School or writing? I will either graduate or I won’t. But I will always be a writer. I neglect certain subjects that I want to know, subjects whose matter I am passionate about. The problem is I have so many words in me that crave my hands writing them. Sentences that would be covered by time or snow if I was not there to shovel them off for the country to look at, to take in, and recycle. Homework, vacuuming, and other sensibilities should be avoided at all costs, like the male dog with his leg erected or a coal fired power plant spitting dust. These things abort the life that could come, naysay the naissance.

We all write differently. Some like me burn a fire inside that desires kindling. Others like me also when deadlines and word numbers rule the roost. This can be a damper on our creativity and on the flame of life that pulls syntactic gluttony from the menu of our imagination. But meticulous writing doesn’t have to leave the soil of our words cracked or arid. Meticulous is only a couple syllables from melodious. Though I come from a place of friction and heat, creative writing can just as likely sprinkle down with intended precision. Probably then I should do more editing than you. But we can get to the same place. You absolutely do not have to be manic depressive to be a writer.

Our neighbor's bees have been busy stealing honey from our two hive boxes, so we decided it's time to build a 5 gallon bucket honey strainer.

The food grade buckets are more expensive, but worth it for a project like this.

Stay tuned for a full report on how this method works for straining out the wax.

So what does Michael Bush's apiary look like?  In some ways it's quite traditional --- he mostly uses Langstroth hives and equipment from mainstream beekeeping companies.  However, he has made a few changes:

• His boxes are all 8 frame mediums.  Since the frames are all the same size, he can move honey and brood around if necessary and can allow an unlimited brood nest.  In addition, the smaller boxes are about half the weight of a 10 frame deep, which makes his life much easier.  The only downside is cost --- getting started requires nearly twice as much capital with Bush's method.
• He uses foundationless frames.  As I've said over and over, foundationless frames help reduce varroa mite problems.  In addition, you don't have the cost of buying foundation, the time drain of installing it, and the problematic chemicals that get carried into your hive from someone else's.  Although we had a collapse after extracting honey from deep foundationless frames, you won't have problems if you stick to mediums or if you cut and crush.
• He uses top entrances only.  Bush has plugged up his bottom entrances so that his bees go in and out entrances in the top of the hive.  Top entrances means he doesn't need to worry about mowing around hives or about snow covering the entrance in the winter.  Mice are much less prone to sneak in a top entrance, and he sees fewer problems from skunks and other pests too.  Finally, top entrances provide good ventilation and, when combined with a layer of styrofoam on top of the hive, lead to little winter condensation.
  
• He doesn't treat hives.  Except in rare cases, Bush doesn't add any chemicals to the hive.  Even "organic" treatments like thymol aren't generally on his agenda since these chemicals will kill beneficial microorganisms in the hive.
  
• He breeds locally adapted queens.  Rather than buying new queens, Bush raises his own.  But even with these queens on hand, he doesn't requeen a hive unless absolutely necessary --- for example, if the hive is failing while others are thriving, or if the bees turn mean.  Generally, his queens live to be about three years old and then are naturally replaced by supersedure.
  
• He feeds only honey (usually.)  In general, Bush tries to ensure that his bees have enough of their own honey to make it through the winter.  If he has to feed, he usually feeds honey, but will sometimes feed dry sugar in a pinch.
  
• He doesn't scrape anything out of the hive.  Bush believes that the burr comb that is sometimes built between boxes is good because it lets you check for mites on drone pupae as you pull it apart, and the intact burr comb gives bees a ladder to climb from box to box.  He doesn't cut out swarm cells, instead doing his best to prevent swarms naturally, then splitting hives to raise new queens if he misses the boat and swarm cells do materialize.  He also doesn't scrape off propolis, since he believes this processed bee sap kills pathogenic bacteria and viruses in the hive.

Michael Bush's goal is two-pronged --- he wants to raise bees that don't need chemicals to stay alive, and he wants his apiary to be as little work as possible.  Those sound like laudable permaculture ambitions to me.

One of the best things about leaves as mulch is that they're totally free.  If you live in town and pay attention, you can probably snag bags of leaves off the curb on trash day during the fall.  But if you're a rural dweller like me, you'll want to head into the woods to find your mulch.

One of the primary purposes of mulch in the garden is to prevent weeds from growing, so it's essential that you rake leaves from weed-free areas.  Mature forests (or yard trees over manicured lawns) are your best bet --- our younger forest areas are home to the invasive Japanese stilt grass, which I don't want to introduce into my garden.

Look for dips in the landscape and areas without a lot of understory growth for easiest leaf harvests.  The old logging road shown here tends to accumulate leaves drifting down the hill, making it easy for me to scoop them up.

If you're able to drive right to your leaf-gathering location, you'll probably choose to use a leaf rake and some sort of bin to gather leaves.  But if you're walking off the beaten path, I've found it easiest to simply scoop leaves with my hands into large duffel bags, compacting the leaves frequently so you get the most leaves per trip.  To save your back, gather leaves during dry weather.  (Wet leaves are heavy.)









The partially decomposed duff beneath this year's leaves might be worth harvesting too, as long as you don't mind creating a slight erosion potential in the spot where you stole the leaves.  Duff is heavier than undecomposed leaves, which means it's less likely to blow away in the garden, and it is often full of beneficial mycorrhizae which will boost the growth of your garden plants.  However, if you delve into the duff, try to pay attention and don't harm the critters living there --- I moved this tiny salamander to the side with a handful of humus and covered him back over so he wouldn't dry out.

More in a later post about the best ways to use leaf mulch in the garden.  Meanwhile, what tips would you add about leaf harvest?

I ventured into a Goodwill in Asheville a few weeks ago, in search of pots and pans and work jeans.  Yeah, it's like that - no shame.  A very nice fellow customer pointed me around to the back, where he said I could find pots and pans even cheaper.  Sounds shady, right?  Well it is not.  Turns out this particular Goodwill has a spectacular bulk wing where you purchase items by the pound!

Here's my haul:
*the shallowest frying pan I've ever seen
*2 qt sauce pan
*venting pot lid (without matching pot)
*nifty wooden cutting board by Crestwood - not moldy, score!
*spatula with lathed wooden handle
*five foot length of metal tube with threaded endcap both ends
*two foot by eight foot light beige carpet remnant for feet wipe and shoe storage
*purple folding clip-on passenger seat for a bicycle or motorcycle
*two VHS tapes for the kids: "The Steam Locomotive" ca. 1940 & "Wee Sing in Sillyville"
*computer speakers
*stereo & unmatched speakers, i.e. top of the line GPX stereo w/ speakers by peerless brand Venturer
*rocking chair customized for use in the OUTHOUSE!!!***
*neato zipper sunglass case perfect for protecting work glasses
*three pairs work jeans that fit
*pimpalicious brown leather jacket that fits
*plastic Darth Vader helmet

*** Okay, the rocking chair is probably not custom designed for use in the outhouse, but that tiny seed of possibility is positively thrilling!  What we have is, I believe, a vintage factory-milled hand-assembled rocking chair, likely 60s, maybe early 70s or unlikely late 50s, quite sturdy and well-made.  Factory markings or pasted slips are absent.  The fresh wood you see from the top view is crudely screwed on from the bottom, clearly not original and fueling my desire that this is actually a rocking plopper.  However, it did come with a medallion of pressed paperboard, visible under the Vader Helm in Fig. 2, suggesting a missing insert panel.

I will remove the tacked on plywood scab and get to the bottom of this . . .
                  ] rimshot [
. . . seriously, I will conduct some carpentry forensics to see how an insert panel may have been attached originally.  If anyone has run across a perfect specimen please comment your findings below.
___
] j [

ps - no offense to any actual pimps out there, or to anyone who has been pimped or otherwise adversely affected by a pimp.  Please allow that 'pimp' is a new bastardized verb and adjective creeping into our silly language.  Expect it in Webster's by 2020, courtesy of MTV.

I forget where I read about running a chainsaw with the bar upside down.

The logic is that the bar will wear more evenly if you flip it every so often.

My system is to make the swap each time I install a new or machine sharpened chain.

PJ Chandler argued that the Langstroth hive is the root of many of the problems currently facing beekeepers.  Michael Bush agrees that honeybees are in trouble, but instead traces the ills to:

• Raising sickly bees.  Bush argues that the modern methods of pouring chemicals into the hive to keep pests at bay ends up selecting for resistant super-pests...and for wimpy bees that wouldn't be able to survive without chemicals.  In addition, since most honeybees now come from only a few beekeeping companies, we've restricted the gene pool so much that we're raising only a few inbred strains of bees, none or few of which have the ability to live in a chemical-free hive.  These bees have also been bred to use less propolis, which might make it easier for the beekeeper to pry the hive apart, but also makes allows viruses to thrive among the bees.
  
• Using foundation that makes bees sick.  I've written before that using foundation in your hive makes your bees create larger celled comb than they naturally would, which helps out varroa mites.  But did you know that the foundation you put in your hive is processed beeswax from someone else's hive...who almost certainly treated with lots of chemicals?  The wax is impregnated with pesticides, which causes drones raised on that foundation to be less fertile and queens who mate with those drones to fail nine times faster than a healthy queen would.
• Upsetting the natural ecology of the hive.  A healthy hive isn't just a couple of thousand bees; it also includes beneficial fungi, bacteria, yeasts, mites, and insects.  It's helpful to think of a bee hive as a bit like our stomachs --- the beneficial critters help "digest" (ferment) pollen while keeping the hive from getting sick by crowding out pathogens.  Using chemicals in the hive is like taking antibiotics every day --- you kill the good microorganisms along with the bad, so the system doesn't work as well.  In addition, feeding sugar water (pH 6.0) instead of leaving bees enough honey (pH 3.2 to 4.5) creates an enironment that helps the pathogens thrive.
  

Michael Bush's solutions --- while they can be hard to implement --- are very simple.  He says we have to stop using chemicals in our hives, even if that means many of our colonies die and only the strong remain.  Deleting foundation allows bees to build clean wax at a natural cell size.  And we must make sure that our bees always have enough honey rather than stealing too much and then feeding sugar water.  More on the specifics of his beekeeping method in tomorrow's post.

My kitchen forest garden island gets all the love while the peach tree just one year younger is out of sight and out of mind.  No wonder my favorite peach's younger sister has a canopy spread barely half the width of my darling kitchen peach.

I decided to begin to remedy matters by expanding the little sister's raised bed.  I wheelbarrowed some partially decomposed weeds from the compost pile in the chicken pasture to line one of the bed's edges, then added another wheelbarrow load of deep bedding, lightly sprinkled atop the soil all around.

Meanwhile, I ripped up the mushroom rafts (which I wasn't very pleased with) and rearranged the aging logs in a big square around the peach.  A friend and I weeded the areas that were mulched last year, then I laid down a newspaper kill mulch atop the parts of the square that were lawn.  (I would have preferred corrugated cardboard to newspaper, but you have to use what you've got.  Mom kindly saved all of these newspapers to be firestarters, and I never ended up burning them since I had too much junk mail.)

Finally, I topped it all off with leaves and promised little sister peach to pay more attention to her needs.  With fruit trees, you don't really see the full results of your actions until two seasons later, so I'll be waiting for baskets of peaches in the summer of 2013.

It's been almost a year since I used some scrap cardboard to block the wind in the used pallet chicken coop.

There's no direct sun, and the roof keeps it dry.

I'd say it's holding up pretty good. I can notice some slight fading, but it seems to have years left in it as an effective barrier.

The Practical Beekeeper: Beekeeping Naturally by Michael Bush is the epitome of a self-published book.  (Yes, I do include my 99 cent ebooks in this category.)  The text is chock full of very good information that you can't find anywhere else, but is definitely a bit rough around the edges.

First of all, the author is up front about the fact that the majority of the information can be found for free on his website.  I've spent years dipping into his informative website and was quite willing to pay a bit of money to have that information distilled into a more linear format.

Unfortunately, I felt like he didn't distill all that much.  There's no index, and the book is divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced sections, each of which covers most of the same topics in different degrees of depth.  So, to find out what Bush thinks about strains of bees, I had to read the entire table of contents and then flip through three different sections of the book.  I even noticed a few paragraphs that were included, verbatim, in multiple sections.

Meanwhile, the book is hardcover and large print, which means it's hefty and sells for the scary price of $49.  In retrospect, I might have been better off with the ebook ($29 on his website) since the photos are black and white and only moderate quality (meaning they wouldn't lose anything by being viewed in eink.)

Whichever format you choose, though, I highly recommend The Practical Beekeeper to any intermediate beekeeper who's struggling to navigate the maze of creating a chemical-free apiary.  The book appears daunting, but is actually an easy read and will definitely open your eyes to concepts you'd never considered.

The first crocuses opened on February 3 this year, and the Wood Frogs hit full chorus on February 5.  Meanwhile, the human chorus of "this is a crazy winter" just gets louder and louder.

However, take a look at the graph at the top of this page, showing average February temperatures at our closest major weather station for the last 64 years.  (We're actually a zone colder than them, but the trends are mostly the same here.)  Isn't it interesting to see that January 2012 is only the 13th warmest year during that time period?

This post is in no way related to global climate change, in case you're curious.  No single data point (and no comparison to the past 64 years) proves anything in that respect.  My thesis is --- our weather is always erratic, so enjoy the crocuses when they come!  I transplanted some of our little beauties into our forest garden island so I can watch them out the kitchen window.  I suspect no one else gets so much mileage from a few little bulbs.

Back in December of 2009 I posted about having some trouble with one of the golf cart lug nuts.

The hardware store didn't have counter sunk nuts, so I got some regular nuts and added a set of washers.



Turns out it was a mistake to take this short cut. Our mechanic fixed the problem with proper lug nuts on our last visit and kindly advised me to not do such a thing again.

It's hard to be sure, but the lug nut situation may have contributed to the bearing going bad.

Dear Larry Shinn and world at large,

My initial instinct on the issue of Jason Cohen's tweet was that students offended by the incident would be best to forgive instantly and find compassion. I am not saying you (we) need to feel guilty for our white privilege, but I am afraid faculty at this school is ostracizing students who speak out with the kind of activism for which we should be proud. I am saying that the tweet unearthed a lot of discomfort around racism that needs to be addressed.

It is easy for me to forgive, to find compassion at the drop of a hat. I have this privilege. But privilege is not the same as entitlement. It has taken me a long time to come to this. But the truth is racism is alive and present at Berea College. Overt racism and institutional racism both exist. This college does not have as many minority professors as it used to. Those numbers are actually going down. Many of you know people who were involved in the civil rights movement. My mother called the white folks who fought for civil rights in the 60's "white knights." Those civil rights activists were integral to the movement, and should be role models us today.

If you don't understand why the majority of white Bereans are apathetic on this issue or are uneasy and defensive then maybe you should study that a little. Maybe you should go back to college on that subject. The people who come here to this college are the most diverse I know. I have student friends here who were homeless, who are gay and lesbians, who are disabled mentally and physically, who are black and white, who are Christian and Muslim and of every religion, who are from countries I never knew existed, to be honest. Each one of these things holds a strong grip on our identities. We ALL need role models here, even in our adulthood. Having Obama in office gave African Americans everywhere the audacity to hope, granted them a sense of possibility.

If you see a white anglo saxon protestant future in the vision of the mission of Berea, by all means, hire more white men, more wives and husbands. Continue the legacy of nepotism. But that is not what your mission statement says, it is not the word your public relations department is spreading.

I don't usually lecture like this, on a soap box or pulpit. But now as I am realizing these things to be true, it seems these words need to be spoken. I think the symposium should be mandatory for all students.

<please, re-post as you may. I no longer use facebook>

in Truth, Maggie Hess

In yo face -- my Facebook performance "git" -- GIT OFF'A Facebook! fer Shy Jo

Change is so

impossible

to avoid,

like a fire

burning in a

neighbor's chimney,

like a poet's

imagination, watching

a squirrel skittering wild.

This photo is less than stellar, but the behavior is too interesting not to share.

Mark called me over to the window a few days ago to tell me that a bird was eating my praying mantis egg cases.  Sure enough, this little Downy Woodpecker was pecking away at the spongy blobs coating my peach tree twigs.

Generally, I like praying mantises (even though the ones I have are invasive species).  But my rule of thumb is that even if an animal is eating a beneficial insect, that's a good sign because it means I've created a quality ecosystem that can support top level predators.

I wonder how many of my other egg cases have been mined out?  And I also wonder if the mantis eggs have hatched into tiny mantises, spurring this attack.  I guess only the woodpeckers know for sure.

I I am riding back from dinner and a movie with Elizabeth Vega. She is forty five and speaks to me about all the things that have happened to her in the last five years. I notice a yin yang pattern, an oxymoron of life and death, in the things that she tells me. At forty she broke up with a man of a five year relationship; she fell in love with another man. She became a grandmother; her grandmother died. I interrupt her, caught up in my own 1 AM thoughts.
“Elizabeth? Do you think I ever will fall in love?” I begin explaining my question over a context of relationships and people. She knows me well enough to pin a truth on me.
“You’ve got to be open to it.” It is so easy to splash the truth on the face of someone else like icy cold water. I am closed. I hide so much. I lie every second, not in what I say, but in what I don’t say.

II Now I am sitting on my bed with butterfly bended knees, with a laptop keeping my feet warm. When we were in the theater, I was thinking at a thought that has been growing in my mind. I healed myself. I had so much help along the way. Overcoming bipolar disorder as much as I have has taken such a combination of drugs and factors, of people watching their little sister, their little girl, their friend do things that made them wonder for years where their girl had gone. And all along, I was required to grow up, as is forced on the 18 year old with the mindset of a child. So yes! Much of my survival was my sister and brother keeping me on a remote farm cove house, naively hoping I would drop out of it. People who knew me in all of my personal shapes and sizes looked at me then and said I was gone. Mental illness is something that takes a lot to understand. After the hospital, I felt they looked at me differently, with stigma. When people return from war, we are so much different. I was changed. They did their best. And so did I. I healed myself. Without my medicines and support, I would never have made it. But without my determination, my love of life, my prayers and hospital yoga, I would have cut myself to pieces like so many people. I was hospitalized for four episodes, if I count right, and I am proud to say that I lied every time when I entered the hospital. People must be suicidal or homicidal to be admitted there. I never gave up on myself, and fortunately, found a path past that violent anger.
When I was hospitalized, my priorities were smartly set. I needed to fix my mental state at all physical costs. The medicines were not good for my body. I grew strict with myself strict in many ways. I was so afraid of losing my mind again, that I kept my virginity. I kept my body clean of coffee until about three years ago. I had been to Costa Rica where huge tracts of rain forests are lush and protected with easements. I had a contract with myself, an attempt to keep sane and stable. I would make straight A’s at the college there. I would do nothing social. Even when my friends found me, when a band of anarchists came my way, I maintained a straight edge. Even when I took breaks from school, semesters, years at a time, I went to bed by midnight. I would not compromise with my need for nine hour nights. I rose with the sun. I did not see chocolate chips or greasy foods as involved at all in my mental well being. I grew twice my original size. I was for a long time afraid to crack a joke. I was for a long time afraid to laugh, afraid of my mania, afraid of who I was, of who I could be. Children made me nervous. I started to drive a Honda Accord with three colors of rust. I slapped stickers on the bumper. A series of stickers that have faded or that I peeled off for change. My mother bought me the car so I could commute to college. I never bought her anything significant. Nothing up to the scale of what she gave me. I lived with my mother for years. I resented her because the house was small. I resented her when I learned the best thing for my insomnia was to write the night through. Living there made me unstable, but it was not my mother’s fault at all. I was largely unstable from my deep paranoia of being out of control.
I called the car she gave me Independence because that was what I wanted deep inside. But I had no idea how to achieve it.

III. I am so hard to contain, so stubborn and willful. But for years I lacked the kind of independence that risks laughing at the expense of worrying family people I might develop a mania. I got my first adult friend, a woman my age who knew what to tell me to help me grow. Until that time, my relationships were so stunted, unequal, full of conversations with only one person talking. She made me listen and asked challenging questions. Out of love. I joked that I could pay her for these therapeutic phone calls. It felt good to laugh. We earned about the same amount of money then, and I did pay her a few times for her labor of love.
I picked up another friend, a mother of an eight and a six year old. Both friendships have the air of permanence for me. I began learning how to be socially normal. I embraced my differences.
I did an internship where I learned about my capabilities. There were things I had written off as possible. Like coffee late in the evening, or letting my insomniac energy roam. There were three other women all growing in their own manner and capacity. I developed some interpersonal conflicts. Being so isolated there with them on that mountain top did not help. Meditation Rock changed my views of things, for sure, if just for the green rolling valley it exposed to me. I loved to go there and listen to chickadees. I learned to be wild, as one of four women dancing in the nude, playing baseball with the other employees, stealing Lauren’s ice cream from the refrigerator and watching her liquored up, vulgar reaction, being verbally coached by Lauren and Dylan on pleasurable masturbation, supporting a tearful Tessa when I did not know I had it in me, withdrawing emotionally, surviving.

IV.
When I bought the painting, Jeff Enge gave me the first good pot he ever threw. I called it my Winnie the Pooh pot until, of course, when it shattered on the pavement that same evening. I knew the symbolism immediately when it fell and broke. I had just impulsively purchased a 300 dollar painting. It meant to me that I needed to take care of myself. I know now that means my whole self, especially my body.
The wise people I know always told me about my need for holistic healing, holistic being. I cannot say that I have solved that riddle yet. I need to take care of myself, for sure. But how do I best go about doing that, when my body craves red meat and soda and my once sacred spirituality is caught in a fight against proselytizing Christianity. I healed myself – to a point. But I did not heal myself entirely yet. However, tonight, I unwrapped Elizabeth’s riddle. We saw a movie about a young boy seeking out something that was not real or plausible. Yet, the boy found it in himself. He found his strength and his love and his compassion.
My life too is a riddle, with that general conclusion. I hold the lock. I don’t have the key. I walk by myself in this little town of thought and paper. I can only solve one riddle a day. I don’t have the answer here, yet. How can a latch learn to open?

I was trying to find some information on cold pressing coconuts when I stumbled upon Youtube user rawfoods and his unique approach.

1. Shred up the coconut.

2. Bake chunks in a dehydrator at 118 degrees for 12 to 24 hours depending on humidity.

3. Slowly feed the dried coconut pieces into a juicer where the fiber will get extracted from the oil, which is very creamy and can be used as butter if you have the proper coconut.

4. You may need to feed the fiber back through to get additional oil out. This guy uses an Omega 8006 juicer.

5. Feed extracted fiber into a grain mill to make coconut flour.

More on this later when we actually juice up some dried coconuts.

Byron, when I met you, I did not love you like a father. Byron when I saw you there in the William Penn House, scowling at me in a punishing way, I did not like you much at all. I went to my own father, who worked above you then, and asked him if he could fire you. I was under the spell of culture shock and about to be hospitalized with bipolar disorder, and still in a place where I was about as uneven as I ever have been.

But when I moved out at the end of the summer, Byron, I took you with me. We had eaten like monks together that summer, not in what we ate, but in the silence. I clearly remember the most poetic thing you said to me then – that monks eat in silence time and time again, and that it is the mutual experience of that silence, what is said without words, the passing of salt, the pouring of water, in our case, the heating of Boca Burgers, that binds us.

Based on last year's onion experiments, I've decided to start my storage onions inside this winter.  The other option that worked well was to grow the onions under quick hoops in soil doctored with biochar, but I only have one bucket of the precious amendment and am not sure I want to "waste" it on onions.  (My quick hoops are all full of overwintering greens anyway.)

So I headed out to the old apple tree for some stump dirt to use as potting soil.  I put the stump dirt directly into my seed starting flats, wet it down, then lightly compressed the organic matter with my fingers.  After sprinkling seeds on top, I added a thin layer of composted horse manure ---  sometimes I use stump dirt alone as potting soil, but the apple tree's rotted center didn't seem quite as dark and rich as the organic matter I mine out of the beech tree further away.

Assuming they come up and grow, I'll transplant tiny onion sets at the beginning of March.  Although it seems rough to throw them into unprotected ground so early, last year's transplants did find even without a quick hoop.  Maybe 2012 will be the year we finally delete the last storebought vegetable from our diet?

Dear 17 year old Maggie, Congratulations on graduating high school and the good grades and the steady job lifeguarding. Maybe you can give me a tip or two someday!
You are heading to your family’s annual trip to Ocracoke Island. They have been going as a family for 16 years of your life. You are adding up those years in your mind thinking you will spend half a year on family vacations before you die at 90 or 100. There will be a time when family beach trips are too hard for you, when you will not be able to handle that much family, and eventually when you will take time away from this vacation. I cannot help you I don’t think.
I just want to comfort you, like anyone when I think I have insight on them that they might not see. I encourage you to forget these words like they are a dream that evaporates in the morning, dew on the windshield. No one can protect you from those rough waters. This is not a place for blame and there is no need for apology. We did our best – you and I and all the people in between. There is no blame because you always will keep your promise with life. This is just a quick note to encourage you.
You are strong in every way possible. This is a theme in your history of being. You will always have a calmness in you and a fire, available. You are intelligent and beautiful. I have good friends just a few years older than you. And I take classes with a number of people just around your same age. Every now and then I will see a young woman who reminds me of you. I want to help her realize who she is, what is and will be a constant part of her. You will always be a writer. You will go into other fields of study, even to the point of agonizing with the question of choosing a college major. Don’t ask me how I know this. Just a guess based on my own life. This is a huge part of who you are. You will also come to identify with other highly emotional people. You will spend a whole year studying Psychology writing papers about your identity with limited truth.
Farmer’s Almanac for your soul. I know you don’t remember me and might be wondering why I am writing this letter. Don’t worry about that too much. I may be a stranger to you here, but I know you well and I am rooting for you! I know this sounds arrogant and/or confusing, but I would rather be me than you. Take comfort in knowing that, ok?
Puravida! a future Friend

We got the golf cart home without any trouble from the local sheriff.

Our mechanic found the problem. It was a worn bearing. I was highly impressed with the way he was able to replace it with a bearing that normally fits in a car. You can't get Club Car parts online, only from a local dealer.

I think he talked us into upgrading the back springs, which will help with the heavy loads we tend to haul.

My last post missed an important thing about GHC 7.4's handling of encodings for FileName. It can in fact be safe to use FilePath to write a command like rm. This is because GHC internally uses a special encoding for FilePath data, that is documented to allow "arbitrary undecodable bytes to be round-tripped through it". (It seems to do this by encoding the undecodable bytes as very high unicode code points.) So, when presented with a filename that cannot be decoded using utf-8 (or whatever the system encoding is), it still handles it, and using the resulting FilePath will in fact operate on the right file. Whew!

Moral of the story is that if you're going to be using GHC 7.4 to read or write filenames from a pipe, or a file, you need to arrange for the Handle you're reading or writing to use this special encoding too. I use this to set up my Handles:

import System.IO
import GHC.IO.Encoding
import GHC.IO.Handle

fileEncoding :: Handle -> IO ()
fileEncoding h = hSetEncoding h =<< getFileSystemEncoding

Even if you're only going to write a FilePath to stdout, you need to do this. Otherwise, your program will crash on some filenames! This doesn't seem quite right to me, but I hesitate to file a bug report. (And this is not a new problem in GHC anyway.) If I did, it would have this testcase:

# touch "me¡"
# LANG=C ghc
Prelude> :m System.Directory
Prelude System.Directory> mapM_ putStrLn =<< getDirectoryContents "."
me*** Exception: <stdout>: hPutChar: invalid argument (invalid character)

Since git-annex reads lots of filenames from git commands and other places, I had to deal with this extensively. Unfortunatly I have not found a way to read Text from a Handle using the fileSystemEncoding. So I'm stuck with slow Strings. But, it does seem to work now.

---

PS: I found a bug in GHC 7.4 today where one of those famous Haskell immutable values seems to get well, mutated. Specifically a [FilePath] that is non-empty at the top of a function ends up empty at the bottom. Unless IO is done involving it at the top. Really. Hope to develop a test case soon. Happily, the code that triggered it did so while working around a bug in GHC that is fixed in 7.4. Language bugs.. gotta love em.

If you've read my lunchtime series on Voisin grazing as well as this one on mob grazing, you might be wondering which method is better.  I suspect the answer depends on what kind of animal you're trying to feed, and on how healthy your pasture is to start with.

Mob grazing has two major benefits --- it heals the soil quickly, and it also allows you to keep ruminants on pasture all winter without feeding hay.  On the other hand, Voisin grazing's tender grasses and copious clover make this method more appropriate to non-ruminants (like pigs and chickens), and to dairy animals that require high quality feed.

Can you mix and match the two systems to suit your own needs?  I'm not positive, but I suspect you could treat different paddocks in different ways, stockpiling winter forage in one while grazing another one close and often to promote the growth of clovers.

I'd be very curious to hear from those of you who have tried either system.  What did you like about it?  What problems did you run into?

This post is part of our Mob Grazing lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Greg Judy on mob grazing Recovery period and trampling define mob grazing Stockpiling winter forage How to stockpile pasture Trampling grass to renovate poor pastures How to start mob grazing Managing animals with mob grazing Starting slowly with pasturing Pasturing with nature Mob grazing vs. Voisin grazing

Unfinished – I know it is approaching greatness, on the road to wonderful, only when I see my writing as unfinished art.
Listening – We only hear in the rare moments when we are able to calm the instinct to control the bustle in our mind, and let the conversation run. Body: Photos over time – This is the story of me, a woman who sees my body pressed against a backdrop of age and time. I have a picture of myself when I was a slender seventeen. I am at the land trust community farm where my mother and I used to go and hike. My sister Dani shot that picture. She knew how to catch me when I was in a moment that I would stand the test of time, that would mean something to me later. I stand there under the porch of the hundred year old house, reaching out my fingertips to the rain that falls there. My mood was melancholy then. But pensive, hiking, feeling rain as it came down off the tin roof. I guess I heard the melody it makes there. I guess I saw the willow tree down there, with a similar beauty and sadness. In another image Dani took, I am sitting on a manmade sand dune near the ferry end of the island at Ocracoke. I have the same down feeling. But sometimes being glum is not a horrible thing. Recently, over Winter Break, I got up in the middle of the night, disrobed, and made raw outline sketch paintings of my raw naked body. A headless, legless, Venus of Willendorf type outline, almost resembling a smile. When I think of my body over my lifetime, almost 30 years, I see it has transformed with both a connection and simultaneous disconnectedness to my emotion.
There are lots of pictures of my eleven year old self, or earlier. This prepubescent girl is who I see when I think “inner child.” I see a power in that girl that I am just recovering. She does gymnastics like many young girls do. And like many, she started too late to be competitive. This is a good thing. Stretching and bending her body in numerous positions, she is a work of art. She arranges herself in a backbend, then folds on the grass of a neighbor’s back yard. She flips her feet over her head in a cart wheel. She is flexible as a clay doll. Her muscles aren’t strong enough to do all the moves her peers can do. But the important thing I remember about her then is in her pluck and confidence. She is a tom boy, having recently read of Tom and Huck in books she found on her parent’s shelves – she spits like her dad. Later I read To Kill a Mockingbird and see myself in Scout, the plucky, wide eyed heroine.
I want to get to be sixty and ninety. I want to carry all of these selves along the way. I want to be more and more spunky and alive until the day I die. In wit, in loving, embodied.

I started my most successful forest garden island very simply.  I planted the tree in a raised bed, then dumped weeds around the bed's edges for three years.  The mounds of weeds rotted down to expand the original raised bed, creating rich dirt that extended beyond the tree's canopy.  I highly recommend this method since it requires you to maintain your focus on the centerpiece tree, giving it a few years to get established before the tree has to compete with anyone else.

The photo above shows the three year old peach tree in August 2009.  At this point, my well established peach was ready to handle understory plants, so I transplanted comfrey and bee balm into the partial shade beneath the peach's canopy, and fennel, echinacea, rhubarb, and Egyptian onions in the sun.

May of the next year, the forest garden island was in full swing.  In less successful forest garden islands, I had planted comfrey under younger peach trees in poor soil, and the comfrey stole nitrogen from the tree.  But this more established peach had no problem shading the comfrey enough that the understory plant behaved.

You'll notice that fennel, echinacea, and rhubarb have disappeared --- these plants didn't like being transplanted in the summer heat.  However, the Egyptian onions were thrilled with their new home and thrived even during my summer neglect.

That spring, I seeded poppies amid the Egyptian onions, which added a lot of beauty, but won't be repeated.  I love puttering in my forest garden islands in the winter, but in the summer I'm too busy in the vegetable garden to give them any care.  Since annuals tend to require bare ground, which has to be weeded, they're out of the running as forest garden plants.

This second year of the forest garden island was when our peach started producing --- over half a bushel that summer.  Meanwhile the ecology of the island seemed to come into its own, attracting birds, insects, and wild mushrooms.




Last year was the third year of forest garden experimentation.  The peach had achieved its mature size and was starting to shade out the comfrey and bee balm closest to the trunk.  That allowed me to add another type of understory plant --- shade lovers.  I transplanted ramps right around the tree's trunk and daffodils helter skelter throughout the island.  Both of these plants are early spring ephemerals, which are active in the spring before the tree canopy shades them out, then die back when summer arrives.

Where will the island go from here?  I'm experimenting with more shade-loving species this spring --- goldenseal and ginseng.  Meanwhile, if I get around to it, I plan to transplant some flowering perennials into the sunny zone --- probably bee balm, echinacea, and fennel, since I have them around in excess.

A wild elderberry sprang up at the edge of the forest garden island a few years ago, and I left it alone since it seemed to be far enough away that it doesn't compete with the peach.  Pollinators seem to love the flowers, and the birds enjoy the fruits.  (I know elderberries are edible for humans too, but I'm not enough in love with the taste that I feel the need to fight off the birds, who really love the taste.)

The island has stopped expanding since the peach has achieved its final size, and I can feel the ecosystem starting to reach a steady state.  Annual maintenance is now about the same as it would be for any other fruit tree, but I suspect the tree is healthier for the diverse ecosystem under and around its canopy.  Plus, we get to enjoy a bit of beauty right outside the kitchen window.  This is one of our most successful permaculture experiments, and I highly recommend you try it out around your own fruit trees.

My Enge painting also has a twin. This is so peculiar. The Mona Lisa's twin is so eerie. Just discovered! Check this out!

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/02/146288063/painting-sheds-new-light-on-the-mona-lisa

I've just spent several days trying to adapt git-annex to changes in ghc 7.4's handling of unicode in filenames. And by spent, I mean, time withdrawn from the bank, and frittered away.

In kindergarten, the top of the classrom wall was encircled by the aA bB cC of the alphabet. I'll bet they still put that up on the walls. And all the kids who grow up to become involved with computers learn that was a lie. The alphabet doesn't stop at zZ. It wouldn't all fit on a wall anymore.

So we're in a transition period, where we've all learnt deeply the alphabet, but the reality is much more complicated. And the collision between that intuitive sense of the world and the real world makes things more complicated still. And so, until we get much farther along in this transition period, you have to be very lucky indeed to not have wasted time dealing with that complexity, or at least having encountered Mojibake.

Most of the pain centers around programming languages, and libraries, which are all at different stages of the transition from ascii and other legacy encodings to unicode.

• If you're using C, you likely deal with all characters as raw bytes, and rely on the backwards compatability built into UTF-8, or you go to long lengths to manually deal with wide characters, so you can intelligently manipulate strings. The transition has barely begin, and will, apparently, never end.
• If you're using perl (at least like I do in ikiwiki), everything is (probably) unicode internally, but every time you call a library or do IO you have to manually deal with conversions, that are generally not even documented. You constantly find new encoding bugs. (If you're lucky, you don't find outright language bugs... I have.) You're at a very uncomfortable midpoint of the transition.
• If you're using haskell, or probably lots of other languages like python and ruby, everything is unicode all the time.. except for when it's not.
• If you're using javascript, the transition is basically complete.

My most recent pain is because the haskell GHC compiler is moving along in the transition, getting closer to the end. Or at least finishing the second 80% and moving into the third 80%. (This is not a quick transition..)

The change involves filename encodings, a situation that, at least on unix systems, is a vast mess of its own. Any filename, anywhere, can be in any encoding, and there's no way to know what's the right one, if you dislike guessing.

Haskell folk like strongly typed stuff, so this ambiguity about what type of data is contained in a FilePath type was surely anathama. So GHC is changing to always use UTF-8 for operations on FilePath. (Or whatever the system encoding is set to, but let's just assume it's UTF-8.)

Which is great and all, unless you need to write a Haskell program that can deal with arbitrary files. Let's say you want to delete a file. Just a simple rm. Now there are two problems:

1. The input filename is assumed to be in the system encoding aka unicode. What if it cannot be validly interpreted in that encoding? Probably your rm throws an exception.
2. Once the FilePath is loaded, it's been decoded to unicode characters. In order to call unlink, these have to be re-encoded to get a filename. Will that be the same bytes as the input filename and the filename on disk? Possibly not, and then the rm will delete the wrong thing, or fail.

But haskell people are smart, so they thought of this problem, and provided a separate type that can deal with it. RawFilePath hearks back to kindergarten; the filename is simply a series of bytes with no encoding. Which means it cannot be converted to a FilePath without encountering the above problems. But does let you write a safe rm in ghc 7.4.

So I set out to make something more complicated than a rm, that still needs to deal with arbitrary filename encodings. And I soon saw it would be problimatic. Because the things ghc can do with RawFilePaths are limited. It can't even split the directory from the filename. We often do need to manipulate filenames in such ways, even if we don't know their encoding, when we're doing something more complicated than rm.

If you use a library that does anything useful with FilePath, it's not available for RawFilePath. If you used standard haskell stuff like readFile and writeFile, it's not available for RawFilePath either. Enjoy your low-level POSIX interface!

So, I went lowlevel, and wrote my own RawFilePath versions of pretty much all of System.FilePath, and System.Directory, and parts of MissingH and other libraries. (And noticed that I can understand all this Haskell code.. yay!) And I got it close enough to working that, I'm sure, if I wanted to chase type errors for a week, I could get git-annex, with ghc 7.4, to fully work on any encoding of filenames.

But, now I'm left wondering what to do, because all this work is regressive; it's swimming against the tide of the transition. GHC's change is certainly the right change to make for most programs, that are not like rm. And so most programs and libraries won't use RawFilePath. This risks leaving a program that does a fish out of water.

At this point, I'm inclined to make git-annex support only unicode (or the system encoding). That's easy. And maybe have a branch that uses RawFilePath, in a hackish and type-unsafe way, with no guarantees of correctness, for those who really need it.

---

Previously: unicode eye chart wanted on a bumper sticker abc boxes unpacking boxes

Our 14 foot long metal roofing panels came in today.

The guy we hired said he won't have much trouble walking the material across the creek and back to the barn.

Yes...he actually has seen the creek and driveway first-hand when he came out to give us the estimate. I'm guessing he has plans to make some sort of stretcher so a guy on each end can lift maybe 4 or 5 at a time?

Well planned pasturing systems can heal the earth --- and can take advantage of natural systems to keep the livestock healthier.  Greg Judy puts up tree swallow boxes since one adult can eat 8,000 flies per day, leading to happy cows.  Meanwhile, he pays close attention to the critters in and on the soil, watching dung beetles roll manure down tunnels into the earth and counting 462 worms in a single cow pat.  He considers spiders to a prime indicator of pasture health since these predators need to eat lots of insects to stay alive, and insects thrive in rich, organic matter-filled soil.

Other parts of Greg's pasturing ecology seem less intuitive.  He believes that careful mob grazing can heal gullies and riparian areas.  He mob grazes steep sided gullies three or four times per year, knocking the banks down so that vegetation can gain a foothold.  While I'm not sure his system would work in very wet climates (his waterways tend to dry up in the summer), Greg's system has created vegetated waterways that capture his neighbor's eroding topsoil (and precious water) each time it rains.  "It doesn't matter how much rain you get," said Greg.  "It matters how much you keep."

This post is part of our Mob Grazing lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Greg Judy on mob grazing Recovery period and trampling define mob grazing Stockpiling winter forage How to stockpile pasture Trampling grass to renovate poor pastures How to start mob grazing Managing animals with mob grazing Starting slowly with pasturing Pasturing with nature Mob grazing vs. Voisin grazing

I saw Mark peeling the bark off the walnut logs we were stacking into the woodshed and realized that he was right --- barkless logs will probably dry faster.  Even dry bark doesn't make good firewood, so I decided to snag the biomass for my garden.

My first impulse is to see how the bark fares as the kill layer of a kill mulch.  I never have enough corrugated cardboard to go around --- maybe a couple of thicknesses of bark will do just as well?

I've been experimenting with alternative heating methods for the new Rajkumar oil expeller.

The soldering iron pictured above failed miserably.

It did a good job of heating the metal, but those things were never designed to be left on for more than a minute, which is why it has a push button trigger instead of a toggle switch. I knew this, but thought it could handle just a few minutes more. That's when the plastic case around the heating element melted. Now I need to find a new soldering iron.

The next round of experiments will involve an electric pipe heater.

Many of us get so excited when we learn about multi-species grazing and about rotational pastures that we want to create a vibrant ecosystem overnight.  But Greg Judy cautions us to slow down.

If you already manage a pasture, he recommends not increasing your stocking rate or expanding into multiple species for at least two years.  It will take you that long to improve the quality of your soil so that it can handle more feet.

Meanwhile, Greg recommends that you figure out what your centerpiece animal is and learn the intricacies of its care before bringing new animals in.  Yes, adding more species can make the patsuring system work more efficiently, but so will focusing on what's most important rather than scattering your attention in five different directions.

Meat animals make much better starter livestock than dairy animals do.  Making milk requires a lot of energy, and it's tough (although possible) to keep dairy animals healthy on pasture alone.  In addition, a quality milk cow is worth a lot more than a meat cow, so there's less financial risk as you muddle your way up the learning curve.

Finally, Greg recommends that you pay as close attention to yourself as you do to the pasture.  If you work a full time job and plan to pasture livestock in your spare time, don't start with a complex dairy cow rotation where you need to move animals seven times a day.  On the other hand, if you're unemployed and are willing to put in the time, you can feed many more animals on the same acreage if you're willing to rotate often so that high quality food is always available.  Maybe in a few years, you'll be able to run half a dozen different kinds of livestock on that same pasture.

This post is part of our Mob Grazing lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Greg Judy on mob grazing Recovery period and trampling define mob grazing Stockpiling winter forage How to stockpile pasture Trampling grass to renovate poor pastures How to start mob grazing Managing animals with mob grazing Starting slowly with pasturing Pasturing with nature Mob grazing vs. Voisin grazing

I hope that when I reported that the Persephone Days were over, you didn't rush out to plant your spring vegetables.  Once daylength is longer than ten hours, surviving crops like kale will start growing again, but that doesn't mean the ground is warm enough for seeds to sprout. 

Lettuce, onions, and spinach can all handle soil temperatures as low as 35 while most other spring crops like the earth to have warmed to at least 40 degrees Fahrenheit.  I tested the soil temperature in the sunniest part of our garden last week, and the ground underneath our quick hoops was just barely 35 degrees, while unprotected soil was hovering right around freezing.

Most of the plants under my quick hoops are starting to grow again, but the tatsoi totally perished in the winter cold.  That means I had a spot just waiting to plant spring lettuce!  Rip out a few weeds, toss down a bucket of composted manure, then sprinkle on lettuce seeds, and the first garden bed of 2012 is seeded for March harvests.

The driveway was frozen enough this morning to risk getting the golf cart through the mud.

We recently found out that our local mechanic has the same golf cart and is willing to take a look at ours.

It did great through the frozen mud. The mechanic is just down the road, which meant maybe a fourth of a mile on our local country road and another fourth on the main highway. I was a bit stressed at the prospect of breaking down half way, or getting a ticket, but traffic is pretty light around here, especially at 9:30 in the morning when most folks are already tucked into their job for the day.

A guy at the garage suggested that a Farm Use tag mounted on the back might be enough to reduce the risk of trouble with the police for occasions like this. Not sure if that's good enough for the law, but I'm guessing it would help.

Even though mob grazing's primary focus is on the soil and plants, you don't want to ignore your livestock.  If you're building up poor soil, it won't be able to support as many animals per acre, so pay attention to the oldest and youngest animals to make sure they're healthy.  Cattle shouldn't have a dent on their left side --- that means they're not getting enough to eat.  Healthy cattle, on the other hand, will have a shiny line down the neck that denotes good gland function (and keeps flies away), and will lose their winter coats quickly.  If your cattle don't look healthy, give them more space (or feed them hay if you must.)

Meanwhile, choose your livestock wisely.  Most modern cattle have been bred for size, but you want to select for the ability to thrive on pasture 365 days a year.  Greg Judy had to go back to older varieties of cattle with short legs, big bellies, and an oily streak down the back.  His full-grown bulls clock in at 1050 to 1100 pounds and his cows at 850 to 900 pounds, in contrast to some breeds that mature at 2000 to 2500 pounds.  He culls relentlessly, removing cattle from his herd if they're getting too thin, so his livestock become hardier every year.

Greg also shifted management patterns to make year-round grazing feasible.  Rather than weaning calves the way most cattle-farmers do, he selects for cows that are smaller, then he gives them lots of forage so that the mothers are able to stay healthy while raising their calves.  He makes sure his cows give birth around the first of April, when the pastures are just starting to pick up speed, which means peak milk production arrives in May when calves are big enough to handle it.

Finally, Greg doesn't worry about parasites.  One of the major benefits of rotational grazing is that you move the animals quickly enough that cattle aren't eating around their own feces, and by the time they come back through, parasites have perished.  That means Greg doesn't even give his herd dewormer --- if the cows get sick, he figures they have bad genes and he culls them.

With the driveway still impassable and the blueberries in need of mulch, I decided to rake some leaves out of the woods.  I'd been eying a spot on the southwest corner of our property for years since beech and oak leaves accumulate there in deep drifts.  I figured the most time-consuming portion of leaf gathering was the gathering part, so I headed to my remembered spot with our two huge chicken waterer mailing bags.

The leaf drifts didn't disappoint.  In fact, I scared a flock of turkeys who had gathered on the hillside for a similar reason (although they were scratching through the leaves for invertebrates rather than snagging the leaves themselves.)  In a matter of minutes, I had stuffed both bags so full they were bulging against the seams.  Then I picked one up...

...Or rather, tried to pick one up.  Who knew that a bag full of compacted leaves would be so heavy?  With a bag on each shoulder, I struggled up to the top of the hill, and then ended up dragging the leaves back down the other side.  (Not good for the bags --- I won't be repeating that part, but no way was I going to leave my organic matter behind.)

The last third of the way was on level ground with lots of logs to cross, so I had to leave one bag behind and come back for it later.  As I walked through the woods closer to home, I noticed smaller drifts, and resolved that my next leaf gathering expedition would be here --- clearly I was wrong about raking being the most time-consuming part of the project.

But I forgot all the pain and agony as I spilled leaves out onto my blueberry patch.  Each big bag held the equivalent of at least four of the trashbags full of leaves Mom gathered for me on the curb.  Since I've lined each blueberry bed in logs, I have high hopes the leaves will stay put (rather than blowing away), and I'm sure my blueberries will enjoy the the dose of micronutrients.

So how do you start a mob grazing operation from scratch?  Say you've got an old potato field that keeps eroding into the creek every year, and you've decided to turn it into pasture to preserve (and build) topsoil.  How do you make that pasture happen, and what do you want it to look like?

Instead of spreading a lot of grass seed, Greg Judy recommends starting with hay.  If you unroll a lot of hay bales into the proto-pasture in the winter and graze your livestock there (even though there's really nothing to graze on), the hay will naturally seed the pasture, and will also add a bit of starter biomass when livestock trample some into the soil.  You'll need to keep feeding your animals for the first year --- this is worth it because you're building your soil every time the livestock pass through.

In the second year, you can finally plant some clover seeds, focusing on fall planting when the baby clover won't be competing much with weeds.  Unlike Voisin grazing (which believes more clover is always better), Greg Judy recommends aiming for only 30% legumes since too much high nitrogen clover is bad for beef cows.

Meanwhile, start feeding your animals free choice minerals in the summer, with each type of nutrient in its own compartment.  The livestock will only eat what's deficient in the soil, and since about 70% of the minerals will pass right through them, you'll be correcting soil nutrient imbalances at the same time you're making your livestock healthier.  Greg Judy noticed that, after three years of mob grazing, his animals are now eating only a quarter as much mineral as they used to, and they don't touch any of the minerals at all when grazing on his highest quality soil.

As your pasture grows, don't worry if you start to see plants you're not familiar with.  If your recovery period is long enough, warm season perennials like indian grass, big bluestem, and gama grass will spring up --- these are great for summer grazing as long as you make sure to give them a long rest period.  Meanwhile, don't worry about a few "weeds" --- Greg Judy believes that giant ragweed pumps minerals from deep in the soil, which is why his cows love it.  (They like tree leaves for the same reason.)  A well-managed pasture will become more diverse and more like a native prairie every year.

Are you the kind of person who sees a strange hole in the woods and has to poke your hand in?  I am.  That's why when the pathway between the blueberries seemed to have more give than I expected, I stamped...and fell into a hole up to my knee.

I usually think of water as dropping from the sky, slowly percolating through the soil, and ending up in creeks and rivers.  But our neck of the woods is full of caves that allow groundwater to flow more freely.  In fact, our creek goes underneath a ridge and river before popping back up on the other side.  Could my tiny sinkhole be the entrance to a large cavern?

Mark rolled his eyes at my "cave", and rightly so.  Although the hole itself was big enough to stick your head in, it quickly narrowed on either side to allow a mere trickle of water to flow through.  I guess now I know where the water comes from for the wet weather spring that spurts out of the ground near the goat path during really rainy spells.

Too small to tap for geothermal, I wonder what the best use of my hole might be?  I could fill it with wood chips to act as a sponge, soaking up water during wet weather and then releasing it back into the soil during droughts.  Ideas?

I couldn't resist featuring this post from Anna and Mark's WaldenEffect.org



Do it yourself plank production?
 
 "When we first got our 039 Stihl chainsaw we also got a ripping chain with a special adjustable guide that connects to the chainsaw body. The guide helps to make even cuts when you want to make planks from a tree.

I think we cut a total of 15 planks from a pine tree that were each about 2 feet long. They worked good for our foot bridge, but the process was not easy.

We decided making our own planks was a bit too complex for our skill level, but if you've got the time and a remote location that makes delivery a challenge then maybe a chainsaw mill is an option worth considering."

Follow the title link to check out a valuable conversation thread in the comments.

] j [ 

The Alaskan small log mill only takes a few minutes to attach to a chainsaw.

It's been years since we've used it. The main thing I remember is needing someway to clamp the log down so it wouldn't move while I operated the chainsaw. The plan at the time was to either build a small structure or fix up a corner of the barn. We got lucky and found someone giving away an old trailer and decided a recycled home would get us on the land a year or two sooner and a lot cheaper.

There's no doubt it would feel groovy to sit back and look at a structure knowing you built it from a downed tree, but I'm not sure the longevity would compare to store bought and kiln dried wood? I guess it would depend on the tree you start with and the level of craftsmanship.

I was drawn to the large painting like a hummingbird to a bee balm flower, strolling past the shelves of mugs and bowls and other pottery on the front porch where the artists were selling their works. I found myself standing on a hill, overlooking a rolling field and expanse of forests. The painting in front of me mimicked its surroundings. I noticed there were some boys on the back porch lighting up something to smoke, but my own exhilaration was fabricated entirely from the painting I saw. I remembered C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, lost the people I came there with, stepping for a moment in through the frame of this painting. It looked like Vincent Van Gogh returned for a day in the body of some Appalachian and painted what I know as home: Appalachian hills, a field, and hay bales, and a sky thick with oily swirls of blue and white. For a long time, I just stood there in the world of the painting, grieving reality, breaking a damp feverishness that won me over in a contest of creative brilliance. I don’t remember what Jeff Enge said to me, except that it was alluring only through being hesitant and unassuming. Something simple like asking if I liked his painting and a soft agreement when I said I liked it very much and was it a Van Gogh? And oh, it couldn’t be “just 300 dollars?” I wanted to tell him about my artist sister, but he walked away as if he didn’t want me to buy the painting at all. Like, he would have sold it to anyone but me. I drifted around the art show, but nothing else spoke to me at all. It was by no means a necessity that I purchased something. I certainly wouldn’t have bought the painting at all and I definitely wasn’t pressured, but I couldn’t find a way not to leave without it.

Like human beings,
clay is a resilient substance.
It can be recycled back into art time and again,
wetting it down and spinning it up
or the simple act of photographing
the pieces on the ground,
lining it up on a table or a window sill.
Even shattered art is still art,
vibrant, purposeful, and with a story of its own.

Inside, there was a selection of free food, which usually is more alluring to me than just about anything. But when I went in, my goal in mind was to run my debit card and buy the painting. I didn’t even try the hot cider. I have been in love, and this feeling I had of not being hungry, was a similar kind of giddiness. Though I must emphasize it was not for the artist but the art itself, like reading some literature that brings me to places I never could have elsewhere gone. The artist gave me a beautiful large pot that fit my character. He said something unreal about it, like that it was his first ever piece of pottery. He also said this was the first painting he ever had sold. I don’t even remember if I thanked him. I was in such a place of wonder. So a cast of artists, my friends, and guys passing around a pipe, loaded the painting in the back seat of Kaleigh’s Honda. The painting rode down the gravel road, leaving Jeff and the other painting he did something like it behind.

The bodies of women
and men are not the only thing cut and ruined by sickness,
mutilation, and suicide.
I have said many times with pride
that I have never been suicidal
but at the same time,
I have quit so many things so many times,
emotionally, giving up on myself,
hating who I am, who I am becoming.
If I had not have dropped out,
I never would be right here,
plugging along.

Henry was contorted in the back seat. As we rode down the crooked road, I thought of Henry’s back, hoping he wouldn’t develop some late onset form of scoliosis. On the way to the art show, Henry had pointed out a turnip field to Kaleigh who was driving. He said the owners were some friends of his and they wouldn’t mind it if we harvested some turnips. I had had so many turnips in my life, up until that point, that I thought I knew the vegetable. But lo and behold and leave it to Henry to pull out his pocket knife as we loaded back into the car. He whittled the root of the turnip, carving off the outer peeling. When he handed it to me, one big chunk of turnip skewered on the blade, probably because I had never before had raw turnip, I took the round hunk of roughage and took a bite. Raw turnip in late fall is a delicious nutty sweet and crunchy food. As we drove on, I began to emote, my puritan guilt emitting from my pours like turnip pheromone. Did I really just spend 300 dollars on a painting? Sure I had 300 dollars. Yes it was a beautiful painting and sure I got a lovely “Winnie the Pooh” pot to go with it. But I never have spent that kind of money all at once on something so unpractical. Except for the kayak… Henry piped up then. He said I needed to shut my mouth and be grateful and stop beating myself up and enjoy the day. What a mantra!

Art makes art like my beautiful 68 year old mother,
and the beautiful wrinkles on her face.
Art is the wrinkles.
Art is in favor of the exorbitant painting.
My mother has a baggy, beautiful face.
She has wrinkles from crying when my grandmother was dying,
and when my grandfather died,
and more for me when I was a blue baby.
I can only dream of enduring my struggle so gracefully.

After, Kaleigh dropped off Henry, I asked her to drop me off at my car, to go with me back to where I lived, and finally to help me unload the painting and carry it down to the basement where I dwelled. I put the Winnie the Pooh pot in the back seat of my Honda, turned on my engine, turned around my car because of the dead end road, and followed Kaleigh to the house where I lived. I wasn’t certain if I should open the garage door to get in the painting more easily and I certainly wasn’t thinking about the potter’s prized first pot when I opened my back door to unload, and it rolled out and shattered on the pavement. I stopped for a couple minutes just to breathe in the day and to take in what was happening. I did this. More guilt. The sun was going down with much beauty. Kaleigh, being the good friend she is, asked if the pot was broken. I felt around the dimly lit pavement, in my attempt of salvaging every bit of this artwork. I knew Kaleigh wanted to bring the painting in and get home. But my floating mood broke with the pot, and I was determined to get some grounding before I carried expensive artwork down a steep set of stairs. What grief. My hands shook. For a few more moments I felt much like a popped balloon, and then I swallowed it down with some joke. And with the joke, I began to forget.

The Joneses
Once I lived
with very
old trees.

I have a memory of one of my first conversations with Libby Jones. “The other incoming students are so strong. I am 27 and already crying because I miss my Mom.” I distinctly remember what Libby responded. “I thought you were the more strong.” Did she mean I was stronger because I was weeping my heart out? Because I was allowing my vulnerability to do what it does? Is it a sign of strength when people wail uncontrollably more than being able to hide our tears?

What I see in these four pieces of broken
pottery is a caste of women.
We work for 75 cents on the dollar.
Our bodies might have aged quickly.
But light rises off our skin
like evaporating moisture,
like auras, like fields of energy,
or white blobs on a photograph
because of the shaky hands of the photographer.
Blame it on her clitoris.

When Roger Jones saw the shattered pottery on the Redwood bench, just outside the basement door, he went towards it thinking he would clean it up. But there was a note on a piece of paper that I had written. “Please leave this here. I will get it soon!” After a busy week, Roger asked me if it would help if he tried to glue it back together. Roger saw a point of sadness, shattered pottery, art, a girl sniffling out in the cold, moving around pieces of broken pottery, snapping these images with her camera, the last drops of rain slipping through the cracks in the upstairs porch. People all see everything through their personal distorted lenses. The next morning, I woke up with the stars. December 19th, 2011. Bundled up in wool and flannel, I grabbed my red camera and a bottle of water. It was five AM when I settled down at the bench to wait on the sun to float over the horizon. Impatiently I clicked my camera.

What is the purpose of art?
I look at these photographs
of carefully positioned
fractured pottery.
I had played with them on the
Redwood picnic table.
Though they were broken,
I still saw the beauty in them.

Maggie Hess

This easy and delicious hummus recipe makes enough to eat now and freeze several cups for later.

• 1 pound of dried chickpeas, cooked up into about 6.5 cups of cooked chickpeas
• 6.5 tablespoons of tahini
• 13 tablespoons of olive oil
• 6.5 heads of roasted garlic
• 2 cloves of raw garlic, minced
• juice of 3 Meyer lemons
• 1.25 teaspoons salt
• 0.25 teaspoons of pepper
• water
  

Mark loves hummus, and I've been wanting to make him some for years.  The trouble is that it's impossible to find most of the ingredients locally.  We found a can of tahini five years ago (and I assumed it was still good --- it was), but our grocery store doesn't carry chickpeas.  When Mark saw some in the big city Sunday, he stocked up and I made a huge pot of hummus.

First, I soaked the chickpeas overnight and then cooked them for a few hours on the wood stove.  Meanwhile, I roasted a lot of garlic and then started passing the rest of the ingredients through the food processor to grind them up.

(I'm zesting the lemons here simply because I never throw away the rind of a homegrown lemon.  I only used the juice, though.)

Once all of the ingredients are mixed together, add water until the hummus has the right consistency.  (I added some more water after taking the photo at the top of the page.)

Here's the important part --- wait a day before eating!  We tried some of the hummus right away and it was good, but the flavors really blend if you let your hummus sit in the fridge overnight.

We like to eat hummus on carrot sticks, but you'll probably have your preferred serving method.  Since this recipe makes about six cups, feel free to freeze some of it for later.  Enjoy!

When we first got our 039 Stihl chainsaw we also got a ripping chain with a special adjustable guide that connects to the chainsaw body. The guide helps to make even cuts when you want to make planks from a tree.

I think we cut a total of 15 planks from a pine tree that were each about 2 feet long. They worked good for our foot bridge, but the process was not easy.

We decided making our own planks was a bit too complex for our skill level, but if you've got the time and a remote location that makes delivery a challenge then maybe a chainsaw mill is an option worth considering.

Fortunately there really aren't times in my writing when my words go entirely gone. But I go through these cyclic phases of feeling unappreciated and unloved. The trick is convincing my emotions to keep on hoping. Ultimately life is a test of faith. In these situations, I just have to keep working and trying and pray that the blog will live up to a really good title.

If you keep potting your dwarf Meyer lemon up into the next size pot each year, it will grow into a beast too heavy to maneuver out the door.  Putting our house plants outside in the summer is the sum-total of my pest management plan, so I chose to instead use some bonsai techniques to keep the dwarf citrus at a manageable size.

I waited until I'd harvested all of the fruits, but made sure to time my pruning to come before the lemon tree opened its first blooms.  With Mark's help, I yanked the tree out of its pot and used a bread knife to shave off about a third of its root ball.

Cutting back roots helps miniaturize the tree, and also ensures that the lemon won't get rootbound and strangle itself when roots circle the inside of the pot.  Meanwhile, the technique allows me to replace a third of the potting soil with well composted manure, which will make sure our darling lemon gets plenty of micronutrients to round out its weekly meals of diluted urine.

To counteract the stress of suddenly cutting off part of the tree's feeding apparatus, I also trimmed away about a third of its branches.  I'd never actually pruned the lemon before, so I focused on shaping it to an open center system, removing twigs that were shaded under other branches.  I tried to leave as many of the branches with tiny bloom buds as possible, but figured the long term shape of the tree trumped the current year's fruit.  (If I was pruning a young tree, I'd try to focus on three main limbs, but I didn't want to make my changes to drastic on this long-unpruned tree.)

My root pruning is relatively major surgery, so I'll keep a close eye on our lemon for the next week or so.  Hopefully it'll bounce right back and start opening those flower buds that dot its branches.

Beneath the rocks
a silence roars;
above the stream
a tame
snacking
bunch of hikers
hums a gorpy
chord.

Today was the day for operation dwarf Meyer lemon re-potting.

I was nervous we'd hurt our precious fruit tree during the procedure.

No branches were harmed. I mainly assisted with the heavy pulling while Anna held the pot and did the actual surgery.

The reason I'm so interested in mob grazing (even though we're unlikely to have large livestock any time soon) is the potential for renovating poor soil.  Next week, I'll cover a few other ways that mob grazing can improve pastures, but today I want to focus on trampling.

Remember how I mentioned that Greg Judy plans for about a third of the grass to be trampled into the soil during each grazing session?  If you're renovating poor soil, you may need to trample a lot more.

Greg notes that degraded pastures will generally produce very seedy, poor quality grass the first year they are managed by mob grazing.  He recommends using a very low stocking density so that your livestock can subsist on the bit of high quality grass present, then make sure they trample the rest.  Next year, the grass will be more palatable.

The same theory applies if your pasture has grown up in poor quality weeds.  Greg regaled us with the tale of how he tried to manage a field of cockleburs by grazing hard every spring in hopes of eradicating the problem.  The result?  The cockleburs did better and better each year.  However, once he started ignoring the weeds and managing for grass, cockleburs were trampled down into the litter and eventually wiped out.

You might be tempted to let some paddocks lie fallow if they're very problematic, but Greg recommends against this.  Remember, your livestock are the ones improving the soil, both with their manure and by trampling down weeds and grass to enrich the ground.  If you have to, give your livestock supplementary feed that they can eat on pasture, but keep them on the problematic ground if you want it to improve.  (And, whatever you do, don't mine out the few nutrients you have by haying!)

Finally, plan your paddock's shape based on the quality of your pasture.  Livestock trample more in rectangular paddocks since they have to mill around to find the food, so make your paddocks long and skinny while you're in the soil improvement phase.  Once you've build up organic matter and your pastures are thriving, you can switch over to square paddocks so your livestock can utilize as much grass as possible.