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It is a really simple idea - things that can't go on the way they have been, usually don't. Sooner or later things that have no future just stop. We all know intellectually that we can't all live and consume like middle class Americans, that our kids are going to have a harder time because of our way of life, that Empires end and ecological disasters cause things to come to hard stops. We know it, but we don't KNOW it. This blog is about coming to KNOW, and figuring out where we go from here. I'm a science writer, teacher, environmental activist and small farmer who is trying to put her lifestyle where her mouth is, and live in a way with a future. When not writing books, serving on the board of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, I run my farm with my husband, where we raise dairy goats, herbs, pastured poultry, heirloom vegetable plants, children and havoc.
Category: garden
There is a fine line, however, between moving forward and making yourself feel like crap - and it is an important line not to cross.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 12:23 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: garden design
On a related note, expanding our horizons fruit-wise had been a good thing for us. Quinces, medlars, the aforementioned peaches and apricots, and unusual fruits like Aronia have tended to do well here, in part probably because so few other people were growing them. It does involve a shift in the way we eat - but mostly a pleasurable one.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:51 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: garden
Sheet mulching is even doable on a farm scale, we're finding. Rotting large bales of hay can be moved to our farm, combined with large quantities of goat and chicken manure (composted), brush piles and leaves left in bags on the street (the bags get laid down in long rows to mulch the beds) and while I can't cover acres, I can make signficant spaces for further production.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 11:03 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: food preservation
So out we go, to scavenge in the mud for our food. And then back to the kitchen to transform the muddy, imperfect and nearly lost into the delicious and perfect - the roasted tomatillo sauce, the green tomato pickles, the peach jam and leather, the spiced plum chutney, the roasted corn salsa. There is treasure in the mud, good food for the claiming, and we will not let it go.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:19 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: garden
he LBGs are pretty thick on the ground this year - in previous years it hasn't been hard to tell the babies apart, but this year, everyone (except Calliope, Bast's daughter) is an LBG. They are different, and you can tell - if they stop bouncing long enough to differentiate. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen very often at this stage, and so you are often fruitlessly trying to count little heads as they move at high speed around you. So we spend a lot of time bewildered and counting fruitlessly.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:30 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: garden
Fortunately, the vast majority of my plants survive, but I have probably tested out just about every creative way to kill a plant not requiring the importation of elephants. I am a professional plant assassin, dammit.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 12:48 PM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: garden design
In the end, thinking of life, plant and human, as having a set of logical stages of succession is helpful to me because there's so much we can do to pave the way for the next thing, the next step, or to speed things along when we haven't prepared as much as we may want to.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 11:45 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: seeds
The first thing you need to remember is to think ahead, and bring in the compost before three feet of snow and ice lands on top of it. That was my big discovery two years ago, and like so many big discoveries was a. unpleasant and b. completely obvious.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:10 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: garden
By dead, I mean there wasn't a living thing in it. Not a beetle or a spider, and especially not an earthworm. It was weird. I knew that some previous owners of our house were umm... shiny green lawn people, and I don't know if that has something to do with it, but this stuff was "Its dead, Jim" dead.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:59 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: fall gardening
We'll be eating out of our garden for a long time yet - with season extension, probably until late December or January, but frost is a marker of change, and it seems as good a time as any to evaluate this year's garden.
Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:43 AM • 37 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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