Category: Sustainable living

If you were a deer, would you be scared?

It irks me that I have to uglify my day lily bank to try to keep the deer from eating the day lilies. This year, they started eating them very early, without waiting for the flower stalks and blooms. With luck and good rain, this bank will be a green jungle of day lilies by early June.

The lilac bush has struggled, but each year it looks a little better. It probably needs a good feeding and a little pruning. Speaking of pruning, I pruned the apple trees fairly aggressively this winter, but the pruning has really improved the shape of the trees, not to mention my ability to mow under the trees without getting scraped off the mower. The fig trees, which are doing well, have just started putting out their leaves, but there’s already a baby fig. I have never seen a baby fig this early.

Ken’s new web site


Ken on the Isle of Mull during our hike there in 2018

Readers of this blog over the years will be familiar with Ken Ilgunas, who lived here at the abbey on and off starting back in 2010. Most of his writing on his books was done here. Ken’s blog, which he started in 2009, was way out of date, and he has recently upgraded it:

Link to Ken’s new blog

You can sign up for Ken’s newsletter. All the material from his old blog is there, with new material as well.

Ken lives in Scotland now, but for the record we are still literary confederates and are regularly in touch by email and text.


Ken was often on TV after Walden on Wheels was published in 2013. On several occasions, a limousine picked him up at the abbey to take him to network studios in Raleigh or Charlotte.


Ken in the abbey orchard, 2014

The Sierra Club

I felt a little irritated when I found in my mailbox a thick envelope from the Sierra Club. I had not renewed my membership, so of course it was a solicitation. The thickness of the envelope was clearly meant to give the impression of something valuable inside, as encouragement to open the envelope rather than just toss it. I opened it.

Inside I found five bifold cards, nicely printed, and five nice envelopes, white on the inside but tastefully washed in a pale yellow on the outside. How could I throw that away? A mailing like that must be very expensive. Not only is there the cost of postage, the cost of printing also would be high. It made me wonder if the Sierra Club spends an excessive amount of money to raise money, but I found at Charity Navigator that the Sierra Club has a four-star rating and that their fundraising expenses are 11.6 percent, which is not bad at all. The mailing worked. I’ve sent them a check to renew my membership.

The Sierra Club must be the oldest environmental organization in the United States. It was founded in 1892 by John Muir. In its long history, it has done a lot of good work and has not made many embarrassing mistakes. (One such mistake was accepting money from Chlorox and donations from the gas industry.) According to Wikipedia, the Sierra Club spent just over $1 million on the 2014 elections, all of it to oppose Republicans. Good work, that.

After I thought about it, I was glad to have renewed my membership, and I was impressed by the effectness of their direct mail appeals. With mailings like this they are, after all, providing much-needed revenue to the U.S. Postal Service. It’s also flattering to Sierra Club members (or former members) that the Sierra Club regards them as people who continue to use the U.S. Postal Service and who even send cards in the mail.

Oil: Why can’t we ever learn?


The 1935 Mercedes-Benz 770 that belonged to Emperor Hirohito. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Here we are once again in that most familiar of geopolitical pickles. The advocates of progress and democracy still have the oil leash tight around their necks, jerking them around and holding them back. The other end of the leash is held by oligarchs, despots, and the greediest and most powerful corporations in the world. We could have freed ourselves by now, but we haven’t. We like our oil too much.

I must hasten to confess how much fun it has been to have lived during the Oil Age. Cars! Labor-saving machines! World travel for the middle class! McMansions, heated and cooled! Lots of food! Lots of stuff! It has been a wonderful lifelong party, with oil in the punchbowl. The industrialization made possible by coal certainly changed the world, but it has been oil, more than any other thing, that has shaped the world we live in now and that made possible a precarious global population of 7.75 billion. The price of punch fluctuates, but the bowl is always full, at least in the rich countries. Back in the 1970s when they told us that we were running out of oil, they were wrong, and they probably were lying.

President Jimmy Carter learned what happens to governments that try to wean people off of oil. It’s the only sensible government policy, but people won’t go along with it. Today, as many people see it, one of the chief responsibilities of government is to keep the cheap oil flowing. Republicans, and all the other servants of oligarchs, despots, and greed, are happy to oblige. It’s clear that we’ll never be weaned off of oil until we can keep the party going on some other punch — renewables, we hope.

Normally I stay home and mind my own business. But the computer went haywire in my four-year-old Fiat 500. That took me first to a garage about seven miles from home for a new battery, which I hoped would fix the problem. It didn’t, so I had to take the Fiat to the dealership in Winston-Salem, 25 miles away. (The problem was diagnosed as a bad wheel speed sensor at the left front wheel.) Everywhere I went, people were complaining about the price of gasoline. At the Fiat-Chrysler dealer, there was not a single Fiat on the lot. Americans (unlike Europeans) hate little Fiats, and most models of Fiat are not even sold in the U.S. anymore. Instead, the dealer’s lot was acres of enormous and heavy vehicles — big trucks and SUVs. That’s what most Americans drive these days. The assumption, clearly, is that the cheap gas will keep flowing. Many people, obviously, can afford gasoline (though they still complain about the price of it). Many poor people, on the other hand, spend nearly 20 percent of their income just on gasoline. Oil is one of the key reasons for the sorry state of our politics. Given a choice between progress and cheap gas, cheap gas will get most people’s vote.

Americans, per capita, use at least five time more oil per capita than the people of China or India. That is a geopolitical weakness for America. And just look at the problems that Germany is having at present because of its need for Russian gas.

This is not going to be a feckless lecture on driving smaller cars and using less gasoline. What we do as individuals is a drop in the bucket, which is part of why we feel so powerless. What matters globally is what the advocates of progress and democracy are politically empowered to do, which will require a loosening of the oil leash. As for our love for cars and our dependency on them, electric vehicles and renewable energy may bring new political possibilities by freeing us from the oil leash. That’s a benefit above and beyond the necessity of just going easier on the earth. Just think how our politics could change if oil no longer mattered.

I wonder, though, whether I will ever be able to buy an electric vehicle as efficient and affordable as my little Fiat. I don’t have the slightest need for a hulking 3-ton electric truck or SUV, but it’s likely that that’s what most Americans are going to want. There’s still something very crazy about that.

Update: Slate has posted a good article about this: “Are Gas Prices Too High? Or Is Your Car Too Big?: When it comes to oil shocks, we have the memory of goldfish.”

Don’t forget to feed the birds


Cat prints and dove prints on my porch

It’s alarming how hard the snow is on the creatures who live outside. While the snow was falling hard yesterday and the temperature was 20F, some doves were sheltering on my porch. Unfortunately they saw me and flew away. After dark, I heard Lily downstairs meowing in such a way that I knew she had seen a cat at the door. This morning there were paw prints. Either a neighbor somewhere is not looking after their cats, or there is a stray. I often think that even the wild animals instinctively look to humans for help when they’re cold and hungry. “So many hungry mouths,” as my mother used to say. Nothing ever went to waste if there was a hungry mouth outside that might eat it.

I put out 45 pounds of seed for the birds a day ahead of the snow, and they worked it all day as the snow fell. During the night I saw three deer pawing the snow to get at the seed. Now I’m afraid it wasn’t enough, but I’m snowed in for at least a couple of days.


This little guy looks like a yearling.

Cherry pie

Maybe pie cherries aren’t as hard to find as I had thought. I usually rush through Whole Foods as quickly as possible, but last week I took my time and did some browsing. I was greatly surprised to see that they have canned cherries. I bought two cans, enough for a nine-inch pie.

It’s inevitable that pie cherries will be pricey. These were $5.79 a can at Whole Foods. Amazon carries them, but I had balked at the price. Previously the Oregon cherries were $7.07 a can at Amazon. The price has come down to $6.19 per can, sold in a four-can pack. I’ve ordered four cans of cherries, not because I plan to make a lot of cherry pie but because the canned cherries have a two-year expiration date, and it’s a good thing to have in the cabinet for company.

I used the recipe from the 1943 edition of Erma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking. It’s a traditional basic recipe. The recipe calls for tapioca flour as the thickener. I substituted corn starch. Berry pies, in my opinion, should always be just a touch runny and crumbly. The pie was perfect.

If I could, I think I’d live off of pies. Pies have a kind of medieval magic about them, not just dessert pies but also savory pies with a top crust. Cherry pie, in my opinion, is the prince of pies.

Here is a hat tip to Dan, who mentioned in a comment a while back that Stark Brothers, the mail-order tree nursery, has cherry trees. Cherry trees were impossible to find locally. I’ve ordered a Montmorency cherry tree, which is to be delivered in early March.

Local pecans!

One of my friends here in Stokes County is a horticulturist who used to work for the county’s agricultural cooperative extension service. He was here a couple of days ago for my winter solstice fire. He brought for me a couple of pounds of pecans, which were grown in a pecan orchard only a few miles north of me. The pecan orchard, I understand, is small. It sells its crop to local buyers. This is wonderful.

Historically (and my memory goes back to the 1950s), pecans in this area of North Carolina were brought in from Georgia. Pecan trees will grow here, but I think that, historically, only connoisseurs have grown pecan trees in North Carolina for their own use. I’m no expert on pecans, but I suspect that the warming climate means that pecan trees are as happy now in North Carolina as they were decades ago in Georgia. I have two three-year-old pecan trees in the abbey orchard. They are years away from producing. But, as my horticulturist friend said, pecan trees get off to a slow start as they build their root system.

Walnut trees grow wild here and are quite common. Harvesting walnuts involves a lot of work. By comparison, harvesting pecans is a piece of cake. Or should I say, a piece of pie.

Do I dare make a pecan pie from my local pecans? Pecan pie is the classic Southern American way of disposing of pecans.

Oysters


Oyster soup, more or less Louisiana style. The sandwich is a winter-style BLT — lettuce from the garden, but no tomato.

Oysters are magical somehow. They’re also slightly creepy. Picky eater that I was as a kid, it’s surprising that I even liked them. But I did, either batter-fried or in a creamy stew. We had them fairly often, as I recall.

In these parts, in the Appalachian foothills and the North Carolina Piedmont, oysters are harder to find than they used to be. People don’t want to shuck them (or don’t know how). And though they’re available by the pint already shucked, I don’t think many people buy them. Rather, when people in these parts eat oysters, it’s almost always in the restaurants that I call fried fish houses.

A neighbor gave me these oysters. He had bought an entire bushel of fresh oysters. A grocery store at Belews Creek regularly has them shipped in by the lorry load, either from the Chesapeake Bay or Florida. As far as I could tell from looking at the box, these came from Florida. The cost was shockingly low — $30 for the bushel of oysters, shipped on ice overnight. My neighbor said that the store sold the entire lorry load an hour after opening in the morning. Somebody knows what to do with them, especially at that price.

It had been 25 years since I’d shucked oysters. That was on vacation near Point Reyes north of San Francisco, back in my moneymaking days. There are two oyster farms there — the Hog Island Oyster Company, and the Tomales Bay Oyster Company. I still have my oyster knife, unused for those 25 years. Opening oysters is rather dangerous work, though I’m sure it gets safer with practice. Today I wore glasses and heavy gloves.

I had at first planned to make a creamy oyster stew. But I decided instead to make something healthier and a bit lower in calories, inspired by a recipe in the Washington Post for a Louisiana-style oyster soup. I used fresh mustard greens from the garden, tomatoes that I grew and canned, and lots of garlic.

With hundreds of thousands of miles of earth’s coastlines to work with, oysters grow (and are eaten) all over the world, though they are not of the same species or variety. I Googled to see if I could find an oyster cookbook with recipes from all over the world. I could not find such a cookbook. On a trip to Scotland in 2018, I sampled one of Edinburgh’s famous oyster bars. It was interesting, and very pricey. It also was rather city-fied. The world, I think, is waiting for someone to make a global oyster tour and write a cookbook on provincial oyster-eating, worldwide.


The neighbor’s bushel of oysters.

Radish sprouts

Radish sprouts are my new favorite sprouts. They’re also one of the healthiest kinds of sprouts you can eat, very high in antioxidants. They do have a fairly strong flavor, though. Not everyone likes them. If you don’t like radish sprouts raw, they work very nicely in stir-fries. They’re almost as big as mung bean sprouts, and they have nice, pea-shaped leaves that will turn dark green if they get enough light. The radishy flavor works really well in spicy stir-fries.

Winter greens

I wish I had started experimenting with winter greens in a cold frame a long time ago. This mustard was planted in early October and is now ready to start picking. I’ve decided to make a little ritual of it, though, and have the first winter mustard on Thanksgiving.

For comparison, I’ve also got some mustard growing outside the cold frame. The mustard inside the cold frame has grown almost twice as fast. Plus, the outside mustard has started to toughen a bit and looks a little shabby and weathered. Next year, I think I’ll expand the winter garden and see what I can do. One very agreeable difference, compared with summer gardening, is that there are no bugs, no briars, and no heat and humidity.