Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
U.S. Department of Agriculture
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has released a new version of the “Plant Hardiness Zone Map.” As you might expect, a warming climate has pushed the zones north. It’s the first time the zones map has been revised since 1990.
It’s interesting to note that the Department of Agriculture isn’t saying anything about global warming. Though the data is obvious, we can’t risk offending the oil companies and the know-nothings.
Atlanta Journal
Right-wing state legislatures all over the country are bending over backwards to sell out taxpayers and give greedy corporations anything they want.
The Raleigh News & Observer has a story this morning about new regulations rammed through the North Carolina General Assembly that allow billboard owners to cut down more state-owned trees. The same thing has been going on in Georgia. No doubt this is happening in other states as well.
Most Americans have no idea that our laws are rarely written by legislators. Rather, lobbyists and corporations write the legislation, and legislators line up at the troughs to sponsor the legislation in exchange for fat donations. The billboard legislation — like anti-union legislation and other giveaways to private interests — is part of a coordinated push by corporations to get their legislation passed by right-wing state legislatures all over the country. It’s no different, of course, in the U.S. Congress.
The billboard themselves are bad enough. But destroying public property — living trees — to make billboards more visible ought to be a crime. Instead, new laws freely give away taxpayer-owned trees to be cut down. To right-wingers eager to drag us peasants back to the dark ages and to enrich corporations at taxpayer expense, that’s not a crime. It’s progress.
It’s surprising how much wildlife drama there is right outside the doors and windows of the abbey. This little scamp from the woods frequently plays on the deck and climbs the chimney, but today he put on quite a little show-off act while Ken and I stood by the deck door and took pictures. The squirrel went through a wide range of antics as though it was taunting us. Ken said it even rubbed its belly.
There also have been rabbits on the steps, and once after hearing strange noises I found a groundhog with his nose to the glass of the front door, looking in.
If everyone could get to know a chicken, we wouldn’t put up with the brutal way chickens are treated in the industrial agriculture system. Chickens have very distinct personalities. They’re curious, and not as dumb as we sometimes think. And they love life. Here Ruth takes a nice, long, luxurious dirt bath.
I accidentally left one of the gates open, and Patience wasted no time sneaking over from the orchard to the garden to check out the new compost that Ken was bringing in.
I finally found a tote tank to store water for the garden’s irrigation system. The irrigation system is a work in progress, and I’ll have photos of that when the project is done.
Tote tanks are much less expensive than the water tanks sold by agricultural suppliers. When you buy one, you’re also recycling it. Otherwise, I assume, they’re industrial waste.
Tote tanks are a product of globalization. They’re how high-value fluids are shipped around the world. They’re designed to be easily moved by a fork lift, and no doubt there is some special means of stacking them on container ships. Some — probably most — of the tanks are used for toxic fluids such as industrial lubricants. But some of them are used for food. That’s the trick. It took me months to find a tote tank that I could verify was made of food-grade plastic and that had not contained anything toxic. This particular tank contained organic olive imported from Spain. The man I bought it from didn’t want to tell me the name of the company he buys them from, because he wants to protect his access to these hard-to-find items. But he did say that he gets them from a company that makes products such as salad dressings.
If you’re looking for a tote tank, check for a label. There always should be a label saying what was in the tank. Personally I would not buy a tank if the label has been removed. In the photo below, note the glass-and-fork icon put there by the Spanish manufacturer of the tank. I believe that icon indicates that the tank is made of food-grade plastics.
Around here they sell for $65 to $100, depending on the condition and whether it’s food grade. They hold about 275 gallons, or 1,000 liters.
I wish I had thought to keep a running total of the amount of compost that has been used at the abbey. Tons, certainly. I buy it by the dump truck load.
This is a leaf compost, made from leaves picked up as a city service in nearby cities. It’s not an ideal compost, because it’s a high-carbon compost. But if you give it plenty of time for the soil to digest it, it works fine. My understanding of the biology is that high-carbon compost requires further digestion by soil bacteria. The bacteria that do this digestion suck up available nitrogen for their cellular protein. When the bacteria have done their work, the cells die, and the nitrogen is released back into the soil. So, when used in a garden, it must be applied out of season so that it can be digested before planting time.
I think of it as food for my earthworms. They too are hungry little animals just like the rest of the wildlife. That’s something I inherited from my mother. She could never bear the sight of a hungry animal. No one at Acorn Abbey is permitted to go hungry, if I can help it, though I must admit that my population of very fat voles tests my tolerance.
Commodities traders at the Chicago Board of Trade
If you asked a few Americans about the causes of food inflation, what answers would you get?
Ask a right-winger, or a so-called libertarian, or anyone else who lives in an ideological fantasy world, and you’ll be told that it’s the government’s fault, that’s it’s all about monetary policy. Totally wrong. Yes, monetary policy is loose, but we are still in a liquidity trap. And besides, real inflation is always accompanied by wage inflation, and wages have barely moved in years and years.
Ask someone who is better informed and you’ll be told that it’s climate change, droughts, floods, crazy weather, increased demand in Asia, the high price of oil, the drain of growing biofuels, and the waste involved in feeding crops to animals to produce meat. Partly right.
The biggest cause, it seems, is — Wall Street. Here are links to two articles that follow the money, publications that Americans don’t read. One is from the German newspaper Der Spiegel. The other is from Foreign Policy.
Speculating with lives: How global investors make money out of hunger
Last week, we had a night when the low temperature was 18F. That froze the remaining greens in the garden. So it was time to turn the garden at last. Ken and his girlfriend Sarah, who is visiting this week, did the work.
It’s a shame that I wasn’t able to plant a cover crop of winter rye, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn under a garden that was still producing mustard and kale. The plan is to make up for it by adding lots of compost to feed the worms.
Speaking of worms, I hope the chickens didn’t eat too many of them. More than anything, they love to scratch in freshly turned soil.
