Though frost come or sun shine

Next year's elephant garlic peeking through the snow

[risa] For a couple of weeks now, when nothing else is happening, I have been moving garlic.

It's not really garlic, but elephant garlic, a closer relative of leeks, though if you have eaten a clove of it, anyone who catches a whiff of you will assume that garlic is what you've been eating.

But there's more to elephant garlic than the cloves.

As with garlic, if you harvest the stalk, the cloves will suffer as they will have lost their solar collector and can't store food properly. But the stuff is relatively prolific -- even invasive -- so, once you've got some, in the ordinary course of things you will soon have a lot, and perhaps you will then feel it's okay to experiment!

You may, for example, treat it as a leek.

We harvest cloves in late summer from some plants that we've allowed to mature, but we also harvest stalks -- or, rather, the sheaf of leaves that precede the extension of the central woody-fibered flower stalk -- in spring and early summer, and if you catch them young they slice up nicely and go well in stir fries and such. And we use the young sprouted bulbs in the winter as if they were shallots. Plants that have been matured to the flower stage -- which, again, doesn't do much for cloves -- also are encouraged here, as we're fond of the clusters of tiny purple flowers in bread, in soups, and on salads. Bees like them, too. And the flower stalks, which grow to be five feet tall, make perfectly good stakes around the garden.

There was elephant garlic in a small, decrepit and snaky raised bed when we got here, sixteen years ago. When we started the circular garden around front, I undertook to move all the available "shallots" -- in midwinter -- to form a border, by pulling away the termite-riddled boards of the old bed, forking up bulbs, moving the lot of them as one wheelbarrow load and planting one every twelve inches, round the fifty-foot diameter circle. Within a few years, the border was a two-foot thick wall of green, making inroads into the rhubarb patch and into the tomato patch, and what not. It was as if I had put in bamboo.

All well and good, as we do think it an important vegetable, but the cloves have suffered from overcrowding because we couldn't keep up with the harvesting. As the root systems were no longer in a bed with friable soil, but growing just outside the "real" garden, they were too hard to dig in summer, and in winter the mud simply cakes up one's digging fork unbelievably. In either case the work seemed to outstrip the benefits of digging for the stuff, and meanwhile the cloves got smaller and smaller.

We've redesigned the garden into a mini-farm of some nineteen long beds, right across where the circle garden stood for fifteen years. This means that now it is December, the green spears shooting up from this year's bulbs are appearing in curved rows right across our new paths.

These I am digging up, when the fit hits me, and re-distributing among the new beds, most of which are not yet fit to receive any other planting, but elephant garlic is hard to kill. You can lay out a plant right on top of the ground here, in the dead of winter, and it will root and right itself, though frost come or sun shine.

I pick a likely-looking clump, grown about six inches tall, and fork gently around it on four sides. Then I tip it up and rip the chunk, like a grass sod, loose from its surroundings, bring it over to the garden and play a stream of water over the clump until much of the clay is gone and the shining white bulbs, from marble size to golf-ball size, each with its shiny green spear, are easily separated. Placing them in a bucket, I move along the beds with a long stick, dibbling a hole down through the eight inches of straw and leaves to the soggy flattened corrugated board beneath, and punch through the cardboard. I seat the bulb in the hole in cardboard, draw the mulch up to the leaves, and pass on to the next spot. That's it.

Some four hundred bulbs have been relocated in this way; this sounds like a lot, but it has worked out to one plant every three to four feet on more or less a grid pattern. We hope to work around them ...

There's some risk that I'm creating a monster, I know; but it's what I do. We could talk about the Jerusalem artichokes ... meanwhile, there's food, with relatively little chance of crop failure. The elephant garlic seems to like being regarded as a companion plant; it cosies up to everything from pumpkins to parsnips, and its aroma seems to help confuse the bugs as they're hunting down the other veggies. You can use it in just about everything except maybe homemade ice cream. And as a last resort you can set up a table out by the road and give it away, as some other folks around here do with their zeppelins zucchinis.

I think, based on the amount of pathway I've cleared so far, that I'm about fifteen percent done with this task. But I've run out of room. Daughter took enough pity on me, at the end of her holiday visit with us, to take away one clump. I'm thinking I might take some to work with me next week, to set up on the "free" table in pots. What do ya think? Too .. risky?

Just enough willpower

A chill has settled upon our landscape

[risa] I thought I would be going to work today, but during the morning hours it didn't look like the few drivers were all that comfy with what they were doing, so, bearing in mind the five-car pileup and assorted crashes all week, I called in to work and self-declared a snow day. I live the farthest away of any of us, and higher elevation, too, so this was not unexpected.

But now what? The next thing on my chore list was to dig elephant garlic bulbs and spread them around in the new beds, but -- unh unh.

Beloved didn't have work today, either, except to go and help Last Son with his shopping, which would be safer to do in the afternoon -- so we did our favorite thing, which is to sit by the fire, drink coffee, and "solve the world's problems."

As this had started around 5:30 a.m., however, there was only so much more we could do of that. So she dressed for barnyard and went to take care of her poultry, and I dressed for crawling and took on the attic, something I'd left off the list for a couple of months.

My insulation supplies, Arrow tacker, and trouble lamp were already there, so it was simply a matter of finding my mask, gloves, hoodie, ladder, and just enough willpower. It's a tiny space, about eighteen inches high mostly, rising to a ridgeline of about thirty inches in the center, and dark as sin. The trick is to inch along between the joists, drag a bunch of stuff as far as you can reach, rest, inch along some more, and then flop over a joist without getting your feet tangled up in the knee braces of all the trusses, which come along every four feet or so, then repeat, till you get where you're going. You can't easily get the trouble lamp to where it's wanted, so you do all this with a LED flashlight tucked into a headband under the side of your hoodie hood. Also a long pole for shoving things into corners you can't otherwise easily reach.

It's cold up there (a good sign), yet when you rest the next time a bead of sweat comes skiing down your nose, hesitates for an itchy moment, and drips down onto the insulation. Every now and then something decides to roll away just out of reach -- you preach at it --

"No. Hey, now, NO. There was NO NEED to do that -- rggghhh -- fehhh -- "

"You okay up there?"

"-- Meh? Mmh-hmm, don't mind me -- " inch along, grab the item, swear at it once more for good measure, inch along.

Actually, when I'm up, we can't often or easily communicate directly. I've taken to carrying the cell phone and we call each other up if I need checking on, or want something, or there's some other emergency down there in the world of life and light.

I'm putting in three ninety minute shifts of that today -- one to go. I'm home alone at the moment, so am doing other chores in the interim. We've agreed I won't do crawl spaces with no one else home.

Chore number one is to paint gallon jugs black, for stashing near tomatoes and the like, filled with water, next summer. The idea is that they will soak up sunlight by day and rebroadcast the heat by night, to give the plants a leg up on the season.

Chore number two is to clean kerosene lamps and chimneys, trim wicks, and refill the reservoirs.

When we homesteaded in the Coast Range, back in the distantly receding Seventies, light was an issue. Our place was more than a quarter of a mile from the valley's main road, and the utility company would have charged us a fortune to line in to us. The telephone co-op did not have this policy, so we had a phone in very short order, but the house we built never had electric service.

We had a wood cook stove, a propane refrigerator, and a propane stove and two propane lamps cannibalized from an old travel trailer, one Aladdin lamp, assorted candles, about ten 15-watt twelve-volt lamps, and four kerosene lamps.

Of all of these, we were fondest of the kerosene lamps -- still are. They have been handed down in my mom's family for several generations, and they don't look like the ones you see in the stores now -- each one's base is a heavy, yet graceful, blown-glass bell, rising to the reservoir at about six inches, and the brass collar, stouter than those now available, lifts the lit wick up to a height of twelve inches above the table surface.

These are the lamps you see in movie Westerns, being lit by the actress just as the studio lights brighten to many thousands of times the candlepower of the actual lamp.

The things certainly don't throw much light to sew by, but, if you've avoided the colored and scented oil sold in housewares at Wal-Mart, and trimmed the wick cleanly on a gentle, balanced curve, like trimming a fingernail, and washed the chimney, and, after lighting, replaced the chimney promptly and then set the wick high enough to burn brightly, but not so high as to soot up the chimney, you can read by it. (More on maintenance here.)

If, as we do nowadays, you have utility power, well, you have enough lighting options not to need such lamps very often. But we get power outages here, sometimes up to twelve hours. I once went through three weeks without power during a particularly vicious ice storm in north Georgia. So we keep the old lamps clean, filled and handy, along with several newer ones.

Mind you, the air gets pretty unhealthy if you run these lamps a lot. Think of them as a way to get through the necessary bits of the evening, then get into your nightgowns, reach around behind each lamp, cup your hand, and blow it out -- then go snuggle in bed together like any self-respecting winter-bound critters.

Snow's coming in

Our first dusting of the year

 We have placed our first seed order of the year, with Fedco for a change (our usual supplier having been swallowed up by Monsanto). 

Seed from Maine may present a few problems as we are in the Pacific Northwest, but its worth a try until we know better where we can safely order locally. We have quite a lot left over from last year, especially corn, beans, runner beans, and peas, but we're also (we hope) getting in packets of: Boothbys Blonde Slicing Cucumber Black Zucchini Golden Zucchini Burpees Butterbush Winter Squash Connecticut Field Pumpkin Scarlet Nantes Carrot Shin Kuroda Golden Detroit Beet Cherry Belle Radish Bordeaux Spinach Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce Hyper Red Rumple Waved Lettuce Gator Perpetual Spinach or Leaf Beet Graffiti Cauliflower Pingtung Long Eggplant Diamond Eggplant Early Jalape Hot Pepper Revolution Sweet Pepper Rutgers Tomato Yellow Brandywine Tomato Aunt Rubys German Green Tomato Amish Paste Tomato Sun Gold Cherry Tomato Mammoth Grey Stripe Sunflower Andover Parsnip Purple Top White Globe Turnip Early White Vienna Kohlrabi Fruit trees, bush fruits, and potatoes we will seek out locally. 

We've got lots of potatoes, but they are going to sprout too early, methinketh. It snowed about two inches here last night. Much more in some parts of Eugene; and the roads aren't improving. We expect maybe 16 degrees F tonight; I'm running a lightbulb in the pumphouse and another in the chicken shed. Everyone be careful out there!

 

A grand tree

[risa]

When we moved here, there was a row of ten-year-old conifers along the fence, across the narrow "front" yard, facing our living room windows. I say "front" because unlike most houses, ours doesn't face the street, but is turned sideways away from it. Approaching from the driveway, you come only to the garage, and as you come in through the garden gate, the first door you come to, along the walkway, left around the garage, is the "back" door. To get the "front" door, you must continue, around to the left, past the kitchen window and the terracotta sun which is pictured, in winter sunlight, as the logo of this blog, along the north side, then turn right past an ancient lilac, then right again, onto the front porch at last.

The living room has east-facing windows, and we like to hang fuchsias outside these, from the edge of the porch roof. Beyond the fuchsias are the evergreens.

Two of these are Douglas firs, one an Engelmann spruce. Another, until this past weekend, was a grand fir. They have all put on another fifteen years of growth, and around here, that can be substantial. The Douglas firs are now eighteen inches in diameter, that is, at four-and-a-half feet above the ground -- DBH, Diameter At Breast Height -- and are already over fifty feet tall. They interfere with hot sun in high summer, shield the poor neighbors from our strange goings-on, and one of them is Granddaughter's favorite climbing tree. The spruce sweeps the earth with a generous spread of touch-me-not needly branches, and is a great favorite with the ducks and hens, who regard it as hawk-proof.

We've added to this row a bigleaf maple, a blackcherry, and a scraggly Scotch pine that was a rather dubious Living Christmas Tree a couple of years back. The hens regard the Scotch pine as beneath them in the pecking order, and we've had to fence it off for its own protection. The maple is doing well, considering I once accidentally mowed it to the ground. The blackcherry has required too much watering. It's a shade-loving species, and though I put it right at the end of the line, to the north of the grand fir, it has gotten, or seemed to think it was getting, too much sun even there.

It seemed to me that the cherry and the grand fir were reaching height enough to compete with our garden and orchard; also the grand fir was beginning to get that pale, needle-necrosis-y look that I associate with rot.

It's a youngish tree for that, but that's how it looked to me.

"I think the grand fir is hollow." I said this to Beloved to introduce my "grand" design.

"Hollow? It's practically a teen-ager."

"Mm-hmm, but when I was a timber cruiser, a lot of the grand firs had the look it's getting. The Forest Circus taught me to walk around each one, and if I saw any conks I had to deduct half the board feet in the tree. The Douglas firs, Ponderosa pines, cedars, and larches didn't have those. I don't remember them on hemlocks either."

"Does it have conks?"

"No, but I think it's getting ready to. It sounded hollow when I thunked it with the maul this summer."

"So, you're thinking it should come down."

"It, and the cherry, too. If the grand gets any bigger, it will blow down too close to everything and take the cherry with it."

"Oooookay. I'm gone this weekend; do you need me working with you on this?"

"No'm; we've got it all covered." This is a standing joke; "we" in this context means me, the cat, the two geese, and all the chickens and ducks.

I procrastinated, come Saturday, by hauling all the remaining stored apples into the dining room, separating them into Eat Soon, Eat Later, Juice Now, and Feed to Chickens categories. All but Feed to Chickens got washed in a vinegar and salt solution and air dried, then the Eat Laters were individually wrapped in newspaper and stacked stem- up, newspaper-twist-side-up, in boxes and moved back to the cold room.

Then I brought out the electric chain saw, oiled the chain, and brought down the black cherry without any problems. Next I took a lunch break (beets, beet greens, kale, chard, and hard boiled duck eggs) and went after the grand fir.

Here I courted trouble. The base of the tree was indeed hollow, meaning there would be no hinge worth speaking of for dropping it in the right direction. And at fifteen inches DBH and over forty feet tall, it needed to drop in the right direction -- and was decidedly a leaner, favoring the poultry fence and the Italian plum tree.

Eekers.

I made as much of a wedge-cut and back-cut combo as I felt comfortable with, but could see the tree was still betting on the fence.

There is a solution for this sort of thing, not always shown in the how-to books, but known to most loggers. Trusting the hens not to come push the tree over in my absence (the Barred Rocks will try anything once), I went to the garage and found an iron bar and a hydraulic jack.

Fellow lady farmers (and y'all gentlemen farmers too), trust me: you can push over just about anything with a hydraulic jack.

Not that everyone who knows how to do this always guesses right. I've never smashed the cab of my own pickup truck, as a friend did who then had to walk ten sheepish miles home, but I have flattened my own gas can.

I tapped the bar into the downhill side of the backcut with the hammer side of the maul head, set the jack underneath the bar, and started cranking. After a couple of minutes, where there had been a trunk, branches, needles, living, flowing sap, lichens, spiders, mites -- a whole city of who knows what creatures aspiring to the sky, there was nothing but air. The grand fir lay atop the blackcherry, firewood-in-waiting, as the gods of firewooding intended, and right between the fences too. Some things you remember how to do. For awhile longer anyway.

Starting at the big ends, I firewooded the trees and branches -- we take anything down to one inch diameter -- and stacked, setting aside the slash for pea-brush. Behind me, the chickens, sensing it was now okay to investigate, surrounded the intriguing black hole in the new stump, and began picking off bugs from the interior, an activity that was to occupy them for the next two days.

I came to the end of the grand fir, and there, big as life, I found this year's Christmas tree -- just the right size and shape.

When Beloved got home, Sunday night, the tree was already in the corner of the living room, in its stand, watered, lit, baubled -- with Suzie Snowflake, the family heirloom angel made by my mom from scraps during the great railroad strike fifty-six years ago, on the tip of the leader that had been forty-five feet above ground the day before.

So the grand fir is still a grand tree in its way.
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Get yer psanki supplies right here!

Risa offered blown goose eggs at the
Library Staff Association Holiday Craft Fair

Old, supernumerary, and greedy

The Dark has descended; I see very little of the home place these days, being in town in a large, windowless building, five days a week, and often attending meetings in the evening and getting home around nine. So any meetings that are scheduled for weekends are anathema to me -- I have hay to move -- firewood to process -- insulation to install -- frustration!

I imagine many others, having realized that their own tiny patch of soil may be needed for their survival and well-being, are experiencing the same dissonance; the need to earn that mysterious stuff, money, trumping what feels in the bones more like common sense: real productivity.

We had the youngest two home for dinner, along with Daughter's gentlemanly Young Man, for a good and quiet time and Too Much Food with Long Food Miles, and, as I do every year at this time, I fall into a relatively deep funk, feeling old, supernumerary, and greedy for fats and sugars, and tumble into bed two hours earlier and awaken at four-thirty in the morning, sore from tossing and turning with the undigested unnecessaries that have been romping about in my middle.

Some things got done. I did, during the long weekend, find time to move hay onto beds one through twelve, and completed building the mulch underneath the grape arbor. I also set up the iron tee posts on beds two, four, and six, stringing wire along their tops, for next year's tomatoes and beans. Built bed nineteen, and painted the south wall of the house. Patched a hole in the dining room floor.

It was sunny enough, sometimes, to break routine in a lawn chair with a glass of tea, listening to a laundry list of complaints from our White China gander.

Also made one really splendid fresh garden salad, that featured kale, beet greens, bok choi, red and green chard, onion greens, and the last of the fall lettuce and the Roma tomatoes. But most of this year's festival cooking fell upon Beloved, who has a more certain hand with the recipes favored by company.

As I grow paler, crinklier, tubbier, and surlier each fall, I retreat into gardening books, where the photos of sunny plots crammed with shining, squeaky clean, lean, green leaves forms a mental salve against the sordid reality of feasting against the background of an increasing world famine.

The next month will be even darker. At some point, I will balk even at ogling pictures of green leaves and curl up deep in the blankets with a pile of Patricia Cornwell novels. World, begone! I'll see you when the trees break forth in bloom.
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Some good soil -- somewhat rocky

Spreading out -- the fences are done, or at least enough to let the birds into the new pasture. This is a view, from atop the roof, of the twelve main garden beds ( there are seven smaller ones, mostly along the house). Lower right, grapes. Far right, apples, plums, compost barrel. middle distance, haystack. Center, compost bin. Near street, more apples. These, and the haystack, are in the poultry pasture, though it may be hard to tell from the image. Their pasture wraps round the garden on two sides. Extreme left, reaching over the fence, a filbert.

There is a USGS brass cap by the maple stump where the street comes in, upper left. When the General Land Office surveyors, led by George Thurston, walked through here in 1853, they noted: "Some good soil -- somewhat rocky." That's a fair assessment; it's a heavy clay, shot through with round basalt stones that come up after each freeze. It should have been left to the Camas lilies, no doubt. Too late now. You can work with it, but not if you love running a tiller -- it never dries out enough to till, until the day it does -- and by that afternoon, it's too dry and cement-hard. Mulch and compost, compost and mulch, year in and year out, yields better results, it seems to us.

Veggies in this photo: Chard, celery, onions, garlic, rhubarb, beets, spinach, four kinds of lettuce, bok choi, broccoli, nasturtiums (it hasn't been very cold), Jerusalem artichoke (in ground). The broad beans planted a couple of weeks ago are up, as well. The reason some of these crops are clearly not in their beds is that the garden they were in was a circular garden, whose fence has been removed. Next year's beds were laid out right through there, and the plants in the "aisles" will be mostly harvested first.

This garden loves to grow beets. As I was spreading the new hay, I hefted a few leaves and peeked underneath; the roots are as big as softballs. Perhaps we're doing something right.

Next we'll draw an improved schematic of the nineteen beds and plan our campaign: apples, plums, pears, cherries, quince, apricot, peach, mulberries, figs, kiwis, grapes, blueberries, raspberries (the blackberries can jolly well stay where they are), wolfberries, and the like, the remainder of the space being divided among shade-tolerant and shade-intolerant veggies, and some kind of rotation. We may or may not put up permanent tee posts in all the main beds (as previously discussed) this year, or even plant them all, but the layout is done!

We've begun pulling things out of the freezer: tomatoes, peas and greens for soup (with our potatoes and dried beans), applesauce to have with yogurt, and pear sauce to spread on the spelt bread. Also to make room for a few things the kids will require for their Harvest Dinner next week....

A few days ago, as I laid out the new beds at last, I went without the customary string lines and just spread flattened corrugated boxes where the mulch would go. I hoped the lined-up boxes would warn me if I were getting too far left or right. I seem to have wandered about anyway, but after fussing with it a little, pushing and pulling boxes and squinting up toward the house, I gave it up and let the chips fall where they may. As long as we can get down the paths with a wheelbarrow, we're good. And the plants won't care.

One of the many things we found in the blackberry patches, when we got here, is an antique three-tined hay fork, the handle of which had broken off near the end. We sawed off the break, sawed a broken pruner handle down to about five inches long, bored through it, tapped this onto the end of the fork handle and soaked the the fork in the creek for a week or so, eventually remembered we had done that, fished it out, dried the surface, oiled the handle, wire brushed the tines, and put it back into service. It's been the best fork on the place for fifteen years and outlasted two store-bought ones.

I've cut open the remaining round bales of hay and whenever I have time, walk a few forkfuls into the garden and drop them on the beds. We'd like to finish off the haystack, as the chickens love to play "queen of the mountain" there and it could conceivably come into their heads to fly over into the garden. Also, we want their pasture to double as a driveway for getting vehicles up to the barn.

The chickens are all over the place all the time, and love to window-shop whatever I'm doing. The ducks and geese have more of a discernible routine. Three times a day, led by the gander, they troop, as one, down into the haystack area and eat grass, honking and quacking excitedly. Then they waddle, single file, back up the hill, take a bath in their kiddie pools, and retire to a sunny part of the old pasture for a nap. When the nap's over, repeat.

Not such a bad life.
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Gardening 101

[posed by daughter]

I am feeling a bit more adventurous in matters of green things after reviving one of the few house plants that had survived the move from Beaverton. I had taken some fresh potting soil and replanted the cactus in a lidless teapot. It not only perked up, but the thing actually blossomed! I am fairly sure that this kind of success with plants is common among gardeners, however I am just as sure I have had no such success with a plant of my own. (Mad cackling in the background, "It's alive!)

I had thought that perhaps "green thumbs" were genes of the recessive type, and that I had been born with a brown thumb. It turns out that I'm really just a sore loser. Not long after I started dating, I realized that I have spent pretty much my entire life avoiding new things. After some thought I came to the conclusion that I like to be best. I like to be best so much that I would rather not even try for fear of failure.

I have failed at gardening before. It didn't get very far. I planted some seeds in a pot on the porch and the cat chose to use it as a litter box. (Sigh). However I have moved to a house with a yard and permission to spruce it up in whatever manner I would like-- and I would like to garden. But, being an inexperienced gardener I have some challenges to attend to:

I haven't the faintest idea how to start. I have a long strip of land with a fence at one end and a shed at the other. The chain link fence is propped up by an immense amount of blackberries which I have been told make great pies and also are a great work out in the Spring when a pair of shears are more than necessary to cut them back. The sun tends to spend most of its time on the left side of the yard with the fence casting a shadow over the ground. The side with the shed gets more sun throughout the day.

The cat has been sentenced to life inside the house due to the busy road we now live on and the danger of raccoons and coyotes! This means the garden will be safe from my cat but I'm curious if the other wildlife will prove to be a hassle. And then there are the holes there are a few of these in the yard and Mojo our little miniature Pinscher appears very interested in them. Any ideas Risa?

Color scheme

[posted by risa]

Two days of -- for this time of year, in my memory -- unparalleled glory. First, there was a slow-to-burn-off fog, under which I participated in Eugene's 400-strong response to Join the Impact, but I will admit I was anxious to finish the fencing. No more work could be done laying out veggie beds until that task was completed. It was daunting, too.

The new stuff is called "deer fence" but it's only six feet tall. Blacktails are lazy enough to respect that, but not if they get really hungry.

So when I took down last year's seven-foot welded wire, I rolled it up and dragged it down to the northeast corner, where they had jumped in most frequently this year, and laid it out along the sheep fence, now rusted and buried in invasive weeds and such, put up by our neighbors in days gone by.

The six-foot fencing I brought along the north boundary, by the street, and cut it off at the northeast corner to retain a kind of informal gate for vehicles, as that place has been, for decades, a kind of second driveway, and we might need it sometime.

In fact, four huge round bales of hay are sitting in the middle of it right now, and will need to be distributed on the new beds as soon as I've spread enough cardboard.

I put up the remainder of these two 185' rolls along most of the rest of the east boundary, past the spot where the fox jumped through last summer, until I ran out of it.

This deer/orchard fencing is heavy. I could unroll it only a few inches at a time. To stretch it before stitching it onto the fence posts you really need a tractor, which "I have not got"; so I was reduced to setting, at intervals, a come-along attached to a newly set post, with a cable puller on one hook, drawing along the bottom wire until it was a taut as it would go without lifting out the post, and then twisting wire to set the fencing on the previous three posts.

The results aren't the prettiest fence I've ever built, but it's a three-woman job with one woman to do it. Later, I'll come back and string tight wire along the top from post to post, to increase the height, but also to weave once through the fence between posts and do a "suspension-bridge" effect, which should help.

Next I started piecing old leftover welded wire onto the inner poultry fence to make it tall enough to convince the Araucanas not to clear themselves for takeoff.

This involved making hundreds, perhaps over a thousand, cuts with the side-cutting pliers, which are fortunately a good brand over fifty years old, stout, heavy, and sharp. It also involved using up the old fencing that had been hoisted into place to keep the chickens out of the new pasture all week, when we found out how much they like to hop three-foot fencing.

I could then attach each piece to the end of the preceding one, weaving the snipped ends of wire into the top edge of the three-foot fence, and thereby create a four-and-a-half foot fence. Labor-intensive, but I place a premium on avoiding waste, and stood back and admired my work with some pride.

The birds discovered within seconds that a corner of Paradise had just opened for business and the land rush was on -- all except for one who kept banging against the fence around the corner, unable to fathom why she couldn't join the others. I had to chase her about ten feet, to get her clear of the obstruction.

Beloved walked up.

"Oh, my, you've gotten a lot done while I was at work."

"Thank you."

"So, are you going to do anything about that color scheme?"

"Color scheme?"

"Green fence below, silver above. Dogpatch."

"Hey! Well, yah, but waste not, want not. And the birds are happy."

"Still, come next summer, when we're sitting out here with a cup of tea ..."

"We'll need a pleasant place to rest our eyes!" We repeated this together, in unison, as it's a regular saying of hers. And both cracked up.

"Tell you what," I offered, "there's plenty of leftover green paint from the trim work; I can run a roller along here and it will look ready-made in the twinkling of an eye."

"That's the spirit."

The geese came over and looked us up and down from their new perspective: north of us instead of south. Behind them, Chanticleer, the rooster, scratched in the new ground underneath the fir trees, and stood back, in gentlemanly fashion, for the hens to inspect his findings. In the distance, the ducks hopped up and down, first one, and then another, catching flies that had alighted on the hay bales to warm themselves in the sun.

Now to begin laying out next year's veggie beds.

Fresh woods, and pastures new

[posted by risa]

Wow, lots of rain. But it was time to hit the ground running, so we did, though trying not to slip in the mud too often.

The idea is to run deer fence around the whole northeast corner of the place, about a quarter of an acre, and poultry fence around the designated garden area, which is within that. The poultry get twice the pasture they have now, and the garden will quadruple over the one we had this summer.

Although we didn't get it all done, we let the birds explore the new ground and it seems we had their complete approval. It's interesting to see how the geese prefer the open air, and the chickens love to scratch underneath all the new trees. Forest critters were their ancestors. And the ducks are the most cautious; it took them an hour to work up the nerve to go see what everyone was talking about.

Hopefully by the end of next weekend, the fences will be all done, and the "raised" beds also will be well on their way to completion. But they say there is a very big storm coming in.

The almost glutinous rain was too much for me, even in rain gear, by the second day, so I took a noon break to start a couple of loaves of spelt bread. This time of year I like to gather thirty or so acorns from the English oaks on our campus quad, in front of the library where I work, shell them, and put them though the hand grinder for a "novelty" ingredient in our bread, just for a couple of loaves, just to be able to say we did. I understand about removing tannin and all that, but a few at a time don't seem to need this treatment. Anyway, we're not dead yet!

This bread is not as pretty as the whole wheat loaves I was making last year, as it rises kinda so-so, but it has a nutty, almost peanut-butter flavor that is especially great thinly sliced and toasted, and spread with butter and homemade jam. For two loaves, or you can double all ingredients for four (saves on baking energy):

30 acorns, shelled and ground
1/8 cup rye flour
1/8 cup buckwheat flour
1/8 to 1/4 cup oatmeal
1 good apple from your cold storage room, cored, chopped and/or ground (catch and add the juice)
32 oz. warm (not hot) water, veg stock, whey, or fruit juice (the more juice, the less sugar)
Two good dollops, from a wooden spoon, of honey, or 1/8 cup brown sugar
Tablespoon sea salt
1 pkg. or equiv. from loose pack, active dry bread yeast
Open your bag of (not stale) spelt or wheat flour and keep it handy, with a small bowl for scooping it out. Enough for the 2 or 4 loaves.

Dump in large mixing bowl all the above except the salt and the spelt, then add one bowl of spelt and mix liberally with a nice big wooden spatula, and set aside while you go do something else. Give the yeast time to think over how it's going to take over the world. Say twenty minutes.

Come back, throw in the salt, scoop a couple of bowlfuls of spelt into the middle of the mix, and start mixing in large circles, folding the dough from the outside in, and then keeping adding spelt till the dough "rises off the bowl" (forms a lump that can be kneaded by hand without sticking all over you). Cut in to 2 or 4 lumps as you intend to bake.

Grease your pans, baking sheets, what-have-you (I use large ironstone plates and make round loaves) and arrange your oven racks to your liking (I like to put both racks on the two lower slots, with a cookie sheet on the lower rack, to prevent the loaves' bottoms burning when the middles aren't done yet).

Shape your loaves (that's right, this is a quick bread, skipping the double rising. Modify the plan as you wish), give them the three cuts across the top if you like (I do), add some sesame seeds if you like (I sometimes do), and set them in the oven (cold for slow, or pre-warmed a bit for faster rising (especially in winter -- we don't have a thermostatically controlled environment).

Ya? So now get back into your raingear, build more fence, come back and see how it's going, and when the bread is close to the size you'll accept as a finished product, turn on the oven to 325-350 F, note the time, and go back to fence building for one hour. Get down in the mud and crank that come-along, dreaming of fresh bread.

Check your watch. Eeek, it's been fifty-five minutes arready. Come in, turn oven off, get out of the rain gear, change out of your wet socks, check your fire, make yourself some hot chocolate, open the oven door, turn out the bread onto a drying rack you've set on the counter, tear off a chunk, butter it, and go sit by the stove with your feet up on a stool.

Ahhhhhhhh.

When bread cools enough not to sweat when bagged, refrigerate or freeze, or put into a good clean bread box, as you wish.

Go back to the fire, bringing along your already-slightly tattered copy of Sharon's Depletion and Abundance, and pick up where you left off, as the wet and blustery darkness gathers outside.

:::

Ooops. Suit up again! The birds have gathered themselves into the barn, and want their door shut upon the roving foxes. A mother's work is never done.
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Bag it

[posted by risa]

The other day, Beloved came home with a twenty-pound bag of rice -- "terrible food miles, I know -- but I couldn't resist the bag" -- neither could I.

It's burlap, something we don't see much of around here these days, but with a zipper sewn in and a carrying handle. Once you've removed the twenty pounds of rice, you can keep the bag as a purse, or a shopping bag. This is beyond clever! One of the nicest things I've seen -- why the stores are not full of such things is ... it's frustrating, this throwaway culture we have.

The bag stirred memories.

Way back in my twenties --we're talking early 1970s here -- eek, and all that -- I heard about a way that people in some places reuse burlap bags, and saw a drawing, and liked it, and made one as shown in the drawing, and liked it even better.

It was my shopping bag for a long, long time. I kept it patched until it was in tatters and in the end, mulched it. But then burlap seemed to disappear, and I haven't made another one since -- until now.

A short story: when I lived in Atlanta, which was when I had that bag, for several years, my bicycle was my only transportation.

I had a very young son, he was about three at the time, and he rode in the child seat on the bike. Which was fine, but we went to a concert at Piedmont Park, which is in a great bowl with hills around, and -- he was tired through and through and fell asleep, deeply asleep, and I couldn't put him in the child seat without waking him, which I was loath to do, so I rolled him into the shopping bag, suspended him from the handlebars, as I had seen Vietnamese do in documentaries on our black-and-white television, and walked the bike up the steep streets twelve blocks home. A very successful expedient -- he slept peacefully the whole way.

A local coffee shop has begun making burlap coffee sacks available, at first for a dollar each, and then fifty cents -- we thought they were a steal at a dollar, and might have paid two.

So we have been collecting them for various projects. Not buying coffee at the counter at all, just going in to get burlap bags, with our spare change, really.

So, with a fond remembrance from Oldest Son's childhood in mind I have attempted to resurrect this project. The results are not perfect but I will improve on it my next try, I'm sure.

Take your burlap bag and spread it out on the dining room table and cut a line around from the bag's waist to its shoulders, so to speak, and back down to its waist, about two inches or three away from the edge, through both sides of the bag, so that you've cut a big inverted letter "U".

Fold both flaps down. Take a sailmaker's needle and a skein of yarn, and work the edges of the cuts on both the "handle" (which you will stitch together, closing what had been the mouth of the bag) and the flaps, with a diagonal stitch.

You may need to shorten the strap by cutting six to eighteen inches out of it, so that the bag does not drag on your thigh (which unfortunately mine does -- I cut out six inches and should have cut out twelve -- will fix later).

That's it. Takes almost no time. To use, roll up the bag, put it in your shopping cart, and at the register, unroll it, open one flap, tuck in your ill-gotten gains, throw the flap over the other one, put the strap across your off shoulder, and go.

Being as it's half a sack now, it's good for -- oh, say fifty pounds -- if you are.
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Well done

[posted by risa]


Beloved and Last Son are visiting my in-laws in California, and I'm lonesome. Keeping busy seems to work best for that.

Sometime during the week I wrenched my back, possibly by stepping off a curb in not the best way, and come Saturday morning I found myself moving very, very slowly. But I had made my mind up to finish the well project, and so dressed nice and went down to Jerry's -- our local competition to the out-of-town big-box stores -- and asked for a couple of rolls of one-and-a quarter inch PVC flexpipe and enough fittings to set up a pitcher pump on the kitchen sink -- someday. For now, we just want to be able to draw water at all -- and so the current project is confined to the greenhouse.

Went home, changed into stinky old farm clothes.

I stashed one roll by the woodshed and rolled the other up to the potting shed, behind the house. There, I installed the foot valve on one end of the roll with a fitting and a ring clamp, and snaked that end down the well until it thumped bottom, backed off about eight inches, then sawed off the pipe with a crosscut saw. I then installed the pipe clamp that came with the original jet-pump pipes, an antique thing that looks nineteenth century, and which has the job of not letting the sawn-off pipe slip down the well. Filled the pipe with water from a hose, to be sure the foot valve was holding water as it should. Yep. Good! Next, slipped on a ring clamp, then tapped in a fitting with a mallet, tightened the ring clamp, and threaded the pitcher pump onto the fitting.

Here I got into trouble! The pump being unwieldy, and my body uncooperative, I got the pump crooked on the first five soft plastic threads of the fitting and stripped them. So it was necessary to remove the pump, loosen the ring clamp, pull the fitting with a pipe wrench, and carry the fitting down to the garage to be sawn off behind the insulted threads. I could go get another one -- they cost only forty-nine cents each -- but I had done my budgeted driving for the day, and didn't feel like changing clothes again -- don't like being out in public dressed like Jolene the Plumber.

Back to the potting shed, tried again, got the pump right on the second try, and pulled the handle.


Ahhh!

And then I reassembled the greenhouse windows, put away the tools, and went to bed early.

We'll have this water tested. If it's safe to drink, then next year I'll run a hole under the foundation of the house and run pipe the length of the place and then up into the kitchen. Meanwhile, having a pitcher pump beneath the greenhouse window has advantages.

It can't freeze, at least during the course of a normal winter. So we should be able to water the stock (and the house) in any kind of emergency involving a broken jet pump, frozen-broken pipes, or a power outage.

The kitchen pump would be about three feet higher than the one on the well. It would have the advantage of supplying water to the kitchen, but the potential disadvantage of exposure to freezing because of the additional 100 feet or so of pipe. So it would be nice to have the greenhouse pump as well. Two pitcher pumps on one line at different heights don't work out, though; not with an open line.

We discovered that problem at our old place in the Coast Range, where we had two buildings, each with its own pump on the line from the springhouse. We solved it by installing an inline valve under the lower pump. By shutting off the part of the line leading to that pump, we assured pressure for lifting with the higher pump. So that's what we plan to do with this well.

Eventually.
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All's well

[posted by risa]

Our current adventure is reviving the old well. We have a nice ninety footer with a 220 volt jet pump, but when the power is down, no water!

The water table is only about 23 feet hereabouts, and most of the wells have been driven to 33 feet. We were clearing blackberries fifteen years ago, and found one of these, apparently abandoned, just behind the barn (not the best location, to be sure), and when we added a tiny greenhouse, made up mostly of three sliding glass doors, to the potting-shed end of the barn, the well platform became the floor of the sunny end of the greenhouse, and remained undisturbed from then until now.

Lately I noticed that the two-by-four frame of the greenhouse windows is rotting at the ends, so this seemed a good opportunity to work on the well. It had a jet-pump system at one time, and the two pipes, suspended from the top of the well casing, had been sawn off and posed a difficulty in getting a new foot valve and flexpipe down to the water.

I would need to raise the pipes, but had put this off while the windows were in the way. Now I took them off and stacked them against a willow tree, set a multi-position ladder in folded configuration above the well, hung a chain around the ladder about 2/3 of the way up, hung a come-along from the chain, tied a rope securely, wound around several times for the sake of available friction, round the two pipes, hung the looped ends of the rope from the bottom hook of the come-along, and cranked. Everything groaned a little as the slack was taken up, and then the pipes began to move, one quarter of an inch per click.


After the pipes had been raised two feet, I faced the issue of how to secure them without letting them crash back into the hole, so that I could unhook the come-along and reattach it to pull the pipes another two feet. I could use another rope, tied to the ladder, but might lose a few inches every time I had to reset, plus having to do quite a bit of untying and re-tying.

This problem occupied me for about half an hour, but was solved as I rooted about in the garage: one of the many tools given to us by my parents and seldom used over the years, a chain vise-grip wrench. This works just like a vise-grip, but includes a length of motorcycle chain, intended to provide a grip on larger cylindrical objects. I last used it to remove a stubborn oil filter from a GMC truck -- or was it an International Travelall? -- twenty-five years or so ago. It worked very well for that -- overkill, really.


The wrench made everything simple -- up to a point. Over the course of the day, whenever I had the energy, I would stand over the hole and crank. Ultimately, the pipes towered over me like a flagpole, and leaned suspiciously toward the chicken pen. No one at home --free range -- and I had chased away the curious hens, who were determined at first to examine my work while standing on my feet, but I didn't care for the idea of two hundred pounds of pipe crashing down through all of their nice wire netting. So I found another rope, and tied the pipes off to lead them in another direction, just as I've done sometimes with wayward trees.

When the old foot-valve, slimy and dripping wet, cranked into view, I could see why the well had been abandoned. The 3/4 inch injection pipe had corroded through, and rather than go to the trouble of raising the pipes (which would have been inside a well-house at the time), the owners had simply drilled another well.

I now had about four inches, or some sixteen clicks of the come-along, to go.

This was beginning to make me nervous -- there was a lot of iron waving around in the sky now. I reset the wrench, the rope and the come-along, left the setup overnight, switched to making seven quarts of tomato puree -- not very successfully, as only three jars sealed. I had been impatient with the water-bath -- a no-no. So I froze the other four jars and went to bed.

In the morning, I waited until after the dew had burned off (the day eventually went to 75 degrees -- on October 25!), to give everything a chance for maximum friction. I cleared an escape route through the potting shed, checked around me to make sure my clothes would not catch on anything, grasped the handle of the come-along, and cranked slowly -- one click, two -- watching the base of the jetpipes intently. The foot valve was an old type, shaped like a coiled spring. No telling when the behemoth would let go and tip itself over.

Click -- click -- click -- szloop -- out it goes! Eek! I backed away through the shed, but everything went as planned. Drawn by the tightened guy rope, the pipe assembly flung itself out into the pasture, with a most satisfactory "whump." I could now snake a garden hose down the well, fill it up and flush it out, and go shopping for some 1 1/4" flexpipe.

In the afternoon, for a change of pace, I dibbled some broadbeans into the winter beds, kneeling on an old pillow stuffed into a feed sack.

Well, well, well

[posted by risa]

Gathered the last tomatoes, zucchinis, potatoes and eggplant ... pulled up all the summer-garden debris and piled it for the mower and bagger,then emptied the bag -- about six times -- onto the winter beds and the compost heaps ...took down all the beanpoles and stacked them for next year ... dumped out the tomato and potato container gardens into the wheelbarrow, and threw the container soil into the heaps and the compost barrel ... found a huge nightcrawler in the potting mix and parked it in a cottage cheese container while deciding whether to go fishing ... affirmative ... made a batch of spelt/apple/potato/Parmesan-cheese bread dough, divided it into two loaves to rise in the stoneware pans in the oven ... got out the miniyak ... went over to the reservoir ... yes, they were biting.

Paddled back to the landing, drove home, put away the boat, started the oven, cleaned the fish, double-bagged them and put them in the freezer, took the cleanings to the compost barrel ... did dishes ... took out the bread ...

The Brandywines of October

... had some, fresh-hot, with slices of Brandywine tomato from the vines hung upside down in the greenhouse ... went back out to the greenhouse and put a hose down the well with the new foot-valve on it ... brought up some water with a pitcher pump ... ugh, it's in foul shape. Brown, with more than a hint of sulfurous mercaptans.

Not surprising when it's been thirty years since that well has been used.

Who knows what might have fallen in there and died over time? I once lived in a Quaker/Hutterite/Bruderhof commune, which, as it turned out to my and everyone else's surprise, was on the farm that had belonged to my maternal great-grandfather, and before that, to his father-in-law -- the barn had been burned, and all our family's mules "requisitioned," by General Sherman's boys -- and in the house in which I, among several of the younger people, was living, had a hand-dug well on the back porch, four feet across and sixty feet deep, lined with quartzite stones. We had it cleaned once and the mud at the bottom turned out to be a mass grave of chicken bones, along with raccoon bones, bobcat bones, squirrel bones, and the like. We didn't know what to think. None of us had ever gotten sick, anyways ...

This could be something like that -- on a smaller scale -- it's a steel pipe, thirty-three feet deep and six inches wide, set in a concrete pad, open at the top, which revealed itself as I cleared blackberries behind the chicken shed, fifteen years ago. I had been told there was an earlier well than the one now in service, which had failed and been abandoned, and had wondered where it might be.

We're interested in seeing if this one can be made to yield water again.

A rig for impromptu well-testing

Clearly it's going to take some doing.

I have a high pressure nozzle, and maybe could put that on the end of the hose and flood the well, hopefully driving the yucky stuff out the top of the pipe and cleaning the perforations at depth enough to regain access to the water table. Even so, we probably can't drink this water without purifying it, and even then I might hesitate -- it's right in the middle of the barnyard -- but could be used for emergency irrigation. We're entirely dependent on electricity for our water and had six outages last year. We're between gasoline-powered generators at the moment, but I'd be happier to find another way to pump garden water, which we can't get from the creek because it doesn't run half the year. A rain barrel isn't a solution either, same reason, and a cistern is a lot of trouble and expense for what we'd get back from the effort, seems like.

We'd also like to get water for household use from the newer ninety-foot well without having to depend on the 220 volt pump, but a full-sized solar immersion pump is too costly to consider, and a smaller siphon pump can't be installed with drilling into the well cap, which gets technical and which we're not willing to do. I'll ask our local pump company if there's a good way to lift water for ourselves without the 220 or gasoline, using the existing piping --we can't use the hand pump for this because that water's more than 25 feet deep in the four-inch pipe -- I think it is, anyway.

It's a good well -- all the others in the neighborhood are 33-footers and in a drought year, back in the nineties, they started to run dry and people came to us with five-gallon buckets from several of the houses around. It felt good to have the life-giving stuff on offer.

:::

At our Coast Range place, there was a spring coming out of the ground right back about sixty feet behind the house. Skunk cabbages and ferns grew all around it. There was not much flow to speak of, but there was enough to encourage us to experiment. So we dug it out, to about the size of a bathtub across and a little deeper, and the hole filled overnight with clean, reasonably clear water; it looked to be about three or four gallons per hour. This was encouraging, so we put together the following system: one new thirty gallon trash can, galvanized, washed clean, punched with many, many holes with a hammer and a nail, and with a two-inch diameter hole chiseled into the lid, sunk into the spring up to lid height and surrounded by a lining of basalt stones (river rocks); one brass foot valve; seventy feet of 1 1/4" PVC flexpipe; one pitcher pump. We put the pipe in the ground alongside the house and then straight up into the kitchen, with the hand pump by the kitchen sink. There was no drain; a five-gallon bucket stood beneath the sink and was emptied onto the gardens regularly.

Beloved's mom liked the pitcher pump;
it reminded her of her Wisconsin childhood!

We built a little insulated springhouse over the spring, too, and milk and eggs and the like kept reasonably well there, year-round. The entire system, in 1979 dollars, cost less than three hundred dollars, including the springhouse.

We won't have such an easy time of it here. But we'll keep after it in hopes of some improvement over the status quo.
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The whiteboard over the freezer

Click picture to enlarge enough to read the funky handwriting! On the right, garden plat. On the left, mostly freezer records. This is supposed to be the cold room, but it was seventy today and they expect similar weather all week.
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Digging in

My son tells me I am a “disaster otaku.” Well, maybe.

Growing and putting by food, adding insulation, finding alternative ways of getting at water and providing heat and lighting, putting away the credit card, paying ahead on and retiring debt, not eating out or going out to the movies or concerts, or paying for cable, or getting my hair done or shopping for style — these are strategies that seem worth while to me right now, along with getting to know neighbors, sharing rides, finding ways to get to and use public transit, and staycationing. I’m not even planning to get the DTV box — who needs it — We have a nice collection of old VHS and some newer DVDs, old vinyl records and a phonograph, some acoustic musical instruments, Scrabble, Monopoly, and books, books, books. And I have someone to read them to me while I shell beans.

I've been experimenting with not riding around in motorboats, not skiing, not watching the Superbowl, and not hanging out in a mosh pit, and, so far, I'm still breathing.

Think about it: home from work, recycled items in hand, via small-town bus, eat a few small Yukon Gold potatoes with sliced Roma tomatoes, change clothes, and go out and pull down bean poles, unwind dying runner bean vines from poles, stack poles, give vines to poultry, check later for de-leaved vines, feed vines to chipper, fork over the compost, come in for tea as the darkness gathers, wash your face and hands with hot water from atop the woodstove, read some more Kingsolver, brush out your hair, put on your nightgown, pull the blanket over you, touch your Beloved's cheek. It's all relatively inexpensive and sustainable.

Avoid complications, and, to some extent, complications will, if the angels smile, avoid you -- for awhile.

To ready up for winter

October 12 -- first frost.

Mostly it hit the squash vines and the stevia. Everything else, even the tomato crop, seems to be soldiering on. Nevertheless I took the hint, and gathered up the three most heavily green-tomato-laden vines -- a Brandywine and two Romas -- and hauled them to the potting shed to hang; we'll see what happens. I had brought in the basil plants and hung them up by the fire to dry the day before. All the remaining green tomatoes I brought in; I'm not fond of fried green tomatoes (except as a book) but I did make a green tomato pesto that I liked. Anything that's half-turned we set out on paper in a window to see if it will ripen; most do.

There were a few zukes among the blasted squash leaves and I took those as well, and gathered the remaining sunflower heads and some bean vines for the poultry. It occurred to me that I haven't been making much mulch the last couple of months, so I got out the electric shredder and made about thirty pounds of chips from sunflower and pepper and sunchoke stalks.

Earlier, after breakfast, I sat by the fire cutting open feed sacks to lay out flat and roll up. I've begun using them to create more dead air space in the tiny crawl space that serves here for an attic, along with bubble packs, styro peanuts, cardboard, and pretty much anything else we can get our hands on.

It's a struggle to get up there as the hatchways are right up under the rafters and I have to squirm like a caterpillar to negotiate the opening. It's completely dark up there, so I've installed the trouble lamp to see for the time being. There's no floor; the ceiling fortunately is made of very sturdy one-by sixes nailed to the underside of the ceiling joists; but one has to negotiate the joists anyway to avoid roiling up the matted fiberglass insulation, only about two inches thick, between them.

The obvious thing to do is get more fiberglass, R-17 or better, but we're out of money for this kind of thing and as we don't maybe have as much wood as we should, for this winter, I'm beefing up the best way I can, mostly with poly sheeting that's had several uses already, such as for drop cloths for painting, and the ubiquitous and numerous feed sacks. These are of three varieties: woven white plastic, patterned after burlap; kraft paper with white plastic insides; and kraft paper inside and out with 1/2 mil polyethylene sandwiched between. Cut open and spread, the bags cover an area about four by six feet each, and I tack them down at one end, then stretch them taut across the joists, tacking down as I go with the hammer tacker. Not very much R-value, I suppose; yet I can tell that it helps; the house already is appreciably warmer. And to think we went fifteen winters before we got around to even this! Shiftless critters...

Beloved has been processing more apples, and planning storytime and music programs, and practicing guitar; so she's within hollering distance to pass things through the tiny hatch to me as as I run out of them. She says that I look like a big bug in my hoodie, mask, and goggles. Whatever.

Oh! She wants you to see some of her eggplants:

We've ordered a pitcher pump and a foot valve, and they have arrived, so when the attic is done, being able to get water when the power is off will be a priority. Then when it has rained enough to soften the ground some, we'll move the deer fence and start making the long permanent beds. GWATCDR (God-Willin'-And-The-Crick-Don't-Rise).

So, that's us. What are you doing to ready up for winter?

What to do ...

... while it's raining cats 'n dogs (roof is good so far).

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Bubble, bubble

[posted by risa]

I have been shelving, in the library where I work, because my student workers are not back for fall term yet, and it's ironic to me, the titles I'm putting away at the moment -- weighty tomes, authored on Wall Street, concerning the world's financial statistics. Volumes for 2004, 2005, 2006 -- my job is to get them into the right order, so that those who need them can find them. But I'm feeling mildly panicked about that. Who's gonna need this stuff? It's mumbo jumbo from a kind of a religion, one that has just imploded.

What I think -- and I've said this before, here -- is that you cannot run a country or a world any differently than you run a household.

The charging of interest on money lent to others is not based on any kind of real-world productivity. Whether you are paying interest on principal or receiving interest on principal, you're participating in a flight of fancy -- and from time to time, reality bites that fancy in its fancy keister.

We're in one of those times.

Let's review some facts.

Suppose the world were made entirely out of oil, coal and methane (I'm not the first to use this notion, but let's keep going here).

And we burn the stuff:

To keep warm.

To get around.

To see by at night.

To make clothing.

To fertilize fields.

To grow and ship food.

To make and move practically everything.

We will still, even though the planet is made entirely out of the stuff, eventually use up half of it and see demand exceed supply.

And by then, have nothing much to breathe worth breathing.

So, some of us say we're at about that point now (which I find relatively easy to believe) and some scoff at it.

But, remember, we're on a platform made mostly of rock, not coal, methane, and oil. So what's to scoff? We're only some 7,000 miles in diameter.

And note that the scoffers tend to be the same crowd who cast aspersions on evolution and before that were casting aspersions on the roundness of the earth, and are now bringing us the spectacular failures of Wall Street.

This crowd's attitude toward the planet's carbon resources seems to me to very much resemble its attitude toward economic resources. The resources are treated as infinite; and they are no such thing. You cannot treat equity as an inexhaustible resource, just as you cannot treat buried hydrocarbons as an inexhaustible resource. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

Not that I'm about scarcity; I believe in abundance, but what I see as abundant is mostly sunshine and human ingenuity. That's maybe another post.

So, back to the well-managed household for a moment.

The householder sees resources (in the form of food, fuel, construction materials and the like, or the equivalent in the form of a shorthand mode of exchange called currency or money) flowing in two directions: out and in, against a general background of the second law of thermodynamics, that is, you cannot get something for nothing, and even your something will diminish over time all by itself.

So, to prosper, a household must see its income exceed its outgo, even just to stay even.

So you may accumulate resources by means of income, from hunting and gathering through agriculture to industry, and you must, to break even, accumulate at a rate that can handle consumption and maintenance. To prosper, your income must exceed consumption and maintenance both, and it is axiomatic that participating in a bubble may be about something but it is not about income.

(For those interested in pertinent Levitical proscriptions [as opposed to any about lobsters or gay people], we pause at this point to offer the reader a link to this one: Lev. 25:36. )

The good householder will accumulate such goods as are good, i.e., healthful to the body, spirit, and mind of each member of the household, and to those of the neighbor as well. The self and one's family, because self-interest is a necessity, otherwise one is subject to unchecked abuses, which is neither good for the abuser nor the abusee; but also for the neighbor, because there is a commons, beginning with the air, the water, and the green earth, upon which are all the living things together. For income must exceed outgo, but only to the extent of this healthful maintenance level. Let's call this program stewardship

A householder bent upon buying a McMansion, filling it with plasma TVs and driving to and from it in a Yukon to buy "food" raised mostly in CAFOs is not doing good stewardship. No nation has been cruising so single-mindedly toward a collision with this truth than the United States, but it is becoming a worldwide trend, just in time perhaps, for everyone's idea of an apocalypse.

So now, let's think of the household account as a checkbook. This is a real-world checkbook, but it works just like a monetary one.

You may make deposits: a sack of potatoes, gasoline, roll roofing, a sweater. You may write checks: eating potatoes, driving to see Grandma, roofing the house (and subjecting the roofing to wear and eventual loss through rain and shine), wearing out the sweater or perhaps losing it on a bus. If you spend more in checks than you can deposit your checks will bounce.

You know this.

I know this.

It's kindergarten-level knowledge, really.

But oil company executives and Wall Street and the current administration of the United States (and perhaps many other countries) do not seem to know this. Nor do most media, especially Talk Radio.

Welcome to Modern Times.

We might blame it on the current U.S. administration and its financial, military and industrial sycophants, but in a nation, or in a world, dominated by greed, the greediest are only relatively more blameworthy than the rest of us if we have been living upon their promises rather than the simple promises of the earth, the air the water, and the green things, without which we are nothing, and upon the well-being of which rests our all.

It's not as if we had not been warned.

So: what to do now, with the Great(er) Depression near upon us?

I suppose there will be resource wars as some attempt to balance their checkbooks by reaching for those of others. Perhaps some, I among them, will not die a peaceful death. It's not like that hasn't been a pretty common response to similar situations. If the violent come, defend yourself if you can, and if you cannot, reflect that no one will live forever on this green earth, the violent included.

In the mean time, those of us with any remaining shred of rationality might consider modeling good stewardship.

That the world may go mad and abandon civilized behavior does not require of us that we do the same; and the best hope lies in the modeling of good stewardship. Do what is right so that others, seeing this, may do the same.

Observe your self-interest and your family's interest and your neighbor's interest by not living upon interest; live by the work of your hands and make, and do, good things.

Now, you've heard all this before, but let's just go down the checklist yet again:

First, consider the automobile. What's the mileage? Carry more gas (petrol to some of us) at a time, to prevent evaporation loss, get regular tune-ups, check the tire inflation. Trade down in size to better mileage: there are vehicles that do fifty miles per gallon, and this is more significant to your kids' future than the prestige that big one gets you. Get more passengers, and carpool. Be a passenger. Leave the car home and ride the bus, the train, the subway, the ferry, the monorail, the light rail, the taxi, or the bicycle. Walk. No light rail? No bike lanes? No sidewalk, no trail? Write and call the local planners and city administrators; lobby relentlessly. Push hybrid; push electric. Sell the $*#!!! thing. Or give it to the GoodWill or St. Vincents. While you're at it, sell the motor home, the motorboat, the plane, the skimobile, the jet ski, the go cart, and the dirt bike. You don't need them; if you do find you need one once in a while, don't buy, rent. Telecommute. Lobby for a shorter work week, then spend the long weekends, the holidays, and the vacations at home (working in the garden!).

Second, consider the home. Why have a big one when a well-planned small one will do? Insulate, turn the heat down a bit, put on a sweater and a lap blanket, get rid of the air conditioner and plant shade trees on the south side and a windbreak on the north side. Make things out of rocks or used bricks instead of concrete. Use hand tools. No time? Turn off the television, you'll have more time. Look for low-wattage entertainment. Try romance. Romance can be cheap; instead of diamonds and skyview restaurant dinners, try being a good listener. Lean an acoustic instrument. Sing. Read. For lighting, go with sunlight through a skylight, or low-wattage fluorescent. Paint the walls white; you won't need as many watts. Replace the hot water heater, refrigerator and the freezer if they predate the energy-saving models. Install a ground cloth in the crawl space. Sort, reuse, sew, mend, repair, recycle, compost. For the furnishings, when possible make your own or buy locally made. Tear up the lawn and put in cover crops, fruit and nut trees, and fruiting perennials, on a schedule that will prevent your having to buy a new gasoline lawnmower when the present one gives out.

Third, consider the food. Cigarettes? I won't even tell you, you know better. Drink less alcohol and more water (from the well or the tap). Eat less meat and more fiber. Eat less prepared food and more fresh produce. Cook less, check out raw. Use double boilers and steamers and avoid frying. Don't send out for pizza; pizza sends for you, and what it wants from your arteries you should want to keep. Audrey Hepburn said the most effective diet is to share your food with the poor. Clean out the cabinets and put the stuff in the food drive bin. Find out who's offering organic produce in your area. Find out if what they're offering is really organic. Find out what "organic" is first, if you don't know, and don't depend on the television to tell you. Patronize local organic cooperatives, merchants and farmers. Raise your own food. Avoid those patented hybrid seeds from large corporations; patronize farmers, merchants and cooperatives providing heirloom varieties. Use hand tools. Garden organically. Plant vegetables and fruit and nut trees. Even, if need be, in a windowbox or containers on the balcony. Preserve your own produce. No time? We already talked about that.

Fourth, look at your clothes. Buy less frequently, go for longer lasting, and think cotton and wool and natural dyes. Most clothing now comes directly from the planetary checking account, and "polyester" should become an embarrassing word in your wardrobe. When possible, make your own or buy locally made.

Fifth, think about your work. Are you working to get your kids out of planetary debt or deeper into it? What are your living expenses? If you're a couple, consider cutting those expenses until only one of you has to work or both of you can work half time. Give the earned time to increased quality of life for the children, or, if you've wisely refrained from contributing to the disastrous population curve, to your friends and neighbors. If you're in the mining, manufacture, distribution, transportation, sales, advertising, or application of depletionary items, from autos to herbicides, re-career as soon as you feasibly can. Think small. We're not talking communism here, just common accountability -- ok, communalism; there's a big difference and we need not go into hysterics. It's all tribes. Even when it's Wall Steet, it's a tribe. Deal.

Sixth, and I'll stop here for now, what about that vote? If you don't have the vote, be careful who might be reading this over your shoulder, and start working on what it will take to get the vote. For this, your life will not be too cheap a sacrifice for your childrens' future. If you have the vote, think about what you're allowed to vote on. Is it just big political party versus big political party? Or nuclear versus solar? Roads versus light rail? Agribusiness versus sustainable farming? Clear cuts versus forest maintenance? Or to put it more simply, corporate greed versus life? If your vote can't access reality, if it isn't patching the holes in the planetary checking account, change that. Campaign finance reform will be the least of your worries. Get the vote, keep the vote, use the vote; get the real issues up for a vote; inform the electorate. And do what it takes to make sure your vote is counted. Perhaps you won't see results on this in your lifetime. But consider the alternative.

Whew! OK, I know, I haven't done maybe a hundredth of that stuff. But I chip away at it here and there.

I'm aware, particularly and painfully, of the cost of the infrastructure that maintains the glorified suburb that in my neighborhood passes for country. It takes six times as much of the planetary checking account to establish a rural home as it does for a comparable urban row house. I've elected to be a creature of privilege, and I don't care to look too deeply into what the mirror says about that. But in some things I can give back something of what I have taken. One way is to learn from the past, to gain pre-fossil-fuels skills, and to apply them, redesigning this acre of the landscape to produce food, shade, and windbreak in ways that do more good and less harm than was done here previously, and to share the knowledge gained, as best I can, with others who also care to learn.

Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders.

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