Experiment updates

Garden- I’m not sure how to put it all to bed. I’ve sheet mulched in between the arms I cleared when I pulled out the black plastic. (I say “I”, but I had many people helping me.) I’m looking at my curved lines and thinking that I’ll try straight rows and beds next summer. So, for now, I’m either sheet mulching three-foot wide beds or turning some compost into three-foot wide beds. Then, I’m using clothing as sheet mulch in the places I intend for rows.

And what about all that sheet mulch? Well, I can really tell where there was mulch and where there was just some compost. The soil where there was sheet mulch is darker and full of worms. Things decomposed very thoroughly; I have found strands of thread attached to pockets. These would be all that’s left of pants and jeans I put in the garden. I guess those cotton pants have polyester thread and pockets. I will also say that I did not have to weed much in sheet mulched areas. I’ve been doing a final weeding as I clean out the beds, and the grass that spreads persistently under anything and everywhere has made an occasional foray into the garden, but it has not been able to establish itself and is easy to remove.

We have decided to have just one big garden next year, and that will be in the space to the north of the house. We’ll focus most of our gardening effort there and see what comes of it.

Even as I type that paragraph, I’m smiling. The thing is we should have a greenhouse ready for planting by the time we get the chickens out of it. And that will certainly be more garden space. And there is also the bed by the front door that did very well this year, and will most certainly be used again next year. I am thinking of making that more of a perennial bed, just as I plan to do in the bed behind the house. I keep thinking about grapes and whether we might be able to trellis them in such a way that they would shade the back of the house throughout the summer but let in light for the winter.

Maybe my perennial efforts should be on trees ad berries next year.

Speaking of berries, I really put the blueberries in a horrible place this year. It was the only place that had lush grass, so I thought they would like it. Well, guess what! Grass likes alkaline soil and blueberries have to have acidic soil. It must be the only alkaline soil on the place. So, come spring, I’ll be moving the surviving blueberries twenty to thirty feet east.

Hair washing and lotion- I think once a week is fine for hair washing if you plan on staying home, but if you want to wear your hair down or go to town, twice is a better choice. The soap is still working just fine. I’m pretty pleased with this experiment. Also, I’m the only one having any hair trouble; even the girls’ hair looks fine with less washing and no shampoo.

The humanure compost pile is not shrinking as fast as my reading suggested it would. That’s the thing about reading versus experience. I am making sure to get more nitrogen into the pile and that seems to be helping, but I’m not seeing how one pile could last a whole year. I’m either still getting the mix wrong or the writer I’ve trusted was overly optimistic. I will say there is no odor, so the mix can’t be too far off.

The pasture- We’ve moved our cow very persistently and we moved the chickens closely after her for most of the summer. Then we got tired and quit moving the chickens as much. We also realized that the chickens really do not like being moved. Our plan for next year is to have two groups of chickens, one behind the house and one up by the barn. The pasture already looks better in some places. In the really bad places, we’re waiting to see what spring brings. We still have the cow on pasture, but she is mostly eating hay. We might be able to move her through the pasture one more time before the snow prohibits it. The thing is that even though she’s not grazing, her poop is going where we need it. So, we distribute grass seed by haying her out in the field, and she deposits the fertilizer. Then, ideally, the chickens spread the fertilizer in their hunt for bug larvae.

Now to button up for winter.

Happy Anniversary

Fifteen years ago, Jason and I got married. There were the normal family dramas and the mix up with the bridesmaids’ dresses and all the false importance of each and every moment. But then, after a two-minute ceremony, we were married.

We had lived together for a few years at that point, and our finances were already joined and we had already had “The Fight” in which it was determined that we were in this in a forever kind of way. But the real dreaming did not start until after that day.

There’s the dream in which we open a cafe or a hostel, and we enjoy the life that passes through our doors. There’s the one where we somehow vanish into the wilderness and live on berries and love. There’s the one where we live in a funky loft apartment in an urban area. There’s also the one where we get some land and we figure out how to be farmers.

Tonight, as we sipped our cocoa and watched the moon rise with a thick ring of moisture and  talked about the weather, we toasted our anniversary. We celebrated this dream we’re living.

Then Jason said, “ What if we...,” and I knew I made the right choice so many years ago.

A Few Lessons about Chickens

1. Do not move their coop too far, even if it would work much better for your grazing plan. If you move it too far, and they cannot see it and you think they'll go there when they get ready to roost, you're wrong.

2. When your chickens cannot find their coop, they just might "roost" on the ground in the last place they remember it being. They might indeed be quite attached to the place their coop was the last time they slept in it.

3. An eight-pound cat can kill an almost grown rooster that comes close to outweighing the cat. That is, if the rooster has decided to roost on the ground because he couldn't find his coop.

4. It is REALLY unpleasant to look for chickens in the dark when it's raining.

5. Even if you have never had a predator problem, a chicken sleeping on the ground outside the electric fence MIGHT get eaten by a fox.

6. If you look at your ten-week-old meat birds who only waddle when they want to move anywhere and think you'll easily herd all 60 of them to a new spot across the road, you're in for trouble.

7. Even really fat meat birds can move fast when they are frightened of the strange surface of the road.

8. Yelling at your children because the meat birds are all over the place on the wrong side of the road will not actually get the chickens where you want them.

9. If you chase a meat bird until it's flapping its wings in fright, you'll be able to catch it sooner because it will get tired.

10. A fishing net is an excellent tool for catching chickens.

11. Once enough chickens are in the fence, the other chickens will want to join them, so you can just get some in the fence at a time. The others will follow.

12. It could actually take five people one-and-a-half hours to move 60 chickens 20 feet. You do the math.

How Did the "Plan" Work Out?

I started this growing season with many great theories and not much experience. For once, these theories still look pretty good after a little experience to try them out.

The sheet mulching worked well. I did have to weed some, but it did not take me hours and hours. As we begin to harvest and clear out the plants that have gone by, I can see how grass has crept in places. It's been a small matter to pull it out and plant my oat cover crop. On the other hand, our root crops did not like the sheet mulch much. There are places where the soil acted completely different from other places, and I cannot explain why. So, for now, I'll put in the cover crop and continue to sheet mulch the places that I just could not get to last year.

What I'm doing is this- The feed sacks are paper, and we get a couple of small newspapers weekly and we get a box now and then, and as these things are ready for the trash, I instead put them in the garden. I'm throwing the straw from our straw bale brooder on top of this.

One thing that was definitely a bad idea was putting the litter from the brooders straight into the garden paths. Maggots grew in that so fast and it smelled so horrible. Interestingly, just a sprinkle of compost over this bad idea made decomposition get going faster than the maggots and the problem was solved.

Another bad idea was working blood and bone meal into the bed I was planting onions in. I think we'll harvest about ten onions because the dogs really wanted to dig in that earth.

Other parts of the plan seem to be going pretty well. The lettuce bed by the front door has been weeded very well all summer, but I think I'll put a cherry tomato and Brandywine in it next year. The cherry tomatoes and Brandywines just did not get harvested from the garden the way they deserve. The perennials I planted in that bed also seem to have established themselves. On the other side of the walk, the raspberries and asparagus look great. I've gotten some Swiss chard and spinach from that one, too, but next year, I'll just fill in with flowers and leave the rest to the stars of that bed.

Planting the raspberries by the path to the front door was definitely questionable. They loll across the walk ready to catch hair, socks, and skin. I laugh at my folly for putting them there, but I might be the only one who finds it funny. I need to reconsider that part of the plan.

One of the gardens definitely did not get enough sun, even with the pine trees cut down. We'll peck away at that this winter once the leaves are off the trees. The three sisters garden got too little attention. I'm not sure what the answer is there, except that I did not like working in the tilled garden. It's very sunny in that spot and might perhaps be a good place for peppers, but I did not like all that sun and bare soil early in the season. Maybe I'll sheet mulch it once we get the beans and pumpkins out of it.

The herb bed did not get planted densely, but it has been a source of joy all summer. I'm thinking about completely filling it with sunflowers next year and just integrating the herbs into the big gardens. The sunflowers are just wonderful and I'm not sure if I could have too many. The few cutting flowers I planted also were a delight and I'll plant those again next year. The varieties I planted did well and survived despite the weeds that grew up in some of the beds.

The trees and berries have been a mixed bag. About a third of the blueberries died, and I'm told my source was the problem. A couple of trees died and four of the other berry plants died. Still, I have 9 apple tree saplings and 6 pears and 2 plums and a cherry and a dozen raspberries and some gooseberries and elderberries and high bush cranberries and currants and a maple and 2 locusts and 2 chestnuts and 2 hickories and a mulberry that lived. And that seems pretty dog gone good.

Also, I have had my doubts about planting trees in the pastures after I have heard repeatedly that I'm making a mistake. But as we come to the end of summer and the grass is drying out, I see how much healthier the grass is that's in the tree line. Right at the trees, the grass doesn't have much of a chance; there's too much shade. But, the trees I planted are scattered and the shade will not be dense. The trees will create a microclimate, helping keep the water in our sandy soil a little longer. They'll drop their leaves and improve the soil. I still think I did a good thing. Time will tell.

A Cow is Coming!

That's all!

My Bucket Has a Hole

When I laid out our sheet mulch last fall, I got tired, I got cold, and I cut corners. For example, I did not do the nitrogen layer that would make the decomposition go faster and there are places where I just mulched without a weed-suppressing underlayer. Now, it is time to plant in the garden, and I'm wondering what the results of my compromises will be. Whatever happens, last fall is completely gone and I'm well on my way to learning whether lazy/compromised sheet mulching will work in the garden.

This leads me to look at the ground in the stalled hoophouse. A more experienced person explained to me that we should not plan to plant in it until fall, and I was easy to convince. She also said if we want to plant in it in the fall, we should go ahead and sheet mulch to suppress the grass, because you just don't want grass in a hoophouse. Here comes the circle- I do not want Jason to have to work around the sheet mulching while he's building the hoophouse, so I want to wait until the frame is assembled. I do want a nitrogen layer in there before I put down the sheet mulch; that would be easily accomplished by having chickens "prepare" the ground a bit before I start to layer in other stuff. We can't have chickens until we have a chicken coop. The coop must be assembled, so work on the hoophouse has stalled out, so I cannot put down sheet mulch. It's not really a circle, but it feels just as addled.

And the watering has begun. This morning, it took just over an hour to water all the new plants and we go tomorrow to talk to the nice man about fruit trees. Maybe I'm growing cowardly, but as I was carrying my sixth or seventh 30 pound bucket of water this morning, I wondered if we aren't perhaps a little crazy to add 20 fruit trees to this watering regimen. I did establish yesterday that I can carry 60 pounds of water a quarter mile; however, I decided to find a gentler, slower method of moving water. Today, I hooked three water hoses together so that the blueberries and currants and gooseberries and the gardens can get their water straight from the tap. That only leaves 9 trees and 14 berry bushes to actually carry the water to- oh, and the 20 fruit trees.

Work

My first day as a bookshop employee found me staring at a huge wall of books that I was supposed to alphabetize. I naively asked, "All of them? You want me to touch EVERY book to be sure it's in the right order?" The answer was a definite yes.

The thing that stands out most for me from that day 16 years ago is that some things are just tedious but must be gotten through. It was a turning point in my attitudes about work. There have been many points along the way, but that one was significant.

Every day has its own list of things to do, as well as the old standbys (tooth brushing, dressing, bed making, cooking, cleaning, etc.). When my waking thought is dread about having to get dressed, then I am probably on a course for a rough day. These minutiae are work; many are habit and we forget the work necessary to make the habit. If I'm dreading the minutiae before I even sit up in bed, then how am I going to enjoy the bigger projects. Let's face it- those bigger projects are also work.

My lesson I brought from that day in the bookstore is that I can surrender to the task at hand and enjoy it. The quiet monotony of slipping a book over one space or up one shelf is very similar to pulling weeds from the lettuce bed or washing dishes or brushing Phaedra's hair. I can do it roughly with a scowl, I can do it half- heartedly with resignation, or I can do it with quiet satisfaction. I choose feeling satisfied over irritated or resigned, and since I get to choose how I feel, I just don't mind work. I even enjoy it.

What I did this weekend-
I planted (with a little help) 12 raspberries in a bed I cleared of ground cover, 3 rose bushes, 2 sugar maples, 1 mulberry tree, 8 elderberries, 2 high bush cranberries, 2 Juneberries, 2 nanny berries, 4 currant bushes, 4 gooseberries, 2 chestnut trees, 2 shagbark hickories, 2 honey locust trees, 20 blueberries, and a row of carrots.  It snowed on me a couple of hours Saturday and rained on me the whole rest of the time, but I'm mighty handy with a shovel these days!

Grinding the Gears

Let's say you finally are embracing a long time dream and let's just say that dream is homesteading. And let's say it's coming on spring in the first year of your little endeavor. And just for the heck of it, let's just say one of the two main partners has a major life change, like a new job, just as things are getting underway in that first spring in the long awaited dream of your homesteading life.

The gears might grind a bit, but you make it right on down the road just the same.

One Thing Is Working

When we moved here, there was no obvious place for a refrigerator. I thought this made an excellent time to try a cold box.

We have a defunct freezer in the entryway. It's pushed into the northern corner of the room in what used to be a closet.

We have two deep freezers that we would run with or without a refrigerator because of meat storage and other frozen foods, like berries and bone broth. We keep bottles of water in the deep freezer. In the summer, we take some of these frozen waters and put them in the cold box swapping them for the ones that were in there before. We do this two to three times a day.

In the winter, we had to be aware of whether certain foods were actually freezing out there. And now, in this in between time, I put bottles in there yesterday, and they are still quite frozen today.

We are careful to not let anything sit in there long and there has been some discussion of whether we should vent it somehow. So far, there is no odor except when something is missed.

It has also caused us to think carefully about what actually NEEDS refrigeration. Our eggs are only days from the hen that laid them, so we do not keep them in the cool box. Ketchup and mustard are full of vinegar, and we have had no spoilage with keeping them in a cupboard. Butter also just stays in a cupboard for the most part; we do pay close attention to be sure it isn't rancid.

We consider these things, because it is easier to keep track of more fragile food when there is not a lot of clutter in the cold box. I think this particular experiment is a success. Now, we want to figure out ways of keeping food that skip the freezer entirely; Jason is casting an eye at the spring for that.

The Miracle Worked Again

I put seeds into soil and less than a week later, little, tiny plants are poking out their wee heads.
These are peppers that I planted last Saturday. They are sitting on a warming mat close to the woodstove. I put plastic over them, too, to help keep them warm. Peppers like that.

This is the setup in the front window. There are starts for celeriac, leeks, broccoli, daisies, parsley, feverfew, lavender, and some other flowers.

And these are the little broccolis and there are little leeks, too.

Outside, when we got home last week, these were poking out of the snow. Phaedra took this picture yesterday. These are snowdrops, the first flowers of spring, as far as I know. They are very exciting.

Preparing for the Trip

We leave day after tomorrow for Texas, and the plans are well underway. Elmer will go with Jason to work for the next two weeks so that he will not be lonely. Many thanks to Temple Grandin for helping me convince him of this necessity. Doby the budgerigar will go to a friend's house tomorrow, the same friend Elmer will stay with when Jason joins us in Texas (Many thanks, Friend!). Another friend will tend the cats when Jason leaves.

Jason is making scones for breakfast tomorrow morning so that we can take the leftovers with us Sunday morning. The plan is to leave very early (6:00?) Sunday morning and arrive in Cincinnati Sunday night along this route. It will be a long day but it will be worth it to not have to deal with a motel and then getting back in the car the next morning. Then, we'll spend Monday in Cincinnati recuperating and gearing up for another day of driving. I hope the weather is fine and we go to one of the many superb parks Cincinnati has to offer. But, there is also a truly awesome museum with a children's section that works for everyone from little Oliver to big Ezra. That would be a fine place to spend the day.

Then, Tuesday morning bright and early, we hit the road again. This time my goal is to make it to Gina's house this way. It will be another really long day, but then we'll be in Texas and the fun can begin.

Being Right

I will admit that I like to be right; I like the superior feeling I get from knowing I'm better than you. The trouble comes when I meet someone more right than me or someone who is right in a way I used to be. And the older I get, the more people I meet who indeed seem at least as "right" as I am and often, even more right.

Confronted repeatedly with this evidence, I spend many hours, like as I am trying to go to sleep or when I am driving alone in the car, puzzling out how I can be right and someone else can be right and we are not doing things at all the same. How can I be right to use a homeschool curriculum and my unschooling friends be right in their fluid days? How can I reasonably argue that I'm right to feed my pets a raw diet when the pets of my childhood ate really cheap kibble and lived to their dotage? How can I be as uptight as I am about food and not strive to be as uptight as my even more uptight friends? If they are more right, why am I not trying to do the same thing they're doing? How can my very amorphous beliefs regarding god and the universe seem so very right when so many people I love might fret over my salvation? How can I commit myself so entirely to homeschooling in the face of my quite strong belief that it almost doesn't matter how school happens? How can I claim any superiority?

The Truth, as I see it, is I cannot.

I can only live in my skin and make decisions from behind my own eyes. And while I love to hear how other people do things and how they got to that point, it does not mean it will change my mind. I also love to talk about how I got to where I am in my thinking and doing, but I've given up on claiming I know what I'm doing. I try to serve my opinions with a heavy dose of my own doubt. I love the saying, "Your mileage may vary," because it's so complete. It helps me remember how much nicer life is when I am not superior, when I am just open to what comes my way.

Food

As I have been preparing for our upcoming trip to Texas I've been pondering the best way to deal with the trip and the food around a trip. I have driven to Cincinnati a couple of times by myself with the children, and one of those times, we did pretty well for food and the other time, not so good.

So, this morning, I said to the children "We are not stopping for any fast food on our way to Texas." They all said, "YEA! No junky food!" (This is proof that my brainwashing is working.) Then I said, "Let's think of things we might like to have that would make the trip more bearable and maybe feel more like a treat."

Ezra said "May we have oranges?" Affirmative.

Phaedra said, "May we have O's?" Affirmative. (O's are the Heritage O's you can sometimes find in bulk.)

Sylvie asked if we could eat at Cracker Barrel. Maybe for breakfast, but no junk from the "gift" shop.

After I mentioned having individual yogurts instead of our standard milkshake-for-the-road and one IZZE per day, they got giddy. They have all picked which flavor of which they'll have, and everyone agreed that hummus and chips and bread and cheese would be fine as long as we have the oranges. There was a request for trailmix and another for nuts.

I might get a strong yearning for a coke around Buffalo and Little Rock, but I have the children to keep me on this path, I guess.

How Many Trees Can I Water?

Let's pretend the next few things are limitless: time, water, and my awesome strength. In that pretend place, I could plant as many trees as we can currently imagine wanting. Here's the math that makes me question just how many trees I can plant.

If each tree needs 5 gallons of water every day for 4 to 6 weeks and that much water 2 to 3 times a week throughout the first season, and maybe all of the second season, too, that's a lot of water even for just one tree.

My friend has a pond and she fills buckets at her pond and then hauls the filled buckets to her trees. It is admittedly difficult work, but it's pretty darn quick to fill a five gallon bucket from the edge of a pond. I would have to stand at the hose filling my imaginary bucket. Oh, and I should mention that my hose water passes through my pressure tank. I could also use the frost free hydrant (much better choice). It is still going to take some time to fill the five gallon bucket.

Then I have to haul the bucket to the trees. Yes, I could run that hose out to the trees, but that would take yards and yards of hose and we would probably have questionable pressure, making the filling of the bucket still slower. I also have not investigated the frost free hydrant, and I know next to nothing (at the moment) about such things, so I do not know if a hose can be connected to it. Definitely worth investigating.

This year, I only want to plant twenty fruit trees, five "shade" trees, 40 hazel bushes, and 26 berry bushes. Then there's the two big gardens and various other garden spots around the house. Let's pretend again for a second that I plant all those trees and bushes and that the garden will not ever need water. Let's also remember that one gallon of water weighs roughly 8 pounds. Each of those 91 trees and bushes would take 40 pounds of water a day for the first 4 to 6 weeks, hauled somehow by me and the children. That equals 3640 pounds of water a day. I'm pretty sure that my plans are a bit grandiose.

Security and Resiliency

I've saved this one for last because it was overwhelming both in scope and content. The presenter was Ben Falk of Whole Systems Design but the workshop was not specifically about permaculture.

Instead, he started with a list of catastrophic things that could happen, touching briefly probability (alien invasion vs. pandemic). Then he began covering a list of items and skills you might want in place in such an event.

Some things were obvious, like hand tools and the knowledge of how to use them. Other things would not have immediately come to my mind, like gravity fed water.

I feel like he tried to stay relatively light, but his topic was naturally a bit depressing and scary. My sense of "hurry, hurry" to learn how to grow a variety of food and to enmesh myself in my new community is heightened. I want to have a small generator on hand. I want to be somewhat comfortable with a gun. I want to know how to take care of cows and find a resource for hay.  I want to get fruit trees planted and get the pines down. I want to plant some trees that can be coppiced for firewood. And so on. I do not even enjoy reporting on this seminar, but I think it was important.

Trees as Agriculture

The second seminar I attended on Saturday was on agroforestry. I am interested in this for some of more open spaces- not to turn them into woods, but to use them in a variety of ways in different spaces. This presentation was a little frustrating because there were two presenters, not one, and in allowing one another to talk, they covered less ground and left less time for questions.

However, I have a better understanding of coppicing, the ways trees may be used for fodder, and how to do hedge laying. I got a few more insights regarding species that do well in Vermont for these various uses.

My long term goal is to strategically plant trees in this field to provide some shade and fodder to animals while also increasing fertility through leaf fall.

We would also like some wind break here. The pines must come down, and they are not a good windbreak anyway. If we could incorporate some other trees into the line of the apple trees moving left of this picture and then curve around, the house would be better sheltered from prevailing winds. Ideally, these would be a combination of fruit and nut bearing trees and hedges. We have to pick carefully, because we do not want to strongly shade the area. But even any garden space we put inside the windbreak would do better with a bit of shelter.

We could lay hedge along the contour visible in the top picture, partly a living fence, and also as a lower bit of windbreak.

The main place I want it is along this field on the left side. We want this field for pasture and we will put woven wire fence around it. Because the ATV trail runs along the left border of this field, we intended to do some denser plantings and it seems a good place to teach ourselves (or fail at) hedge laying.

Off on My Own

Bright and early, just as the sun was coming up, I was headed east down 15. It was really beautiful this morning; the temperature was below zero and the sky was partly clear. The light looks somehow crisp and fragile on mornings like that. Then, as if hiding from the cold light, little errant wisps of clouds were tucked into the shadows of hills. By the time I was on 2, past Danville, the White Mountains were aglow. I somehow managed to stay on the road and make it to the Vermont Grazers Conference before things got underway.

It was a good day and I learned many new things. The most informative was a presentation by a fellow out of Jericho. He was explaining the benefits of raising beef and poultry on the same pasture, the poultry following the beef. He was clear and seemed very certain of why he was doing what he does. It made buying a cow this year seem a bit less crazy.

There was an ice cream social at the end with local, organic ice cream, but I was too ready to be home to mill around with a bunch of strangers. I had had lunch with the group, and it was a nice lunch, also made primarily of local foods. However, I kept thinking we looked like animals in a confinement operation, so I skipped the ice cream and headed home to tell my little group of people all the things I learned.

Seeds and great resources

My first batch of seeds arrived today (Thursday), which was quite a surprise since Jason and I only placed the order Tuesday night. It's the cover crops, legume inoculant, and biodynamic calendar. Now, I just need to learn what to do with these things. Some of the cover crop will go in the garden in the fall to provide soil building for next year; the others are for trying to improve the places we plan on pasturing. The current thought is to put chickens in this field this year while planting a soil builder (oats, peas, vetch) behind them. Depending on how it goes, we would then let them eat it later. Not sure if that will actually work, but I feel certain the chickens plus the plant diversity will improve things at least a little. Then, we want to put berries here (5 year plan?) with room between the rows to move a chicken tractor.

The back field will be pasture with maybe strawberries on this south facing slope slightly above the wider field. This year, we will experiment a bit with seeing how winter rye grows back here.  Also, we plan on putting a few trees or doing some planting of "alleys" between paddock areas. The middle of this field needs something to help the soil, and if we are certain (at least as certain as we can be) that we will not want this for anything but animals, there are distinct advantages to putting trees back here.

I'm getting very excited.  And adding to that excitement is the upcoming NOFA conference and this weekend's Grazing and Livestock Conference. I feel embarrassed somehow to go to these because I know so little, but that's also the best reason to go.  Maybe I'll learn some things to prevent a some phenomenal errors.

Birds and snakes and airplanes, Lenny Bruce is not afraid

Jason called on one of his overnights in Williston this week to ask just exactly what we'll do if the economy collapses.  He really devotes quite a bit of time to this dilemma. I think some about it, but I'm much more likely to just do something, for better or worse.

I actually am coming to hate this question. However, it's worth some reflection.

I will feel much less distressed by the topic once we have successfully grown food enough to feed ourselves.  I will feel even better when we have a cow, some chickens, a fence, a small barn, and some knowledge of how to better deal with human waste. Our water supply is not dependent on electricity or oil, but I will feel better when we have it better maintained and we have a clearer understanding of how it comes from the hill to the house.

None of these things is a waste of time even if the economy and the rest of the world continue to merrily roll along. All are things I have wanted for a long time, separate from the worries of the day. The sense of urgency is a bit oppressive.

I'm the one with a plan.

It may be a bad plan or it may completely fall to pieces in the face of reality, but I have a starting point.

I spent six hours yesterday and Saturday assembling a seed order from Fedco.  I kept thinking about the amount of garden we have available and how much is "ready", and I worried I was selecting too many things.  Then I remembered that I'm trying permaculture, so it does not all have to fit in the garden.  Maybe the peppers can go in a bed along the southwest house wall where they will be warmer.  Maybe all the peas and beans can be trellised by the garden shed and woodshed.  The morning glories can definitely go by the garage door (OH! How I love morning glories!) The potatoes and tomatoes do not have ideal homes this year, but we can pick their home for next year and plant it in a soil building cover crop.  The winter squashes (especially the ones for fodder) can be planted down by the chicken field in that especially rich bit of soil by the decrepit barn.  Maybe next year I can try a melon or two.  Surely we have room for the onions I'd like to grow.  The herbs will be tucked just by this door in a bed I've already prepared. I'll let the kids plant most of the flowers. See- it will all work out.

Now, I have to figure out where to start all the things that would benefit from a head start.