Humble Garden

(Some of our organic sustainably grown tomatoes, micro-greens and herbs from last summer)

Yeah, we can NOT do anything new. I met my husband on the internet, we are liberal homeschoolers, we do some telecommuting, and now it seems we are Peakniks.

A simplistic way of defining what a peaknik is – otherwise non-alarmist professionals who have undergone a conversion to a dedication to surviving Peak Oil.

One doesn’t WANT to be a peaknik, it happens a lot like taking the red pill in the matrix … once the cat is out of the bag there is no going back. By definition, if you are the sort who feels very comfortable with cognitive dissonance (magical thinking) then the cat may peek out of the bag but it stays in there.. you can sleep at night and believe that things are not indeed much later than you think.

I cant do magical thinking, just not my nature. This is why I am a scientist and not a pastor or some such.

I am also used to doing things on my own, having moved 15 times before I graduated from high school I just learned to resource from within. For this reason, I find it hard to do one of the things that many people recommend in planning for the post-carbon age – form a tight knit sustainable community.

I loathe drama and the thought of living in a communal setting without private space sounds dreadful.

But, there is power in numbers so I am wondering if I can go there, make peace with a lack of peace.

(Home-milked goat milk)

For those of you just starting out with the whole local food thing the following might help.

I subscribe to The Energy Bulletin (Peak Oil News Bulletin) and today found one of their book reviews in my feedreader.

They excerpt a list from Chapter 6 (Local, Organic, Sustainable Food) from “Go Green: How to Build an Earth-Friendly Community” by Nancy H Taylor (Gibbs Smith Publishers):

• 1. Start small, raising a few successful plants at home. Herbs, a few lettuces and radishes are foolproof!
• 2. Think about where your food comes from. Are your apples from New Zealand, from Chile or Oregon? Do you buy strawberries all winter long?
• 3. Take your own bag to the market, neither paper nor plastic are good options for bringing our food home. Your own canvas bag will save trees and help stop the plastic proliferation we see hanging from our trees and plastered against fences.
• 4. Find a neighbor to share trips to the store, put a basket or rack on your bike or take the bus. Plan ahead so you don’t have to make several trips to the store.
• 5. Start a food co-op to order foods in bulk and share them with your community.
• 6. Start a Farmers Market; it can be small and fun, and supports local food.
• 7. Start a CSA, support a local farmer and keep the food dollars in your community.
• 8. Pay attention to your fast food diet. How do you feel when you rush by the takeout window and eat in your car? See the film ‘Fast Food Nation’.
• 9. Talk to your kids about their diet, where foods come from, how they nourish the body. Get exercise and fresh air, you will want to eat better food after that.
• 10. Don’t get discouraged. Changing our eating habits takes time. Start slowly and add what you can afford over the period of a year or two. Once you switch to healthy food, you will notice the difference and not want to turn back!

(Tomatoes)

For the peaknik I recommend subscribing to The Energy Bulletin’s RSS feed and learn everything you can. I also recommend working hard to not get depressed. Think of this as a challenge.

Do not assume a Mad Max future but plan for one. There is so much more to say about that but I won’t do that here, would prefer to be upbeat.

This is a call out to those of you out there who have some experience with setting up your own CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) activity.

I need your guidance and mentorship so any and all input is welcome and appreciated.

We are currently seriously contemplating setting up a trial run chicken CSA where the chickens will be raised naturally (the word “organic” is woefully deprecated and co-opted by money-grabbing certification types – I cant afford organic certification status right now, not if I want to actually get started that is).

We will raise slow-growth long bodied breeds of chickens like you see the French growing in their “Label Rouge” program. Our chickens will be forest dwellers like those in the Label Rouge program. There is no official “Label Rouge” program in the US but that’s ok because the First Principles of Label Rouge are attractive and to be emulated. We will be more like the organic Label Rouge where we will not use any sorts of chemicals or antibiotics, not because I think it’s the “in” thing but because I follow the golden rule in my cultivation and animal husbandry:

Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

Corollary: Treat your animals with the greatest respect possible – they are beings too

Life is absolutely too short to start something like this and not do it MY way. This is not to say that what the neighbor down the street is doing is wrong, its just that I need to do this my way.

I compromise on so much else; don’t we all!

What do I need?

I need to know how to find a local butcher and how that all works (in terms of costs and their capacity) – I have zero clue here. I need to know how best to find people who will want to buy these CSA shares – I fear raising a load of chickens which then are not pre-sold. These questions MUST be asked by any producer when they first start, I know, but I do sound sorta goofy not knowing the answers.

We are also going to be doing CSA egg shares (we just love them girl chickens so much!).

I hope that you all, with clues on this, will come out of the woodwork and drop me a note. When you leave a comment the system gets your email (confidentially I think) and then I can reply to you off-blog to have a longer convo on this.

(Mesclun)
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I hope that your indoor garden is sprouting up a storm!

We have been starting things like tomatoes and eggplants and onions and today we will seed out herbs.

A while back I found a link that showed people starting corn indoors so we have been giving it a try.

(Giant corn sprouts)
(Bitten a bit by our cats, I think we got it in time tho)
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These are not your normal corn. No, these are Giant Corn which will, supposedly, reach over 12 feet high. They are seed corn and not meant to be eaten by humans. The chickens will LOVE it.

I planted a tray of mesclun lettuces so that we can start having some salad even before mid May which is when we can start planting in the garden outside.

(Sprouting mesclun)
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We have some other news but I will share that a bit later in the week.

Share how your indoor starts are doing!

Those of you who have read this blog previously may have picked up on my Zen Buddhist worldview. I view garden tending time as quiet reflective walking meditation although I am not perfect at it by any means. I am an imperfect seeker who begins journeys but I do not necessarily follow the path to the very end because I am not end-motivated but rather journey-motivated. Gardening from this perspective makes for a more harmonious experience because I am not pining for the end of the plant life cycle but am admiring the whole process of growing.

But I also garden for what is a much darker nefarious reason; one that I fear makes me look like a nut instead of a level headed scientist who is on a zen path.

What could that possibly be?

Its something which I have great attachment to (in the zen sense), something which has me at the visceral level, the deepest seated of my fears.

I fear that I am not preparing my children for their future well enough to help them survive the tough times we are in for. It’s the boogey man that haunts my fitful dreams and skitters into dark corners when I wake in a start.

We Americans are taught that we get schooled to be competitive so that we can make money. Some of us learn that making money in itself is the goal. I wasn’t taught that. I was taught that I had to make money to survive (but not in love of money).

I have a sense that we are living in times where we can not teach our kids the same thing. They will not be able to compete in a world where the structures and institutions that we compete in now (companies, universities, etc) will be crumbling as the country crumbles under the weight of post-peak oil and economic collapse.

Which is the more humane and rational path?

– nudge your child down the educational path I took that ended in a PhD in science which is severely inhibited due to malignant neglect by the government .. this path most criminally requires the student to incur massive debt at a time when the student is least likely to be able to afford the burden.

– not nudge your child into higher education (and skip the MASSIVE DEBT that is built into the college experience now) but opting out of that immoral boondoggle and find some other solution that gets the child an education (for humanity’s sake) but still allows the child to develop skills that actually support her survival.

I am pretty sure I do not want my kids to suffer my fate and my school loan experiences – that’s just an inhumane thing to do to anyone.

I do not know really what to do at this point. Do I get the kids trained up in self-sufficiency skills (like the garden and my older child’s chicken husbandry) or plumbing? (Plumbers surely get better pay that your average scientist and have at least 1000% more job security).

Should they learn how to plant feed crops for our chickens and goats and other future subsistence animals or do we teach them some internet based skill that can bring in some money (cant fathom what that is for now).

I am leaning toward a “both” answer. I need my children to become educated but it doesn’t require traditional means (obviously, otherwise we would not be homeschooling) but I also need them to be prepared to live self-sufficiently. My ideal would be for them to become important contributors to solving some of the intermediate problems (anything from becoming a climate change scientist to becoming an activist that helps others become self-sufficient to other visionary activities). I also want them to be building on what we are starting with our own little post-modern homestead that still needs a lot of work to be self-sufficient.

So many considerations.

The problem is that NO ONE is talking about how the educational paradigm we have right now with respect to undergraduate schooling has become an obscene credit-scheme and not about the kids learning anything that they can really use to put food on the table.

NO ONE is talking about how we as parents of young kids are not prepared for training our kids to survive, just how to compete in the status quo.

I wonder if I sound like a nut to you?! I hope not and I can assure you that we are not theist isolationists putting up barbed wire and loading up the guns.

I am just fretting and planting the seeds of our future and uncertain Garden of Eden in a post-oil world. Just wish I didn’t feel so alone.

Recently, I had a car accident (a rather scary close call) that has put me much more into a metaphysical state of mind versus practicalities.

Gardening generally is very practical and I love it for that. The garden is somewhat like a cat in that it doesn’t scream for attention except for when it really needs it. It doesn’t hurt and it does help to pet it on a daily basis though. I am much more of a cat person. If my garden were more like a dog, needing to be walked (weeded) with a 100% certainty several times a day, the joy of it would fly away.

I LIKE to weed because I choose to do it (as in, it’s a part of the gardening flow) and I approach it with a sense of wonder and investigation.

I knew I liked it too much when I found myself asking for a book of weeds and how to identify them (the store keeper was surprised for the question and then more so when she realized no such book existed in her store). I have not googled much for it so there may very well be many well established books on the identification of weeds in the Northeastern states of the US.

All I do know is that I can identify a weed as it sprouts but I have no names for them.. there are no names except for the expletives that escape on occasion. The ones that came late in the season (wind borne?) that I hate with a serious passion? The painful tricky prickly evil stinging weed that affected every bed. One mission of mine this year is to track those down the moment they rear their evil little seedling heads. They are much harder to see though because they take refuge under more mature plants (they like shade). My secret weapon, for many different reasons, will be red and black polymer mulching and row covers.

Because we humans tend to build templates from past experience to frame our expectations, I find that I experience my garden within the whole motherhood-spectrum.

Early spring is a time for “trying to conceive”. If you have ever had problems conceiving you would know what it feels like – anticipation, excitement, concern, disappointment, sadness, and then cycling through that again and again.

Thankfully, with gardening, the conception can be controlled a bit more, the early development can be troubleshot much better, and the numbers of offspring are much higher so success can mitigate some of the losses.

I am sure you can extend that metaphor yourself.

As an experienced mom, I know that right now, before we get our seedlings growing indoors, I am going through the thought-conception process where I am recognizing and acknowledging the transformative process of gardening (motherhood).

It fits in or is augmented right now by the metaphysical sort of mood brought on by the near death experience. Some might prefer to not linger on such thoughts but it is my way, always have been. It will build important feelings and investment in my garden later, as I watch growth and participate in the transformation.

As a mother, it will always be a bittersweet experience and not a rote exercise. I am glad for that.

Like my garden, things have been sort of dormant around here and I apologize for that. I am hoping to even things out more in years to come so that there is content all year long. Like gardening, this blog is a long term project because things, people, thoughts, take time to grow.

It is December 28th and our garden is buried under winter’s snow. Its quite a change from this last summer, huh?

Our chicken family has had it’s first tragedy with the death of a beloved silkie bantam, making my daughter Q very sad. We buried Snowball the silkie bantam with a ceremony of appreciation for her loving ways and the burning of dried sage. We were shin-deep in snow so the ceremony was a quick one.

We have been experiencing a good amount of snow and some interesting ice species. We had hoarfrost here last week, very interesting stuff.

Now that the fall holidays are out of the way, I am feeling a very strong urge to start the planning for our next growing season. We need to be efficient with our time and resources as we set up to start some plants indoors and also set up some heavy duty row covers out of doors for when the sun warms us a bit.

What I learned last summer with respect to our intensive raised bed growing:

• No corn in our planters
• No squash of ANY kind
• No delicate and overgrowing cherry tomatoes
• Grow all vine crops in designated non-bed growing area (more about this later)
• No snow peas
• Respect rigorously the projected height of plants and plant accordingly
• Get companions in early
• Use row covers on delicate crops for bugs from day one
• Grow for immediate use and not for storage (this is our family’s way and I dont see it changing fast)
• Plant a kid garden to allow younger kids to grow and futz with their own
• Plant chicken feed cover crops to fill in between grow seasons and also between crops and companions
• Plant many more marigolds
• Get those marigolds started as early as possible
• Grow tomatillos as pollinator attraction but not IN the beds
• Grow tomatoes in lower beds, not main beds
• Grow lots of pick-again crops like lettuces (this is what this family likes the best)
• Grow cucumbers in non-bed areas
• Grow more pollinator-attractive flowers in and around main beds

Animal predators were not a problem at all!

Thats just a few of my lessons! I can tell you that organic gardening is the ONLY way for me because I can not feed my kids veggies made toxic by chemicals, just can’t. Although I am a scientist (or perhaps because of it?) I find the thought of figuring out the right pesticide and how much etc etc tedious and makes me anxious of overdose (as well the potential for a child or pet to eat the stuff by accident).

In terms of what we will grow this year, think delicate leaves, plump tomatoes, crispy radishes, ponderous pumpkins, squashes and cucumbers, delicious green beans, tasty herbs.

Our raised beds will be bursting with mescluns and other greens, peppers, carrots, beets, beans, chickpeas, onions, eggplants, broccolis, rabes, bok choys, and more.

I am hungry just thinking about it all!.

The young chickens have moved into their new chicken house and are loving it. We are enjoying an indian summer here in central MA so they are doing fine with the transition (we also have some heat lamps for when it gets chilly at night and for the coming weeks when fall gets down to business).

Today we are looking at 83 F as a high so I am hoping they stay cool enough. We have yet to finish the outside enclosure but the husband is working as fast as he can to get it done.

Let me know if you cant see the slide show above!

What do you think?

You may or may not remember from my earlier posts that I want to integrate a home-use aquaculture pool to grow our own fish (vary the types of protein we eat and we also really like fish).

One can spend a LOT of money on this sort of activity but I want to be as frugal but as productive as we can be. I also want to choose fish species that are native to this area so that they do not need out-of-region living requirements (high temperatures, long days, salt water).

One Massachusetts native species that I find very attractive is the stream trout. It has special needs, like any fish type (doesnt want to go above 70F for one and needs well aerated, running water for another) but its delicious and tolerant or even loving of the Massachusetts environment.

We visited the McLaughlin Trout Hatchery up in Belchertown, MA, right next to the Quabbin Reservoir to see how the “big guys” raise these fish (for stocking the streams of this state).

Here is a bit of a photo essay on what they have set up, its VERY nice.

I learned that fish released from the hatcheries in MA (some 1.3 million from this hatchery alone) last only 2 WEEKS before being caught.

All that you see here (and a whole lot more not shown) is not paid by general taxes but by fishing licenses!

As I mentioned obliquely before, perhaps in the comments only, my vine crops were hit with a double whammy of powdery mildew and then 6 weeks of drought. No amount of spraying milk helped so I pulled out the spaghetti squash, the watermelons, the zucchinis, the scallopini squash, and then my poor little moon and stars which also got the mildew.

I just had to pull out the turnips because they started to mildew as well and they were also heavily fed on earlier by bugs.

This is what I got, tiny stunted things.

But you can see we are still getting tomatoes and now some of the cranberry beans are drying up very nicely! I am very much looking forward to those bean crops.

I have planted spinach, beets, and green onions where the squash and zucchini once were.

I also planted some bibb lettuce some weeks ago.

Some delicious braising chards and such were planted some time ago but the baby bok choy have been eaten to bits.

I will grow the bok choy again but under row covers for certain!

Here is a patch of straw potatoes that I wanted to dig up and see what was what.

I pulled back the straw on some 4 or 5 plants and the yield is very low. This is because we didnt put enough straw on these to make a deep thatch.

KD points out some of the potatoes.

A close up.

We have quite a few more patches that we will be letting go for some time to allow all the tiny potatoes to grow to adulthood.

I think I like this method but next year I will also be planting them in the ground.

Can’t have too many homegrown organic potatoes!