The fall roundup from the garden etc

After I left the Marines in 1994, I ended up working briefly in northern Montana on a ranch in the middle of the Blackfoot Indian Reservation. The Two Medicine River ran through the ranch lands and it was a gloriously beautiful place to be in Big Sky Country. That year I participated in the ranch’s fall round up of cattle off of the open range to bring them to winter pastures that surrounded the headquarters of the ranch. The round up took several days of old fashioned cowboy work on quarter horses, rounding up cattle spread far and wide over open range and then driving them the 15 or so miles to the main pastures, and then working the cattle at the barns (this involved inoculations, worming,  castration of male calves etc). We were miles from everything, a trip to the post office was 30 miles and over half of the trip was on unpaved roads, there were hardly any people around and the sky was HUGE.  That provides quite the contrast to where I find myself now nearly 20 years on, in Southern New England and the fall round up only involves harvesting the garden (having been kicked, head butted, stomped on and smashed into the barn wall by cattle in my life, this is not necessarily unwelcome).

New England is famous for the show the forests put on every year at this time. The various deciduous trees so prevalent here, elms, beeches, birches, maples, and oaks of various kinds, start to shutdown for the winter and stop the flow of nitrogen to their leaves. As the nitrogen seeps out the leaves turn their beautiful shades of red, yellow, and brown creating panoramic views of stunning autumnal splendor. Walking in the woods for me at this time of the year is wonderful.  Autumn is also the traditional time of harvest celebrations and getting prepped for winter as the temperatures start to dip. A quick check of the NOAA weather site (no commercials!) tells me that lows will be in the mid to upper 30s this week in Branford. Chilly!

Despite the dips in temps, my garden still has some beautiful, healthful food to yield. The beans are all ready to harvest and are dry in their pods. Carrots too should be getting sweeter as the temperatures cool. Being biennial, carrots will over winter in the ground living off of the starchy root until spring. Then it will  put up new greens, flower and go to seed at the end of its cycle.  The kale and collard greens are still  going strong and probably will for quite some time yet. I have seen kale growing and green with snow around it in Pennsylvania, so I think it will be good for a while. There are still two potato mounds left to harvest and even some peppers that are hanging on. I doubt the tomato flowers will mature though!

The garden was challenging this year due to the starting soil ph (4.6 yikes!) and the subsequent unintentional neglect mid-season when I was off my feet for a few weeks due to a little mountain biking accident. The garden received very little care at the time, including little water, yet still produced because of the polycultures I had set up and all the compost I amended the soil with. Appropriate plant groupings are key as certain plants work well together and in many instances HELP one another. Pests get confused when plants are in mixed plantings, soil retains moisture better when densely vegetated, and shaded, and beneficial pollinators come to all the flowers. This is a small part of what permaculture is all about. It is so much more too. The key is to get started!

Now  is the perfect time to prep your garden for next year. Save your leaves and get some plain brown cardboard. Place a layer of cardboard directly on the surface of the ground. Top with leaves and wet them down.  Placing more layers than one is preferable if materials are readily available.  The cardboard and leaves will biodegrade and create rich, dark humus as well as inviting worms to come to the spot. The mulch will prevent grass and other plants from growing until removed for planting.  Sheet mulching is a great way to expedite the soil building process. It removes cardboard and leaves from the waste stream and cycles them back into a system. Win, win!

Gardening has a positive domino effect for us. It lessens food miles, increases activity, connects us to nature, and can build community through sharing surplus tools, produce, knowledge, and labor. It is a highly educational activity and there are many ways to include children as well. In short, gardening is vital to a thriving, healthy community.  Grow an organic garden!

Leaving the dirt on the potatoes helps to preserve them. GMO free organic spuds!

Leave your dry beans to dry on the vine (these are black eyed peas).

Bright flowers attract pollinators and other beneficial insects as well as creating beauty in the garden.

A little Indian summer weather in October by the garden.

 

 

 

 

The sometimes dirty business of being compassionate

Today I went on an excursion into New Haven for art supplies and some leisure time at the Yale Museum of Art (outstanding and free) and for lunch at my favorite restaurant/ craft beer bar, The Cask Republic. Surprisingly, after being in Branford, CT for over a year now, this was my first day trip like this into the city. There is easy train service as well as bus service into New Haven yet I have been content to go in only on those days when I had to do errands in our truck. It was nice to get out and be in a different place. Being in the city though can be exhausting for me as I seem to pick up the energy of the people and the place pretty often and I am just a country boy by nature.

Today I at times felt a little like Siddhartha on his first sojourn outside the palace walls. The people I see in cities often seem as though they are to quote Bono of U2, “counting down for the pain to stop.” So many faces, expressions, habits , and mannerisms that bespeak of merely existing rather than living or living almost entirely in a painful place (I’ve been there and it sucks). I saw a family walking down the sidewalk where the woman was clearly in distress about something, her male partner pushing the stroller seemingly oblivious to her frantic torrent of words and to the small child breathing second hand smoke from his dangling cigarette. What can I do as a compassionate being in that moment as I witness such a scene? A well meaning question or offer of help may be met with a ferocious response from a person in such pain. I often just send a mental word of peace to all concerned as I walk past and hope that is enough. Is it?

Later at the train platform, I heard a woman say something about a poor bird and then looked down to see a grey catbird on the concrete near my feet. I immediately bent down and gently picked it up to get it out of the way of foot traffic. The beautiful bird was clearly in pain, gasping for breath and almost certainly suffering a great deal. Without any forethought I put some reiki symbols on it, mostly hoping to calm it down and then I placed it on the top of an emergency phone box to be safe. All the while I was looking at it and mentally saying how beautiful the bird is and that I loved it. These thoughts just came of their own volition seemingly from deep within me. Meanwhile there are many people on the platform with me that may have been wondering what the hell I was doing talking to an injured bird. My goal was to alleviate the suffering of the poor creature but only if it was clear that it would die painfully without any further assistance.

I left the bird there as a train pulled in on its way to the main station in New Haven. As it went by the conductor, who was leaning out her door to tell us all that our train would be coming soon from the other direction, noticed the bird as it tried unsuccessfully to fly from its perch to safety away from trains and people. I took this as a sign that the bird was indeed too infirm to live without a great deal of pain. Moving quickly, I grabbed the bird and in one motion as if butchering a chicken twisted and pulled its head off and then tossed the lifeless carcass onto the rocks surrounding the tracks. The bird was free of its pain and I had bird shit and blood on my hands with no way to wash them. I felt completely fine with that though content that I had done something compassionate for the beautiful catbird that no one else seemed willing or skilful enough to do.

I suppose the lesson for me to notice is that sometimes being compassionate can be messy. It can be messy when it gets in the way of our beliefs such as when we come to see those painted as “enemies” as real human beings. It can be messy because it is often unpopular to view the world through the compassionate lens because when we do we are then forced to make more mindful choices about the ways we live our lives, the resources we consume, and the systems we support with the money we spend. Can we see the world compassionately and still buy sweat shop made or even slave made goods? Can we look at our world compassionately and and see issues such as the politics regarding incarceration, immigration, and labor reform the same way and with the same “solutions” that we now have? I doubt that we could. Yet people of every major faith are called to be compassionate. Surely that means we need to get our hands a little dirtier. It starts where we live, work, and play. Let’s do this.

Ban RoundUp now.

There is no reason to have RoundUp in your home. None. It is an ecological disaster that needs to be outlawed immediately.  Write your LOCAL (county, state, municipal) civic leaders and demand that they ban RoundUp for sale or use in your community.  See the link below for more info on why this is important.

 

http://wakeup-world.com/2013/06/24/glyphosate-roundup-carcinogenic-in-the-parts-per-trillion-range/

It’s all about design

Our modern society is designed predicated upon abundant cheap energy that we use to move food, durable goods, and ourselves around the planet. We have on demand internet, electricity, water, gas, news, entertainment, and information all readily available as a result. I can provide information, humor, art and poetry for you on this blog because of all this seemingly abundant energy. There are flaws inherent in the societal design however. Some of these flaws can start as annoyances before becoming a glaring problem while there is a huge flaw that is almost always glossed over. This latter flaw is the lie that policy makers both private sector and governmental always perpetuate to the the public-that we can maintain a perpetual growth economy on a planet with limited resources. The logic is fundamentally flawed and sooner than many realize, we may come face to face with that reality.

The other types of flaws become apparent the moment the optimal dynamics of the system change–i.e when the fertilizer hits the ventilator. The interstate highways are great (supposedly) when all is well,but  throw a wreck into the mix at rush hour, or any hour for that matter and things change in a hurry. Ratchet that up to a major storm event and those flaws are even more apparent and lead us to see even more flaws like concentrating millions of people into such a small space? The systems were all designed seemingly with only ideal scenarios in mind and never a wrench in the works. Permaculturist design for resilience with all types of energy in mind from those once in a  100 year type storms to making use of the prevailing wind, solar, and water generated energy on the site. Our policy makers (which is really you and me et al) should take notice!

On the home scale level design flaws abound as well in most homes. Energy is wasted in various ways because of bad design be it thermal energy, water, bio-mass, or human. I am being made more aware of that at the moment as I attempt to negotiate the confines of our second floor apartment on crutches. There is only one way to get down to the yard and that is via the stairs which are rather difficult to navigate at the moment. That means the garden has been left pretty well untended save for harvesting for almost two weeks.

Fortunately, I did design the garden well enough for it to withstand some neglect and still be fairly productive. Given the challenges of the low soil ph that I have had to deal with, I am surprised at the yields I have been getting from the garden beds . Along with adding bio-dynamic and organic composts,  I planted poly-cultures of plants that work well together under most conditions and planted more in a smaller space than most conventional gardeners would. I’ve been getting regular harvest of kale and collards for quite a while now.  Recently, the jalapeno peppers, cucumbers, green beans and lettuce have been coming in strong.  Lettuce will typically bolt in the heat. Mine was purposefully planted near taller plants that would shade it from the harshest afternoon sun. So far it has yet to bolt despite the withering heat wave we had earlier. Some of the plants are suffering from the soil conditions and now the neglect of not getting watered or tended for a while. There are so many of them though that I am still getting a yield (thanks to my wife’s harvesting efforts) and  am doing it all while BUILDING soil by fostering microbial life and attracting earth worms instead of killing everything in site for a short term gain in this year’s yield. I get REAL food now while creating better soil for next year. Sounds like a wining situation to me!

We must all remain aware that all things being equal it takes clean air, water, and soil to live. Period. Yes we do have to live now while also caring deeply for the future. We can do that through better design from the micro level to the macro level. It starts with getting involved in our communities and demanding that the places where our children play, learn, and live are free of toxic industries or practices that pollute the systems we all depend upon. It starts with our own homes and choices we make in them. Do we really need to “feed our lawn, just feed it” to create an unnatural mono-cropped system or do we need to spray RoundUp on dandelions, one of the most beneficial plants around? No. We need to change the way we do things from the ground up and ditch the lawn and the RoundUp. We may not be able to completely re-design our communities but we can certainly retro-fit them.

Some quick tips to start a community retrofit:

1) Demand your municipality ban RoundUp and all similar herbicides on municipal property including parks. Ensure that your friends and neighbors know why this is important.

2) Dig up a good portion of your lawn if you have one. Plant organic fruits, veggies, and flowers. Invite others.  Stop using synthetic fertilizers and eco-cides on any remaining lawn. These often leech into the local water ways creating pollution.

3) Demand locally available organic foods to supplement what you cannot grow. It’s imperative that farmers local to you are using methods that are non-toxic to the soil, plants, and water. If they aren’t, you and your family are getting those toxins.

4) Learn your watershed. Get to know it intimately. Water is life. What’s in your watershed? Intimate knowledge of your water shed will empower you to make the necessary changes within your watershed to make it healthy again (chances are it is in need of your help).

5) Find out about your communities recycling program and make use of it. Recycling is the absolute BARE MINIMUM we can do to prevent waste.

6)  Supply and demand– make it work for you and your community.  Shop locally owned stores. Let the local shops know you want a non-toxic community.

7) Write letters to the editor of community newspapers informing people about local environmental issues.

8) Go barefoot. 🙂

Real fast food. No drive through needed.

In which the author details his recent excursion to the woods

Getting out into a more natural, undeveloped, place on a regular basis is paramount to my personal well being. My ideal life-place scenario looks like this: I awaken in the morning and walk out my door into a paradise of cultivated ecology, clean water ways, and wild zone 4 and 5 lands. I hold that frequency a lot. In the present moment, I live in a bedroom community of New Haven, CT in a town called Branford along Long Island Sound. While different from my ideal outlined above, this location does afford me the opportunity to find natural beauty rather easily due to the glaciated landscape, the many parks,  and pockets of forest that still exist within a short drive from my home.  Better yet there is a nice preserve around a network of ponds within an easy bike ride of my house. The ponds formerly supplied ice to the residents of Branford. Earlier this year I purchased a mountain bike from a local bike shop with a view of riding it on these trails thus increasing my time observing and interacting with nature. I’ve been getting in mountain biking shape since.

I took my longest ride today from home to the Supply Ponds to ride more of the trails there.  In addition to a good cardio workout, my goal today was solitude in the forest  and I found it on a hitherto unexplored trail. I spent some time off my bike roaming around, exploring tree-fall bridges and photographing fungal blooms after the latest rains.  A bit later, I found a rough hewn log bench along the trail and stopped for a while to just listen to the wind through the leaves, the jack-hammer like probing of an unseen wood pecker looking for lunch, and to watch some butterflies darting to and fro in the dappled sunlight. It was perfect, no one else happened by and the sounds were almost entirely from the natural world.  I wrote a short poem, snapped some photos,  ate a snack and  then got back on the bike refreshed.

This trail was very challenging, with lots of big rocks, loose sandy gravel, roots galore, and hills coming and going! It was definitely the most challenging ride from a technical stand point that I’ve done so far.  I rode a loop in the trail and then decided to take a side trail instead of returning the way I came despite the lack of a blaze painted on any trees, figuring it was chance to explore.  What I found was a suburban neighborhood when I very suddenly came off the trail and onto a residential street. I promptly got turned around for a while riding those McMansion filled streets with their unnatural mono-cropped lawns. After 10 minutes or so of riding around trying to found a way out of Purgatory, I turned around went back to the trail…and it was awesome. Going this direction the trail had a long downhill portion over the aforementioned tough terrain, replete with blind corners, thorns lashing my arms and my skid marks as I tried to stay upright while gravity took its course and I careened downhill. Literally just as I was thinking to myself, “Wow, I’m doing a really good job of staying upright on this trail”, I found that time started to slow as my bike and the trail disagreed with my handling of the situation and soon I was picking my self up off of the ground and checking for obvious damage.

My guardian spirit was definitely on the case at this moment. The spot I wrecked was a downhill portion with a steep drop off to my right hand side. The disk brakes on my bike stood me in good stead slowing my momentum just as I started to go ass over tea kettle over the handle bars. My momentum stopped and inertia kicked in just before I would have rolled down the steep cliff and into a rock strewn stream below.   Adrenaline is a wonderful thing at a time like this and mine kicked in allowing me to finish the trail portion of the ride and then pedal on home the couple of miles through town. I’ll be sore tomorrow, as much from the distance as the graceful roll over my handlebars.  The solitude and inspiration were well worth the scratches and soreness.

There were a bunch of these right at the opening of the trail today. I need to get out my guidebook to find out what it is.

Feeling happy and alive in the woods!

I had to work to get this picture. These were off trail across a stream and up a steep slippery slope dotted with poison ivy.

Gills alive!

Eliminate the concept of waste from your mind. Nature recycles EVERYTHING it makes.

 

 

Fragile systems and garden notes

One night late last week, I woke up in the middle of the night which is hardly unusual. What was unusual was a very strong smell that I couldn’t place. The heat and humidity kept me awake that night as did the offensive smell. Eventually I realized that it was coming from the back of the fridge (the melted ice cream in the freezer was a pretty good clue something was amiss).  I knew from prior experience that the relay on the compressor had burned out and that the fridge was likely toast. When the repairman came later that morning, his diagnosis of the problem was the same as mine and so we were immediately without a fridge in the July heat. Fortunately, I had put off my grocery run that week so there was comparatively little in the fridge. We had also kept some big bags of ice in the freezer from when Tropical Storm Sandy hit and knocked out our power last year. Despite these positives, we were faced with the fragility of our household systems that we depend on so much.  In this case, all our capacity to store fresh perishable food was instantly taken away. Putting all our proverbial eggs in one basket proves to be problematic at times and yet we often find ourselves as a society doing it all the time with important things such as our food production, biological “wastes” processing, and garbage removal.

Permaculture design seeks to mitigate system fragility by designing redundancies into the household (or community, agricultural, or societal) system and the cultivated ecology that supports it (them). Living in a rented home certainly creates some opportunities to get really creative with things to design within the limits imposed by the property owners, neighbors, or even municipal regulations. I am working within those limits now in this home. For instance, in home owned by me the kitchen scrap compost pile would be located in place close to both the kitchen exit and the garden to minimize the energy (work) needed to deposit the scraps into the pile and then later retrieve the finished compost for use in the garden. Our present home limits my ability to do this so I put a compost pile in the only place available to me and covered it with a tarp. It’s better for me to walk a little extra  than to put the veggie scraps in the garbage.

The question of perishable food storage can also be addressed in many ways other than just getting a fridge and freezer. One of the best ways is to plant a garden so that food can be grabbed, fresh and full of nutrition when it is needed. That is REAL fast food. When there is an abundance of veggies and fruits to harvest (and there will be) then other strategies can be used to preserve them without refrigeration such as canning and fermenting. Today, I made some fermented cabbage with homemade whey, real salt, and organic curry powder.  One cabbage made almost 1.5 quarts of sauerkraut. Tomorrow I plan to make a second batch using whey, fresh jalapenos from my garden, green onions, and powdered ginger. I just experiment with flavor and spice combinations to create truly healthful, flavorful  fermented veggies. So far so good–except that one batch of beets!

Buying whole grains in bulk too is a good way to have food without needing to refrigerate it. I like to put ours in empty jars from previous items like spaghetti sauce or salsa that way I can reuse both the jar and the bulk bag that I got from the co-op grocery store I shop at. I’ll re-suse the plastic produce/bulk bags until they get holes in them and then take them to be recycled. I recently stopped buying quinoa when I read that demand for it in the U.S. and Europe was making it too expensive for people in Bolivia and Peru, whose staple grain it is,  to buy it. Instead of quinoa, now I buy a couple pounds of organic rice, millet, beans, lentils or buckwheat during most trips to the co-op which helps reduce the number of trips and keeps my larder well stocked while adding great diversity to our diets!

……………………………….

The heat is well and truly here now. I had no idea New England was this hot and muggy in the summer. Growing up in Texas without A/C, one could be forgiven for thinking that Texas has the market cornered on HOT.  Alas, no…The garden however seems to be doing pretty well in spite of the heat and humidity. New appearances are being made seemingly on a daily basis as the season progresses. There are now tiny little squashes, cukes, and tomatoes scattered throughout the beds as well as the first flushes of green beans. There were some really large sweet annie plants that volunteered in the garden. I cut them down to ground level to give the aforementioned veggies some more space. Leaving the roots in the soil keeps the soil in place and allows everything below the ground that dies off to break down where it is thus keeping those nutrients in the garden.

I did make a mistake with my beans  by failing to write down which beds I planted which types of beans in. Some of the beans are for eating fresh like green beans and some of them are for drying like pinto beans. The problem is that they look an awful lot alike as they grow making it difficult to know which bean is which. I’ve at least narrowed down which ones are string-less and will eat those fresh. Hopefully I’ll end up with a good amount of dry beans anyway. I do know that next year, I’ll be a lot more careful about knowing for sure where I have planted different beans. Learning and growing–c’est la vie!

A  garden experiment that worked well was the planting of buckwheat as a cover crop. I chose it because it grows very quickly thus protects the soil as new seeds germinate. It also makes a good mulch. I let mine go completely to seed in some beds and only to flower in others depending on how tall the plants around it were. Either way, I cut rather than pulled the buckwheat and then placed the stalks around other plants as mulch. The buckwheat exemplifies the concept of ‘stacking functions’ that permaculturist use. Simply put, it means getting as many uses out of a design element (in this case buckwheat) as one can rather than just designing a system with many elements with only a single function. Hopefully, I’ll continue to have more successes in the garden and in finding ways to stack functions.

One of my mystery beans.

The first tomato!

The garden from above on 7/17/13 after clearing out the poke and sweet annie.

 

 

 

On the soil in my garden

Even though it was planted somewhat late, my garden is looking pretty good at the moment. Some of the plants look less thrifty than they perhaps could though. Being new to the area, I knew very little about the growing conditions that prevail around this area of Connecticut. The key to finding that out is to get one’s soil tested to know exactly what kind of growing medium is existent for the garden. Normally this is done prior to  planting anything so that the soil can be amended with any necessary nutrients, organic matter, and to alter the ph if needed. I did it after the fact of planting because I thought I would be gardening in a completely different place and only secured permission to dig up the landlady’s yard at an advanced date in the spring after the other plot fell through. In other words, I had to get stuff in the ground and hope for the best lest it get too late to plant.

I went to the Connecticut State Agricultural Extension Agency website to find out the procedure for submitting a soil sample for testing. Most states (and indeed many counties) have agricultural extension agencies that are a great source of information about all things garden, plant, orchard, or farm.  These offices are tax payer funded (and sadly often corporate funded as well) so submitting a sample is “free”.  The procedure I followed, which is pretty standard, was to get a small amount of soil from multiple spots throughout the garden beds, mix it all well and place in a bag with a seal. I chose to mail it to the office in New Haven and after a week I received the results.

The soil in Connecticut is often acidic according to the state’s soil test report and my garden’s soil is no different. I had previously asked at the local garden center if there was anything in particular that soil in Branford needed to be amended with. Unfortunately the store clerk failed to mention that soils here tend towards the acidic at that time. To bring up the ph of soil towards neutral (7.0) agricultural  lime is used, again typically prior to planting so that plants are in soil as close to neutral as possible (with a few exceptions, such as some types of berries that grow best in acidic soils).  My plants are planted fairly close together in often random ways to mimic nature, so it may be hard to get lime into the soil in the correct amounts at this point. I needed a more ‘gentle’ and fool-proof technique to neutralize my garden soil.

Compost is a good way to bring the soil into a better balanced ph and to help increase moisture retention in sandy soils like I have here. Unlike lime, it’s impossible to add too much compost to the soil.  It also helps with mineral deficiencies as well which my soil also has. The test also revealed a low amount of organic matter, a result of my digging up the turf and composting it and the owner’s former yard maintenance program of removing all leaves in the fall.  I shared the results of the test with the owner and fortunately she is receptive to doing things in a more holistic way such as building a compost pile and keeping the leaves here on site to replace lost nutrients into the soil. I built the compost pile without asking –sometimes its easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission. In this case, forgiveness was unnecessary, as she has already started to use it too instead of dumping her weeds off site. Little steps, BIG results!

I purchased two bags of compost made in Maine from lobster pieces. It is ph balanced and due to its constituent parts being full of chitin, it has a lot necessary minerals. Top dressing with compost is simply taking fully finished compost (hopefully from one’s own personal stash) and placing it all the way round the base of a plant. I top dressed all the plants in the gardens, except the tallest potatoes which are mounded with some of the inverted turf that was dug up to create the beds. In addition to top dressing with compost, I also added a mix of beneficial microbes that I purchased from a local organic garden center to a watering can and used it both as a foliar (applied to the leaves) and also watered it in around the roots of each plant. Lastly, I watered each bed to get the compost to soak into the soil a little. Hopefully these amendments will help the plants adapt to the acidic soil and will also bring the soil’s ph up towards neutral.

Soil testing is important as it helps the grower to know exactly what the soil needs and what is there in sufficient quantities already. Knowing this, we can prevent our watersheds from being polluted by agricultural/garden run-off of soil amendments (even organic ones can be a pollutant if too concentrated). Creating a compost pile closes an energy loop by keeping nutrients on site and allows for soil health and  fertility to be maintained in a sustainable way. It also reduces the amount of “wastes” that enter landfills and helps to foster biodiversity by providing a home and food for countless microbes, worms, and beneficial insects. It would be fantastic if municipalities or neighborhood associations made it mandatory to compost all plant based food scraps, unbleached cardboard, leaves, green wastes, and newspaper. What a huge difference that would make to our soils and watersheds!

Barefoot harvesting in the organic garden. Life is GREAT!

Pepper plant top dressed with lobster compost.

Cabbage seedling top dressed with compost.

Organic Plant Magic plant food with microbes. Those microscopic beings make a huge difference. Foster LIFE!