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.