slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • nibbled to death by ducks

    Yay! A three day weekend, and I have warned everyone at work that I might make it a four or five day weekend. I have got to get my anxiety under control. I’m getting quite crazy. It’s the “Nibbled to Death by Ducks Syndrome” again.

    Part of the reason I am pursuing a simple lifestyle is by economic necessity. My choices in life have led me to being at this income level, so I still think of that as being voluntary simplicity. Also, I am preparing for the hard times ahead when the oil runs out. But the main reason is that I am often overwhelmed by life, and I am trying to find some peace.

    The past few weeks have been very, very hard for me. I go through bad times. This blog has helped. Some things I have not been able to write about, or I’ve written them and deleted them. Things finally started getting better today.

    The gutters were installed and directed into my rain barrels. The short one over the porch extends out and has a place for me to hang a rain chain one day. The first night we had a major rainstorm and they all filled completely up. We had tested one before we bought the other three. The one we tested was solid as a rock. The other three were spouting mini-geysers and seeping out at the bottom. I’m telling you, it did not help my nerves a bit. But they seemed to tighten up after a couple of days. I set up a soaker hose in my new spring garden beds and emptied the two back barrels through it.

    Another thing that has helped…my husband Sandy got into a temp job. It was beginning to look like he wasn’t going to qualify. He had to make an 80 on two of six tests, and he didn’t make it on the first four. So he had to do it on both of the last ones. I was ready to climb the walls. He has the worst luck in jobs that I have ever seen in my life. We both joke that he is cursed, but sometimes we’re not joking. He has not had a permanent, full-time job in two and a half years now. And people wonder why I’m a liberal Democrat.

    The washing machine is about to die on us. We’ll have to think about what to do about that. My hope was to replace each major appliance as they wore out with highly energy-efficent ones. Until Sandy gets a real job, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to follow that plan.

    But my spinach seeds are coming up, and I picked three radishes and a few spinach and lettuce leaves that I planted in January! I filled it out with dandelion greens and had a nice little salad out of my garden. Then I made a very good pot of soup, which I’ll never be able to recreate, but it contained a little butternut squash that I grew and picked last September – amazing! I’d forgotten I had it. I sliced some collard leaves into thin strips and put into the soup, and added a lot of dried parsley from this summer. It’s great to be able to eat food that you have grown. Best therapy in the world.

    Now if I could just grow some Xanax!

  • biting the land that feeds me

    This essay was sent to me by the Slow Food DC listserv. It is important reading for everyone who eats. As consumers, we have more power than we think. As a descendant of many generations of farmers, I know how important it is to support the small farmers who are trying against all odds to revive our agricultural economy and heritage. The way to do it is with our pocketbooks.

    Biting the land that feeds us

    By Jim Scharplaz
    Prairie Writers Circle

    I am a rancher. I live on the land I grew up on, in the house my father built for us. For more than 25 years, I have tended descendants of the same cows my parents bought when they married 64 years ago.

    I am also a licensed professional engineer. I hold an advanced degree in agricultural engineering. I have done university agricultural research, and I have designed and built specialized machinery to farm research plots.

    I think I have a pretty wide view of agriculture.

    What I see are wonderful people doing their best to care for creation and produce healthful food. And I see practices that pollute the soil, water and air, and destroy our long-term ability to feed ourselves.

    It’s easy to blame lazy, greedy farmers for destructive agricultural practices. But I believe that the economy within which farmers must operate is responsible. This economy aims only for cheap food and a quick bottom line. It forces farmers to cut corners with our soil and water, to use practices that harm the land on which agriculture depends.

    As our source of food suffers, so eventually do we all.

    For about 15 years I have been involved in various efforts to change the things in agriculture that, if not stopped, will lead to hunger in the future. Others have worked far longer and harder than I have.

    Have things changed? Certainly. They have gotten worse.

    More fertilizer has polluted the rivers, more topsoil has washed away to the ocean, and more pesticides have polluted the groundwater. Noxious odors and dust have fouled the air. Bioengineered “Frankenfoods” have infiltrated the supermarket and corrupted the gene pool. Multinational corporations have commandeered the marketplace. And many more of those wonderful people have had to leave their farms forever.

    That’s not to say efforts have been wasted in promoting an agriculture that can furnish abundant food and also protect our soil and water. The situation would be far worse without this work. But I no longer believe that farmers alone can change agriculture for the better.

    Agriculture is the basis of civilization, and the two are inseparably linked. No wonder, then, that our agriculture reflects the rest of our economy, in which everything is simply a resource to use, profit from and discard. Our economy’s lust for resources has become so rapacious that its relationship to the agriculture that feeds us has become like that of a drug addict who is willing to rob his own mother for another fix.

    Many non-farmers are as concerned as anyone else about this. And now that more than 98 percent of Americans don’t farm, the decisions these non-farmers make about what to buy, what kind of work to do, what kind of public policy choices are made, and what to value have far more influence than the decisions farmers can make about how to farm. When our economy is driven by consumption, the cheapest possible price and immediate profit, it is not realistic to think that farmers’ decisions about how to farm will be based on feeding generations to come.

    Our future food security depends on redirecting our society and its economy. I am not about to prescribe the form this should take. But I hope that once we realize our headlong race to the bottom of the resource barrel is madness, our combined good will and intellect will be sufficient for a new path.

    Farmers and ranchers are a small minority of our population. They cannot keep feeding us in an economy determined to extract every penny from every resource as fast as possible. Whether our grandchildren will eat is up to non-farmers.

    ###

    Jim Scharplaz raises cattle in Ottawa County, Kan., and serves on the board of the Kansas Rural Center. He wrote this essay for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan

  • kabob sticks

    I have not ever had seedlings get so big this early. But I haven’t had this lamp or these particular kinds of plants growing indoors before. I had to stake my tomatoes in their little pots with kabob sticks! Hope I can get them out early this year.

  • spring planting and gutters

    This weekend, I got the bulk of my spring planting done. I sowed more seeds, transplanted most of the broccoli seedlings, and I decided to plant the two biggest artichoke seedlings. I know that they are supposed to have strong tap roots so I thought that maybe I should get them in the ground. It immediately started turning colder, so I redid the cold frames so that I could divide them in half, and put them back over the new plantings. I also put bricks around the artichokes to help retain heat. I planted more potatoes. I bought humus instead of cow manure this time.

    I’m really excited because I should be getting gutters installed this week. It was a lot more expensive that I expected, but I already bought four expensive rain barrels that are pretty much worthless without the gutters. Guess I put the cart before the horse. I think that this is a good investment – not only for the water catchment system and my garden, but for my crawlspace and basement, which is damp.

    My stress level is sky high now. Working in the garden is such a relief.

  • regression to tomboyhood

    Today was beautiful again, and my husband went back to Guilford Courthouse to fight the rebels against King George (uh, that would be 1781 King George, not our current dictator).

    I resolved to clean up the mess of boards and pallets I’ve been hoarding with the idea that I’d build a nicer looking compost bin. Well, I guess it looks just a tiny bit nicer. And it’s 10-year-old child workmanship, the sides are not even hooked together. I nailed some pieces of a picket fence together to face the side that you can see from my deck. I leaned it and two wooden pallets against the three sides of my wire compost bin (the fourth side being the chain link fence behind it). I was going to nail it or hinge it all together, but it’s a lot heavier than I thought it would be and I need to be able to move it. So I think I’ll wire the corners together so I can take one side off when I need to. At least I cleaned up some stuff that just needed to be chucked.

    It took me back to when I built a “fort” out of scrap lumber in the woods when I was little.

    Now I need to clean up the brushpile and paper and mulch that back middle bed, which I don’t think I’ll plant this year. And the biggest part of my class project will be done. Part of which, by the way, was to incorporate recycled objects into my garden. Admittedly, I do that anyway. I’m a terrible trash picker. The other parts were to concentrate on spring vegetables and rework my path and beds to have curved borders.

  • i smell dead people

    Maybe using that fish emulsion on the inside plants wasn’t a good idea…

  • d-oh! chalk one up for the learning curve

    Today, I busted my behind in my garden. It was a gorgeous day. I will pay for this tomorrow.

    It didn’t start out so hot. I went to the farmer’s market, with money this time, and a couple of the organic farmers had a few spring plants for sale. I bought two Salem rosemaries to replace my recently deceased ones, who I believe were another type. These should survive our winters. I bought one flat-leaf parsley because I’m tired of trying to get them to grow by seed. I have had widely varying results, and I use a lot of parsley. It was $3 which I thought was high, but then I realized that it was not one plant, it was a bunch of seedlings growing all together. I bought three oriental poppies that he said were perennials. And I bought one broccoli plant. I felt kind of like a guy who goes fishing and stops at the fish market on the way home. But so far so good.

    Anyway, I started talking to one of the guys about organic gardening, and he told me that using composted cow manure is not organic, even if it says organic on the bag. You know, if I had thought about this for two minutes, knowing what I do about feedlots, cattle production, and product labeling, I would have known this. I am kicking myself because here I thought I’d been organic for three years, and now I’m not–even this year is down the drain for organic because I have dumped cow manure everywhere. And he gave me advice on what to use, but he can’t tell me where in Guilford County to get it. Without owning my own truck or paying $140 for delivery, that is. He thinks Guilford County gives compost away, and I do not think so. Then he tells me to talk to the broccoli guy, who doesn’t know right off hand either. Apparently they produce their own compost. The broccoli guy advises me to use fish emulsion on my sad little broccoli seedlings, which I already have from last year but just couldn’t bear thinking about the smell being in the house.

    So I went to Lowes and looked over everything and looked closely at the packaging. I need lots of soil to build up the beds and the organic compost was $4 for a 40 lb. bag. I just can’t afford that so I bought 5 bags of “organic” humus at about $1.50 a bag and 2 bags of this new stuff that Miracle-Gro is marketing for organic gardeners at $4 a bag. And it seems legit because I looked at the ingredients. Unless the chicken manure is full of antibiotics. Oh, shit. I bought it to put in my containers, then when I got home, it said quite clearly on the bag “not to be used in containers.” Why? I don’t understand. I’m going to use it anyway.

    I came home and got right to work in the garden. Sandy was doing his Redcoat thing at the Guilford Courthouse battle re-enactment. I usually do too, but I’m tired of it. That’s another story. So that meant I had to do all the heavy lifting, which is okay, because I used to work in very physical jobs. But I’m out of shape now.

    I got about 20 little parsley seedlings out of that one parsley plant! If three of them survive, I’ll be happy. And I planted lots of seeds – carrots, beets, chard, spinach, sorrel, two kinds of lettuce. (Note to self – I didn’t plant to the right or front of the red table.) I mixed up fish emulsion and bottom watered my indoor seedlings and poured the rest on my outdoor beds. Here’s hoping that Mama Kitty or a raccoon doesn’t dig everything up – that’s the other reason I stopped using the fish emulsion. Mama Kitty thinks that I do all this for her pooping pleasure anyway. I have to be vigilant to remove her little deposits all the time. So I put all the wire tomato cages and screens I could find over my seed beds to try to deter the animals. And I turned my little compost pile that never seems to grow. And I moved around my stepping stones until I had something that pleased me.

    Whew.

  • jq and a red table and a green chair

    I had a nice little japanese lunch with my friend JQ and she gave me a ride back to work when I saw that a neighbor threw out a bright red table! It looked like it had been made from three broomsticks and a circle of plywood. Naturally I had to have it for the garden! And I got it! Woo-hoo!

    This almost makes up for the broken green child-size Adirondack chair I passed up a few months ago. Well, no, it doesn’t. That could have been a great throne for Mama Kitty.

    small green chair on curb
    i remember you fondly
    waiting for a friend

  • artichoke blues and a wattle fence

    Wow, my paths and beds are really looking great! I can finally visualize what it might look like when the plants grow in. I used up all my newspaper and cardboard, so now I have to wait to collect some more. Bummer, because I NEED to work in my garden right now. Staring at tiny seedlings and willing them to grow can only sustain me but so long.

    R.I.P. for another baby artichoke. I swear I won’t water you guys any more for at least a few days, just hold on, hold on! I’M SORRY!

    Later:

    When I got home late this afternoon, it was absolutely beautiful. So I wove a wattle fence.

    I stuck about 8-9 sticks in the ground, cut off long pieces of porcelain grapevine GRRRR, and wove them between the sticks.

    It felt good to cut that porcelain grapevine GRRRRR. But a lot of it is dead now YAY so there wasn’t enough to weave a very high fence. In fact, I’d be amazed if I get it up to two feet.

    Maybe I’ll do another one with honeysuckle YIKES. There will definitely always be a supply of that. The next-door neighbor on THAT side doesn’t do anything at all to her yard, and the honeysuckle YIKES is coming from there. Oh well, I prefer that to the other next-door neighbor, who nukes everything with Round-up instead of mowing. I had a nice little spot next to her yard where a couple of rogue tomatoes and a pumpkin were growing from where I tossed them for a compost pile, then changed my mind. They died the first time she nuked her yard. Even a cement block wall didn’t stop the Round-up.

    Monsanto – AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

    UPDATE 6-19-05: My broccoli and artichoke babies are growing up. I’m so proud!

  • pulling the worries out

    What a difference ELEVEN hours of sleep makes. I was so sleep-deprived. I am a NEW WOMAN today! And it helps that I didn’t have to deal with distressful undercurrents. And it helps that I got to weed in my garden.

    There’s something about pulling weeds. In a way, I’m a little sad that my new method of gardening reduces the need for weeding so much. I pulled up the weeds, mostly snakeberry (I think it is called that–it is like wild strawberry but doesn’t have any taste) and creeping charlie, which I HATE because it has just about taken over the entire yard, and if you leave the tiniest little piece it springs back to life, and travels under mulch until it pops back out, good as new. It blew my mind when I saw it for sale at Home Depot. I wanted to put a note up asking people to come to my house and take it away for free.

    Then I laid thick newspaper down over the area, and on top of that, straw. Later I’ll dump compost and/or topsoil on top of that.

    I used the bagged compost I bought today to fill out the garden bed towards the front, which I newspapered and mulched several months ago. I can never buy enough. I planted some spinach in this area in the shape of a flourish. I’ve got this notion that I want to paint with plants. And I planted some more peas, this time in the herb/rock garden bed that I can’t decide what to do with. I bought some bonemeal and sprinkled it over everything. I hope this was a good thing to do. I don’t know why I get so confused over soil nutrients. Maybe it’s because my high school chemistry teacher really taught us sex education instead.

    I read somewhere an account of a woman who was diagnosed with cancer, who visualized pulling the tumors out of her body when she pulled weeds. Ever since, when I get upset or overly anxious, I go to my garden to pull the worries out of my life.