Category Archives: soapbox

And sometimes growing a lot of food happens easily with an active compost pile (all the butternuts you see above are from the pile)

If you had told me 25 years ago that making food for a lot of people was in my future, I’d have, if not laughed in your face, at least told you you had your facts wrong.  Cooking for others would’ve seemed too trad fem for someone raised in a feminist household, and 25 years ago I was on my way to pursuing a butch-enough profession (architecture).  “Nursing and teaching were the only professions open to me, and I didn’t like bedpans,” my mother often said.  “You should do something I could not,” and so I did.

Yet here I am, scurrying about on a Monday morning, assembling four boxes for my CSA customers and sticking 12 loaves of bread into a carrier to take to our daughter’s school for the kids’ mid-morning snack.  Food growing and making IS a large part of my life, at least as big a part as my code books and my drawings.  And like making buildings, making food is terribly enjoyable to me…and I happen to be fairly good at both.

Like most transformations, my shift from either/or to both was gradual.  Certain imperatives hastened my decisions, of course:  our move from our small city lot to five country acres; parenthood; global warming/climate change:  the world is small, and growing more crowded daily.  This is the world I am handing my child, and it’s a world with many problems.

So I can show her that consuming less is a laudable goal…and it’s hard in a culture that only celebrates “more.”  But I can also show her that one can be a producer, too.  Whether it’s just for ourselves or (at this point) six other families, I can demonstrate that quality home-grown food can be made (despite? in addition to?) while someone has a full-time job.  And yes, it might mean that she helps too, and her dad as well.

But what I am also trying hard to demonstrate to her, and to you, is that the world is going to need a lot more people like me who’re willing to produce food for themselves, and eventually for others.  The transformation might be gradual.  But we’ll certainly be eating better food…and better serving our earth and each other.

Viva la revolucion, gardeners!

This is a bit of a “taking care of business” post.  Apologies for its strange list-like format.

1. BEES ARE OUR FRIENDS. I find it quite hopeful that 120 people showed up for the Introductory Beekeeping Class that my husband attended this past weekend.  The Kalamazoo Bee Club can now boast 500-odd members.  And if only half of those attendees start their own hives this year, that’s sixty new hives.  This is a great and positive thing, and I look forward to home-grown honey topping our home-grown breakfast yogurt!
2. MO’ MONEY, MO’ MONEY. I have been watching with interest the kerfuffle over the apparent trademarking of the terms Urban Homestead/Urban Homesteader, among other oft-used terms.  I’ve been looking at the debate as one of morals (simply, individual working orders) versus ethics (collective working orders that don’t necessarily apply to everyone).  It seems the point of most people’s frustration is the graying of the moral/ethical line by a grabbing of the commons to the benefit of an individual.  The folks who are the center of the controversy started their home food-producing endeavor with what I can only assume were the best of intentions (a moral choice).  With time and the internets, it appears money has blinded them (an ethical matter).  This happens so often to individuals in the business world (that someone’s personal compass gets de-magnetized from one’s moral true north) that it barely bears mentioning…and 99 times out of 100 it is because the idea of “more money” is behind it.  In point of fact, “more money” is a laudable, revered goal in the business world (it’s the business world’s ethic, if not any one individual’s).  So my first response to this controversy, frankly, was why would anyone be surprised? What makes it galling, of course, is this one family’s land grab over anyone else’s use of the term as it would now infringe on their ability to make (more) money for themselves.  They’ve gone way beyond the mere sharing of gardening ideas to the copywriting of an idea.  This is morally suspect in the personal world but in the corporate world, it is par for the course.
3. TRADEMARK THIS. So I of course have been thinking about how I would never be motivated to trademark anything.  Goodness, why?  Money has never been much of a motivator for me, and the idea of making money on how-to-grow-food advice is distasteful.  Collectively and individually, we all need to learn how to grow some of our food, and the sooner the better.  But over the nearly six years of my writing this blog, I have been contacted by two publishers expressing interest in me writing a book that codified and expanded on its ideas.  I have considered the proposals with all seriousness and have rejected them mainly because a book would not be free, it’s instead a money-making venture off of the commons.  The blog and its contents are free to those of us lucky enough to have access to the web, and likewise I do not accept ads.  (If indeed I were to write a book, it would probably be about something else entirely.)   However, if I were to rip off anything, how about my personal spin on Michael Pollan’s food recommendations?  You know:  Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.  This is what I advocate for myself, and thus by extension, anyone else who can do so:  “Grow food.  As much as you can.  And share it.” I wouldn’t trademark it though.
4. VEG GARDEN BOOK. Speaking of books, I have a fabulous one to recommend to you.  (Full disclosure of course is that I do know the writer, and, in point of fact, she interviewed me for the book…but I get no kickbacks from this, peeps.)  Michele rocks, period.  And her argument is completely convincing.
5. MEAT CHICKENS. I have ordered my meat birds for this year.  This, indeed, is quite early…however, I won’t be getting them until the first week of July.  For those of you considering it, I annually raise 25 meat chickens within a chicken tractor that I drag around the back 40 twice a day for 12 weeks.  In other words, I expend a lot of energy just for a freezer full of chicken dinner.  And like last year, I am ordering the godawfully named Freedom Rangers because  honestly they are more tender than the usual slower-growing meat chickens I have raised in the past.  Marginally more tender, that is; they taste the same.  And despite the problems I had with them (splay legged chicks: a nightmare to resolve, frankly, and general meanness in the flock) I am going with them again.  Shoot me now.
6. GREENHOUSE STARTS. Indoors and out, many things have begun to sprout, and it makes me happy.  I have two toads that have come out of their hibernation hidey-holes in the old greenhouse, too.  It’s fun to visit them.
7. SWEAT EQUITY. I finally finished my bleeping kitchen renovation.  Ergh.  Took me eight weeks.  Now I can spend my extra time outside!

Ah.  That’s quite enough of a list.  I wish you all spring cheer.

The new greenhouse at dawn:  it’s a fun in-between season in here.  New lettuces transplanted from outdoors in the foreground beds, tomatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes in the back yet to be harvested, and hot peppers, beans and corn hung from the purlin to dry

Another October 1st is here:  2010 makes it six years since we purchased our house and started down the road of food self-sufficiency.  A seventh growing season, likewise, has come and (nearly) gone.

Would I say that complete freedom from the grocery store was my goal way back when we bought the farm?  I would say no, it was not:  I had the small goal of simply having a big garden and (eventually) eggs.  Let’s just say we’ve come a long way from my initial modest goals.*  But last Thursday morning, after dropping my daughter off at school, I could be found…trolling the aisles of a grocery store!   What’s up with that?

Listen, I am not what anyone would consider “an average American food consumer,” and never have been.  Sure, I love to cook, and I love to eat good food.  I have never, however, been a fan of what clogs the shelves of your average grocery store.  For most of my adult life, I was a car-less vegetarian city dweller who shopped at walkable specialty food stores, food co-ops, and, later, got my vegetables from a CSA.  I also loved to garden and spent part of each season canning big purchases from the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market.   I am not saying this to toot my own horn but instead to point out the obvious:  if anyone, I was probably more prone to the Grow Your Own (name your item of choice) than not.

But fast-forward to last Thursday morning.  Yes, we do use the grocery store on occasion, for cow milk, butter, and the occasional bag of sugar (and indeed, local sugar and canning lids were my reason for stopping).  If we don’t grow it, we buy it in bulk (coffee, tea, fish, beef/pork, flour, grain, oil, etc.)…and truth be told, it’s Tom who does the non-bulk shopping.  As I zipped through the huge long aisles, I thought about all the sections of that store that I have completely written off over these last six years, and it’s here that I think my experience will be relevant to you who endeavor to do the same.

Perhaps, next year, you can try to make one or two items home-produced ones too.  And after six years of adding one or two more home-produced items, you might have whole sections of the grocery store that are worthless to you too!

• It’s fall, even though I am in denial:  fall is a perfect time to get new garden beds made. If you do it now, you will have all winter to read up on tomato varieties so you can make as much salsa, say, or ketchup/barbecue sauce, or just plain tomato paste, to last you a year.
• It’s fall:  if you own land, why not plant a few fruit trees?  Some larger trees, though you’ll pay more for them, will reward you with a harvest in just a year or two.  Raspberries, blueberries, and strawberries likewise can be transplanted in the fall.
• If you build a greenhouse, or even a low tunnel, you can easily be self-sufficient year-round in salad stuff.  Plant some herbs and a couple of rows of shallots and onion plants next spring, you can be self-sufficient in the basics for salad dressing.  (But as I have repeatedly said, greenhouses are wonderful for more than just salads.)
• If you build a coop, you can easily have three hens to supply you with at least a dozen eggs a week.
• If you buy a milk goat and make cheese, my goodness, you will make a lot of new friends.  Even if you only make yogurt and kefir, believe me, you will have more than you can consume…thus, more for those friends.  You’ll also be self-sufficient yourself in dairy, making everything from buttermilk to creme fraiche to chevre to cream- and cottage cheese:  in other words, even if you don’t like to drink straight goat milk you won’t need to.
• If you make a very small initial investment, you can have a three-compartment hutch, a breeding doe and buck, and all the rabbit meat you can consume by this time next year…and you can feed them very inexpensively, or even free, with your garden scraps.
• If you learn how to make decent bread, you will never be satisfied with store-bought again.
• And if you buy a chest freezer, the world is your oyster.  You can stock it with fruits as you pick them for winter eating; you can find a local grass-fed meat farmer and buy yourself whole, halves or quarters of cow, pig, lamb or goat; you can likewise stock up on chicken by buying your yearly needs, cut them up yourself, and freeze portions and whole birds.  Freezers are also great places to stash bulk grains and flours.

Listen.  I know it’s hard to start from zero, and I also know that not everyone has the cash to just go out and make huge bulk purchases of things or buy chest freezers, fruit trees, chicken coops and the like…and land most of all!  But gardening is seriously one of the cheapest pleasures in life, one that yields the biggest returns, and fortunately you don’t always need to own land to garden it.  A shovel, a fork, a hand tool or two and a few packets of seeds…these can be had for under $100, and the library has scores of vegetable-growing-how-to books.  You don’t need a fancy compost bin; a pile on the ground will do…or put it in a pit if you’re worried about what it looks like.  And once you find a friend who gardens, you will be trading know-how and zucchini in no time.

You can do it, I know you can.  And:  I think you want to.

*Major steps by years:  2004, house and land, first fruit trees planted.  2005, garden, canning, first chest freezer.  2006, egg chickens, pressure canner, blog!.  2007, greenhouse, guineas.  2008, 2nd greenhouse, meat chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese.  2009, home-hatched turkeys and geese, milk goat, rabbits.  2010, home-hatched chickens, winemaking, outdoor kitchen (masonry oven/rocket stove) and mini-CSA. 2011:  who knows?

Is there anything cuter than a bowl full of baby bantams?

Many, many good points and questions were brought up in the comments section of my last post on the cottage industry law that recently took effect in Michigan.  The legality of home-baked, home-produced goods was but one facet of the conversation, with bartering, taxes, and general farm-based living issues wrapped up in it too.

So again, the obvious.  I wouldn’t mind being taxed on my egg money, not at all, which is why my CPA knows about the contents of my farm earnings  jar.  My point in the last post is that the farm’s output has repeatedly exceeded the consumption pattern of its residents.  What to do with this excess?  I could bank it against a cold and rainy day, and do.  I could give it away to the food shelves, but I have been discouraged from doing so:  the ones in town don’t want anything that’s not already in a tin can or box, thanks.  I grow and can things for my daughter’s school.  I could give it away to friends and relatives and generally, this has been my operational model.  But my friends think they’re taking advantage of the bounty, especially now that there’s a high-value, rare item involved (goat’s milk products).  Thus, the filling jar.

Let me first make a personal state-of-the-homestead/farmer statement.  I am avowedly on the left side of the political spectrum, and I surely do not think I am taxed enough.  In my particular worldview, I am taxed little and get little in return.  Locally, our property taxes are a pittance, and I suppose that grants us the pittance we receive:  our roads are plowed and paved, and we have 911 service if we can afford to have a telephone.  One example: Despite the hefty share they receive from local and state funding, the public schools in my area are awful.  Every referendum on an increase in millage (basically a percentage increase to pay for school “improvements” based upon property taxes) has gone down in flames.  I consider this short-sighted, crass, and anti-community, and really a part of a larger social problem that is frankly beyond the scope of this blog post.  (And no, my daughter is not in public school, and won’t be:  this in no way affects my opinion on paying for those children who are.)  But the (non)value of schools is an illustration of my larger point.  If we don’t care for school-aged non-tax-paying children, we’re probably not caring much for many others in my community.  But hey!  What about them low property taxes?

Bringing this one-sided conversation from this particular person to the general readership.  The bigger picture is how do you, dear reader, take the next step in your own little homemade-food world?  If you live in Michigan, the steps for putting up a tent in a farmer’s market are now a lot clearer.  Those cookies everyone raves about?  Wrap them up, list the potential allergens, the ingredients in descending order, your home phone and address and you can legally sell them, if you’re so inclined!  Likewise your home-decanted vinegars, dried herbal teas, killer pickles, jewel-toned fruit jams and more can be legally sold.  Grow enough vegetables, you can start a CSA along with your Saturday stall.  The world is your oyster, or at least your zebra mussel.

If, however,  someone were to ask me the course I would chart to, say, move from city to country and make a livable wage off the products of one’s labors, I would snarkily ask to see their trust fund disbursements.  It’s more than a gamble, frankly, and there’s a lot of work and head-banging ahead of you.  For the foreseeable future, one needs off-farm income to make a go at this kind of life.  I feel I am in good company (Wendell Berry, Gene Logsdon, Barbara Kingsolver) when I say this.  You can raise as many heirloom vegetables, meat animals, and make as many artisan cheeses and wool products as you would like to sell but it will in all likelihood be a losing venture, economically.

I am still trying to ride the razor of the livelihood/lifestyle that is what it is that I do.  I like producing food because I like CONSUMING food.  I like to share; so do others, which is why barter is fun.  I like the idea that I could be a bigger part of something should the lights go out and my neighborhood worries about its food supply.  I like to teach.  Money is in no way a motivation for me mainly because I am as yet secure in my off-farm income.  This cottage food industry bill that has become law is a boon to me, should I really fire up the Loven more than once a week, or if I should decide to can more veg than we consume.

My point to all of this:  For me, it is not about the money, and so far has not been.  It’s about the life, and about sharing that life with others.  We moved here knowing we’d make a third of our city income.  That income still stands, but the quality of our life has vastly improved, of which diet is the first obvious part.  Am I saying “follow me”?  No, not unless you’re already so inclined.

But hey:  those taxes are sure low.

Okay, so it’s not quite a full bowl.

Pick me!

Driving back from Minnesota last week, my husband and I were discussing some of our old friends and acquaintances.  I had a neighbor, for instance, who spoke an odd form of the American English language, and we were wondering if her verbal tics were particular to the neighbor or particular to Minneapolis.   (We agreed it might be both.)  One thing she would always say was “borrow me” when she meant “lend me.”  Another thing, and this is the one that sticks with me, is she’d say “had boughten” instead of “bought.”

Had Boughten!

I say this all the time, in its negative:  “This salad is so much better than any I had boughten.”  “My gah, this roast chicken is fantastic, better than anything I had boughten in a restaurant.”  “Okay I am going to die quite happy, this cider vinegar dressing I made is out of this world, much better than any bottle I had boughten.”  I say all these things to myself, of course, in my head:  saying such things aloud could bring some strange looks.  (Okay, I could have said them out loud to my old neighbor.)

But here’s my point:  there’s no contest between the home-grown and the had-boughten.

Why don’t people see this, know this?  Why do people settle for convenience?  Is a supermarket salad really that much more convenient than a home-grown one?  Unless it’s salad-in-a-bag (horrors), you still need to wash and separate and mix and dress it.  The time it takes me to come home, grab the salad spinner, trade work shoes for garden shoes, harvest the salad, rinse it, bowl it and dress it is STILL much shorter than me swinging by the grocery store and had-boughening the salad fixings.  I can even poach an egg for the top and still come out ahead on the clock.

And the chicken.  Granted, not everyone either wants to or can raise chickens for eggs or for meat.  But home-grown eggs are a separate kingdom altogether, might as well be from different species of animal…same with the meat of those home-grown chickens.  As is doing little things like making your own salad dressing:  clipping your own herbs, mincing your own shallot, shaking it all in your own little jar with your had-boughten olive oil and salt.

Okay, okay; so there are very few things that I get around to had-boughtening.  That olive oil, that salt, in bulk.  Boxes of pasta (in a pinch).  Butter, sugar.  Selected seafood, and not from the grocery store.  Wine.  Everything else, though, really, everything, is grown here or are things that I had boughten through local farmers:  wheat, oats, corn, cow, pig, all in bulk, all purchased and stored for the year.

I get a lot of questions, mainly because people assume I don’t work and doing all this MUST take the hours of a day job just to keep on top of it all.  “How is it that you have time to can things?  I certainly don’t have the time to garden, much less can,” was a statement (how can this be a question) from a mother at our daughter’s school.  How am I to answer that?  That I spend wonderful time daily with my daughter in the garden, in the kitchen?  That my life with her is not spent in a minivan, getting drive-through food between soccer and ballet?  That eating breakfast and dinner, seated at the table with cloth napkins and candles with my family every flipping day is the best kind of quality of life that I can imagine?  That it is a choice to live this way, to eat this way, to be this way?

To just say no to the had boughtens?  Because that is what this is: saying nonono, while greedily saying yesyesyes to the best food money can’t buy.  And I’m having the best time making it all happen: much better than anything I could have had boughten.

Meet your meat

On so many levels, I am glad that the “food revolution” has begun to sink in.  I surely wouldn’t say that everyone has signed on, nor do I believe there’s been enough of a revolution (that’s the anarchist in me I suppose), but I am personally glad I don’t seem like such a crank now.  Lots more work needs to be done:  lots more movies and books, lots more profitable small farms, lots more awareness, period, that our food system is neither sustainable nor particularly healthy.  In Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ steps, I would say that we’re still collectively in Denial, maybe moving toward Anger.

Having run through all those steps myself, I do wonder what the next collective level of awareness will be.  Don’t you?  The food revolution, at the very least, has a tasty payoff.  Living life with less of what we have because, well, we’ll have to, is not something so easily changed, like just replacing our lightbulbs.  There’s lots of other half steps that will need to be taken, lots more bargaining, depression and finally acceptance.

But I still wonder what will be next.  I do foresee the day when my grandchildren or maybe our great-grandkids marvel at the idea that we flush perfectly drinkable water down our toilets.  There is so much in our world that is good, but so much more that is simply wasteful and wantonly short-sighted.  And that is it, I suppose.  We were in the dark for so long about our food:  what else are we ignorant of?  What surprises lie ahead for us as individuals, as a society?  And, perhaps more importantly, what are we going to do about it?

Me, plowing the school’s garden this spring

…If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

–Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Isaac Mcpherson, August 13, 1813

The above quote was taken from a letter in which Jefferson questioned England’s patent law, and wondered whether exclusive copywriting of ideas truly benefited all of society.  (He didn’t necessarily question patents on inventions, but bare ideas themselves:  ideas are by their very nature fleeting things.)

My reasons for bringing up this quote is simple.  We ALL have ideas and skills, and we should share them.  I taught a couple of garden-related classes this past weekend.  It was really quite fun, frankly, and even if I initially doubted my qualifications, I shouldn’t have:  enough ideas and questions were thrown around in those few hours to leave everyone with something new, with new skills shared.

SO:  if there’s someone around you who’s hoarding some skills you’d love to learn, then ask them to share.  If there’s some canning you’re afraid to do on your own, then host a canning party.  If there’s a new garden you would love to put in, then get people to come over and help you.  Life is so much richer if you can share what you know.

New greenhouse on an August morning

Other than the fact that the front and back seats of my car are filled with ripening peaches as I type this, I think I have a handle on food preservation for the year.  It’s not much of a juggle, I do swear to you.  Nope; it’s more like cooking an extra course with each dinner, with the occasional five-course dinner thrown in every week or two.  Seriously.  It’s not that hard if you’re used to cooking your own food.

Granted, I am well acquainted with my canner and my carving knife, my fingers are nimble at harvesting, and I have a certain knack for vegetable gardening, but putting your own food away for the year is not  an overwhelming challenge.  Every night or so, I probably put away four dinners’ worth of food.  It could simply be something like four dinners’ worth of green beans for the freezer, but the next day or two will see tomato sauce for four pasta dishes.  The potatoes are plumping, doing their thing; the winter squash likewise are just out there absorbing the sun, no help from me at all, both are instameals, plucked from storage on a snowy day.  And six three-hour days will see all those chickens magically become frozen chicken dinners of the future:  three long hours at six birds apiece:  six birds for the three of us is a LOT of dinners, lunches, soups and gravy; 36 birds is a year’s worth.

The reason I mention any of this is I met yet another person recently who thought I simply must not have a day job.  This happens to me fairly frequently, frankly.  “Oh, I thought you just farmed,” comes the comment, with its half-sister “Oh, I didn’t think you worked full time.”  Huh!  Wow, well, those 40-50 hours I spend at my job would put a LOT more food in the freezer, I think to myself, and again I demur that it’s not that much work.  Because it isn’t, but then again, this is what I wish to do with my free time.

It beats tv.

On track to beat the 3.25 pound monster I grew two years ago?  Perhaps!

I am going to be completely boring and unimaginative and give you guys a reread of one of my favorite posts.

I’m a bit tired today:  we put away 26 quarts of strawberry, strawberry/rhubarb, and blueberry jam last night for the school’s snack pantry.  So much more to do!  But exciting nonetheless.

Pea season

“Guess what’s NOT for dinner tonight, folks?”  I have just walked in from the garden, colander brimming, and I am addressing my husband and daughter.  “SALAD!”

“Woo-hoo!” was the response.

Don’t get me wrong:  we adore salads in this house.  We easily eat between six to nine cups of salad an evening for dinner:  that’s the equivalent of about one of those huge bags of premixed salads you buy at the store…though ours is much better, of course   Our daughter eats a good two cups by herself.  And it’s not like salads aren’t still on the menu, because they are.  It’s just that other things are ripening and moving the salad over.  Last night’s big harvest was broccoli, and it was really quite tasty.  Tonight will be greens of some variety, perhaps turnip or spinach or rapini, to pair with the pot of cranberry beans bubbling away on the stove at the moment.

Eating seasonally means you do need to take what’s available:  it’s completely different from “well, what do YOU feel like eating for dinner tonight?”  The garden dictates our diet!  One more day and that broccoli would’ve opened too much, another 5 days my spinach will be bolting.  While many people would find this incredibly limiting, I instead pity their narrow-mindedness and lack of opportunity.  Everything we eat is at its nutritional peak, still warm from the sun.

The downside, if it could be considered one, is when something’s in season, that’s what you eat.  It’s license to be a glutton, I think.  Asparagus!  Green garlic, multitudinous greens, spring onions, broccoli, Asian cabbages.  It’s not a bad way to eat, frankly.

You want me to pick and eat WHAT:  snap peas on a trellis

Certainly, life would be a lot simpler if I (or you) had our way all the time.  In many situations, dictatorship ultimately appears to be such a simple solution:  my way or the highway, you’d say, slashing greenhouse emissions or implementing universal health care or heck doing WHATEVER it is that’s on your burning agenda.  But no.  Most of life is compromise, and much of communal living is searching for that compromise, but…it does help to have a burning agenda.

In our house, it’s my husband who’s the more recalcitrant.  I think back to when, as a preteen, I was learning to ride horses, and one of the first things you learn is you need to speak softly and not make sudden movements or you’ll spook that horse, losing all trust.  Husbands appear to be the same way, and, given their size, they (in my singular experience) can become just as easily spooked AND immediately become as immovable an object as any 1500 lb. quarterhorse, snorting and stomping their feet in indignation.  So!  Lots of change is taken by baby steps around here.  Speak softly, I say.  Move slowly.  Someone, though, still needs to lead.

But substitute “recalcitrant husband” for whatever your own situation is:  perhaps it’s 8 and 10 year old children who resist new foods, or a wife or a grandfather who insists on doing things the way they’ve always been done.  Introduce change slowly:  over time, say, you can substitute more and more whole-wheat flour in your bread and baked goods for less and less nutritionally empty white flour.  New greens on the plate, lovingly grown and harvested and cooked by you:  well, tell that 3- or 30-year old that it’s okay, today, to dump ketchup on them to make them palatable, but tomorrow it could be different.

Another thing I know about working with horses:  They move away from pressure.  Heels in, reins free:  they’re going to charge.  Right heel in, right side of the bit tight:  they’ll step left.  Speaking softly all the way, encouraging them:  you ARE a team if you work at it.  Beating them, screaming, or just being hard on the bit and that’s going to be one resentful horse, and one really frustrated rider.  Anyway, family members can be the same way.  If your people aren’t happy about the changes you wish to implement overnight, then ease up on the reins, folks!

Baby steps!

Ugh: something else to can. The plums are ripe.

I got an email from a friend recently. He’d started reading this blog and was letting me know he liked it. He said something that made me pause, though. He pointed out I don’t do much complaining about this life.

I was puzzled by this. I have chosen this life, we have chosen this life. How in the world could I complain about it? Yes it’s lots of work to be a subsistence farmer, or a subsistence gardener-slash-bird rancher, or whatever little pigeonhole you wish to stick me in as someone who raises 95% of what she eats. Yes I do work for a living, putting in my 40-50 hours a week, mostly working from home. Yes I do cook from scratch, relying only rarely on the occasional bag of pasta. Yes to the laundry on the line, yes to the nightly canning sessions, yes to the mornings pulling a weed or two. Yes to parenting, that full-time job.

So much of this life of ours is one based upon complaining. Yes, I do readily complain about the not-terribly-smart man occupying the White House, and yes, I do think we’ve soiled our planet beyond easy repair with a lifestyle based upon buying things. Yes, I do wish for certain things, like world peace and marital peace. But when has complaining really done any good? I suppose it acts as a social lubricant: by complaining about how horrible my child or my husband is, I have truck with all the other whining mothers out there. But here’s my point: didn’t you plan to have that child, didn’t you marry that man on purpose? Why complain?

Maybe it’s not complaining that I am getting to: maybe it’s follow through, it’s the consequences of your actions. Yes, moving from the city and taking up with 5 acres of land meant I would be outside a lot more than I had been. That was the point! And unplugging the dryer does mean it will take longer to dry the clothes, and yes, as my neighbor claims, one quick way to make it rain is to have El hang out her laundry. And children are work, whether you have one or a dozen. So are husbands, not that I would want a dozen of those.

I guess what I am saying in this long-winded whining-about-not-whining thing is this: if you live to your ideals, you’ve got no right to complain.

Gratuitous cute-ducky photo

Monica tagged me for a meme that I have seen a few other bloggers respond to lately. It has to do with what is it you would refuse to do without, should things really take a bad turn. I have read hers, and mostly agree if one had to make choices, hers are definitely reasonable ones to choose.  I think, though, that the meme is entirely wrongly directed. No offense to Monica as hey: she was tagged too; she didn’t make the thing up. It should not be the X Things I Cannot Live Without but How In the World I Can. That is the ultimate question, isn’t it, in any worst-case scenario?

And it has been my journey, upon moving to Michigan, to see how much we can do ourselves, without resorting to huge extremes of time or cash outlay. I have made it very plain in the entries in this blog that Rome is burning. You can either fiddle, or you can grab a fire extinguisher.

And these are my discoveries. Your life on this path need not be dire, or even wanting in any particular way: there is a world to be discovered when you bake your first loaf of bread, plant your first garden, taste your first egg from a little chicken under your care. You may even like the way your laundry smells when you hang it out to dry. Those are simple transitions anyone can easily make. The harder leap is one of degree. What would I do if gas jumps to $10/gal., as it inevitably will? How about heating our house without heating oil, or getting our water out of the ground if the electricity goes out? I know the answers to these last three, and while Rome is burning, we are working out ways to do them.

As it is now, so many of my transitions are gradual ones that it’s kind of hard to notice over time. We long ago stopped buying stupid stuff that is used and thrown away. Paper towels are now washcloths, purchased from Target by the dozen. We have always had paper napkins. Leftovers? They go in glass canning jars and then into the refrig, and not into a wasteful and never-to-leave-us plastic bag. We do still have garbage bags but it is crazy considering we have almost no waste with which to dispose. I never get the stand mixer out if I can grab a whisk or a pastry blender, and hey, I have the best-looking biceps of anyone I know because of it. In other words, any area of our lives (and in this paragraph I only focused on the kitchen) can see the easiest of changes undergone, changes which are NOT “living without,” just living differently. Am I wanting for anything? Maybe a little more time, but any parent of a young child would likely say the same thing.

So sure, I could play along and say I really do not want to give up coffee. But to be completely honest, I really do not want to give up life on this farm!

Chinook salmon fry in a tank at our daughter’s school. The school annually hatches chinook eggs for the Michigan DNR and releases them into the St. Joseph River in May. You are seeing 3 of 93 baby fish here. With luck, these babies will come back to the St. Joe in 3-4 years to spawn.

I say without reservation that I enjoy the challenges of this local diet. I do find it distressing, though, that I cannot regularly eat the fish out of my backyard creek, down-the-road river, or over-the-dune Great Lake.

My father was a fisherman. Not as a profession, but as an avocation. He did, however, descend from fisherfolk, on both his French and his Irish sides, who made their living on and around Beaver and Mackinac Islands near Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I spent my childhood, then, catching and eating fish out of Lake Michigan and its tributaries. I still own–and throw a mean loop with–a smelt gillnet.

I adore fish, and fishing. Our honeymoon was a fly-in fishing camp in Ontario: one week, thirty miles away from the nearest other human: what fun that was! The last fish I ate, though, was on that honeymoon. Freshwater fish in this country is well nigh inedible, where Michigan says that eating even the smallest perch is inadvisable for me, and a definite no-no for my daughter. A simple perch, as poison! We’ve overfished our oceans, we’ve polluted our streams with agricultural runoff, our coal-fired power plants have rendered all inland lakes, from the tiniest pond to the Greats, as mercury-laden sinkholes. And this, even after the Clean Water Act actually cleaned up the lake! One can actually see the bottom of Lake Michigan when you’re at a depth of 40′: something unknown to my ’70s childhood. Cleveland’s river doesn’t even burn any more.

I look at the state of our world and I wonder, what would my father say? His grandfather, his great-grandfather? That we live on a lake filled with inedible fish, what would they say? Knowing my dad, he’d probably say “What the holy hell did we do?”

This guy was on to something

Our child received a DVD of 101 Dalmatians this week. I’m no Disney fan, but the kid, she likes her cats and dogs.

“How many puppies were there, kid?” I ask her after we watch it.

“Millions, Mama!” she said, proud of herself.

“How about one less than a hundred?” I ask her. We then went on to discuss numbers (again, as it’s a recurring theme with a 4 year old), especially the idea of tens. And it got me thinking about the spending we’re doing on this particular war in Iraq. We are, as you know, approaching the fifth anniversary of its beginning. Its cost in pure dollars can stagger the mind, or rather, it staggers THIS mind.

Think about this: What is it you have that you have a million of? A billion? How about a trillion? So far, we have spent a trillion dollars on this particular endeavor.

I tried to make it simple on myself and wrap my mind around the number “one million.” I thought about what it is that I could physically count. I know, for example, that millions if not billions of microbes make their home on my very person. They’re arguably too small to count without great aid, and rather disturbing to think about. Going outside, the grains of sand or, in my yard, particles of clay are likewise uncountable. I then look over to the wooded section of our land and wonder about the evergreens there: if I counted, there might be a million pine needles. We have almost two acres of pines.

Our driveway is gravel. I suppose there’s a million pebbles out there.

What else do I have a million of? Blades of grass? Check. How about leaves? Now, there is something interesting. If I looked in my vegetable garden, there’s a countable couple of thousand there in the high season. Likewise the perennial gardens and (bingo!) wow, there sure are a lot of leaves in the herb garden. (Think about a clump of thyme and you will see what I mean.) So if I count them all, I would bet I have a few hundred thousand leaves in my gardens. Probably nowhere near a million, unless I counted the trees which ring the house.

But this is war spending I am talking about. A trillion is a million millions, if you count the way we Yanks count. Other than things I cannot see with my naked eye, I don’t think I have anywhere near a billion (a thousand million) of, much less a trillion (a thousand billion) of. But what is a gardener to do, to understand the concept of the dollars we are spending (and borrowing to spend) in this war?

I am thinking of that image of that young guy placing flowers into the gun barrels of some National Guard soldiers during a protest of the Vietnam war. FLOWERS! That’s it! There’s an idea as we start our sixth year of this war. How many of us gardeners would it take to make a million flowers? A billion? A trillion? Go down the list of your flowering plants: hmm, my asters sure sport a lot of flowers. Buddleia, calendula, dahlia, echinacea, foxglove, gaillardia…keep going. We’re getting up there! Then you can cheat when you look at compound flowers like sunflowers; each head has as many flowers as it has seeds. But I am still looking at only a few thousand flowers.

Let us then grow some flowers for this war. Maybe we can have a flower sale, and send our earnings to the Treasury. But better yet, let us grow them and know that, for all our fallen, for all our injured, for all their fallen, for all their injured, for the lives changed and the dollars well spent, squandered, lost, wasted… It will take a lot of gardeners sowing a lot of flowers to make a trillion flowers to equal the trillion dollars we have spent.

Maybe a million gardeners. Maybe more. Probably, a lot more.