Lunatic or not?

Judging from the homesteading forums I frequent, my absolute refusal to use any chemicals and to proselytize against their use in other people’s gardens has branded me once again as a lunatic. Apparently I’m a lunatic even by organic gardening standards.

Huh?

I took Jared to the store to buy him some rubber boots. On the way back we were amusing ourselves by talking in outrageous foreign accents … which is pretty amusing in itself. I launched into a pretty good imitation of the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show and Jared replied:

“Actually, I don’t know much about Sweden. Except that in 1523 King Gustav won their independence. Oh, and that they’re a constitutional monarchy. I think their capital is Stockholm and their chief exports are fish and barley. But beyond that I don’t know ANYTHING about Sweden.”

Hrmph. I’m pretty much just limited to Swedish Chef imitations and my kid knows about exports and governments?

The Chicken Zerg

I'm testing out integrating YouTube's video functionality with my blog. I took a brief video of the baby chickens after I fed them some Japanese beetles. The baby chicks make me laugh, and as Kat says, "bugs are free". Each Japanese beetle is a mouthful for a baby chick. They grab one, run off with it, drop it, someone else steals it, and then the chase continues. Eventually someone ends up eating it but it's often gone through a half-dozen beaks before then. The hapless beetles don't stand much of a chance. It seems the foraging instinct is very strong in this batch. So far (day 4) we've only lost one out of 78. As you can see from the video, the rest seem very, very active.

It's like a horror movie for worms

If you have an infestation of tomato hornworms, and should be so lucky as to see one that looks like this ... leave it! The white bulbs are egg sacks of braconid wasps, which lay their lovely little babies IN THE SKIN of the hornworm. When they hatch they'll eat the hornworm first, and then resume their more normal life of sipping nectar from flowers. They can control the hornworm population quite well and are an excellent addition to an organic farm interested in natural pest management.

You can also plant small flowers around your garden to attract the adult wasps. It's all about the biodynamics, baby!

Stealing a line ...

I am the man I am because of my loving wife … but I don’t mention that to her because she doesn’t see it as a compliment.

We have pollen!

The Italian bees, the ones who lost their queen, are carrying pollen into their hive! That means there is a new laying queen in there. All hail the queen!

Berry Up!

Over 2 and a half pounds of black raspberries were gathered in this morning. That’s a lot of berries! I think that’s worth a few thorns.

Farm Bill - Grrrr ... aggravation # 1

I haven’t kept on top of the farm bill like I should have … mostly because I’ve been too busy earning an income on my second job which pays for what the farming doesn’t cover. Ironic, that, isn’t it?

Here’s a snippet from NPR’s coverage:

 

Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, says giving up 20 percent of America's corn crop to make ethanol has unintended consequences, like spiking the cost of livestock feed.

Chicken farmers in Foxx's district are getting hit hard, she says:

"One chicken consumes one bushel of corn a year," she says. "For farms housing 100,000 laying hens, the cost of feeding them goes up $100,000 a year if the cost of [a bushel of] corn goes up by one dollar."

Now while I find it incredibly hilarious that the chicken farmers are represented by someone whose name is “Foxx”, her statement just plain pisses me off. I’m sorry that your massive CAFO chicken farms which pump out cheap and nutritionally worthless eggs are finding that their costs are increasing. You can’t tell me that a chicken farm with 100,000 birds laying eggs is any sort of a family operation which I think my tax dollars should be helping. It’s not even a place I would want to live next to, much less own.

 

Big Red Cow

My friend Tom at the learning center where I volunteer some time has just gotten a mother cow and a calf. Here's the mother cow. (I apologize for the poor quality of the photo ... cellphone pic)

She's some Scottish heritage breed. She looks kind of sulky all the time, but she's certainly big and robust. A very hardy cow.

Brick Oven

I want to build a small outdoor oven. Something in the adobe or brick style similar to what homesteaders used to use. Aside from being very practical, it’s also decorative and furthers our concept of “what to do when the electricity goes off”. Unfortunately my online research has yielded hundreds, if not thousands, of plans for these things. Yikes. It seems a lot more research will be required.

Morning on the Farm

As soon as I drop the ramp the chickens are ready to come out and begin their day. Here you can see the "Four Hens of the Apocalypse" making their way out the door. They hit the ramp with all the grit and determination of an Iwo Jima marine.

Halle the goat likes to stand on the pile of fence posts and make racket.

While Primavera comes over to the fence for a little love and attention. I think goats thrive better when they're treated well by people. They really are sociable creatures, for all of their mischief.

And how can you not love those faces?

The cucumbers are escaping from their raised bed. I made them trellises and tied them up but they seem to prefer the open grass. I call them, "Free Range Cucumbers". These are Burpee's "Pickling Cucumbers". I don't know how big they're supposed to get or when they're ready, which is somewhat problematic. I'm looking forward to giving them a try, both when it comes to slicing and eating them and pickling them.

Some of them are ready, I think. Ain't they beautiful?

Not all is idyllic in the garden. Aside from the grass you can see growing in the background, there's something munching on the potato plants. This one is one of about five or six that have been completely decimated by hornworms. I didn't realize the tomato hornworm liked potatoes as well, but apparently so. I have spent quite a bit of time out looking for them, and a number of the nasty critters have gone to a painful chicken death. Yet there are always more.

The smallish Brandywine's I direct planted from seed are about 8" tall now but some of them are trying to set fruit. They have little buds out. When the plants are still small I pinch off any early buds so they continue to develop their roots and structure. It will mean more tomatoes later on on a plant that can handle them. I have an example of one I didn't do this with where it yielded one huge (and flavorless) tomato and then never did anything else.

I'll end here, though there's a number of other things I want to discuss, with the purple coneflowers we, uh, "liberated" from our old house. I don't feel bad about it. We'll take the seed from these and propogate an entire garden bed next to the house. They're beautiful AND medicinal. This is echinacea at its finest.

Gray Montana Skies

It was hot, over 100 F, when I landed in Kalispell, Montana yesterday. Gray ash clouds hung low in this bowl in the mountains, smoke from the forest fires blown in on the wind. The scent of burning timber filled the air. I managed to grab lunch at the Nite Owl café (and it was very good) in Columbia Falls and then I made it to the hotel for a couple of hours sleep. I woke up at 7pm, hustled to where I’d spent the night working and got my job done in an hour and a half. Hyped up on the nap and coffee, I made it back to the hotel where I stared at the ceiling for a couple of hours, too late for dinner to be delivered and I didn’t want to roam around the city looking for fast food. I woke up at 6am, ate a donut, and now I’m packed and headed out the door to catch a flight home. Twenty hours on the road for an hour and a half of work. It’ll be just about the only paid work I do all week. Ain’t life beautiful? It will be when I can get some sleep and some food.

President's Colon

While in the Madison airport bar eating breakfast, CNN shows a clip of GWB's colonoscopy. The old guy next to me says, "Maybe they're searching for his head up there."

Anyone seen my butt? I think I worked it off.

From 6am until just now I’ve been working. I put fencing up around all the orchard trees. I weeded the garden, I mulched the garden. I picked up chicken supplies at the store and then I turned the brooder box around and got it ready to go. I fed and wormed the goats. Except for the 20 minutes where I fell asleep in my chair outside, I’ve been in constant motion.

I’m tired, but it’s that good kind of tired.

Fortress Ernie

I’ve always believed that my spirit guide (Indian totem animal thingy) is the bear. However, that don’t seem to really fit me anymore. Or maybe now that I’m older and have a little more self-knowledge, I’m discovering that I’m just not a bear. My spirit animal is (drum roll) a turtle. Not a fancy turtle. Not a sea turtle. Probably your plain old, get-run-over-on-the-highway, hide-in-the-bushes turtle. Some people are hawks, some people are wolves, and some are bears … but not me. I’m a turtle.

When I’ve got something to accomplish, I plod along slowly. One foot in front of another. Keep on marching. Occasionally I’ll try to “think it through” but that’s usually just a form of procrastination with me. In the end, I’ve got to just knuckle down and do it. And when a situation gets bad, I “turtle up” or pull myself into the shell, make sure nothing sensitive is showing enough to get bitten and ride it out. Like a hapless turtle being chewed on by a dog, as long as the shell is intact then hey, I’m ok. I’ve got a pretty tough shell.

But over the years, I’ve gotten more little turtles along with me to pull inside that shell. Now the shell must hold four kids, a wife, a job (worth defending too) and a farm. The old shell feels a bit crowded at times and I think maybe my tail may be exposed. I know how I got this way, the mental way anyhow. It comes from a lifetime of having to fend for yourself. I’m ok with that, but I know I need to get prepared. There’s an invisible clock ticking over us all and we can’t see how much we have left before the cards we’re holding become the hand we’ve got to play. Are you ready? I’m not. My shell is still pretty soft here and there and I’m right out in the middle of the road still.

Maybe with all the metaphors here you aren’t getting what I’m saying. There’s a crisis coming and it’s going to hit in the next twenty years. I’m talking about a serious grocery-store-shelves empty, starving people roaming the countryside, martial law declared, end of life as we know it crisis. The oil is going to run out and we have nothing to replace it with. I’ve started preparing, and that’s a big part of why we’re now living on a farm (aside from the fact that I like that sort of life) but will I be ready when the time comes? Not likely. Does one ever know enough to deal with that? I think we’re going to see a gradual slide downwards become a very fast slide. It’ll start with stores closing, jobs disappearing, goods and food becoming scarce. Those will be our warning signs. How will I know when we’re ready? When we’re prepared? Well, take a look around your house now and see what runs on electricity. What do you need to replace from outside inputs (going to the store?) or what do you consume that you didn’t produce yourself? Yeah. I thought so. You’re in the same boat I am. I think it’s time for you and me to turtle up.

Apple Tree Loss

The nine trees I have in the orchard have been eaten down to only a few leaves on each one. All the new growth was nibbled off, and the leaves removed. Most likely culprit was deer, though my goats remain on the short list of suspects. I was pretty torn up about it earlier today but the fact remains that this is my fault. I knew there were deer back there and I didn’t put up any sort of fencing around the trees or take steps to prevent this. It’s a problem with the timing, in that it sets back our apple production by probably a year. It’s a fiscal setback as well, considering those trees cost over $200. That’s some expensive deer feed. I have some fencing that I purchased today (too little, too late) and I’ll put that up around the trees tomorrow and we’ll see if they can’t survive. If not, then I’ll put some more trees in the ground next year. It’s all I can do.

In the almost three months we’ve been here, I’ve had a lot of setbacks and I get depressed when I think about them. The chicken massacre, the sod takeover, and now the loss of the apple trees. Yet we’ve had a lot of success as well, probably more than I ever anticipated having this year. We’re learning, and we’re harvesting food and growing out our farm. We’re also gaining valuable experience and setting in deep roots here. I can get more apple trees and go forward now with more experience. I’ve begun to get a handle on the garden again and I’m taking steps to stay ahead of any problems that develop there. I’ve got more chickens arriving this week and we’re going forward with new knowledge there as well. We can do this. We just need to maintain our determination and commitment. God has called us to this life, but he didn’t promise that it would all be roses.

The Garden Master

Ha! I showed those weeds who is boss. I went out and pulled up grass by its sodly roots all morning and all afternoon. You can now actually tell that potatoes are growing down through those rows and it looks like a garden instead of a patch I decided not to mow. Pulling the sod up was not without some casualties. Often, baby potatoes would pop out of the soil with the clinging sod roots. So those are for dinner tonight. One plant died due to mishandling, and I inadvertently pulled up a bunch of onions too, which are also going to become dinner. I’ve got a lot to go, but it’s progress and now I know that I can do it. “Brute strength and stamina shall triumph where cleverness and technology fail.”

Other than that, I went and did some computer stuff at the learning center (a farm kind of thing) like I’ve been promising to do for a couple of weeks. It’s not hard and often just a matter of showing them what to click, but they aren’t computer people so it’s difficult without guidance. Kat put together some Adirondack chairs and the rest of our evening is going to be food, fellowship, and some serious relaxing. How blessed we are!

The Queen is Dead

I went out to the hives just to look and I saw a strange circle of bees clustered out on their front little bee porch. I looked a little closer and I could see that in their center was a dead queen. This is the sweet little Italian queen that came with the hive I bought from Chuck the Beekeeper.



That's her, upside down on the left. You can't really tell from this photo, but she's about twice as long as the rest of them and almost ALL abdomen.

I tried to extricate her from the pile in order to get a better picture (and a closer look to see if I can determine why she died) but no such luck. The bees will as aggressively defend a dead queen as they will a live one. I got stung four times before I decided to give it a rest. They say that queenless hives are more vicious, and this is the first time the Italian bees have ever come after me in such an aggressive factor. I wasn't able to just walk away from them and let them cool down. I had to RUN away from them and they still didn't cool down. As soon as I went back over there they started flipping out again.

So I'm left with a couple of options now. I can order a new queen and try to insert her into the hive. They may or may not accept her, and she'll need to go through the risk of breeding. Plus it costs a little bit of money, AND I don't have the slightest clue on how to insert a new queen into a hive.

Another option is to just let it play out. Queens sometimes die and the hive has a mechanism to resolve this. The Italian hive (named Milan) has always had less density than Hamburg (the German hive) so this queen may have been very aged and ready to go. If you remember, when I popped this thing open last month I could see queen cells in it, so they may have hatched and did their fighting thing and unbeknownst to me there's a brand new queen crawling around inside of Milan.

I think I'm going to let it play out. It will be a good learning experience to watch how this goes, and Milan may now get a big boost in population from a younger queen. Even if the old queen killed all the baby queens before she died, they still will have SOME eggs in there they can feed the jelly to and turn into new queens.

Sod Wins - Potato Loses

I think the potato and onion rows have been completely taken over by the sod. The grass is as high as the onions and in places you have to peer down into it in order to see the potato. I don’t have enough mulch to get a handle on it now, and when I try to pull it up around the plants I expose fingerling potatoes. So I think I’m just going to let it do its thing and what I get out of it I’ll call good. But it’s a warning for next year, and a warning as to what to do with all the other plants that are still fighting the battle of the sod. More mulch!

Michigan Blues

I’ve had this thought floating around in my head all day. Normally I like these things to crystallize a bit more before I post them. My thoughts are more lucid then and I’m not running on 3 hours of sleep out of the last 24, and I haven’t spent my brain cells on someone else’s problems. However this one is the seed of something that I feel may be really important to me someday. It’s the germination of an idea that may change my way of looking at America. That said, I’ll go ahead and throw this out there. It’s rough, and it’s raw and I don’t really know how to back it up yet.

America has devoured and squandered its own resources. I’m driving through Michigan and far out in the “wasteland” I can see some farms still struggling by. Otherwise everyone bought into industrial America’s wild scheme to move to the city and give up their farms, becoming factory workers. Now the factories have failed or moved overseas and the capitalists have gotten richer while the poor they exploited are in ruins. Do you think the Ford family heirs live in the ruins of Detroit? The American economy is nothing more than an elaborate game of musical chairs, playing through the generations. Move from the farm to work in the factory and then we move the factory. The music stops. The workers starve. Now the focus is on retraining the workforce to become information technology workers. Never mind that this is probably a 2% job capacity at best and will never hold all of the displaced.

I heard on the radio today that Michigan is looking at a BILLION dollar surplus in their tax budget and the government is trying to figure out what to do with it. Uh, hello? It’s OUR MONEY. GIVE IT BACK, YOU THIEVING BASTARDS. Well, not our money, but it belongs to Michigan taxpayers. We live in a completely exploitive society, folks. We exploit the land, we exploit nature, and we exploit each other. This pirate mentality cannot last forever, and when our governments look at us only as “revenue” and no longer as the citizens they server, then it’s a sign of the final end.

Asian Assumptions

So I spent all day working in Michigan. Insane. The people I’m working with are smart, but they’re trapped in a web of stupid policies. All day it went like this … Me: “You’re doing what? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Why are you doing that?” Them: (looking embarrassed) “Uh, well, management directed us to do that.” It’s all in the interest of saving money. Awesome. This company is saving themselves money right out of business. Really, when you didn’t want to spend $40,000 as a one-time expenditure that will last you five years in order to keep the system that makes you a million dollars a day running … well, you deserve to go out of business.

There’s this pretty Chinese woman I’m working with. Well, maybe Chinese. Maybe Japanese or Vietnamese. I don’t really know. Definitely Pacific-rim. I know that Chinese-American is more politically correct, but when I can’t tell where she’s from and she still has a thick accent then that PC battle is lost. I said I was going back to the hotel and they began offering suggestions. “Texas Corral” was one good one … yeah, right. People from Texas do not dig Texas-themed steakhouses. Especially in friggin’ Michigan. So the Asian woman suggests I hit up this place she knows and frequents a lot. The “Asian Buffet”. Hmm … that’s not a good sign but I figure she’s got to know Chinese food, right?

Oh boy. How wrong can I be? I mean, that’s a huge leap. A person’s ethnicity has nothing to do with friggin’ food. I couldn’t tell you quality French Cuisine from the worst waterfront dive in Bordeaux. This was probably the worst Chinese food I’ve ever had … AND I had to go out and get it. Normally I eat my steamed dumplings and General Tso’s chicken while going through server telemetry data in my underwear. (No, there is not telemetry data in my underwear … I mean I’m going through telemetry data in my underwear … ah, never mind.)

So now I’m in a pickle. Do I mention to her that her taste in Chinese food is horrible? Do I take her to task over the declining standards of Pacific Rim cuisine in Michigan? Ordinarily I’d say that my sense of humor could carry me through the situation, but not here. We didn’t exactly hit it off. When they introduced me to her, she looked me up and down and then locked her purse in her desk drawer before shaking my hand. I’m pretty sure she cleaned her own hand off with a tissue afterwards. Frankly, I think the bad Chinese food issue needs to be brought out into the light. It’s as if a Mexican gave me a recommendation to go to Taco Bell.

Farming in July

Last month I put in some grapevines that I found on sale at my local nursery. I put in two Concords and two Catawbas. The spot I chose for these was an empty space running down the side of the driveway. I put in steel posts at 10' apart and strung wire at 3 and 5 foot high for the vines to be cultivated in the Four-Arm Kniffler method. Unfortunately that spot does not get a huge amount of sunlight throughout the day ... certainly not the amount that grapes should get. Still, enough may be enough and that spot wasn't useful for anything else. Besides, they'll look pretty later on growing alongside the driveway.

Here's another picture of the grapes where you can see the posts and wire a little more clearly. Use thicker gauge wire so it's stiff and holds the vines up better, as well as it doesn't cut into the tender plants later on. In the background you can see the rest of the garden as well as some of the child laborers.

The basil has come in ridiculously thick. Even with the Japanese beetles (curse you, beetles!) eating off the top leaves, I've still got more basil than I know what to do with. I paid $9 for all the basil plants that I bought ($1 each plant) and so far we've harvested 22.25 oz, or $38.94 worth at current market prices. I could get out there and pick another 4 pounds of it right now and probably not kill those plants.

Since the massacre, our two surviving Reds have achieved "Favored Chicken Status". They get a special ration of grain and access to the porch. I'm not sure if these two were made skittish by the raccoon attack, or whether they may have been some of the birds that were always very flighty and standoffish from the beginning (which may have aided their survival when the slower, dumber birds failed to run). Either way, they rarely come out of the bushes where they forage unless a person is outside in the backyard or they're being fed. Even so, they're never farther apart from each other than what you see right now.

Here's the chickens with the useless hayburners. The previous owners had hauled out a load of horse manure outside the barn and just piled it up where it sat for years. It's now a rotting mass of poo, infested with worms and grubs and all sorts of insect life. It's the favorite hangout for chickens. Every morning they make a beeline for either the poo pile or the compost heap to see what's on the breakfast buffet. They cluck happily as they peck through the poo. Horses turned green matter into fuel for themselves and poo. They deposited the poo which in turn became food for insects. The chickens eat the insects and turn them into eggs and edible flesh. All life comes from poo!

This was in May ...

This is now, in mid-July. The raised beds are all full, except for some non-productive plants that need to be removed and the space re-utilized. I've began to process of putting PVC pipe up that will hold the cucumber vines as well as support the plastic tarp come fall when I want to extend the tomato season. You can sort of see how it works in this photo. I drill holes in the vertical pipes every 6" so that I can pass wire through it. The bed is exactly 4' across, and the pipe braces are put along the side every 4' as well, so that if I want I can swing them to the side and only have them along the outside instead of over the top. The ground level garden is very weedy, with the sod having taken back over. The onions and potatoes are still in there, but there's a thick cover of grass. We'll see if that still yields anything. I should have mulched at the beginning of the year, but not having done so and then traveling and getting behind on the weeding was costly ... and the sod having been established there's hardly any way to get it all out barring getting on my hands and knees and pulling it all out.

Here you can see the lettuce and the cucumbers. My thought was to have the lettuce all harvested by the time the cucumbers got this thick, but as you can see the lettuce is still thriving. It hasn't bolted and since when I cut lettuce I only take about a quarter of the leaves from each plant, the plants themselves are still producing. From about 6 square feet of space (3' X 2') I've (so far) harvested 2.3 pounds of lettuce at a market value of $18.75. This provides us with a nice salad every night, freshly picked. It's harder to put a value on that. I'll keep eating the lettuce until it starts to die back or bolts. Then it'll be time to reutilize that space for something else.

Tomato cages are not the way to go with these indeterminate Corazons. They are an excellent slicing tomato, if somewhat oddly shaped (like a heart, hence the name)and yield really large tomatoes. I've gotten 3.9 pounds of tomato off of these plants. I bought the 9 plants for $1 each and almost all of them did well. The exception was one little one that budded too early and produced only one tomato that wasn't very tasty but was very large. The market rate for organic tomato is $4.69 per pound, yielding me $18.35 for these 7 tomatoes. The online grocery store where I do all my pricing may be gouging the public somewhat. Those sure are good tomatoes though.

Here's a longshot of the groundlevel garden. In the middle you can see some Brandywine tomatoes which are coming along very well. I put poles in the ground and I'm weaving between the posts to support the plants. It works much better than caging the wild and uncontrollable indeterminates and is a cheaper solution. I can pull the posts up and store them come winter and then reuse them next year. From left to right you can see Squash, peas, Brandywine tomatoes, sweet corn, and sunflowers. Not visible at the far end of the row are pumpkins, cantaloupe, and okra.

Here's some grape tomato plants. I only put in two to see if we like them (we do!) but they are very prolific. They are an indeterminate and will keep growing and producing tomatoes until the frost. I'm going to tarp these and see if we can't extend the growing season a bit. They really are a delicious tomato. I intended to use them for salads, but as they've been ripening almost one by one, we get maybe one the first day, another two days later, and a third two days after that. They don't end up in salad that way, but rather Kat just eats them fresh from the garden. I hear they are delicious though.
There's plenty left I didn't take pictures of, and I'll be coming back later and doing some indepth discussion of the various plants. Still fighting the sod as it threatens to take over, but I'm making headway in some places. The mulch was an important lesson that will serve me well in years to come.

Possum Morning

My raccoon trap caught its first critter last night … a possum. He was sitting in the trap this morning, looking sulky and mad. He didn’t snarl or snap, but just shifted restlessly in the cage when I took it up to the porch so the boys could see. He was an older animal, with scars across his face and another on his haunch. The end of his tail had been bitten off, somewhat recently from the look of it. The wound had scabbed over, but was not fully healed.

I had set the cage up a little ways off from the house where the raccoons normally lurk, by some old trees and berry bushes. So here comes this old possum, minding his own business and he can’t resist the rancid corned beef I’d put in the trap as raccoon bait. After being ignominiously displayed in the trap for a brief time, he was released where he promptly fled (waddled) for his very life right into a chicken-wire fence where he struggled vainly for a moment before extricating himself and disappearing into the tall grass of the pasture. As far as I know, possums aren’t a threat to chickens and this one had been caught at a fair distance from the scene of the previous crime. He lives another day.

Drip Irrigation

I’ve been doing some studying and I think I’m going to pass on setting up a drip irrigation system. Yes, they are more water efficient but Illinois rarely has water restrictions. The biggest problem is that there is a large startup cost and a decent-sized annual cost as you replace the plastic tapes and hoses. Plus, that’s a yearly supply of plastic for a landfill coming off of my supposedly sustainable farm. I think mulch will be the key to controlling weeds and using the hose/sprinkler combination will remain my water solution.

Pope Speaks

Well, the Pope’s recent comments about protestants has made it to the front page of the paper they lay outside my door in the hotel, so I guess it’s big news. I went online and found his exact words, and I don’t know what to think about them. I believe there are plenty of people more qualified to speak on this subject than I am (Catholics probably being one group more qualified than I) but I’ll throw in my two cents …

I see a lot of remarks blasting the Pope for his intolerance of other religions. One ignorant editorialist even called for the Pope to be fired. Can you even fire a Pope? I think we are wrong when we judge a religious leader in the same vein as we do other public figures. He’s holding to a different standard than say, Michael Jordan, Hillary Clinton, or Paris Hilton and we shouldn’t judge him based on traditional western thought. The Pope can’t be considered homophobic, for instance, because his entire religion is aligned against homosexuality, considering it a sin and an abomination before the Lord. So when the Pope comes out and makes a religious proclamation, then if you are Catholic you need to stand by it and if you’re not then it doesn’t pertain to you so just zip your lip and sit down.

Hopefully someone more educated in these matters (and there are a bunch of you reading this) will jump in and explain to me exactly what the deal is.

My Brush With Greatness

Once upon a time I worked for the FAA. I worked in the basement but was up on the third floor. I got in the elevator, pressed the appropriate button, and was riding down when (in a post-lunch moment of male grossness) I decided to pass some gas. I’m all alone in the elevator … why not? It was not pleasant. It was probably the most foul and noxious fumes ever to issue forth from my body, in a long history of foul and noxious fumes. And of course the door opens on the second floor. Who should step in but my boss, his boss, and Norman Mineta, the secretary of transportation who is responsible for many of the most hateful rules regarding air travel today. He was secretary of transportation during 9/11 and if there was any cover up there, you can bet he was at the heart of it.

We rode down the remaining floors together, nobody saying a word, and every one of us breathing as shallow as possible until the doors opened again. And I think about this every time I go through airport security and have to put up with their ridiculous rules. I think that maybe, if there is any justice in the world, Norman Mineta is still carrying around some of my nasty fart molecules in his lungs.

Why did I share this with you? I don’t know. Maybe because we’ve grown so close over the past few years.

Strange Things

At the hotel bar in San Antonio I went down for a pharmaceutically based sleeping aid. A White Russian, if you’re curious about my drink of choice. The bartender made it and then handed it to the waitress. I overheard him say, “Take this to Jesus down at the end.”

Um, it may be time to either cut my hair or shave. Or both. Ah well. It’s better than being called Charles Manson.

OUCH!

Primavera, with her propensity for sticking her head through fences, inside buckets, and ramming against the wall, has broken off one of her short stubby horns. It’s bloody and looks like it hurts, but I can’t tell if she’s really any the worse for wear. Poor girl. She gets extra love tomorrow.

Farmer Ernie Excels at "Hide the Egg"

No longer satisfied with the little nest of straw I made them, which they then dissembled and remade themselves, our hens have taken once again to the clumps of grass, bushes, and shrubs to lay their eggs. This morning I found FIVE eggs beneath a small ornamental cedar by the deck. These are probably a day or two old, since it’s only 10am and I don’t think they’ve laid today’s balance yet. Could be that they squeezed a few out in a hurry after our morning pep talk in which I declared that if they’ve stopped laying, they need to pay for themselves somehow and as a good, free range eating bird costs $8 then one of them could volunteer to “take one for the team” and buy them some time. I spoke eloquently on the “last full measure of devotion” and of the importance of the success of our farm venture. The ladies seemed to take it well and walked around mumbling and clucking for a bit as if repeating key selections of my speech.

A Farm Full of Drama

My life has become much more filled with life and death drama since we moved to the farm. If it’s not the eternal dance of predator and prey, it’s a constant battle between the food producer and the insect pests. I’m sure that 8000 years ago, farmers along the Nile raised their hands and cursed the beetles that were eating their crops pretty much the same as I’m doing today. This afternoon I took the boys out to the barn to see the baby barn swallows that had hatched and were peeking their little heads over the edge of the nest. To my horror, the nest was empty and one baby bird was dead, dangling upside down by a foot caught in the straw. I found two others (out of a possible 4 that I’d seen a few days ago) in the nearby vicinity, still alive but floundering around on the ground helplessly. Mother and Father Swallow wheeled overhead, going so far as to swoop within inches of my face in their efforts to keep me away.

I removed the dead baby, donned a pair of latex gloves to try and mask my scent a little, and scooped up the two living babies and deposited them back up in the nest, at great peril to my own neck as I balanced precariously on a rafter as an angry mother swallow relentlessly threatened to remove one of my eyes from its socket. The babies were returned, though I know that’s not what you’re supposed to do. Supposedly the handling of them leaves too much of your scent on them and their parents won’t take them back. It seemed to me that they’d either starve on the ground or starve in the nest so the nest seemed the better option. A couple of minutes later the swallows checked the nest and then headed out to circle the skies above the pasture, snatching insects on the wing. They’d then disappear into the barn for a few minutes before coming out for another turn around the farm. Maybe they’re feeding their young now. I don’t know, but this fall when I tear down the nest I hope I don’t find little baby skeletons in it. Maybe all our efforts to help nature along are in vain and all we can do is hinder it. I don’t know.

I’m armed for tomorrow with a new $62 Havahart trap sized for a large raccoon. Following Leslie’s suggestion, we’ll bait it with peanut butter and there’s a grisly death awaiting any raccoon I find in it tomorrow morning. I have already bookmarked several websites where they give detailed instructions on how to skin a raccoon. Email me if you think you’d like a coonskin hat like Daniel Boone. The circle of life and death continues here on Tanglewood Hill.

Conceptually, there is a beast among us. The focus of this beast is to convert every resource of the material world into raw wealth for a handful of human beings. I can see it in the boardrooms and office parks of the nation as I travel about in my role as a wage slave. These office parks are almost always named for the thing that was destroyed in order that they be built: “Whispering Pines”, “Golden Meadows”, or “Pleasant Vista”.

Lately I am more and more loathe to leave my farm. Gardening, and the pursuits of growing things and animal husbandry, consume more and more of my thoughts. They are a way of getting something back from the world, a way of putting something over on this beast that is devouring the world. Ha, I can say, these carrots and onions came out of the soil and I paid nothing for them. That is a journey and not specifically a destination, to be able to say that. Even on the farm I am not self-sufficient. I buy seed, I buy livestock feed that I cannot grow myself, and I bring in lumber for I do not have enough trees to spare cutting even a single one to build with.

Yet I am still living free in many ways, more free than the existence of the next man, whose labor saving devices and modern life are slowly killing him. When his lawn needs mowing that he might conform to society’s vision of manicured grass and tamed wilderness, he mounts his trusty riding mower which cost him $2500 and another $200 per year in maintenance. He fills it up with the distilled essence of dead dinosaur plants and then rides around for awhile with a radio headset on his head, listening to a baseball game or the daily stock market report. Meanwhile his blood pressure is up, he’s a hundred and fifty pounds overweight, and his doctor tells him that he simply must get more exercise but he complains, asking, “When could I ever find the time?”

We are told that work is a thing to be avoided, and maybe so a certain type of work. I am certainly loathe enough to go out and do my “real” job, that of a wage slave fixing broken computer systems so that our nation’s ridiculous economy can keep on “manufacturing wealth”. Yet beautiful are the days when I work under the hot sun at a task that I’ve set for myself, to benefit my own farm and family and to be accomplished without any direction but that of my own mind. I work those days and when they end I only wish they could have been a little longer so I could have worked some more, as opposed to those days as a wage slave where I sit counting the minutes until I can be finished, a clock-watcher and an avoider of labor.
While work is truly a part of the human condition, I believe that good work can improve the human condition. The work that we do for ourselves, given to improving our own state or the state of people or causes that we care about, is more meaningful and fulfilling than any other time we could spend. Even the basest malingerer, the most laziest of souls, has some special task at which they will busy themselves endlessly.

You cannot harness that work ethic to the wheels of capitalism. A man may come to care about building cars, especially if they are good quality cars that he may be proud of having completed, but no man can ever come to care that his time is spent on an assembly line fitting part 39C to part 14H. By dividing up useful, fulfilling labor we have simply fed the beast. Now the purpose is to make as many cars as possible instead of good quality cars. In many cases, cars that the assemblers will scarcely be able to afford unless they go deeply in debt, thus feeding yet another economic entity.

Why does our society belittle the garbage man, who hauls away the useless and despoiled products made from the exploitation of our natural resources? His labor could “be done by anyone” and thus is devalued. Yet the business executive or hedge fund manager earns a fortune by promoting a system in which useless and despoiled products are created. As Wendell Barry asked, “Why do we value the remover of garbage less than that of the producer of garbage?”

If society had no “jobs” and every man worked to the benefit of himself and his own family, on tasks that he saw fit to participate in, what would such a society look like? If a bridge needed be built, people in the community would certainly come together to cut and saw the timbers needed, or to dig and smelt the iron. Yet many jobs are such that nobody would do them at all unless they were paid to do so, and the system is set up so that we all must be paid. Without salary, we starve. The basic necessities of human life have been enumerated, priced, and valued now to what the manufacturers of those items say they are worth, not what the purchaser is willing to pay.

Adam Smith believed that raw goods would be turned into useful products and that the producers of those products would also be their consumers. Their pay for their labor would go in turn towards buying those useful products, thus keeping the entire system rolling along steadily. Socialists argued that we should eliminate the middleman and our entire society be structured around the worker, allowing that the worker could decide for himself what his labor would be worth and the products then doled out according to a system of participatory need.

How would either Adam Smith or the socialists view such a system as we have now, where foreign countries like China loan us money and buy our raw materials at a pittance in order to turn around and sell us useless and faulty products that we not only do not need, but can’t use to any satisfaction? We are given money, thus incurring a debt, in order to keep buying their products, which are being created with yet more debt, as we rob future generations of the material wealth of our nation. A material wealth that is being turned as quickly as possible into refuse for our landfills.

Recently, California has been decrying China and South America for flooding the market with cheaper, lower quality food. Ironic this, since it’s exactly what California’s agriculture has been doing to the rest of America for so long. Yet the American public has very little idea what the true cost of our food is, or what it should be.

Take a fresh tomato, most likely grown in California. The field in which it grew was plowed by an enormous machine, most likely made overseas and fueled with oil that almost certainly came from overseas. The parts that serviced that vehicle were made overseas and shipped here using yet more of that overseas oil. The fertilizer that brought fertility to the soil in order for the tomato to grow was likely created overseas as well, utilizing enormous amounts of fossil fuel to create and yet more to ship to its location in the field. The tomato was thus fed and watered, water which may have came from one of California’s many irrigation systems, piping water off of numerous rivers and waterways that once nourished entire communities in arid regions, but now dwindle to a trickle as they service enormous farms. Come harvest time, the tomato likely was picked by illegal immigrant labor, people who will work hard and allow themselves to be exploited as yet the latest in a long line of immigrants exploited by the capitalist beast. The money these immigrants are paid, a paltry sum to be sure, doesn’t remain in the community but yet goes back to their country of origin.

The tomato may fetch $1.99 a pound in the local megamarket, which only barely breaks even on the produce aisle and turns its real profits in the frozen and processed food sections. That $1.99 doesn’t reflect the significantly smaller amount the farmer got paid. And most of the costs are born by the consumer. Who paid for the vast highway infrastructure that moved all the machinery, fuel, and produce? Who paid for the war and its subsequent human costs that provided the raw material for the fuel the trucks and tractors needed? Who pays for the cleanup of the toxic environment that the unsustainable methods of agriculture created? Who pays for the health problems associated with that toxic environment, and who pays for the health problems from eating the toxic end product? Who pays for the vast number of bureaucrats who oversee the agricultural system and its immigrant labor force?
As a society, we would benefit much more from paying local farmers a living wage and eliminating those additional costs. You won’t, however, see that concept in the farming bills put up before Congress. The large agribusinesses who profit so greatly from passing on their operating costs to the taxpayers are giving large amounts of graft to the politicians in order to prevent that.

By raising my own food or by doing without the expensive labor-saving devices the advertisers tell me I need, I’m denying these corporations my money. I’m improving my own life by performing the crucial work that the farm requires. I’m teaching my children better values than can be found in a box of cereal or in a 30 second commercial. In effect, I am helping to starve the beast.

But I can’t do it alone. In World War II, millions of Americans planted “victory gardens” to help win the war. They realized that food that didn’t have to be shipped to them could go to the war effort. The gasoline that was saved by not having food shipped to them could power airplanes and tanks and move soldiers to the front lines. They had a cause and they were willing to work towards its success.
Today I’m calling upon Americans to build “protest gardens”. By growing your own food you’re denying money to the agribusinesses that are destroying local economies and polluting the earth. You’re not participating in the exploitation of natural resources such as soil and timber. You’re not contributing to the destruction of small family farms. You’re telling our government that we don’t need to go to war and kill people in order to get oil to fuel the transport trucks.

Get to digging!

June Report

Finances ought to be private, but I know some of you are following this blog with the intent of working on your own farm, so I’m going to disclose our June farm report. The financials and the business side are difficult to keep track of, but I keep detailed records of what we gather from the farm, so it’s an easier time to just do the math. We’re basing our income on the current price of the selected item. For example, I can buy organic eggs from my neighbor for $3 per dozen, so that’s the rate I set when I gather eggs for my own family. Without further fanfare, here’s the income numbers:

Eggs: total of 2 for June netting us $0.51

Basil: total of 0.5 oz for $2.29

Baby Lettuce: 8.4 oz for $4.20 (this is baby iceberg lettuce, what Kat calls the cattle feed of lettuce and the price of $3 per 5 oz is for organic baby Romaine. I upped it to $3 for 6 oz for calculations here.)

Black Raspberry: 11.5 oz for $3.74

This puts our farm income at $10.74 for the month of June! The eggs are a steady producer, but we didn’t pick up those Cinnamon Queens until the massacre happened, so we didn’t start getting eggs until the 30^th. The lettuce is just starting to really go, so we didn’t harvest as much of it. The basil is a big ticket item which we use in sauces and later plan to use in pesto. I had no idea fresh basil was so expensive until I looked it up. Each basil plant might get me several pounds of fresh basil over the summer, and each plant only cost me a dollar. The raspberries were better yet, because all I had to do was go out and pick them. No cost to plant them, no cost to water them, no cost to harvest them. I can even use child labor to harvest the next batch. Go, Farmer Ernie, go! We normally use frozen raspberries or strawberries for our morning smoothies and I had hoped to pick enough to make some jam and freeze for the smoothies, but the 11.5 ounces didn’t last 20 minutes on the table once the child labor got hold of them.

Some people might think it’s strange to use your own family’s food as ‘income’, but if we’re raising our own and eating it then we’re not buying it and I go on the basis of “money saved is the same as money earned.” Plus, there’s really two farms here at Tanglewood Hill … the inner farm, which is what we feed ourselves with and provide us with food security, and then the outer farm which is what we take to market. This year, the goal is to fully develop the inner farm. Next year or the one after that we’ll expand out to the outer farm.

Scooter Libby and the Long Arm of the Law

I won’t say much about this, but how did people not see this coming? There was a flagrant violation of the law in the Bush Administration and it was pretty apparent that the orders for it to happen came down from the top, definitely at Rove’s level, likely even Cheney himself, since he’s the busiest behind-the-scenes vice-president the nation has ever seen. Scooter Libby stepped up and fell on his sword, like so many of Bush’s followers have done, and was convicted of the weaker felony of perjury for lying about his treason … instead of convicting him of the treason itself. Let’s face it, folks … giving classified information about an undercover CIA operative’s real identity to the media for the purposes of political retaliation can be considered nothing but treason.

Scooter was convicted and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, not quite the lifetime sentence he deserved. However, before he actually goes to jail, President Bush commutes his sentence, which is a little weaker than a pardon. The conviction and fine stands, but there is no jail time. Scooter can continue the appeals process from the comfort of his mansion without worry or fear, because hey, if the appeals doesn’t get his record cleaned up, then Bush will just go ahead and pardon him too.

Realistically, this had to have happen. Bush has many other cronies out there breaking the law and doing treasonous acts for him. If they start suspecting that their loyalty won’t be rewarded, then the evil empire of Bush and Cheney quickly unravels.

I swear I will ...

I'm going to buy this t-shirt and wear it to every customer site. I'm stuck in Denver today, helping those who won't listen and don't deserve it. They need a swift kick in the ass and I think tomorrow I'm going to deliver.

Egg Poker

Yesterday we had two eggs, today I found one in more or less the same place … but the hen had pecked a hole in it and was eating the yolk! I didn’t actually catch her doing it, or she’d have been a stewpot bird for lunch today, but yeesh …