Garden Girl

I read quite a few of the bloggers & journalists who write on issues of sustainability, climate destabilization and energy.
I’m happy to see a zeitgeist building as these issues are starting to permeate into the mass consciousness. A few years ago ( heck even a year ago), it was easier to dismiss these writers as fringe eco-maniacs with chicken little complexes, even when the body of scientific research had been supporting what they were saying for years.

As the number of people gathering & disseminating information online about the ecological challenges we’re facing grows, I’ve noted a trend in the writings that makes me very happy. That trend is one I think of as writing in a spirit of pragmatic optimism.
Some of the first bloggers I became aware of and started to read regularly had grim facts to report & an even grimmer forecast for human civilization. These folks certainly were not & are not talking out of their hats. Many of them have been gathering data & investigating issues like peak oil, arctic melting, soil depletion, and the problems of monoculture farming for years and I would imagine it’s beyond hard in the face of daily new reports of increasing peril and mis information spreading, apathy & greed on the part of governments and industries, not to take a pessimistic view.

But here’s what I strongly believe:

We don’t have the luxury of pessimism.
We have no time to spend energy in “I told you so” judgmental recriminations & a self righteous schadenfreude.
Nor is it going to help us to take a survivalist attitude of “the smart & strong who saw this coming & prepared will make it just fine”.
Even if that were true, which I doubt.
Those attitudes may feed the ego when times are tough, but they won’t feed our bodies.
To feed our bodies (and our spirits), we are going to need knowledge and skills and local networks sharing them.

If we preach gloom, doom and the elitism of those who have already started on creating greater self sufficiency, we may put people off the path of self empowerment that will not just serve them well, but help them serve others well too.

It can be scary to confront change, especially when we’ve been socialized into a very dangerous passivity that eats at our confidence.
I think what people may need most now is encouragement to take a few baby steps like going car free or joining a victory gardening community and growing just a little of their own food, because if they take these small steps successfully, they will feel empowered to take more steps and to help others take action.

Pragmatic optimism is about building a real momentum for change, which beats being smug while others end up feeling helpless all to heck.

The fig tree is pushing forth nubbins.

We’ll see more journalists & writers living low impact experiments & writing about their adventures. I’m all for anything that generates memes that convince Americans that living more sustainably ≠ fate worse than death.

I just discovered Doug Fine & his blog for his new book:

Farewell, My Suburu

& he’s my new hero. See videe here:

Doug in action (”oh, hello goats”)

I have two kinds of blackberries in a raised bed. There’s 6-8 little spriglings in a good amount of mulch & well tilled soil underneath. I am not sure what this little guy is (it was untagged & I need to ask Bio-Gardener).
The other variety we have is Thornless Arapaho.

Thanks to Jose & the crew at Bio-gardener for the bed o’ berries!

Me:

Jeremy:

Mr. Garden Girl:

A kind person on flickr finally identified my front tree as a Bradford Pear and I’ve noticed my neighborhood is full of them. Texas Mountain Laurel is coming out strong too (ahhh, the Springtime smell of grape koolaid , *chuckle*.)
The Red Oaks are still asleep, ‘though.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen that other local favorite, the Texas Redbud around here.

In more very local tree news, Jeremy from  Bio-Gardener brought us fruit trees! He was a one man tree planting, information & education giving force of nature and he pointed me at even more resources for learning about my little plot of earth. He told me, for example, that the soil of the Blackland Prairie, where we are, is very different from the soil of the Hill Country next door.

Digging in to plant the fruit trees, I saw an earthworm or two, a good sign that the ground isn’t such dense clay that there’s no life going on down there.
My next post will be photos of Jeremy doing the hard labor & me just helping out getting the treelings in their new home.
Here’s hoping the baby plum, apricot, fig & peach trees that now gently stand watch at the four corners of my home thrive under my newbish care

I’m waiting on my fruit trees to arrive (today or tomorrow depending on the whims of weather). And while I wait, I’m thinking about berry bushes to be. I love blackberries and I’m jazzed at the idea of making blackberry preserves.
I’m excited & happy that we are finally at a place where I can start the garden experiment just a little, but I’m also a bit nervous. It’s been a long time since I even helped out in a big garden & I’ve never started a big garden from scratch like I am here.
And we’ve gone deeply into debt to fund this incredibly modest little dream.
Yes, we’ve gone into debt to give up our car, get a home smaller than some peoples’ bathroom and rent- not buy- a small plot of land to grow just a smidgen of food.
So, I’m nervous.
Some would say I’m being reactionary.
They’d say that technology and market demand will address the issues of climate change & oil crunches far more efficiently & effectively than just individuals making some lifestyle changes.

Maybe.

Maybe we need all the help we can get: grass roots initiatives, individual action, technological breakthroughs and changes in policy on the local and national levels.

But, I’m doing it anyway, because this I can do.
It’s empowering to be doing something positive, to take some personal responsibility, to work toward a better more sustainable way of life, to be more of a creator & less of a consumer, to slow my life down and become more thoughtful about the impact of my actions.
This I can do.

(& thanks to http://www.foodshedplanet.com for giving me that one sentence answer to “why?”. If you plan to grow a victory garden this year, you may wish to add your name to the FoodShed Planet Victory Drive found at the link just above.)

Are locavorians simply wrong about local farmers markets decreasing greenhouse gas production?

A small farmer replies:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/07/AR2008030702520.html

Ocean ships’ emissions in the U.S. alone measure about 13 percent of the nitrous oxide (N2O); 17 percent of the particulate matter and 50 percent of the sulfur oxide found in our air. And ships are expected to release as much pollution by 2030 if current trends toward global trade continue.

Add emissions from planes and trucks in and you’ll see why eating local is not only tastier, better for you and your local economy, but better for the planet too.

So you’re getting your CSA box and trying your best to decrease your carbon footprint, support local growers and eat more real food, but like me, you were raised in the micronuke TV dinner generation. You’re impressed at the skilled home cooking of people who have learned to make demi-glace from scratch & roast their own veggies to serve with a sprinkling of home made herbed vinegar, but you aren’t there yet, or just don’t have the time this week for fancy.

Things you can do with your CSA box before it becomes compost that are quick & oh so easy:

A) Salads.

My husband is from California, the land of the meal salad & so I know from experience that there’s not many veggies that don’t taste good raw & with all their vitamins & nutrients intact. Add some boiled egg, cheese, tofu , tempeh, or nuts & grains. & then put on your favorite dressing. (& don’t stint– you’re being healthy enough just by eating a big bowl of raw veggies.) This is as simple & good as it gets.

B) Steamed.

Invest in a big ass rice cooker with a steamer attachment. Steamed veggies will keep in your fridge for the next week or so just fine. Put them over rice with a little sauce of your choice– curry, Annie’s Goddess ( http://www.consorzio.com/catalog/organic-dressings-c-30.html ) or any other salad dressing, or a little teriyaki sauce- experiment with any spice or seasoning you like for variety. Steamed veggies over pasta topped with marinara is yummy. This is so easy your kids can take the necessary components out of containers in the fridge and pop them in the microwave themselves for dinner.

I just watched one of the most disturbing things on TV that I’ve seen in a while. I recently discovered that one of my favorite NPR radio shows, This American Life, with Ira Glass has also become a TV show of the same name and with the same format. It’s a fascinating, well written show.

The episode I just watched has been out for a while (I download shows from iTunes since I won’t watch TV with commercials) and it has a segment shot in a hog farm. It wasn’t graphic but it did briefly highlight the problems in industrial livestock facilities that most of us in the slow foods movement are painfully aware of: the animals have such weakened immune systems that any person entering the facility must go through a full chemical decontamination process from head to toe. The animals have been bred to put on weight so quickly that at 6 months they are ready for slaughter. They live their lives in tiny little pens without access to fresh air, sunlight , grazing, the touch of their own kind or any other comfort than animals would naturally desire. These facilities are packed with so many animals that they are literally above vast lakes of excrement that end up making the residents of the areas near them sick and eventually this excrement finds its way to the ocean where it is still so toxic that it poisons the seas.

Now here’s the part that may surprise you. This isn’t what disturbed me about the episode. Oh, not to say that I am not disturbed by all that. Of course I am, but I’ve been disturbed by factory farms long before I saw this episode. I wasn’t even very disturbed by how disturbed the crew of This American Life was upon learning what conditions are like in these places. I expect most people in our culture to have very little idea of how food gets to their plate.

Here’s what disturbed me: while filming at a hog farm, the sound man for This American Life witnessed a sow giving birth. And you know what? Among all the other events he witnessed at the hog farm, among all the events I’ve described above, it was that event– the birth of some piglets–that caused him to become sick to his stomach. He threw up. & he couldn’t eat meat after that.

The one normal & life affirming thing that I saw in that entire segment is the thing that freaked him out.
Now that’s just odd to me, because the last time I checked that is how we all got here. We are all critters born of other critters.

I don’t want to pick on the man, because I really don’t know *why* he became so repulsed by witnessing such an universal event, but that fact that he said something about being grossed out at seeing those piglets “shooting out of a pig’s ass” (ass?!) leads me to think that he may be rather fundamentally psychologically disassociated from the very basics of biological functions in mammals. & I don’t think he is alone in that disassociation. In fact, I think it’s that dissociation that is a root cause of factory farms to begin with.

Now I’m not about to lecture anyone on “meat is murder.” Every animal is food for something. It’s true. Including us– no matter how much formaldehyde they fill you up with after you are dead, the microbes will eventually eat you. Whole darn planet is a cafeteria. Just the way it works.

So I am not going to say raising animals for slaughter is wrong. I’m not even going to suggest that we enter into a compact with a livestock animal that requires us to be kind and give that animal as decent a life as possible because we know that eventually we will take its life to feed our own. I’m not going to suggest that because no such compact can exist. I’m pretty sure if any animal knew it was going to be eaten it wouldn’t accede to such an agreement no matter how good a life we gave it.

No.

But I am going to say this: we should treat livestock humanely because to not do so diminishes our ability to empathize. When we do callous acts we must, of necessity, become more detached from our sense of right and wrong. We must became more detached from ourselves, lest we feel the hot uncomfortable wriggle of shame in our bellies that candid introspection would elicit. And becoming more detached we become more likely to lose more & more of our ethical bearings and empathy.

In a word- it’s harmful to *ourselves* when we treat animals as simply parts of an industrial machine.
And, I would further posit, it becomes easier for us as we become lost and numbed to treat each other as cogs in that same wheel over time.

Now, that I find disturbing.