Mistaken Premise

I keep thinking I am going to have more time to blog. I am not really sure how it is that I managed to write (at times) most every day at Idle Ramblings. But with the demands of family life, parish life, and getting ready for the growing season, time in front of the computer is relegated to work on the very quick interactions allowed by Facebook. I can catch up with folks there quickly, and have even found myself sending links there rather than here. Who is to say that this won’t just eventually die and be replaced entirely by FB until some newer and better format comes along?

Anyway, until that time I guess I could update you on what has been happening.

1. I ordered organic seed potatoes and received more than I can possibly plant. I have enough to plant about 75 linear feet, and b/c of the room they take up, I can’t really put them in my raised beds without wasting a huge amount of space. Any suggestions? Should I just go ahead and till up part of the yard. or is there a better way?
2. I am in the process of building four raised beds (8′x4′x16″). One is complete and the lumber is cut for the other 3. Due to time constraints and iffy weather, they haven’t been completed, though I hope to get them constructed by Friday so I can start prepping the soil. I’ll get some pics up when I can.
3. We keep getting quotes to put up a fence around our back yard, and they keep coming in at over $3000. I think I am just going to do it myself. My concern is if we don’t fence in, someone is gong to complain about the mini-farm in the backyard. I am actually surprised that – between the water barrel, the cord of firewood, the 20 containers, and now the raised beds – that no one has complained yet.  Plus, people let dogs and children run free here, and there is at least one pesky dog that gets into everything, harasses my dog, has knocked over the compost, and eats my garbage. Sometimes I hate living in a subdivision.
4. Derek has my interest all up in the possibility of aquaculture. Apparently there are folks raising tilapia and such in their yards. I really want to introduce livestock of some sort, and this may be the answer. I can’t do bees (deathly allergic), chickens are a no no in this ‘hood, and i am guessing they would frown on goats. Any other ideas?
5. Oh yeah, I am stoked that our all organic, grass fed, no-antiobiotic laden beef is at the butcher’s place and will be ready to pick up next week. We bought half a cow for about $2.49/lb, supported local agriculture, and got some clean beef that is melt in your mouth good! Now if I can just find some hogs…

until next time…

Gardening as an Act of Subversion

In my last post, I admitted I had never grown anything in my life. So why this sudden urge to start planting vegetables? Part of it is linked to the rise in food costs at a time when the quality of food seems to be diminishing. Rising food costs have led to riots worldwide. In April, riots broke out in multiple locations as staple items such as rice and corn increased by as much as 75%. When a person is already living at the poverty level, such an increase can be devastating.

I am not an alarmist. I realize that the riots that have have taken place have occurred in third world countries, where extreme poverty is a reality and people constantly teeter on the edge of starvation. It would be foolish to suggest that it couldn’t happen here, however. Even in the metro Atlanta area, warehouse stores like Sam’s Club and Costco restricted the amount of bulk rice a person could purchase. While this mainly affected businesses and not individual consumers, it should serve as a wake up call to those of us who thought that the world’s supply of food would always be cheap and readily accessible.

Another factor was the desire to move toward more healthy and sustainable living. While factory farming has given high yields of some foods, it has also brought with it many issues, not the least of which is concern about the long lasting impact of chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Some foods absorb more of these potentially hazardous compounds than others. If you are thinking about going organic, you might want to try starting off by avoiding the so-called Dirty Dozen. I know I feel much better seeing my kids eat grapes that weren’t sprayed with any of the more than 35 chemical pesticides found in imported grapes.

The other part of the equation was our desire to keep more of our income for ourselves. We have paid up to $3.99 for a pound of tomatoes. For the same amount of money, you can grow your own, with an exponentially higher yield. There is a cool article here from the UGA Agriculture extension on this topic. (Note: check out the ag extensions for local state universities. Most of them have good websites with relevant info on growing vegetables in your locale).

We have started a very humble garden this season. Because we started so late, we did not have time to properly prepare the soil for planting, so we planted a container garden. There was a great article from Mother Earth News on how to do this, as well as countless places online that gave tips for growing vegetables in containers. We tried to select items that we eat regularly that would give us a chance to have a small yield while catching up on the learning curve. This first time around we have planted tomatoes, green bells, red bells, habaneros, cucumbers, jalapenos and cayennes. We have used store-bought organic fertilizer so far, but we are hoping that by the next time we plant we will have a decent supply of compost to cut down on our need for anything purchased. Pests have not yet been an issue, so there have been no insecticides (organic or otherwise) used on any of the vegetables.

There has been something amazing about watching our small garden go from seedlings into vegetables. Our first round of tomatoes are getting close to coming off the vine. The red bells are still green but growing. The hot peppers are starting to bud and form fruit. The cucumbers and green bells aren’t doing so hot (another post about this later, I made a few early mistakes here). The cool thing is that we grew these. Even if just for a few bites here and there I know where my food came from and how it was grown. And the things we have learned will be things that go into planting for the Fall.

LP’s Suburban Homestead, v.1

If this site is to be about the transformation of our suburban home into a suburban homestead, it would probably be a good idea to describe our surroundings nd how we came to the realization that we want to become self-sufficient.

In the Fall of 2007, I was extended a new call from a small congregation in an Atlanta suburb. We had not yet sold out home in North Georgia (still haven’t, actually), and with the housing market doing what it was, it became quickly evident that if we intended to purchase a home in our new location, we needed to focus on new construction rather than a resale. Needless to say, when we picked this place, creating a suburban homestead wasn’t even on the radar for us, and didn’t factor into the decision. We found a home in a new subdivision that was big enough for the family and close to work and school for everyone. The housing market allowed us to make a low-ball offer, which was accepted.

The house itself is your typical suburban house for this area, indistinguishable from every other vanilla house in every other Atlanta subdivision. It is large by many standards, a little less than 3,000 square feet. It sits on a postage stamp of a lot (.25 acres) that was farmland less than a decade ago. It is a restricted covenant community, meaning that a Gestapo-like group of bus bodies (aka, the Home Owner’s Association) dictate whatyou can and can’t do to your own property. I have already received nastygrams about my refusal to use chemical treatments to prevent weeds growing on the lawn. If it can’t be hand pulled, then it is staying. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, kids and animals play on these lawns. In other words, everything that people hate about suburban life and subdivisions is alive and well here.

For the past couple of years, my wife and I have talked about how much we would like to retire to a rather secluded place to enjoy the peace and quiet that you don’t always enjoy living right next door to someone. We figured this was many decades in the future, but the more we discussed it the more we realized that we could begin to incorporate certain aspects of country living and values regardless of where we found ourselves. We never thought of ourselves as being materialistic or overly consumptive, and always tried to place value on the things of the Spirit. After our move to our new house, however, we both found ourselves in a funk. She was several months pregnant with our third child and had left a high paying job as a private school administrator to take a classroom position at a school with a poor reputation. I don’t think that using the word depressed would be too strong to describe her for the first few months here. My first few months were spent with my nose to the proverbial grindstone, trying to develop and implement a plan for the small mission church I was serving. On top of this, I had just lost my youngest brother to cystic fibrosis, and was really struggling with my own grief.

On Easter we got a huge surprise. Our beautiful son decided he couldn’t wait to be born, and joined us more than two weeks early. We named him after my brother. His birth was not only a blessing, it was the catalyst we needed to start re-examining our lives on a deeper level. We realized we had always talked a good game about consumerism and societal resistance, but it had been mostly talk. As stupid as it sounds, I felt like being heavily tattooed was enough to demonstrate that I wasn’t playing along by the same rules as everyone else, when the reality was clearly that I had been playing the game just like everyone else.

The consumerist lifestyle is subtle and seductive. The problem is that living life in order to secure more goods and services is a life of perpetual slavery. Those in power know this and create powerful systems to keep the general population dependent. I always knew this on some level, but the birth of my son was like a moment of satori, calling me to not just recognize the evil of our culture, but to begin to find ways to actively resist it.

Though an awakening has taken a place, and our family’s consciousness has been raised, I am the first to tell you that we have so much to learn that it is downright frightening. I have never grown a single plant in my life, and what few house plants I have had I managed to kill with relative speed. I haven’t raised an animal other than a house cat since I was in 4-H as a kid and raised one cow. There is a lot to do, and none of it is easy. But damn I am glad we are getting started living.