More time and many things -

The time has slipped farther along and there have been many things happen on the way. My garden this season has been abundant, but not so much as to give me all that is needed. I have found that the time commitment needed to raise a sustainable amount of home grown veggies is not yet within my grasp. I will however continue to try. I have several plots of land covered in green and producing a variety of veggies. I hope to be able to  extend the growing season a bit with cold frames and the as yet not rebuilt greenhouse.

The greenhouse is still a series of drawings after the original catastrophe. I still will rebuild something soon however it will be built to withstand both heavy snows  and the high winds we experience here. I will see if I can post construction photos along with more writing when I begin the project.
 I enlarged the chicken enclosure this spring to allow a far bigger flock to wander freely about the lower meadow and have added guinea hens to the chicken flock.... I will wait till spring to see what happens before I add a new crop of hens to the flock and bring egg and poultry production back up to the level before the great coyote massacre... I hope that I will be able to have broody hens by next fall that will produce a good crop of chicks the following spring. The guinea's may also be an abundant resource however they are as yet not in the laying season and it will be early summer next year before they begin to nest.  Right  now  I am focused on this falls harvest and being able to put away some  of this summers plenty for later when it is cold....

Fire wood must be cut, hauled, and stacked and other chores around the place are crying out to  be accomplished.....There is always something to mend or build and never enough time or funding!
  

Once and again

Once again it has been almost a year since I have taken the time to jot down my thoughts here. Very much has changed and much is still remaining the same .....

New work and longer commute time has me spending less time on building my subsistence farming and gardening endeavor. I lost the green house and as yet have not rebuilt it. I have a plan for later in the spring when the weather is better and the wind has subsided. I have been investigating the possibility of building an aquaponic system in the new green house but I am still uncertain about the upkeep and several of the fine points of breeding and sustaining a reasonable population of fish, or what species to even begin with. There are several choices and many ways to design and operate an aquaponic system.

The wheat is in and I have the onion and garlic starts all set. I am thinking about building a vineyard on the upper garden area perhaps if I can find a cultivar that can stand the cold and will still produce under some of the drought conditions we have been experiencing.

perhaps I will have some more time to write down my thoughts more often this year......

We'll see!!

So you must have a government ID to vote eh?
How about - you have to have your Government Issued Number tattooed on your arm! or perhaps those RF ID chips in dogs and cats are now required at birth!

There are many Constitutional issues with these types of restrictions on voting and there have been many assaults on the 1964 voter-rights act but the bottom line is that Supreme Court has yet to hear or decide on several state wide mandates of this type - so far the high court has upheld the law as it has stood since the mid 1960's - we will see!

Hasn’t it been the Governments job to verify, and validate the electorate not the other way around? I signed the voter role and can verify my signature and that is not enough? Humm, seems like fear and suspicion is running rampant in the Land of the Free!

I wonder as the "right leaning" continues how far back up the trail we will go in destroying civil liberty and reducing the people's power to have voice in governance.

At some point the reality that, governance can become tyranny easily, which the framers of the US Constitution well knew, will become the reality -

how much the people will be able to reconstitute fair and impartial governance, when the populace realizes the score, may be vastly more limited by the growing technological might of a continually more and more Orwellian government bent upon keeping power, assimilating all, and suppressing derision, for the economic welfare of a wealthy elite who supplant the vote with dollars.....

That is a far greater fear, for me, then somebody voting out of turn!

well the winter destroyed the feeble attempt to maintain the green house. A heavy snow and hurricane force wind collapsed the reinforced pvc structure. now it is planting time again and the wind has not cooperated even in the least. 

Plans are to buy a tubing bender and create a more rigid hoop structure from galvanized steel tubing this season. Having had the experience from last season and knowing the expectations we will have for fresh veggies I would like to make the replacement a good bit larger then the 10x20 foot print of the first attempt but I will have to find a reasonable resource for covering materials and perhaps use some of the pre-fab devices to fasten the covering and allow ventilation etc so I have a great deal of planning and preparation to do before I build hoop house II.

 I acquired an inexpensive incubator and have had great success hatching our new chicken crew. There were two hatching cycles which resulted in 16 chicks. Plenty of young chickens and hopefully some of them will be laying blue and green eggs if the genetics prove correct and the Amerucana roosters have done their job. I do not know what I will call the cross breeding that I have but it will be interesting to see what these chicks look like when they are older.

I will be improving the hen house and making the chicken yard much larger this year. I would like to be able to house at least a dozen laying hens and perhaps a few more which means improving the hen house a bit adding perching area and mostly enlarging the yard. I think going up to 50x50 will be good but I still am worried about the marauding pack of coyotes. the fencing will need to be very high and will likely need a hot wire around the top. more planning and prep!

We will see how much I am able to accomplish this season!

Passover - family - spring - reflection - renewal
All are the moment that is right now and will begin this next years trials and tribulations. having given the last years over to memories and lessons - as we swing again around the sun..


I posted this elsewhere and though it apropos 

The Greenhouse

Wow, I have not had the time to write in quite awhile.
There have been too many things to write about and many experiences have passed but for now beside the ever circular political debates and the ever present social arguments . It is again time to plan and prepare for spring.

Over the holidays I received a new, and hopefully productive, present. A High Tunnel greenhouse! It's not the grand and immense size of the ones at some of the farms and CSA's I have visited, but according to some of the articles I have regarding high tunnel growing it will be very useful. It could produce the bulk of vegetables for this household if managed properly. We will see how successful this project can become!  It has completely taken over the garden and required me to level out some extra area so that I could build it on the present garden plot near the cisterns and where the soil has been amended and is rich. I Now have to finish securing the structure and reinforce the frame. The high winds we have are likely to be too much for it and I want to insure the work I put in will not blow away. The 80 mph winds we had did break things once already and now I will have to see just how sturdy I am able to make it. If the original frame won't take the torture I will be building something much more sturdy to put the covering on very shortly.......... I have been preparing soil and constructing raised beds on the inside in preparation for the first set of cold weather plantings depending on weather in late February. My plan so far will be to successively plant different veggies throughout the spring, summer, and fall and until we get the long hard freeze of winter again.

My neighbor has a very large High Tunnel and has an amazing rotating 9 to 10 month garden in it.... 

My daughter ran across an amazing purchase of spring bulbs, daffodils, tulips, crocus, hyacinth, and more...
My garage floor is now piled high with hundreds of bulbs. The kitchen counters are covered with trays forcing several colors of hyacinth and paper-whites. and there are jars and trays of others upstairs near the great windows drinking the sunlight. The plan is to scatter them through out the front yard (which is my wife's wildflower garden). I can't wait to see hundreds of flowering bulbs early in the spring and then the wild flowers through the summer and fall again. I hope my daughters vision of spring bulbs scattered throughout the yard is a complete success it will be beautiful.

On another farming front - My flock of hens was attacked by coyotes again, further reducing the population to the point that I must bring in more chicks this spring. I have had several raids by the pack of coyotes that lives up on the mountain behind us over the years but nothing like this fall and winter. I fear the amount of food has dwindled and that has pushed the pack to hunt my birds. I have noticed while cutting wood and riding the trails up on the mountain that there have been fewer cottontails and jackrabbits. I also have seen fewer great horned owls this year. So I guess the coyotes are forced to raid my hen house out of desperation. Still, the pack has grown and even with a few well placed shots there are at least six members that I have seen on raiding parties. I will be investing in more fencing when the ground thaws and seeing if I can run an electric wire around the perimeter and along the top of the fencing. They seem to like to climb on the wire roof of the chicken yard and cave it in to get at the birds! Smart!

Before railing against foreigners I think we all must look carefully at each of our own families’ travels across the planet and stop seeing differences and start seeing brothers and sisters.  Depending on which sides of my family history I look at I am either 3^rd or 4^th generation on this continent. There are many whose families came here before mine. Does that make me a foreigner to this place? I think so, in the sense of nationalistic boundaries. However I don’t think of myself as anything more than a human being  and this planet  is where humanity originates so far as I can tell, therefore none of us are foreigners, are we?   But more importantly what difference does it make? Yes there have been injustices. Yes there have been many things people have done to each other under many flags and under many beliefs that are based upon perceptions of difference and ignorance that have caused divisions. We as a planet are no longer ignorant unless we want to be or are made so by others. Information is available unless we are deprived the ability to find it and learn. Hate and fear are born of ignorance and compassion comes with understanding.  Everybody is different in some way, when people move from one place to another for economic or political reasons they tend to do it when they are in dire need to do so... Others are wanting for reasons of circumstance or misfortune what place is it of ours to judge our brethren?

Mark 14:7 “For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you will you may do them good: but me you have not always.” Matthew 26:11” For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good; by feeding them when hungry, clothing them when naked, and supplying them with the necessaries of life. ..“

We have the understanding that there will always be a need to lend help to some portion of our population and that it is something moral, necessary, and humane. Weather it is a function of government depends on your view of the term “welfare”.  As a rule government holds several keys to maintaining civil society, those being, to provide for general health, safety, and welfare of the society over which it governs. It is well known that the welfare of a society reaches to every member so to ignore the poorest in society (which also in many human societies is the most numerous group) would be done at risk of insurrection. Here in this country the amount in dollars given to keep the peace among the destitute is far less than the amount needed to rebuild a nation. It is also a minute amount as compared to the cost of policing the entire world,which we seem to be intent on as some righteous or upstanding gesture. We should consider our morality closely when we offer the world charity to help in times of need, billions of dollars, and yet many of our children are hungry at school. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world cringes when we as a nation send our Billions in aid abroad with a benevolent smile while our armies stand ready to sweep in and “keep the peace”  with trillions in arms to back them up?

After all - with family (both our direct family and our globally extended family) 

 ” If we fail to look after others when they need help, who will look after us?” ― Siddhārtha Gautama

shouldn't we look after others without threats, without malice or disrespect?    

 This is indeed the land of opportunity and as a species we have taken every opportunity we could. Now look carefully at where we are and what the future looks like for our brothers and sisters. I think we are blinded by chauvinism of a perception that the “American way of life” is somehow eternal.  The admonition of Siddhartha Gautama that “nothing is forever except change” should be paid some great attention by those people who are not willing to see that they live in a world of change.  We also live in a world where we are constantly moving to survive. We have been migrating across our big blue marble for as long as humanity's existence.

Some paleoanthropologists have suggested that the early ancestors of North Americas first peoples  may have been responsible for a more rapid extinction of many species of large game (paleomegafauna) when they were beginning to expand into the new world many thousands of years ago.  People have been changing the planet like other life has changed it before us and will change it after we go. To say our existence does not change the planet is put simply – ignorant. We as a species are not that much different today from the first peoples of the major land masses in the northern hemisphere as we migrated from the southern hemisphere of this planet after the glaciers began to recede.  We gobble up resources and destroy the cycles of life to suit our desires. This is and has been and may be both a wildly successful survival strategy, and our inevitable down fall. The more successful we become, the more rapid the resource consumption. Sooner or later there must be a limit unless we discover an escape hatch to the stars and there we find more resources to consume to feed our continued growth…

Have we changed the planet?  – I think the evidence is clear indeed we have.  Good, bad, indifferent? We have yet to tell, because in the time span of the planet we are nothing more than a recent blemish on the surface of a very slowly changing system. Weather we have made a scratch in the skin of the environment that will heal in time or we have punctured an artery and it will cause our inevitable demise is still a future we must wait to see. Either way we are all children of the same mother and are fighting as siblings do. But we must at some point grow up to see that the squabbling is about nothing and the real task of living on our little rock is to do it well with some small amount of comfort and security.  Together we can have that comfort and security through compassion and understanding. Fighting and separation by economic or other types of warfare simply provide discord and distress that further alienate and segregate the peoples of the planet, the siblings of us all. Mohandas Gandhi use a simple idea of personal industry to help raise the standard of living in India and that idea of personal industry is at work around the globe. But industry no matter how small takes investment. Investment by both the society and the individual is critical to starting a self sustaining human enterprise no matter the size.  

 The few bucks we spend on helping those who need it in our own nation are so minute as compared to the amounts spent on other things I wonder if those people who are opposed to the expense are simply angry and mean spirited because they have been treated badly, dealt a bad hand, or have never wondered where the next meal is going to come from. Perhaps they are just sociopathic fascists with no conscience. It makes me wonder what leader they would follow when the global distribution chains we have built are broken again and the world becomes a very uncomfortable place. We all will migrate to food and resources and struggle to simply survive as immigrants and foreigners in what may become more than a hostile political landscape………