Category Archives: soapbox

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.

More greenhouse parsnips from 2006 seed

It occurred to me, when I wrote my latest seed-saving post, that I mentioned an obstacle to seed-saving that might just stop some of you from doing it altogether. There is a very human tendency to glom on to a problem first and decide, forthwith, that this problem is insurmountable, so, well, I won’t seed-save. I say, get over it.

So I would like to talk about the concept of “obstacle” as it seems to be such a hindrance to so much in our lives. The particular obstacle I mentioned in re: seed-saving is the separation required between plants to result in pure (unadulterated) seed. Well, dang: the way to get around that is to only allow one variety, say, of carrot to blossom, and then make sure you keep its wild cousin, Queen Anne’s lace, mowed down during flowering season. Or, just be like me and don’t care.

There are so many other quasi-urban legends out there that somehow stop us from doing decent gardening. Urban gardeners might become spooked from planting anything edible in their yards because they have heard that many urban soils are lead-filled brownfields. A soil test or four will confirm or deny this: then, go plant out some raised beds with imported dirt and use lots of homemade leaf mold and compost and (non-chemically-treated) grass clippings…and do some research about which plants might be more prone to taking up ground-borne dangers. Then research lead sensitivity, period: it’s infants through 8 year olds who are the most sensitive. If you live in an old (pre-1978) house, you should get your children’s blood checked for lead levels anyway; there’s much more of a risk of exposure living in a house with flaking window paint than there ever will be than with the few carrots you’ll pull out of an urban garden.

And then there’s the I-can’t-have-a-rainbarrel-because-of-my-asphalt-shingle-roof fear. Well, how old is that roof? The ones on our outbuildings are 40 years old (yep; time for a change, anyone have a spare $20K they wanna give me?) so I don’t have much worry. So, is there something there there? Well, there might be, if the roof is new, and/or you’re downwind from a coal-burning power plant (how about some heavy metals in your rain, folks?) but in general I don’t understand how people can honestly think that fresh rainwater from a rainbarrel will somehow poison your veggies to inedible levels. The key here, of course, is FRESH. Don’t let the water steep in the barrel like tea if you’re at all concerned.

And I guess that brings me to the crux of my rant. I finished reading Michael Pollan’s latest book about a week ago. It is an indictment, rather scathing, of the way we eat. (I’ve blathered on about Pollan for a long time now. I appreciate the man because his Bullshit-O-Meter is finely tuned.) With all these “obstacles” to home-grown vegetable production, people still somehow blindly trust the contents of their grocery stores. Do you have any IDEA how those things were grown? Sure, it might even say it’s organic, but… Anyway, I think we have absorbed the fear and confusion we have toward our purchased food (“high fat” “trans fats” “low carb”) and have transferred that fear to gardening. We’re somehow too spooked by some unseen unknown (lead in soil, cooties in rainwater, cross-pollination) to dare to plant a bean.

All I am saying is be educated, and exercise some common sense. Evaluate the risk against the reward. But even if there’s nothing scary in front of you, don’t let something stop you: most likely, you have the keys available to you (soil tests, etc.). And you will find your home-grown veggies will still be better than anything you could ever buy. They’ll be more nutritious, certainly; they’ll be fresher, they’ll just plain taste better. What’s the risk in that?

Some dangerous things in the world of botany are prickly: castor bean pods

I’m kind of going through the push-pull of blog direction that I know happens every year at this time if one writes a mostly gardening blog. I have friends from my past life (my city, pre-farm life) who drop in and read this blog and are bored silly…and admit it to me. So hmm, I think: should I write more personal information here, as that’s what they’re looking for, fully knowing they care not for my lovely greenhouse’s contents? Or should I slog on, bragging about the greenhouse (as it IS the only place things’re happening this time of year) and thus annoy the purely on-line friends who begin to think I am just all-greenhouse, all the time? Or what?

It’s just that somnambulent time of year for a gardener. I kind of go through my days dreaming green thoughts: I look out the window and it’s only white that I see, white and maybe a blue but mostly a gray sky. I think about writing about food, I think about writing about family, but both these things seem so personal and I guess I am just not too comfortable sharing “that side” of my life. Not that I don’t admire and enjoy blogs who do: in the main, that’s what’s on my blogroll.

So I readily admit that it’s going to be chickens, seeds and greenhouse for a while yet, until I get inspired (or more comfortable) otherwise. I do need to tell you about our Slow Snack; I should tell you about my co-op finds and friends; I should tell you about some new things I have discovered with bread-baking. I could trumpet my environmental bona fides and tell you about the initiatives we’ve implemented here on the homestead. But I know I disappoint my non-gardening friends. Dang, I don’t even talk about architecture here, and only occasionally about art, and nearly never about our daughter. Those things ARE my life, frankly, and my gardening and chicken-ranching are the supports of my life; the windbracing, as it were, to a whole and fruitful existence. And they might be boring to some, but they’re important…to me. And they’re important enough that it’s what I choose to blog about, to the exclusion of almost all else.

Hmm. Old friends? Just pick up the phone, or drop me an email, okay? You’ll find out a lot more about me that way.

I’m a bit dissatisfied with what I find in this year’s seed catalogs. Maybe I am a seed snob.

I think of all the flower/ornamental gardeners out there. Do they have an issue with seeds? I think it might be different: their plant suppliers are constantly hybridizing and upping the ante, keeping things fresh, or at least garish. Also, flower/ornamental gardeners often expand their holdings by getting plants and bulbs, not seeds. I know many a great gardener who deigns not plant seeds. This does not make them any less of a green thumb.

It’s not so if you’re a vegetable gardener. Seed sowing is something you danged well better be able to do, or you’re…well. You’re toast, or you’re certainly going to spend a lot more cash to get a garden going. (Your choice, I’m just saying.)

But maybe I should simply cut myself some slack. Am I a snob if I just want…choices? Like, LOTS of choices, lots of NON-HYBRID choices? I stand here atop this small mountain of seed catalogs (and rhetorically so, with my online sources) and I just KNOW it’s not even the tip of the iceberg, botanically, of what is out there. Any one featured variety of seed is simply the one variety that has somehow outdone its challengers. We weren’t all Homecoming Queen, yet that’s what our seed catalogs feature: beauties of some stripe or another (best taste being only one possible criterion). What about the REST of the class, I’m asking you. Where are the runners-up, where are the nerds and Goth chicks who wouldn’t have gotten chosen.

And then there’s the other also touchy issue of seed marketing. Yes, I’m going to talk about anti-Americanism. Actually, I am just going to bash traditional American seed choices. It’s, er, touching that most catalogs have finally gotten around to featuring open-pollinated Asian vegetables. Considering that part of the world has been gardening continuously on the same patch of land for millenia you would think that we’d have raided more than a couple of mustards, pac choy and tatsoi for our gardens, yes? What about all those beautiful little bitty pea-sized eggplants I saw with such regularity at the Hmong stalls in the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market? But maybe Asia is too foreign: well, let’s just go back to Europe, where many of us originally hail. Why only three or four choices of chickory in most catalogs? Where are all the other greens, turnips and beets? Whither the rampion? Are they simply not American enough?

I know that food preference is just about the last thing that people change when emigrate/immigrate to a non-similar country. I also know it’s the hardest thing to change if you start out life (and are thus encouraged to be) a fussy eater. “Oh, geez, he’s got to eat something, let’s just shut up and fix him a hotdog, okay?” I know, in other words, that food is a…tetchy issue, as my esteemed Southern friend Tim says. I live with a fussy eater who has enormous food issues, a ton of them garden related. (And no, it’s not our daughter. She eats anything.) And I am also sure that traditional American food choices is a factor in the limits I see even in my favorite catalogs. But we know how badly we as a country eat: why would we WANT to replicate our grocery stores in our gardens?

Seed companies, like all commerce, are going to sell what freaking sells. I know that, too. Does it make me happy that all they sell are Homecoming Queens, or F1 copies of the Queen with the Homecoming King? Nope, not in the least. And yes, I seed-save, and yes, I am a member of a seed-saving organization, and yes, I have a lot more choice ahead of me than I let on. It’s the rest of YOU I worry about.

I think we all need to fight for bigger, deeper catalogs. Especially so if you’re a new gardener, fed up with grocery store holdings and now itchy to dig. The world is sadly diminished if all you’re offered are Kentucky Wonder and Fortex pole beans.

Me, outstanding in my (septic) field: view from Mont Merde
Apostacy: from Greek αποστασία, meaning a defection or revolt, from απο, apo, “away, apart”, στασις, stasis, “standing”

I understand dogma, I understand rules. Rules are out there for many very good reasons: for social cohesion, for safety, for clarity. Dogma is an interesting nut. It throws rules and religion (or at the very least, orthodoxy) into the works.

What does it mean to cheat, though? Cheating has been a purely academic exercise for me for a while now. There is nothing that stirs me up enough that I feel I need to cheat at it. There is nothing in my life (and I consider myself highly fortunate to have achieved this state) that I wish to cheat on, or from. No strictures, no bridles, no ties from which I wish to loosen myself, nothing that I feel I am denied or in want of that I need to bend, or break, life’s rules to get, or to achieve. Again, I feel fortunate.

But (and there is ALWAYS a “but”)…but, in this life I lead now of living with less, in so doing, I am continually restricting my access to “the great more” that is out there. I cut up my credit cards before I went to grad school. That was nearly twenty years ago, so I suppose I am out of the habit of credit spending; should I go out and get one, and go wild? Should I buy a gas-guzzling vehicle, just because I have denied myself the pleasure of driving one, these last ten years that I have had my miserly one? Should I leave a light on all night? Should I plug the dryer back in?

Should I eat meat again?

Ah. There is the rub. We’re plumbing the depths of my own personal orthodoxy. I have been a vegetarian for, what is it now, either 15 or 16 years. A long time, in other words. I have been a vegetarian on moral grounds: I really did not think anything needed to die to keep me alive. (And yes, that, like any orthodoxy, is hairsplitting: how many poor little fieldmice and bunnies had to die to cultivate my grain and bean meals?) My main reason for it is I just did not want to eat anything that had been badly treated, and let’s face it, the vast majority of the meat animals in this country have lives of horror and pain. I just couldn’t turn a blind eye to CAFOs and continue to enjoy a rare steak.

But now, now in this world, there are animals that have been humanely raised, pasture fed, living their lives out the way they naturally would have lived, or at least how they’d lived on farms of 100 years ago. And this meat is available widely, if you look.

My new dogma, or rather my walking papers, are another big nut: local eating, low impact lifestyle, thrift, living close to the land, doing things ourselves, permaculture. I grow my own food, I raise my own chickens for eggs. This spring, I will raise my own chickens for meat. Turkeys too, and maybe ducks.

What has come over me? A hard look at our household, that is what. I’m looking at things like the nutritional needs of a growing child. I am looking more to traditional foods. I am also looking at the fossil fuels that are expended to continue to supply my Michigan-based vegetarian diet. Some studies have stated that omnivorous lifestyles actually use less land than pure vegetarian ones do…and that is intriguing, in these trying times. I am all about having a smaller footprint on this earth.

I am often asked if I ever really missed eating meat in all those flesh-free years. Yes, I did cheat on occasion: our annual family clambakes were my once-a-year binge on molluscs, and there were times I tried bites of things off others’ plates. But I never went through Wendy’s drive-thru or anything. (Bleck, the idea gives me the willies, frankly.) It just did not appeal; my life, and my palate, were well sated on the diet I have had.

But it is with some reluctance that I here admit that I have become an apostate to the vegetarian lifestyle. We are now practicing a diet of meat from one animal every other week or so. I usually stretch things far, so the beast’s sacrifice is spread over many different meals. It is my goal to know the animals I will kill and eat. But now, we are only eating animals from farms we have visited, from farmers we know. We have seen them alive. In a couple of cases, like our turkey, I have seen them killed. For our family, for our life here, this is just enough syncretism to make complete sense to me: occasional meat-eating is the answer, frankly, to the trajectory of the life that has led me to this farm.

I said I was going to stay away from religion in this blog, but today I am making an exception.

My friend Michele is a writer. This summer, in Ohio, she had a week to kill between dropping off and picking up her daughter and niece at summer camp, so she decided to avail herself of some of the local Amish community.

“Thinking I will learn something, I visit Amish country. Sure enough, there is nothing to do. As promised, I see people in buggies and on bicycles. I see boys fishing in ponds. I see people walking up and down roads. Everyone seems cheerful. I find a windmill maker, a birdhouse maker, a chair maker, a broom maker. None seem particularly anxious to sell anything.

In Yoder’s store, where I buy a few hand-drawn coloring books, there is a small index card with writing, in script: ‘Newlywed Special. 10% off furnishings for all newlyweds, to set up your new house. To be used by your first anniversary.’ There are cups, and bowls, and plates, and coffeepots. There are dishtowels, and trivets. There is, in this small set of rooms where the only sound is that of a ticking clock, everything one could need for a house.”

So I asked Michele about her experiences. Had she gone specifically to learn something, or had she gone merely to observe? Is she, as I asked her pointedly, a seeker?

No, she said, she is not a seeker. There is a Buddhist phrase she asked me if I knew of: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, haul water. After enlightenment, chop wood, haul water.” In other words, do things one at a time; they need to be done. She went looking to see if the Amish live their lives one task at a time. She did not come away with one answer.

I am struck by the image of that general store. It was not the Town Square general store of our minds a la Little House on the Prairie; it was a man’s house, a few rooms of which were devoted to commerce. Can you imagine finding all you need to set up your house and live your life in one store? Sure, Target or Wall*Wart fit the bill, and, of course there are charity second-hand stores like Goodwill that could, too. But the idea of parsing your life down from what you want to what you only need? Now there, there is a thought to live by.

I believe we all find something inspiring in a willful existence. Unplugging from the hurly-burly craziness of 21st century life for an 18th century one sounds appealing to those of us trying to declutter and simplify our lives. It may not be THE answer, but there is something small there to learn. Chop wood…

In need of defense

Some very interesting comments came out of my Wednesday post on how the world is a-changing, and how some of us are doing something about it, and others, well, aren’t.

Here’s a comment: My friend Tim, in an email, said “The list of things not to be discussed in polite company (this includes the internet) now includes ‘consumption patterns’.”

I agree it’s a touchy subject, especially when one trains one’s sights on one’s relatives as examples. (OUCH. Believe me, things’ve cooled considerably in my own household after that post; I’ve done a lot of mea maxima culpas to those affected.) But, (and Tim knows this about me) BUT…polite company aside, isn’t discussing religion, politics and now consumption patterns at least really INTERESTING? Maybe it started in college, where I was one of maybe 6 Democrats in a student body of 7,000…maybe that is where I honed my combative skills. (It was the Reagan era: tough time to be a liberal, believe me.) But maybe it’s a personality fault, or something, but I do like a good argument; I do like to poke the hornet’s nest, to rattle a cage here and there.

Why consumption? Here is the thing: here is why: we are all connected. That Big Mac you had for lunch? It has global implications. It really does. And how good did you feel after eating it? Did you feel as good as you did when you ate your last homegrown tomato?

Big Macs are not the Great Evil, nor is a homegrown tomato a kind of Grail (though close, if it’s a Brandywine). But it’s a small, small, shrinkingly small world out there. By 2050 there’ll be 9 billion of us calling this little planet home. You don’t need to be an economist, geophysicist or even a farmer to realize that having India and China on a Big Mac diet too is just not going to happen. Our world is too small for this kind of consumption pattern. And we have to face this fact. Collectively. Together.

Our leaders are not leading on this issue, much less any other. Detroit continues to roll out vehicles that get only 18 mpg. We keep doing things as if there were no Katrina, no fires, no drought; that these were fickle aberrations of the weather. So, well, I will be discussing consumption patterns (and politics, but will stay away from the third rail that is religion) here. Why? Because enough of you have told me you do take a little something away from my rants: encouragement, head-shaking disagreement, something. And because someone needs to stand up for homegrown tomatoes!

Sunset, Wednesday night

I can’t seem to shake this feeling of dread, this the-world-is-f***ed-up dread. But I am able to appreciate things, like this beautiful sunset. The wind brought in our first frost too Wednesday night: little glittering bits on the pumpkins, and look at the tiny damage it’s done to the seeding basil. One little blackened leaf. It’s like a stay of execution, you know?

I hope to be out of this funk soon.

The source of guilt AND motivation.

This post has been floating in my head for a long time now.

I was on the phone with my mother Sunday, trading tales, when she said, “don’t you just love this [mild] weather? I guess global warming does have an upside, doesn’t it?”

Now, my mother is a terminal optimist. Her motto, quite seriously, is Marty Feldman’s line from Young Frankenstein: he played Igor, and, when queried by Gene Wilder’s character about his hunchback, said, “What hump?” She cannot help herself. That said, she does understand that coal-burning power plants like her own really do compel you to save electricity by at least buying compact fluorescent bulbs and adjusting the thermostat all year. She has reset her sprinkler system, and I am trying to wean her off her green lawn love. It is a small gesture.

But frankly? My mother and [name redacted for family peace] have an enviable lifestyle. The [redacted ones] especially, God love them, don’t practice conspicuous consumption, practice instead what I call Entitled Consumption. You know: we worked hard all our lives dammit so therefore we SHOULD be able to…fill in the blank consumptive habit. Maybe they are tinged with a bit of planetary guilt, but in reality, they won’t live long enough for their lifestyles to be changed in any measurable way to them.

Me? LOADS of guilt. Especially since I became a mother myself: I realize SO VERY WELL that my daughter will not live in the same cushy world her grandparents, uncles, and parents had. The damage, in so many ways, was done long before she was born. Whether she grows up to resent the hell out of those who have gone before, soiling the planetary nest as we go, is yet to be seen.

I can only do what I can do. Moving to this farm has helped lighten our load (and my guilt) considerably. Thumbing my nose at industrial agriculture by growing my own has helped both our health and our wallets, and it certainly has challenged me in many ways to both show how easy it is to do, and to progressively do more. This blog is my small attempt to buck up and teach. But really, our lives, they are going to be a-changing. And I unfortunately have not inherited my mother’s optimism. It is a lot more work, I know, to be a pessimist, but people, there is no quick fix to our problems. There are small gestures that, if taken collectively, will make a small impact. With the rest of the developing world following us by imitating our lifestyle, from hamburgers to SUVs, our little gestures are but a trifle, a drop in the ocean.

I am the bridge between the used to be and the future. I will see my parents’ generation die off, and hopefully will see their habits die with them. I will see my daughter grow up in a world where consuming less won’t be a matter of personal do-gooding preference but a matter of global imperative. Who knows if I will live long enough to see my daughter’s own progeny be born and grow, because, let’s face it, at 38 I was an old bat to be giving birth to her. But if I do live that long, I hope some solutions have been undertaken, Manhattan project-wise, going-to-the-moon-wise, to solve some of our global screwups, because, really, I don’t want my succeeding generations to be cursing my name.

And I know my kid will at least know how to grow her own food, raise and slaughter her own chickens and make her own bread. This, this I can do.

You know, I do wish this blog could be something as light and simple as a documentation of the pretty flowers and luscious vegetables I grow. Maybe this could’ve been the case 15 years ago. But fifteen years ago, there were no blogs, and I didn’t own a farm. I apologize to all of you whom I have potentially offended here in this post. I simply do not see enough being done. We’re all still arguing about if things are really changing, whilst we still go about with our spendthrift habits. (I am not above reproach myself, jetting about hither and yon.) But really. Let’s all get busy, doing what little we can do.

Manifesto: from the Latin manus (hand) + festus (struck, stuck)

So, I have done some thinking.

I am always doing “some thinking,” frankly. My mind is like a hamster on its wheel: constantly churning, sometimes realizing I’m going nowhere, but liking the motion just the same.

This blog is as its by-line says: a garden journal of sorts. I’m a big picture person, though; the garden is but a wee slice of my life. Food is a bigger part, and the garden has been servicing that bigger part since I dug it up. “Eating local” is an exercise that I have enjoyed mainly because it is something I love (food) mixed with something else I love (avoiding both the car AND shopping). In other words, it’s an exercise slanted very heavily toward reward in a risk/reward sense.

I realize that what I do, what we do here at this house, is not for everyone. We are both artists, although it’s Tom who makes the money strictly with his ability: I only dabble now, getting paid instead to do architecture. As artists, though, we favor craft, we favor working by hand. And craft is exactly what we do: we craft our living. And craft, frankly, requires one thing above all others: it requires time. There are no shortcuts. We take the long view on most of our undertakings, be it cloth diapering our child or making our own bread or building our own buildings. Craft comes easily to us. The long way is the preferred one. The long way generally reaps the greatest rewards, too, longevity-wise, consumption-wise, and, best of all, it’s rewarding in and of itself.

Knowing, then, that our long view and way is antithetical to the modern way of living, I am not out to seek converts. I am also not really out here to do anything but perhaps document how my gardens affect our small, plodding lives here on the farm. IF I am a nag, and I can be, it’s only because I do not understand how people can honestly prefer HotPockets to a homemade pasty (half my family hails from Michigan’s U.P.). Do people really worship at the altar of their microwave ovens? Or are their lives so stretched, time-wise, that they have to shortcut their lives, one bad microwaved meal at a time?
Food sustains us. I value my life, therefore I value the quality of food that sustains our lives. That it sometimes takes longer to prepare is not a sacrifice. I suppose I’m just doing the work that the HotPockets workers are doing, just without paying a middleman. Middlemen usually mean shortcuts and poor quality, but you’re paying for quicker service. I prefer absurdly high quality, patient service, therefore…I do it myself. By hand.

It’s not for everyone, all the time: but really, people. Try making a pasty sometime instead of reaching for a frozen box. Try kneading your own dough. Try growing your own garden. Just try.

Wait: maybe I am out to seek converts, after all…

This monster made a lot of salsa yesterday. A LOT.

I have always loved food writing. Always. I remember learning about M.F.K. Fisher in college and was hooked, even though my preferred diet at the time was diet Coke and peanut M&Ms (oh the stupidity that is youth). Food plus culture? Even better. So writers like Barbara Grizzuti Harrison and other Europhiles became my escapist reading. But then I found Frances Moore Lappe and I changed my life.

Today, while rolling out tortillas over my lunchbreak, I thought again about my current reading jag: local foodism. It is true that what most attracts me to cucina povera is the fact that there is a local food culture that backs it up. Sure, it’s immensely obvious that the Greeks’ hilly, sunny clime was an excellent place to have goats, grapes and olives. Or that the arid climate of northern Mexico and the American Southwest enabled its people to cultivate the native corn, peppers and squash. Or the grassy beauty that is central Europe allowed those people to have the most wonderful dairy cattle, sheep and goats. I could go on: the leftovers that weren’t good enough for slave owners became the fatback, collards and cornbread of its slaves. All these foods were amazingly whole, and amazingly healthful to those who ate them.

So I look at culturally loaded things like French food and I see through it to the farms that initially produced it: the mother sauces, after all, were simply ways to sex up the common, daily cuisine. Crepes, like tortillas, dosa, injera, pita and countless other flatbreads, are simply using what is at hand to both fill the tummy and extend what little protein is available.

With all this floating in my mind, I do wonder where I am going with all this research. I complained to my uncle a couple weeks back that I am kind of in a reading rut. He, like many of my family, is a voracious reader, and his advice was that this is no rut: you are simply working through something.

And I do know where I am going with it, at least tangentially: I am looking to produce my own food culture, whereby we can live, mostly, off what we produce here on the farm. And that there is a whole tide of generations who have done it before me is both daunting, and really, really inspiring.

And it’ll be much better than M&Ms.

I’m going to take a few days off from blogging to do some thinking.

Well, the calendar says I have been blogging for a whole year now. (Where did that year go?)

My main objective in this blog thing was garden journaling. Of course, I have fallen far from my goal, and instead have had a number of detours instead, mostly soapbox-worthy things regarding the quality of our food. Besides, a journal of “X bloomed on Y day” is really insufferably boring copy, even to its gardener!

But memory fails, often, especially regarding the garden. So I will give you all a tip. I expanded my veg beds considerably last fall, and now it’s far too large for me to keep on top of it all, especially as a sketch on a piece of paper. So here is my answer. Recycling.

This is a cut-up piece of a vinyl miniblind. Yes, it’s recycled, but from GoodWill: our farmhouse was last decorated in the days way before miniblinds, frankly. If you cut them at 6-7″, and write on them with a permanent marker, these things will be legible through the season. A deciphering of my scrawl lists the seed variety, the plant date, the point of origin of the seed, and the date I got the seeds. I usually bury them to a height of 2″, and hill mulch around them enough so I don’t have to look at them, unless I really want to.

Where this blog will go is a mystery. It has been an enjoyable morning routine for me. I have really enjoyed “meeting” all of you, as that has been the biggest surprise of all: readers!

Little wooden soldiers at work

When I lived in Minneapolis, I co-owned a couple of sailboats. (In the land of 10,000 lakes, a few can actually be sailed, and some of them were in town even.) I was much better at the important things like drink orders or boat repair routines than I was a sailor, however. One boat was all wood (a Melges C-Scow, 1968). It was held together, quite literally, with epoxy, and thus its name was the Epoxymoron.

Nowadays, well, I live on a much bigger lake. I neither have the motivation nor the deep pockets to continue my sailing habit. But I still know how to catch the wind.

This is how I do it now.

The wind is very consistent here, coming west off the lake. In no time at all, our clothes are dry and smell just wonderful. I do use vinegar in the rinse cycle to keep the towels from getting stiff, though a crunchy towel can be an acquired taste. Part of the clothesline is in the sun, but most is in the shade. And sometime around Mother’s Day Tom bought us another line: an umbrella-type one. (I try hard not see the significance of buying a household item for a holiday, as he has yet to buy me a vacuum for a birthday, though for my 40th I did get a tiller….)

When we bought the house, we had the basement plumbing redone to accommodate a decent laundry room. It took a while for us to get the new dryer hooked up. (I’ve been a huge fan of the Whirlpool Duet line, having had them in our city house, too. Lots less water and soap used, and it spins things super dry.) We had a cloth-diaper-wearing baby then, and it was winter, then spring, before we had everything completed. We hung everything out to dry then, too, though we had to string up lots more lines in the (warm) basement. I do remember, though, that every time I would get the damned diapers on the outdoor line, it would rain. The neighbor would chuckle and call us and say, “El, we need rain, why don’t you hang those diapers out again?”

Well, we’re doing it again now, but it is not for lack of a dryer. Global warming has something to do with it, though.

(But I can still fix a mean drink.)

As the ground is still frozen and I am housebound, I thought I would ask you all a question that’s tangentially farm-related.

I recently purchased this saltcellar, and it is causing me great worry.

It is highly unusual for me to purchase anything; I am most definitely not a shopper. I never feel bitten by that “gotta have it” bug with the exception, maybe, of things for the farm. Yes, you could say this little (and I mean little: it’s less than 3″ high/wide) is somewhat farm-related; we’re chicken keepers, after all. It has utility, and it will be well-used, as we love our sea salt here. But I am distressed nonetheless.

And I really don’t mean to offend my relations and friends and any of you by saying this, but is this the straw? That breaks my back? That makes me a purchaser of All Things Chicken? Because though I understand the desire to collect things, I really do not understand the…need? desire? to…well. To decorate for every holiday!!! I am really concerned that the purchase of this small thing will lead me to start decorating my house for every (and I mean every) holiday. My mother is at this moment probably gathering all the storage boxes labeled EASTER right now, and into them will go all the rabbits and eggs and all ephemera that she has seen and somehow said “gotta have it.”

Should I be concerned?