer. The windows rattled.

I sighed, and lit the lamps again.

Beloved came in, dripping, with a handful of unsolicited catalogs. Her eyes were wide.

"I thought I was being shot."

"You were practically right under that thing, I shouldn't wonder."

"Tell you what, let's just go to bed."

"Let's."

I took the soup off, and the hot water, closed the damper, blew out the lamps, and followed her off into the darkness.

About as soon as we closed our eyes, the lights came back on. You could just hear the refrigerator cranking up, against the steady drumbeat of the last rains of February.

Country Living, brought to you by the fragile, expensive, and unpredictable twenty-first century.

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Casaubon's book

Sharon Astyk has moved her site again. Yeesh! But it's worth changing all our blogrolls to keep up with her. Head over to Casaubon’s Book for her latest thoughts, for example these on starting from seed.

A quarter of barley

[posted by risa]

Those of us who remember the name H. Rider Haggard are familiar with him mostly as the author of King Solomon's Mines.

On his return to England from Africa, he took up farming in Norfolk, and noted that, though he and some of his neighbors persisted in it, economic considerations, driven by the twin demons Urbanization and Global Trade, had made it impossible to make money at agriculture.

In A Farmer's Year, Being His Commonplace Book for 1898, Haggard has this to say about globalization:

Men only too often keep up the game till beggary overtakes them, when they adjourn to the workhouse or live upon the charity of their friends. The larger farmers struggle forward from Michaelmas to Michaelmas, and at last take refuge in a cottage, or, if they are fortunate, find a position as steward upon some estate. The landlords with farms upon their hands work them with capital borrowed at high interest from the bank, till they can let them upon any terms to any sort of tenant. Unless they have private means to draw on. or are able to earn money, into their end it is best not to inquire ; they sink and sink until they vanish beneath the surface of the great sea of English society, and their ancient homes and accustomed place are filled by the successful speculator or the South African millionaire.

This is the result of Free Trade, which if up to the present it has brought a flush of prosperity to the people as a whole, has taken away the living of those classes that exist by the land, at any rate in our Eastern Counties. When that principle was introduced ruin to agriculture was foretold, but at first, owing to a variety of circumstances, it did not fall. Yet disaster was only postponed: now it has come, and whether the land and those who live on it will survive is more than I or anyone else can say. The truth is that the matter is no longer of pressing interest to the British nation. The British nation lives by trade and fills itself with the cheap food products of foreign countries ; the fruit of the fields around its cities is of little weight to it one way or the other. If all England went out of cultivation to-morrow, I doubt whether it would make any material difference to the consumer—the necessaries of life would still pour in from abroad. What would happen if a state of affairs should arise under which corn and other food could not be freely imported is another matter. When it does arise, no doubt the town-bred British Public, and the Governments which live to do what they conceive to be the will of that public, will give their earnest attention to the problem, perhaps too late. Meanwhile, all is doubtless as it should be, and, as there is not the slightest prospect of redress, we poor farmers must bow our heads to the inevitable, and, while hoping for a turn of Fortune's wheel, make the best of things as we find them and be thankful.

Yet, with becoming humility, I would venture to ask a question of those who understand these matters.

A____, an English farmer, grows a quarter of barley which pays rent to the landlord (part of which the landlord hands over to the Government in the form of taxes), rates to the parish, tithe to the parson, and land-tax to the State. This quarter of barley he offers for sale on Bungay market. B____, an Argentine or other foreign farmer, grows a quarter of barley and also offers it for sale on Bungay market, to compete against that offered by A____. This quarter of barley has paid no rent to a British landlord, no rates to a British parish, no tithe to a British parson, no tax to the British Government. Also, in practice, it has the benefit of preferential rates on British railways, and is carted to the market over roads towards the cost of which it has not subscribed, as A____'s quarter is called upon to do.

In what sense, then, is the trade which takes place in these two competing quarters of barley Free Trade? That it is free as air in the case of the Argentine quarter I understand. I should go further, and call it bounty-fed; but surely in the case of the English quarter it is most unfree, and indeed much fettered by the burden of rent, rates, tithe, and taxes, which have been exacted upon it for the local and imperial benefit. To make the trade equal, just, and free in fact as well as in name, before it appears on Bungay market, ought not the Argentine quarter to contribute to our local and imperial exchequers an exact equivalent of the amount paid by the British quarter? Why should the Englishman bear all these burdens and the foreigner who seeks the advantage of our markets be rid of them? In the case of whisky I understand the principle to be that imported spirits should pay an approximately equal tax to that exacted upon those manufactured in this country. Why, then, should not this rule—if it is the rule—be applied to other things besides whisky ; the barley from which it is distilled, for instance?