Life in the Slow Lane

I spent the first year in my house getting to know the seasons and how they affect my house and yard. I had planned to sheet-mulch a section of the yard this summer for a garden, but just hadn't gotten around to it. Too much biking, sailing, and sunbathing during the weekends. :-)

Today I rolled out of bed while the frost was still on the ground and staked out my 8-foot circle. This circle will eventually be a "keyhole bed", a permaculture term describing a circular garden with a path leading into the center. (This gives you the maximum amount of accessible garden for the minimum amount of path).

Dad had offered to bring over the rototiller to prepare the ground, but I decided to try it without. I did aerate the area first, using my weight to sink the tines of a manure fork deep into the ground and then using my body weight to rock it back and forth. It was a beautiful morning and the whole procedure became a kind of dance that left me free to gaze at the trees, the sky, the frost on the ground, and reflect on a glorious Fall day while completing my task. I think pre-MS I would have just muscled my way through it; now I am better at using my body wisely to accomplish physical things with less effort.

Once I had finished, I hosed down the whole area (forgot to do it the night before), and then headed over to South Portland to meet Mom for a trip to the dump -- oops, I mean "transfer station". The Portland facility doesn't have any kind of mulch, but in South Portland it's free for the taking, all composted. Since we were going over there anyway, we took a couple of big old doors that Dad just replaced and I had to snap a picture of the past: a piece of plywood with an area for "notes for Mom". At the transfer station, we chatted up the Usually-Cantankerous Guy Who Overcharges You and I snapped a photo of the 24-foot-wide lawn mower.

Mom has spent the summer mulching a large amount of her lawn, and has it down to a science: scope out the pile for a large vertical "cliff" area, back the trailer right up against it, then climb up on top of the pile and use the fork to shear away huge amounts that are easily hoed into the trailer. With both of us working, we had a trailerful in about 30 minutes and then drove it over to my place.

My original 8-foot circle looked pretty small when I got back home, so I extended it to 10 feet. Then we laid down the cardboard, with Mom on hose duty while I went to the back of the garage to get last year's partially decomposed leaves. These went on top of the cardboard, and were also hosed down. I then applied some special "homemade" high-nitrogen liquid fertilizer that I had been harvesting for the past 24 hours. If you're thinking about human byproduct, you'rein the right ballpark. :-) I did this because the dried leaves are so high in carbon that I wanted some nitrogen mixed in.

Finally, we put on the top layer of the composted mulchy stuff from the dump, and voila! Instant garden bed. This will rot over the winter, and in the spring I'll plant some soil-building plants. Lots of deep-rooted ones like daikon radish and sugar beet, since I have a lot of clay that needs to be broken up, plus alfalfa and some others.

Before I went inside to collapse, I took some pictures of my swale/hugelkultur project out back. Last month I screwed together an A-frame level from scrap wood so I could dig the ditch on contour (the rope had a wrench hanging from it for the weight, taking the place of the beer bottle traditionally used in permaculture circles ;-P ). Once the ditch was dug, I filled it with brush, and will now fill it with grass & leaves, and then hoe the dug-out dirt back over it. Today I threw in a few leaves and old (super slimy) grass clippings; I'll probably get it finished just before the snow comes.

So, those daikon radish sprouts that have been underwater for an entire week are still alive. The yard finally drained today and I went to take a look. We'll see whether they will make it. I'm rooting for them. Sorry, I couldn't resist. :-)

Last night while Googling for asparagus guilds (a "guild" is a permaculture term used to describe a bunch of plants that support each other as a mutually beneficial system) I discovered the Portland Permaculture Meetup and signed up to go to this month's meeting. I'm looking forward to meeting a few local permies. The group organizer mentioned kiwis in a post so I definitely want to talk to her about that! I'm planning an arbor behind the first floor deck to screen it from the apartment house next door. Maybe then my tenant can use the deck without feeling like he's on display. I was originally thinking grapes or maybe hardy kiwifruit, but right now sandra berry is my favorite. Hmmm...should I do that first, or should I do the cob wall in the back so I can put in the peach tree? Or should I do the big trellis up the deck posts along the driveway and put sandra berries there, and kiwi over the deck in the back? Is this what M. means when he says I have too many projects?? Nawwww...

But speaking of "too many projects", (whatever that is), tonight after cleaning house and practicing the violin for a bit I made the 5 frame struts for my Murphy bed. I need to get a framing square and then I'll be ready to screw together the rest of the frame. The Sawhorse Fairies (how's that for a mental picture?) left me a gift of a beautiful pair of adjustable sawhorses, so I was able to work at a comfortable height. Wheeeee!

On Friday I cut a restful visit to the camp short so I could have my doctor check out my ear/throat pain when swallowing. At that point, the pain was mostly in my ear and, after flushing my "excessive earwax", (I believe I snorted on the examination table due to "excessive imagery"), he sent me on my way. A day and many salt-water gargles later, the throat pain is now much worse, prompting me to cancel both my Music Together teacher training class next week, (involving lots of singing), and my trip to NYC to visit E. Double bummer.

As I wait it out until Monday to see whether the throat gets better or worse, I find myself in my usual "I'm sick" mode, which is to say: trying not to overexert myself, yet not bore myself to death. After transplanting the 4 eggplants that S. gave me yesterday when I went to her house to collect a carful of 30-pound rocks (thus flunking on the overexertion front), I pruned some water sprouts off the plum tree and spent some time sitting around the yard in various places, trying to figure out where I will plant blueberry bushes and wondering whether American persimmon trees will be taller than my two maple trees at maturity. And is that OK, or will I be tortured in 15 or 20 years because the trees aren't following the lines of the house? Perhaps pear trees instead? Ooohhhh, but I really want to try the persimmons.

Anyway, just about the time I had decided where the blueberry bushes should go, Bonita decided to accidentally fall off the deck, (her third time but the only time I've actually witnessed it), landing with an impressive plop upright on the driveway. I hastened inside with the slightly freaked-out (and thus ultra-fluffy) furball, who proceeded to go right back out on the deck and stick her head through the railing. Duh.

Then inside, I got on the computer to see if the mycorrhizal fungi associated with cranberries will live in coconut fiber instead of peat, and then proceeded to look up blueberry habitat. Thanks to "Brad S.", I now know that "The Native Americans eat them and use them for craziness." Hmmm...to promote it or to hinder it? Inquiring minds want to know--especially the inquiring minds of those who spend most of the year dreaming of mountain blueberry (and soon, yard blueberry) season. Mmmmmmmmm.

It really is getting to be Spring ("Spring" only lasts 3 days in Maine, but we spend weeks getting there...): it's past 6:00, sun is streaming through my southwest windows, seed catalogs are open on the kitchen table as I figure out which permaculture projects I will tackle this summer. At school, they've finally fixed the heat in my room (just in time!); they discovered that a vent had been wide open all winter, which explains why I was often wearing a hat and scarf indoors. What was that about Portland Schools going over budget on heating expenses this winter?

Now I'm gearing up for this Saturday's TML performance at the Downeast Country Dance Festival, holding the last of my parent/teacher conferences, and thinking happily of Easter weekend in NYC. And really making an effort not to eat any Cadbury Creme Eggs. :-)

From an article in the Patriot News:

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, pig, chicken and cattle wastes have polluted 35,000 miles of rivers and contaminated groundwater in 17 states. Cesspool lagoons leak and emit dangerous and toxic bacteria and gases such as ammonia, methane and hydrogen sulfide.

From Collapse:

Another form [of soil salinization] arises from an industrial method to extract methane for natural gas from coal beds by drilling into the coal and pumping out water to let methan escape to the surface. Unfortunately, the water contains dissolved salt.

So let me get this straight: in America we are letting vast cesspools on huge factory farms pollute the air with methane (which, though a greenhouse gas, is a useful form of energy) and then we're instead letting companies go drill for methane, causing more pollution? Hello?

It's really enough to drive a person crazy. I am so not allowed to think about this until school's out.

When I was 8, my family moved from our subsistence farm in Wilton to the big city of South Portland. I had never seen so many cars--the day we moved in, Ryan and I spent every possible moment counting the cars that went by the house. In the backyard were several large trees, but the quirkiest and most accessible (i.e., easy to climb with lots of places to sit and build platforms) was one that one of us named "Apple Tree Avenue".

A few weeks ago my mom told me that Apple Tree Avenue was finally dead enough to be a hazard and had to be cut down. When Dad cut through it, the whole middle was rotten. My ears pricked right up: rotten wood? Can I come get some? Not only was there a bunch of nice, punky, crumbly wood, but loads of decomposed soil from the middle of the tree. So now I have a nice hugelkultur in my yard, courtesy of Apple Tree Avenue and grass clippings from my hayfield...er, yard. I threw down some weeds and clippings, then the smaller pieces of rotten wood, then heaps of grass clippings, and topped it off with the soil that I had dug out of the trunk of the tree. Add some squash seedlings from Mom (I'm not sure whether she planted those or whether they just came up in the compost, and have no idea what kind of squash...surprise!), add some bricks for thermal mass, and viola! [sic] Instant squash mountain.

The squash hugelkultur is cooking along. I refuse to water it, because, I mean, it's squash! You don't plant squash, you wait for the squirrels to bury seeds for you or for it to come popping out of the compost, (thereby telling you that your compost isn't getting hot enough...), but in no way do you coddle it. Same with tomatoes; I didn't plant any tomatoes this year. And then, when I suddenly had 150 volunteer tomato plants, I remembered throwing a tomato plant on the garden last year. I see that I will have cherry tomatoes, probably later than everyone else because they planted themselves from seed, but as it required no work on my part (except for a gigantic amount of thinning), I'll take it. They're very conveniently coming up in the peas, so when I slash the peas down in a few weeks maybe the tomatoes will really get going.

I suppose I am coddling my squash a little bit, because I filled in the brick mulch I started, but that's it. Time to go out and do some heavy gardening, which in a mulched garden means: eating peas.

The latest "Alcohol Can Be A Gas" newsletter (here) says that the book is done! Yaaaaaaaaayyy! It seems like another lifetime when we were at SolFest talking up alcohol fuel, but it's only been four years. I can't wait until my copy arrives!

Finally! Today I had an afternoon off, so I decided to tackle my nearly-complete hoop house project. I strapped the pipe to the frames, screwed in the wood strapping pieces on top of the pipe, and walked over to the Farmers' Union to see what kind of plastic they had. I probably would have finished tonight, but ended up talking to my next door neighbor for a while. I'm so close, though! The icky part will be shoveling mulch into my parents' trailer and then into the boxes.

These houses are a modification of the hoop houses that have been going in around town as the Portland Permaculture Meetup folks hold work parties. I made my boxes in 2 sections out of whatever wood I had left over from various summer house projects. I can't wait to try these out this winter!

Today I got out the apple peeler/corer/slicer thingy and made some apple upside-down cakes. Two 8" cakes this time instead of one big one. One I took over to Liz's today to eat during our sewing date and the other I was going to bring to my sister-in-law until I remembered that I'd put butter in it, and she's off all wheat and dairy right now. That's OK--it was nice to come home from a party and wind down with some apple cake. It's still not exactly the way I want it, but close.

It's hard for me to line up the apple on the apple peeler/corer/slicer so that it takes the core out straight. Sometimes I get the side of the core left in the slices, and it's tough. I have to cut it out with a paring knife. I wonder if smaller apples also have smaller cores and so would work better? I can't believe I never noticed.

Other current apple dilemma: what kind of apple tree to plant in the yard this year? The Fedco catalog always makes me want to hang city life and go plant a whole orchard of different varieties, but I have managed to narrow it down to 3 choices: Black Oxford, Canadian Strawberry, or Esopus Spitzenburg. I confess that a large part of the attraction of the Esopus Spitzenburg is the name of it. Come on! It's an Esopus Spitzenburg! How could I not want one of those in my yard? But one of the others may yet beat it out.

The toaster is back online. I wish I could claim some kind of intellectual wizardry, but all I did was take it apart, give the circuit board a look that told it I meant business, and then did what I'm not supposed to do: plugged the thing in so I could play with it while it was apart. It worked perfectly. I think I intimidated it.

In apple news, the Black Oxford has edged out the Canadian Strawberry and the Esopus Spitzenburg (sadly...) for a place in the yard. I'm still trying to work out how I can squeeze a Canadian Strawberry in, but I figured I'd get the Oxford in first while I ponder that. The Black Oxford won because its best eating is December - March, the time of year when the only organic apples I can get in the store are from New Zealand. Maybe I'll also order a few hardy kiwi vines and then call it good...need to get my order into the Portland Permaculture group's order to get in on the bulk discount.

The viburnum tried to die this Spring. And then it tried to produce a gazillion little suckers. I thinned them to the ones that looked the most promising, planted a bunch of scarlet runner beans around them (I left the old dead tall branches for bean supports), mulched the whole lot, and left it for the summer, hoping that the beans would fix nitrogen for the struggling viburnum.

Today I cut down the dead part and then got busy with the pruning saw in other parts of the yard (dead larch in the back). Finally planted the daylilies my mom gave me, carted tons of mulch hay around, and dragged the logs from Apple Tree Avenue to use as edging for my keyhole bed. Then I was tired. Then my mom called and said "Merry Christmas! 3 yards of mulch will be delivered to your house on Monday." My mom is the best.

Inside, I shelled the dry pods of the scarlet runners. I think I'll save them until Spring, when I can inoculate them and plant them with the hazelnut seedlings for a living windbreak.

Today A. and I drove up to the camp with my parents for some cross-country skiing and (for me) a chance to locate the hand-crank ice cream maker so I can use it for my birthday party. The ski into the camp was a little more exciting than in past years, since there's a lot more plowing and sanding on some of the camp roads around there. Getting one ski caught on sand is not so much fun. We had a good ski, though, and some walking, and then sat around in the warm kitchen having a picnic. We skied back out at dusk, the ice cream maker on my back in one of my big dry bags--turns out those backpack straps on the dry bags have really come in handy! A. and I still had time to go back to my place, make beef stew in the pressure cooker for the second time (just as successful as the first time), and head back up Route 26 for a few miles to join in a big Portland Permaculture solstice potluck and bonfire. Yay!

I've been trying to unwind from all of this crazy fun, but keep getting distracted by my idea for birthday shenanigans: to shovel off my deck, bolt the ice cream maker to it, put my old touring bike out here, and somehow hook it up so that we can take turns making ice cream using pedal power! Yes! Still have a few weeks to sort out how to do that, since I'm delaying the birthday party until Magic Person is back from his long trip.

Favorite pedal power resources so far:

Pedal Power - A How-To Guide from Humboldt University
This idea of converting a magnetic trainer sounds very easy
Pedal Power in work, leisure and transportation from Rodale Press (just requested this via interlibrary loan, though it may not arrive until too late. I just received The Epidemic today).

Must. go. to. sleep. Argh. Too many projects on the brain, as usual. The permie potluck answered lots of my questions (hoop house reengineering, sheet mulching asparagus...) Permaculture events are dangerous, because hanging out with a group of people who love projects as much as I do...well, it's just dangerous.

During one of the permaculture work parties this summer a bunch of us were talking about composting and what happens when you start composting: all of a sudden, everything is compost. You eat lunch at work and save the scraps to take home to your pile. You eye your neighbor's plate and wonder how you can convince him not to throw that out, but to let you have it to take home for compost instead, and so on. Liz now sends me home from rehearsal with a bucket full of scraps.

A few weekends ago at the permaculture solstice potluck I was talking to a fellow permie whose childhood job it was to walk around his family's farm with a jug of blood to fertilize the fruit trees. This conversation came on the heels of a conversation with A. about our menstrual cups, so my ears perked up immediately (particularly since I'll be planting a Black Oxford apple in my yard this Spring). How cool. I mean, I already love my menstrual cup (5 years now!) but now I'm thinking, wow, I could actually save this blood (maybe in the freezer? Dunno. Is that gross? No more gross than, say, a bunch of bloody beef, but that's just my opinion. I didn't have to die, for example...) and put it to good use.

Huh. Now the real question is: how to broach this subject to other ladies, even the ones who already use menstrual cups and are thus more chill about the whole blood from your body thing. If sending me home with a bucket of compost is Level 1, what the heck level of acceptance of your body and of the whole life cycle does it require to get women to come dose my apple tree every month? Now some possible scenarios are making me giggle. But still.

I love the hoop houses, but they've been losing heat because I can't keep the fronts shut. After a conversation with another person from the Portland permaculture group, I revamped one house yesterday in the hour of daylight I had after getting home from school. I screwed a brace into the tubing on each side (to hold them together as I took the house off the rebar spikes), lifted off the tubing/cover, pulled out the 4 rebar spikes, and drove them in inside the box. I carefully put the house over the new rebar locations and stapled the plastic back down. It now closes much more tightly in front. This morning as I left for school in sleet/freezing rain, the remodeled hoop house looked steamy on the inside.

On Saturday it was 45 degrees and sunny and the apartment was all cleaned and rearranged and ready for the party, so J. and I went outside and remodeled the other hoop house. In November I had planted a bunch of seeds in that one, and then was disappointed with the gaping fronts of the hoop houses in the winter winds. The ground froze, just a little inside, so I gave up and figured I'd do a planting in the early Spring.

Anyway, as we were getting ready to lift the tubing and plastic off of the frame, J. said, "is there something growing in there?" and I poked my head in and...yes! 3 kinds of lettuce and Asian greens and who knows what else (I forget exactly what I planted), tiny sprouts that must have surfaced in the last few days of relatively balmy (30s and 40s) weather. Woohoo!

I returned from a bike ride to Tina's today to see both hoop houses nicely steamy and much better sealed. I'm hoping to see bigger lettuce in one, and a nice environment for my wild-blueberries-from-seed experiment in the other, come March. But first let's see if they make it through tonight's snowstorm.

This is a long video, but well worth the time. I've always hated being in debt (and always got out of it as quickly as possible), but this video puts our system of money and debt in a new, scarier light for me.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279&pr=goog-sl

One of my recent resolutions has been to get smarter about investing in the stock market. I've never liked the stock market, because to me it doesn't represent anything "real", or of value according to the things in life that I find valuable. I used to have conversations with co-workers about this when I worked at MM, and afterwards I always felt like I didn't get it. I have to invest in the stock market because that's where my various 403bs, 401ks, etc., are, because it's what you have to do to "get ahead", but I don't like it, and making money off the stock market? I've always felt a little bit like that was cheating.

This year I thought, maybe the reason I don't like the stock market is because I don't know enough about it and I'm scared about it, and so on, much like my dislike of dating.

So, okay, I read some books on investing and read blogs on investing...and discovered that 1) the stock market is even less reality-based than I thought it was, 2) investment strategy BORES ME TO DEATH, ARGH, 3) I still don't care about it, and like it even less than before. Hmmmm.

Finally releasing myself from Investment Book Boredom, I opened up Dave's new book and read this on page 4:

It took over 25 years to finally get this book to you. It represents the confidence of almost 30 people who collectively loaned more than $250,000 to see this project through.