Slow, slow, watering job is all can do after a weekend like mine. This needs to be done as it is. The ground in here is dry as always, plus watering plants is somewhat cathartic. The girls are hoeing when I get to Fabio, preparing the bed for endive.
Out to orchard field with a truck full of frilly mustard. It is a good looking salad leaf. The rows where we are to plant this mustard are becoming overgrown with some volunteers from last years brassica crop. It is growing over the kohlrabi. So instead of planting we weed until lunch. I try and practice my zen weeding technique. It is hard to be zen when you are uprooting entire colonies of successful crop plants. If the body acts in a way to disturb the mind there is dissonance, zen planting is much more successful.
I found lunch to be quite satisfying. It included a salad with peanut dressing, chickpea and potato curry (turmeric), green tomato chutney, and redundant but delicious humus.
When returning to orchard field from lunch, some more weeding is done before we start hoeing the beds. I swung that hoe around again and again chipping away at weeds and clumps of clay until my wrists hurt from the constant bludgeoning. I do wonder why the rototiller was not pulled out. Perhaps it is broke or more trouble than its worth to lug it out here.
I should mention that orchard field has no orchard in it. At one point it did, but the previous owner decided to take out all the trees. I do not know why this was done, seems very foolish to me.
I count my breaths and crouch down to cup little craters in the soil, homes for the newly liberated detainees, seedlings from seed trays.
My weekend:
I attended the Mother Earth News Fair, once a year the famed magazine comes to south western PA to promote green living, farming practices, and let vendors sell their wears.
I am scrambling to get out of the house by ten o'clock. When I find that impossible I push it back to eleven. I am packing my car with camping supplies, a last minute plan after speaking with B-rad. I called to ask if he was interested in going to the fair, but he already was, and with a group of friends. I don't have a real tent so I throw a couple tarps and a rope in my car and hope there will be a few trees on the campground to sling them over. The trip to Seven Springs is not a bad one, except for the tolls $3.20 both ways. I had only one mission when arrived at the fair, and that was to hit the seed swap at Southern Exposure's tent. Looking around The Mother Earth News Fair it seemed a lot like a county fair. Goats and chickens in pens, hay bales strewn about, smells of food trucks.
The main attraction one Joel Salatin, the proprietor at Polyface Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah valley. He imparts that we all should participate, that this is the only time in history that we as a human race have decided that we are separate from the natural world, that it does not effect us and that we don't have to worry about our effect on it. He suggests that we leverage our remaining fossil fuels to create plastic laminate for greenhouses on every building. People could grow right in their own back yard and instead of wasting i.e. burning fossil fuels, we would be using them for years to come. Instead of Ecological abandonment, "It is our job to massage our ecological womb with the correct management to create more decomposable biomass than nature would do in a static state." If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly - first, he says. The travesty of our day is not that we are lazy but rather that we are busy doing the wrong things.
Out to orchard field with a truck full of frilly mustard. It is a good looking salad leaf. The rows where we are to plant this mustard are becoming overgrown with some volunteers from last years brassica crop. It is growing over the kohlrabi. So instead of planting we weed until lunch. I try and practice my zen weeding technique. It is hard to be zen when you are uprooting entire colonies of successful crop plants. If the body acts in a way to disturb the mind there is dissonance, zen planting is much more successful.
I found lunch to be quite satisfying. It included a salad with peanut dressing, chickpea and potato curry (turmeric), green tomato chutney, and redundant but delicious humus.
When returning to orchard field from lunch, some more weeding is done before we start hoeing the beds. I swung that hoe around again and again chipping away at weeds and clumps of clay until my wrists hurt from the constant bludgeoning. I do wonder why the rototiller was not pulled out. Perhaps it is broke or more trouble than its worth to lug it out here.
I should mention that orchard field has no orchard in it. At one point it did, but the previous owner decided to take out all the trees. I do not know why this was done, seems very foolish to me.
I count my breaths and crouch down to cup little craters in the soil, homes for the newly liberated detainees, seedlings from seed trays.
My weekend:
I attended the Mother Earth News Fair, once a year the famed magazine comes to south western PA to promote green living, farming practices, and let vendors sell their wears.
I am scrambling to get out of the house by ten o'clock. When I find that impossible I push it back to eleven. I am packing my car with camping supplies, a last minute plan after speaking with B-rad. I called to ask if he was interested in going to the fair, but he already was, and with a group of friends. I don't have a real tent so I throw a couple tarps and a rope in my car and hope there will be a few trees on the campground to sling them over. The trip to Seven Springs is not a bad one, except for the tolls $3.20 both ways. I had only one mission when arrived at the fair, and that was to hit the seed swap at Southern Exposure's tent. Looking around The Mother Earth News Fair it seemed a lot like a county fair. Goats and chickens in pens, hay bales strewn about, smells of food trucks.
The main attraction one Joel Salatin, the proprietor at Polyface Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah valley. He imparts that we all should participate, that this is the only time in history that we as a human race have decided that we are separate from the natural world, that it does not effect us and that we don't have to worry about our effect on it. He suggests that we leverage our remaining fossil fuels to create plastic laminate for greenhouses on every building. People could grow right in their own back yard and instead of wasting i.e. burning fossil fuels, we would be using them for years to come. Instead of Ecological abandonment, "It is our job to massage our ecological womb with the correct management to create more decomposable biomass than nature would do in a static state." If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly - first, he says. The travesty of our day is not that we are lazy but rather that we are busy doing the wrong things.
I attended a few talks, one on Bioshelters by my PDC (permaculture design certificate course) instructor Darrel Frye. A bioshelter is simply a greenhouse managed like an ecosystem, it relies on some specific design elements to maintain a warmer climate.
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