Archive for July, 2019
Spidey Sense
23 July 2019Before the Storm 7/20/2019
20 July 2019
Too Busy
6 July 2019What keeps us too busy? Our jobs, our lives, taking the kids to soccer practice, making money to buy all the extras in life that we think we need. Making money is behind most things that we do, that and preparing our children to follow in our footsteps.
Is it a conspiracy? Sort of. I don’t think that some secret group sat down and decided to make us all wage-slaves by addicting us to the pleasures of the consumer culture. But employees who are not too aware of the evil things done on their behalf around the world are preferable to employees who are politically active and take the time to understand the consequences of their actions. Citizens who are satisfied by consumerism are preferable (from the perspective of the government) to citizens who are asking if there is more to life than the culture of consumption and making enough money to pay for it.
Too many of us are…
- Too focused on career and family to think about our place in the world, what our country stands for, what our country is doing so we can enjoy cheap gas and cheap food.
- Too busy to think about where our food comes from.
- Too busy to make good food choices.
- Too busy to learn the difference between good food and bad food.
- Too busy to learn that the food choices we make affect the way other people live in other parts of the world and the whole world’s environment.
- Too busy to care that watching mainstream news for 30 minutes does not make you well-informed.
I confess that I’ve rarely been that busy. I’ve always taken time when I wanted to and never been obsessed with winning the rat race…or even entering the rat race. If I had, I would have accomplished much more than I have in common cultural terms.
Of course I’m busy now, with two kids and a full-time job and getting ready to be poor.
Grass and Clover
6 July 2019I’m continuing to bag grass clippings from the back yard and put them in between rows/hills in the garden. I should have been doing this for years, but didn’t have a bagger on the old gas mower (drowned in the flood). Our new Ego battery-powered mower (which I love) came with a bagger.
The back yard needs nutrients removed from it because of the chicken poop that’s constantly being spread. The front yard has much less chicken activity, so we mulch the clippings up there to keep the lawn healthy.
We have a lot of white clover in the lawn, which, in my humble opinion, is a good thing. It’s not grass, so it’s not desirable from your typical lawn nazi’s perspective, but monocultures are abnormal and can only be maintained with a lot of work and/or herbicides. And clover is a legume, so should be fixing N and improving the soil. You never know when you’ll have to dig up your lawn and plant something for people to eat.
I seem to recall that I had a bag of white clover seed and broadcast it in the lawn at some point…but I don’t remember any details beyond that. Anyway, that was years ago, and it’s well-established now. I’ve read that white clover plants only live a few years, so you have to be sure you let it go to seed to maintain it in your lawn, which means not mowing it until it’s done flowering and setting seed. A higher mowing height also helps with this.
There was an area of the lawn that had a wood pile on it last summer that killed almost everything. It was still very bare a couple of months ago. Now, it’s got a good stand of clover on it (plus various other weeds and grasses), so that clover clearly got seeded from somewhere.
Anyway, I love our lawn. It looks great, and is a healthy and diverse ecosystem containing several kinds of edible plants (including clover 🍀). And, unlike many other pesticide- and herbicide-laced local lawns I could name, it could be converted into a garden virtually overnight.
Ending and Beginning 