There was frozen dew on the windshield of the car this morning, but none of the garden plants seem to have been touched by frost, so I guess I’d call that a very very light frost.
Yesterday I picked a watermelon from the garden, and we had it for desert after dinner tonight. Yellow flesh, not too juicy, not overly sweet, but good.
Also picked another bunch of red peppers and put them in the drier yesterday.
Also picked all the stevia and put it in a paper bag in the greenhouse.
First fire of the season in the woodstove today.
Menards, one of our local home-improvement stores, is advertising a woodstove for $195, this one. I like the design of it, where you put logs in end-first, because it will take logs up to 27″ long, which would mean quite a bit less cutting of wood compared to the 16″ limit on our Intrepid II. AND, for $195, I could buy 5 or 6 of them for what we paid for ours.
But here’s what that stove’s manufacturer says about the stove meeting EPA requirements: “Vogelzang stoves meet EPA requirements for “exempt” wood/coal burning appliances (stoves).” Which means that it’s exempt from the EPA requirements and so meets no standards whatsoever. Weird.
It turns out that the EPA has these odd standards for which stoves require certification and which don’t. The stove for sale at my local Menards should be required to meet the EPA certification requirements. People are going to buy that stove and put it in their house to heat with, in other words, they’re going to use it just like I use mine. But because the EPA leaves these loopholes, it doesn’t have to meet any standards at all: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/resources/publications/monitoring/caa/woodstoves/exemptwood.pdf
I guess I should be happy about limits to government regulation, but it’s still pretty odd….
I keep coming back to this same idea, sometimes it takes me weeks or months, but I always come back to it: the time spent reading about how financial/climate/peak oil doom is right around the corner is time wasted. What possible good can it do you? You’re not going to pick up on some late-breaking news story that will help you survive the apocalypse. Last-minute prep is not really possible except in a very very limited sense. You have to be living a local, sustainable lifestyle that won’t notice when the outside world goes to hell. You have to be ready all the time, because when and if a fast crash goes down, no more preparation will be possible.
I love reading blogs, but doomer blogs are a waste of time. And there are dozens of blogs that talk about people’s struggles to attain the kind of lifestyle I’m working to attain, blogs that can inspire and teach me.
And yet…I keep drifting back to the doom and gloom. Yes, there’s a part of me that wants to be told how bad it’s getting and how awful it’s going to be. And there’s a part of me that wants society to fail, that wants the world to return to a simpler, more honest place. I want all the investment bankers and other cheaters and smart guys to fail miserably. I want farming to be a high-status occupation. I want the world to be set right, and I think the way it is now is wrong in thousands of different ways.
Yes, I think I want all that, even though, truth be told, the chances of me successfully shepherding my family through that kind of breakdown are slight.
I’m hoping that writing this out and acknowledging that part of me wants the world to change in a dramatic way will help me to focus my energy, work on what is possible, and stop wasting time on doomer blogs. We’ll see.
Cut up and split some of the oak firewood that was too bit to fit in our stove, also some of the elm and maple from around the yard. Carried it with the wheelbarrow down to the greenhouse (aka solar kiln) and stacked it up high. It should finish drying there within the next couple of months.
Brought the sawbuck back into the greenhouse to dry it out so it doesn’t rot.
Our big white pine on the East side of the yard shed all its brown needles in the wind last night, so it’s looking all new and sparkling in today’s occasional sunshine. Raked up a bunch of the needles with help from G and D and dumped them in the garden. I’m not worried about occasional additions of pine needles making the soil too acid.
M picked a bunch of cherry tomatoes.
Yesterday, I cooked up a bunch of collards and kale in butter along with some ham and turkey spam and one of our red peppers in a frying pan on the stove. It was awesome. I’m finally figuring out how to cook and enjoy collards.
Dug up another row of potatoes today — 2 down, 3 to go. The end result is quite disappointing, don’t even want to think about the ratio between pounds planted and pounds harvested. But I did just throw them on top of the sod, so I can’t complain.
Cut the heads off all the buckwheat today and put them in two paper bags and put them in the greenhouse. A cold front is coming through this evening accompanied by strong winds and some rain, so I figured they might be laying down on the ground by tomorrow. Need to pay attention to them and spread them out if possible to get them dried.
Still no frost predicted.
Ending and Beginning 