I’m beginning to believe my age. I don’t think I’m 27 any more, and I’ve earned the right to my opinions. I’m not willing to hide any more, ’cause, ya know, there ain’t all that much left.
Archive for September, 2009
Coming to terms with 54
26 September 2009The end is near
26 September 2009Dug 20 gallons of coffee grounds (plus a few peels and rinds) into the garden. Between now and freeze-up I want to dig as much as possible into the garden. With the nitrogen in the coffee grounds, all that will be well decomposed by the Spring.
I want to make a strong effort to harvest from the garden this weekend. I don’t want to be pulling an all-nighter the night before a freeze. We have carrots and potatoes in the ground (although the first freeze won’t hurt them), kidney beans, watermelons, peppers, stevia, etc. to get inside.
I’m also trying to figure out how to harvest my little patch of buckwheat. The seeds are maybe 60% brown, so I want to do it soon, but with the rain of the last week they’re pretty soft. I’m hoping to get a few days of sun, then I’ll just cut off the tops of the plants by hand and bring them under cover — maybe into the greenhouse — to finish drying.
There’s the amaranth also.
Update — Got most of the rest of the kidney beans inside and shelled. They’re in the dehydrator now. We have maybe a quart total. Again, I’m struck by the herculean effort that would be required to grow enough food for self-sufficiency. If we’d been paying attention (I barely knew there were kidney beans in the garden, since we never had a plan and M planted them), we would have gotten all those beans inside before the rain of the last week. We had a dry, warm month that must have left them in near-perfect harvest condition if we’d been paying attention. As it is, there’s a fair amount of mold going on.
Cut the seed heads off the amaranth and put them in the greenhouse to finish drying. I don’t think they’re going to get any better sitting outside, and I’m sure we’re losing more grain off the heads the longer they stay out there. I still don’t know exactly what to do to get the seeds off the heads, but at least they’re contained and in a dry place now.
Grapes
23 September 2009It was, apparently, a good year for grapes. Picked a lot of them today.
Used our new Roma Food Strainer and made grape juice out of about half of them. Don’t know what we’ll do with the rest yet.
Madison received about 3.63″ of rain yesterday, so our drought is officially over. That amount set the record for daily rainfall for any day in September in any year. The previous record was 3.4″ on Sept. 18, 1874.
Contextualizing Local vs Corporate Solutions
20 September 2009If you have to call someone you don’t know to get it done, that’s a corporate solution.
We believe in the illusion of reality manufactured by corporations, and most Americans have been doing so for generations. It’s no wonder that breaking free of that illusion is difficult.
I’m trying to break free of the corporate illusion of reality and find true reality. That is my life-long fascination with the basics: where food comes from, where our waste goes, how do we keep ourselves warm in the winter, what are the minimum and essential requirements of life — the fundamental truths of life. I’m at a point in my life when my beliefs are less flexible, and I’m returning to some of the things I recognized as truth 30 years ago.
For humans, part of our reality is language, written and spoken.
These days, virtually every human problem has both a local and a corporate solution. The local solution solves the problem for you. The main purpose of the corporate solution is to profit the corporation. It may also solve the problem for you, but will probably create other problems for you, for other humans, and for the planet.
All of us need to recognize that corporate solutions always create problems, and all of us need to go as far as we can towards solving our problems without any corporate involvement and as locally as we can. It’s not easy, it’s not something you learn how to do overnight, and it’s not something you put into effect overnight, but we all have to start. Corporate solutions always create problems, sometimes for you and sometimes for others. Choosing the corporate solution is always wrong.
What I mean by contextualizing the local solution is the process of incorporating local solutions into your everyday life and your every waking thought. I mean to destroy and abandon the corporate illusion of reality.
When you shop online, you are inevitably participating in the corporate illusion.
Think about satisfying your basic needs. You can always do that with local solutions. Consider the possibility that needs that can’t be satisfied locally are not really needs, but wants created in you by your participation in the corporate illusion of reality. It’s likely that satisfying those wants will not make you feel better, but will just lead you to more wants.
Prepping is finding a sustainable, local, non-corporate solution to the problem of survival for yourself and your family.
No Frost Yet!
19 September 2009We’ve had about a month of dry, warm weather. It’s been beautiful, although I’ve had to water whatever I want to stay alive. And we have not had our usual mid-September light frost, which was fortunate for my butternuts.
I’ve been digging coffee grounds into the garden as much as possible. They’ll be nicely decomposed by Spring.
Still have lots of potatoes in the ground, but they should keep there just fine as long as it stays dry.
Ending and Beginning 