slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Back home. The trip to Lake Waccamaw has become much shorter since two parts of the I-74 corridor has opened around the two-lane 220 through Ellerbe and the two-lane old 74 near Lumberton. I feel sorry for the produce stands and antique stores in Ellerbe, but I won’t miss the old 74 route at all. I’ve nearly gotten in a serious wreck three times there, one of which would have likely involved a horse.

    Took a nap, dressed in long-sleeved white shirt and white capris to pick butterbeans and field peas. I still took out four mosquitoes with one hand slap on my calf, so I guess I’ll either have to wear long pants and socks or resort to bug spray.

    We are getting some of the volunteer cherry tomatoes and they’re great. One is a grape type tomato that I suspect originated with some Juliets that I planted a few years ago. The other is obviously an ancestor of Sungold. It looks the same but doesn’t have quite the same smoky taste.

    Part of my permaculture philosophy is to encourage volunteers whenever possible. If I ever have part of an old packet of seeds I scatter them to the winds rather than throw them out. I learn interesting things about plants from volunteers. One early spring before frost I had a watermelon come up beside a cement block. That’s when I started using bricks and cement blocks to retain heat around some plants in the winter.

    Of course if you till, you don’t get the joy of volunteers unless you’re very lucky and/or very careful.

    There was a great article about urban gardening and local food on the front page of the News and Record Sunday that featured Bobbe Wright, Gratia’s husband!

    I made three books at the lake. I’m being lazy tonight, but I’ll try to get a few more done for the Art Oasis.

  • Yesterday was Mama visitin’, fried shrimp and steak eatin’, sittin’ in the water beer drinkin’, and nappin’. Today is coffee drinkin’ and bookbindin’. There is a nice breeze but we’ll probably catch the rain later that Greensboro is getting today. I don’t mind the rain so much down here. Usually I can sit on the screened porch and watch it come over the lake.

  • Newest books

    These all began as discarded books on the free shelf at Ed McKay’s. I covered them with gift tissue paper or handmade paper and Lumiere acrylic paints. The binding for each book is longstitch, using waxed linen thread and glass beads.

    Altered book, “The Search for Peace” 8.5 x 5.75 x 1 in. 48 pages of recycled handmade paper, made mostly from discarded outdated student handbooks.

    Altered book, 5 5/8 x 3 1/8 x 1/2 in. 64 pages of gleaned paper from the UNCG printmaking studio recycling bin.

    Altered book, 3.25 x 2.75 x 1/2 in. 40 pages of gleaned paper from the UNCG printmaking studio recycling bin.

  • Yikes, CFSA reported that HR 2749 was likely to pass today. I don’t know why people can’t understand that the same rules that are good for industrial food safety can’t be applied to small farmers and food producers without killing them. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Didn’t any of these folks read The Omnivore’s Dilemma? Apparently not.

    So I hope that this won’t totally kill the farmer’s market movement. It was a beautiful thing while it lasted. Call and email your senators and ask them to fix this problem before the Senate votes on it.

    Anyway, this is supposed to be my journal. I gave up being a food politics writer, right? But it’s a part of life.

    I bound three books today and one yesterday. Woo-hoo! I’m going to borrow a camera tomorrow and take photos. I also designed and printed some business cards on my wonderful cheap Epson Stylus CX8400 printer.

    Better wrap this up, there’s some loud thunder, and the battery on this laptop is dead as a doornail.

  • HR 2749 defeated, but not dead

    Received this email from Carolina Farm Stewardship Association today. My disappointment? My N.C. rep is not on this list. Miller voted for the last b.s. food “safety” bill too. Whenever I write to him about agricultural issues, he replies that he is not on the agriculture committee. Well, by God, he eats, doesn’t he? If he is from North Carolina, then he ought to be interested in agricultural issues.

    This is why I am leaving the Dems. They definitely don’t always get it right, especially when it comes to food. The appointment of Monsatan henchmen to important food posts clinched the party desertion for me. The Democrat Party is too happy to wallow in the corporate slime.

    Not that I’ll ever, ever, ever be a Repub. But I do recognize a few of these names as Republicans, which shows that sometimes, rarely, but sometimes, they DO get it right.

    Dear CFSA members:

    HR 2749, which did NOT have the Kaptur-Farr language CFSA supported that would have provided better protections for small and organic farms, was defeated today. Thanks to Reps. Heath Shuler, Howard Coble, Virginia Foxx, Walter Jones, Patrick McHenry and Sue Myrick of NC, and Reps. Barrett, Brown, Inglis, and Wilson of SC, for voting against the legislation. If one of those folks is your representative, please feel free to thank them. Your calls, emails, and our work educate our legislators made an impact—without those 10 votes, HR 2749 would have passed.

    The bill is not dead. It was brought to the floor under a special rule that required a 2/3ds majority to pass the bill where the vote was both on the question of having the vote under 2/3ds majority requirements and on the underlying bill. So now the bill can be brought back up under “regular” rules, which means that there will have to be an opportunity for amendments on the floor. Or it could be brought back under special rules, but obviously they’ll have to make a few changes to get the extra few votes they need. If it were to come back under either scenario, that would be a chance for our community to influence positive amendments. When, and whether, there’s another vote is anyone’s guess right now.

    Both NC Senators are on the Health, Education, Labor Committee, which has jurisdiction over food safety, and I know personally that the offices of both Senators are concerned about supporting small and sustainable farms. We should take advantage of the opportunity to exert our influence on them.

  • Peach and banana slices in the food dehydrator. Red Calico, Lowdermilk, Carolina Sieva, and Willow butterbeans and Purple Pink Eye and Dixie Lee field peas in the fridge. Plenty of snaps.

    I finished 3 by Flannery O’Connor last night and started Twilight, which is the latest office obsession. I figured that I should join the fun so I’d know what they’re talking about.

    Put together some paper signatures for books, worked a little on covers. My plan is to begin binding tomorrow. Bad news: I expected some watercolor paper to come in the mail this week. I was going to use it for some of the books. UPS rescheduled it for delivery next week. I might need to buy some paper before the weekend.

    I started a batch of my own paper on Sunday, recycled paper and abaca in which I dumped some dried mint and basil from last year. Somewhere in the middle of dealing with it, I decided that it was ugly and not worth proceeding. It was a lot of pulp, but I saved it in the freezer and I can add color to it or add little bits of it to other pulps later. The irony is that the little that I pulled couched (laid) beautifully and was easy to handle, something that I’ve had a bit of trouble with lately.

  • You can thank me for the rain because all I had to do was to doubt in print that it would rain, and see, it poured rain. Last night and right now.

    I don’t have much to say tonight because I’m fatigued again and about to go to bed early. I slept very little again last night. I wish that I could get this aspect of my life adjusted again, because it is essential for my anxiety/panic disorder to get regular, sustained sleep. That is one thing that I discovered over the years of struggling with it.

    I should go to the neighborhood association meeting right now because they are gearing up to fight a very bad developer who is planning to build a 750-bed apartment complex two streets over from my house. Plus, the word is that he’s not planning to provide adequate parking. These streets are jammed during fall and spring semesters, and it will be a disaster to our neighborhood if he doesn’t adjust his plans to something reasonable.

  • Sunday sweep

    Aw, I see rain to our northwest on the radar, but I doubt that we will get it. The weather forecast all week is “y’all might could git a few thunderstorms. If yore lucky, hit’ll git y’all a tiny little bit of rain. If you ain’t, hit’ll blow away yore trailer and flood yore crick.” That’s my interpretation, anyway. We need rain badly – Pat told me that it hasn’t rained for five weeks at her farm. I haven’t been counting but I know that it is terribly dry.

    I did not get the artwork done that I meant to yesterday. And I probably won’t get it done today either, but I hope to at least get set up to make it easier during the week. I’m partially there. I have a workspace cleared and a few more covers ready for binding. I have to prepare signatures (the paper) and pierce some holes and do some beading.

    I did get a little bit of Silver Queen corn blanched, cut off the cob, and frozen. It brought back a lot of childhood memories. In July, the main activity at my house was shucking corn and freezing it in one of the three large chest freezers we had. We ate corn and field peas or butterbeans almost every day of the year, so we froze a lot of it! We had to cut it off the cob because of my daddy’s false upper plate, but I tried freezing it on the cob and I didn’t like it, so I’ve gone back to cutting it off. It’s not that much more effort and it is a lot more convenient and tastier and easier to add to other recipes.

    I have to say, though, that I am saving some freezer space for some Peaches and Cream type bicolor corn. When I see it, I’m going to buy a bunch of it. I’m also considering buying a bushel of butterbeans and a bushel of field peas to freeze, since it looks like I’ll never be able to grow enough of them myself.

    In the Back Forty, I’ve harvested some of the Purple Pink Eye field peas and the Carolina Sieva butterbeans. (I think. They are interplanted with Willow because I mixed up the identical beans when I planted. So much for heirloom seed saving.) Because they got ripe suddenly when I was on vacation, I had enough for a good-sized pot. I only added Liquid Smoke and salt, and they are delicious!

    I’ve also gathered enough dried Toscanelli and Jacob’s Cattle beans to plant next year’s crop, but I’ll have to weigh whether giving the space to them is worth it.

    No ripe tomatoes yet. My green cotton has been flowering. And I could probably pull a few carrots.

    I did weed-whack the front yard enough to keep the city and neighbors happy. I bought an electronic mouse repellent. I tried to take my camera back to Office Depot, but it turns out that the salesperson lied to me when I bought the warranty and they wouldn’t give me my money back. I have to do some bureaucratic BS and send the camera back in the mail to somebody and they are supposed to replace it. Except that it is discontinued, so now the line is that they will send me a better camera. I don’t want another Canon 500 series because I’ve had the same problem with both of mine. Granted, I worked the hell out of them. But I wanted to use the money to buy a better camera. It would have been a win-win situation for both Office Depot and me to refund my money.

    Whether they handle this to my satisfaction or not will convince me whether buying the extended warranty was worth it and whether I want to do business with Office Depot or not. I don’t do business with Best Buy anymore because of the way their customer service department treated me when I returned a new defective PC years ago.

    I’m not over my exhaustion from earlier this week, clearly. I did manage to go to sleep at 12:30 last night and sleep straight through the night, but I woke up at 10 a.m.! I think that part of the problem was that I got off my vitamin regimen so I started back on that this morning. I’ll try not to take a nap today, but it is the sabbath so I’m not promising. I’m going to bind books, make some paper, maybe weave, and organize so that I can come home from work and get crackin’ right away on a project. And cook some pork chops and spaghetti sauce, and do some laundry. And freeze some squash. Sheesh, I’d better shut down this laptop.

  • Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market Love

    Okay, I swear that I’m getting off the computer after I write this, but I am filled with love and needed to express it.

    Whenever I go away on a trip, especially somewhere as beautiful as Alaska and Vancouver, I begin fantasizing about moving there. I have lived two places in my life – in Marietta, NC with my parents, and in Greensboro, NC. I think, isn’t it time for a new start, a change?

    Then I go to the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market for the first time in several weeks. How did I stay away so long? I would live in Greensboro for the rest of my life because of this place alone.

    I bought whey-fed, pastured pork chops. Grass-fed beef. Freestone peaches. Blueberries. Cantaloupe. Yellow squash and Silver Queen corn, enough to freeze some. Cherokee Purple and Sungold tomatoes. Okra. Red sweet pepper. That’s when I made myself stop, only because I was getting really hot and needed to leave.

    Otherwise I would have bought fresh baked bread. Handmade soap. Baba ganoush. Marinated goat cheese. Organic beets. Whole free-range chicken. Stone-milled grits. Hydroponic lettuce. Sweet onions. Local honey. New potatoes.

    I wish that this place was open every day. Our community is blessed to have this market, and even more blessed because we CREATED this market.

  • Introduction to the Alaska/British Columbia trip posts

    “The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. ‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked.

    “‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’”

    Here’s how this travelogue works. I posted my notes from the journal that I kept during the trip, along with scans of sketches and selected photos from that day, under the actual date that I experienced it. [I included my thoughts in hindsight in brackets, like this.]

    If you are considering going to Alaska, I hope that these photos will convince you to go. I’ve been to a lot of pretty places, but Alaska beat them all. I never knew how beautiful a glacier was until I saw one face-to-face. It seems like a living thing. Go see one before they all melt – they’re melting fast.

    So, to begin at the beginning, click here, then follow the links at the bottom of the posts for the next post in the series.