I forgot the corn

The seeds are here for the season, most of them. I forgot to order the corn, beets and carrots, too. I ordered more than enough to keep our table full of tasty salad, stir fry and salsa for the summer and fall. A few new items like chard and winter squash have been added to the regulars. The tomatoes have been downsized. I'll plant fewer and given them more room. That should let their yield ripen during the summertime instead of in big buckets on the counter after it has become too dark to leave them outside any longer. We've added more varieties of lettuce now that we know it grows like a tasty, tasty weed. Spinach, broccoli are back. Peas, too, make their return, though I've opted to only grow the sugar snap peas. You eat the pod and all. Luke loved them last year even though the pods were hard to work on without molars. He should love them even more with a full compliment of teeth. I'll get he corn, beets and carrots at our corner nursery. That'll just leave me with the task of finding a spot for it all. 

Grow your own Thanksgiving

I've been utilizing my commute time lately to read. I've just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Its the recounting of a year in the life of a family wanting to live locally. Local means what they can grow on their farm and what is produced organically within a hundred miles. There were a few exceptions. Each chose a luxury food, coffee for example. They bought their flours from a non-local source because a local source never presented itself. Other such things also cropped up, but the point of their experiment remained very much in-tact. Using their own hands and hard work they dedicated themselves to planting, weeding, picking and nurturing their food sources from one March to the next. Barbara writes the book with the intent of showing that not only is it possible, but it should be our responsibility to limit the energy we expend growing and shipping food from one corner of the world to the other. There is a factoid in there: for every calorie of food in the United States, eighty were expended transporting it. Those bananas we eat may be organic, but they trail behind them thousands of miles of exhaust. She also stresses organic food origins. It is better for your and the Earth's body to grow and consume organic food. The stress on the land through conventional farming parallels the stress on our atmosphere and climate.

I found the book a little preachy, but that may be because I don't need much in the way of persuading. Shari and I have been moving steadily toward a lifestyle rooted more in locally produced, organic when possible, foods. We believe in lessening our impact on the world. We would like to get off the electric grid, or at least offset our electric needs. We've talked about finding ourselves on a farm, our farm, raising chickens and corn. I love the idea of working on and in the land. Getting to that point is a major undertaking for the future.

I see new value in Thanksgiving after reading of Barbara's and her family's. It meant something to them just as it meant something to those who came before shrink wrap and fresh December strawberries. To grow and then enjoy a bountiful meal at the end of the growing season is much more meaningful than opening twenty cans of product and defrosting a plastic pop-up thermometer enabled turkey in the refrigerator three days before cooking.

My old friend Eric and his family live and work their farm in Athens, Georgia. There he raises crops for sale at the farmers market and works with other local farmers to build their co-op's health. What else he does I'm not sure of any more. He was a prolific blogger at one time, but the arrival of their daughter seems to have sapped the remainder of what little free time he used to have. I suspect that he is still actively building the farm, brewing his own mead, and trying to make a go of it as a family farm. I suspect he will succeed; he usually does.

Becoming Alec

Darwin wrote a book. It is called Becoming Alec. It is available from LuLu and maybe other outlets soon. I downloaded the book shortly after I saw the announcement and began to read it. While Gay, Lesbian and trans-sexual fiction isn't my normal genre, I very much enjoyed my side trip through this foreign neighborhood. I quickly forgot that the book was written by a friend of mine, though I was thrilled to see character traits from friends and relations Darwin and I have in common expressed by characters in her books. Perhaps she isn't pulling these traits from the people I know, but I imprinted them onto faces from my past. Like getting a mention in the credits of a CD, it felt like a little nod in your direction from the author.

I once called the Young Fresh Fellows great when working on an article for the New Mexico Tech newspaper. I had booked them for a show at school and was working on a piece for the paper. I recall Tom Jones looking at this and basically asking if that was the best I could do. I was embarrassed and still am when I think about that; he was correct. Its great, their great doesn't mean much. It is what I meant and I think its true, but there are more rich and useful ways of saying it. So, I sit here and try to think of why I liked Becoming Alec. I enjoyed the cast. I could visualize each of them clearly in my mind, though Tucker was a black man in my head (his strength, style and sense of coolness didn't seem possible when I pictured him as some white guy). I felt myself walking in those bars and bathrooms and dining rooms. I enjoyed my journey and look forward to Darwin's next effort.

Content aside, I find it a very remarkable display of focus and fortitude to write an entire book and to get it published. A good deal of stamina is required to start and finished any project of any significant size. Bravo to Darwin and all authors out there working in their spare time to see such projects through. It is something that I long for. The smattering of projects on this laptop are many. The number of them that are done or near done is very scant.

Time to plant, not yet, probably.

Its January 7th. I've been looking through this year's seed catalog for a few weeks now. Shari went through and bookmarked and starred her choices a few days after it came it. She won't look at it again unless I have a question or want to show her something. That's the way she is, sees a task, does a task, moves on. I love her for that. I'm drawn back to the catalog time and again, browsing, reading, trying to find something new or to visualize what will go where in our limited garden real estate. This year there will be fewer potatoes; corn will make an appearance after a year's absence, this time in quantity enough to germinate properly; pod peas will be replaced by sugar snaps exclusively; there will be more greens, planted at staggered intervals to keep us in lettuce all season long. I'll get to the planting on time this year, or I'll have a chance to. Last spring I was extending the garden box. Luke's chance of taking a header onto the patio is greatly reduced this year. That alone will help, but more than that, he'll love to play alongside us. Hopefully he'll not specialize in digging up just planted seeds. We (he and I) were out digging through the garden over the weekend, hunting for worms for Myrtle (our box turtle) and generally just playing stomp-in-the-dirt. I turned under some of the weeds that had been is sustenance mode to this point, what little sun they clung to plotted out by the shovel of their non-benevolent deity. Luke, with his own shovel, turned over and flung dirt himself. I picked around the onions and leeks that are over-wintering. They seem to be fine. I haven't gotten the hang of onions, yet. Their bulbs don't ever seem to amount to much. They will be the mission of the year. The leeks are fantastic, on the other hand. Their thick green leaves show no signs of failing against what has been a pathetically un-cold winter so far. The frost has yet to really settle in. I seem to recall the puddles at the bus stop being frozen every day back then, their thin sheets shattering under heal and rock. There isn't any sign of that so far. Snow is predicted for tonight. We'll see. In either case, planting will have to wait for another couple months at least.

Two weeks, no keyboard

Work gave us Christmas and New Year's Eve off, making it two four-day weekends in a row. I took the intervening three days off myself. That made eleven days at home with no travel plans anywhere in sight. I'm used to the weekend with Luke routine, not the everyday with Luke routine. There is a mental mental shift to get out from behind the desk. It takes a day to realize that I'm not commuting, not sitting behind a desk all day. After that I didn't think of work and didn't touch a computer more than a few times. By the end of the days I had forgot about work completely and did not want to get back on the bus. In all, it was wonderful and excellent. Now I'm on the train, ending this short post-holiday week and looking forward to another couple days at home.