Casaubon's Book

Independence Days Challenge Update #1

Category: independence days challenge

I won't usually publish ID updates here, but I did want to remind everyone who wants to participate that this is going on - please feel free to jump in, post updates at your blog, on facebook or in the comments of the update threads (posted on Fridays) at www.sharonastyk.com. In the meantime, here's the first one:

The weather of our discontent continues - weirdly warm for upstate NY in winter, plants and animals blooming or returning too early. The pussywillows have catkins, my elderberries have green buds, the daffodils are up and we saw a red-winged blackbird yesterday - all of which are signs of late-Marchness in upstate NY, here at the beginning of February. Mud season, usually a month from March to April, has been going on steadily since the hurricanes back in August.

That said, even when you know it is a sign of wrongness, it is hard not to appreciate less wood burned, easier barn access and more days outside for the critters. The goats, unconcerned about climate change, do appreciate all the opportunities to follow me around and get in my way - everyone needs a dozen does to help them carry firewood (help here is defined as "stand in front of me and refuse to move, stick your face in the wood bin to check for any snacks left lying around, untie my shoelaces and then nibble my coat buttons), hay or water (tripping me while I'm doing the water is the little one's favorite game).

The calves and our buck goat who gave us four cryptorchid babies this year went to the butcher on Tuesday, so we were able to open up the fence and move the remaining couple of bucks down the hill with the does. The poultry (ducks and chickens) will move up to the barn that held the calves and bucks, for several reasons - first to get them further away from the house where they have been flying over the fence and trashing my perennials, and also because that gives us more space down the hill for goats. Moving everything around is a bit of pain, but well worth it. So was the baby beef operation we did this year - we are hoping to do more next year, since this was so successful. We are also debating buying a heifer calf to be raised up as a milker as well.

Real seed starting (rather than the little bit of desultory stuff) commenced this week - early tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, flower and herbs that need a long season got started this week, along with some more things that require stratification. I also took geranium cuttings for spring as well - both brightly colored red, white and pink, and lemon and rose scented.

I'm still pruning fruit trees, which I should have done earlier in the winter - normally early February isn't too late, but this isn't a normal winter. The goats and the rabbits have eagerly devoured our offerings.

We had the first winter litter of rabbits when Marigold, one of our does kindled with 9 beautiful babies - this is the first time we've crossed our American Blues with the Cinnamons, and I'm anxious to see what color combinations we get, and also whether the Blue's faster rate of growth gets transmitted.

A kind reader sent me a box of cloth diapers from her children (THANK YOU) and I'm expecting a few more, so I took the time to sort out what I'd saved from my own kids - it turns out that there was more than I thought that survived my children (and a lot of it had come from a friend of my mother's with twins, so more than my four) including some wool diaper soakers and a few precious wool covers - my favorites. I may knit a few other covers as well - but I'm glad to be able to cloth diaper again.

The foster stash is in increasingly good shape - which is a huge relief. The main issue for me, given where we live, our one-vehicle situation, our ongoing schedules and Eric's work schedule is that I may have to go four or five days before I can go shopping for children's clothing, and yet the kids have to be dressed - and for visits or trips to synagogue, dressed fairly nicely. I think I can now do that for just about all sizes, which is a huge relief - after all, no one either wants, in a house full of 7-10 overstimulated kids to either take all the children to a store or worse, be the one stays home with them alone while the other goes shopping - this gives me the time and space to get everyone settled without dragging kids out all the time.

We've managed to do almost all the major reorganization of the house, except for the garage (which will by necessity be done next week since we have to clean out the freezer in said garage to put the beef from butchering in). We've now got the door between the kitchen and dining room gated, so that we can use the wood cookstove while foster kids are at our place (previously we tried to gate around it, but really can't cook on it that way, so had just been only using the other stove). There is still cleaning, sorting and organizing in small places yet, but we're WAY ahead of what we've been. I suspect it will all go to pot when we finally get a large sibling group placement that stays, but at least we start ahead.

I haven't done much on building up my pantry - actually, sort of the opposite, as we've been rearranging it, I've been working on us eating down some things. Still, the time to build on this will come.

Skill-wise, the main thing I've been working on is figuring out whether couponing is worthwhile for us. I've never bothered much since we purchase so few things at the supermarket. Foster care, however, has changed some of that - besides the desire to sometimes offer familiar foods and snacks as kids transition to our home (we can work on food issues gradually, but comfort is the most important thing initially), we also now need more things like toothbrushes and toilet paper - and need toiletries that can go home or on to other placements with kids. I'm still not totally clear on whether this is worth doing for us generally - while using the occasional good coupon is always nice, serious couponing and sale shopping requires a. more driving (in some cases, Eric goes past some of the stores coming from work some days) and often the best savings are found in buying the smallest sizes, which increases net packaging. Still, I'm playing with running the numbers and seeing what we can make work for us within the bounds of our general environmental priorities.

Best of all, we began the week with a lovely celebration of Tu'Bshevat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees. We ate fabulous things - including Key Lime pie (with limes brought back by a friend from a FL trip), Black Forest Cake (from cherries frozen over the summer by another friend), Banana Cream pie (from totally non-local bananas) and apricot-applesauce. It was wretched and delicious excess, and a lovely time was had by all. I celebrated the actual day by planting the seeds of some quinces and apples gone mushy to stratify. It may be too late (I planted others in the fall) but hope springs eternal, which is kind of the point.

Ok, official results:

Plant something - Tomatoes, Peppers, Eggplant, Hawthorn, Quince and Witch Hazel, Coneflowers, Galliarda, Geraniums, Eryngium, Echinops, Basil, Dianthus, Alyssum, Parsley.

Harvest something: Eggs, Milk, Beef and Chevon. Also fruit tree prunings for bunnies and goaties.

Preserve something: Nope. Should can some applesauce from the soft apples, though.

Waste Not: All the sorting out and organizing have been great - the kids are thrilled with the exciting "new" things we find in the back of the attic or in boxes, and we've managed to give away a lot of good stuff. Otherwise the usual composting and feeding wastes to various critters.

Want Not: I can't take credit for the cloth diapers, but they were awesome! I am totally out of peanut butter (our dumpster diving friend and our foster son's WIC had us stocked for what seemed like eternity), so I need to add that. I also will need to buy apples pretty soon - my kids eat 5 - 7 apples a day, and we use them in cooking, but this year's supply didn't keep as well as usual due to the warm temperatures. We will buy a few bushels from the local coop.

Eat the food - Nothing really new. We are eating the small hen turkeys we bought from a friend (we didn't do turkeys this past year for reasons that were really stupid ;-)) - at 13-14 lbs, they make two meals for a family of six straight and the one large pot of laotian chicken soup (basically chicken soup seasoned with lots of citrus juice and soy sauce and a bit of brown sugar, ginger, garlic and ciles until it is salty, hot, sweet and sour, and then with added onions, canned pineapple (if we have it), and I usually stir brown rice in. With a few extra ingredients, one chicken is 4-6 meals, depending on size and how many people are home. The apple-apricot sauce was also really fabulous - a bunch of apples, some dried apricots (about 5-1 proportions), a little apple cider and a splash of vanilla. You can add sugar if you want, but it doesn't need it. A hand blender, food mill or food processer all work equally well at smoothing it out if you want. Just cook until the apricots are very soft and the apples are applesaucy.

Build community food systems: Not a thing

Skill up: Aforementioned coupon research. That's about it.

How about you? You can report here or just stick in a link to your blog!

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 11:02 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Shale Hype

Category: natural gas

Kurt Cobb has a great article at Resource Insights about why I think the best case against fraccing in my area isn't the water, it is the boom and bust cycle - with a predominance of bust. The last thing rural PA or upstate NY need is another short term boom and bust cycle that leaves them with a lot of played out gas heads and environmental consequences. Or worse, just a plain old bust.

But, in its early release of the Annual Energy Outlook for 2012, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) cut its estimate of technically recoverable resources of U.S. shale gas from 827 tcf to 482 tcf. (That says little about whether all those resources will be economically recoverable.) Much of the decline in the EIA estimate comes from a downgrading of the Marcellus Shale, by far the largest of the U.S. shale gas deposits spanning vast areas of New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia as well as sections of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. The downgrade resulted from extensive drilling results now available as the rush to extract gas from the Marcellus Shale accelerates. The EIA cut its estimated technically recoverable resources from 410 tcf to 141 tcf. This estimate remains well in excess of last year's estimate from the U.S. Geological Survey which put those resources at 84 tcf.

What ought to be acutely troubling is that the history of revisions to oil and gas resources has heretofore been one of increases. For the first time, we are now seeing not just downward revisions in estimated natural gas resources, but drastic downward revisions. That should tell us that the era of unlimited horizons for fossil fuels has come to a close. All the advanced technology that was supposed to bring unending plenty in the form of fossil fuels is now giving us better estimates of what will be available, namely, not nearly so much as we thought.

Cobb goes on to mention the recent failed attempts at finding profitable shale gas in Poland and Hungary. Just as we wildly overstate the potential of most oil fields at discovery, we do the same with natural gas, and that leaves us in a precarious place. As we've seen recently our public officials read the same news stories the rest of us do - and no one ever publishes the headline - "Radical downgrade in extractable resources anticipated" - even when it is entirely true.

We have systematically misled just about everyone who doesn't read the raw data carefully to expect a future of abundant fossil fuels. The mismatch of expectation and reality, however, is likely to be enormously painful.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 11:09 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Feb/March Food Storage and Preservation Class

Category: Classes • food preservation

Are you gearing up for the new garden season and thinking ahead about what to do to make your garden work all year long for you? Concerned about the rising price of food and looking for ways to feed your family through tougher times? Want to get in on the fun and wonderful flavors of home preserved food? Concerned about how to adapt your storage or preserving to special diets? Want to make the most of your farmer's market? All of the above? I'll be teaching a six week online, asynchronous (ie, you don't have to be online at any particular time) class on food storage and preservation starting on Thursday, February 16 and running until the end of March. Cost of the class is $100, and I do have five scholarship spots available to low income participants in need. If you'd like to donate to the scholarship fund, you can also do that - 100% of all donations goes to make more spots available to low income people who wouldn't ordinarily be able to take the class.

Email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com for details or to enroll.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 11:03 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Ending "Farmer's Wife" Syndrome

Category: A Nation of Farmers • agriculture

Fairly often, when someone comes to our farm to make a purchase or do a job, the implicit assumption is that they should talk to Eric. The first time I remember seeing this was when we were farm shopping back a decade ago - we met our first realtor and visited our first farm, and the realtor led me into the house and then turned to Eric and said "Let me show you the barn." My husband's very calm response was "Sharon knows much more about barns than I do, I'm going to take our son for a walk." This was the beginning of my experience with "farmer's wife" syndrome.

Now on virtually all farms I have ever visited, everyone who lives there farms. The children help in the barns, the spouses share the duties - even if there is a gendered division of labor much of the time, as on Amish farms, the harvest or peak canning season overwhelm this and everyone who is present pitches in. It should go without saying that no farm can have anyone who isn't competent to recapture lost livestock, fix a fence, handle an emergency birth or a medical crisis - because some days one person isn't there. Nor can all knowledge rest in one person - because who milks or picks the beans when someone is ill, giving birth, caring for a family member or making the money that most farms don't provide to pay taxes and bills?

Yet we cling stubbornly to the idea that instead of a family of farmers, all equally engaged with the land, if sometimes in largely different ways, that a farm family consists of a "farmer" and a "farmer's wife" - and that the female partner is necessarily secondary. Gene Logsdon has a great essay about both why this is, and how that presumption is being disrupted by the growing number of independent women farmers:

Women rarely did the plowing however, and that seems to be the key difference. Lots of plowboys, nary a plowgirl. In other field work, women did more than their share. (I have theories but will leave it to someone smarter to explain why women didn't plow.) The notion that males were the real farmers probably was rooted in the hunting and gathering stage of civilization where men brought home the game from afar (adventure time) and the women did the rest of the work at home (boring).

This prejudice was astonishingly apparent even at farm magazines. As a journalist working for Farm Journal magazine, I often sat in farm kitchens interviewing farmers and their wives about their business. It was amazing how often the wives answered my questions much better than their husbands and how they so often did this by diplomatically and cleverly putting words in their husbands' mouths. It was obvious that most successful farms got that way because the wives were smarter and more articulate than the husbands. But the wives knew how to keep the male crest from falling by seeming to defer to their husbands on every occasion. The wives knew they had to make their mates look like top operators so that they could borrow the money they needed to keep on going. Bankers were no different from farm editors. They wanted to deal with men: women weren't smart enough to run a business like farming.

The answer to the question about why women didn't do the plowing is anthropological - when tillage was done with digging sticks and handtools, in many societies women were the primary tillers of soil. But as anthropologist Judith Brown long ago observed, there is virtually no society in human history where women's primary work is incompatible with the care of young children - and plowing behind draft animals is tough to do with a babe in a sling, and hard to do when you may have to stop and nurse, or chase a toddler away from the horse's feet. Tractors are not good places to haul babies and young kids for long stretches either, and I know from experience you don't fit well behind the wheel in late pregnancy. Moreover, in the era of chemical agriculture any number of things that are part of the farm experience are best not touched by women who may be pregnant or nursing. For most of women's history, being pregnant or nursing was a normative experience for many years.

Most of us don't have a baby every three years anymore, so there isn't any reason why tillage or organic no-till agriculture can't be done by women (chemical agriculture is still tougher for women of childbearing age, since so many things accumulate in body fat and breast milk). So is small-scale farming without large equipment - with the modern digging sticks. In the meantime, independent women small farmers are the only fast-growing segment of American agriculture - an entity that we all know is going to have to grow fast just to keep up with the aging population of farmers, and all the more if we are to remove the fossil fuel inputs from our agriculture and untie food and oil.

We have used language to write women out of agriculture - out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the "housewifization" of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer's wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.

I look around me at the farm families I know and see women and men with a host of skills that step outside of gender. Sherri, who lives with her aging mother cuts hay for a living. Alice handles the thousand pound draft horses on their farm with skill and grace. The sheep are Rosa's, not her boyfriend's, as is the market garden. Louise milked fifty cows a day to her husband's fifty and drove the tractor while he tossed the hay bales for forty years.

This started out as my farm, with my husband who was happy to give me credit, happy to do the heavy lifting, but not so interested in plants. It has become a project of two overlapping people with related interests and the ability to do one another's work. The bees are his. The native plants and herbs are mine, the livestock are both of ours, the work is shared inside and outside as preference, pleasure and ability define. The daily applied science of agriculture is worked out between us. The pride in it is shared, and neither of us would demean our contribution by suggesting it comes primarily through the other, as "farmer's wife" does.

The question of where the next generation of farmers is going to come from is an important one, because we're engaged in an experiment with no historical precedent - for the first time in history, the majority of new farmers will have to come from off the farm - for decades we have been able to reduce the number of farmers by drawing off many and destroying farm cultures and communities, while still having enough to meet our needs, but the farm population is rapidly aging, the next generation of farmer's children have already left the farm, and now we must ask who will replace them?

The answer so far is that women are a part of the answer, and I hope this will be the end of farmer's wife syndrome and the emergent recognition of the fact that farmers come in many packages, and that a way of life is something that circles round and encompasses everyone who lives it.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:56 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Throw a Spitball, Go to Jail

Category: education • foster parenting • kids

I am a homeschooler, a private schooler and a public schooler, and as such, don't have a strong ideological commitment to any of the above - I think they all have their place. My oldest son has severe autism and attends a private school for children with autism, but paid for and managed by the school district since they have no appropriate placement for him. My three younger boys are homeschooled, which we started not because of a dislike of public schools, but because our local school went to all-day kindergarten when my son Simon was ready to start. His birthday was late November, and at four and a half he still needed a nap and a day that began with a 7:30am bus ride and ended at 3:15 was just too long for him. We were advised to keep him back, but since he'd been reading for two years, that didn't seem wise, so we homeschooled. We had so much fun doing it that we've kept on. We are also public schoolers whenever foster children are in our home, since foster kids can't be homeschooled legally in NY.

My general take on that the rigid lines drawn between home and school are somewhat artificial - that homeschool and public school are actually part of a larger continuum that anyone with children to educate in their lives needs to participate in. Moreover, even if we are committed to one option or a particular educational philosophy, we never know when our ground could shift. Some of the most ardent anti-homeschoolers I know have found themselves home educating when a local public school couldn't meet a child's needs, or when a child was victimized by bullying or laid low by a major health crisis. Many a dedicated homeschool parent has found themselves unable to continue due to a health crisis in a parent, a need to take on new work for economic reasons, a kid who didn't respond well to the dual role of parent/teacher, a disability they were not prepared to respond to at home.

Moreover, in more difficult situations, any of us may HAVE to become homeschoolers or public schoolers - consider a major natural disaster like Katrina in New Orleans which closed many schools for an extended period. Some kids can be out of school for a bit and no harm done - others can't. in a longer term crisis, the community will need to respond to the need for education for kids.

All of which is just a long way of saying that I don't think of myself as an ideological homeschooler. I could probably become one, however, if I lived in Texas. Check this out:

The charge on the police docket was "disrupting class". But that's not how 12-year-old Sarah Bustamantes saw her arrest for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck in class because other children were bullying her with taunts of "you smell".

In 2010, the police gave close to 300,000 "Class C misdemeanour" tickets to children as young as six in Texas for offences in and out of school, which result in fines, community service and even prison time. What was once handled with a telling-off by the teacher or a call to parents can now result in arrest and a record that may cost a young person a place in college or a job years later.

One of the things that has fascinated me as a foster parent is the realization of how afraid many people are of children. Whether this stems back to Coumbine or other issues, a few rare cases of violent children seem to have reshaped our national culture in a way that makes us genuinely afraid of kids. I've had people outright ask whether I worry foster children will kill me in my bed - even though the kids are far more vulnerable than they are dangerous.

Add into this the fact that non-white children, especially boys, are much more likely to be disciplined more strongly for the same things - expulsion rather than detention, and to be judged as violent and extreme for things that would be considered minor in a white or female child, and I admit, I'm pretty strongly suspicious of the impulse to police childhood. That doesn't mean no children are hard to handle or that classrooms aren't hard to manage, but to me this is just one more sign of something deeply wrong in our culture generally.

I was a disruptive teen in high school myself - I was politically aware and active and a bit of an agitator. I had smart mouth, and my dream as a 16 year old pain in the rear was to be a test case for the ACLU ;-) in a high school that I saw as repressive and intellectually deadening. I was fortunate in that my teachers and the school administration were, for the most part, smarter than I gave them credit for, and kinder - they didn't want to ruin the records of young people, and handled my actions appropriately. I can only imagine what would have changed in my life when childhood earns you no grace, only harder and harder crack-downs. The track to prison already begins in school for many kids - do we really need to make the track run faster?

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:24 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Poor Mitt

Category: politics • poverty

Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about the very poor. Add in the fact that Mitt demonstrably cares only about his hair, campaign donors (not a lot of them among the very poor) and getting elected, and this isn't exactly news.

GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very poor because there are social safety nets that take care of them.

"I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I'll continue to take that message across the nation."

Ultimately, Mitt is pretty safe in saying this, because he's playing on a whole host of American presumptions about poor people that are generally shared - even by many poor people. First of all, that the poor constitute only a tiny percentage of people, while 95% of us are "middle class." In America, everyone is middle class - it is one of our cultural precepts. There is lower middle class, which for the most part could be more accurately described as "poor' or "poorish" and upper middle class (better known as "richish" or actually rich), but very few people who will willingly call themselves rich or poor. This is, of course, factually ridiculous, but it is part of our national mythos.

The second assumption is that the very poor people are doing pretty well. You can see this on evidence any time any news story about social welfare appears, whereupon one is deluged with commenters about people on food stamps driving Jaguars and how unfair it is that some people get to live with these awesome safety nets while others have to work for a living. This is because one of America's best tricks is setting the poorish against the poor, and setting up the very poor as the enemy. What we like to believe is that poor people are those whose moral failings are the primary reason for their being in poverty. In fact, their moral failings (which exist) tend to be mostly the same moral failings of ordinary Americans, only exacerbated by a lack of support and many things that other people take for granted.

Mitt seems to believe what most Americans believe, which is that those on social welfare programs are doing just awesome, while the real victims are middle class Americans. This is a pretty funny idea, but it isn't just Mitt's. The notion that lower and middle class Americans are struggling more than the truly poor is not an uncommon one by people who look on social welfare programs with hostility. If there's anything really different about his assumptions it is the very funny classing of the desperately poor with the extremely rich as having a lot in common.

Let's take a look at some of Mitt'e assumption, though. First, how many people are actually poor in the US? The number is just around 40 millon at this point, not the 2-5 percent at the top and bottom that Mitt seems to think, but around 15% of the US population (relative poverty is greater, but I'm using the US census figures).

More than half of all Americans will spend at least a year in poverty during their adult life times. Almost a quarter of those people that Mitt just said he didn't give a crap about are children. Another ten percent are senior citizens. Let us note for the record that Mitt just disavowed interest in just under 10 million children and four million elders. Just mentioning it, since kids and senior citizens get a lot of attention during an election year. But they aren't the right kind of kids or seniors.

How well are safety nets doing for these folks? Well, we know that despite those safety nets, the ones that the Republicans do their best to hammer Barack Obama with (despite the fact that the dramatic rise in food stamp usage began under George W. Bush), 11 percent of American households were food insecure in the course of a year. This means that even though the largest percentage of people in history are on food support programs, we still have a significant number of people who don't know where their next meal is coming from a lot of the time. Again, it would be worth noting that a lot of those people are kids.

What about other measures? Well, we know that infant mortality rates in poor areas are a scandal. We know that in a number of poor counties around the America lifespans are actually declining, and that the poor endure more stress, having higher rates of suicide, depression, homicide and disability due to untreated medical conditions - yup. those poor people are doin' just awesome - practically as good as their counterparts like Mitt, the incredibly rich.

What's disturbing about this is that it reinforces an absolutely insane set of beliefs that people really do hold - that an upper-middle class person struggling to manage private school tuition is actually really hurting, while the desperately poor are protected by social welfare programs. Unfortunately, this belief isn't limited to the American right - it is reinforced by the language of the Occupy movement, which speaks of the "99%" as though they are uniformly oppressed by the ultra-rich 1%. This isn't the intent of Occupy, of course, which is vastly more concerned about poverty than Mitt is, but the rhetoric being used builds on the assumption that we're all basically part of one group, the (vast) middle class except for a few people, and that there is a great deal of commonality between the moderately rich and the very poor.

That simply isn't the case. While the 1% have more money than the 2 and 3%, all of them are doing just fine - what the rhetoric does is make sure that the people you are opposing are never you, always someone else. By building on language of classlessness that America loves so much, we elide differences just as much on the left as the right. That's not to say that under the sound bites the Occupy Movement hasn't a had a lot of good things to say about class and poverty - but that the sound bites are the things that other people hear best and remember longest.

Income disparity and poverty have become part of the national discourse in a way that owes enormously to both the Occupy Movement and the traditional poor-bashing that goes with an election year. That's a positive thing - but the language that we use to talk about poverty, class and equity falls short of what is needed and that's a problem on all sides.

It is easy to pillory sleazy, ignorant Mitt Romney for his inaccuracy and inequity - actually what really should be news about this is the unpublicized part of this. What's actually shocking is Mitt's statement that if safety nets are inadequate he'll fix them, a statement almost unheard of by a Republican. What he doesn't know about poverty and class aren't really news, unfortunately, because they represent what America doesn't know and doesn't want to talk about.

In a society where energy and resource decline has clear economic results - more poverty, more volatilty, more uncertainty and a winding down of the growth economy, those people that Mitt doesn't care about will get greater in number - indeed, have been growing greater in number. As long as we use language and misconception to conceal them, however, they can grow and grow and still be marginalized until the day that they decline to be marginalized any more, and everyone looks up, startled, that the very poor are so many and so angry and so familiar to us.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:57 AM • 42 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Independence Days Challenge is Back!

Category: independence days challenge

Check it out at ye olde blogge ;-).

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:01 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Bark of Popple, Twig of Willow: In the Woods in Winter

Category: forestry • weather • wood

Counting Out Rhyme

Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

I should be in the woods at this time of year. Instead, because of the unusually warm winter and heavy rains that have left the ground saturated and soggy, rather than frozen and covered with snow, and because I managed to do something to my shoulder chopping wood. (I turn forty this summer, and my assumption is that the two different minor injuries I sustained in about two weeks were the official "the warranty on your body has expired and it will all go to hell now" notice.) I mostly haven't been, but they call me. This is the season of trees on a farm.

In the dark of January and February, when the ground is hard as stone (normally) and the weather is cold, cutting wood, hauling downed braches by sled, harvesting bark for baskets and medicinal use and pruning trees are the natural works of the season, and I really enjoy them. We don't cut most of our own wood - when we first moved here we assumed we would take all our own wood from the property, but what we found was that firewood and hay are the two most common ways for our rural neighbors to make a living, and in the end, we'd rather have the time for other things and enrich our neighbors, so those are two jobs we don't do a lot of. Still, we put up some hay by hand every year, and we cut some of our own wood. The depredations of the hurricanes this fall mean that we've got a large supply of fallen wood - plenty for many years to come, so I expect I'll do more soon.

One cuts wood for the following winter - 9 months or a year to season is a minimum, and a bit longer is better. I don't use a chainsaw, because, frankly, I'm afraid of them - I have always been more than a little clumsy, and I like my limbs attached. The Bucksaw and the Crosscut saw are slower, but also quieter and much less likely to keep going without me if I make a mistake.

In a good year Eric and I find time to go out in the woods together - the two person cross-cut saw is an art and a pleasure to use, and it is good for a marriage. Until you master it, it can be bad for marriage too, but once you learn one another's motions it can be deeply satisfying. Most of the time, though, it is just one of us that go into the woods to make piles of firewood that will then be sledded out.

There has been no sledding this year - in fact the pussy willows have catkins and today is supposed to hit sixty degrees. My daffodils are up and the world is convinced that spring is nigh - whether it is or it isn't, it makes the woods harder.

Harvesting small wood for bentwood (one of Eric's hobbies), hurdle making, basket making (which I do incredibly badly, but I try) and pruning the fruit trees are less tough on my shoulder, so most of the time I spend with wood of late is around the house. The goats and the rabbits are delighted when I bring them the trimmings from the peach and apple trees, and I the quince prunings I set in glasses of water to force into bloom.

I found pruning intimidating at first, not really grasping what it was that I was trying to do. A friend who is an old orchardman simplified it for me - he taught me to imagine what the tiny growth of this year will look like in ten, drew me pictures, and then showed me what it would look like if I made different choices - all of a sudden the idea penetrated and I was able to look and see what I wanted my trees to look like - more or less. I still pay some price for my years of not fully grasping things, but it gets better all the time.

Our property has more willow than anyone would want to shake a stick at - it is a wet piece of land, and willow grows abundantly here. We have encouraged the goats to cut back on the sumac and willow in certain areas, and we coppice the willows behind the barn - in fact, this year I'll take our second harvest after the cutting we did 7 years ago. We have only just finished burning the willow - not great firewood, but old dry willow make a good starter - that we took off the trees the first time.

Thorny locusts are wonderful fence posts and great firewood if you can cut it - we lost two big locust trees to the hurricanes, one right by the barn, the other behind the house, and the goats and calves quickly denuded them, eating their high protein leaves. In a few weeks, after the calves are gone to the butcher, I'll need to cut up the locusts, but it must wait until I take the fence that encloses it down.

We're out of "tree hay" at this point - mostly locust and willow that I put up and dry on old shipping pallets for winter. The rabbits, goats and calves love it, and it is an infinitely renewable resource for us. Over time, I hope to cut more each summer to feed our herd. To do so, I also have to keep planting trees - I want plenty, and of course, we also sell some trees in the nursery business, so I check on the little dormant nursery, and then harvest willow to make willow water for rooting cuttings in late winter.

The sap is already starting to rise in the trees because of the unseasonable warmth - soon enough we'll put up our little mite of syrup - our sugar bush is tiny, and we do it in the simplest possible way, with buckets and homemade taps, but it is a sign that winter is winding down. Ordinarily the beginning of February doesn't mark spring at all, but simply the time when northern people and critters start to dream of spring, but this year all is early, and everything feels ready.

I still hope for some snow and ice yet - it is too early for things to move forward, and while it saves on heating fuel, it isn't good for birds and plants to be so out of synch. Moreover, I still hope for some time in the woods yet when my shoulder mends and the sound of chickadees and the crosscut saw are the only songs in a wintry silence. If I don't get it, though, the trees and I still have plenty to do.

This coming week is Tu B'shevat, the Jewish holiday that marks the "new year" of the trees - the date that one counts tree birthdays from. It is traditional to celebrate with the fruits of trees, mostly out of season here, but a pleasurable luxury that reminds us of days to come when we will devour piles of peaches and apricots, process baskets of apples and quinces into jars, when the fruit of trees will pour upon us in abundance, asking little, giving much. Now, in the quiet season of winter in the north, it seems that trees give little - unless of course, you go into the woods and see what there is to receive.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:09 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Goat Humor

Category: goats • humor

My fellow geeky Jewish goat-farmer Reb Deb sent me this, and I couldn't resist posting it:

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:56 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks