One of the first cosmos blooms in one of my wildflower patches. Can you espy the beetle?
May was cool and rainy, but we’ve been in a hot, dry spell now for about a week. So far, the garden and landscape are tolerating the weather well. I’ve watered the celery, but that’s just the nature of celery. The beets are looking a little wilty, but they’re a cool-weather crop, and they’re almost ready to harvest. Otherwise the garden is looking great. The tomatoes love the hot weather, as do the cucurbits — squash, pumpkin, watermelon, and canteloupe — all of which are young plants started from seed. The real test will come in July and August, but so far the water-saving gardening methods advocated by Steve Solomon (Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times) seem to be working well. The tomatoes and squash, in particular, seem to be finding plenty of water deep in the soil.
The day lily bank
The onions are blooming and will need to be harvested soon.
I’ll harvest the celery as soon as the hot weather slows it down.
A young pumpkin plant
Young blackberries, on the way to the mailbox
Holly, who lives up the road near the mailbox and who sometimes comes to visit and stomp in my flower beds. The funny look is because she’s suspicious of my camera.
Ken’s van, parked in the storage area above the garden
Ken has departed with a one-way ticket for Coldfoot, Alaska. It was a miserable 95F outside yesterday when I drove him to Winston-Salem to catch a bus for the first leg of his trip. I couldn’t help but quip that heading for the arctic is what a sensible person would do right now.
Ken put out ads to try to sell his celebrated van, but there were no serious offers. So Ken is still the van man, even if the van is in storage for a while here at the abbey.
The first three day lilies opened this morning on the day lily bank. The lilies are thick, and the bank is covered with bloom stalks. Soon there will be a jillion more.
A friend sent me this altered photograph today. He took a copy of a photo on this blog, then applied digital effects to the photo using tools at BeFunky.com. I guess I’m getting ever closer to making Acorn Abbey look like a Thomas Kinkade painting, as long as some digital effects are applied.
The wildflower patches and day lilies will be blooming soon. Then I can take photos with much more color.
Yes, I’m aware that sophisticated artsy types look down on Thomas Kinkade. But I’m not ashamed to say that I like his cottage paintings. They evoke a simpler, more innocent, more rural, more self-reliant time. And what could be wrong with that?
I first read Watership Down back in the 1970s, soon after the book first came out. Wikipedia says the book was turned down by 13 publishers before it was finally accepted by a small publisher. It was an instant classic and has sold more than 30 million copies.
After I saw rabbits kicking up their heels near Acorn Abbey’s rabbit patch this spring, I decided to read the book again. It completely stands the test of time and totally deserves to be a classic. Not only is the story compelling, it’s also a wonderful nature book, with descriptions of terrain and habitat that sometimes remind one of Tolkien. The story is about some rabbits who think outside the box and make a new home after Fiver, a rabbit who has visions, foresees that their warren will soon be destroyed by a bulldozer.
I suspect that reading Watership Down back in the ’70s made me much more sensitive to wild animals’ need for habitat and the destruction of that habitat by carelessness and suburbanization. One of the things I’ve tried to do at Acorn Abbey is create as much animal habitat as possible on my little five acres, even though I’ve learned that if the gentle little vegetarian animals move in, the predators will come too.
Jefferson Airplane, Woodstock 1969: Got to Revolution
I am dumbfounded at the passivity of today’s young people, particularly recent college graduates. If they got any education at all for the money they spent on a college education, then they ought to be able to see that they are among the designated losers in an already almost-lost class war being waged by the corporate and political elite against the people of America.
My generation would never have put up with it. Even if we lost the struggle, we’d be in the streets raising raising hell and having a good time at it. To quote Jefferson Airplane from the song they sang at Woodstock in 1969:
Look what’s happening out in the streets
Got a revolution got to revolution
Hey I’m dancing down the streets
Got a revolution got to revolution
Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet
Got a revolution got to revolution
One generation got old
One generation got soul
This generation got no destination to hold
Pick up the cry
Hey now it’s time for you and me
Got a revolution got to revolution
Come on now we’re marching to the sea
got a revolution got to revolution
Who will take it from you
We will and who are we
We are volunteers of america
The statistics are appalling. Surveys show that 85 percent of this year’s college graduates will be forced to move back home with their parents. Their average student debt is $27,200. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that at least half of college-educated people under age 25 are unemployed or working for low wages in dead-end jobs such as bartending. A survey showed that 71 percent of recent college graduates wish they’d done something differently while they were in school to better prepare for the job market. In other words, they’re blaming themselves.
I already detect that some young readers are about to click the comment button and say that this is a generational problem: That my generation, which grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, got all selfish and self-indulgent as we aged, in spite of our youthful idealism, and that we screwed up the world. Don’t bother, because that’s just right-wing propaganda. The vast majority of we Boomers who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s worked our butts off all our lives to raise the generation that’s now moving back home. The tax money we Boomers paid out was the greatest source of revenue this country ever had. This was not a generational failure, this was a right-wing project: To capture the government and regulatory agencies to serve corporate interests, to shift the tax burden down, to redistribute income up, to starve the schools and the social safety net, to shift government expenditures toward profitable business projects such as war, to privatize profits and socialize costs, and to saturate Americans with propaganda so that we blame the poor, the hard-working, and the weak for the country’s problems while building right-wing hero myths around weak-minded, sociopathic pipsqueaks like Ronald Reagan and George Bush.
Right-wingers say that the country is broke. Ha! The United States is richer than ever, so awash in cash that new speculative bubbles may again be forming. Corporate profits are at record highs. The rich are richer than ever, and paying far less in taxes than they used to. There is plenty of money, but all the gains are going to the top. In Reaganomics, you’ll remember, that was the excuse for reducing taxes on the rich and ending regulations on corporations and Wall Street — it would create jobs. How’s that working out for you, recent college graduates? And how do you like the new line that’s coming out of the corporate propaganda machine, that college degrees are a hoax? That’s the new propaganda line: It’s not that economic elites are capturing all the new wealth and productivity gains, it’s that college degrees are a hoax.
Each year, about 3.2 million young people graduate from American colleges and universities. There must now be millions of college-educated young people unemployed and/or living at home. What the devil are they doing with all that free time? If they organized themselves and took to the streets, they all by themselves would have the power to take back the American democracy from corporate control and to get this country’s wealth back into the hands of the people who produce it rather than the greedy, unproductive hands of those who skim, scam, exploit, and tax-avoid their way to the top.
How I wish that today’s young people would start raising a little hell and pushing back against the elites who’ve eaten their lunch and offshored their future. Taking to the streets and civil disobedience are very effective strategies. Right-wingers know this. That’s why rich oilmen like Charles and David Koch pay good money to organize those fake little made-for-TV Tea Party rallies.
If you’re looking for an organization to get started with, consider U.S. Uncut. They’re a sassy new disobedient but non-violent organization going after greedy corporations and the corporate capture of government. They need help starting local chapters.
You don’t even have to have a revolution. You only need to claw back the American democracy from the corporate forces that have bought it with their obscene profits, and shout down the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine.
Right-wing propaganda update: This is from a transcript of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show yesterday:
LIMBAUGH: Young people are moving back in with them. Their moms and dads! And some of these people moving back in are 35 and 40. How old are their moms and dads? 60 and 70, try. But they’re 60 and 70 and if they can afford their worthless offspring moving back in with them, just how poverty-stricken are they?
After some Googling and discussion with old hands at keeping chickens, Ken and I are of the opinion that the most likely suspect in the killing of our two young chickens last week is a weasel.
Googled sources say that there are indeed weasels in North Carolina. Several sources say that weasels, pound for pound, are the most vicious predators of all. They can get through amazingly small openings.
We’re going to attempt to trap the weasel. I bought a trap. It’s a live trap, a Havahart model 0745. The trap arrived today. We’ll set it for the first time tonight and see what happens. I plan to use an egg as bait.
Two nights ago, there were blood-curdling animal screams in the woods below the house. Lily ran and hid inside her hiding chair. I’m pretty sure it was not a bird. It was so loud that it couldn’t have been too small an animal. The sound was too shrill and cat-like, I think, to have been a fox. I’m wondering if there’s a new predator in the neighborhood that is tangling with more animals — possibly competing predators — than just the chickens.
There is such a variety and abundance of wildlife around the abbey that there’s always some kind of wildlife drama going on. Recently Ken was sitting in the rocking chair on the side porch. A bird flew right past him, hit the window, and fluttered into the yard. It was alert, but stunned. We left it alone until it came to its senses. Eventually it flew to the rocking chair, perched a few minutes collecting its wits, and flew off.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the cabbage plants were seedlings under the grow light, less than an inch high. Today we harvested the first cabbage. It’ll be served tonight at supper, when we’ll be joined by one of Ken’s former professors who is coming over from Durham.
On Monday we froze four gallons of strawberries, fresh-picked (though we didn’t pick them this time) at Mabe’s Berry Farm near Walnut Cove.
