Questioning Priorities

For as long as I can remember, I've wished I could find a way to withdraw into my mind.  I have a truly luxurious headspace, most of which is full of cobwebs and totally wasted.  I wish I could spend more time there, or even all of my time there (i.e. go insane).  I think the reason why I've never been able to write a novel is that writing fiction requires an ability to detach from the real world and concentrate on your own mental world that I lack.  I've always been too distracted by other things, not least of which is my stomach. 

Lately my obsession with what I eat has become fashionable.  Eating locally-grown,  growing your own food, and food preservation are all the rage now  (although, sadly, nose-to-tail eating has yet to catch on to a wider audience).  It's easy to build a whole life around food, and that is effectively what I have done.  Is it really worth it?  Some people eat ramen noodles every day, for crying out loud.  Why do I have to eat such impeccably high-quality, morally superior food?  Has it really made any difference to my health or anything else?  Wouldn't worrying a lot less about food bring some of its own rewards for my health?   What if I could choose to spend that energy on educating my child, or learning a craft?  I'm not sure there's any way back for me, but I'm starting to question the way forward.

For one thing, as hard as I try, I can't reliably get dinner on the table.  Any time I'm involved in any significant project, be it gardening, building, food preserving, taking a class, or even a lot of shopping, we end up eating out or getting take-out, unless there are leftovers.  My energy is so limited (mostly, I'm sure, because I'm too fat) that cooking dinner takes a disproportionate share of it.  I'm pretty sure eating out so that you can make homemade pickle relish totally defeats the purpose.  And eating out so that you can make your umpteenth attempt to bake bread, which will come out dense as a brick again, is utterly stupid.  I'm thinking of doing a 30-day, or even a 365-day challenge to make dinner every single night.  

Today I had to choose between taking part 2 of the beekeeping class, or taking a moccasin-making class.  I took the bee class because it was easier for me to get a ride to, I had already paid for it, and I'm more likely to use it.  I want to do crafts, but I can't manage to do anything other than knitting (only because I can do it sitting in the living room), and not even that lately.  I feel like I'm falling farther and farther behind. 

Late Winter

I've made a complicated and thorough garden plan for the first time, loosely based on Cindy Conner's system (see Homeplace Earth on my blogroll).  I put it in a binder, along with clippings from seed catalogs and other bits of information I need at planting time.  I'm not even sure how I'm going to manage the garden this year, because my husband may be taking on a weekend job with my uncle in addition to his full-time job, and the garden plan is quite ambitious.  But, I figure it's better to plant it and not be able to handle it all, than not to plant it and end up needing it.

Seed starting has begun.  I'm trying some Imperial Star artichokes this year, but I've had very bad luck with the seed, only 10% (3 seeds) have germinated from a $5 packet of seed.  I dug a few of them out and treated them with peroxide, after reading that it helps some seeds, and replanted them.  My onions are doing much better, and I had lots more onion seed than I could use.  I just started some jicama (a type of bean whose root is a crunchy vegetable while the seeds are poisonous) and some roselle (a flower that is dried and used for tea or jelly), both tropical plants that need a long season to mature here.  All of these are experimental crops for us.  I was reluctant to buy onion seed and actually ordered it late, after my regular seed order.  My garden is usually too muddy to till before April, so I'm not sure how I'll plant them when they need to go out.  I started them a bit late, partly because of my waffling and partly on purpose, because I prefer my onions small so that I don't have to figure out what to do with a leftover half an onion when I only need a little.  Next year I want to plant onions on my hugelkultur, which will be better-drained, if we get it built this year. 

I haven't moved any seedlings out to the greenhouse yet.  I'm keeping them in the upstairs bathroom, which is the warmest and brightest room in my house, and is now available since my housemates moved out.  The new corner shower has been called into service as a chick brooder, making the room even warmer.  The greenhouse has been a bit of a disappointment.  It doesn't hold warmth at all, and a black metal barrel with 250 pounds of water (thermal mass) has done nothing appreciable to help.  We've been heating it, at significant expense, with a small electric heater, but the temperature has dropped below freezing a couple of times because the thermostat on the heater is not sensitive enough.  The only plant I can tell has been damaged by the temperatures is the lemongrass.  The citrus look terrible, but they looked terrible before they froze too.  Next year I want to build a cage and put some hens in the greenhouse and hope their body heat, and the compost heat from their bedding, helps; I also need to close up some gaps in the door, and either insulate or eliminate the raised wooden floor.

Today I attended the first of two sessions of a beekeeping class.  It left me feeling overwhelmed, with respect to all the equipment needed, the expense, the learning curve, the apparent mess involved in home-scale extraction, and the risk of being stung.  

Our microwave broke about 3 weeks ago and we've been getting along without it.  I miss it for reheating leftovers, and for warming up milk for my coffee.  I intend to replace it with another used one (it's a built-in model), but I hate buying things off Craigslist so much that I keep delaying the chore.  I might need it soon though, because I'm thinking about doing Weight Watchers again.  I did pretty well on it last spring, and then slowly put the weight back on over the rest of the year, and now I'm feeling quite fat again.  I don't want to do it, because for me it means eating frozen meals and other fake food (hence the need for the microwave) instead of real food.  For example, organic fair trade iced tea with organic fair trade sugar is better than diet soda in every way except one.  The main reason I quit WW after a couple of months last year was that I couldn't even calculate values for the foods we like to eat, especially offal.  WW was only supposed to be a stopgap anyway: my long-term weight-loss plan all along was to move back to Mexico, and now my mom has backed out of the exploratory trip we had planned.  I'm really disappointed about that, and a bit resentful.  

I've been on a bit of a spending spree and I really need to rein myself in.  I've bought lots of seeds of course, fruit trees (Cox Orange Pippin and Gold Rush apples, 2 elderberries, 2 native plums, 3 bush cherries, and a nectarine), a grape hoe, a batch of chicks, and I just ordered myself a parka - I figured it was a good time to buy one because it's been such a warm winter that they'd be cheap, and I'll need one if I'm going to have milk goats.  I've been getting by with just wool dress coats and fleece jackets, but I almost never go outside before 10:00 these days.  I rarely make truly frivolous purchases, but that's not really the same as being careful with money, is it? 

Resolutions

So, I'm back, sort of.  I've given up on this blog becoming even modestly popular or important, and accepted that it's going to be me thinking out loud with an occasional spectator.  I've also concluded that online forums and Facebook are always going to be unsatisfactory, and that I'm probably never going to have a close friendship again, much less the often-touted "chosen family" to compensate for my absent biological family and unhappy marriage.  Whatever I'm going to do in this life, I'm going to have to do it on my own.

I did accomplish some things in 2011.  I got a greenhouse, did more canning than I ever had before, got the upstairs of my house remodeled and cleaned out.  We started building a large shed with a loft, part of which may become a goat shelter.  I kicked my diet soda habit and learned to make an elderberry syrup, a daily dose of which has kept my son and me illness-free so far this season. 

Food has been a focus up till now, and will continue to be.  My goals this year include foraging wild foods; using cover crops, sheet compost, and our improved chicken tractor to build soil; building a solar dehydrator; growing all our chicken feed; completing a large hugelkultur; finishing the shed; and planting 3 fruit trees.  I am thinking about getting miniature goats, but I'm not sure I can bring myself to get up early in the morning all winter long to go out and milk them.  I am taking a beekeeping class next month and, thanks to a beekeeping friend, may be able to get one of the much-in-demand local nucs this spring.

But I also want to focus on herbal medicine this year.  Health is the one thing that, in my opinion, doesn't get enough attention (probably because people are afraid to write about it on the internet).  I was thinking about my dad, about his totally unsustainable lifestyle, and I had to admit that my dad is in no imminent danger of starving or freezing or being eaten by zombies, and that the biggest threat to his survival is probably his health.  And, although I'm obviously much younger, the same is probably true of me.  I'm too fat, and I've suffered from untreated moderately high blood pressure since my son was born.  I live in a failed marriage with an angry man, have a demanding 3-year-old, and I'm a natural worrier and control freak, so I have a fair amount of stress.  I don't have health insurance.  If I really assess my situation honestly, health is a big concern.  Not that I would care if it was just me, but the thought of my son being raised by his father or any of his grandparents is terrifying to me.

A recent change in immigration laws means that my husband should be able to get his "green card" this year.  So that is going to be a priority.  He will be able to earn more money and have more job security, and freedom to visit his family.  We will have to save several thousand dollars for all the fees and the required travel to Honduras. 

My mother is wavering now on whether she wants to go to Mexico or not.  She clearly doesn't trust me and the information she gets from other sources is contradictory and confusing, and she doesn't even really want to think about retirement and getting older, so she'd rather put off even the exploratory trip a few more years.  I, on the other hand, always feel like the window is slowly closing for me, and if I don't go in the next couple of years, I won't be able to go at all.  I just can't figure out how to travel by myself with a 3-year-old.   It's getting harder to leave even briefly as I build up more responsibilities and complexities around my now-constant presence at home.  I'll be starting the first seeds of the season today, and the garden won't really give me a vacation opportunity until November, and I'm not sure I can trust anyone else to take over for a while (see "control freak", above.)  But there are days I feel like my home, my garden, and my stuff actually own me, rather than me owning them.

Garden Planning

My housemate has sort of moved in, although she is sleeping in the guest room because we don't have her rooms ready yet.  We have moved most of the stuff that needed to be moved, and reorganized most of our house, from books to food storage, and given away a truckload of stuff, but there is still work to be done. 

At the same time, we are working on outdoor projects while we still can.  Our garden this year was haphazard, and next year we need to do much better.  Our soil needs a lot of help.  It needs organic matter, fertility, drainage, shading for perennial weeds, and pest control.  Unfortunately, it is too late to plant most cover crops this year.  We just got some rye in the ground, which is marginally worthwhile at this point, according to what I've read.  Yesterday my housemate tilled about 800 square feet of heavy clay soil with her medium-sized tiller and my mini-tiller (when the larger one overheated and quit), then came inside and baked an apple pie.  I tried to keep up with her by raking, picking out Bermuda grass and seeding rye, but I collapsed in a heap of exhaustion mid-afternoon.  My housemate is easily twice as productive as I am (and eats half as much - does that make her 4 times as productive?)  We have started buying materials for a 12x12 shed with a full-size loft, which we plan to use for shared household and garden storage, a goat shelter, hay loft and "treehouse" for the kids.  Then, we plan to put up a privacy fence around what is currently an area of brush and small trees, and get a couple of milk goats.  Livestock of any kind is illegal here, which is why we need the privacy fence.  We've already put up a second-hand iron fence for her hens and hung tarps on it so they won't be visible from the street. We are planning to put up a low tunnel and plant some late greens in it, in addition to the small fall garden I managed to plant on time.

I go through periods when vegetable gardening feels kind of lame.  Fruit trees, animals, and other projects seem more glamorous and appealing, although I know deep down that the vegetable garden is the heart of the homestead.  Maybe it's seasonal cravings for protein, or sweet things.  Maybe it's just a rut.  But at the moment, I am in love with vegetables.  I'm looking forward to this year's seed catalogs quite a bit more than any of the holidays that come first.  I'm going through last year's catalogs and marking things I want.  I'm reading gardening books and making lists and plans.  Instead of feeling tired of the garden, this year I feel like I didn't get nearly enough of it.  

So far, our plans for next year's garden include growing enough tomatoes for our yearly consumption, carefully planting potatoes and sweet potatoes and hopefully having better luck with them, planting seed pumpkins in a row of sheet compost I'm currently assembling, making a hugel and a wet rice paddy, growing 3 types of corn using time isolation, growing most of our animal feed, using summer and winter cover crops, using season extension, growing heirloom vegetable starts for market, acquiring a beehive, growing some new things like sesame, loofah, artichoke, peanuts, and edamame, and asking the neighbor if we can rent or sharecrop part of his backyard to grow some heirloom popcorn for market.  My husband thinks we're crazy for wanting to plant rice, and he might be right, but we want to experiment and we have a suitably low and damp yard for it.  I also want to experiment with grain sorghum, but probably not this year because we're planning to grow a sorghum Sudan grass as a cover crop.  Other priorities, for me, will be planting fruit trees and perennial vines and doing a much better job of growing berries and medicinal herbs.  Even expanding to use all the usable parts of our yard and some of the neighbor's yard, I anticipate we will run out of space, but we will also run out of energy (some of us more than others) and time.  I don't know how much of the above will actually get accomplished, but it sure is fun to plan.

My housemate also may be getting a part-time job working at the local-foods market nearby, which is great for our food security outlook, and also makes it easy for us to sell a few small cash crops there.

Protests

I don't watch or read the news that much, so my information about the Occupy Wall Street and the spin-off/solidarity protests is mostly second-hand.  Here in Richmond we have a protest coming up in a few days.  Many of my friends are supporting the movement, if not actually participating, and I've felt some peer pressure to join in, but I have been reluctant to do so.  Reading a few comments on an online news story (why do only mean, ignorant Conservatives comment on online news stories?) made me want to run and join the protests, but it was a temporary effect.  It took me a while to put my finger on what bothers me about these protests.  The "99%" slogans don't appeal to me.  I've always been an anti-elitist (or a "reverse snob"), but never a populist.  Being part of a huge majority doesn't feel like something to aspire to or boast about, to me.  If they brought back "Eat the Rich" I might be more sympathetic.  But it goes beyond the slogan.  I find myself wondering, why now?  Who are these people who are just waking up to the inequalities of our systems, the lack of effective socioeconomic leveling mechanisms in our culture?  I guess they didn't care about it until it affected them personally.  Can they possibly be serious?  What do they want to happen?  

I don't believe our problems can be neatly blamed on the 1%.  The 99%, the collective majority of Americans, has a lot of culpability in the situation.  I'm not talking about individual debt, it goes much deeper than that.  Are the protesters making real changes in their lives, other than easy ones like moving their money from banks to credit unions?  I suspect the majority of them want reform, not revolution, and certainly not a radical change in their own lifestyles that would take power back from the CEO's and politicians in a meaningful way.  Being a leftist movement, I'm sure they want to transfer some power from corporations to government, which is not a goal worth fighting for in my opinion, any more than the Tea Party's effective goal of transferring power from government to corporations.

I am working, in my own life, to transfer power from both corporations and government to myself and other individuals.  I have a lot of room for improvement, but I am working hard to meet more and more of my family's needs by producing things myself, community-building, buying locally grown, buying handmade, buying used, buying from small family businesses, buying from socially and ecologically responsible companies, consuming less, transacting in cash, and avoiding taxes whenever possible.  These activities take time, energy and money, which I feel is better invested than it would be in political action, and pays better dividends.

Failures

We are in the midst of a whole-house purge and reorganization, while simultaneously remodeling a bathroom and assembling our little greenhouse.  I am even more overwhelmed than what has become normal for me, and longing for a couple of days off.  You know, the kind of days off I used to get before I had a child - sleeping until 10, doing no work at all, maybe not even making my own meals.  

I just sold something I said I'd never sell - my recumbent exercise bike, the first big thing I bought new for myself as an adult.  It takes up too much space, and owning it for the these past 7 years hasn't magically made me lose weight, although at times I have been motivated enough to use it to treat a chronic weakness in one knee.  Making the house ready for more occupants has pushed us to do all kinds of things we were meaning to do for a long time, and some things we otherwise would not have done, but will someday be glad we did.

I just finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and family.  If you haven't read it, you must.  I found myself moved to tears by nearly every chapter, not because the book is sad, but because it rang so true for me.  I loved the recipes, and I kind of wish I had made notes as I read about their planting and harvest times, since they garden right here in Virginia and seem to have a much better idea what they're doing than I do.  It's a library book, so I won't be able to refer back to it later.

Even with a few years experience and many gardening books read, I still feel like a beginner.  Our small sweet potato crop, like our Irish potato crop, was a complete failure.  My garden failures this year alone are too many to mention.  This year's garden was unplanned and poorly executed, since we had decided not to grow a garden this year at all in order to focus on remodeling the house.  All our gardening so far has been somewhere between recreational and compulsive - try though we might, we can't resist planting - but I'm ready to get much more serious about it, especially with another serious gardener moving in.  When I try to make a garden plan for next year, I feel so confused, because all the books I've read contradict each other in the most basic ways, and I can't decide which system to trust.  Do I plant my beans in a compost pile, or in a three sisters guild?  Do I mulch or not?  Plant clover in the paths, put boards over them, or eliminate the paths altogether?  Plant rows, blocks, or willy-nilly? 

And my failures aren't limited to the garden.  Every vegetable ferment I made this summer failed, although I had made some successfully in previous seasons.  Every jam and jelly I've ever made has failed to set, but I want them to work so badly that I keep trying, with decreasing hopefulness.  

I'm a smart person who generally can accomplish whatever I set my mind to.  Failing at such simple tasks as growing potatoes and making jam, despite sincere efforts, is difficult to accept.  But I am trying not to be resentful about it.  We are making progress in some directions, and we have accomplished some worthwhile things, and other things seem much more possible than they used to.

Heritage Harvest Festival

The Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello was this past weekend.  I talked M. and B., urban-homesteading and homeschooling friends, into going and giving me and my son a ride.  We camped two nights, as they are avid campers and had access to a pop-up.  I am not a huge fan of camping.  M. thought it strange that I want to live off-grid, but find it awkward to cook a meal at the campsite; but it's really more about familiarity and convenience (e.g. having running water at the sink) than the electric stove.  I also find all the packing and unpacking tiresome.

I got to take two brief, paid workshops on herbal medicine on Friday while they watched my son, but on Saturday I didn't get to do much because my son won't stand still.  Honestly, I couldn't stand still either, because it's all so overwhelming.  There are so many things to dream about doing.  Home dairying, fiber production and spinning, permaculture, beekeeping, solar dehydrating, heritage breed pigs, et cetera, et cetera.  I lose focus and end up just wandering around.  Which goes hand in hand with a conclusion I have reluctantly reached; that before we try to go in any new directions, we need to do a better job at the things we're currently doing.  We need to focus more on soil fertility.  We need to slow down, and do the hard and unglamorous work, and prioritize our projects based on real needs rather than shiny temptations.  We need to use the things we've already bought and the skills and advantages we possess.  And we can not do it all ourselves.  I dream of having enough land and freedom to raise all kinds of animals, as many people do.  Every time I throw food waste away, I wish I could have a pig or even some chickens (legally) that would eat our table scraps, and I constantly wish for a dairy animal.  But I also know that there is so much more I could be doing even without that, and land is not the most important limitation.  Child care, or child distraction, is a critical need.  Lack of physical stamina is a close second, if not the primary limitation for me personally; as lack of time is for my husband.  And lack of funds is obviously a concern.  

I'm trying to stick to my no-food-buying challenge, but it is really hard.  We are eating a lot less meat, because my meat stores in the freezer were a bit low when I started this challenge.  This weekend I bought some fast food on the road because we were starving and unable to access our packed food.  The retail farmer's market I buy from emailed me to say they had finally found me some pigs' feet that I had requested a while ago, so I'll have to buy them now.  My spouse is not on board for this challenge; he doesn't get the point of refusing to buy even an onion or a carton of eggs.  A friend wants to can some peaches with me this week and I find it difficult to say no to that, having become somewhat addicted to preserving.  And I still have 3 weeks to go!  I'm going to do the best I can.  Hopefully, even if I don't do it perfectly, I will accomplish most of my goals, and form some good habits like I did with my food preserving challenge.