Apple surprise

 

We all know I'm kind of about apples. I think every house and apartment block in the area (city) (state) (nation) (world) should be surrounded by apple trees, with chickens and ducks running around underneath them, dodging the drops and then cleaning them up, and people coming indoors with bushel baskets of the things.

Apples and many other tree fruits can be hard to raise organically, and I often remember that my dad took a little sapling with him from our place here in Oregon in his camper truck, en route to Florida, only to get in a ruckus with border guards in Arizona because they didn't want him to cross their state with it (he won, kicking his case up through three layers of supervisors).

We bring in apples by the wheelbarrow load around here, and have done so since our thirty-somethings were five-somethings.



 

(By the way, buy your wheelbarrow in the 70s and it will last forty years ... )

We dry apples,



 

freeze bags of slices, make applesauce and apple butter,



 

juice and vinegar and cider,





and do just about everything except store them the way we store potatoes. Well, we do that too, but we don't count on it, because we don't spray, and we're not far enough from the neighbors to have returned to a balanced ecology on site, the way Greenpa has.


So this year I only kept a half-bushel of "keepers," more than half expecting, as usual, that worms would hatch in the cores and spread throughout, and the whole mess, an apple at a time, would be tossed to the chickens for a protein-rich winter snack.


But this year, not a worm.


Not one.


Zip, zilch, nada.


What's up with that?



 

Extra low cost seed starting kit

So, here's an idea I had, don't know if it works.

Tear the lid off an egg carton. As you use eggs, just tear off one end of the shell (the ones shown here are from our ducks) and place it in the carton after the contents have been dumped in the pan or whatever. When the carton is full, take it out to the potting bench.

Add potting medium and seeds.

Water eggs. Place carton in greenhouse, cold frame, whatever makes you happy.

I would not overwater these, as they don't drain, though it would be easy enough to fix that, for example with a dremel. The plan here is to get some seedlings up (these are Forellenschluss lettuce) and then transplant. The method will be to crack the egg as I'm about to put it in the hole, pot, whatever. What say ye?

lettuce in winter

The potting room was a miserable dank
shed, trash-chocked, roofed in plastic, blackberries
ingrown amid bedlam. she dragged it all into

the light, sifting for tools or nails, then
consigning the rest to dump runs. With one son,
the quiet one, she roofed the room with scraps,

tucking, there, or here, oddly-sized old windows.
To the south, a sliding door turned on its side
served for greenhouse glass. A friend's offer

of a chimney to salvage solved the question of how
to floor. With her other son, the tall one, she
rented a long-legged ladder for picking bricks

from the air, frightened at every ragged breath.
They piled them by the plant-room door, and the girl,
last child, brimful of jokes and laughter, brought

bricks to her from the pile, which she set face up
in a herringbone pattern. They swept sand and mortar
into the cracks, and danced in the sunbeans then.

Now for a bench, new-painted green for the color
of wishing, and pots of all sizes, flats too,
with a tall can for watering. She hankered for lettuce

in winter, and sowed the flats in October. After
a month, wild geese and their musical throats gone south,
she noted her seedlings spindly and sad, so taking

her hammer and two-by sixes, built a quick coldframe
with the other half of the always helpful sliding
door. By the sunny south wall in the duck pen she framed it,

and dibbled the seedlings within. They liked that,
but a darkness comes on in December; after a full
day, full week, one comes home exhausted, to eat,

to sleep, not to water gardens. One thing
only has saved the lettuce: the ducks do not like
coming in for the night. She goes into the dark

to disturb them; they rush about complaining;
the madwoman hops and chuckles. She locks them away
from coyotes, and turns, as in afterthought, to visit

her seedlings. By feel she gives them water, her hands
stretching toward summer in the unseen leaves.

From Collected Poems 

The good life

Processing beets to simmer in vinegar and spices on the wood stove

It seems like in all my online communities at once, we are all suddenly asking one another, "what is the good life?" Most of the answers are now necessarily contexted in a simple reality: there are fewer and fewer rural people. The National Geographic, perhaps under the influence of its new TV partner News Corp., has now gone so far as to suggest saving the Earth by dropping whatever we're doing in the boonies and heading for the nearest apartment complex.

I get that it takes six times as much copper for me to discuss this with you than if I lived in town, and all that. But I think that if the plug gets pulled (fun link), as well as more likely scenarios I can think of when reviewing the situation we're all now in, I am and would be happier where I am and feel somewhat justified, despite the Tolkien quote concerning advice, in recommending this life.

Beloved and I read books in the Seventies that had a lasting impact on our thinking about how to live, among them this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one. They influenced everything that we have done since.

But the one that impacted my personal outlook the most, despite some criticisms of the authors that have surfaced since, was this one. Helen and Scott Nearing pared down, pared down, and pared down. They bought land as cheaply as they could, avoided debt, dug, sowed, composted, built with native materials, found items and salvaged objects, made implements, bartered, ate simply, and entertained themselves and their guests at home with acoustic instruments and with reading, talking, debate, and contemplation.  Their regimen of strenuous effort for a short part of the day and rest and relaxation thereafter, with an extremely simple and low-cost diet, appears to have added many disease-free and senility-free years to their lives.

I would not or could not be the Nearings; I'm not as social or socialist as they were, and I remain mildly omnivorous. But I do believe in paring down, and I do believe in subsistence. My own book about this, written about ten years ago, does not really do these thoughts justice, though it tries: it recommends watching the nearest mountain (if you have one nearby) and having a cup of tea -- as opposed to busying ourselves with running to big box stores for huge television sets.

You can do this in an urban setting. I have. But access to land matters; no one can exist without food, and as farmers disappear and corporations take over, almost everyone's food is fast diminishing in quality and becoming downright dangerous. And as the climate, abetted by greed in general and the climate obtuseness of the American establishment in particular, destabilizes, access will become an issue. If we know this, and we are independent-minded enough not to wish to become a burden on others, might we not seek a way to produce, and not merely consume?

Work, as defined by the industrialists, the bankers and the politicians, has come to mean, more and more, a cubicle existence in exchange for chits which we may exchange for toys which are made of poisions. But especially for food -- which has also been poisoned, with our water and our air. Henry Kissinger said, "Control food and you control the people."

Do you wish to be controlled?

Apples and garlic in the kitchen; the empty bucket at left held beets until today

A way out of the present difficulties, though perhaps it will not do for all, is to reverse the trend of urbanization, at least family by family, as way opens. As we pare down and refocus and become more productive -- not productive of poisonous toys and needless services, but of our own necessaries and subsistence -- I submit that we will be happier.

Not to mention revolutionary.

Here it is December already

The ducks and their adoptive mother, Susannah the goose, along with the chickens, have now spent two weeks snootling through the garden beds, with the result that the whole garden has been knocked flat, and you can't tell by looking where the beds are supposed to be. But we know, and we'll be raking everything back into place before spring. This is sheet composting at its best.

The hens have rolled out a number of potatoes we missed, and I've plodded around, once every few days, and scooped them up. These typically have had more solar exposure than we like, and are a bit bitter, but they make fine seed potatoes. We're moving potato production away from the garden to a bed across the creek, and so I really appreciate spud discovery by the flocks.

En route with the spuds to the washing faucet on the south side of the house, I notice the herb bed is still in pretty good shape.

We moved the basil indoors two weeks ago, but the sage, marjoram, oregano, and of course rosemary are hanging in. We've only had about four actual frosts, and here it is December already.

The washed spuds from today's gather pose here with a fava.

Foliage on favas makes a decent winter green, even in salad, but once the seed pods set, it turns bitter. A few of the spuds are not sunburned, so I will probably make a colcannon with them and some leaves from the favas. Add in some winter squash from the ever-present stock pot on the wood stove, with diced dandelions and spring onions (they winter over or start early here) and you have a nice winter soup.

Mix & match

Back in the summer, our beans looked like this:

Right foreground, your basic green bean. We forget the variety, they were planted from last year's crop. Kind of a Blue Lake thingy. Center, farther away, are the runner beans, which shot up ten foot poles and doubled back, coming after us like triffids. But we stood our ground and ate a lot of them. Last year there were two kinds: Scarlet, and Hungarian. We knew what they had done, behind our backs, but we were kind of curious to see how it would turn out. So we planted the two kinds again this year, knowing they had become more or less one kind that would yield multiple characteristics.

Here's what we have saved for seed. Sure enough, the runners had melded. In the three jars at left, the dark blue came out like Scarlets, and the cream with brown spots look like Hungarians. But the violet ones are trying to look like both. Over on the right you have the Blue Lake thingies. They don't cross with the runners.

We'll plant these next year and see what comes of all this. These new runners are not as pretty as either the Scarlets or the Hungarians, but they taste about the same. Over time maybe we'll come up with our own variety. Mendelian mix & match.

Temp fence up, birds in

About this time every year, we open up the potager (kitchen garden) for a month-long bill and beak treatment. This helps some with slugs and insect pests as well as weeds, weed seeds, and out-of-season volunteer plants. It also stirs the sheet-composted layer throughout and adds manure.

To do this, we run a section of used welded-wire fence around from one corner to the other, near the house, in such a way that the birds invest the garden with mucking up our walkways. We still have access through a gate we have by the driveway, the usual use of which is to import bales of straw and wheelbarrow loads of grass clippings and straw.

We also set up a five-gallon bucket of water, as ducks can die of asphyxiation from mud-encrusted beaks if they can't snortle in water from time to time, and it's a long way back to the barn from here.

When everything is ready, the gate from the garden to the far end of the "chicken moat" is thrown open. The waterfowl and the "wild bunch" chickens (Australorps) can be counted on to find this expansive opportunity first thing in the morning. The more sedate Araucanas and the rooster, however, must be driven at least once or they'll miss the whole show.

a) House b) garage c) wellhouse d) garden shed e) barn/poultry house f) garden beds  g) fruit trees  h) chicken moat i) optional goats/sheep j) truck access k) walkway l) shade trees such as mature cherry or walnut. Not shown: plantings of tea, spices, berries, grapes, lavender, etc. m) place for humans to zone out.

Here is a crude drawing of the sort of thing we're trying to do, though it does not represent our actual layout. The homestead (or least the part of it on the house's side of the creek) is surrounded at the perimeter by a tall deer fence, on which we are encouraging blackberries, grapes and such. Ten to twenty feet in is the poultry fence, forming in effect a moat -- the birds' pasture is the outer ring of the property. This keeps them active, as they have a large enough territory but it's long and narrow. Our home, yard, and garden have the "interior lines" -- thus we don't have to spend all our time thinking about chicken poop underfoot or tracking into the house.

The round things inside the chicken moat are the majority of the orchard trees. Apples and such that drop and are not retrieved by us are the traditional transition zone for some fruit pests -- but the birds get them, as well as the fruit. The birds also interdict slugs and snails that are migrating toward the garden. Those that get past -- well, we hope the birds can find them in November and December, when they are our guests in the inner sanctum.

Winter squash routines begin

Snow on the hills again, a little lower.

I've been processing squash for the poultry -- about one fruit every two to three days. There's plenty of winter squash as well as pumpkins this year, unlike last year -- our worst garden summer ever here -- but also we have a lot of zuke-kins.

These are crossbred seeds saved from 2010 or 2011 that resulted in large green or yellow blimps a la zucchini, on zucchini-type vines, but yellow fleshed and hard like pumpkin. Some weigh over twenty pounds. They don't store very well, so we are using them up first.

Here you can see the zuke-kins peeping out from under the winter collection.

There is a stock pot dedicated to life atop our wood heat stove, which resides in the dining area. Sometimes it's heating dishwashing water; sometimes it's processing squash or pumpkin. I cut up a squash and put the pieces in the hot water overnight, and the next day I drain the rich water into the "wet" compost, cool the squash, and toss it over the poultry fence.

Yes, it makes a mess, but that's why we live a little ways out past the suburbs. In this picture a piece of new squash is at center, the peeling left over from the last one is at lower left, and the stripped greens are the remnants of whole kale and chard tossed over last month.

The birds appreciate this menu. The chickens quickly clean up the seeds and the ducks and goose go for the softened flesh. Then the chickens entertain themselves with the rind until it's cleaned to the "bone."

Sometimes the squash is so big the pieces don't all fit in the pot. I could wait and do half now and half later, but sometimes you want to make a pie or a squash soup. Around here, one doesn't try to do that too often, especially the pies. This family maxes out on "pumpkin" quickly, even if you throw a lot of nutmeg and sugar at them. The soup seems a little more sophisticated, and I for one can eat it quite often.

When I'm doing this I like to set aside some seed from our share of the squash for salting and roasting. We have a veggie processing sink in the laundry room with a short bit of hose and a brass nozzle, and the seeds can sit in a colander and have their pulp blasted away. Drain, bring into the kitchen, add some grapeseed oil and salt (I also add veggie seasoning [dehydrated leaf vegs, crumbled] as I do to everything), move the seeds to a small iron skillet, and set that on the stove along with everything else. Below, at left, you see the soup sections of the squash simmering, the stockpot of poultry feed is simmering in the middle, and a light lunch of salted "pumpkin" seeds is roasting at right.

Yes, the stovetop is a bit stained. If you're going to do this kind of thing, it's going to get that "lived-in" (in this case, "lived-on") look. But the heat's radiating to the house anyway -- so why not use it?

Snow job

The hills around us are white today, but we've only gotten the one flurry so far -- bit of a "snow job." But because we expect a relatively severe freeze, I'm moving smallish fall-garden plants to the greenhouse. There's room to do this because while I was away, the greenhouse was necessarily unattended, a heat spell came through, and the place exploded with cabbage worms, who wiped out the kale, leaving behind some bedraggled chard, beets, onions, peas, and surprisingly enough, cabbage.

They've died down now. I've covered the path with burlap and shored up the plastic where it was pooling rain, and we're back in business. Outside temperature is 38F, greenhouse is a balmy 54.

Indoors, I'm making some pre-mixed cereal for quick hot meals.

Contains wheat, rye, barley, oats, quinoa, TVP, veggie crumble, powdered milk, salt, stevia. If you're gluten-sensitive maybe leave out the wheat or substitute what you like. One cup to 1 1/2 cup water in a bowl, or as you like it. Being incredibly lazy and not fond of cleaning wheat-glued pots, I zap for 99 seconds at 1K watts, with some dried apple slices or apple butter, and it's ready to eat. YMMV, we just don't hang out too close to the zapper.

When I have more patience, I use the wood stove. There's a bit of a trick to this. We have a couple of nice large trivets and a small one. Pots of water move from stove top to trivet as needed, which is the usual use for these; but you can pop the little one into a flat-bottomed Dutch oven and set your cereal bowl on top of that. No trivets? Canning jar rings work well.

Cover with the iron lid and fuggeddabout it while you're transplanting in the potting shed. Come back a couple of hours later and you have cereal or soup or whatever. You can even bake bread in the bowl, if you like. Takes a long time on a heating stove, though. This is another reason, if there are two or more of you, to at least try to find a way to have someone at home full time. This kind of work adds value and isn't taxed to death.

Pour yourself some tea water from the teakettle while you're about it; if your tea is homegrown like much of ours, I can't think of much cheaper eats. If you can move out past the suburbs a bit, and grow your own fuel, all the better. Now, have your hearty lunch and look out the window.

There. Isn't this better than TV?

Tea for two

Planted two camellia sinensis (tea). These are a Russian cultivar, supposed to be able to handle our winters, should be delivering green tea within two to five years.

A gathering in

The mulberry trees are transplanted, the pickled beets are canned and spuds lifted. The tea (camellia sinensis) bushes, raspberry canes, replacement kiwis, and red grape vines haven't arrived. What's a girl to do?

Winter storms have begun passing over Stony Run, and Risa finds herself sitting in her corner with a lap blanket more, and digging in the mud less, as the days diminish and the nights lengthen. She knows it's the other way round in, say, New Zealand at the moment, but for her, November is a time for appreciating the things that have been gathered in -- apple juice, pickled beets, tomato sauce -- and reading and thinking, as well as making lists and planning. One hopes for another spring, and the resources with which to honor its potential.

Pictured here is the reference section in the dining room, across from the wood stove. It's a rotating collection -- John Seymour is on the beside table, for instance -- but you can generally count on certain things staying put until wanted, such as the Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening (here's why we like our older edition).

It's worth noting that most of the books shown were found, over time, in the free box at a local used book store. They've discontinued that service, Risa mourns its demise.

John Michael Greer is the current exponent, in blogland, of things Seventies, and, looking over her collection, Risa must admit she's cut from the same cloth. Yes, there were things we didn't know then, but the rough-and-ready experimentalism of the time -- how much heat can you trap in a used hot-water heater if you peel its insulation back, paint it black, and park it in its own "cold" frame? -- was useful then, is useful now, and does not wait for the attention of venture capitalists and the mercy of  the 1%. The answer to the above question, for example, is "quite a lot" -- you can lower your electric bill by making such a thing out of scraps -- though you might not want to discuss it with your county code enforcers in some areas, if it's hooked up to the house for that purpose.

Right next to the reference collection are the white boards, with the homestead map and the year's planned activities, with assigned beds -- mismatched gardening styles dictate this. There's a dance among the reference section, the boards, the seed catalogs, the teapot on the wood stove, and the gathered-in things.

In other words, just because we homesteaders are sitting in our corners under lap blankets at the moment doesn't mean we're not farming ...

A particularly sunny smile

When you want to serve pickled beets for dinner and there are beets in the garden, one thing can lead to another.

Risa went out and picked about half the year's beets, a mixed lot of Chioggia and Detroit Dark Red, and "strangled" them, i.e. wrung off the leaves, which she tossed over the fence to the chickens, and brought the roots in to wash.

She's finally got a saucepan, a really big one that kind of resembles a wok, which she knows will make seven pints of canning contents if filled to within an inch or so of the top.

So she cut up the beets, along with an onion, and threw in some honey and some homemade vinegar and spices, right up to the rim of the pot almost, and set it all to simmer while lifting more potatoes and weeding in the greenhouse. Later, she got out the smaller of the two water-bath canners and swapped it onto the burner that was cooking the beets, then filled seven jars from the pot, lidded, ringed and labeled them (she just writes on the lid -- "BEETS 11/11" in this case), set them in the water bath, and there in the bottom of the pot were the pickled beets she wanted to serve with dinner.

She'll rinse the pan, pour out the rinse into the compost bucket, and set it aside to wash, then take the jars off the boil, set them out to cool, and use the hot water from the canner to wash some dishes. Oh, and stop to take a portrait of the jars: pickled beets have a particularly sunny smile, she finds.

A lot to offer

Would love to just sit inside and sip cider while contemplating the fall foliage and the newly put-to-bed beds:

... but there are things to do.

One is to hunt down stray potatoes. Risa had to go away for eight weeks, leaving a number of things undone, including spud lifting. The main patch grew over in weeds very quickly:

But that doesn't mean there's nothing there. With her ho-mi and kneeling bench, Risa pokes about underneath the grass roots:

These are Yukon, German Butterball, and Red. Reds are down in production this year, but yellows -- both kinds -- are up. You never know. Risa's maintaining three patches in rotation, so as to get away with using her own potatoes for seed ... what with the price of seed potatoes these days.

She doesn't neglect the smaller spuds, down to about marble size, as they can be planted as seed spuds and the results seem to be just fine.

She'll sort these into two categories: 1) large, without solanine (green patches) for eating this winter, and 2) everything else, for planting. Five wheelbarrow loads should just about do it, y'think? Imagine how well this would go if she'd hill them up and water and weed them like she's supposed to! Spuds,well, for the lazy or absentee farmer, they have a lot to offer, it seems.

Everywhere at once

So, it is time to get caught up a bit.

Frost hit the garden while Risa was away:

There's still plenty to eat out there, so she picks the remaining tomatoes and squash -- 

-- harvests the sunflower stems for kindling --

-- sets them out to dry in the sunny part of the woodshed --

-- and stores the squash and pumpkins indoors. She'll make tomato sauce later, after harvesting a few onions.

At the rate we're going, it will be next week or even later before the potatoes are lifted. But who can be everywhere at once?

Insurance

All packed. Now here is a report on the greenhouse.

Regular readers (there are a few) may remember we had to kick the ducks out of the outside pen because a raccoon was ripping the poultry netting and using that space to enter the barn and take a bite out of a different chicken every night. All the birds had one entrance, through the barn, so now everyone stays locked in the barn all night, not a mode the ducks prefer but at least the predation has stopped for now.

So Risa moved several years' accumulation of extremely rich bedding from the pen, found the soil very compacted, tilled the remaining rich dirt, and started a fall garden in July. That might have been a bit early, but you do things things when you can do them; who knew all of our summer heat would come in September?

Here's the pen right before tilling:

Here's the garden growing:

And here's the "greenhouse."

Well, really, just a very kludged lean-to grow tunnel. The budget did not really admit of anything pretty; so Risa spread three odd-shaped pieces of plastic (left over from other jobs) over the poultry netting as best she could, then salvaged boards to attach the bottoms and is holding the whole thing down with salvaged eighteen-gauge wire from around the place. The idea is to keep the family in kale, collards, beets, onions, peas, cabbage, and chard in her absence. These things sometimes make it through the winter here, but sometimes they don't. The polyethylene is insurance.

Also, the cover is intended to have these plants get by on well water instead of rain water. In times like these, that's insurance too. Such as it is.

Fresh kale and mulled cider

Apple season has begun, and Risa has climbed down from the roof-sealing chore long enough to pick, grind, "press" and can.

Two wheelbarrow loads made thirty quarts of apple juice. There are easily enough apples out there to do another thirty quarts. The drying, saucing, and freezing are done -- and experiments with "keeping" haven't turned out well lately -- the cold room isn't cold enough to keep worms dormant (unsprayed apples).

So that means juicing.

Thirty quarts is not so very much from this many apples, but the budget has not yet admitted a fruit press into our stable of tools. With so many young apple and pear trees, plus grape vines, coming on, that's certainly on the wish list, but it's as far as it has gotten -- other expenses come first. [ed. -- several readers have shown me kludged presses of just the sort I would make, myself -- the problem with these is if anyone sees me using one, they won't drink the cider. It's a public relations problem.]

This year's procedure is the same as last year's. Chop each apple into about four chunks, throw it into the electric shredder (dedicated for this purpose), throw the buckets of pulp into a suspended cloth bag, and let gravity (mostly) strain the pulp into a clean tub. Risa did tie up the bag with several loops of baling twine, slip sticks through the loops and twist, but a lot of the juice stayed with the pulp. That's okay -- the chickens get the pulp, and they don't waste the juice that's in it.

Primitive procedures of this kind are an instance of resiliency -- not letting the lack of an expensive gadget keep you from doing a thing. Labor will often get you what you want, within reasonable tolerances, in the absence of money to do it more efficiently. And there's a hidden inefficiency in gadget-buying:

I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day (H.D. Thoreau).

The next few days are going to be our big heat wave of the year -- upper nineties. More than a hundred thousand acres are burning just over the hills, and even the very grasshoppers look parched. But our mornings are dropping into the forties, the orb-weaver spiders are staking out the best blackberries, and geese are flying low over the roofing job. Soon it will be time to cover the greenhouse.

What's in there, mostly, is kale, onions, cabbage, beets, chard, and peas, planted in late July. Everything has matured faster than anticipated, and we can't really use much of it. The chickens are helping as best they can, by craning their necks through the poultry netting to peck away all the kale they can reach. This saves cutting it to bring to them, so Risa will put off covering as long as she can.

As this "greenhouse" is only a failed poultry pen (the raccoons were gnawing through the netting), it will need some redesigning. the poles that stretch the netting will be dismounted, then the plastic spread on and made fast, then the poles will be re-installed to tighten the skin from within. Right now the netting is taller than the barn, and rain water from the barn roof would have nowhere to go.

There are a few summer things in this garden as well, planted out simply because they were in the last flats. The squash turned out to be crookneck, not much favored by anyone but Risa. There is a little room in the freezer, so she'll harvest these, dice them, spice them, lightly oil them, zap them, bag them, and tuck them away for January, to be consumed with a little fresh kale and mulled cider, when no one else is at home.

Home-grown love

Daughter was here for a lovely visit and when she got home, posted on social media this photo of loot acquired from the "parental units." Aww ...

Recently, Risa read an article, which she cannot find now, about an observed cultural phenomenon among Vietnamese, or Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S., to the effect that the current elder generation worked to send the children to college, then to acquire access to a bit of land, and upon retirement concentrates on supplying their extended family with vegetables. It's absolutely the way to go and Risa strongly recommends it: if you're done with the nine to five and you have family, get out there and feed them. Remember, subsistence is income and not taxed; and world agriculture is in trouble and will get worse. Subsistence strikes at the very heart of the rich-me-poor-you system currently in place, so wherever you can grow some vegs (hopefully non-Monsanto), please! Do so. And send th' kids home with home-grown love.