Category: Sustainable living

Baby pumpkin

There’s something magical about pumpkins. I’ve never grown pumpkins before, but I’ve wanted to for years. I thought they might be hard to grow, and they’re said to be heavy feeders. But the vines from my two pumpkin plants are now the biggest, most vigorous plants in the garden.

Last week’s rain helped the garden get through the hot, dry week that followed, with temperatures over 95. Yesterday evening, 1.1 inches of rain fell. I took advantage of the soft ground to do some weeding and hoeing this morning. The forecast for the next five days looks good — pretty good chances of rain and normal temperatures in the upper 80s.

Even with the drought, the garden has supplied 99 percent of my fresh food for over two months. I hardly ever go to the grocery store these days. I had been planning to make my monthly trip to Whole Foods this week, but I realized that there really isn’t anything I have to have, so I’ll wait until I run out of half and half or something. For those of us who use a lot of fresh produce, I can definitely testify that a garden saves a bunch of money.

As for the pumpkins: pumpkin pie!

Know your farmer? Not if she can help it…

There is no creature in the U.S. Congress more vile, more black-hearted, more ignorant, and more determined to horse-whip us all back to the Dark Ages than Virginia Foxx. I am ashamed to say that she represents my district, the 5th District of North Carolina.

She’s always up to no good, in service of corporate greed and pandering to the fears and prejudices of the ignorati. Her most recent deed was to introduce an amendment that would shut down a U.S. Department of Agriculture web site known as the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative. Though the web site has no real budget to take away, its purpose is to lend a little support to small farmers and local markets. Foxx thinks that’s a bad idea, you see, because she doesn’t want any competition for corporatized, industrialized agriculture. There’s nothing that free-marketers hate more than any attempt by groups of citizens to band together to supply their own needs. Consider, as an example, the right-wing North Carolina legislature’s recent approval of a new statute that would prevent rural communities from setting up their own broadband systems. When groups of citizens dare to “compete with the private sector,” these libertarian types elected with corporate money just pass a law against it.

Tom Philpott blogs about this at Mother Jones.

Foxx is from up near Wilkes County, which is one of the largest producers of factory chickens in the United States. It’s this proximity to factory chicken farms, apparently, which qualified Foxx to sit on the agriculture committee, including a poultry subcommittee.

Here’s a link to the web site Foxx wants to shut down. Foxx does not approve of its mission: Support local farmers, strengthen rural communities, promote healthy eating, protect natural resources.


Where corporate chicken comes from

A meteorologist's roundup of wretched weather


My ever-empty rain gauge

The high temperature here today was 94 degrees. The normal for this date is 86. In the last month, I’ve had half an inch of rain. Lots of things are turning brown. Even the squash are wilting. High temperatures alone wouldn’t be so frightening, if there was rain. It’s the combination of hot and dry that is life-threatening. Crops will grow in hot and wet. Crops won’t grow in hot and dry.

Under these circumstances it’s a depressing time to read this roundup of extreme weather by Jeff Masters at Weather Underground. These are not climate predictions that right-wingers can say are lies. It’s just real, measurable weather, compared with the weather we used to have. Last year, remember, tied with 2005 for the hottest year on record.

From Masters’ post:

“The pace of incredible extreme weather events in the U.S. over the past few months have kept me so busy that I’ve been unable to write-up a retrospective look at the weather events of 2010. But I’ve finally managed to finish, so fasten your seat belts for a tour through the top twenty most remarkable weather events of 2010. At the end, I’ll reflect on what the wild weather events of 2010 and 2011 imply for our future.”

Never turn your back on a cucumber vine


Three days’ worth, two cucumber vines

Three days ago I picked all the cucumbers. I left no cucumbers over two inches long. I was in no hurry to go back, thinking that the weather was so dry that not much could be happening. But this morning there were oodles of cucumbers, and some of them were even too big to be ideal.

The ability of certain plants to grow and produce in hot, dry weather continues to blow my mind. It’s almost as though the cucurbits — cucumbers, squash, pumpkin, melons — tap into the high humidity, though I know that they don’t actually do that. The key — as was clear in my organic gardening books and as I am now seeing with my own eyes — is to have fertile soil, to plant things well apart, and to keep the weeds down. This is simply old-fashioned gardening the way our grandparents did it. I have had only .3 inch of rain in the last three weeks, which I’ve supplemented with a quick watering with the hose on particularly hot days when the temperature went to 95. These were not deep waterings, but just enough to cool things down, reduce stress, and buy time for rain.

Though the tomatoes seem to crave more moisture than the cucurbits, they are holding their own. Based on what I’ve learned this year, I’ll amend my planting next spring. The brussels sprouts took up a lot of space but never produced, so no more brussels sprouts. The cauliflower was finicky. No more cauliflower. The cabbage and broccoli, at least, earned its space. Next spring I’ll reduce the amount of space allocated to the cabbage family and save the garden space for more cucurbits.

Chicken jump … and a fox report


Ready to jump down and start their day

One of the morning chores here is to go let the chickens out. They spend the night in their wooden chicken house, three feet off the ground, where no night predators can get at them. During the day, there is always risk.

I’ve known since last winter that a fox had moved in down at the edge of the woods about 50 yards from the house. Now I’ve learned that she’s a vixen and that she has at least one, maybe two, pups. The pups are now a little larger than half the size of their mother. Now that the pups are starting to roam and to learn to hunt, I’ve seen them almost every day for the last week. The pups are not as shy as their mom.

Last Wednesday afternoon, one of the pups got inside the chicken fence. I heard the chickens squawking in panic and ran out the back door. The foxlet saw me and ran, banging its head on the fence before it found the way out. I promptly made some reinforcements along the bottom of the fence using stone, boards, and metal stakes. Since Mrs. Fox has been here for months and has never bothered the chickens, my guess is that she is too big to defeat the fence, but junior was able to do it.

Three times now in the last week, Lily has alerted me to a fox near the front window. The voles’ main home is the day lily patch near the window and the vole patch out near the road. I was afraid I had an overpopulation of voles and even ordered some vole traps, but now that I see that the vole patch is a grocery store for the fox family, I’m going to not worry about it and let nature take its course. The voles have taken some bites out of beets and cucumbers and ravaged some pea plants, but their harm is slight enough that for now I’m going to leave the voles alone for the fox to manage. No doubt this time of year is the time of maximum population for the voles and similar creatures. Their numbers should dwindle greatly by winter as their food supply diminishes and the foxes press them harder. A few days ago I saw Mrs. Fox with a vole in her mouth, trotting back to her den. Ah, the mysteries of the food chain. The fertilizer feeds the day lily roots and bulbs, which feed the voles, which feed the fox. We all owe our livings to the soil.

The young foxes are outrageously cute. So far I’ve not been able to get a photo. Though they clearly roam all over the yard, they dart away as soon as they see me. But I will keep the camera handy.


I need to reshoot the chicken jump with a fast shutter speed. My new camera has a fast enough shutter to stop hummingbirds’ wings, but I’m not yet fast enough to change the settings in time when a photo demands it.

Summer: To hate thee or not to hate thee?


Looking toward Prabhupada Village from Moir Farm Road

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…

— William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if summer days were still temperate?

I realized while I was mowing this morning that I don’t hate summer. What I hate is abnormal summer. After a long run of days with temperatures in the 90s and as high as 97, today seems downright cool. It was 80 degrees out when I was mowing. Now, at 3:30 p.m., it’s 86. It feels like a cool spell, but really it’s not. It’s just close to normal (though still a few degrees above normal). According to the National Weather Service, the normal temperature for June 13 in Greensboro, N.C. (south of here) is 83. Amazing, isn’t it? Temperatures come down to a few degrees above normal and it feels like a cool spell.

But this is what summers used to be like.

Since the weather was so fine, and since I had to go to the post office anyway, I went on a short picture-taking expedition to Danbury, then through back roads to Sandy Ridge, and home again.

I stopped to talk to Carl Hicks, who was out on his tractor on Mission Road. Mr. Hicks owns the land that the nearest Verizon tower sits on, and I drove by hoping to bump into a Verizon technician who I might pump for information on Verizon’s Internet services in these parts. There was no technician, but Mr. Hicks did confirm that Verizon finally ran fiber to the tower a couple of months ago. Maybe that will help with my Internet service, though I’ve not seen any improvement yet.

Mr. Hicks and I talked a while under the shade of a huge oak tree. His view is the same as mine: It wasn’t this hot when we were young. Weather like today’s reminded us both of how summers used to be.


Butterfly weed on Pitzer Road


Mr. Hicks and his tractor


Mr. Hicks


Moratock Park on the Dan River near Danbury


A classic Jeep near Sandy Ridge


Brandon, who was skate-boarding on Moir Farm Road


Brandon


Brandon’s dog Spud

Garden strategy

Sunday morning I pulled up all the defunct members of the cabbage family — broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage — and threw the carcasses onto a pile for composting. I left a few cabbages that might revive enough to be eaten. I got caught up on the hoeing and weeding. Every little bit helps when it comes to saving water. Not that many weeds had grown in the dry weather.

Late Sunday afternoon, about .3 inch of rain fell. In a way, that’s pathetic, because it’s all I’ve had in three weeks. But it was definitely enough to refresh the garden and help me hold out until the next rain.


These poor cabbages won’t be perfect, but I think they’ll be edible.


With the celery refreshed by the rain, I’ll pull it all within the next two days.


The high summer vegetables — tomatoes, squash, corn, beans, pumpkin, watermelon, and canteloupe — are holding up well, though the tomatoes show signs of stress.

Abbey rations


Chioggia beets, kale, abbey bread

When you try to live close to the earth, you’ve got to eat what you’ve got. I had hoped to stretch out the spring crops rather than harvesting them all at once, but the hot, dry weather has forced me to do otherwise. Still, I count my blessings. I haven’t eaten grocery store produce, other than a couple of squash from Whole Foods, in several weeks. I’ve been living off the garden.

When I bought beet seeds, I didn’t know that I was buying chioggia beets. When I realized what I had, I was a bit disappointed. After all, what’s the point of a beet that isn’t blood red? But I’ve found that the chioggia beets are delicious, and I’m not getting tired of them. It seems they’re a new “in” food. Sunset magazine put chioggia beets on a top 10 list of healthy foods.

Yes, I do eat protein foods. I’ve been having the vegetables with vegan pimento cheese. I made a batch that has lasted me for days. When Ken was here, dishes didn’t last as long, and leftovers were rare. Now, with no one to cook for but myself, leftovers are a daily thing.

We people of the grocery store era don’t realize how unnatural it is — or at least how environmentally costly it is — to have such a variety of foods available at any given time. Our ancestors had to eat what was available. When cabbage was plentiful, you ate cabbage, no matter how strong a craving you might have for tomatoes, which you might get later in the season if you were lucky.

Archeologists have shown that, though the Celtic people of the British Isles (my ancestors) ate meat, it was not something they had year round. They mostly ate meat in the late fall, when they thinned the herds that they couldn’t afford to keep over winter.

Yet, we’re not completely without some economic discipline in these matters. Whatever is in season and plentiful will usually be the cheapest. You can have blueberries from Chile, but they won’t be cheap.

As for me, if the beets have to be pulled and the kale has to be cut, that’s what I’ll eat. I’m still trying to figure how how to use all the celery. And today I cut a beautiful cauliflower that I’ll roast tomorrow.

Unbearable weather


Panting chickens


Wilted beets


Dying cabbage

I try to honor a policy of never posting when I’m angry. Once again my anger has got the best of me.

After a cool, wet May, soon it will be three weeks since I’ve had any rain. During this time, day after day, the temperature has gone into the 90s. Today the high was 97F. A storm appeared out of nowhere up in Virginia yesterday evening, and it moved south and gave Surry County to the west of me a nice soaking, but I didn’t get a drop. That alone makes me angry — when I watch thunderstorms on radar that miss me by a few miles.

But it goes beyond that. Weather varies wildly from year to year and month to month, and always has. I know that. But this simply can’t be normal. When I was a child in the Yadkin Valley, I was around crops and gardens every summer. Sure there were dry spells and lost crops. But I don’t remember gardens drying up and dying every year, summer after summer. Because of the hit or miss nature of summer thunderstorms, some people will have good luck and others will have bad luck. But increasingly I’m afraid that no one will be able to garden consistently and successfully without some source of irrigation. I’d happily irrigate from a pond or a stream if I had one near enough. I don’t. I’ll use well water sparingly to revive the celery or keep a newly planted shrub alive, but well water is not the answer. It’s just wrong, and it’s unsustainable.

I expect next year’s weather in the U.S. will be just like this year’s: some places will flood, and others will parch. Some places will dry up, others will blow away.

My beets, cabbages, celery, and kale are done for. If I spritz them with water in the evening, they perk up enough to be harvested in the morning, so it won’t be a total loss. If it rains soon, most of my tomatoes and squash will survive, but the tomato leaves are starting to curl, and the squash is starting to wilt.

This morning Thomas Friedman — who as far as I’m concerned has devolved into a stopped clock when he writes about foreign affairs — has a pretty good column with the headline “The Earth Is Full.” He interviews Paul Gilding, an Australian who recently published a book, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World. Gilding gathers data on the brutally excessive demands we’re making on the earth’s natural systems.

Gilding is optismistic. He says, “We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

Oh we’re not, are we? I beg to differ. Americans are incomprehensibly thoughtless and ignorant, and they show no signs of rethinking their lifestyles or levels of consumption. Just the other day I gritted my teeth as one ignoramus said to another ignoramus at the gas pump, “We’ve got enough oil for 2,000 years.” The other replied that all we needed to do was get the environmentalists off our backs so we could do more offshore drilling, and that would solve the problem. I know where they hear this stuff: from the shouting heads on television who are paid handsomely to retail corporate and right-wing propaganda. One good thing about the current recession is that consumption is down. But if we ever pull out of this recession, Americans will expect to go right back to their old levels of waste and consumption.

Ken recently quoted Lew Rockwell, a libertarian and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama, a right-wing propaganda tank. Rockwell said:

“I spritzed some hairspray at the sky (not having enough hair to justify pointing it at me), used up a whole roll of paper towels, turned the refrigerator thermostat down, mixed newspapers with my garbage, filled up my car at an Exxon station, turned on all the lights, and took my daughter to McDonald’s for cheeseburgers, since they still had those nice, clean styrofoam containers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t cold enough to wear my fur hat.”

And:

“Chicken or chicory, elephant or endive, the natural order is valuable only in so far as it serves human needs and purposes. Our very existence is based on our dominion over nature; it was created for that end, and it is to that end that it must be used — through a private-property, free-market order.”

That last idea, of course, is a religious idea, and it comes from America’s dominant religion. And his rabid anti-nature attitude isn’t just ignorant, it glories in its ignorance. The appeal this kind of talk has for the American ignorati and the blindly religious is enormous. And those masses of Americans, of course, are exactly the target the propaganda is designed to reach.

I wish there was some other planet for those people to go live on. Then we might have a chance at saving the Earth.

Our sorry species doesn’t deserve a beautiful water planet like Earth. If we left it to the chickens and the chicory, the elephants and the endive, they’d take care of the Earth. They’re not as stupid as we are.