Help turn around one of the hugest misinformation campaigns ever perpetrated against this country.  Hemp is an incredibly useful product that we now must import because of an archaic and absurd ban that the chemical, synthetic fiber, plastics, and timber industries helped to push upon us decades ago.  Lifting this ban could do amazing things for our economy.  We can get educated and turn the tides–find an event near you. Or, learn something new, that is in fact VERY old.

Self-sufficiency being the goal of the homesteader, it would seem we have crossed our first little milestone.  We’ve been here going on 14 months and since living sustainably and off-the-grid as far as energy, water, waste and transportation are such far-reaching and challenging goals, we have focused first on the food.

Saturday night was the closest we’ve come to a truly local meal, with 75% of it coming from these 55 acres.  Soups and stews have long been my specialty, and this one was the best I’ve ever made.   Since last week I was as irritated and frustrated as a caged up ‘coon, for a change of pace this week I’d like to share this little success story with my fabulous new recipe and a few fun photos.  Bon Appétit!

Homestead Stew

From the forest:  Leftover roast deer and leftover wild pig BBQ short ribs deboned and cut into chunks

From the garden:  onions, new potatoes, fennel, turnips, Greek oregano, French tarragon, German thyme, banana peppers (still frozen from last summer’s harvest!)

From the store:  several slices bacon (will make our own someday, but that’s not an easy one), 1 cup red wine (ditto on the wine) , celery (requires advanced gardening skills, I’ll get there though), salt & pepper (no hope there)

Chop the bacon and sauté with the diced onion, celery and peppers.  Add the chopped new potatoes, fennel and turnips.  Deglaze the pan with the wine, add the herbs and leftover meats, and cover with water or stock.  Et voilá, 20 minutes later a truly delicious stew.

For his Mother’s Day handy hubby made a fabulous berry cobbler from the last of the frozen dew berries picked last spring, because it’s time to fill the freezers back up again with this year’s crop!  And I can’t wait for those free-range, farm fresh eggs!!

Finally the cricket and grasshoper population is under control in the garden!

In the kitchen garden: spring lettuce mix, Cinnamon, Thai and Sweet basil, French tarragon, Greek oregano, German thyme, cilantro, mint, lavender, sage

Growing fine: several varieties of corn, tomatoes, beans, peas, summer and winter squash, potatoes, onions, melon, peppers

Born Free!

Happier chickens are tastier chickens!

Variety is the spice of life. To each his own. These are great old proverbs that seem to be losing their weight even as we attempt to hype-up modern buzz words like diversity and tolerance.   “Blue doesn’t make a rainbow,” handy hubby cleverly adds, as he shakes up a 10 pound bag of 4 bean varieties to throw willy-nilly into the field,  and so perfectly punctuates my point.   I need to know, who else is tired of the homogenization of this country and the world?

I realize this has been happening for some time, but I for one am really annoyed with it.  A Youtube video forwarded by an RPCV friend, among a few other things, has my feathers ruffled this week.  In case you don’t have time to take a quick peek, it’s a Czech pop group dressed like American gang-bangers singing  some Ragga jungle mish-mash on a beach in Mexico.  When it comes to this video, all I gotta say is:  Synthesis does not quality make, nor does it define originality, which is the true measure of creative talent, not to mention the only thing that deserves to have any real value to the public.

In the farmer’s world creating a synthesized monoculture may have worked for us, for a while, but we see now  we should have listened to those few wise and truly creative dissenting voices like Sir Albert Howard and J.I Rodale who worked their lives away in order to buck the system and predicted long ago such industrial crop calamities as soil erosion and mineral depletion.

I used to think at least in this country, if not the Western world, we valued both creativity and the individual, but it seems the opposite is happening all around me:  the further homogenization of food, and integration of cultures, and reduction of language, and simplification of education, and elevation of mediocrity,  and especially the pathetic political correctness that has us all talking the talk of the PR agent.  Instead of the individual trying to find their own unique voice, the world is flooded with sheeple all trying to bellow the loudest.  When the music becomes all the same, the fashion all the same, the food all the same, the thoughts all the same, the cultures all the same, I guess then we’ll finally be able to focus on fixing all those dreadful languages too.

And speaking of languages, what’s happening to our own?  An article about Twitter I read not too long ago comes to mind about the dismal reduction of language and social interaction.  I know some shiny-toothed, syrupy-tongued, plastic people who are offended by any sentence that does not have a smiley-faced emoticon attached to it.  I don’t even care if everyone in this country speaks English, just speak your own language well, and hopefully with individual color.  In the meantime, it wouldn’t do us any harm to become multi-lingual, and therefore truly multicultural, but we can’t even be bothered to learn the language of our neighbors.  I say let’s try it, if for no other reason than to prove we’re not as dumb as the rest of the world thinks we are.

But what I really wanna know is, are there are so few truly inventive people out there because, while we purport to value diversity and tolerance, we simultaneously continue to over-value monoculture in our lands, our schools, our governments, and our cultures?  We really don’t need more integration, that just leads to a new strain of homogenization.  What we really need is polyculture and the balls to handle real diversity.

And what about these absurd, useless regulations, like one I heard of recently in a NYC restaurant about a chef who dared to serve homemade cheese made from his wife’s breast milk.  The Department of Health decided human breast milk cheese is not suitable for the human adult.  Good grief, but the milk of every other mammal is suitable?  If those folks want to eat momma’s milk cheese over cow’s milk cheese, who the hell cares?  Let people do their thing, for goodness sake!

Monoculture might be convenient, homogeneous might be safe, but it’s already proven itself to be unsustainable in every way.  Do we really want to regulate, integrate, placate and suffocate the entire world into one bland boring pre-wrapped slice of American cheese?

Dare To Dissent, Sheeple!

A year has now passed and I’ve decided it’s high time to praise all our successes here. Mom, who was our first visitor a year ago and so was one of the very few to get the full before and after perspective, has recently visited, and she said we should be very proud.   Of course, I always obey mother.

I’ve complained continually about the huge learning curve in gardening, and all the other failures, but today it’s suddenly clear to me that after one year we’re like practically old farm hands.  Last year 8 chicks lasted about a week, this year 35 chicks are still here after one month.  They are as happy in their magnificent home as our pup is in his pond, and are already successfully free ranging.  This month handy hubby, the great protector, has had to kill two raccoons, one possum, and two copperheads to ensure their continued safety.

This gardening thing is such a breeze, I’ve obviously got it down pat.  The transplants that went in a month ago, after having barely developed in their half toilet paper rolls, are now thriving.  Transplanting those measly things seemed a hopeless endeavor and took the hands of a surgeon, so I am clearly on the path to Master Gardener status.  No actually, let’s just say I am already there.  The tomatoes, zucchini, and watermelon that reseeded themselves in the corn and pea patch, I meant to do that.  Really!  I’m taking credit for everything, even the regular rain and constant sunshine.  Why not?  Last year I felt responsible for all the failures–the drought, the insects, the voles and every other critter–so now that there are successes, I say I deserve to take credit for those too.  Oh I know what you’re thinking, don’t weigh your produce before the harvest.  But what the hell, I’m feeling so good I’ll make a wager with you, in one month’s time will begin a summer-long harvest that will rival the produce section of Whole Foods, with so much surplus I’ll be cursing that I’m so damn good.

Best of all, I haven’t had one single case of poison ivy.  Last year at this time I had already had three huge rashes.  But after all the screaming, and scratching, and spraying, and pulling, and even burning, what was once poison ivy paradise is now a lovely flower garden, half annual, half perennial.   The birds are happy, the pup is happy, the garden is happy, handy hubby is happy, so damn it, I’m jumping on that happy train too.  This place is looking ship shape, so Mom you are so right again, it’s time to pump up the proud!

Some folks think what we’re doing out here is really out there, so I thought I could put things into some perspective.  Extremes exist even among the extremists– the hardcore homesteaders, the survivalists, the simplicity freaks–but the bar is moving even lower these days.  Restaurant chefs in big cities are buying into the trend to go low big time, some of them even planting their own kitchen gardens and requiring their menus come from within 30 miles.  Now that lowering our carbon footprint is an international movement, (being manipulated of course by advertisers to sell new products) I’ll bet within a few years even the craziest of the crazy won’t be considered that crazy anymore.

So I’d like to share some stories of folks who have led the pack in low, even when they might not have meant to do that.  My first fascination with self-reliance was observing the Czechs and their various skills during my Peace Corps service, talk about a low carbon footprint, they hardly even produced any garbage in the home!  But it was not until a few years later, when I was interviewing a young Czech man for my first novel, that I really witnessed low.  His name was Petr, a buff and handsome 20-something who was a reenactor.

Maybe you don’t know what that is.  It’s a troupe of amateur actors and history buffs who sometimes travel and work at castles recreating scenes and skills for tourists.  Most of the time they do it for free, much of the time they don’t even have an audience.

He took us to his “camp,” a few acres among lovely rolling fields and meadows where he and a dozen others practiced their various trades:  pottery, metal work, old school carpentry, savory dishes cooked underground or over fire, and of course the crowd-pleasing skills of swordsmanship and archery.  It was one of the most far-out things I’d ever witnessed first-hand and relatively sober.  This small group of folks, who had full-time day jobs as bank clerks and secretaries, and school teachers, chose to spend their entire weekends and vacations there, way out in the sticks, doing everything exactly as it would have been done in pre-Medieval times.  There were no motors or electricity or plumbing, all the structures were built by them with tools replicated from the period.  It was as authentic as could ever be imagined by an American–the needle to mend their boots was carved from bone, the thread was home-spun, the boots themselves were cut from leather tanned and fashioned themselves.  They bragged that one pair of boots had taken months to produce, and they had only the one pair to show for it, several others having been total failures.  I have never seen such pride in achievements in my life, not before or since, nor have I been among a happier group of 20-somethings.  They had no clue about carbon, these guys were doing it just for kicks!

There are also the hardcore homesteaders and survivalists I read about and DO NOT envy one little bit.  The ones who refuse fridge and freezer top the list (Hello, how do you keep your vodka and paté chilled?!).  There are others out there who live without electricity altogether (So how on earth do you connect to the WWW?!) NO thanks!  I will never be one of these hard core types.

But there are other ideas out there that sound crazy that I am dying to try, like the composting toilet.  I’ve been researching this one and can’t wait to share all that crap with you here (hehe).   I’m willing to try just about anything, but I know myself pretty well, the only kind of homesteader I can really aspire to becoming would be of the somewhat spoiled diva variety, except I think I might be the only one.   I would love no motors, but how would the work get done?  I would love handmade tools, but who the hell would make them?   We will try milling our own lumber and growing and grinding our own heirloom wheat someday, but for now, it’s still baby steps.  Thank heavens.

Reenactor Petr trying to teach me some skills

Our dog Papi hated lettuce, until we started feeding it to the chicks.  Suddenly it seems to be among his favorite snacks, when he can steal it from them.  In the kitchen he still doesn’t like it.  This makes me consider once again the nature of our natures and I’m reminded of the parable about the frog and the scorpion.

I’ve always hated this tale, because while I feel I’m perpetually playing the frog, others mistake me often for the scorpion.  Being convinced that I am the frog is not because I have delusions that we are not all self-interested beings.  I know, for better or worse, it is what has allowed us to thrive– the dog, as much as the frog, or the man, or the plant.  I know I’m the frog because I have always been gullible, the scurvy of the optimist.   I’ve always been over-ready to allow words or appearances to supersede actions and sometimes even common sense.  I think I’m not the only one.

So I’ve decided to update the frog and scorpion tale to suit my own life better.  The frog will be a chick and the scorpion a black lab.  Instead of a trip across the river the sweet and friendly lab pup begs the chicks to play his provocative but seemingly innocent  chasing game through the meadow.  At long last his charming pants convince them, it’s a beautiful day and he clearly means no harm.

That black lab, just look at that face, how could he possibly be the scorpion?  Has he not so far obeyed orders, sometimes under great pressure to indulge his instincts?  But just the flap of a wing and he is on high alert.  It’s so very lucky for those chicks that he is well-supervised now, under constant surveillance.  If only they knew, those poor little chicks, how their natural moves provoke him.  He cannot help that at all.  Any more than they can.  He’s still playing the patient watch dog, for now.   I know he is surely not capable of strategically planning his next move, but just you wait, one of these times that seemingly innocent little flap will provoke a tragic end to their already shortly numbered days in the meadow.

The moral of my new twist to the story?  A seemingly careless little misstep or two made out of innocence or ignorance are still missteps with fatal potential.

Will discipline trump instinct?

The first time around he said, Let’s just wing it.   This was very uncharacteristic of him, to go into something so unprepared, and I guess he learned his lesson well.  This time he’s got a set up that deserves a spread in Better Homes & Coops:  a 370 sq. ft man-sized shaded pen and a 96 sq. foot structure with gutters, windows, and storage cupboards, all on skids in case he wants to move it in the future (I can’t help but remind him we’ve had apartments that size) .  Indoors the coop looks like Romper Room for birds with tree branches and beams as bridges and a “quiet corner” for naps; underneath it all there’s a thick carpet of pine shavings.

I appreciate handy hubby’s new hobby, which has a hope of paying for itself in about 15 years, if the cost of chickens and eggs goes up about ten fold.  Yes, of course, I exaggerate, slightly, but I think it well worth that cost and upwards if the birds and eggs are as fabulous as others I’ve tasted home grown.  As an added bonus they will keep the area free of insects of all kinds and fertilize in tandem, along with the healthy dose of entertainment while we’re watching them.  It was weird for me to think of animals “grown”, like vegetables, rather than “raised”, but that’s the term used on the feed bags and in the books.  We are growing 35 of them, or thereabouts, it’s impossible to get an accurate count without tagging them in some fashion.  Only a handful will be staying around long enough to lay, and I guess that’s a more accurate time to count them anyway–who knows how many will actually live to make it to the freezer.

Chickens are the hottest topic on the homesteading wire, whether that’s in the city or the country.  There are an impressive number of books out and already four existing magazines on the topic and a new one just started last month.  As with nearly every other topic the jungle of information is intimidating, so if you don’t have a real drive to sift through it all, it’s bound to fall to the bottom of the list.  Handy hubby, however, has been talking about chickens since I met him.  Of course, talking about chickens, and actually doing them, well, he may have underestimated the first time what it would take, but now, he’s a man on a mission, failure is not an option.

The birds have already taught me something significant about human nature, which I swear I never knew before.  I’m not a sports fan and have never liked team sports, playing or observing.  But when I come across a cricket or beetle in the garden and cringe with my gloved hands all the way to the coop to feed it to them this is one of the funniest spectacles I’ve seen in ages.  This natural behavior is where man-made sports comes from, no doubt.  Only it’s hilarious!  The way the one with the treasure zips all around, through and over and past all the others, hopping up and down, the way they all chase him around the pen, sometimes he fumbles or another steals, it’s comical mayhem and it’s leagues better than any sporting event or reality show I’ve ever seen.

Handy hubby invariably has two project outcomes, either over-engineered or total bust from onset.  The cabin that sits nearly finished is an example of the former, the recent cold frame an example of the latter, there’s an entire list of them, I’m happy to report, on both ends.

So actually the chickens have already taught me two things about human nature.  The other one being, there’s certain times in life when a woman has to learn to step aside. In our defense, men have had a hard time learning that one too.  Whether it’s for women or chickens or money or glory, there is no pursuit in life more single-minded than a man on a mission, in those moments he is behaving as instinctively as the chick with his beetle.

Older and wiser the second time around, we hope

Pampered chickens taste better?

I give a whole new meaning to the expression country dumb.  According to UrbanDictionary.com this expression I first heard in the film Ray describes “A person, usually from a rural area, the south or small town; who deliberately speaks or behaves in a manner that indicates a lack of understanding of the modern world, and uses this false impression to take advantage of urban or cosmopolitan people.” But then, what do you call us folks who really are country dumb?

Last week I bitched about the inherent risks of gardening, but I should’ve mentioned that, also like gambling, when your luck is good, even the most stupid mistakes may not have any effect on the resulting rewards.  As an example, late last fall I inserted 75 tulip bulbs upside down, and what do you know, they grew anyway!

One more reminder that dumb mistakes sometimes turn out perfectly.  The kitchen DIY project I mentioned a while back, well I didn’t admit that the lovely new island was a major accident that amazingly didn’t send me to the hospital.  Those cupboards that were turned into the kitchen island used to be attached to the wall, and came crashing down nearly on top of me, breaking an entire set of dishes, and almost giving me a heart attack.

Sometimes it’s nice to think that other folks out here are actually more country dumb than me.  The garden sections of the large box stores are more crammed than ever with new convenience products like pre-soiled and seeded peat pots.  On my last trip to town I watched as several women filled their carts with such useless and costly goods.  In my continued fledgling effort to make frugality my new mantra, I turn up my nose and silently sneer,  “These novices are way dumber than me!” They don’t even know to use old egg cartons and toilet paper rolls, which work wonderfully.  I continued to happily browse the seed section when I spied the pre-packaged potatoes, garlic, and shallots meant for planting, and without a second thought, into my cart they go.  Once home I realized I have been duped but good.  Did you know that the very same potatoes, garlic, and shallots are sold in the produce section for a fraction of the price?  They are exactly the same!  It took a documentary some days later for me to clue in: an Aztec woman was dropping whole potatoes into the ground, so that’s what I did.  Would you believe it, all my root crops are already thriving!  These roots and bulbs practically grow themselves, who knew?  DUH!  As I’ve said before, common sense is very relative.

Last year’s feeble, unprepared, hasty  attempt to raise chickens was among my biggest country dumb moves to date.  I believe those poor chicks lived about two weeks before being gobbled up by a hungry raccoon.  Next week we plan to rectify that dumb move by trying anew. Surely even the biggest country dummies don’t make the same mistakes twice.  But if so, at least you’ll be the first to know!

April Fool’s Day will officially begin my next planting season, and unlike last year when I started a month late, already exhausted from the move, without a scrap of knowledge or real experience, this time I am relatively prepared and waiting for it eagerly like it was the first day of my dream job.  Might it be?

Except that it just snowed yesterday, again, and the weather has been as erratic as a three-year old boy.  Already the transplants are looking weary in wait, and the cold frame has an insect infestation.

Being so intimately linked to your food source, as in relying on it for survival (at least in theory), it occurred to me that old school farming and serious gardening is for gamblers who don’t like to play games .  Both are all about testing the odds, securing every sort of advantage, and while skill is essential it can be learned, but more greatly required are a passion for strategy, a knack for assessing risk, and a superior  talent at reading the signs.  If you keep at it for a really long time you may get good enough to sustain life, but to really flourish requires a certain degree of luck.  You can’t change the weather any more than you can change the cards.  All you can do is learn the tricks of the trade through experience and study, in an attempt to push the odds in your favor.

While planting on April Fool’s Day may seem like a bad omen, in a serious way it makes sense to me, because even the most inexperienced gardener knows that gardening is something of a fool’s folly.  You could research indefinitely, then work for weeks, wait for months, only to lose an entire crop days before harvest.  Stockpiling, I realize, is the only real kind of insurance against the whims of nature, that is of course, if you had to live primarily from what you grew.  As in investments diversification and patience and are your only reliable insurance plans and a little insider knowledge goes a long way.  I guess that’s why real farmers, of the modern monoculture variety, have no choice but to rely on subsidies.

The irony is that with most “real jobs” your reward for hard work is typically some relaxing time off, but for the homesteader or gardener the reward is an abundant and varied harvest, which then requires a whole different skill set and new load of work.  And still somehow, I am finding this way more fun than gambling.

I spent the week in NYC with my sisters and now must recant the bulk of what I professed last post.   To resist the overwhelming and constant temptations of city life would require a morale of steel, the stoicism of a soldier, an empty wallet and zero credit.  It’s no wonder why so many folks in this country are fantastically fat and/or desperately in debt–the pressure to consume is absolutely overwhelming.

Manhattan is a vast bazaar of offerings, each neighborhood serving a different population or persona, with nothing and no one overlooked.  There is a zoo of products and services at every price point.  The array of restaurants is spectacular, the fashion ubiquitous, the salons irresistible, the bars buzzing.  Anything you desire at pretty much any hour.  Not even Superwoman could resist against such an all-encompassing force.

And Superwoman has never even played near my orbit.  My statement last week to value time over money is shot to shite pretty much instantaneously on arrival. Every day was like a safari through the endless world of consumable goods-one day as determined as a mouse in a maze for the ideal shoulder bag, the next day a treasure hunter for discounted boots-the perfect pair finally found at half-price, a mere $350.

My youngest sister is a diva in the Manhattan design world and so keeps abreast of it all, in knowledge and presentation.  They (her and her not-so-handy hubby) are vegans, are mindful of the planet, even experimenting this year with seedlings to be transplanted into a plot in their community garden.  It is an applaudable effort and attitude, but has hopelessly little hope of success.   I think of the constraints already chaining up all their waking hours-the social life, the family obligations, not to mention the extracurricular career commitments and daily commutes.  No wonder they watch ridiculous reality shows, what brain or body power could possibly be left for anything else after all that pressure-to produce, to perform, to consume?

Nothing haunts me more than hypocrisy, especially my own, so thankfully I’ve long ago realized I’ve got to be pretty far outside the mainstream to resist the pull of getting repeatedly sucked into it.  While ecology might be trendy, its trendiness is antithetical to the movement itself, because consumption cannot be at the core of a sustainable society.   New products for vegans and diabetics and celiac sufferers and vitamin water and aroma therapy and elliptical machines-the message is very clear, get healthy, get green, but don’t stop shopping!  I know urban homesteading is getting a huge following fast, but wow, I have to really admire those folks, because there is so very much working against them in the city.

Now I’m back to square one on my conservation question:  How to create a sustainable society when there is no hope at all we will ever choose time over money in this country.  Consumption is as deeply engrained in us as corn.  Hehe, sorry, pun intended.  For some strange reason I heard the same phrase repeated several times last week in the city:  Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

I’m home at last again, far out of the way.  Thank heavens one long walk in the woods is as easy and reliable as tapping the refresh key.