I mentioned in an earlier post that we’re saving seeds from a couple of pumpkins, one home-grown, one purchased. It occurred to me today that although I’m fairly confident the seed from the pumpkin grown at home will reproduce the same pumpkin (by virtue of the fact that we didn’t grow anything it could cross with, and it’s unlikely our neighbors did), I don’t know anything about the location where the store-bought pumpkin was grown and it’s possible it has crossed with something else. Only growing the seeds will tell us for sure, so we’ll keep an eye on it and try not to be surprised by whatever it produces.
Archive for October 18th, 2009
Saving Seeds
18 October 2009More Gardening!
18 October 2009Today, I:
- wrapped the three pear/plum trees with anti-rabbit fencing.
- weighed down the bottom of the green snow fencing around the hazelnuts with a section of pipe to keep them from getting blown over in the winter
- planted the daffodils dug up from the vegetable garden last summer in between most of the arbor vitaes between the house and the road
- dug ten gallons of coffee grounds into the garden
- stripped the dry leaves off one of the stevia plants that has been drying in the greenhouse for the last few weeks and packed them into a quart jar
- put the onions in the basement in a cardboard box to make room for the butternut, which I moved from the greenhouse to the basement (from what I’ve read, the butternuts would probably do better up in the house, but I haven’t figured out where I would put them — the obvious place is the shelves in the dining room, but they’re full)
- ate a fantastic meal of collards and cut-up pork roast cooked together by M. Man, I can’t even begin to describe how good that is
Progress
18 October 2009One hundred years ago, progress was always good. It meant more leisure, less pain, less work, longer lives, and more ease and comfort.
But sometime in the last century, many of us began to realize that progress was not what it used to be. We began to see that progress was a double-edged sword. We began to understand that progress for some meant more hardship for other people, or harm to the planet, or even detriment to the individual who is supposedly the beneficiary of the progress; in other words, we began to realize that the American version of progress is never wholly good. And so the idea of progress today is much more complicated than it was in 1909.
In 2009, progress might mean giving up some of our trinkets and baubles and comforts and food in order to lead a more rigorous, austere, but meaningful life.
Change
18 October 2009Change is always happening; all that changes is the rate of change. We live in a world today that is different from the world of a decade or year or month ago.
So when we talk about the TEOTWAWKI, we’re talking about dramatic changes to the world that make us realize change has occurred, that things are not the way they used to be. For most of us over 50, comparing our lives and the world today to our lives and the world of our childhood, it’s already the end of the world as we knew it. If we could somehow compare those two editions of the world side by side, the changes would be dramatic.
But for most of us, TEOTWAWKI means dramatic changes in a short period of time — the changes of the last 40 or 50 years, for example, compressed into 5 or fewer years. And I don’t know if that will ever happen. It may be that the truly dramatic changes most of us expect in the near future will never reach the critical level to shock people into calling the end of the world as we know it.
I think for most of us, the end result of most of the changes happening in the world today will be a return to ordinary human poverty. There will probably not be any cataclysmic world-wide events that will release the zombies, it will be more like a gradual, uneven slide down into the poverty that has characterized most of human existence. And if it’s gradual enough, we may not even recognize what’s happening. The wealth of the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be nothing more than a distant memory — for most, a myth.
Ending and Beginning 