Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
We ordered 3-year-old asparagus crowns online from AsparagusGardener.com in Tennessee. They should arrive any day now. Ken is digging a bed for the asparagus and amending the soil with compost, sand, and organic fertilizers.
Asparagus is a perennial and will come back year after year, but there’ll be no asparagus to eat until next spring at the earliest.
The chickens go crazy whenever he digs.
I bet that some of you who live in California are feeling a little paranoid right now. Can you trust the authorities to tell you what the radiation levels are? And maybe you went looking for iodine supplements and couldn’t find any because it had sold out. You’ve got to think ahead, folks.
Several years go, I bought old Civil Defense radiation detectors on eBay. They’re from the 1960s, but they’d never been used and were in great working condition. They were inexpensive then. If you can find them right now, I’m sure the price is sky high. As for iodine tablets, why not just keep kelp tablets on hand, which you can get at health food stores (though I’m sure kelp supplements are sold out right now as well).
Here’s what you need to do. When this crisis has passed, start looking for radiation meters. Keep in mind, though, that there are several models of the old Civil Defense radiation meter. The one you want is the CDV-700, which is a true Geiger counter and is the only one sensitive enough to measure background levels of radiations. Other meters, such as the CDV-715, are less sensitive and would be helpful only during high-radiation events.
You also need to educate yourself about radiation — the types of radiation, what the normal levels are, how to shield against radiation, and what the dangers are at increasing levels of radiation. This small document is a good place to start. Print it out and keep it with your radiation meters.
Here in North Carolina, I can assure you, background radiation is normal, about .02 milli-Roentgen per hour.
It’s no so much that I’m paranoid that I have things like Geiger counters, though it’s true that my trust in any kind of authority approaches zero. A bigger reason is that I’m a nerd, I have some obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and I love to measure things. I have all sorts of measuring instruments — oscilloscope, magnetometer, capacitance meters, inductance meters, frequency meters, and so on.
But as an ham radio operator, I also have an altruistic motive. I ought to be of service to the community during a crisis, able to provide information and communication.
It’s good to know some science and have a few tools.
The meter shows the current background radiation, March 20, 2:45 p.m. — .02 milli-Roentgen per hour.
In June 2009, using analytics software licensed from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and statistical data from the Department of Energy, Microsoft launched a web site permitting homeowners to enter data about their homes and energy use and compare their energy use to that of other homes. The web site is www.microsoft-hohm.com.
Microsoft launched this web site the very month I first turned on the lights at Acorn Abbey, so each month since June 2009 I’ve entered data from my electric bill. The web site stores this data, graphs it, and analyzes it in interesting ways.
Acorn Abbey, I’m happy to report, is energy efficient. It rates a 91 on energy efficiency, on a scale of 100. The national average for energy efficiency is 61. In my Zip Code, the average is 57. The average in the wastrel, free-market utopia of Texas is 51!
In dollars, here is how it looks. Acorn Abbey has an electric heat pump for both heating and cooling. All appliances including the water heater are electric. (In densely populated areas where piped gas is available, some gas appliances are more efficient, but that’s not an option here in the sticks.) The overhead insulation exceeds the building code requirements. My annual electric bill comes to $979, compared with $2,228 in my Zip Code for houses of the same size built around the same time.
So my electric costs are 43 percent of what others in this area spend for similar houses. Or, to express it another way, people around here with similar houses use two and a quarter times more electricity than Acorn Abbey does.
I stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I use the heck out of the kitchen. I take showers with pure hot water (my water heater is set pretty low). My Macintosh stays on all the time. In other words, I live comfortably. How in the world do others manage to use so much electricity? I don’t see how it can be anything other than waste.
After 17 years in California, where the cost of electricity is much higher than it is here in North Carolina, I became accustomed to being frugal with electricity. When I returned to North Carolina in 2008, I was stunned at how promiscuous local people are in their use of electricity. When something is too cheap, people waste it. And I’d better not even get started about the horrors of the McMansions and new suburbs that are going to be with us for a long time, squandering energy, ugly in every way.
The nuclear catastrophes in Japan have renewed the national conversation about the wisdom of building new nuclear power plants. But the thing that is almost never discussed is that we wouldn’t need so many power plants if people didn’t waste so much electricity. Most Americans still blindly live as though they’re entitled to endless consumption and endless waste.
Microsoft Hohm makes two suggestions for making Acorn Abbey more energy efficient. Its data includes the percentage of my light bulbs that are compact fluorescent vs. incandescent. It wants me to install all fluorescent lighting. I will, eventually. All my frequently used lights are compact fluorescent, but I’ve not yet spent the money to change out my seldom-used lights. I’m also hoping that the cost of LED lighting will come down.
The other step Microsoft Hohm suggests is caulking around my windows and doors to control air leaks. They’re exactly right about that. Last fall, I had a plague of lady bugs and stink bugs getting into the house looking for a warm place to spend the winter. They could have come in only around the windows and doors. Before next winter, I must do some serious caulking. In retrospect, caulking would have been a much better investment than the heavy curtains I bought for the windows. And it would have kept the stink bugs out.
Today we put almost a hundred young plants into the ground. These are the plants that we started indoors five weeks ago from seed — cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. We also have eight small celery plants. I think the odds are low that we’ll be able to grow celery here, but I wanted to try that as an experiment.
The soil was a bit wetter than ideal, and the plants had been “hardening” (getting used to the outdoors) for only five days. But we thought it best to go ahead and plant because the forecast looks good. We should have some rain starting this afternoon, followed by a week with highs in the 60s and 70s and lows in the 40s and 50s — good cabbage-growing weather.
Next step: Starting plants for the summer garden indoors from seed — tomatoes, squash, etc. Those plants need to go in the ground in late April.
Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”
One of the many puzzling things about today’s political environment is why so many of the people who distrust government think that corporations can do no wrong. My view is that out-of-control, anti-democracy corporations are far more dangerous than government.
Mind you, I don’t want to totally demonize corporations the way some people totally demonize government. Corporations, if they are reasonably regulated, can do lots of good things — make iPads, for example. But as corporations get richer and more powerful, they want a weak government. They will use their resources, if they can, to take over the government. They will use propaganda to demonize government and keep lots of people from seeing what they’re up to. That is what is happening in the United States today. Corporations are well along in their plan to weaken our government and our democracy and bring about their vision of a dog-eat-dog, corporatized, free-market utopia.
If corporations get their way — and increasingly they are getting their way — government will be powerless to stop them. Already our democracy is too weak to restrain corporations. The Congress regularly passes bills that the majority of Americans clearly don’t want. Instead, Congress passes the bills that corporate lobbyists and big-buck campaign donors want.
What can we do, on our own, to get back at corporations when our democracy fails us?
Here are some suggestions.
1. Get out of debt as quickly as possible, and stay out of debt. Not only will corporations bleed you dry on the costs of servicing your debt, debt limits your choices. It keeps you on the treadmill. It forces you to remain a slave indentured to corporate power. Your debt lets them treat you like a dog, while you are powerless as long as you owe them.
2. Don’t sign contracts. Contracts with corporations these days rarely benefit the little guy. They benefit the corporations. Consider your cell phone contract, for example. You got just a cheap phone out of the deal. The corporation locked you into a long money stream and prevented you from taking advantage of competition.
3. Build up your savings. We need savings to get through unexpected crises, such as loss of a job, or a costly illness. Many people lose their homes to foreclosure, for example, after losing their job or getting sick. With no savings, they are at the mercy of every corporation that has a claim on them. And corporations have no mercy.
4. Spend your money as close to home as possible. Corporations suck money out of our neighborhoods, where it ends up as profits for Wall Street to be invested abroad. If you eat at a chain restaurant, for example, the money goes to Wall Street. But if you eat in a neighborhood restaurant, the money stays in your neighborhood, with your neighbors. Support your local farmers and farmers markets!
5. Cut your consumption. Most Americans buy all kinds of junk that they don’t need. See the Story of Stuff. Buying useless stuff is a waste of your money. It ends up as just more trash in our landfills. And it makes corporations fatter.
6. Don’t let them snoop on you. Corporations see the Internet as a wonderful new way to snoop on, and brainwash, consumers. They’ll track everything you do on the Internet, if you let them. You’ll find articles here and elsewhere on what you can do to prevent this.
7. Don’t let them scam you. Increasingly, diluted regulations and lack of government oversight let corporations scam you, legally or not. There are all kinds of scams, particularly having to do with borrowing or investing money. Half of the junk mail I get has a whiff of scam about it. The housing bubble and bust came about largely because of scams, some of which are actually legal in our deregulated business environment.
8. Don’t let them push you around. Is your bank pushing you around with high fees? Did the dealer try to tack on hidden fees when you bought a car? In how many ways is your credit card lender abusing you? When they try to pull a fast one on you, be smart and push back. Don’t let them take you for even so much as a penny. It’s a matter of principle.
9. Don’t believe their advertising and public relations. Corporations spend billions of dollars to make us think they’re nice. Oil companies, for example, love to make commercials about how “green” they are. It’s all bunk.
10. Cut off the propaganda. Virtually everything on radio, television, and cable these days is propaganda. At the very best, it’s low-grade information or mere infotainment. Those people who get their “news” by watching television are guaranteed to be ill-informed and besotted with propaganda. Not only that, but people like Rupert Murdoch make billions of dollars selling propaganda to people on his cable networks. Americans actually pay for their propaganda! Cut off your cable or satellite TV. The only way to be well-informed is to read, not to watch.
11. Don’t outsource to corporate America what you can do for yourself. Every time you take a ready-made supper dish out of your freezer and pop it in your microwave, you’ve outsourced your cooking to a corporation. Your supper cost you five or ten times as much as it should have. You ate all kinds of chemicals and cheap ingredients. A corporation got the profit.
12. Remember co-ops? Back in the 1970s, when health food stores were less common and before chains such as Whole Foods existed, there were many food co-ops. People got together, bought foods in bulk, and distributed the food, at cost, to the members of the co-op. I would love to see a resurgence of co-ops. Meanwhile, remember that credit unions are co-ops and are an alternative to banks. The Farm Bureau is a non-profit co-op, and it sells insurance. Look around for co-ops and non-profits that you might be able to shift your business to.
13. Support regulation and fight the corporate agenda. Don’t believe the corporate propaganda about the evils of regulation. In the real world, as opposed to the imaginary free-market utopia imagined by idealogues, it’s obvious that, if unregulated, corporations rapidly move toward predation, monopoly, and, eventually, oligarchy — which is pretty much where we are already in the United States. Corporations will always do everything they can to privatize profits and socialize costs. They don’t want their profits and sky-high executive salaries messed with, but they love bailouts. In Ireland, corrupt, corporatized politicians actually shifted the entire cost of the Irish bank bailout to Irish taxpayers. In the U.S., at least we mostly lent the bailout money to the banks. In Ireland they actually gave it to the banks. Corporatists, emboldened and empowered by the 2010 election, are pushing a nasty agenda: Rolling back environmental regulations, weakening unions and pushing wages down, continuing the takeover of public assets, continuing to shift the tax burden away from corporations and the rich to working people, weakening and starving the public school system, and so on. They’re winning, even though the public don’t support these things.
14. Rethink your career plans. If you’re young, how you make your living for the next 20 or 30 years can make a huge difference. Can you start your own business? Might you be able to work for a non-profit? I learned that there were many benefits for working for a private corporation rather than a corporation owned by Wall Street. Private corporations often take better care of their employees, because they don’t have to play games every quarter to try to keep Wall Street happy. Where you make your money is as important as where you spend it. Granted, working people in today’s post-industrial economy don’t have a lot of choices. But if you do have choices, go for it.
15. Roll back the clock. I would never argue that corporations have not improved our lives. In some ways, they have. That, after all, is why corporations exist — to supply some human need, something that can be done only with the combined effort of lots of people and specialized knowledge (like building airplanes, for example). But the problems occur when we, without thinking, let things go too far. So spend some time thinking about how corporations have brought you benefits but how they’ve also caused you harm. Did you buy tobacco from them? I hope not. Are you overweight because you eat too much corporate food? Have you become so dependent on television that you no longer know how to entertain yourself or your children? Have you failed to learn basic human skills, skills that your parents and grandparents once had, because you’ve become too dependent on corporations? How can you, in your life, roll back the clock to the time before corporations were out of control?
I leave you with a famous quote by Robert A. Heinlein. It’s from Time Enough for Love:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Heinlein is considered to have been a libertarian. But it wasn’t just government that helped us lose all this knowledge and give up so many choices. It was corporations.
For the past two years, I’ve been gardening in raised beds. Now that I have a deer fence and have prepared a real garden area, I can move beyond raised beds and do old-fashioned in-the-dirt gardening. But one of the things that shocked me while gardening in raised beds was the huge amount of watering required.
How can it be, I wondered, that my grandparents raised huge, productive gardens without any irrigation? One of my grandfathers grew enormous, juicy watermelons year after year, rain or drought. This is a mystery that I’ve wanted to understand.
In Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, Steve Solomon emphasizes the importance of being water-frugal and not relying on irrigation. He is not a fan of “intensive” gardening methods like raised beds, which require regular watering and extremely rich soil. The key, he says, is to garden the old-fashioned way: Plant things far apart. When plants are too close together, he says, they compete for water and draw huge amounts of water from the soil. The water drawn out by the plants’ roots, he says, greatly exceeds water lost to evaporation.
Solomon also tells us how surprisingly large the root systems of garden vegetables are. Canteloupe roots, for example, will go two feet deep and reach out 10 feet in all directions from the spot the seed was planted. A tomato will go four feet deep and four feet outward in all directions. That is huge! And, at four feet deep, a lot of moisture can be found, even in dry weather.
So, when I plant this year’s garden, I’m going to give everything lots of space.
Solomon’s book is concise, logically organized, and dense with information. It has answered a lot of my questions. For example, why is leaf compost not ideal, and what is needed to compensate for its deficiencies?
I think this is the single most important book on organic gardening that I’ve come across.
Every spring and every fall, the grass gets the same treatment: lime, fertilizer, and more seed. We also repair bare spots and pick up rocks. Today we picked up almost a wheelbarrow load of rocks while working on smoothing out one of the remaining rough areas of the yard.
Yesterday Ken planted two holly trees, two more arbor vitae trees, two forsythia bushes, a rhododendron, and a number of small plants. Rain is forecast for the weekend, so everything is in ahead of the rain.
If the weather cooperates, we remain on target for a productive spring. Depending on the long-range weather forecast, we may plant the cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc., next week.
The chickens love anything that scratches the soil.
A lot of work got done in the garden today. It’s almost time to plant the cabbages, etc., one to two weeks from now.
Ken spread 300 pounds of organic fertilizer, 50 pounds of lime, and many wheelbarrow loads of compost. All of that got nicely tilled into the soil. Now the soil needs to sit for a week or two so that the winter rye, which we tilled under today, can break down. The fertilizer also needs to wash in a bit. Rain is forecast for tomorrow.
We actually measured the pH of the garden today. It was 6.9 — just a tad on the acid side of neutral. This surprised me. Pine trees grew on the soil for years, and I expected it to be more acid. On the whole, the garden soil is looking much better than I expected. We’ll soon see how well things grow.
Ken spoils Patience.
We had a nice, big load of compost delivered today. It looks like a lot of compost, but it’s amazing how much compost this place eats. You spread a bunch of compost and then wonder what happened to it all. This compost came from a local landscaping supply business. It’s made from leaves and brush chips.
Next chore: Using the tiller to turn under the winter rye grass that now covers the garden. Most of the new compost will then go into the garden. It’s a shame to till the rye under, but it has served its purpose — ground cover for the garden during the winter and providing winter greens for the chickens.
A tiny celery plant, planted 11 days ago
In a post yesterday, I said that my Wakefield cabbage plants didn’t germinate well. I was wrong. I had misread the chart on which I recorded what was planted where in the starter trays. It actually was celery that appeared to have a problem. But now I can see that the celery seeds actually are germinating. They’re just much smaller seeds and slower to appear. So far, six of the 10 celery seeds are up.
The plants are looking much better now that I’ve lowered the grow light closer to the plants. If all continues to go well, 95 percent of the seeds I planted will make it all the way to the garden.
For comparison, this is an 11-day-old brussels sprout