Month: June 2011

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.

Mr. Groundhog comes calling


My front door

Earlier today, while I was upstairs at the computer, I heard a thumping noise downstairs. It sounded as though it was coming from the front porch, or the front door. It sounded more like thumping than knocking. I stepped into the upstairs bedroom to make sure Lily was on the bed where I thought she was. She was, but she had an alert, confused look on her face. She’d heard the sound too.

I went down the steps, and there at the front door, nose to the glass, was a groundhog. I don’t know what he was doing. Trying to get the door open? Curious about what was inside? Intrigued by his reflection in the glass? Knocking?

In any case, when he saw me, he clumsily bounded down the steps and ran back into the rabbit patch, pausing a couple of times to look back over his shoulder at me. It all happened too fast for me to grab the camera, so that’s a scene that I was unable to capture, like the time before the garden fence was built when I found a deer and two turkeys raiding the garden together.

The behavior of wild animals can be so puzzling. But I do believe they’re much smarter than we think.

Vegan pimento cheese

There are lots of vegan cheese substitutes on the market. I’ve never found one that I thought was good. If you Google, you’ll also find recipes for vegan pimento cheese with ingredients similar to my favorite recipe. However, the recipe in Frank and Rosalie Hurd’s Ten Talents cookbook is so good that I don’t feel a need to try other recipes.

A key ingredient in this recipe is agar agar, a kind of vegan gelatin made from seaweed. The agar agar doesn’t really add any flavor. It just gives the pimento cheese a cheese-like body, while also adding all those nice trace minerals that are found in sea vegetables. Whole Foods carries agar agar. For the pimentos, I get big jars of roasted peppers at Whole Foods. It’s cheaper in the big jar, and it’s of higher quality that the little jars of pimentos found in most grocery stores.

The Hurds’ recipe uses a blender. I find that it’s difficult to make in a blender, so I use a food processor instead. Don’t be afraid of the yeast. It actually adds a nice, cheesy flavor to the pimento cheese. The recipe uses quite a lot of oil, so that the vegan cheese has about the same fat content as real cheese. I’m sure you could reduce the amount of olive oil without spoiling the recipe.

What's happening outdoors, June 3


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.

Bon voyage, Ken…


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.

I believe Ken plans to write about his adventures at his Spartan Student blog.