Where to start?


The garden, this morning

It’s been over a month since I posted. The abbey has been caught in a whirlwind of spring projects, spring farm work, and community organizing. I really appreciate the emails from those of you who have written to make sure everything is OK. Retirement is not supposed to be like this.

I think I’ll try to catch up with a bulleted list of items, stealing a bit from the way the late Herb Caen used to do things in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  • By far the biggest time sink in the past month has been getting involved with the group of people in Stokes County who are organizing to resist fracking in Stokes County and in North Carolina. Fracking is now illegal in North Carolina, but right-wing members of the North Carolina legislature are working hard to fast-track legislation to permit fracking. I was aware of what the legislature was up to. But I did not know until Ken and I went to a county commissioners’ meeting (to speak against a county resolution supporting North Carolina’s marriage amendment) that there is a potential fracking area here in Stokes County. There were people who came to the meeting to speak against fracking, and Ken and I immediately got involved with that group. Ken started a Facebook group (No Fracking in Stokes County), and I started a web site for the group (nofrackinginstokes.org). We helped set up a community meeting at the Walnut Cove Public Library, which almost 100 people attended. This isn’t over, because the legislature just reconvened in Raleigh, with right-wingers in the majority and ready to continue with all sorts of corporation-coddling, the-people-be-damned evils. The abbey — normally quiet and peaceful — has been noisy and busy, which leads me to the next bullet item.
  • The abbey does not have a land line telephone. Rather, we have two Verizon cellular phones with oversize antennas and 750 shared minutes a month. Normally we come nowhere close to using all those minutes, but this month we’re having to check to see how our minutes are holding up and budgeting the minutes out according to our needs. Yesterday Ken and I were on the phone at the same time. I was in a conference call with a consortium of North Carolina anti-fracking organizers, and Ken was doing interviewing for an article he’s writing. He also has calls to his literary agent in New York, his publisher, and his publicist. How did this happen? It’s temporary, but I told Ken yesterday that I feel like we’ve both been yanked out of the abbey and cast kicking and screaming back into the corporate world.
  • I finished with my book project. I did the editing, typography, and prepress work for People Skills Handbook: Action Tips for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence. The book is now being printed and should soon be for sale. It’s a corporate training manual, and it brought in some extra money that has been very nice for getting some projects done (which I’ll mention in later bullet items).
  • Ken sent the manuscript for his book to his publisher. He had edited it through eight drafts, and of course the book got better with each draft. He has worked like a dog. The book will be published in May 2013. Now that Ken is no longer tied down with writing and editing work, he’ll be leaving soon to work on his next projects (later bullet items).
  • The irrigation project ended up taking way more time than we expected. It also cost a great deal more than expected. Ken spent many days wearing waders, building a dam in the small stream below the house. At last the dam is holding and is impounding a generous amount of water. The first pump I bought was underpowered; the second pump is working great. Now we just open a couple of valves, and branch water flows into a drip system down each row of the garden. This has made a tremendous difference in the garden’s yield. The garden is picture perfect. We have eaten so much lettuce that it’s a wonder we haven’t turned green. The broccoli is starting to come in. There will be cabbages — and possibly spring sauerkraut. There are two rows of very fine beets coming along, and two rows of sweet Georgia onions. Ken planted the first round of corn and my family-heirloom green beans on Sunday. The tomatoes and such are still in the greenhouse but should be ready to transplant soon (Michael Hylton of Beautiful Earth Garden Shop at Lawsonville is starting our plants for us this year).
  • The trees in the orchard are three and four years old, but they’re going to bear fruit this year. The orchard has never looked so good. We have observed that, if the orchard grass looks good, the trees look good. My theory is that all those organic soil amendments that we’ve spread on the grass is getting down to the tree roots. And credit for that, no doubt, has something to do with our rising population of earthworms.
  • Using the nice money from putting that book together, we’ve gotten two other important projects done in addition to the irrigation system. We poured the basement floor, and we had the attic floored. Both were jobs that I didn’t have the budget to do when the house was first built. There’s a good-size basement down there, but the floor was dirt, with all the dampness, cellar crickets, and ickiness that that implies. Now the basement is dry and snug with a concrete floor as smooth as marble. There’s shelving for tools and canned goods. Upstairs, the attic floor has opened up a tremendous amount of new storage space. It’s amazing that a house so small contains so much space. It’s on five levels — basement, first floor, second floor and two levels of attic. There actually have to be steps in the attic to get from the lower level to the upper level. The roof is so steep that there is standing room even on the upper level. Both these projects created a lot of fuss and disorder, and each ruined a week of peace and quiet at the abbey.
  • I’m going to learn to can this summer. I got an All American pressure canner. My first effort probably will be pickled beets. And later this summer I want to can as many tomatoes and green beans as possible. I’m really counting on that irrigation system to not only maximize our yields but also to make yields more predictable.
  • Now I have to buck up and prepare for Ken’s departure. I often marvel at how absurdly optimistic I was with my dreams for this place. I bit off more than I could chew. One person working alone can’t start a tiny farm, no matter how tiny. One person can maintain, barely, but there is no way that one person could manage all the start-up projects. Without help, I would have gone under. But not only did help magically appear, the magic was powerful enough to bring Ken Ilgunas. Ken Ilgunas! I sometimes find myself writing little Visa commercials on my morning walks. They go something like this: “Garden and orchard, with fence and hawk net: $2,208. Chicken house and chicken infrastructure: $1,422. Irrigation system: $1,088. Stone and sand for stone walkways: $792. Five hundred dinners with Ken Ilgunas: Priceless.” Ken is brilliant. Ken is modest. He is polite. He is quiet. He is tireless. His self-awareness, and the Socrates-level refinement of his character, often make me feel like a crank and a curmudgeon. Ken is a born writer.

    But in the important ways, I don’t think I have ever misunderstood Ken or the deal we have: Acorn Abbey is about leveraging his freedom, not about tying him down. It’s a place to write, a place to winter over, even a place to be needed — but not needed so much that leaving feels like shirking a responsibility. Ken is an adventurer. I have always understood that. I believe his next project will take several months and stretch into the fall. I’m sure he’ll talk about that on his blog when the time comes. But I do hope he’ll be back and that Acorn Abbey will be his home base as he starts the publicity tours for his book after Thanksgiving.


    Chioggia beets, red beets, lettuce


    The first broccoli


    The spring chickens


    Peaches


    Apples


    Patience starts her morning stroll. Note the lushness of the orchard grass. It’s all about feeding the earthworms.


    New rose trellis (built from scratch by Ken and David)


    The first day lily stalks. They’ll start blooming soon.


    The water tank, which contains branch water for irrigation


    The basement project


    Two spring chickens


    At the anti-fracking meeting


    The virgin pressure cooker, waiting for beets

    • Honeybees


    [Click on images for high-res versions]

    We see disturbingly few honeybees at the abbey. Last year, it seemed as though bumblebees did most of the pollination. There were some honeybees working the apple blossoms this morning, though, and they were a welcome sight. There also were lots of other nectar-sipping creatures.

    The new iPad

    It took me months to decide to splurge on a new iPad. In the end, I decided that I could justify the cost by the amazingly many things I can do with it:

    — My old iPad 1 was my favorite reading device. The new high-resolution display is extremely easy on the eyes. It’s a fantastic reading device. The Kindle app has been updated to take advantage of the high-resolution display.

    — My GPS device is five years old and was ready to replace. The iPad has a GPS chip. With an app like MotionX, the iPad serves as a GPS turn-by-turn navigation device. This must really be cutting into the sales of companies like Garmin.

    — I have longed wanted an HD video camera. I’ve had no video camera at all for years. The iPad has two cameras. The forward-facing camera on the back can shoot high-definition video. The iPad also is a very good camera for snapshot quality photos.

    — It’s an email device, including when you’re traveling. I have the Verizon 4G iPad.

    — It’s a web browser.

    — It’s the best device I’ve ever seen for video phone calls. It’s easy to switch between the two cameras on a video call, so the person you’re talking with can see your face, or, switch cameras and point it at other things. Using the Facetime app, I had a video call with a friend in California yesterday. He showed me what his cats were doing, I showed him what Lily was doing, and I walked around outside and showed him what’s blooming at the abbey. I am now sold on video phone calls.

    — Using apps such as Apple’s GarageBand or MusicStudio, I can connect the iPad to my Rodgers organ with a MIDI interface and connect the audio output from the iPad to the organ’s amplifiers. Then the iPad can add orchestral voices, and other synthesized or digitally sampled acoustic sounds, to the organ. I’ve worked up a number of arrangements for string orchestra and organ.

    In short, the new iPad does a lot of cool stuff to help justify its cost.

    I haven’t even tried out the iPad’s new speech-to-text dictation feature. I’ve had the iPad for only two days, and it takes some time to try out all the iPad’s capabilities.

    As many reviewers have said, the iPad’s high-definition Retina screen is stunning. Once you’ve seen it, there is no going back. In a few years, probably almost all device and computer monitors will have these displays. Individual pixels are now too small to be visible. You see only a smooth image and perfectly formed text. I’ve realized that I’ll consider replacing my iMac desktop Mac when Retina displays become available for iMacs.

    Babbling and strewing flowers


    The pear trees up the hill from me. Click on photo for high-res version.

    I think it’s time for the annual posting of a poem about spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

    Spring

    To what purpose, April, do you return again?
    Beauty is not enough.
    You can no longer quiet me with the redness
    Of little leaves opening stickily.
    I know what I know.
    The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
    The spikes of the crocus.
    The smell of the earth is good.
    It is apparent that there is no death.
    But what does that signify?
    Not only under ground are the brains of men
    Eaten by maggots,
    Life in itself
    Is nothing,
    An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
    It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
    April
    Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

    — Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1921.


    Click on photo for high-res version

    Ruth, R.I.P., and other chicken news


    Ruth resting in the grass the day before she died

    Ruth died on Tuesday. Some sort of digestive disorder carried her off. She fought it for a week, then finally she stopped eating and drinking and weakened fast. Tuesday was a cold day with a very cold night forecast. We brought her inside and gave her a heat lamp Tuesday morning, but she died very peacefully around dusk.

    We bought a flowering cherry tree as her memorial. She’s buried under the new tree. I am not certain what made her sick, but I think there’s a very good chance that it was the organic fertilizer we spread a couple of weeks ago. The fertilizer contains chicken manure, and it’s pelletized. I’m afraid the chickens ate some of it before the rain washed it in, because it probably looked like food and wasn’t recognizable for what it was. Patience also was sick and had diarrhea for a while, but she recovered. So there’s a new rule at the abbey: The chickens must be kept away from newly spread organic fertilizer.

    Now we’re down to one chicken — Patience. I was afraid that Patience would be depressed from loneliness, but she seems to be doing pretty well so far. Then again, she’s had Ken for company. Ken has been working on replacing the screen and re-securing the chicken house against predators, in preparation for new baby chickens. Patience has stayed right with him almost every minute. Ken said that, at one point, when he was lying on the ground to work on the bottom screen, Patience was exploring his hair with her beak. I think I’ve mentioned before that Patience has long had a crush on Ken.

    Anyway, it’s almost time for spring chickens, and we’ve had to make some quick decisions. Ken had the brilliant idea of getting some fertile eggs and giving Patience a chance to hatch the eggs and raise the chicks. She has already shown a bit of a tendency to nest this spring, though she hasn’t been obsessive about it. Maybe some eggs will stimulate her instincts. I’ve ordered a dozen Golden Comet fertile eggs from eBay. They should arrive next week. We’ll give Patience five or six of the eggs and see what she can do. If she succeeds, we’ll have to figure out what to do with the males. If she fails, there should still be time to buy chicks from the local roller mill. They always sell baby chickens in the spring, around Easter.


    Any time Ken’s in the garden or orchard, Patience dogs him, especially if he’s digging, or on the ground like a chicken. Patience has thoroughly enjoyed Ken’s work replacing all the predator wire on the chicken house.


    What’s wrong with this picture?

    Banana bread

    It seems I regularly fret about how to get more variety into breakfasts, but I forget about banana bread. I had not made banana bread in months. As with many traditional American basics, I start with a recipe from Irma Rombauer’s 1943 edition of The Joy of Cooking and modify the recipe to make it healthier. This is whole wheat banana bread with vegetable oil instead of butter.

    The Ingle’s grocery store in Walnut Cove regularly carries organic bananas at prices only slightly higher than regular bananas. I find that the organic bananas always have a much nicer, more old-fashioned taste. Bananas have changed over the years. They tend to be too big these days, and lacking in flavor. Organic bananas are more like bananas used to be.

    The income of the top 10 percent


    Striking It Richer: Emmanuel Saez

    Charts like the one above help make it clear why the right wing hates — and fears, and demonizes — progressive economic policies like those advanced by Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Those policies left us with plenty of rich people, but the rich could no longer take it all. That, of course, is how the American middle class arose after World War II. By the beginning of the Reagan era, the rich got the upper hand again and started taking it all back.

    Emmanuel Saez has newly updated data showing that the top 1 percent captured 93 percent of the income gains in 2010.

    And yet, thanks to the right-wing propaganda machine, white working Americans in the red states are kept in a state of deep ignorance and cheer for and vote for their continuing impoverishment and marginalization.

    Update: The Huffington Post has a story on this today.