Sustainable living – Page 17

Bush cherries

I believe it was four years ago that a gardener friend urged me to go to Tractor Supply and get some of the cherry bushes they were selling. The potted bushes were very small — not more than two quarts, as I recall. I have never known a bush that is so hardy and grows so fast. The bushes have been heavily pruned at least twice, and once again they’re starting to block the path from the garden to the orchard.

As for the fruit, I wouldn’t say that it’s the best fruit in the world. But it has the virtue of being very early and very prolific. The pit-to-fruit ratio is not all that great. But who can turn down fresh cherries in May. Bush cherries would make a fine, fast-growing hedge.

The muffins are whole wheat, sweetened with maple syrup and honey.

Watch out for pits!

The 2016 apple crop is coming along great.

Someone told me recently that the abbey is looking shaggy. Oh well. Better shaggy than barren.

Stokes County terrain at its best

Click on image for high-resolution version

Given enough time, Americans can ruin just about any landscape. Suburbanization is one of the most popular methods.

Suburbanization requires major expenditures on roads. We don’t have those roads here in Stokes County. Our roads are narrow and crooked. Suburbanization also requires population growth and money. We don’t have that either.

The photo is of Younts Wine Farm near Walnut Cove.

Ken’s new book

In a recent comment here, Jo asked whether Ken Ilgunas was involved in the upkeep of the abbey’s orchard. Yes he has been, actually, very much so.

Though the first trees were planted before Ken first came to the abbey, he has slaved in the orchard for many hours — planting new trees and replacements for casualties, feeding the trees, pruning them, straightening them, weeding around them, and mourning for the fatalities that always seem to overtake the figs.

Ken’s second book, Trespassing Across America, will be released April 19, 2016. It’s available for sale (or for pre-order, if you’re reading this before April 19) at Amazon.

Ken’s first book, in 2013, was Walden on Wheels.

Watching the development of Ken’s literary career is like watching his generation finding its way. Ken, however, insisted on blazing his own trail. Student debt? Down with that. Cubicle job? No way. A career-oriented education? Nope — English and history.

I will never forget a critical moment in Ken’s career on the abbey’s side porch. The year was probably 2011. Ken was sitting in one of the rockers in his dirty work clothes, in a quandary, looking off into space, as he often does. He had been offered a desk job at a salary that anyone else his age would have had to jump at. Ken was teetering: What kind of career did he want to have? Should he take the desk job, or did he want to take the risks of making a go of it as a writer?

He asked me what I thought he should do. I evaded the question, because I was pretty sure I knew what he’d do. I believe my words were, “Whatever you decide, I totally trust your judgment.”

Having published two beautiful books by the age of 32, I’d say that Ken made a pretty good career choice.

A killing frost, and a close call

It’s as though March and April got reversed this year. March was obscenely warm. April has been dangerously cold. The warmth of March teased all the plant life into venturing out, so that April’s frosts could bite. The fig trees had put out leaves, and all those leaves were killed. With luck, the fig trees’ stems didn’t freeze, and there will be new leaves.

Otherwise, we seem to have survived what probably will be the last frost of Spring 2016. The peach trees and pear trees already had bloomed and set fruit. They seem to be unharmed. The apple trees are in the late stages of blooming, but they seem to have survived just fine. Once again, I am reminded of the risks involved in exotic species (such as figs). Whereas the tried, true, and experienced local species pretty much know what they’re doing. Some people covered their lilacs. I trusted my lilac to know what it was doing, and luckily it seems fine.

The apple trees are looking great this year. The trees had their adolescent pruning two winters ago. That really reduced the number of bloom buds in the two subsequent springs. But this year the apple trees are looking nicely balanced, with lots of bloom buds. There will be fruit in the orchard this year, though the squirrels and raccoons are likely to get more of it than I do. Not until the trees produce more than the wildlife can eat is an orchard truly productive.

Above, a young pear.

Above, a young peach.

As for the chickens, they don’t mind the cold. They actually seem to do better in winter than in summer. Nothing is happier than a chicken — a chicken, at least, with freedom — in the spring.

Kill your dryer

According to an article at grist.org, Americans spend about $9 billion a year on electricity to power their clothes dryers. While appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines have made great strides in energy efficiency, dryers have not. In 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council published a “call for action” for more-efficient clothes dryers.

It was news to me that dryers sold in Europe, Australia, and Asia use heat-pump technology, which can cut energy use by more than half. Heat-pump dryers have recently come to market in the United States. They’re not exactly cheap, but I’m sure that, over the life of the appliance, they more than pay for themselves in energy savings.

Some people, I realize — for example those who live in cities, or in apartments — pretty much have no choice but to use clothes dryers. Heat-pump dryers could yield considerable savings and avoid a lot of carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere.

But when you live in the sticks, like me, and when you’re a cheapskate, like me, a $4.99 clothesline is the way to go. I don’t even have a dryer and don’t want one. Not only do clothes dryers eat your clothes, they give things that dryer smell instead of a fresh-air smell. I even like scratchy towels. Why am I thinking about this now? Because March winds are the best clothes dryer ever.

Local milk!

While in the Winston-Salem Whole Foods on Monday, I was pleased to see milk from a local dairy in the dairy case. It’s grass-fed milk, and the dairy is Wholesome Country Creamery in Hamptonville. Hamptonville is in the Yadkin Valley not far from where I grew up.

Not since I was in San Francisco have I been able to buy milk from a local dairy. That milk came from the Strauss Family Creamery in Marin County.

The Winston-Salem Journal did a story last year on Wholesome Country Creamery, which I did not see at the time. It’s an Amish dairy, and the creamery grows all its own feed. The dairy also uses a lower-temperature pasteurization process.

I’m old enough, and my rural roots are deep enough, that I remember when relatives, including my grandmothers, used to keep cows. That’s important, because I remember what milk should taste like, and I will never forget. My grandmother no longer had a cow after the early 1950s, but a few of the neighbors kept cows up until the early 1960s, and we used to buy milk from them.

It’s pricey, but I could get used to local grass-fed milk.

The (distant) future of eggs

Home-laid abbey eggs

It has been nice to see a number of stories in the past month about major restaurant chains switching to cage-free eggs. But it’s a slow process. There’s an awful lot of industrial chicken infrastructure that has to be changed. And even hens that aren’t in cages are not exactly living in chicken heaven. The majority of cage-free hens will still be packed into big, crowded barns with no access to the outdoors.

Wendy’s restaurants announced yesterday that they will go cage-free by 2020. Starbucks and Panera also have promised to go cage-free by 2020. McDonald’s and Subway will take 10 years to go cage-free — 2025.

This is a start. Surely it was the market, or “consumer sentiment,” that demanded this change. People are becoming increasingly aware of our cruelty to animals kept on industrial farms. However, I suspect that, for psychological reasons, most people have less denial in thinking about chickens raised for eggs, because laying hens aren’t slaughtered (not, at least, when they’re still young). It’s easier to think about the lives of laying hens than about the short lives of broiler chickens.

Here’s a link to a nice Chicago Tribune story on cage-free egg farming. A farmer is quoted as saying that he keeps his hens for over seven years before they’re sent off to be made into soup. I’m a bit skeptical that hens are kept that long.

Though I love knowing that all my eggs are laid just up the hill, I’m very aware that having chickens is not for everybody. If I were buying eggs, I’d just pay extra for the most hen-friendly eggs I could find.

Given a choice on a January day between a grassy orchard and the woods, the girls prefer the woods, though they also spend time in the orchard to get the clover and chickweed.

Green grass and chickweed from a warm and wet December

Farms and farmland: What are the trends?

This is the farm of my great uncle Barney Dalton in Laurel Fork, Virginia. Barney was born in 1876 and died in 1972, but his farm is still owned by his heirs, who work hard to keep it looking like it looked 75 years ago.

A story in this morning’s Winston-Salem Journal (by my friend Meghann Evans) reports that Forsyth County, North Carolina, is working on a plan to preserve farmland. I’m all for it, though for Forsyth County it would seem that the plan is a little late. Though Winston-Salem and Forsyth County have not grown as fast as Raleigh and Charlotte, developers have been buying up farmland and turning it into suburbs for decades. It has been more than 25 years since I lived in Forsyth County, but decades of uncontrolled suburbanization is one reason why I would never be able to live in such a place anymore.

Meghann’s story about Forsyth County got me wondering about the trends in farmland.

Just a couple of weeks ago, actually, I was at a Stokes County Arts Council event and saw a friend who is co-owner of Stokes County’s largest real estate company. “How’s business?” I asked her. “Have property values gotten back up to the pre-crash peak?”

She said that farms are selling very well but that homes are still a bit of a drag.

I’m going to guess that one of the reasons that Forsyth County can even afford to talk about preserving farmland is that farmland is more valuable than it used to be. Developers can no longer buy up farmland dirt cheap and turn it into suburban gold. Driving through a place like Forsyth County, evidence of this change is easy to see. Suburban housing is still being built, but the housing is much more dense than it used to be. That is, new suburbs don’t sprawl as much as they used to because the land is not as cheap. Houses are much closer together. Much of the new housing consists of multi-story, multi-family units.

Worldwide, farmland is increasingly seen as a good longterm investment. Much of the investment in farmland is coming from corporations. In fact, here in Stokes County, one of the biggest land transactions in the past couple of years involved 1,000 acres of farmland in the Dan River bottomlands. The buyer was a corporate outfit from Greensboro. I still don’t know what they plan to do with the land.

One surprising new trend is that agricultural degrees are in great demand, and there aren’t enough graduates to fill the available jobs. Just this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 60,000 high-skilled jobs in agriculture are expected each year but that there are only about 35,000 graduates available to fill the jobs.

In a news release earlier this year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, “There is incredible opportunity for highly-skilled jobs in agriculture. Those receiving degrees can expect to have ample career opportunities. Not only will they be likely to get well-paying jobs upon graduation, they will also have the satisfaction of working in a field that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges. These jobs will only become more important as we continue to develop solutions to feed more than 9 billion people by 2050.”

Though the corporatization of farmland ownership is disturbing, I nevertheless see it as an encouraging trend that farmland is becoming too valuable to be trashed by housing developers out to make a quick buck. For a young person trying to figure out what to do in college these days, I’d suggest horticulture with a minor in English. Wouldn’t that improve the world?

Lily (the abbey cat) gets nervous if her food bowl gets low and she can see the bottom of the bowl. She nags me until I fill it, and then she feels secure again. I feel the same way when I’m in places that are too densely populated, too dry, or otherwise too dead to support an exuberant population of living things. I need trees, rain, streams, good dirt, my own water from a well, an orchard, a garden spot, and some chickens. If the deer, voles, raccoons, possums, rabbits and even snakes rush in to live off my spot of land, then I’m flattered. At least I’ve got something for them to take.

Normally I’m at odds with trends. But the trend toward valuing and wanting to be near farmland is a trend I’m glad to see.

Nearby farmland

The abbey garden in a good year

A little moral reasoning

Photo by Wildlife Conservation Unit

As the outrage swelled around the cruel and meaningless death of Cecil the lion, the memes intended to shame people started showing up on Facebook. The Black Lives Matter movement, anti-abortionists, veterans — everybody got in on the memes and op-eds. The theme was always the same: What is wrong with you that you show more concern over one dead lion than [insert cause here].

On Facebook and in letters to editors, I often am shocked by people’s apparent inability to handle even basic moral reasoning and by their inability to detect fallacy.

As for those of us who felt rage over the killing of Cecil, are we so small and limited in the range of our moral concerns that we can be concerned about only one thing at a time? Can we not be concerned about both Cecil and about veterans who are going without medical care? Is it written somewhere that concern for the welfare of animals must somehow be deferred until perfect justice for all human beings is achieved? Who has the right to try to shame us for our lesser concerns while claiming — narcissistically, I would say — that their cause trumps all other causes? Instead, why don’t we divvy up all the deserving causes and each of us choose the causes we’ll focus on according to our own experiences and passions?

I prefer the term moral philosophy, though one can also call it ethics. Moral philosophy has changed a great deal over the centuries as our understanding of justice has changed and evolved to become more inclusive. Probably the most prominent text at present in the field of moral philosophy is John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. The book is a very demanding read, but it’s well worth it.

There is a preacher in this county who constantly writes letters to the editor scolding those of us who don’t share his black and white, Augustinian, hell fire and damnation notions of morality. In a letter just last week in which he raged against marriage equality, he wrote: “If truth can change, it’s lie — it’s false!”

Horse shit. King Solomon had 700 wives. David had eight. “One man one woman” actually was a pagan innovation and did not originate with Abrahamic religions such as Christianity. Christianity picked it up from the pagan Romans. So what changed? If you pointed out to this local preacher these small factoids from the Bible he thumps to assert that he is always right, his authoritarian mind simply would not be able to see a contradiction. Cognitive dissonance would shut him down. He sees moral reasoning as a slippery slope to hell and instead clings to his blacks and whites.

Is the life of one lion worth more when there aren’t many lions left, as opposed to the time when the African jungles were full of lions? Does it matter how and why a lion dies? Are the lives of human beings worth less when there are 7 billion of us rather than 300 million? Does it matter how and why human beings die? Is the life of an obnoxious and cruel dentist from Minnesota worth less than the life of a Princess Diana? Are the lives of any two human beings worth more than the lives of the last two lions on earth? Would the world be a better place if the life of Cecil the lion could be exchanged for that damned dentist?

I’m not necessarily taking a position on any of these things. I’m just saying that they’re worth thinking about. And I refuse to be shamed by those who seem to think that it’s shameful to care about animals before humanity’s problems are all solved. If that were the case, neither our wild animals nor the billions of animals kept on factory farms will have a chance, ever.

First apple pie from the abbey’s orchard

I started the abbey’s small orchard seven years ago with small, bare-root trees, all of them old Southern heirloom varieties from Century Farm Orchards. Lots of grief and patience are involved in getting a new orchard to the productive stage. I’ve had a few apples in previous years, but this year was the first year I’ve had enough to make the orchard’s first apple pie. I took some portraits of the apples before I picked them and put them in the pie. The pie is totally from scratch and largely followed Irma Rombauer’s “Apple Pie I” recipe from the 1943 wartime edition of “Joy of Cooking.”