Christmas Sale

It's not officially winter yet, although we've had two snow storms in Connecticut over the last four days, and I'm already thinking spring.

High Mowing Seeds (www.highmowingseeds.com) offers a Seed CSA with a deadline of Saturday December 21st.  Purchasing seed credits allows you a 10% discount.  This is the second year I've participated.  While saving money is nice, what is more important is the seeds' performance.  In last year's garden they were terrific.

The Seed CSA was a little Christmas gift from me to me - and it's one that will fit, and I will like.  It's also one that I will enjoy as I page through the catalog on the wintry nights ahead with visions of my new and improved garden.

Black Friday & Onions

I planted about 100 onions beneath the hoop house on Black Friday.

First, I had to address the pockets of water that had pooled and turned into ice.   There were several chunks of ice that had already formed. After pulling the largest icebergs from the slumping plastic covering,  I tugged at the plastic and watched the pooled water slosh from one side to another until it emptied into the soil.  I turned the covering, got on my knees, scratched a few rows in the soil.  I planted the onions close together.  I could harvest them in various stages and the openings would provide space for those that remained.

Underneath the plastic there was growth!  Tiny sprigs of spinach, the first tender shoots of lettuce, radishes, and peas have sprouted.  My guess is that I waited too long to plant them and they will not produce under the diminishing light and heat.  However, I'm approaching this as an experiment to be reordered and remembered for next year.

Of course, I wonder about the onions falling to the same fate.

It was an interesting juxtaposition working outside on Black Friday in a neighborhood on top of a hill that doesn't receive much traffic.   The news of the day was about shoppers flocking to stores for the best deals on the newest technology.  Footage showed a fight in a food court.  It's complete Bread and Circus.  While a slightly less violent version of the extreme footage was happening throughout the country, I was muddying myself with onions.

There is a crisp silence that comes in late autumn and winter.  The diminished bird and child song, the dormant lawn mowers and in my case the hibernating neighbors' pool filters have mostly settled down for a long winter's nap.

The body desires to stay warm to protect itself.  Who doesn't derive comfort from a steaming bowl of soup or coffee on a winter's day?  Or that ping of warm gratitude of protection when looking through an insulated window and seeing the blustery wind?  There is a desire to seek comfort against the harsh elements, even when we seldom encounter them for more than a few minutes on a daily basis.

As I finished planting the onions and did some stretching to loosen my back, I found this quiet refreshing like a cold glass of water.  It cleansed the soul's palate of the house's ambient noise.  My body may seek the comfort a warm house offers; my heart wants to burst in the silence of mystery and majesty that surrounds me.

Thanksgiving Morning 6 AM

Thanksgiving.  6 AM

“Trouble, life is trouble,” Zorba the Greek.

These are stressful times, but I wonder if they are any more or less stressful than any other time in history?  I suppose it would depend whom you asked the question.

I realize that my middle class stress is not abject poverty stress; it is not a young pregnant woman stress; it is not a father’s stress who cannot protect his family in a violent neighborhood.  No.  My stress centers around life choices and the desire to experience the marrow of life.  This stress is a luxury in disguise.

I am blessed that as I write this the furnace warms the house to a comfortable temperature.  I am blessed that there is food in the cupboards, refrigerator, and big freezer.  I am blessed to put two feet on the floor and walk from my bed to the kitchen.  I am blessed that I get to worry about producing at a job that pays me well and gives me the opportunity to make more.  I am blessed to have my parents still alive and in good health.  I am blessed to have a good marriage.  I am blessed to have good friends.  I imagine I could go on all day.  Yes, my life is that good. . .

As I sit in the quiet of my dining room, darkness still pours in through the patio doors, I appreciate that I am sheltered from the wintry wind that sounds sinister.  In the silence I am grateful for the great gift of time and solitude.

Nearby a bushel of apples from the orchard down the street are piled high.  I will give some to my parents and sister.  The apples were easily paid for and easily shared.

Food, love, shelter, clothing, and heat.  Soon the sun will cast its first light on a frosty garden.  

“What more can human beings want?” Rumi.

Seed Catalog & Thanksgiving Gratitude

Last week I received my first seed catalog of the new season.  I was grateful to put my sights on warmer weather and green grass, although winter hasn’t officially started.  My first inclination when I saw the catalog in the mailbox was to be cynical   Was this mailing a way of pushing the seed buying season earlier? Why not skip the season to rest a little and give thanks for the year’s harvest? I couldn't help but wonder if this act was similar to retail’s Christmas buying season starting at Halloween - the seed company hoped to forgo the fallow Thanksgiving season and skip right to consumerism.  This is me at my cynical best.  

However, I cannot allow myself to accept that.  Rather than recycling the catalog, I read it closely.  High Mowing Seeds www.highmowingseeds.com sends its catalog early in the seed selecting season and offers a CSA style discount if you commit now and select later.  

Happily, I paged through the catalog on Sunday and circled the different varieties for my 2014 garden.  I selected spring, summer, and autumn varieties of carrots, lettuces, and spinaches to eat, store, and share throughout the growing season.  2014 is going to be the year!

The catalog pictures show handsome people hard at work and proud of it.  Many of the pictures are set against the beautiful Vermont mountain backdrop.  Ah, romance.  Of course, it takes only a little imagination to think what is not in the picture - the summer sun bearing down on them day after day, the mosquitoes, and achy bodies after long days.  So, I am grateful for their work and for a few dollars have enough seeds to eat all the butternut squash I want come winter.  And, if I act now will get their labor at a discount.

Seed selection feeds into my ego:  I am a visionary, and I mean that in the worst possible way.  I can see a magazine cover quality garden in my backyard.  Victory at last!  Yet, the execution goes awry sometimes as early as April.  Near Victory at last?  Like people, myself included, who make New Year's resolutions to lose weight or exercise more, mine is always - take better care of the garden.  

I know my promise means much, much more than that.  It means taking care of myself and the land around me.  It means being a good husband.  Inevitably, those New Year’s resolutions of losing weight and exercising more get folded into being outside.  It means living a more connected life and returning some of the economy back home.  It goes from being cynical to living a more wholesome and connected life.

Making Due

Most of my life I have made due.  As a child when my mother purchased clothes for me, I wore them without question.  Most of my furnishings I took from my grandmother’s house when she downsized - a mishmash of things that for the most part are utilitarian.  When I purchase something for the house, I will usually take the cheapest route, believing my frugality is more important than the ease of doing something with the right tool.  I work easily within a world of delayed gratification because my present situation is always good enough.

Rather than reach high and put a foundation beneath my dreams, I will take a softer and safer landing by living a shadow life that is easily graspable. Because of my pragmatism, I’ve been unable to heed Gandhi’s simple advice - live your morality.  Instead, I live in a world of justification and unnecessary compromise.

Part of this make due attitude is that at heart I'm a contrarian.  I believe or trust in very little about our consumer lifestyle.  Yet, I do my share of excessive consuming.  I live in a nice neighborhood but not a spectacular one.  All of us have vast yards, most with nothing but grass that is delightfully manicured. Some use chemicals and some don't.  Behind our house the woods have been leveled and acre by acre are being transformed into a subdivision.   I see all of it as a folly or a paean to ego, including my own. 

 

Since I was twenty-five I wanted to own a farm - to me it’s the directness of agrarian life that calls me.  Yet, I've never worked on a farm and lack the skills or knowledge that would make such a transition easy:  I don't understand soil; I'm not mechanical; and I can easily say that I’ve not completed a week of hard physical work in nearly thirty years.  There are times when I wonder if having a farm is really some metaphor or an escape from an average white collar life.   Either way, it would be disingenuous to deny this soul calling.  

 

In the Winter 2014 Yes! magazine there is an interview with Vandana Shiva.   She says:

 

No matter what problem you look at, every ecological problem comes from this illusion that we are separate from nature.

 

Her quote addressed the macrocosm, but she speaks exactly from my point of longing.  

 

With the shortened daylight I lament that my work hours are spent in a home office, in a car, or in a building.  The separation of my life to nature - even with my commitment to a garden and yard work - remains vast.  I am still more inside than out.  I tend to think of relaxation as being in front of a screen than in the backyard.     

 

I have been gardening for fifteen years.  I have no illusions about my skills or my commitment to gardening - both are quite spotty.  Yet, I also understand that each year I take to the garden with the hope this year will be better - and see my garden’s winter vision fully realized. 

Most of it is in my realm of my control:  my commitment to the process and creating an environment to make the process easier.  

Yet, I seldom put myself in a position to succeed: I’ve purchased drip hoses but will not use them; I allow the wheelbarrow to sit uncovered in the rain and rust; I let the weeds overrun the garden; and this summer I didn’t stake my tomato, eggplant, or pepper plants.  While all of them grew, the tomato harvest suffered the most.  Pounds of tomatoes rotted in a tangle of vines and weeds.  Fresh tomatoes, the reason alone to garden, became compost for next year’s garden.  

Next spring I will turn over the soil, rake out the weeds, and put seed in the ground. In the past none of it was done with real attention because in my heart I always know that my income or my food is not at risk.  This half-assedness is a fantastic way to sabotage myself; and it provides another soft landing, cushioned with excuses.  I’m sure I could use an hour or two of therapy why I continue this behavior that stops me short of nurturing a vision literally into fruition.

 

Any serious gardener knows that most of the work is done before sowing seeds.  Building soil and having the infrastructure in place make following executing a plan easier.  This is why this year I am going to integrate chore calendars from www.waldeneffect.org  or www.awaytogarden.com.  

While I may not have the best garden, I can at least accept that gardening is in my heart.  I have passed the point where any purchases are about the lifestyle or image of gardening.  Every time I set foot out there, even with a tangle of weeds, I feel better.

 

Last week I was reading the www.waldeneffect.org blog on their hoop houses.  It was a small detail in the picture - they had all of the re-bar in a plastic bucket - while they determined which garden to cover.  It reminded me how much of my own work is done in the maelstrom of disorganization.  For me to do any project often means going to any number of places to get either tools or materials.  Further, none of it is greatly respected.  The shovel edge needs sharpening and the pots are just strewn wherever I last utilized them.  I leave the wheelbarrow and grill to the elements.  It disrespects the entire process and the tools.

 

As I plan for late winter seeds starts with grow lights and utilizing my small hoop house, I need to have an infrastructure ready to go.  Without the strong bones of it, it is impossible to succeed.  It is a way for me extend a season and find something useful to do when it’s freezing cold.

In the end I’m talking about investment in myself.  There are the outer signs - having the right tools to do the job and taking care of them.  It’s having the organization, the necessary bones that are nurtured in the down time.  It is about engaging in a life, not a lifestyle.  Seeds are meant to sprout and need little help to fulfill their biological destiny.  The same can be said for humans.  

Dreams, gardens, and calendars

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." - Henry David Thoreau

Who among us does not have at least one calendar going?  Whether it's for work or personal appointments, I have it marked somewhere to ensure I maintain my obligations.   But what about for both achieving and maintaining those castles in the air?  Isn't a calendar one of the bricks in that foundation?

One of my resolutions is to both create a householder calendar and then, of course, stick to it.

I both hate discipline and thrive on it.  As I've gotten older I have accepted the place discipline has in fulfilling one's dreams.  Having played both baseball and basketball, I grew to hate discipline.  The scheduled practices seemed to based more on fear than improvement.  Yet, on my own time I took playing sports seriously and trained.   I hated going to the gym to lift weights, even when I saw a noticeable difference in my physique.  I did it because I knew if I didn't get stronger and better, someone out there was.

Once I was finished playing, having been devoured by athletic Darwinism, I experienced a great deal of relief not being tethered to a practice and game schedule.  Once I stopped playing I had a tough time committing to anything.  Rather than understanding that through discipline I may have maxed out my athletic promise, I saw the investment of time not worth it.   As new dreams replaced the ones of being a professional athlete, it was easier to live in dreams of hope and wanting - never willing to risk and see if they could be obtained.  In my mind I had already failed once.

This devastated my life in my twenties - I wanted to achieve things, but I did not do my share in order to obtain them, as if success would depend on luck alone.  I had to re-learn that discipline could create a richer life.  This had to be the foundation from which all would be built.

My mid-life crisis centers around living a richer life, not necessarily financially.  Living more sustainably and closer to my morality are two steps closer to that.  I've gardened long enough to know that to achieve the garden I want, I must put my share of work into it.  My goal is to eventually provide enough vegetables to feed my wife and me through the year.  Yet, if I don't create a quantifiable schedule, I know I will fail.  It's really what my coaches told me all along  - success is where preparation and opportunity meet.

One of my first excursions into the gardening blog world was www.awaytogarden.com by Margaret Roach.  She has monthly chores that can help keep a gardener on task.  They've been helpful and have used them as a guide to inform my own chores around the house.  Another blog I follow closely is the http://www.waldeneffect.org.  Anna Hess is currently selling a homesteading calendar that was just posted today.  Either one of these websites have been helpful guides.


No, my garden isn't a game that is about winning or losing.  Rather, I'm viewing it as play, which is always more fun.  If it all fails, I will have enough money to feed myself.  If it all goes bad, as it sometimes does, I have ask myself the first tough questions - did I give the garden the time it deserved.  Moving towards a life that needs a foundation built, I am not accountable to a coach or team, but to myself and living in a manner that is more in concert with my soul.

Towards a new season

It snowed here yesterday.  Not enough to cover to the ground.  Not enough to provide a child's excitement when the ground turns brownish to white.   Not enough to hope for critical mass that it would slow the world down for a day or so.  No, the flakes barely held form as they hit my windshield.  They were a gentle harbinger of the inevitable.

Over the past week I had two conversations regarding how quickly the holidays will be here.  The natural association means so will winter.   However, I think it's all of demands our holiday season has brought upon us and that has become difficult to apply the brakes.  It seems paradoxical that winter is meant to bring a reprieve from life's demands gifts so many people with more stress.

I try not to be romantic about an old way of life, say just before the Industrial Revolution, which was undoubtedly difficult, especially for women.  It's easy to imagine winter two hundred years ago and how nice it must have been to have the natural rhythms dictate what can and can't be done.  The reality, I imagine, was far more challenging.

Years ago I watched a PBS documentary One Man's Wilderness about Dick Proenneke's life in the Alaskan wilderness.  There is one point, after he finished his cabin and has a fire burning, where he states the room is now toasty.  If I remember right the cabin was 40 degrees.  I don't mind a chilly house.  But, anyone who has ever spent a winter night solely heated by a fireplace knows there is nothing romantic waking up in the middle of night and quite literally freezing.

I am grateful for being able to experience a much dreamier vision of winter.  My deeper animal body wants to hibernate and there will be days that I'll let it.  My hermetic self wants to be home alone, drink a bottomless cup of coffee, read, and write.  The give and take of modern life is that my house is comfortable, but I also have to navigate snowy roads and hope I'm not an innocent victim of a reckless driver.  Through much of that travel I tend to focus on little more than the road in front of me.

Yesterday as I was enjoying a few minutes outside, appreciative that the work week was behind me. As I strolled to the garden area, I contemplated what work around the yard I could do over the weekend.  This is a slow-paced activity, where I listen to the silence that is occasionally broken by car engine or lawnmower.  I watch the shifting clouds and the sun falling into the horizon.  It is a time of paying attention when so much of modern living seems to be done by rote.

I noticed the buds on the peach trees in the picture above.

There are many lenses to see the world, and I'm pretty sure there is a literature, philosophy, and rhetoric to support them all.  I've reached a point that the corporations' or our country's billboard mythological promises are obviously just a way they want us to see.  Most of it I didn't buy.  Now I prefer to pay attention to peach trees in November, the few little chores the weekend will offer, and how snowflakes touching the windshield drew me back to a quiet place.

My small orchard needs a home, which leads to some questions

The last few days whisper reminders that winter hovers nearby:  frost, a biting morning wind, and diminished sunlight.   Yet, there remains an illusion that there's more time than there is - the pleasant coat-free afternoons and my general sense of denial!

There are still a few chores left to do in the garden.  Habitually, I make several desperate bursts to clear the yard like put away the patio furniture (unlike my neighbor who did it last week), bring in the herb pots (usually while getting poked by the blackened decaying stalks in them), and unhook the hose.  

Last spring I bought two dwarf apple trees, two dwarf peach trees, and three blueberry bushes.  I thought it would be cool to have a small orchard and berry patch, especially since there is space and sun for them.  In my typical fashion, I bought first and considered when I'd plant them second.  They spent their first summer in too small pots and always on the verge of being burned to death by neglect, by lack of water and by the summer sun.  What small fruits the trees promised withered with my lack of husbandry.   I have plenty of room for them, but since I never articulated a plan to my wife,who would have agreed to it without issue,  they have remained in their pots and homeless.  

Besides planting the new ones, several trees need to be cut down.   I hate the idea of altering the landscape, despite my passion for growing food.  Yet, both trees, a red maple and a twenty-five foot pine, are problems.  The maple is rotting.  The pine, which was placed too closely to the garage some twenty years ago, has grown so large it is a hazard.  All I can see when I look at that pine is a day when there is too much water held in the poorly drained soil that helps topple it.  When that tree falls in the yard, it will be heard because I guess about a third of the garage would go with it.

Now their demise is not only for, God forbid, safety purposes.  The open area would provide a perfect home for the fruit trees and blueberry bushes.  

I have known this for six months and have not acted.

How many other pines do I have in my life?  What other fruit has withered from my lack of care?  Will I do what is necessary to ensure a better bounty next year?

Gardening and Meaning

Oh, it already sounds both pretentious and righteous. . .

Yesterday I spent the afternoon tweaking the Quick Hoop, planting various greens inside of it, sowing garlic, and cutting the last of the kale and chard.   The air had a wintry chill to it, and it was quite a change from Saturday.

Through the brush I saw my neighbor putting away the lawn furniture, but other than that I was largely alone in the neighborhood while working outside.  There were no lawn mowers or leaf blowers, just expansive silence.

Part of the reason for the blog was to help me to break a bad habit - watching television - and to commit to a life that is more meaningful.  I'm easily amused or easily willing to shut down - I'm not sure which - when watching television.  Television has addictive qualities for me.  

Many years ago I read Jerry Mander's Four Reasons for the Elimination of Television and his thesis still resonates with me.  Intellectually, I get it.  Emotionally, I struggle with letting my bad habit go.  Yet, I understand that staying clear of both sports and other forms of television is a day-to-day proposition.  It's accepting the smallness of my life.

Since I can remember I've watched sports on the weekend and this was well before ESPN.  It's a habit that I've carried every weekend of my life since I can remember, now only made easier by the cornucopia of televised games.   As a kid, watching a game played on the west coast had some sense of mystery (no jackets had to be worn in California in winter?) or seeing the college kids' from foreign lands like Texas and Oklahoma when Keith Jackson introduced them.  

At this point in my life, I don't care who wins or loses and don't really find them interesting.  For me it's a bad habit, like smoking.  And like a smoker who wants to quit, there are the endless relapses.  Now, I view games as placeholders and with a touch of nostalgia.  They eat time and give me something to do without really doing anything.   I should probably talk to a therapist about this.

By making a decision to spend the afternoon outside on my projects, I experienced a different rhythm and engagement.  Both felt more wholesome and real - imagine that?

With the time change, darkness fell around 5:15.  In the dusk I scurried to put the rake and hoe away.  My wife was with friends, so I was alone for dinner.  I sautéed some of the Rainbow Chard I just cut.  Rather than sitting quietly at the table and continue to experience solitude, I turned on the television to watch the Patriots and Steelers.

In Ken Burns's Baseball, he says that baseball, the national pastime, is a metaphor for American life.  Twenty-five years ago, I would have believed that.  Anyone who follows sports knows the real national pastime is football.  Taking Burns's theory and placing it on football, I believe his idea holds true:  football's power, violence, facelessness, special teams, and spectacle have replaced baseball's sacrifice bunt, sportsmanship, unpadded players, generalists, and grinding daily schedule.

In just a few minutes, I was bored.  The quiet rhythms of working with nature I experienced did not  synch with the screen.  

Now what?

Quick Hoop - Maybe too late but worth the effort

I like to read about people who are both more skilled and braver than I am when it comes to homesteading and gardening.  There is a joke in my family that if I can do a project and have nothing burn or keep all my digits, then it is successful.  

Despite my overall lack of skill with tools and inability to understand how machines work, I am drawn to self-sufficiency.  Last year I bought Anna Hess's Weekend Homesteader e-books (www.waldeneffect.org).  She created various projects someone like myself could undertake and move towards greater self-reliance.

Yesterday I took her instructions from the October e-book and made my own Quick Hoops.   Of course I'm a little behind, since it is November, and I do wonder if I've given the seeds a chance given the angle of the sun and diminishing sunlight.

The Quick Hoop required a trip to the Home Depot and secure re-bar, electrical conduit, and plastic.  And, in my case, a hacksaw.  I did have a hand sledgehammer (I, um, borrowed it from my dad a decade ago) to secure the re-bar in the ground.

In undertaking this project I had three goals:

Goal number 1:  Do not cut my fingers off with the hacksaw.  

Goal number 2: Relax while making it.

Goal number 3:  adjust as needed

Strangely enough, my ineptitude causes me a great deal of stress.  The only way I can describe this is that as an adult there is an expectation that I should be able to do simple man work (sorry for the sexist characterization).  This is akin to asking me to be an accountant, computer programmer, or any other specialized profession today without proper training.  Yet, I expect some type of magic to happen.

The other part of it is my concerned that my slightly left view of yards, food, and gardening will cause my neighbors and loved ones consternation (and cast judgment on me).  Whatever I undertake to build surely will not look like the model.

When I started building the Quick Hoop the tension built.  I managed to breathe through it and experienced a great deal of satisfaction as I wrapped the plastic over the hoops (the Quick Hoop measures about 25' x 10'.  It rained last night and the plastic sagged a bit (see Goal 3).  Today I'm going to run support tubing down the center of the hoops and pull the plastic tighter.  

Despite the tweaking, I've viewing this as one small step for man and one giant step for me.  

By the way - I still have all my fingers . . .

Why Now?

Several years ago I read The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Alisa Smith and J. B. Mackinnon.   What immediately impressed me was that they didn't start this diet in June when local food was plentiful and could build their pantry to be prepared for a scant winter accessing local food.  They started when the pickings were slim and immediately put themselves to the test.

Starting a blog about a Connecticut garden in November seems to be poorly timed.   Like Smith and Mackinnon, I want to challenge myself to live a gardener's life when most people in the northeast are content to wait for their seed catalogs.  

So why now?  Simply put, I want to be more connected to the land and its rhythms - not only when the days are long and warm, but short and cold.  I want to pay more attention to what is happening in my backyard than in the world.  

Like an increasingly growing number, I am concerned where my food is grown and how.  I know by having a garden and paying more attention to where I buy meat,  I can control this.   

Why the blog title?  I've been gardening for nearly twenty years and the results have been spotty at best.  There's always been plenty grown and plenty to eat, but by August the garden is a mess and remains so until I put it to bed.  Despite this I am committed to expand the garden to the front yard next year.