tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80265573195689451152024-03-14T00:09:07.190-04:00The Concrete GardenerConcrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.comBlogger716125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-48149161011368179582019-12-05T07:34:00.002-05:002019-12-05T08:36:13.509-05:00There is always compromise: Eating well in a complex global food system<style type="text/css">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ng1SYlnMOrA/Xej5CeNR0PI/AAAAAAAALfg/8R8U1dOjVmUk8jYoAYzqlO-n6a-J9qrjQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/rooster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ng1SYlnMOrA/Xej5CeNR0PI/AAAAAAAALfg/8R8U1dOjVmUk8jYoAYzqlO-n6a-J9qrjQCK4BGAYYCw/s320/rooster.jpg" width="180" /></a>There have been quite a few articles circulating recently about orthorexia, about the desire to control ones diet to the extreme and eat perfectly. With this approach, too often your diet is a type of shorthand, a ticket into some kind of exclusive club. If you say you do or don’t eat x, you get to be in relationship. And that seems quasi-religious to me.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I agree that it is good to eat well. I even attempt to treat illness with changes in diet. I’m sold on this— it’s the subject of much of my research and it’s a key reason we farm.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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I want to speak out against the moral dimension that creeps in all too quickly— that we become righteous by what we eat, by what we consume. If someone comes to my house, I want them to be equally valued whatever they bring with them— I want them to know they are valued and that I can never fully know their stories and I will never judge them based on their food choices.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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As much as I want to do right by what I eat, in perfectionism lies madness. I say this with the caveat that I know there are real food allergies where perfectionism is pretty important if one wants to stay out of hospital. The motivation for “clean” eating seems a little different. It’s along the lines of wanting to always be in perfect health, or to be along a uniquely sustainable pathway. It sometimes even sounds a little evangelical.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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We live in a world that is infinitely complex, where our choices are always difficult. They are choices between us and God, or between us and our conscience.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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For me and my family, there is always compromise: what food our children will enjoy in the long term, our desire to not control our children’s preferences, our desire to steward our money and land well, to manage our dreams and our goals, how we manage our time, how a specific food fits with our five-year farm plan. In this set of dreams and dreaming, we make food choices. And in the safety of conceding inevitable imperfection, we make tremendous progress. Our diet is indistinguishable from the diet that we consumed nine or ten years ago. Yet if I need to go back to that diet for a week or a month, because we are traveling, I am sort of ok with that. I am ok getting chips and ice-cream with the kids now and then, ok with consuming meat with friends and family. I’m not saying this way of being is another kind of perfect, just that it is peaceful, and I find that it’s only when I’m peaceful that I’m able to make genuine progress— progress that extends beyond myself, because peace (like violence) spreads.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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In recognizing the compromises I make, I am also ok with the compromises made by farmers, provided they are honest, there are ways for us to talk about these compromises, and they are not compromises that will lead me directly to a hospital, at least in the short term.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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In farming for my family, I am able to farm quite idealistically, because I have made compromises in other areas: I feel I have enough money that I don’t have to farm for maximum profit. When I fail, I can still buy good food. That feeling of having enough is really important and powerful.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QBCEBSMyXzw/Xej5F4vIBXI/AAAAAAAALfo/JPA9DVl_3bMbXxJaQIQLJKoBnA9_U4zZQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/carnivorous%2Bplants.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QBCEBSMyXzw/Xej5F4vIBXI/AAAAAAAALfo/JPA9DVl_3bMbXxJaQIQLJKoBnA9_U4zZQCK4BGAYYCw/s320/carnivorous%2Bplants.jpg" width="320" /></a>If one is able to eat, supporting only the very best local farms, there are still questions of the definitions of best, definitions of local, prioritizing planet or healthy people or trying to weigh the two. Vegan or paleo? How much do farm workers get paid? How sustainable is the packaging? What if something you’ve eaten for a long time is not grown locally: do you change your diet? Was using the money to buy this food better than giving it to a neighbour who is eating very poorly because of circumstances beyond their control? Why is it better? These are questions of values, and it is ok for people to have different values around food. For me, farming and spending a lot of time on food is about trying to live the value that returns us to the actions that connect us to the earth, physically and spiritually.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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So I think there is always compromise (visible or invisible), and compromise — literally “coming together”— is not a bad thing. Remaining cemented in our rightness means we often cannot meet another person where they are— and in food, there is always a mountain of ambiguity, uncertainty, and trade-offs that are specific to local context. In finding common ground, we can move forward together. And ultimately, it is only together that we can go far.</div>
Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-25970340515487695732019-12-03T00:09:00.000-05:002019-12-05T08:36:49.163-05:00The Philippi Horticultural Area: Preserving agricultural land is urgent<style type="text/css">
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There’s been <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-11-06-of-developers-governance-and-land-speculation/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups%5B0%5D=80895&tl_period_type=3&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=First+Thing+Thursday+7+November+2019+Libstar&utm_content=First+Thing+Thursday+7+November+2019+Libstar+CID_e50c69acac061a34f937fe7fe62e7438&utm_source=TouchBasePro&utm_term=Of+developers+governance+and+land+speculation&fbclid=IwAR2NJOAy45yGXU70kuv_bt1CfZxd-PMOrSI8RBGsFw1F0u4nMSFJly7W8As" target="_blank">news</a> recently about the PHA: about the need to protect the agricultural land of the PHA, for the vegetables it produces for the City of Cape Town. Nazeer and the PHA have been fighting for the PHA to be preserved as farmland, and I stand alongside them.<br />
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Some older commercial farmers have said: you don’t represent us! This may well be because they are old and need to retire, and have little to retire on— they have worked for themselves all their lives, and there is no pension plan or medical scheme to fall back onto. From the time I’ve spent in the PHA, I could imagine it a hard place to retire. I see them trying to cash in, or already having cashed in and sold to developers, who leave the land fallow as they wait eagerly for zoning to be approved. And I think: perhaps it is a luxury for me tie myself to the land I steward. It must hurt to move on.<b></b></div>
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There have been several excellent articles about the fight happening in the High Court, and I don’t know more than the authors of those articles about the status of the PHA. I speak as a middle-class academic heading slowly into full-time farm-related activities. I don't want to ignore the racial and class battles at play, but I want to explore the possibility that the needs of the poor and the needs of the middle-class, (and the needs of the city's residents more broadly), all overlap.</div>
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Protecting the PHA is a core responsibility of the City, firstly by retaining rural zoning.</div>
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At the same time, this is not the end of the City’s responsibility (and, perhaps only the beginning of the responsibility of the Department of Agriculture). Rural or even agricultural zoning is not enough. The divide between the commercial farmers (many of whom are selling and leaving) and the landless farmers (who do not have the money to buy up land) is a reflection of the core challenges faced by farmers. Farming, especially small scale farming, especially physical labour: that these are complex, difficult activities. There ARE still commercial farmers in the PHA who continue to farm despite not having made money for themselves for several years. If the city saw crime in the area as an issue, or the agricultural extension office appreciated and supported the types of capital inputs uniquely needed for urban organic agriculture (for chippers or fencing, for example).<br />
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<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The current battle over the PHA comes after many years of neglect of that area by the city. Commercial farmers— including a robust organic agricultural tradition in parts of the PHA— have been selling up and leaving because it is dangerous, hard work, with little money, and their children will not take on the baton. While the area is close to the centre of the city, and close to market, it is no longer a safe place to raise children. While it remains potentially viable as a livelihood for very poor farmers if they are given land, this does not mean that the small scale commercial farmers aren’t also worthy of our compassion. Those who want to make money by paving over the city and are making boardroom decisions— developers and politicians— are making a choice that cannot be undone. It is the decision to use the space that is resulting in a free-for-all, and this is ultimately the city’s responsibility. It is not easy to re-ruralise built up areas. And there is a massive moral weight to that choice, given both income inequality and food insecurity (lack of dietary diversity in particular) set to worsen with climate change.</span></span><br />
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To make farming work, the City has to see urban farming as viable, important work. The farms cannot be seen as simply bits of land in a free market economy, or worse, as opportunities for densification. The land cannot be judged by what is looks like when you drive by fallow bits, as that is as much the consequence of political action as the driver or it. Work done by small-scale farmers involves stewardship that is quite different from larger scale operations. It is in the City’s interest to build agricultural traditions— not wine grapes in 17th century vineyards— but the basics: fruits and vegetables to nourish the people of our city.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This should be viable as a living for the middle-class, as well as for the poor. If it is not viable for the middle-class (commercial farmers) it will never really be viable for the poor, even if it appears to be, for a time.</div>
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Climate change makes this urgent. Diversified urban farms are essential in an age of uncertainty— small-scale farmers can adapt and grow varieties that work in our climate, we are flexible. I have eight different types of granadillas growing, all suited to slightly different climates. Each year, I throw out pumpkin seed and harvest seed from the best pumpkins that needed the least work. For all this resilience, it takes time to build a farm. For the land once farmed organically in the PHA, it makes me shudder to think of the work undertaken covering that land with compost, year after year, only for builders rubble to be dumped on it: turning all their work to dust. Soil building takes at least five years, growing perennials takes 5-7 years of investment, growing a windbreak takes 10-20 years, learning how to farm well takes decades. If we wait until the problem is urgent and in our face (when fruits and vegetables become too expensive for the majority of our city), it will be too late.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Our family is on the front end of a trend: there are plenty of young (ish) people looking to farm in the city: they need viable small plots where they feel safe. Far from undermining the goals of poor farmers or even the landless poor in townships, having a mixture of farmers changes the colonial and condescending tone that continues to plague conversations around “local” fruits and veg in Cape Town. That is, farmers don’t need your help in the sense that we’re needy nor do we want you to buy our food/plants out of charity, we need help in the sense that we present a clear, rational response to urban problems, and that response will continue to encounter roadblocks until a faceless economic system acknowledges that climate change is real, urgent, and caused by capitalist excesses. While the economy more broadly is anonymous and distant, our city officials are not. They are human and face difficult decisions. What we ask is that they do not let money or even self-preservation define their choices. The needs of the poor and the needs of a hot planet are aligned.</div>
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We face a similar battle in our little set of smallholdings, one that is less public. Raising the possibility of densification and development in a place like ours leads us on an inevitable path that ends with our soil, our work, the connections we have cultivated in our neighbourhood, and even our land itself, all disappearing. It also leads to transience and lack of stewardship: a willingness to do with the land whatever they want, as the whims of the economy and the pressing political priorities shift. Yet the soil is central to our life, our wellbeing, and our future, even in the city. And so, we farm as though all this were not happening, as stewards.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-44600496606307108862019-11-12T06:50:00.003-05:002019-11-12T07:09:01.272-05:00How to think about biodiversity and food production simultaneously<style type="text/css">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Wendell Berry has written over the years about the divide between the desire to preserve nature preserves/parks and the agricultural sector: between nature as something to be preserved and … well… consumed by the hiker or the watcher or the tourist… whilst food is almost beside the point. He describes the ways in which nature gets turned into agricultural land, and how that agricultural land is used up, consumed. Farmers and rangers </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">end up at opposite sides of an impassable crevasse.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Yet these two groups are actually well-poised to be partners. The farmer understands the natural world from making a living carefully harvesting life and livelihoods out of the soil: life that they pass onto you. In a world of runaway consumption, many farmers have also lost touch with biodiversity and wildness.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">For those of us pursuing urban agriculture in Cape Town, engaging in this tension seems really important. Not to find the perfect answers, but to acknowledge the complicated reality. To choose engagement rather than being right.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">In Cape Town, much of our income revolves around tourism, and much of our tourism is centred around our fynbos biome. We have this really unique biome, and we need to preserve it. And that is not in question: fynbos is special and important.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">I think what is up for debate is how much food a city can grow. And if there are ways to integrate many kinds of plants into the urban environment. By doing so, to take pressure off the edges of the city, the National Parks.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">What I wish for is a way to actively understand our biome— to preserve the open space, the endangered species, and so on, without ignoring the fact that each time we eat we engage in the natural world, and there are better and worse ways to do this. So that all those people who passionately talk about indigenous plants, become equally competent in the art of growing food. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">At times, one’s vocal hatred of pines and gums and port Jackson has become synonymous with a certain right way of being in Cape Town, and I feel this shorthand is lazy and unhelpful. Our world is too complex a place to operate using these markers as symbols of our rightness. Port Jackson (Acacia saligna) stabilized the sand of the Cape flats. Gums gave wood and forage for bees, pines gave us wood. There are times when when declaring something an invasive is a way of saying you know ecology. Yet even the official invasive list is often nuanced: often there are exceptions if you using a tree for firewood, or fruit. There are exceptions for urban environments, where no-one can really assert what is “natural” or “native:” we have paved over too much to call our environment natural, and the question that remains is whether we can make it simultaneously abundant for humans, for birds, for insects, for bacteria and fungus. I am convinced we can.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">The problem seems to be when plants are grown with maximum profit in mind, particularly when there are monocultures (pine plantations) without attention to the ecosystem, or when someone owns too much land to actively manage and care for the land they have (port Jackson takes over). To me, these are both problems of neoliberal capitalism running rampant, not the species themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">For our space, our goal is to make it as biodiverse, resilient, water secure, and productive (for us, for others and for wildlife), and to actively support this biodiversity as best we can. At times this means leaving the native soil so that it can continue to grow proteas, at other times it means leaving the much hated port-jackson as nurse trees for our fruit trees, so that somewhere else fruit trees do not have to replace native habitat to provide our fruit. Later, port Jackson will become a key food for our goats, so that we do not need to ship in hay from far afield. In a space with intense wind and no water, the pioneer species that may be invasive elsewhere often barely eek out their survival. Our bees forage the gum trees in our neighborhood. We collect mushrooms under the pine trees, and enjoy their shade on walks. To be clear, we occupy marginal land, and our choices might be quite different if we had a property for sale on the mountain, adjoining the national park.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Rather than valuing neatness and a preconceived idea of beauty, we need to be creating resilient households, and we need every tool in the book to make that possible. The solution to so many unbalanced ecosystems is to observe, and gradually make changes, and to actively make use of whatever contribution provided by the pioneer species. For example, with Port Jackson the solution is to actively use the wood and leaves to improve the soil, and to gradually reduce the number of trees. Gums, apart from preserving our bee population by providing forage, also show promise for use growing shiitake mushrooms, and imagine the amount of native habitat that could be preserved if mushrooms were grown on waste wood? That is, when we cut something down, let us do carefully, slowly, and with multiple purposes in mind, and a plan for what will be there once the pioneer is gone.</span></div>
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Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-52767448255719296172019-09-11T02:15:00.001-04:002019-09-11T02:40:46.956-04:00How do communities change?<style type="text/css">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">We’ve recently been asking each other in our research group: what is our theory of change? That is, how do people and societies change? Because this impacts so much on what we recommend in our food work, and how we go about recommending it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">When I was a teen, I read a Gandhi-esque “You must be the change you wish to see in the world” story about a man on his deathbed who wonders why he did not change the world, then wonders if he had first changed himself, maybe his family would have changed, then his street, then his community, and perhaps even his world. And while it had a cliched quality, cliche is what I needed as a teen, and that story is still at the core of how I think about social transformation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">So my theory of change is around change starting with oneself and not worrying too much about changing the world. This does not mean keeping ones head down and ignoring the pain around us (I write this partly in the context of Nene's horrible murder)-- I think it means engaging in that pain but not trying to control the outcome. This is seen as almost beside the point in academic circles, and I agree: systemic, corporate change is essential. I just tend to agree with GK Chesterton who responded with one word to a newspaper prompt “what is wrong with the world.” His answer?: “Me.” While such an answer has quite puritanical undertones, I think transformation begins when we acknowledge that we are not on the outside of some kind of awful conspiracy looking in. While the 1% or Trump or your worst enemy may seem to live in a particularly awful bubble, I am not so far removed as I would like. I do not believe that I am made of altogether different stuff than Trump, Stalin, de Klerk, Mandela or even Mother Theresa. There is a process through which we become more of who we already are, and I believe in that process we can be brave and make difficult choices, and that small acts of bravery can compound and have ripple effects. And that while we can begin with change that focuses on our beliefs about the world and changing those structures, unless we embody those beliefs, it is hard to imagine deep transformation of (for example) corrupt structures without leadership that has undergone deep personal change.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In the food example: I don't think grocery stores are evil monsters, even feedlots seem to be a disaster of endless scaling: the people involved didn’t see their work as involving deeper morality (and it is just so easy to justify job creation), and so they strayed, one profit-driven choice after another. And this is the awful part: so many of us— even those of us who grew up without a lot of money— are direct descendants (heirs, really) of this economy that has valued efficiency, money, and the free market over decency, stewardship, and common sense.</span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> And so many of us make one profit-driven choice after another in our own lives, also. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In economic terms, I believe that we transform the little circle around us when we actively pursue downward mobility, and that the ripples move outwards. For those of us with my kind of baggage: when we admit the hold that money has on us and actively try to release that grip.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">When it comes to food systems so often the recommendations seem to be along these lines, depending on your audience or your class: Don't waste food! Only eat organic and local! Don't eat sugar! Don't eat animal products! Don't eat fat! Don't eat processed food! Shop at farmer's markets/zero waste shops! Grow your own food! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Having tried some of these things, I think these recommendations don't speak to the core issues in our food system. If a family tries to do one or more of these things, maybe it will be helpful, or maybe they will feel like failures, because to me it is all about the context and depth of change-- that makes things stick, and that makes us realise diet is always an imperfect, messy series of negotiations. In some ways my suggestions wouldn't be terribly different from these recommendations, but hopefully if you're a friend, you'd see the context in which we eat, the haphazard but persistent planting that happens on the farm, the messiness and the good stuff. Because to me it's understanding context that really matters, and makes us feel braver.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">So, what else might deeper change involve? I am not sure exactly, but I think it means that we actively deal with our stuff— our fears, our addictions, our pain. If we have to work hard at a job we don’t really like to support our family, I think that is completely admirable, so I don’t mean to inflate the bubble in which we all just go and fuss around in the dirt. Rather, I think it just means being brave, one decision at a time, whether it involves gradually weaning yourself off paid work and cultivating vegetables, or not. Imagining other possible paths that cultivate your talents or whatever special gift you bring to the world. if you’re a person of faith, taking care of your faith and your soul rather than letting a harsh world turn you into a cynic.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">When it comes to food, it snowballs: I am not a good gardener, a good composter (actually I self-identify as a great composter but don't tell anyone, it's my special superpower), a good farmer, a good cook, or a good eater. But getting better at these things brings me immense joy, and in the long-term, I certainly do get better, and I have an experience learning that is completely humbling and allows for much better transmission of ideas around food. For example, it is only through having killed various plants that I know how to keep (some of) them alive and growing. It is only working with small companies that I learn what values we hold dear. It is only after eating whole wheat sourdough for years that I now think it's the best bread ever. It's only after foraging and discarding mushrooms for years that it finally became a priority for Noah and I to go on a foray with a pro and start cultivating. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Finally, we have a guinea pig system that's safe for the guinea pigs but also gives them plenty of space and opportunities for us to interact with them.</td></tr>
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<tr><td><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vYDBQKbVQhk/XXiKZHX37II/AAAAAAAAJYk/7UFf1IBa9nwalM_Z3k75IwfZe77IbXMZQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/mushrooms.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="697" data-original-width="523" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vYDBQKbVQhk/XXiKZHX37II/AAAAAAAAJYk/7UFf1IBa9nwalM_Z3k75IwfZe77IbXMZQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/mushrooms.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Our first propagation of mushrooms-- we are propagating the King Straphoria we found on the farm. </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">This is just a rain spider, but we have so many and it's hard not be freaked out. We encourage them, because we notice they really help with the flea population-- I think by eating eggs. We never have flea problems if we give habitat to the spiders.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">This is a type of baboon spider-- a tarantula that occurs in South Africa. They like one part of our property but never cause us harm. That said, we have to be careful of spider bites as there are several smaller spiders-- including the black widow-- around that can be quite nasty.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">This is Noah's favourite dog at TEARS at the moment. Our lives are really enriched by training the puppies.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Our lives are also really enriched by knowing our mushrooms (and eating them, and joking about, but not actually having, psychedelic trips)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Furry Potato had to go back to the shelter because otherwise there'd be more reproduction (his mom arrived to us pregnant), but we really loved him while he was with us.</td></tr>
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<tr><td><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qcqFUqTSNb4/XXiKeSgxzOI/AAAAAAAAJZM/bRUCVP8kCisyB8GF4NAtqiqbY4C1_pkCQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/hike%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qcqFUqTSNb4/XXiKeSgxzOI/AAAAAAAAJZM/bRUCVP8kCisyB8GF4NAtqiqbY4C1_pkCQCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/hike%2B2.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">I am really excited about a new stage that crept up on us: The kids and I went for a 3 hour hike with a group of homeschoolers, and the kids loved it! And I didn't carry anyone! Noah and Eli went on ahead, while Hana and I were with a younger group of kids and adults.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Loofahs are the thing I'm currently really into. Grow your own sponges!! Hana is gathering seeds for this years crop.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Cousin's party!</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;"> A LOT of baby spiders.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">We finally have asparagus to eat!</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Wall art.</td></tr>
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Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-27067661419784802522019-08-04T10:49:00.000-04:002019-08-04T10:49:05.526-04:00Uncertainty, equality, guinea pigs, mushrooms, making pasta, and springThe mole rats are driving us crazy by eating through our vegetable garden, but we're managing to keep morale up with microgreens, peas, gooseberries, granadillas, guavas and naive determination. Also by rescuing Guinea Pigs. Four of them. And by learning more about mushrooms, and starting to eat more varieties foraged here and there. <div>
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I've been thinking about equality, specifically equality between food producers and consumers. I think this relates deeply to the economy and to who is poor and who is not. As our society has become more and more urbanized, the division between producers and consumers seems particularly profound and problematic, and we have come to undervalue the people who make our existence possible. </div>
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Speaking from a South African perspective, it is incredibly hard to be a producer, so we/they really need help to keep producing good food at a small scale (or even at a large scale). We require capital to start, or some other form of privilege. So the small scale producer arrives as the underdog to the fight. Not only that, we are not always the type of underdog you want to root for. Because the stakes are so strongly stacked against us, we sometimes develop a victim complex. We can be unreliable, defensive, scrappy, a little desperate, tired, rude. And the consumer is accustomed to high quality, palatable (processed) food available for the taking, the externalities to the ecosystem or our bodies rendered invisible by the sheer convenience of the supermarket.</div>
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At the same time, consumers also really need transformation within the food system. Those invisible externalities: the damage to our planet and our bodies, an economy based on endless growth-- these things may be invisible but they are still there. So we need a quasi-miraculous shift-- where we still have consistent food but it is local, nourishing, non-exploitative, not implicated in NCDs. Where we're the consumers, we're the overdog, and we want to root for us because... we are all consumers. Yet we can be demanding, entitled, and hedonistic.</div>
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Somewhere in between, there is hope of averting the fight completely. Of confronting the worst characteristics of both the producers and consumers and learning that the fight was something completely different from what we thought. I think somewhere there, is a viable alternative to the neoliberal capitalism I have inhaled since birth.</div>
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How do we get <i>there </i>when we're here? It's a minefield: who gets land titles? Should we eat animal based products? If we don't, where are we getting our food from-- what is the collateral damage? If we do eat animal-based products, how do we justify it? Who is empowered or disempowered by our eating? How healthy do we have a right to be?</div>
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For those of you who come at this from a faith perspective, I like Wendell Berry's take on how faith and food intersect: the recognition that our daily bread is provided, not earned. That, at the same time, meaningful, productive labour is one of the most powerful ways we can be connected to one another and to the earth. That natural beauty can be a farm as much as it is the mountainside or the ocean. At the same time, that our capability, our competency, is not a measure of our worth, nor is it a measure of what we end up having. Rather, in farming (farming the way we farm, anyway) we learn that we are not Gods. We are small, we are stewards, and we are subject to the laws of nature, and nature always takes its share. We are never fully in control. We also learn we do not need too much to live, grow, love. It is this perspective that I find helpful in embracing the death, loss, sadness, and inevitable joy of the cycles of bringing our farm from bare land to fruition. </div>
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I see the trending phrase: "cruelty-free eating" and my hackles are raised. Not because our farm is cruel, but because in life there is always death, we are always making difficult choices that impact ourselves, our families, our communities, our world. To ignore that in favour of a sterilized version of our lives is to avoid deep change, and deep change is so urgently needed.</div>
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At the same time, we find ourselves back in the minefield: of what to eat, when, and how. Part of the reason I am gradually retreating from academia is that I find these questions incredibly compelling, but at the same time I really feel one just has to step out into the minefield, or the thin ice, or whatever metaphor you want to use, and just start walking. One can study almost endlessly, and share ideas from our study-- imagine a different world, even. Without diminishing the value of study, I believe that we talk with more authority when we have skin in the game, when we have a lot to lose, when we've tried and failed. </div>
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By walking, you learn what is right for you. Rather than saying that as a cop out (oh I am just too stressed to do x), or to avoid critique, I mean to say that when something is between us and God (or between us and our conscience), we do not move forward to impress anyone or to secure our future. Sometimes I think I write to keep myself accountable to the trajectory and the journey we are on.</div>
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Small-scale production, small scale farming is important and more people need to produce food. We need to find ways towards community, and those ways are not always intuitive-- our route is not clear and straight. Yet we are accountable for the time we have on earth-- not accountable to others' measures of truth and justice, but to our own. </div>
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Sometimes producers do not have easy entry into the market, and so there are intermediaries who bridge these gaps, and power differentials loom large. I'm thinking particularly about the phenomenon in Cape Town of trying to "uplift" farmers in the Cape Flats to farm organic veg for middle-class city dwellers. In general, I think highly of both the farmers and the people trying to be the intermediaries.... and yet I have strong reservations about this model, because I dream of producers selling to those with whom they can negotiate, communicate, and learn with. For this reason, I believe that in a place like Cape Town, there is a big need for middle class people to take up the plough (figuratively only... we're all no-till nowadays aren't we?). That, in short, is a big reason we are farming the way we are: farming in a way we always put in the most physical labour, even though we have staff in our nursery. We only understand the value of physical labour if we have been out there and put our bodies on the line. I feel more inspired by models that actively try to link poor farmers to poor consumers-- to bridge that gap. That is the gap that is very difficult to bridge in a sustainable way; but it's important to recognize that in South Africa, the buying power of the poor is massive.</div>
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In our journey of farming (part time, but farming nevertheless) we step back, we strategise, we find better ways to do things, we figure out what is essential and what is optional, and we keep going.</div>
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When we produce food, there's some level of epicurianism, but there's also quite a bit of frugality, holding back, learning that basic food is good enough. Learning that very basic food is a blessing, that we do not need endless choice, constant supply, perfection. This is where I find myself out of place in foodie gatherings, much as I appreciate the need for foodies. I feel deeply that restraint and care by the middle and upper classes is essential to change in the food system, to changes in capitalism. Food can be lovely, tasty, nourishing. But not every meal. Some meals can be weird and mismatched, with bits of rubbish leftovers, because that is what you had. Sometimes we don't need to eat very much, sometimes we need to eat a lot. </div>
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I do not mean that we should tolerate a life devoid of joy, but that our tastes may need to change in the transition from this food system to another one. We can't turn back the clock, of course. We cannot become our great-great- grandparents. But we can reinvent what it means to live joyfully in this 21st century of climate change. </div>
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Living where we do in the times we do, our future is always uncertain and we can never feel completely at peace with our choices when so many of our (literal) neighbours are hungry and cold. This is at once very scary, disconcerting, and ... well, a real and important reality. The uncertainty forces us to be brave with the resources we have: resources that are not ours forever. They are just ours for a short time- we are stewards, for as long as we can be, with few guarantees. </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JoUOXjVlCtA/XUQ3PA54eEI/AAAAAAAAI5k/UNQBWH17xfIHg-9GO72EgK_jFGcklDmsACLcBGAs/s1600/Acquarium%2BEli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="894" height="239" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JoUOXjVlCtA/XUQ3PA54eEI/AAAAAAAAI5k/UNQBWH17xfIHg-9GO72EgK_jFGcklDmsACLcBGAs/s320/Acquarium%2BEli.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Looking out on the aquarium.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beautiful and poisonous...</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zFsTW1gdo1A/XUQ3SuI1_NI/AAAAAAAAI6U/RAkRTzeGBNE_rOEYVx5zaBUJ4yrRKbl3QCLcBGAs/s1600/blewitt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zFsTW1gdo1A/XUQ3SuI1_NI/AAAAAAAAI6U/RAkRTzeGBNE_rOEYVx5zaBUJ4yrRKbl3QCLcBGAs/s320/blewitt.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">first blewitt </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7JRQ3FWDR8o/XUQ3S19LbkI/AAAAAAAAI6Y/3CNtlNA_pR0v0gN09-HkwEDo7sfU9pbiACLcBGAs/s320/boletus%2Band%2Bpasta.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="239" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">with a lot of eggs from our ducks and chickens, pasta making has become a big part of our day.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7JRQ3FWDR8o/XUQ3S19LbkI/AAAAAAAAI6Y/3CNtlNA_pR0v0gN09-HkwEDo7sfU9pbiACLcBGAs/s1600/boletus%2Band%2Bpasta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br /><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7JRQ3FWDR8o/XUQ3S19LbkI/AAAAAAAAI6Y/3CNtlNA_pR0v0gN09-HkwEDo7sfU9pbiACLcBGAs/s1600/boletus%2Band%2Bpasta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iU99ZbkrvWY/XUQ3TFRBrNI/AAAAAAAAI6c/qoqxke1NNv0x3HLTJfqTozAAzOvEqS1UgCLcBGAs/s1600/brains%2521.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iU99ZbkrvWY/XUQ3TFRBrNI/AAAAAAAAI6c/qoqxke1NNv0x3HLTJfqTozAAzOvEqS1UgCLcBGAs/s320/brains%2521.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">cross section of an unopened bit at the bottom, opened alien-looking mushroom at the top.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-21KKFxMskjk/XUQ3PNG4a4I/AAAAAAAAI5o/ilUofD5HMyAWcJO1N-hZPX66hkX6mAPXQCLcBGAs/s1600/Camps%2BBay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="894" height="239" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-21KKFxMskjk/XUQ3PNG4a4I/AAAAAAAAI5o/ilUofD5HMyAWcJO1N-hZPX66hkX6mAPXQCLcBGAs/s320/Camps%2BBay.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">midwinter- the 12 apostles and the back of Table Mountain. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rFndRihukkM/XUQ3TphUegI/AAAAAAAAI6g/pxEql6pHmcg5do8r-IRHap3I-AMklLxzACLcBGAs/s1600/dye%2Bball.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rFndRihukkM/XUQ3TphUegI/AAAAAAAAI6g/pxEql6pHmcg5do8r-IRHap3I-AMklLxzACLcBGAs/s320/dye%2Bball.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Horse dung fungus, or dye ball. I wish it had been more mature as I'd have loved to spread spores over the farm. These fungi form a relationship with almost any trees, and could support our food forest. Still, we are spreading spores of so many different mushrooms, that eventually, those saprophytic relationships will be cultivated.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UBqyqWD0n_A/XUQ3T6-slAI/AAAAAAAAI6k/WVhfy7I44hsK2KGE9EvQoivBPVnFeTtggCLcBGAs/s1600/earthstars.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UBqyqWD0n_A/XUQ3T6-slAI/AAAAAAAAI6k/WVhfy7I44hsK2KGE9EvQoivBPVnFeTtggCLcBGAs/s320/earthstars.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">earth stars shooting spores into the air</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s2SYpmrmKLg/XUQ3UNlzDBI/AAAAAAAAI6o/uLA3dqTpSegiTeV1cC09bEBdMesynRNYgCLcBGAs/s1600/eating%2Bporcini.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-s2SYpmrmKLg/XUQ3UNlzDBI/AAAAAAAAI6o/uLA3dqTpSegiTeV1cC09bEBdMesynRNYgCLcBGAs/s320/eating%2Bporcini.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">giant porcini...</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2H_hLkUE_04/XUQ3PB49jbI/AAAAAAAAI5g/lVX7EHbiyJkYiM4mOL8FtS8-5ohHaLx5wCLcBGAs/s1600/First%2Bporcini.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2H_hLkUE_04/XUQ3PB49jbI/AAAAAAAAI5g/lVX7EHbiyJkYiM4mOL8FtS8-5ohHaLx5wCLcBGAs/s320/First%2Bporcini.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our first Porcini. We gave this one to another forager, but got another one for ourselves.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-51kNt4Y-eEg/XUQ3Udtn-zI/AAAAAAAAI6s/CFIaYCbf2zMiYcIluPuEPHV07a__WIFCACLcBGAs/s1600/fly%2Bagaric.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-51kNt4Y-eEg/XUQ3Udtn-zI/AAAAAAAAI6s/CFIaYCbf2zMiYcIluPuEPHV07a__WIFCACLcBGAs/s320/fly%2Bagaric.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fly agaric- a kind of magic mushroom. We learned that reindeers eat this mushroom, and people in the Northern hemispheres used to drink reindeer pee in order to experience the high without the toxic effects. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-53Ju4ftWbNk/XUQ3U5-LfUI/AAAAAAAAI60/i9gPhWTY_G8d-vSPQoYudRug3xO7FNHSQCLcBGAs/s1600/grassy%2Bcuddles%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-53Ju4ftWbNk/XUQ3U5-LfUI/AAAAAAAAI60/i9gPhWTY_G8d-vSPQoYudRug3xO7FNHSQCLcBGAs/s400/grassy%2Bcuddles%2B2.jpg" width="298" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bubbles finally has friends. There are lot of guinea pigs needing rescue in Cape Town. We took 4 girls, and got Bubbles neutered (he has to be next to them in a different cage for 6-8 weeks though :( . Poor guy.)</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">mushroom spores.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">midwinter swimming...</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Taking a shelter dog to an adoptathon. We were supposed to take a puppy but instead got this massive dog who wanted to drive.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F3GBkItRH5s/XUQ3RTDBmkI/AAAAAAAAI6E/mzz-r3ivYIApkBuyU8T_Pc7CLddwtiB-gCLcBGAs/s1600/Soapie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F3GBkItRH5s/XUQ3RTDBmkI/AAAAAAAAI6E/mzz-r3ivYIApkBuyU8T_Pc7CLddwtiB-gCLcBGAs/s320/Soapie.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">a lot of guinea pig cuddles. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xf7m52OpGoc/XUQ3WKrBeqI/AAAAAAAAI7I/H08loFRmOAk0RBlavIeLh-6ZNySCf_NWwCLcBGAs/s1600/trampoline%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xf7m52OpGoc/XUQ3WKrBeqI/AAAAAAAAI7I/H08loFRmOAk0RBlavIeLh-6ZNySCf_NWwCLcBGAs/s320/trampoline%2B2.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Also got a second hand trampoline. I've been on the lookout for cheap one with a net for about 2 years-- it was worth the wait!</td></tr>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AwhHe0ylDd0/XUQ3WsfrqgI/AAAAAAAAI7M/fC5P5HFO7Pov5Du2AHZZvtQfPqWHussuQCLcBGAs/s1600/trampoline.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AwhHe0ylDd0/XUQ3WsfrqgI/AAAAAAAAI7M/fC5P5HFO7Pov5Du2AHZZvtQfPqWHussuQCLcBGAs/s320/trampoline.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rxRlIZ9oesM/XUQ3W9E6-hI/AAAAAAAAI7Q/18npKKVxOLMDW6hvSF82HpPEVKodd99mwCLcBGAs/s1600/turkey%2Btail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="894" height="239" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rxRlIZ9oesM/XUQ3W9E6-hI/AAAAAAAAI7Q/18npKKVxOLMDW6hvSF82HpPEVKodd99mwCLcBGAs/s320/turkey%2Btail.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Turkey tail bracket fungus-- apparently medicinal.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bOB_BQPqxsU/XUQ3SGB8qKI/AAAAAAAAI6M/fbpISysBVeQd8MdZCHVMup26qvDjZ537ACLcBGAs/s1600/V%2526A2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="502" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bOB_BQPqxsU/XUQ3SGB8qKI/AAAAAAAAI6M/fbpISysBVeQd8MdZCHVMup26qvDjZ537ACLcBGAs/s320/V%2526A2.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The acquarium is a little far away from us now, but we decided to get membership again because it feels like a season where we're going to be getting out more.</td></tr>
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Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-54863766368495096922019-07-19T01:08:00.001-04:002019-07-19T01:08:25.953-04:00July update: Italy, Mushrooms, composting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Here are some pictures from what we've been doing recently. It's been a busy few months, with me traveling more than usual, and now it feels like we're able to gradually settle more, and prepare for the larger spring garden (I usually like gardening in winter because we don't need to water, but the mole rats' put their tunnels much higher and end up eating everything, so this winter has been really hard vegetable wise). We've also been experimenting with microgreens, with a boon of expired lettuce and spinach seed we acquired (usually the expense of seed is a major reason not to do microgreens in South Africa). We have a consistent system set up for the chickens and ducks with barley grass, and we're eating spinach and lettuce microgreens, and thinking of selling some.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UtGR8pPHJMM/XTCM7NKIEzI/AAAAAAAAIq4/kEfKVHXBNUUKVqgH0-1roPq-7MdAfYvNQCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="679" data-original-width="905" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UtGR8pPHJMM/XTCM7NKIEzI/AAAAAAAAIq4/kEfKVHXBNUUKVqgH0-1roPq-7MdAfYvNQCLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah is really into mushroom identification (and where possible, eating) at the moment.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BFcofYqVFw8/XTCM-4E8V3I/AAAAAAAAIrg/JNsz1KsYEowZxoBIpP-Sd4S2FIDDrwaLwCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BFcofYqVFw8/XTCM-4E8V3I/AAAAAAAAIrg/JNsz1KsYEowZxoBIpP-Sd4S2FIDDrwaLwCLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B2.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not edible but very beautiful.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Minq_QSYLOo/XTCNA9nViWI/AAAAAAAAIr0/_CWnHAyFlBcjDUvIQ-esKPwHRcNqkMMEwCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="679" data-original-width="905" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Minq_QSYLOo/XTCNA9nViWI/AAAAAAAAIr0/_CWnHAyFlBcjDUvIQ-esKPwHRcNqkMMEwCLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EgQoLeZZVBo/XTCNB2GOS1I/AAAAAAAAIsI/NcnTfTeCsa03QnyV3gANKA_U2vMHk5D5QCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EgQoLeZZVBo/XTCNB2GOS1I/AAAAAAAAIsI/NcnTfTeCsa03QnyV3gANKA_U2vMHk5D5QCLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B8.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">discovered an old phone can play radio...</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l94njKGaMU0/XTCNChzTGnI/AAAAAAAAIsM/nbZDm0xXTgAX8-XMo9xf5qZL0k3ONvDigCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-l94njKGaMU0/XTCNChzTGnI/AAAAAAAAIsM/nbZDm0xXTgAX8-XMo9xf5qZL0k3ONvDigCLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B9.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I got to see my high school roommates in Milan, then present at a conference in Prato. It was one of those unique once-in-a-decade opportunities to reset. I have the best high school roommates in the world.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">On the (very hot) train.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wgiYFF9_N6U/XTCM8R2Pi1I/AAAAAAAAIrE/h24i9sgF-MYQ19M4pS1SB7hHUP0S4Ru-QCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wgiYFF9_N6U/XTCM8R2Pi1I/AAAAAAAAIrE/h24i9sgF-MYQ19M4pS1SB7hHUP0S4Ru-QCLcBGAs/s320/July%2Bupdate%2B13.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Roommates!!!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BFEGSZmlq18/XTCM8XbTFZI/AAAAAAAAIrI/ZayS-bxWrokihFXovKbE1vCLaHDm2ecFQCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="679" data-original-width="905" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BFEGSZmlq18/XTCM8XbTFZI/AAAAAAAAIrI/ZayS-bxWrokihFXovKbE1vCLaHDm2ecFQCLcBGAs/s320/July%2Bupdate%2B14.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">vegetable garden. Getting ready for a big spring garden.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j2UuUZM_Yvg/XTCM8qut_JI/AAAAAAAAIrM/0WwWGPaeSD0NJZvreqQH9bKJXpIvHv1mgCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j2UuUZM_Yvg/XTCM8qut_JI/AAAAAAAAIrM/0WwWGPaeSD0NJZvreqQH9bKJXpIvHv1mgCLcBGAs/s320/July%2Bupdate%2B15.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tiny baby mole rat. Relocated to the mountain. Within the general theme of failing as farmers: We're breeding mole rats. Great.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="283" height="299" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xWkQAvfdqyA/XTCM9Z_BN2I/AAAAAAAAIrQ/86slqrlCUxwzspyHk85KmbZAjsUyvnVWQCLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B16.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">River construction in midwinter.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jigQxSVQv8U/XTCM99hqUqI/AAAAAAAAIrU/nzAiicqlApQlZeXCt01upYlFeZJyvedDACLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jigQxSVQv8U/XTCM99hqUqI/AAAAAAAAIrU/nzAiicqlApQlZeXCt01upYlFeZJyvedDACLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B17.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The kids love watching the geckos climb all over the blinds.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ubAIxmQTG_E/XTCM98AC1xI/AAAAAAAAIrY/mxw4-Jx6nx8Knv7t9MKTbqCoOZ7Mlr9JgCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ubAIxmQTG_E/XTCM98AC1xI/AAAAAAAAIrY/mxw4-Jx6nx8Knv7t9MKTbqCoOZ7Mlr9JgCLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B18.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Catching tadpoles...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u-LBsrv5OZs/XTCM_wYZg-I/AAAAAAAAIrs/nIgf-kzzRnkVrdrXNfRSeWt3us8t6XDHgCLcBGAs/s1600/July%2Bupdate%2B21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="692" data-original-width="519" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-u-LBsrv5OZs/XTCM_wYZg-I/AAAAAAAAIrs/nIgf-kzzRnkVrdrXNfRSeWt3us8t6XDHgCLcBGAs/s400/July%2Bupdate%2B21.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mushroom identification</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="239" data-original-width="319" height="239" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IQfnN-lXmso/XTCM_wHTrlI/AAAAAAAAIro/e4bfvyqSOcQLeKvsH7bFemVtScScvFaIgCLcBGAs/s320/July%2Bupdate%2B22.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="320" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We're getting ready for goats... well sortof. We're taking it pretty slow and doing some serious composting in their pastures, using it as a way to feed chickens as we prepare for goats in about a year's time.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-69747090716785182102019-07-11T08:13:00.002-04:002019-07-11T08:37:45.110-04:00Where your local food is connected to your waste stream<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YzjqDdj4MLk/XScncJUYZ0I/AAAAAAAAInw/ylT9K7Xo1U8a9AQ0PnXovRKk_b5lbHlJwCLcBGAs/s1600/plastic%2Bwaste.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="526" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YzjqDdj4MLk/XScncJUYZ0I/AAAAAAAAInw/ylT9K7Xo1U8a9AQ0PnXovRKk_b5lbHlJwCLcBGAs/s320/plastic%2Bwaste.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Our
little farm gets gardening waste from a local gated community, and a surprising
amount of plastic waste comes along for the ride. Dog poop, cat litter— all
things that can’t be composted safely in a small farm system (and also can’t be
composted at the local dump). I wonder how this came to be. As I pull bits of plastic and dog poop
out of the pile while I’m building it, I feel tired, sad and worried.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">It
got me thinking about where our food comes from, and how things are connected
in surprising ways. When we try to buy local food, these connections are all
the more apparent. I’d argue even when we’re eating non-local food, the
connections are there in significant ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The
primary different between organic and non-organic farming, relates to the soil,
and thus to the scale of the farm. If a farm is using inorganic fertilizers,
it’s a lot easier to scale up because you can calculate and purchase the exact
number of kilograms of N-P-K you need for your farm, and it’s basically infinitely
scalable until your soil is destroyed or gets blown away. That is, while fossil
fuels are cheap and plentiful: so not forever. <o:p></o:p></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The quality of that fertilizer, and the food chain in general, is important-- we have fairly good evidence to say that food that is grown on poor quality soil is not as nutritious.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Attention
to soil health and to the circular nature of all our existences is a central
driver for farming and a central driver for small scale farming. Soil health is
what keeps organic farms small, if labor is valued correctly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">So when
it comes to organic operations, it’s not simply that we don’t use pesticides
(often the focus of people’s interest.). It's all about the soil: we require fairly vast quantities of
compost. For example, our small 1 acre (probably only ½ acre actively
cultivated) farm makes 15- 20 tons of various kinds of compost a year. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Getting
this compost adds either a very significant cost or a tremendous amount of
labor, depending on one’s circumstances, and I wanted to talk a bit about this
process, and how it relates to the cost of vegetables and fruit, as I think
organic produce is still hugely undervalued and unsustainable at the prices you
often see— at least in the sense that it is impossible to adequately value the
labor of workers at the current costs. </span><br />
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Right now people are willing to
pay more to avoid pesticides— which has reached the public consciousness as
important. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman", serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">That is, I am not sure we have not necessarily made the connection
back to soil health, or to hugely increased labor costs, or to relatively
smaller farm sizes, and the ways these are valuable and important, but not
accounted for in a free market economy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">When
I think of leveraging for change at the local level, I feel it may be valuable
to keep picturing, imagining, enacting a different economy. This is what we do,
to an extent, when we sell our produce for the same price as the supermarket:
we say, perhaps we are the ones who have been given much and so are also the
ones who can sacrifice a little. Or maybe we are simply going along with market
economics where consumers are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries: you get to have
your organic cake and eat it too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Anyway,
back to the compost story:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Firstly,
in a highly specialized farm there is more likely to be waste. In a family farm
with a little of everything, all the parts can stand a reasonable chance of
working together. For example, waste from the kitchen can be cycled through the
small number of chickens, whose waste is an asset, not a toxic waste. Tree
branches and leaves are similarly an asset, not a waste product. In a family
scale farm, the family is eating what you are eating- we have every incentive
to grow the best possible food we can. In a smaller scale business, the success
of the staff are up close and personal, not distanced from our reality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">There
are a few ways to get the quantity of compost we need to grow food: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Buying it in: Here, the cost
of the compost will be part of the cost of the vegetables. The advantage of
this is that the quality of the compost is not your responsibility in the same
way. But the more I compost, the more I feel that large scale operations are
either using a lot of fossil fuels to produce their compost (e.g. through large
chippers or turners), or are having to pay people poor wages to go through and
try to remove plastic and poop. There are simpler possibilities for compost out
there (particularly in more rural areas): horse or cow manure. While these are
great sources of compost, it’s unlikely that most sources can vouch for the
horses or cows’ own feed, at least in South Africa, where most farms are
informally organic rather than certified as such. The challenge with buying in
compost is not only that the quality is often quite poor, it is that it also means you have to grow much more intensively to make sure
you recoup your costs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">And/or<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">Make your own compost using
farm waste (I.e. cycling back kitchen scraps, humanure, animal manure): I think
this works as long as you are not exporting any food off site— ie it only works
your soil is starting from a relatively good place, and if you aren’t selling
anything to anyone.) The advantage to this is that you can vouch for the
quality of the compost based not only on making it, but also based on knowing
the quality of the individual components (e.g. you know the chickens and humans
were healthy and not fed anything that would impact their manure).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3)<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I think most organic farmers
try to make their own compost in order to try to price their produce more
competitively. I make lots of different kinds of compost, and I think
ultimately this will contribute to much better produce than if I just used
horse manure, for example. </span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">This is where it comes back to the gated community I
mentioned at the beginning: either the families or their gardeners do not think
it is a big deal to put plastic or dog poop into landscape waste, but when they
do, a few things might happen: </span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">1) I might pay someone to set up the
compost pile for me, because I can’t afford a higher wage given low prices. I
cannot expect that that person will carefully remove plastic and paint chips
etc, no matter how much I pay them: it is simply very undignified work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">2) I might make the compost pile myself, carefully removing the plastic,
because I’m not quite sure how to navigate talking to a worker about
encountering dog poop etc. When selling the produce, I’d either have to vastly
undervalue my own time, or increase the cost of the produce still more
“artisanal” comes to mind. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">The easier option: For the resident of the gated community to realize that their landscaping waste comes back as their organic, local produce, and they have choices that will help enable the organic farmers’ work. That is: it truly is a circle, whether a small local one, or a huge global one: what you do matters. How you pay your workers matter, but honestly no worker, however well paid, will remove small pieces of plastic chucked into your waste stream. How attentive you are to issues of plastic waste matters, matters for a long time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">I
struggle with concepts of artisanal food, because sometimes it seems like
shorthand for paying hipsters more than farm workers, for the same product. At
the same time, I want to suggest that in a family farm, the level of skill
required to farm in an ecological way is extraordinarily high. I think there is value to farmers
laboring on their own land, and selling the same food they eat and labour for,
even though they could produce food more cheaply if they paid someone else to
do the labour for them. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have read as
much about permaculture and about small-scale farming as I read for my PhD, and
still farming challenges me in significant ways. So while I don’t expect an
academic salary as a farmer, there’s no way minimum wage will work for new
urban farmers, even frugal ones. So it’s something I’m pondering— not
necessarily with clear answers. Perhaps there is something in there for finding
ways to respect all work?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">In
practical terms, I dream of using our farm, and the Good Food Club Valley, as a
place to experiment with a wellness economy. To grapple with our needs and
wants as farmers with skin in the game, while thinking practically about what
it means to access nourishing food. Perhaps it looks like bartering, perhaps it
looks like something else. But definitely, imagining a future in which food is
nutritious and sustainable involves some fundamental shifts in how we relate to
one another. Maybe it involves getting into uncomfortable situations— I know I
am in the midst of this as we grapple with how to pay our staff when we are not
yet making any money at our nursery. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">No
farm is an island— even the most holistic family farm needs inputs, and a
network of supporting structures. We all specialize a little bit: for example
it is impractical to simultaneously grow seed, seedlings, trees, full grown
vegetables and fruit, eggs, and meat (I don’t even consider grains here, as I
think on an urban scale grain is largely impractical) compost, and then market
and sell all of these directly. .<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #2a2a2a; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.5pt;">The
immediate issues of how we pay an individual farmer for a set of goods may seem
like a very tiny set of questions in a world of Takealot, Amazon and the free-market.
I’m not sure I have the answer for that, but I convinced that if we pay
attention to small, daily, actions related to food: where we’re willing to
change both our taste buds and our buying patterns, that this can make
significant local (though scary) changes.</span></div>
Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-69151063091417673432019-06-13T08:08:00.001-04:002019-06-13T09:59:47.163-04:00Reflections on learning to farm in the shadow of Big Ag<style type="text/css">
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<div class="p1">
As a mom, I’ve been trying so hard to do things differently from the punishment/coercion/reward model that was passed down. I’ve been thinking a little about how that relates to experiences of food systems: </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I want to be kind and gentle and responsive etc with our kids— but when I first started focusing on kindness, on explicitly "doing things differently" it was…. problematic. Partly because it dismissed the strengths of my own upbringing, and the fact that it was not all about punishment or rewards-- it was about living as a helpful member of a community and lots of other things. But also, where I departed from what I had grown up with, there were worlds I knew not of. I could not simply be consistently kind and gentle using willpower alone. Nor would those actions— taken alone— be helpful to my kids. Kind words— for example, were not necessarily their core need in times of crisis. They needed kindness backed up with deep empathy, good listening, a squishy welcoming belly: these things take time and effort! My kids needed to be individually known and for me to respond to them as a person, not because I was being gentle for my own self-edification.<br />
<br />
To live out ideals in a deeper way, I needed an extensive supporting structure to help me: practice with genuine empathy, some of my own needs being met, prayer, lots of childhood development books, a good night’s sleep, feelings of support and encouragement around me, and so on. Otherwise I waver(ed) between a confusing mix of beliefs and ideals.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kdB379_ET24/XQI0P89brjI/AAAAAAAAIQk/y7DENEyniqoT9Co3OEiKY-wcrDDLEjlmACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190613_131908.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kdB379_ET24/XQI0P89brjI/AAAAAAAAIQk/y7DENEyniqoT9Co3OEiKY-wcrDDLEjlmACLcBGAs/s400/IMG_20190613_131908.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fruit trees are camouflaged next to the proteas and sourfig-- but they're in there. It has taken a long time to get systems up and running to the point where we may, in the forseeable future, have surplus. I have no idea how we would measure the value of our labour and the thousands of hours of studying. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="p1">
I feel a parallel between this experience and the food system. We are trying to break away from the system we have inherited; how we currently farm and eat, and it is deeply necessary. There are important ideals that we should be striving for, but these ideals cannot be effective, sustainable, or fully realized without a full cohort of support structures. I would even argue that some of the health motivations of eating local or organic are more tentative…less robust… when it is only the exclusive few who get to eat that way.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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In the Good Food Clubs, we try to support small farmers, small businesses, and in general our goal is towards organic, local, biodynamic, permaculture. The challenge is— we live in a world where for the most part, none of the supports are there. The odds are weighted against small, organic, biodynamic, farmers.</div>
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When I see a farm that is touted as perfect, I get nervous for several reasons:</div>
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<ul>
<li>They have nowhere to go but down.</li>
<li>It can make others farmers look bad, as it implies perfection is doable and doesn't seek to understand the contexts in which we farm.</li>
<li>I am worried I’m missing part of the picture: are we the only people for which farming is difficult?</li>
<li>I am worried that capital came from somewhere else, and that that makes it difficult for other similar businesses (who did not arrive with that capital) to make the case for why their products are much more expensive, or why they are not following the same practices. I.e. it conceals the inner workings of capitalism.</li>
<li>I am worried this desire for perfection encourages farmers or businesses to lie, rather than explain their logic and for us as consumers to explain our priorities— i.e. it encourages box-ticking rather than listening and complexity.</li>
<li>The idea of “perfect” food can make good food more exclusive, or create ever higher standards for “good” food, or even a level of competitiveness around eating, which seems anachronous to the core values of nourishment and togetherness.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></li>
<li>To extend that thought: It can raise our standards for food to the point of obsession, and ignore the tremendous luck and privilege we have in being born at a time where so many of us are much taller than our grandparents, because of better nutrition.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></li>
<li>In raising our standards so high, our constant striving leaves little room for gratitude and a sense of peace. Without margin we are too busy to notice that many people (our neighbours, in fact) are eating much, much worse than their grandparents did, and we can get a bit stuck in a cycle of alarm and scarcity about risks that pale in comparison to the very real risks of profound economic inequity in South Africa, climate change, corporate greed, or even our own personal greed.</li>
<li>It can lock us in as conscious consumers, where I don’t think this is necessarily a good end point, though it’s a great start.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-converted-space">All to say, I dream of compassion and grace towards consumers and producers, as we muddle our way towards a better food system.</span></li>
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This is NOT my trying to argue that we should not support awesome organic local biodynamic or permaculture farmers. We are fully invested in the dream. Support us and those like us! Please! But don't put us on a pedestal, and don't discount the importance of any and all family farmers, all small business owners operating in an environment that is incredibly difficult for small food based businesses. </div>
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It is just to say: let us not assume to know a farm’s story, given that we are starting from a tremendously skewed: Big business, Big Ag, Big Food world. To jump out right into organic, local, biodynamic, permaculture, without examining all the support structures? It’s like when I try to be kind to my kids without considering all the things I needed— well beyond willpower— to do so. It's very difficult (and in our case absolutely not profitable).</div>
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The desire to farm in a particular way does not make that approach sustainable or uniquely helpful, in the absence of infrastructure.</div>
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The desire to eat local and organic often seems to be have a uniquely urban character— almost like we are entitled to literally have our cake and eat it too. Urban artisanal production sometimes also has that flavor of the teenage know-it-all coming to set us right, not realising they are in fact joining in on the traditions of their grandparents. And as we’ve dived into farming, I’m amazed by the depth of knowledge conveyed by old farmers, more so each time I lose a crop because I thought I knew better than my dad.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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So as we reach out to farmers and small business owners, I do so wanting to learn, not to criticize or tick off boxes of all the things I consider important. I want to hear their story, and see if we can support them in doing even better.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XSmG3say6lk/XQI0OoOrquI/AAAAAAAAIQc/gjLo78KuT8UMWzj-FRGcjmtelvXyCtaxgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190613_131707.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XSmG3say6lk/XQI0OoOrquI/AAAAAAAAIQc/gjLo78KuT8UMWzj-FRGcjmtelvXyCtaxgCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_20190613_131707.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A view of our annual garden-- again, things are growing pretty well and we have quite a lot of food, but it has been a long journey</td></tr>
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I’m conscious that this may have a weird tone (almost pro some romanticized past— which in the South African case is particularly problematic), and I feel like I have to explicitly state I’m not talking about recreating a romanticized past. I’m talking about the need to build strong infrastructure that supports better consumption practices, and build on existing farming knowledge, particularly small-medium sized farms, because while most farmers are imperfect, the very real alternative is essentially corporations running very large farms.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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I’m shocked by the challenges of being a small farmer, well beyond actually producing food sustainably. Farmers have to be consistently productive, grow the right things at the right time to market specifications, have the right market, know how to get it to that market affordably with an intact cold chain. You can’t be too expensive, but you have to be expensive enough that you make a living and so do your workers. If you want to farm animals— the deck is even more strongly stacked against you if you’re a small-scale operation. To do so organically adds another layer of complexity and labour: getting nutrients from manure or vermicompost is orders of magnitude more complex than grabbing a bag of fertilizer; harvesting a permaculture food forest can be like walking through a maze. The farmers— the old farmers— who somehow succeeded in doing this, have so much knowledge to share. Importantly: the networks through which they did all these things are dying because these farmers are leaving farming and not being replaced, and young farmers like myself have none of these networks.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Front of the house: we killed about 10 granadillas before we managed to get some going. It took ages to learn how to grow in our conditions.</td></tr>
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I also want to raise the issue of casual labour. Increasingly, labour on farms is casual and seasonal. Which often sucks if you are the casual worker. I interview former farm workers (who lived on farms) sometimes, and I notice the responsibility farmers had towards their workers, far more responsibility than I would feel comfortable taking on. Those are treacherous waters, I know, so I do NOT mean to romanticize deeply unequal and often racist relationships, but only to highlight depth of responsibility, which highlights my own state of privilege, and how little I want to have my livelihoods so intertwined with others.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> How nervous I feel when I am responsible for others' standard of living.</span></div>
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There is a need for many more people who know (and do) the basics of farming in their context. We need to build robust networks for all the crazy steps needed to survive and thrive as a farmer. It may be ok to valorize seemingly perfect farm practices. But unless the system changes fundamentally, we will simply be raising up (and bankrupting/destroying) waves of young farmers or their workers, to the benefit of the consumer<span class="Apple-converted-space">. Right now, it feels like the consumer holds most of the power, and I think this should change.</span></div>
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There are currently very few ways for a farm to be organic, profitable, responsible to their workers (by that I mean a true living wage), and sustainable long-term in South Africa (and elsewhere), without grants from department of agriculture to offset infrastructure costs and a supportive consumer base.</div>
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If you can afford to eat local and organic for every meal, there is a strong possibility that your work/brain is overvalued (I know mine is, at least until I am farming full time) and that overvaluing is intertwined with the very same Big Food, Big Ag, etc that concentrates profits and shares them with people who are actually taking the least risk. So we should be careful about casting ourselves as the heroes of our stories.</div>
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A while ago I went to the funeral of an old farmer, and all the members of the local organic soil association attended. I was struck that very few of them still had family on the land they’d previously farmed on. I was struck by this because they had, between them, many decades of experience of organic farming, which was set to be lost— the new (artisanal) farmers on the block, to my knowledge, are not connected to this older generation. I was also reminded that organic farming has been around for a really long time— thousands of years, even-- organic farming has historically fed the world, and is just as efficient and productive, if you start to actually measure all the toxic externalities of Big Ag (in particular, the use of fossil fuels in place of labour). I dream of ways for that knowledge to become intuitive to a new generation of farmers— to a diverse group— that more people could be farmers.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZGZl0OxWj-c/XQI0OfX3btI/AAAAAAAAIQY/0HpFlF9XT4YdynmXYgRAthbNhZeu_TjJACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_20190610_112656.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: Times; font-size: medium; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZGZl0OxWj-c/XQI0OfX3btI/AAAAAAAAIQY/0HpFlF9XT4YdynmXYgRAthbNhZeu_TjJACLcBGAs/s320/IMG_20190610_112656.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our first known edible mushrooms, Ascaris. We've been strewing mushoom spores since we moved into the farm, and finally have a reasonable shot at getting quite a few mushroom meals.</td></tr>
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I think of farming like certain types of cooking. You know all the cooking that doesn’t use recipes, that is just passed down, and known, in a deep way? We’re trying to farm with none of that knowledge, and hoping that over time, we will be the ones to pass that knowledge on. Our knowledge is new, unproven, tentative. It will get stronger, more robust, able to stand on its own two feet. But in the meantime, I look to farmers with more experience, I look for the quiet eye roll while we’re describing our plans, and I learn.</div>
Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-11319661347452089992019-06-09T09:22:00.001-04:002019-06-09T09:22:27.846-04:00Adventures in Seoul, and adjusting back...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
This trip to Korea was the first where we had to buy 5 seats (and 5 entries to most things). So we took advantage of borrowed bicycles... Bikes really helped to keep the kids in their comfort zone. Though we didn't go to many museums or eat too much unfamiliar food, they still absorbed a lot from being in a different environment. </div>
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Our kids are all at different stages and we had to figure out how to meet everyone's needs-- Eli likes to know what to expect and loves to bike everywhere, Hana wants adventure, preferably in the form of playgrounds. Noah doesn't want to feel that someone is trying to coerce him (who does-- but a lot of museums in Korea geared towards kids are explicitly "educational"). We are really lucky to be able to travel and see family, and we don't take such a trip lightly-- we are not relaxed flexible travelers. Everyone did very well, and it is amazing for them to be able to spend time understanding different perspectives on the world, and spend time with Eugene's family. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah turned 9 and got an ice cream cake.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Flower market. We were really inspired by the careful and beautiful layouts.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Even though it's not that easy to find nature in Seoul, we loved the park by the flower market, where there was a fountain, a stream, and this frog.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We stayed at Eugene's Mom and brothers flat, where they live on the 14th floor. </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The miracle of escalators.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We stayed at a hotel for a couple of nights, for the indoor pool. The kids were delighted. </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Palace!</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Playground.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">children's museum!</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The fountains in Bundang hadn't been turned on yet, but in Seoul we got to spend time in 2 fountains-- our kids were the most enthusiastic and wild-- enough that Vietnamese monks kept wanting to take photos of/with them.</td></tr>
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We were so grateful to my parents for holding the fort while were away. And back home, we were back to business faster than you could say hot compost...</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Back to life: hot composting.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Roasting coffee</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Terrifying acrobranch: Noah leveled up to terrifying heights.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hana is still on Level one, but it's pretty intense for a 3 year old. </td></tr>
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<br />Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-61028368627772919912019-04-29T21:53:00.003-04:002019-04-29T21:59:38.549-04:00On blind spots (or: it's hard to eat sustainably, from scratch and earn a sustainable moral income while unschooling your kids) <style type="text/css">
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There is a field</div>
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Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing</div>
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And righting there is a field</div>
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When the soul lies down in that grass</div>
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The world is too full to talk about - Rumi</div>
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I don’t know the right way to be in this complicated, sometimes fragile world, but I know that if you’ve found it: if you definitively figured out a right way, that seems a sure sign something is wrong. My version of the good is all about having enough uncertainty to stay humble, but not so much that you lack direction or, you know, go insane.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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To see ourselves (not the collective ourselves, but the personal) in all our weakness, and to say that we can be brave and step forward tentatively, but never with such certainty we squash the parallel hopes of those who walk alongside us. I never want to be the one who has it all together, because that is the place that excludes the rest of us. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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On labels: mother, wife, unschooler, permaculture, Christian, zero waste, farmer, daughter, researcher, activist, friend. I know for certain these are all spheres of huge importance to me, and that I cannot fully inhabit all these identities or knowledges instantaneously or simultaneously. Though perhaps I will have the opportunity to if I am lucky enough to grow really, really old. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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But for now: I know that I can’t produce my own food and gently support my kids in self-led learning while caring for my community and supporting myself and my family on an entirely moral, non-exploitatative and fair income stream (doing altruistically motivated, moral and mutually helpful research, or selling enough plants to earn an income but not creating plastic waste while paying our two staff members adequately without making it harder for our neighbouring nurseries to function). (and a million other tensions: bearing 3 kids in a world of climate change, flying to Korea to visit family...or not)</div>
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It's a lot, right? But those are the folds-- like villi in our intestines, the surface area if you zoom in enough is infinite, and you cannot be zoomed in and yet see all the folds at once. Family and community helps- family that is willing to come alongside and do bits of things that fit with their own vision of where they are and where they are going. One priority has to be embedded in us, like muscle memory— we have to inhabit one thing so much that it becomes second nature… then another thing, perhaps. In the interim— before I have that layer, the best I can do is to be honest about it. I remember a few years I had a bit of an academic crush on a great economic philosopher, a very famous woman, and I bent over backwards to attend a conference where she was speaking. It was terrible. She came from the U.S. to Cape Town, and deeply misread the circumstances in which we lived and couldn’t understand or imagine another way, yet was fully assured of her own genius. Which didn’t diminish her contribution or her work, but reinforced my sense that we cannot be whole in every sphere. None of us needs a pedestal.</div>
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That is, we cannot be right about everything. </div>
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We can be brave and say that we do not understand the lives and experiences of all people. That is not to say we give up our perspective, but that we try our best to inhabit and understand the experiences of others, including narratives where we are cast as the bad guy. A dear friend with a very different upbringing than mine once told me something deep: that shouting at a loved one is not always hurtful, and that one can be deeply hurtful without shouting. In my polite world, an alternate dimension (including as a parent) seemed to open up when I thought about that statement. </div>
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This idea may be hard to apply in a linear way to the political divisions in the U.S., or in South Africa, yet I think some bit of that does apply, particularly when someone proudly says they are non-racist or not patriarchal. In some ways where we are comfortable and wealthy, we have the comfort of saying the equivalent of “I never raised my voice” or “I always gave money” or “I learned and applied anti-colonial language,” or "I did better than most." It is too easy to cast ourselves as the consistent heroes of our stories. In some ways people like Trump and Zuma make it easier: you can feel superior and self-righteous just by telling the world that you don’t like sexual harassment or inciting racial violence, or by refraining from stealing billions in tax and being married to four people at once. It’s a very low bar. And it is always easier to articulate your rightness when you are already comfortable and have had a few evenings to think about your worldview with a diverse group of friends. It is pleasant and idealistic to embrace a vision for the world when you’re not the one it’s experimenting with, the one who has been discarded by colonialism or capitalism or both, time and time again.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Which is to say, I think we need to have a higher bar, but also be humble about our virtually infinite blindness. I deeply desire a society that cares for the poor, that is inclusive and generous and principled and safe and sustainable and transparent. And yet: I have layers and layers that are none of those things, does none of those things. Yet. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> It is disingenuous to argue for your vision of the world without acknowledging your blind spots or actually doing the work of changing and experiencing the deep limitations of our capacity to change.</span></div>
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In the world of morality and faith, I don’t really think we should rank or feel that we are not measuring up. I think we can say: we are finite— there are ways in which we are not acting rightly, and we can do better, slowly (perhaps prayerfully)— one step forward, one sickness or financial emergency and we slide back— but we do not measure the progress exactly. We can check ourselves on the direction and forsake the judgement. We are not seeking redemption through our actions. We are redeemed already, we are simply doing our best with the gifts we have, in our small corner.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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</style>Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-7703750493738150472019-01-30T02:07:00.000-05:002019-01-30T05:18:04.513-05:00And how's homesteading working out for ya? Adventures with snakesI got bitten by a Cape cobra IN THE CAR last week. Even our car is a healthy ecosystem for wildlife. This is the food chain: old apple cores and banana peels ---- cockroaches and mice-- CAPE COBRA. Right? Right. I'm not feeling great, but then I'm alive so that's quite a good thing given the alternative. Ok, it hasn't been positively identified as a Cape Cobra because WE STILL DON'T KNOW WHERE IT IS (come for a visit, guys!), but it's a fairly large venomous snake with fangs that causes vomiting and shaking so unless it's someone's exotic pet, it was a cobra.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not a cobra: tortoise is back, and has a girlfriend. Ok we've never seen them together but hopefully they sense the presence of the other and will be cosmically drawn together for the sake of my seeing baby tortoises on our property. Because nature is all about me. </td></tr>
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This, together with other family health issues that aren't mine to talk about, means we're still having a relatively tough time of it, despite our circumstances being rather lovely in many ways.<br />
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So I wanted to reflect a little on perspectives on homesteading: getting sick, experiencing unpredictable difficult events, living "healthy," all that stuff. Spoiler alert: I am still sold on homesteading, because I'm stubborn like that.<br />
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Here's the thing: I don't think homesteading protects you from the possibility of illness or weird catastrophic events, in the same way that being Christian doesn't protect you from sucky things happening to you. Yet connecting with God during sucky things seems to matter at some deep level-- in helping us avoid jadedness and cynicism and closedness. Not that connecting with God is the same as homesteading. Anyway.<br />
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Maybe homesteaders are a little less prone to allergies or IBS or cancer or whatever, or maybe we aren't. Either way, the reality is that bad stuff, including illness, happens. If you haven't already noticed, I don't like the narrative that reaches for homesteading (or worse, "clean eating") as a utopian solution to all our problems. I often watch videos about people turning to homesteading because of health issues, and as much as I like those videos, I don't think that sets up beginners' expectations appropriately. Homesteading is hard and messy. Yet I think, if you can, growing stuff-- especially as hipsters/millennials/people with day jobs-- having your energy directed towards growing things-- even when you can't always avoid illness or hard times-- is a step in the right direction.<br />
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I think it is more than a step in the right direction for you as an individual or family, it's a step for communities. Chances are, your family avoiding getting sick from glyphosate because you're growing your own happy organic food probably won't outweigh the discomfort you're likely to experience from mosquitoes that time you forgot about the liquid fertilizer, or the diarrhaea you got from questionable hygiene practices in your garden, or the time a COBRA BIT YOU IN THE CAR. Yet I feel, collectively, those kinds of discomfort are qualitatively better than the ones that derive from the world where we buy everything from Amazon-- and the illness derived from a rushed, unhealthy system that we buy into. At least for me, though I still do a lot of rushing.<br />
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A couple of days ago, when I didn't have any energy to do something fun with the kids (cobra bite), we watched a documentary of the 2004 Tsunami. It was totally inappropriate for kids at some level (cobra bite), but in another way it was not as emotionally difficult to see because the event was so clearly beyond the power of humans. If I showed them something as graphic about war, it would feel deeply different (though there will be a time for that, probably). It's not exactly analogous to homesteading, perhaps, but sometimes I think that when bad things happen while homesteading, it's hard, but it's not the same kind of hardness. It's not the hardness that comes as a product of an exploitative system.<br />
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Now, you might say the logic of this is off if you apply it to the cobra situation, given that there wouldn't have been a cobra in the car in the first place if we weren't homesteading. You're right of course- but I reckon if you're not doing this you're doing something else- driving a long way to work where you might have an accident, etc. etc. You may even rightly argue that we may be able to avoid a lot of risk simply by staying in the U.S., and I think that's true. Yet I don't think homesteading, or staying or leaving, should be about avoiding risk or suffering. Those are a given. I think it should be about building something meaningful-- and perhaps even finding ways to meaningfully give up some of the power that comes of whiteness, savings and education-- within the constraints of our knowledge and resources.<br />
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The thing I've found growing things is that slowly, we speak from a place of deeper knowledge. Not that growing things is the same everywhere, or that our circumstances are at all similar to yours. But anyway, here's to building together, wherever we are in the world!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BSxqE0OBxaA/XFFJhMlcnXI/AAAAAAAAH4o/xm5rYHgGVAcewXvE6vODMlyVK7Y4f-KlwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8224.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BSxqE0OBxaA/XFFJhMlcnXI/AAAAAAAAH4o/xm5rYHgGVAcewXvE6vODMlyVK7Y4f-KlwCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_8224.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1rmkOElbX40/XFFJhnm6WuI/AAAAAAAAH4s/J9UwBHPblpI1blF0f49x2ONbnM1PIVNOgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8226.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1rmkOElbX40/XFFJhnm6WuI/AAAAAAAAH4s/J9UwBHPblpI1blF0f49x2ONbnM1PIVNOgCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_8226.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Silvermine (with spongebob??)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--0zbUCnBjiY/XFFJh16apMI/AAAAAAAAH4w/m5XnR0w67yoEOUrvJ4rpS8R5CNQoSi9NwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8228.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--0zbUCnBjiY/XFFJh16apMI/AAAAAAAAH4w/m5XnR0w67yoEOUrvJ4rpS8R5CNQoSi9NwCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_8228.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah is a finalist for a dog food ad to help raise money for our local dog rescue, where he trains puppies. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-q9uLY07VB-A/XFFJiP8vjFI/AAAAAAAAH40/XBIB4EUTK5o3i816JQV-OX1LxZLkN15ZgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8231.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-q9uLY07VB-A/XFFJiP8vjFI/AAAAAAAAH40/XBIB4EUTK5o3i816JQV-OX1LxZLkN15ZgCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_8231.JPG" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Random picture of bread to impress you.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah jumps off rock into ocean...</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">3 ipads, 3 children, and a guinea pig.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cIFSzmFZhxI/XFFJio5tDsI/AAAAAAAAH48/Gjq_Dv3KImwu_v1yNtU_9LZkjfPeRjVdwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8234.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cIFSzmFZhxI/XFFJio5tDsI/AAAAAAAAH48/Gjq_Dv3KImwu_v1yNtU_9LZkjfPeRjVdwCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_8234.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hana on a rock.</td></tr>
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<br />Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-55700159453921524502019-01-09T01:04:00.002-05:002019-01-09T07:49:20.348-05:00Considering Genetically Modified Food in a broken food systemWe organize a small food co-op which involves buying direct from farmers/small businesses (and a couple of medium sized businesses), at wholesale prices. Once a month, we supply this food to order, to about 30 families.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>
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We have a few motivations for running the group (which is one amongst quite a few such groups around the city): thinking about how to support access to healthier food, more ethical food, food that supports more sustainable farming practices, food that focuses on short supply chains where possible, rather than giving all power and money to distribution channels.<br />
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It’s evolving: we don’t supply everything we’d like to, and not everything we supply is from small farmers, or local, or organic (it is usually at least one, often two, of the three). The balance of the amount of time we have, the relationship we have with suppliers, the reality that we eat oats and certain legumes even though they’re not really grown in South Africa for human consumption, etc. It’s a great learning experience for us, and I know much more about the South African food system than I did a couple of years ago.<br />
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I’m a bit nervous about the exclusivity that such a group may foster, especially at a time when money and health are closely tied together (i.e. the wealthy eating from a growing set of ever-more-nutritious [add your adjective here] healthy foods, while the impoverished eat from a shrinking set of ever-less-nourishing foods). I’m not quite sure how to navigate this dynamic, except to name it and commit to figuring out what food attributes seem important to our family, and then think more about how to make these attributes a less exclusive option.<br />
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One question we get a lot is about whether the products we supply are non-GMO. In fact, we have some foods that suppliers proudly declare “non-GMO” even though there is no GMO version of that particular crop (various legumes, popcorn are often-labelled “Non-GMO” despite the fact that South Africa does not have GMO versions). I find these labels misleading. These labels suggest that GM foods are a key evil to organize around (and implicitly, that they’re hard to avoid if you do want to do so). I get the sense that label is added as a value statement, because the product isn’t certified organic, and the supplier wants to put something to show values, even when the product is coming from a large farm in Turkey (in the case of many legumes) or Australia (in the case of oats).<br />
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So I’ve been looking a bit more into GM foods in South Africa, as I think the GMO conversation can become a distraction (or sometimes shorthand) for a much more complex set of issues within our food system. It can be quite difficult to find <a href="https://www.who.int/foodsafety/areas_work/food-technology/faq-genetically-modified-food/en/" target="_blank">trustworthy, neutral</a> resources on GM foods: large commercial farmers put out information in favour of genetic modification* and rarely acknowledge downsides in a serious way. On the other hand, there is a also a fairly large anti-GMO lobby that tends to be quite sensationalist, without necessarily having much evidence to support their position— Mercola and the Weston A. Price Foundation are two groups that I’d consider examples of this category, where their articles are widely referenced on SA health sites, but if you follow the citations back to the actual research, there is a confusing mix of good science and pseudoscience published in dodgy journals (I say this with sadness because I like Nourishing traditions/Weston A. Price type stuff quite a lot).<br />
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So, I’ve been digging through journal articles to learn more, in the hopes it can help us navigate who we buy from, how we ask about their product claims, and how we think about good food more generally:<br />
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<i>How widespread are GMO foods in South Africa?</i><br />
GM technology is expensive and tends to be developed mainly for cash crops in very large scale production. There are three GM crops in commercial production in South Africa: Maize (not popcorn), cotton, and soya/soy— if you consume maize or soy you’re likely eating a GM crop, as a large share of the market is GM. The two main modifications of these crops is herbicide resistance- which is where the glyphosate concern comes in, and insertion of the BT gene which kills a specific corn pest- this is where pesticide resistance comes in. It’s not clear if any canola on the market is currently GM-- there may be a little, or there may in the future. There’s also interest in the development of GM sugarcane, and talk of GM wine yeast. Legumes (excluding soy) are never GM, and nor is oats (i.e. there is no GM version in commercial production anywhere in the world).<br />
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Maize and soy crops affect a wider array of foods because they are an important part of animal feed and processed food (partly because they are grown so cheaply and on such a large scale). For farmers farming chickens and livestock, unless they have a huge amount of space, it becomes fairly difficult to avoid GM animal feed. Soy lecithin is part of most chocolate products, and corn starch is also widely used as a thickener.<br />
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<i>What issues with GMO seem most important to think about?</i></div>
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First off, I think it’s valuable to disaggregate the potential issues with GM foods, NOT to stoke vague fears and start labelling everything “non-GMO,” even when there is no GM version of that food. The gene transfer itself is potentially distracting as an issue: It is too easy for the farming tech giants to brush off unsubstantiated claims about the health effects of GM foods (and indeed, those claims are largely unsubstantiated to date).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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The broader— much more substantive I think— issue is that large commercial farms are designed to focus entirely on profit, at the expense of soil health or broader ecology. GM crops supports a type of farming that depends heavily on fossil fuels and very large acreage of single crops. In turn, this type of farming shapes our diets in important ways: they affect the soil our food draws nutrients from, and shapes the affordability of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods on the shelves of our supermarkets. So GM crops form one part of that important discussion of food as a commodity.<br />
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<i>Some potential issues with GM crops that seem to be borne out in the literature:</i><br />
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<li><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935115001747" target="_blank">herbicide exposure</a> for farmworkers.</li>
<li>Increases in applications of, and dependency on, herbicides to control weeds (For Roundup Ready cotton and soy)-- i.e.<a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.development.1110033.pdf" target="_blank"> farmers become increasingly dependent on outside inputs for both seed and herbicide</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://safsc.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Agroecology-small-farms-and-food-sovereignty.pdf" target="_blank">our growing dependency on just a few crops</a>, </li>
<li><a href="https://www.omaha.com/money/a-tale-of-two-nebraska-farmers-one-grows-genetically-modified/article_c323c398-cbd2-5753-bd1e-7dccd7ccd1f3.html" target="_blank">The difficulty farmers may have </a>in farming non-GMO versions when neighbours are farming GM crops. </li>
<li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bayer-monsanto-merger-has-farmers-worried-2018-4?IR=T" target="_blank">The mergers of agricultural technology companies</a> (Monsanto and Bayer versus Syngenta & Chem-China— two behemoths) are alarming because it further concentrates power and control of a growing number of foods globally.</li>
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More broadly, GM foods undermine food sovereignty to the extent that farmers who used to own their seeds are increasingly pressed to purchase seeds. The production of cheap staples of soy and corn encourages ever-more concentrated animal operations, where feed is bought in— and this is driven the world's increasing demand for animal products.GM crops often present technological fixes to much broader, more complex issues— e.g. yield can be improved by supporting smaller farms in improving their soil over several years. However, supporting smaller farms is incredibly complex: markets favor bigger farms, because everyone (big or small) is forced to compete on equal footing, so smaller farms need a really wide range of supportive mechanisms to get their products to customers while earning a reasonable living.
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So the issues with GM foods are intertwined with broader systemic issues in our food system. I am convinced that food should not be a commodity traded like any other commodity on the open market, because when it is, the costs to environment or health become invisible, and it is very difficult for impoverished people (and small scale farmers) to survive/make a living. It is too easy for bullies to monopolize farming practices for their own gain, even though it’s apparent that this style of farming cannot feed the world.</div>
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So I think it’s valuable to say what/how we WANT our farmers to be growing, to articulate how we will support small and medium scale farmers, and to figure out in very practical terms how to do that, perhaps by bypassing existing structures (supermarkets) as well as by actively creating alternatives.
Relationships with farmers are a key part of this: if we are not producing the food ourselves we need to learn about the priorities and logic of those who do, so that we can make alternatives viable for them. The thing is, small and medium scale farms are competing against larger operations, and it’s an incredibly difficult competition to be a part of, because ecological damage/nutrient density is not factored into price.
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One thing I’m always afraid of is making farmers claim to be something they’re not, because that’s what this emerging niche market demands. This creates false expectations for emergent farmers as well as consumers, because consumers think that they can request something that is terribly difficult to actually supply and still make a living, at least for the first five years of farming. Sustainability is not just about the earth’s resources, it is also about Human Resources: all too often, in order to compete, farmers are faced with the choice to either pay their workers too little to sustain them and their families, or burn themselves out.<br />
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<i>How we navigate GM foods in our family</i></div>
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We generally don't eat much processed food in our family (a goal is to bypass supermarkets completely by year-end), and this is where one would eat GM foods. I try to acknowledge that a large range of foods are enjoyable to eat, and I try to think with gratitude about the farmer/worker growing our food, no matter how far removed s/he is from us. On the occasions where we consume processed food, I try to enjoy the food rather than panic, and I try to see if there are lesser evils (e.g. chips from a smaller company with fewer ingredients). I don't really worry about these occasions, I see them as learning experiences for my kids who are growing up in a big, beautiful, world where we are often the odd ones out. I focus on making it possible and pleasurable for our family to eat from scratch most of the time, for the long-term. While large scale systems are at fault (one could argue that the evil is unleashed when a company becomes an entity), I doubt that specific farmers, scientists, or even specific company employees, are deliberate villains. I tend to think that we need margin to eat well and to think of alternative models (at the expense of our work and/or time and/or our money). </div>
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On our small permaculture farm we buy in supplemental feed (which inevitably contains GM maize) for our chickens and ducks. We also grow organic barley micro greens for them. Our farm can support a larger number of free range ducks and chickens (currently around 25 chickens and 10 ducks) if mixed fowl feed is a supplemental option, because we don’t have time to do enough barley micro greens and there’s not enough diversity in the farm to support the chickens and ducks without supplemental feed (we’ve tried— using chickens to process compost was a useful supplemental feed option but wasn’t enough).So, the chickens and ducks obtain much, but not all, of their nutrients and calories from eating scraps, weeds, insects, and having supplemental barley sprouts when I have enough time to grow them consistently. I.e. they’re consuming about 15% of their overall diet in supplemental grain, which is partly corn. We even <a href="https://permaculturenews.org/2016/06/20/cut-your-chickens-feed-bill-by-fermenting/" target="_blank">soak the mixed feed</a> because I read somewhere that that helps with digestibility. I think the supplemental feed improves their health (they know they have enough food, which is important for preventing annoying chicken behaviour, which is not pretty). The eggs we consume have a very low carbon footprint relative to others. We have extremely happy chickens, though my time with chickens suggests they are not terribly sentient. Let's just say they get to live free as chickens.<br />
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The factors shaping our decision-making include time, best use of land, costs, etc. (and where we are in our own learning and experience). And the fact that I really like the guy who drops off grain for us each month, and that it takes a while to be brave enough to ask him about alternative feeds. I suspect that as we learn and our farm improves, our need for this supplemental feed will fall away— our animals don’t particularly like the corn in the feed, anyway. Our experience is shared just to highlight that farmers’ priorities should not be judged too quickly; as far as possible, they should be carefully understood (and vice versa), to promote transparency and common ground.<br />
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<i>Some last thoughts (sorry this is so long)</i></div>
As our co-op tries to buy direct from farmers, knowing how hard it is to make a living: I want to focus on learning (in an open interested way) about how farmers cultivate their soil, about how they prioritize, about how they improve the lives of their farm workers. That is, I do want accountability.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>
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To me, this type of accountability is much more important than asking more stark "do you ever" questions. Open and interested questions may lead to increased knowledge about sustainable food practices and supporting common priorities. On the other hand, avoiding farms where GM feed is used may squeeze out other priorities, because of how difficult it is to be profitable. Over time, when other priorities are realized, it becomes easier to consider the issue of GM feed. Taken alone, a one-to-one substitution of non-GM feed, for example, would not necessarily result in a substantive benefit (just an expense), whereas gradually building up the soil and building capacity to grow alternative feed on site, may facilitate a more sustainable and resilient system.<br />
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Small farmers fight an uphill battle and my sense from dealing with small farmers and companies is that if they seem to be perfect (or worse, put in a lot of effort to seeming perfect), there's often something that we're not seeing.<br />
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If we return to the issue of divergent diets between wealthy and impoverished South Africans, one key goal would be supporting suppliers/farmers in providing viable, dignified livelihoods for themselves and their workers, while caring for their soil and their animals. Supporting sustainable livelihoods through farming is an important piece of facing up to inequality. Promoting healthy soil and healthy workers when we buy from farmers and suppliers, and finding ways to support reasonably diverse, relatively unprocessed diets, to me goes a long way to creating a better food system. GM crops are a symptom of problems in our food system (where it is very hard to make a living unless you go big and farm a certain way), and we need to be thinking of the illness itself.<br />
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*[<a href="http://www.pub.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Factsheet-Pub-GMOPRINT.pdf" target="_blank">This</a> publication does a fairly good job of laying out some of the evidence simply, though I balk at the continued mention of food security, since in South Africa food security is an issue of access, not overall supply, and there’s virtually no evidence that GM crops make nutritious foods more affordable.]</div>
Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-27747470105594938762018-12-16T07:34:00.001-05:002018-12-16T07:34:30.946-05:00Vegetable gardening: biting off more than you can chewA lot of vegetable gardening advice emphasizes starting small and growing your garden very gradually. This advice assume that it is better to grow a small area well than a large area badly. Or that you'll burn out attempting to keep up with a larger garden if you're not experienced enough. The goal of this narrative is help you garden long-term, rather than giving up, which seems a very good thing and is probably true.<br />
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And yet...<br />
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I fear this approach promotes perfectionism. I think the size of your garden depends on your personality, available space, water, and whether you have opportunities for free sources of carbon/nitrogen (manure, bags of leaves, etc.).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-12yqx6vczDE/XBZCeSr1PDI/AAAAAAAAH2k/Q5-QrL1WnoIJ1jxnxVhGoeyBwpyu2ArpACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8112.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-12yqx6vczDE/XBZCeSr1PDI/AAAAAAAAH2k/Q5-QrL1WnoIJ1jxnxVhGoeyBwpyu2ArpACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_8112.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Finally, we have hundreds of granadillas and some other dillas coming along.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2-NjdpiHOPU/XBZCeXyHjNI/AAAAAAAAH2o/1eRSLnW5o6o-x8EhSA0YpXDkD9Y4GAQEwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8113.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2-NjdpiHOPU/XBZCeXyHjNI/AAAAAAAAH2o/1eRSLnW5o6o-x8EhSA0YpXDkD9Y4GAQEwCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_8113.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We're harvesting a lot of tomatoes, basil, spinach and zucchini, and our other kinds of squash and peppers are coming along pretty fast, so hopefully in a month we'll be eating those also.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zUW7Iavsc5U/XBZCeVRiwzI/AAAAAAAAH2s/RZkTbUBdYhAPHHB0QbY2UxoDdJ3wIGKBACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8114.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zUW7Iavsc5U/XBZCeVRiwzI/AAAAAAAAH2s/RZkTbUBdYhAPHHB0QbY2UxoDdJ3wIGKBACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_8114.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">can you see the bananas in the background? and the bags of dirty raw wool. I came to terms with the fact that my windfall of wool was never going to become a beautiful carpet, and am using it as a really useful mulch. This year is all about Serious Mulching.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PJYmkIKJf-4/XBZChB3HwII/AAAAAAAAH2w/cKcl6UP6zAQCOvRZeYDF1cjxJcPBOqKvACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_8116.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PJYmkIKJf-4/XBZChB3HwII/AAAAAAAAH2w/cKcl6UP6zAQCOvRZeYDF1cjxJcPBOqKvACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_8116.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our reservoir stores our rainwater for irrigation (and to have a nice place for dragonflies and frogs). Behind it are 2 of our beehives, 2 mango and one quince tree (and a lot of kei apples, all around). </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I've actually never eaten Hubbard squash before, so I'm REALLY hoping we like it, because we have so many.</td></tr>
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<br />So I am an advocate, within reason I guess, for gardening a large area badly... or rather, as best you can. I'm not entirely convinced I could garden any area (big or small) brilliantly. I think "better to do a small area well!" narrative is condescending and promotes a sense that if only you were knowledgeable enough, you're guaranteed a great vegetable yield. Which in turn leads to increasingly protected and controlled types of gardening-- hydroponics is perhaps the epitome of this. While experience is a wonderful teacher, I don't think there are ever any guarantees of success; failure should be considered normal, unless one is completely dependent on success for survival. Try again! Use all the resources you have been given! One of my favourite neighbours has a truly amazing vegetable garden, and even with their skill and experience, they lose a lot of food because the baboons have decided their garden is a good place to forage. Even when you're doing everything excellently you can still lose crops.<br />
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On our property, last year I wanted to get things set up to vegetable garden in a serious way, and then put effort into improving over time. It's definitely more space than I can actively manage, and yet... I would prefer to extend myself and potentially grow at a scale that puts a serious dent in our food needs. I've already learned a lot-- I just need to work to find the time for weeding or watering or picking off insects (I've got starting seedlings covered- because there it's just as easy to do a lot as a little). The costs of a crop also decrease significantly as you scale up-- in the case of our garden, we can take on weekly deliveries of free manure and hay because we are trying to improve the soil in a fairly large area (it is much more difficult to get these free inputs if you're picky about quantity). I am not against short-cuts when necessary: I had enough time and had made enough compost to start a couple of new beds in our garden, but not enough time to start another round of seedlings-- so I just bought seedlings for the new beds. With the garden bed prepped and set to lay empty for longer if I started from seed, a tomato plant only had to produce a few tomatoes to pay for the purchase.<br />
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On a small scale, I tend to be no more attentive a gardener than on a larger scale-- I think we have limited control of each season's crops so I am a strong believer in focusing on making sure the soil is in good condition, then hedging my bets and sharing with critters and weeds if that's the way it goes (I'm lying about being completely sharing here: don't talk to me about mole rats. Here, some lies are just better than the truth. The truth being that I can't figure out how to kill those mole rats.) If a weed gets out of control, I generally only fight it for a short while, and then I plan for the next crop to be better-- usually I won't lose everything at once (except for that one time that pig razed the garden). I also tend to try to grow various families of vegetables in 6 different places at once (I'm insane), trying to remember (I keep pretty terrible records) where they were last year and where I've added compost most recently. I figure while we will have losses, there will be something that does well. Over time, I'm developing a feel for the space and the water needs of a variety of vegetables. I no longer mulch the vegetable garden with waste straw or unprocessed horse manure, as it creates too many weeds-- the soil is good enough that I can make compost, and this year I invested in a load of woodchips to help with weed pressure.<br />
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With vegetable gardening and small-scale farming-- especially if we did not learn from our parents or grandparents, or we are not living in the house or region we grew up in-- we don't have a whole lot of time to build our skill sets. There's an urgency to get going. So go ahead and do whatever you need to do, and don't worry if you fail (certainly don't stop because you failed).<br />
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Our advantage today is that we have access to virtually infinite information, so can improve our skills rapidly. Yet so many of us are living in different climates, and different soils, with different conditions, and we have a limited time. Each crop takes time to grow, and if we're really lucky, we have a maximum of 30 or 40 opportunities to grow a crop before we get too old, move, or die. Then there's climate change.... We have the advantage (or burden) of being able to grow year round in Cape Town, so with planning we can grow 3 or even 4 crops in one place in a year.<br />
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Some other things that cause burnout are overly high expectations and/or expecting that you can control a space. That, and very low vegetable prices due the dominance of very large scale supermarkets and Big agriculture. For me, it has been very meaningful to commit fully to staying in the space we're in, and improving the soil on a large scale. Digging in, literally, and being along for the ride long-term. The size that's actually actively cultivated year to year may change according to how many seeds I start or how organized I am-- but the potential to grow a lot is there.<br />
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I'm cheering you on in your vegetable gardening efforts.Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-50542434226075501272018-09-21T01:58:00.004-04:002018-09-26T02:46:54.343-04:00A snapshot of things that come up unschooling three little kidsA lot of this is likely to change as we find a new rhythm with my parents on the property, but I thought my last post about unschooling was pretty abstract so I wanted to be more specific today. A lot of people ask about unschooling if you work or do other things-- and this is us-- we juggle and it works out!<br />
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The last few months of building my parents house has meant our schedule has been complicated and busy, and coincided with Noah (8) and Eli (6) getting really into Minecraft (and now Terraria), while Hana (2) has needed a lot of our hands-on time. Part of me thinks that they got so into Minecraft because we were not as available to do fun and interesting things with them, and because the winter has brought a lot more illness this year than previous years. So the boys have played a lot of Minecraft. I say that totally fearful of judgement, and yet supportive of their strategy because our house has remained peaceful and happy during a potentially intense, overstretched time.<br />
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I'm not [yet] an unschooling mom who totally understands when my kids want to spend large chunks of the day gaming, but I have learned that it's all in how your perceive the situation (even if there are limits how far you can stretch yourself in the moment). I have said on various occasions to Eug "I think they are playing too much Minecraft!" I like that that hasn't led to us reverting to control. If a partner or another loved one was doing something you were concerned about: you might talk to them, see if they perceive an issue, discuss how to support them, protect your own boundaries, see what their motivations were or what they were going through or getting out of their approach. This is more or less what we've done, and it's been an opportunity to reflect, and to think through how to support the kids in their interest, while also figuring out the extent to which they're playing to numb difficult feelings. It has been a chance to notice and appreciate that they have found ways to to meet their own needs and spend their days tremendously gracefully during a busy time. I appreciate that they'll know themselves better from these few months-- we talk about what we're doing with our days and why-- not in judgement but with interest, to reflect and think through choices and options. In doing this, I also notice that I'm making not-perfect choices: I have kept up with farm chores and propagation for our nursery, and with from-scratch cooking-- both of which require a huge amount of time and energy-- because that's was what I needed to do for myself. Yet this has come with costs and I could have sat with Noah, Eli and Hana more than I have done. So I'm working on doing that, now. In an ideal situation, we'd be giving them plenty of opportunities to connect and do other things if that's what they want. We were working to bring up the adult-child ratio on the farm, and so the temporary trade-offs seemed right to us.<br />
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Most days, either Eug or I wakes up early to start work (I sometimes go into work when I need to be at meetings, and then I leave very early to avoid traffic), and the other person gets to wake with the kids, start coffee and oats, feed the animals, and check on the state of the farm with Hana. When Eug is working, the boys don't play Minecraft because we don't have enough devices, so the kids and I will do something inside together, or work on something out on the farm (or sometimes I'll work on something, and they'll just join me). I bake a lot with Hana and occasionally do some cooking with Noah; Eli's favourite thing is to play boardgames and make up elaborate stories together. When with Eug, they'll often play Minecraft, with Eug in the background participating where he can (he'll sometimes play with them also).<br />
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Eug and I will switch after a few hours, and whoever is caring for the kids will make lunch. In the later afternoon, we will either be with individual kids, or Eug will work on the house and I will take the kids out to the beach, or to a couple of classes they participate in (clay lessons, swimming lessons, speech therapy, Scouts). I do speech therapy practice with Eli, while playing Star Realms, his favourite card game! It's not rushed most of the time. I will sometimes walk down the street with one or two kids, to our nursery and check in on how things are going. The kids will sometimes pair up and play together for a while-- legos, magnatiles, or telling stories outside, until something happens (If Hana is involved) and conflict comes and goes. I sometimes feel very busy if I look at the number of jobs I seem to have in addition to my actual full time job at the university. Then I settle into the actual day: what I actually need to do, and it is always doable-- though the issue of our kids' less visible needs is definitely something I'm thinking about more, as I tend to go from one task to the next, and kids are not tasks.<br />
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Amidst the imperfection, all three kids seem to learn what is relevant to navigate their day-to-day life, and what they enjoy-- I remain convinced that we can learn naturally, given interested and supportive people around us. We try to offer lots of interesting options, which sometimes are taken up, and sometimes aren't. I am not measuring whether they progress similarly to others of their age, though I do try to observe if they are stuck in a rut and if we can help. I do marvel at all they know from our reading of copious fiction and non-fiction together, and from watching Youtube-- this is even without me understanding all their skills from playing Minecraft-- and those are abundant. We discuss so many things together during the course of the day. I read quite a lot for work (and enjoyment), and talk to them about what I'm learning, and about what I'm learning about farming, also. All three kids can spot a spekboom from 100m (CUTTINGS MOMMY-- they even know the spekboom-on-pavement map of our routes and sometimes will generously say "There's a spekboom coming up soon, you can stop the car"). They know the kind of pelargonium that only grows naturally on Ou Kaapse Weg, know the difference between English, Dutch, French and Spanish lavenders (I learned this like a month ago) and can identify which chicken laid which egg based on size and colour. They know how to care for many different animals. More than what they know or don't know, we are learning how to relate to one another, and how to relate to other people, also.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Star Realms</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We still get to the beach a lot</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Soap carving</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Found a lizard tail- it was still moving!</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">matching Minecraft and real life stones</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Silvermine dam- it was too cold to swim so we walked around the dam instead. I could not keep up with my 2 year old, which is a bizarre twist.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">dinosaur tea party.</td></tr>
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<br />Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-74869233518595584982018-09-13T06:29:00.001-04:002018-09-13T08:07:05.363-04:00Some experiences unschoolingA few people have recently asked about how and why we are unschooling, and in the moment I usually mumble something incoherent about autonomy. I wanted to reflect a little more deeply here, though not comprehensively, as supporting our kids' education is inevitably complex. Noah would be in Grade 2 this year, and I've written <a href="http://www.concretegardener.com/search?q=unschooling" target="_blank">about unschooling in the past</a> (though I cringe at some of those posts). School can seem really innocuous to those who thrive in those settings (or seem to), so I'm grateful for a firstborn who is sensitive and challenged so many of my assumptions.<br />
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The experience of unschooling, to me, has been a move away from outcomes, towards the journey, and towards connecting with my kids. If you've ever read this blog, you know I plan and scheme and will suffer seemingly endlessly for a goal (I think this is partly a result of school). This can serve me well, at times, but it also means I struggle to be present for the ride. It also means that my tendency is to think of the future for my kids-- and inevitably, because I'm that kind of person-- to constantly be measuring my kids' successes.<br />
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In fairly Calvinist (conservative Christian) settings as a child, during college and our early years of marriage, there were a lot of fairly awful ideas about children. Alongside these were also quite negative ideas of God-- and these were tightly wrapped up in a highly patriarchal social structure. What was terribly confusing is that God (and parents, leaders, and teachers) did not necessarily have to be kind or considerate-- they could do anything and say it was "for our own good." A consequence of being in this kind of setting is that one cannot trust one's own feelings. Don't even get me started on what it was like to be a girl and a woman in these settings! Not only could we not trust our own desires and motivations, we also could not trust God to be good, all the time. I am not sure if this influences how kids in schools are being taught around the world-- I am outside of that world right now-- but I want to move away from my tendency to see my children as vessels to be urgently filled (with skills, or knowledge, or even values), whether or not they want that skill. While self-reflection is powerful-- I want my kids to be the ones doing the reflecting on their desires and motivations, not me or another adult. In this sense, unschooling is less about learning and more about relating-- knowing that in healthy relationships it is easy to learn and grow.<br />
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There are a lot of people who believe God is always good who don't unschool, so I think my experiences are the result of a particular, non-universal, journey. Still, unschooling has brought a helpful consistency: In imagining a more relational, less capitalist, less power-based, less shame-filled/competitive society, a lot of ideas align, albeit messily (and inconsistently). We can enjoy our lives while remaining responsible and responsive to our contexts.<br />
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So as I grow with our kids, the value of unschooling is less about outcomes and more about finding ways to be consistently kind and support our kids, while being careful to attend to our own journey, responsibilities, and boundaries. It is a way to trust our children and try our best to connect with them, which is harder than it sounds. It does not mean leaving them to do their own thing, but finding opportunities for them to get to know themselves, and to shine. It means creatively finding ways to meet all the needs of all family members, and be explicit when we are struggling to do so because of financial, time, or energy constraints. What I want them to feel is an abundance of opportunity, and an abundance of love-- a complicated abundance, given friendships with those who have much less than we do-- but abundance nevertheless.Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-60027782452114672132018-08-19T15:00:00.000-04:002018-08-19T15:16:43.722-04:00August 2018: building my parents' house, no electricity, no drainage, no stove <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/G3bk0V_X_-4/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G3bk0V_X_-4?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
Noah started a YouTube channel of his own...<br />
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My parent's house is built. This time around, the person managing the build was lovely, and we were able to implement all we learned from our last construction attempt (just you wait until we build a third house... no...wait...).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">another red house!</td></tr>
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As with all construction/renovation -- in our family at least-- things started to get really hard at one point around two months ago. We had no electricity, little water, no drainage (our greywater system was dug up to make way for my parents' house). We also had some unsettling break-ins, and our whole family got unusually sick. All the while Eug was taking a very active role building parts of the house, and I had to keep up with work and both of us still need to care for our kiddos (who, admittedly, have been playing a lot of minecraft).<br />
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Previously when I had heard about homesteader burnout, my response was a pretty smug, "you don't know how tough I am." I am sorry for that smugness. I think burnout is very normal because homesteading is often illogically difficult, and when you're in the thick of it you can't remember exactly why you're sitting cold, dark and sick in a modern city. Self-righteousness just feels stupid! At that point, we often end up at the McDonald's playground, though this time we didn't-- not because we're above it but just because somehow the brief satisfaction no longer feels worth it (if you want to get serious about being frugal, <a href="http://www.concretegardener.com/search?q=nursery" target="_blank">buy a nursery</a> and track all non-essential spending to how much more you could pay your employees.. no wait, don't! Seriously, though, the nursery has changed my experience of money in a pretty visceral way.).<br />
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In these experiences, we are learning homesteading is less about self-sufficiency and more about learning about deep interconnectedness-- our dependence on the grid, on not having our stuff stolen, on the weather and our surrounding ecology/soil, on technology, on our fragile health. Even though we can sometimes produce some of our own food, we're inherently vulnerable, and understanding that vulnerability increases our empathy for those around us who are indeed cold, in the dark, and sick (and maybe even hungry) in our supposedly modern city. It's still possible to keep learning from our mistakes and to slowly work on resilience-- not to make ourselves invincible but to learn to be more peaceful, empathetic, and hopefully less exploitative.<br />
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Part of resilience seems to be making peace with hardship and imperfection, and being able to cope with our own smallness and lack of control and knowledge. For the first time, in the thick of it, we haven't just fantasized about moving somewhere where we imagine we wouldn't have problems: we're rooted here, at least for the next while. I am constantly learning new things I didn't know I didn't know. There's a spiritual dimension to this process, which for me takes the drudgery away and replaces it with a sense of wonder.<br />
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In hard times, there's anger and indignation and a sense of helplessness-- perhaps it is this age of Trump (though perhaps there is also the <a href="https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/07/17/how-ethiopia-and-eritrea-made-peace" target="_blank">Eritrean-Ethiopian peace</a> to look to in amazement and hope). I am not sure where it comes from or where it will go, but there is injustice and inconsistencies in our own lives that could take a lifetime to work out, so perhaps it is not right to direct anger towards an other (Here I don't mean to advocate apathy). Again, there is something to be said for empathy in absurd situations, for the bigness and goodness of God, and tapping into that rather than into the despair enacted around us.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hana has been cutting her hair and, unrelatedly, bringing a lot of grass to Bubbles...</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Potato planting. Our vegetable garden has been a bit of mess with grass taking over, but we've planted a lot of potatoes and garlic because that was what I could wrap my head around, and with a few hours work I'm cautiously optimistic about the growing season ahead.</td></tr>
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With building we haven't had time to think too much about farming -- either starting seeds or caring for fruit trees. Thankfully it is winter, so watering is taken care of by the rain. Perhaps because of the winter, we still had a fair amount to eat from the garden, and there's quite a bit of self-seeded vegetables emerging. I can see that a little bit of consistent work (primarily involving improving the soil) over several years is cumulative-- we may well get as much food this summer as last summer, despite my lack of attentiveness. Having kids is also helpful- I plant with them, with more attention to the process and less to whether we'll grow anything. I figure a pack of seeds is a pretty affordable homeschool lesson, right? And over time, we have a garden.<br />
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On optimism: I remember two early goals on my farm googledocs spreadsheet: to have around 20 granadilla vines throughout the farm, and to have around 10 tamarillo trees. I struggled to start tamarillos from seed, and granadillas kept being destroyed by ducks or weevils. At the time it seemed impossible and things kept failing. Two years later, this goal is no problem-- 16 granadilla vines are already well established and some more are newly planted on my parent's fence, with plenty (60 or so) ready to be sold or planted depending on space and irrigation. We were able to get just one tamarillo to a good size, and it fruited this past fall. I planted some tamarillo seeds from this one fruit haphazardly (aah, to have an abundance of seeds instead of the pitiful 10 included in those seed packs) and now I have maybe 100 tamarillo seedlings (though they still need to survive planting into the ground.) Anyway, gradual incremental learning and soil/infrastructure development is meaningful, and the historical view is always helpful when we're facing challenging times.<br />
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Also helpful: going to visit penguins at low tide, before any tourists arrive.<br />
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While Eugene and I have generally been a little tired and worn out with the many demands of the last couple of months, we press on! I'm guessing that many more happy, exciting and hopeful updates on our farm will follow- and many more photos!Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-17740882186960733912018-06-13T01:59:00.001-04:002018-06-13T06:11:01.275-04:00Our goose died<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BxaWpwa9VW4/WyCxHfOu1XI/AAAAAAAAHps/MRT_mA24pPcXWpPtD96QCDnDCJODIJ4qACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_7162.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BxaWpwa9VW4/WyCxHfOu1XI/AAAAAAAAHps/MRT_mA24pPcXWpPtD96QCDnDCJODIJ4qACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_7162.JPG" width="640" /></a><br />
Our male goose passed away a few days ago. He's been ill for a long time, ever since he had a stroke in December. Our female goose keeps calling for him. There's something very poignant about the sadness of a goose losing it's mate. We'd been nursing the male goose for 6 months... Carrying him in and out of the kiddie pool, feeding him by hand at times. I feel sad because winter suddenly set in and I didn't think to bring the goose into our house until it was too late, and maybe he could have had longer.<br />
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Then I wonder how it happened that I am bringing a full grown goose into the house to lie down in front of the fire. Caring for this goose even after we knew that he and his mate would probably never give us eggs or meat-- it brought me back to the economics of farming. The economics of our farm often don't add up. As pressed for time as we are in this season of our lives, to spend time on a dying goose verges on absurdity. As you may guess if you've read a few posts, I go between painstakingly calculating our costs (time and money, time is money??) and outputs to convince you that farming is a great idea, and giving up on the economic value. (and of course, you might just say the geese have ended up as pets, which I suppose is also true) I focus on the frugality of farming because I don't think it is enough for people who love farming to farm... maybe it is, or maybe more people will grow to love farming as the world shifts and shifts again?<br />
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I grew up in evangelical settings where we had to not only be sure and right and have all the answers, but we also had to convince everyone else we had what they were missing. So bear with me when I do that, it's a habit that is hard to break. Part of our urban farming efforts began as entirely evangelical (YOU MUST ALL FARM) but farming has a way of messing with one's sense of certainty and control. There is a world of wonder and contradiction on our farm, where you don't get away from money (for example, our animal feed costs more than eggs would, though we can sometimes sell ducks or chicks, our financial benefits are very haphazard and fuzzy) and yet-- perhaps only if you have the financial margin to do so-- we do find ourselves emerging from that hard logic of economics. We edge away from supply and demand thinking, in the sense that money gradually gets less important. Of course, we've had to do a lot of work, and a lot of careful saving, in the context of a cutthroat capitalist economy to get where we are-- i.e. no mortgage and student loan debt etc. Habits are very hard to break. But I hope one day money will factor much less in my life than it does now, and there's some tentative evidence that this is possible-- not because we're so rich money doesn't matter, but because we're not measuring everything in those terms, or buying much from the monied economy. We're not going to l<a href="https://www.becomingminimalist.com/the-man-who-quit-money-an-interview-with-daniel-suelo/" target="_blank">ive without money</a>, and we're owners of stuff, but our relationship with money has shifted a lot already, and I think it'll shift a lot more.<br />
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As we produce more, money becomes a tool for fewer things, and we get more resourceful. But it's more than that; it is gradually less important to measure value in terms of money, or to measure at all. <span style="text-align: center;">Even though I am stuck in my head so much, as part of working within a university structure, I am stuck in my head much less than I used to be, because there are so many chores to be done and little kids to be cared for. I like it. </span>Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-54776501849578106632018-05-29T01:33:00.000-04:002018-05-30T01:38:32.434-04:00On working and owning land in urban South Africa<style type="text/css">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">Now and then, we see the land invasion trucks, accompanied by police trucks, hurtling down the street to stop a shack from being built further into the wetlands. Occasionally, like this morning, we wake up in the morning and we hear a surge of hundreds of voices— sometimes singing, sometimes angry and shouting. Less frequently, thankfully, we hear the noise of rubber bullets and water cannons or smell the smoke of tires burning. It always feels very close. Our fence is just diamond mesh, after all— no electric current, no solid wall. Transparent. (admittedly with lots of baby spiky plants as a token of our security intentions)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">Most of the time, our farm is peaceful and quiet. I watch the chickens scratching and try to resist the temptation to plant more seeds while I’m supposed to be writing or studying or reading a student's work.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">How do good intentions fit into this picture? Perhaps good intentions are not really the point. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">When people look at the map, or when friends visit from Masi, they sometimes say “hey! Eug and Jo have a farm and lots of land right next to a township where people are suffering and squashed together. There’s something wrong with this picture!” And they would be right.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">We might reply “we bought this land for a fair price, and we could have bought better land, in a more convenient and safe place, more cheaply. We are working for good things for this community and neighborhood.” That would be true, also.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">So the problem is less that we have land or a house (Many of you reading this blog have a much better standard of living than ours—and if you have access to Amazon and Ikea you almost certainly do), but that our neighbors have a standard of living that is unconscionable. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">From the limitations of this, my one perspective, I’m convinced that part of the solution to this, a seemingly impossible problem, is: We should actively seek out the lowest standard of living that our happiness allows for (and, to the extent of our influence, seek out policies that do the same). Wealth only increases happiness until our essentials are covered, right? Yet it feels never-ending. When taxes increase, or you face unemployment, you should still be able to pay fair wages to everyone who supplies you with goods or services (this follows up the entire chain, not just those directly employed by you: it includes the person in Malaysia who made your child’s hotwheel car… something that I haven’t quite figured out yet). We should aspire to lives that do not take (or even 'earn') more than our fair share, which is terribly difficult if you have access to so much stuff, but which can be a progressive, gradual set of choices.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">We should strive to produce as much as we can, or at least understand the world from the perspective of the producer. Not the manager of the factory understanding the supply chain, but the person actually sowing a seed or sewing a garment. My perspective has changed so much with each dead animal or failed crop, and it is so painful when I hear a customer at our nursery complain about our price increase from R10 to R12 ($1) for a plant, knowing how difficult it was to grow it.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">Capital is concentrated in the top end of consumption chains, and when I see my peers I think part of this picture is that we’re so busy, and we’re literally the beneficiaries of capitalism— we have higher degrees and responsible jobs and are trying to cobble together enough childcare to raise our children well. We’re probably a bit stressed a lot of the time because we think perfection is somehow within our grasp (and if you are in the U.S. you may be stuck with a lot of debt).<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">Our land is just starting to become productive after being vacant for over five years.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: normal;">The past few years we have been working harder than is sustainable, because I feel so much weight of responsibility to use our land wisely. Yet if you saw our land, you might (rightly) cast it as under-utilized. Give us some time. Utility should not be measured just by economic productivity or human density, it should be measured in terms of values, perhaps (in the case of land) in terms of the depth and strength of commitment to make a space ecologically productive over many years. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span class="Apple-converted-space">I guess my point is that when it comes to land, farmers must have the margin to take the long view and set up farm systems carefully and wisely (not just in a day and a rototiller). Specifically, if financially we'd had to make the whole acre productive right away, we would have made choices-- rapid clearing that would likely have made the soil worse, paying people marginal salaries to help us. </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">There is land all over South Africa that has the capacity to become sustainably productive, given the right resources and better economic policy, but it takes time (longer than a political term) and care and is often a thankless task, though you would be right to argue that parts of SA have a much better climate for some kinds of farming than Cape Town. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Despite the challenges, when it comes to small farms, I am all in. For health, productivity, and sustainability in the context of climate change: small farms are vital, even within city limits and even in the context of densely populated settlements. For vegetable production in a city like Cape Town (with year-round growing): we should be growing our vegetables within city limits.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">For those who arrive from the Eastern Cape to Cape Town, trying to get enough money to educate their children and improve things for themselves: people who live in zinc shacks and do domestic work: where so often the employer sees themselves as magnanimous and the employee furtively thanks them for the hard manual labour they have received. In academic conversations, to talk about expanding options for farming in the Eastern Cape is seen as insulting (why would they want to farm? why should they not have access to the city!?) and shortsighted (people are coming, cities are the inevitable future) at best.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">Yet in saying that the options for farming should be expanded and supported I do not mean that anyone should be excluded from the city, or that cities should not grow in proportion to population growth. I mean that farms should be getting smaller and more people working smaller pieces of land, not larger, that food supply chains can and should be shorter, and that mechanization has harmed our food system in significant ways. Of course, mechanization has also benefited our food system: Threshing wheat or grinding corn are unromantic tasks that I am loath to take on. Yet the point where ecological forms of land management and continuous soil improvement become impossible, farming has become unsustainable— at that point farms have become too large.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">So, we should have pathways and tools to farm on large enough pieces of land for subsistence (I have read, and experienced, that 1 acre is a full time job for 1 person), and we should receive the extension services and support for this to be a viable, dignified option, so that farming is not something you run from the first opportunity you get.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">One should have the capacity to live a dignified (nourished) life on even marginal farm land, improving that land and making it more productive. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">For those of us who are not farming, there should be ways to live simply, to produce at least some of one’s food, and not outsource jobs that are too dirty and uncomfortable (unless they are outsourcing with a good, livable wage). We should not leverage our super-educated brains for maximum money, as others leverage their bodies to produce our food, build our houses, sew our clothes and care for our children. (I may not yet have the words or tone to express this idea as anything other than a tired, opinionated rewriting of Marxism. But I will get there one day!) </span><span class="Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;">The back to the land movement should not be just a super upper class thing (yet it should also not be a thing that we tell the poor to do). This is not River Cottage. As societies, we should prioritize understanding the basics of what it means to sustain ourselves: from what it takes to build a structure, to what it takes to grow our food. We are poorer for not knowing. I have heard activists in the city say proudly that they are not land owners… they are able to move freely and they are not taking land from anyone. Yet we all put their money in a bank somewhere (and that bank uses their money to buy shares in companies, which buy up land) we buy things, many of us travel, and we all eat, and in that way we are all using land somewhere. Owning land, and farming it, incurs responsibility and a depth of attachment (and moral ambiguity) that is altogether different from buying more responsibly at the farmer’s market. That is not to say one is only moral if one is farming/producing, but that our moral responsibilities are enacted in many different ways, even in a place like South Africa where access to land is deeply contested.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Perhaps part of imagining a different world is to realize that parts of our existence are in grey areas, our perspectives limited, and that we moving through the world imperfectly (whether farming or not).</span></div>
Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-15229556945297230902018-05-04T09:02:00.001-04:002018-05-05T01:13:44.564-04:00(Not) Self-sufficient in Cape Town: Lots of honey & vegetables, failed olive oil harvest<i>Our fellow workers on the farm are confronted by endless work, lack of tools, seed, lack of variety and stimulus in their daily work. They are indeed leading a hard life and a poor life. But they are trying to rebuild within the shell of the old, a new society, wherein the dignity and freedom and responsibility of man is emphasized. And there is no place better to do it than on the land. (The Catholic Worker, October, 1939) </i><br />
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<i>One of the most important and growing costs of the modern way of life is ‘cultural fraud’: the promotion of images and ideals of ‘the good life’ that serve the economy but do not meet psychological needs, nor reflect social realities. (Richard Eckersley)
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We've been living on our farm for over 2.5 years now, so I'm thinking again about what we do and don't grow here, and what our lives are like. It's not 1939, and we're not living communally, but the Catholic Worker movement does provide inspiration, and also speaks to the challenges of trying to produce our own food. The lines between producing poorly and producing "well" are fuzzy, and figuring out how to make our small, 1 acre farm more productive is as much about good stewardship given highly contested (and scarce) city land as it is about a romantic idea of feeding ourselves. I also list out foods to make food more visible, and the processes of growing (and not growing) less abstract.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dVduaIyFHFA/WuxYhsEnPLI/AAAAAAAAHmI/k_dzvlKDWAobIPMhJX0379U-XDehd00_QCLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-04%2B%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="384" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dVduaIyFHFA/WuxYhsEnPLI/AAAAAAAAHmI/k_dzvlKDWAobIPMhJX0379U-XDehd00_QCLcBGAs/s640/2018-05-04%2B%25282%2529.jpg" width="480" /></a><br />
<br />
It's still early days in the life of our farm. Also, our story is definitely the story of part-time farmers who support ourselves through off-farm work, and who struggle to find the time to farm. Still, I'm coming to think that a lot of descriptions about how difficult and expensive it is to become more self-sufficient in food emerges from early (in)experience, bad farming conditions and running out of energy or money too early on. I'm still very inexperienced, of course, and one cannot quickly change one's farm environment (our sand is not going away any time soon), but eventually things start to shift. The soil starts to get better. There are a few successes. So my farming motto, if I had one, might involve the word "persistence," and be about not taking these few years of unusual drought as proof that (urban) farming isn't efficient, doesn't "work," or is too difficult. It can be very efficient, but only if you have a lot of margin to survive inevitable failures-- every farm is different and so even if you are very experienced, I imagine it takes some time to acclimate. As a side note, I think this means that if policy were to better support farmers (urban and rural), it might involve providing greater margin (financial and in terms of time) to survive early failures (and more time to build up the soil and infrastructure slowly so that a farmer really understands what systems they're adding and why, and how to fix them if things aren't right).<br />
<br />
<i>Vegetables</i><br />
We still buy big bags of potatoes and onions, which are staple items for us, but we produce most other vegetables (I'm afraid to say that on the internet, as we're always one chicken invasion away from disaster). This year, my plan for the garden includes (weather and pest permitting) a large crop of garlic, sweet potatoes, potatoes and onions, enough tomatoes to preserve for the year. I can't really calculate the calories on the vegetables we produce, but despite the drought we eat greens a few times a week (I know it should be every day), produced a pretty good crop of squashes, pumpkins and tomatoes, and are still getting a lot of peppers, eggplant and cape gooseberries from our lingering summer crop.<br />
<br />
<i>Fruit</i><br />
We're close to getting a lot of fruits and should produce enough fruit for our family's consumption, and possibly more than enough, in about 2 years, but for the most part we still buy fruit as our trees are taking a while to mature-- not helped by the drought! We got some peaches, some apricots and blackberries this past summer, have a fairly continuous supply of gooseberries we eat every day, and have a large crop of tamarillos (currently), guavas (still ripening), and bananas (still ripening) and granadillas/guavadillas are finally on their way. We're hoping next year we'll start to harvest some citrus, pomegranates, almonds, figs and plums. Then in another couple of years we'll get much more citrus and nectarines, apples and pears.<br />
<br />
<i>Oil</i><br />
Our trees produced a lot of olives this year, and we tried to make olive olive oil with our Piteba press, with disastrous results (Hana mercifully overturned the "olive oil," so we didn't have to actually make the decision whether to use it or not). We're going to try peanut oil rather, then work our way back up to olive oil... So we're going to be buying in oil (or at least nuts) for a good while. We were able to give away some olives to friends so at least they weren't wasted.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aaLuzdmcbe8/WuxjCJtHNuI/AAAAAAAAHmo/NbzSCy7gYBcgpfbeQaX71_jZw0GG83bIgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6371.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aaLuzdmcbe8/WuxjCJtHNuI/AAAAAAAAHmo/NbzSCy7gYBcgpfbeQaX71_jZw0GG83bIgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6371.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Not-Pinterest version of making olive oil...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<i>Honey</i><br />
Thanks to my dad and our three hives, we're suddenly in a position to stop buying sugar. My dad did not take honey from the bees over the summer at all, because both of our two hives had swarmed (I managed to catch one but not the other). It's not that sugar was exactly eating away at our food budget, but having a row of honey jars on the shelf feels wonderful.<br />
<br />
If we need to get about 3 million calories per year as a family, the amount of honey we produce is significant-- if we ate most of our honey ourselves we could get over 10% of our calories from honey produced by 3 hives.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-S5zvJ5EyFKE/WuxZU6pKj1I/AAAAAAAAHmY/L-l0Tmh6dC0LDd13fuBCs3at8OuQifGGACLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-04%2B%25283%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-S5zvJ5EyFKE/WuxZU6pKj1I/AAAAAAAAHmY/L-l0Tmh6dC0LDd13fuBCs3at8OuQifGGACLcBGAs/s640/2018-05-04%2B%25283%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Honey stores on the top right (and foraged seaweed on the left.... odd but free and full of good nutrients)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<i>Eggs</i><br />
Not counting our duck eggs (which come and go depending how well they hide them), we consume about 500 calories a day from eggs-- and could probably consume more, when we include duck eggs. Again, this could be up to 10% of our calories as a family.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Bj__IY7bvVI/WuxYhUg6GtI/AAAAAAAAHmE/CmcDtBvfjIUPZbHK_tYQJfi3pNHs1bm0gCLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-04%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Bj__IY7bvVI/WuxYhUg6GtI/AAAAAAAAHmE/CmcDtBvfjIUPZbHK_tYQJfi3pNHs1bm0gCLcBGAs/s640/2018-05-04%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ducklings, olive trees...</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Anyway, so what's the plan for the future?<br />
<i>Buying in the short term but hope to stop buying in a few years time</i><br />
<ul>
<li>Some feed for chickens and ducks (about 40% of their diet)</li>
<li>Almonds</li>
<li>Macadamia nuts</li>
<li>Potatoes/sweet potatoes</li>
<li>Onions</li>
<li>A lot of different fruits.</li>
</ul>
<i>Still buying in the long term?</i><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OY_dHMbokfQ/WuxYg_NiG_I/AAAAAAAAHmA/dOHhPb-1C7Ie9gC6wNhFjHD1S4_IXWbgACLcBGAs/s1600/2018-05-04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OY_dHMbokfQ/WuxYg_NiG_I/AAAAAAAAHmA/dOHhPb-1C7Ie9gC6wNhFjHD1S4_IXWbgACLcBGAs/s640/2018-05-04.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Good food club: buying stuff in bulk for 25-30 families.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<ul>
<li>Olive oil</li>
<li>Maybe meat (once/twice a month).</li>
<li>Cat food, budgie food.</li>
<li>Milk/cream*</li>
<li>Butter*</li>
<li>Cheese*</li>
<li>Lentils</li>
<li>Raisins</li>
<li>Blueberries</li>
<li>Flour (possibly sometimes also in the form of pasta, or we might going back to making pasta!)</li>
<li>Coffee (green beans, which we roast)-- though I think over time we'll produce enough robusta coffee beans for a month or two of consumption. We have 3 robusta coffee trees (and one arabica, which we keep indoors) and are growing more from seed-- ultimately once we have enough shade, my goal is to have 25 shade grown robusta trees.</li>
<li>Chocolate </li>
<li>Brown rice</li>
<li>Rolled oats</li>
<li>Peanuts</li>
</ul>
*Although I don't have any definite plans to produce any of these things ourselves, I am still dreaming about getting a few dairy goats (Nigerian dwarf gots), maybe in three years' time, especially if I can organize enough organic waste from landscapers to offset their feed.<br />
<br />
My point in making this list is just to admit that we're not trying to produce everything, and that independence from industrial food takes a lot of time and effort. If one wants to maintain a decent standard of living in the in-between, the industrial food system is actually what makes the transition possible-- knowing that I can go and grab crappy ice cream, for example, is sometimes what gives me the self-control to cook lentils. In fact, the bottom five things on that list that are mainly imported, most notably oats, which we eat daily (usually from Australia or Germany), short grain brown rice (usually from the USA), which we eat couple of times a week, and peanuts (usually from China)/peanut butter. In the future, it may be that we actively work to make some of these things become less important in our diet so that we can rely even more on food grown on the farm, or it may be that other life adjustments take priority. We would like to keep improving the productivity of the farm, but at a certain point that could mean selling or giving away food, and spending more time reflecting and sharing how our farm fits into broader food movements, rather than endlessly adding diversity.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "bembostd"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">The challenge of envisioning real utopias is to elaborate clear-headed, rigorous, and viable alternatives to existing social institutions that both embody our deepest aspirations for human flourishing and take seriously the problem of practical design. Real utopias capture the spirit of utopia but remain attentive to what it takes to bring those aspirations to life. What we want are utopian destinations which, even if they are themselves unreachable, nevertheless have accessible waystations that help move us in the right direction. </span><span style="font-family: "bembostd"; font-size: 11.000000pt;">(<i>Erik Olin Wright</i>) </span></blockquote>
The hard thing is remembering that although there's an endless list of things to do, the projects must be paced somehow, and daily life/work should not have to wait. There will never be a time when the farm is complete. There's also no such thing as a perfect diet or a perfect farm; it seems to be all about learning what to try and when, for our unique context, and not going too crazy in the attempt.
Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-41555480924762729982018-04-18T01:13:00.003-04:002018-04-18T01:13:50.877-04:00Lots of different composts and many ways to improve soil<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wX888J-OnZQ/WtbOYFHy0MI/AAAAAAAAHlA/qRKOzbVf6rkG1mJLjYqqz0I1U2HCzb5IwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6689.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wX888J-OnZQ/WtbOYFHy0MI/AAAAAAAAHlA/qRKOzbVf6rkG1mJLjYqqz0I1U2HCzb5IwCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_6689.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Start of winter cropping... One thing that's really challenging (and wonderful) in a Cape Town context is that there's always something you could be planting, so planning bed rotations for the year becomes really complex. I'm trying to think of ways to grow a large winter garden because we don't have to irrigate from May-September, provided the rain comes.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I like <a href="http://www.thesurvivalgardener.com/" target="_blank">David the Good's approach</a> to composting a lot-- i.e. compost everything!<br />
<br />
Actually, about David the Good: I love his videos, I think his take on gardening is interesting and helpful. Also: He supports Trump?!?!! And seems to have such a different perspective on many things I value. My conclusion, abbreviated: We must be reading very different things and converse with very different people-- our experience of the world is very different and somehow, this has led us to profoundly different sets of conclusions on some things... yet a lot of similarities in our day to day life, I suspect. I find it so interesting that someone I admire so much online is occupying such a different world. So my vague sense from this is that we should try to be kind to the people around us, and try to keep writing and spreading an inclusive type of kindness, with the knowledge that our vision is super limited so... don't be too dogmatic (this is not to be confused with me saying that Trump is ok). There's so much out there we don't see or imagine.<br />
<br />
Anyway, back to compost-- I wanted to share some experiences because I've been composting for a long time, only sometimes successfully, and I use a lot of different approaches:<br />
<br />
<i>Chop and drop:</i><br />
We have a lot of Port Jackson (acacia saligna, an invasive but nitrogen fixing tree from Australia), which we chop and leave in place- this is classic permaculture and ultimately the idea is that you don't have a lot of outside inputs coming onto your farm. I'm also multiplying comfrey as much as I can, also to do chop and drop next year if I can get it big enough. In the meantime... we clearly are bringing in a lot of free sources of fertility, and making use of various manures (human, chicken, duck, guinea pig...)<br />
<br />
<i>Vermicomposting</i><br />
If you don't have a lot of space, vermicomposting is brilliant and effective for kitchen scraps, and you can't really beat vermicastings in terms of quality of compost. That said, if you have a household with more than a couple of people and eat at home most of the time, the quantity of compost can quickly overwhelm your worms (and even kill them, or attract rats). In our experience, it's a good idea to be persistent (get through the fruit fly stage!), it's also a good idea to scale up gradually. In terms of the quantity of compost you get out, I think vermicomposting requires a lot of patience relative to other kinds of compost-- as in two years of patience. I often wonder if people know that going in, if they'll be more willing to weather the fly times and the rat times. When we were still a family of four, we already needed a MASSIVE (240L) bin.<br />
<br />
So, worm composting is the absolute best option for kitchen scraps in a household that doesn't have chickens, and that needs small amounts of very high quality compost (I know there are also large scale applications, but I have less experience with those).<br />
<br />
Check out our many worm bins:<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OYKtIXI-XPY/WtbQF_q2u3I/AAAAAAAAHlc/1DECUeCGbvgA1B5ICsBLe7AN2F939yLRgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6683.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OYKtIXI-XPY/WtbQF_q2u3I/AAAAAAAAHlc/1DECUeCGbvgA1B5ICsBLe7AN2F939yLRgCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_6683.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The very unromantic reality of our largest worm bin. As you can tell our minimalist dreams have given way to hoarding cardboard and seed trays... While our municipal bin is totally a pain to harvest from, because of its size it's also extremely resilient and a great source of worms if we're having any trouble with our other bins. And we do also harvest castings, as the worms are well established. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bwJpfa2ckRs/WtbOWbAJwmI/AAAAAAAAHks/uNmUIkMSfZ4WBwMHEBr7lcb-G194BtzlgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6684.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bwJpfa2ckRs/WtbOWbAJwmI/AAAAAAAAHks/uNmUIkMSfZ4WBwMHEBr7lcb-G194BtzlgCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_6684.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">These are the classic tote bins with holes drilled in them-- I'd recommend these for most households, you can always just add a new layer if necessary (looking back, adding many totes is probably better than getting a really huge bin like we did). We have five totes-- 3 for regular farms and two just for cat litter.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7LF1LeDVGJ4/WtbOWrC6g_I/AAAAAAAAHk0/zbvog2ioKWIDeVB4tcG6hm1_gzYE0tsawCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6686.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7LF1LeDVGJ4/WtbOWrC6g_I/AAAAAAAAHk0/zbvog2ioKWIDeVB4tcG6hm1_gzYE0tsawCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_6686.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">These are the two bathtubs on the border of our property, under some trees. They're a bit further away from the house, so it's harder to care for them. But they're large and I think over time they'll be an integral part of our household. I made the mistake of feeding them spent brewing grain, which very quickly got extremely dry and hot... so we're building up again after that mistake!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_SIy2KaI7_k/WtbOWtqr-QI/AAAAAAAAHkw/_X8wr7caUUo8R_DL4zWuFCgtephSLuywACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6685.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_SIy2KaI7_k/WtbOWtqr-QI/AAAAAAAAHkw/_X8wr7caUUo8R_DL4zWuFCgtephSLuywACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6685.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">You can see that at the moment, because of the pig and everything else eating our scraps, the worms mainly live on newspaper. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
We don't have enough to feed all of them, so I feed them manure at times, and have two bins where I take compost out fairly regularly, whereas I leave the two bathtubs alone right now. I have one bin that is just for cat litter, and I will never harvest from that: it's just so that we don't throw cat poop in the trash.<br />
<br />
Worm composting is a kind of cold composting, so it's not a good idea to compost things where you're very worried about pathogens, unless you're never going to harvest from that bin. In a drought situation, vermicastings are truly phenomenal for increasing the water holding capacity of small volumes of soil (i.e. if you doing row gardening, it'll make less of a difference), particularly if you're gardening in raised beds or containers. Generally, vermicastings tend to be bacteria-dominated, which means that it is great for vegetables.<br />
<br />
Ok, so while we love vermicastings it's not our only type of composting: we do a few types of hot composting:<br />
<br />
<i>Humanure compost</i><br />
Our humanure compost gets very hot, but as a failsafe we also leave it for one year so that the pathogen cycles are broken. The issue with this is that the volume of compost is much less than it would be if we did a rapid cycle of hot composting. So sometimes this is a bit sad because a year's worth of humanure for five people, mixed with a huge amount of straw, ends up being just enough (fairly phenomenal) input for a few fruit trees. So it's not a huge quantity, but it's going to have a compounding effect over the years.<br />
<br />
<i>Berkeley pile</i><br />
The <a href="http://vric.ucdavis.edu/pdf/compost_rapidcompost.pdf" target="_blank">rapid hot composting style</a> is great for vegetables and in contexts where you are starting out with a low volume of organic matter in the soil (like our very sandy, drought-stricken environment). You do need some space to build the pile and turn it. When I need to renew a vegetable bed (or if I have a sudden flux of leaves, to balance my regular deliveries of manure), or have some energy, it's fast, you get good compost, and you get a good volume of organic matter. And horse manure, which usually can't be helpful to my vegetables in the short term, is ready to go into the garden in just 18 days (versus the year I usually wait otherwise).<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hBhvBy1tL1M/WtbOY9kbVQI/AAAAAAAAHlE/tYvDQcjbddEAGlDMO9uY-AaJR_X6celWQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6691.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hBhvBy1tL1M/WtbOY9kbVQI/AAAAAAAAHlE/tYvDQcjbddEAGlDMO9uY-AaJR_X6celWQCLcBGAs/s400/IMG_6691.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is day 8 of the current pile, and it's already starting to look really dark and crumbly-- 10 more days (5 more turns!) to go.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Other kinds of composting:<br />
<i>Chickens</i><br />
Every week, I dump two bags of horse manure, 2 bags of alpaca manure, and two bags of straw into the chicken coop. The chickens free range on about 1/4 of the property, so we given them a specific set of the manure inputs for them to work through. I put their mixed up manure-sortof-compost directly onto the bottom of raised beds, and directly around fruit trees. It's not exactly compost, but it's not raw manure either, and it seems like a great way to get a few wheelbarrow loads of compost-like-stuff every week or two. In the long term, I'm hoping that chickens and ducks will do a lot of our composting in place, and that we can find a way to make composting for the annual garden simple, and routine (and not involve a lot of energy).<br />
<br />
<i>Ducks:</i><br />
The ducks roam around our house, so we have a lot of straw around our house to mitigate the effect of their pooping. I collect the soil around our house when I'm potting up trees or making seedling mix (I have get trees and shrubs pretty big before they get planted out... ). Duck poop is fine going directly into seedling mix, and I've had good success using a mixture of coconut coir and soil from around the house as seeding mix.<br />
<br />
<i>Horse Manure</i>:<br />
I put horse manure and straw directly around trees: no composting. Not right up against the trunk, and I don't dig it in. Basically, I'm trying to increase water holding around trees-- but I actually need to do a lot more to fertilize our trees. We have a lot of fruit trees now and it is pretty hard to keep up. I also put the guinea pig's bedding directly around a tree. This style of composting is slow and dominated by fungal action, which is beneficial for the trees. The danger of this is that persistent herbicides have been put into the straw-- either the straw eaten by the horse, or to the straw that I recycle from another household. I suspect that this has, at times, caused weird leaf things to happen in my vegetable garden, and so I'm hoping gradually I'll be applying horse manure further from trees roots, and not applying it to our vegetable garden at all. For now, the benefits of bringing in 200-300kg of free organic matter each week is pretty significant.<br />
<br />
<i>Seaweed:</i><br />
To my family's horror, I have smelly buckets of seaweed soaking in water around and about. I'm using this primarily, diluted 1:10, for our vegetables. It has to be covered to make sure mosquitoes aren't laying eggs in there, and it is pretty gross. I'm hoping I can gradually scale up to the point where I'm providing seaweed fertilizer to all our trees, as well. I basically get a 25L bucket of seaweed every trip to the beach-- 1 to 2 times a week. I'm not systematic about it, but over time, like everything, it adds up. I generally wash the seaweed in sea water at the beach to remove any sea creatures/sand. At our farm, I only rinse the seaweed if I'm adding it directly to vegetable garden beds. Otherwise, I just add water and let it sit.<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vi9DcCVHe94/WtbOX8YtvpI/AAAAAAAAHk8/n2BdXkLOuXoj0MDJGiHq0tPu-xnYrgPAACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6688.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vi9DcCVHe94/WtbOX8YtvpI/AAAAAAAAHk8/n2BdXkLOuXoj0MDJGiHq0tPu-xnYrgPAACLcBGAs/s320/IMG_6688.jpg" width="240" /></a><br />
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<i>Korean Natural farming:</i><br />
The core idea of KNF, as far as I can understand, is that you try to inoculate large volumes of compost with beneficial fungi and bacteria. There fermentation happening (as with soaking seaweed). I'm not being terribly scientific about it as yet, and I'm not going to specifically use precious rice to multiply out bacteria (unlike in Korea, we never have leftover rice!), but I'm attempting to multiply out my sourdough starter with fruit peels and other stuff. The thing I'm getting out of learning about KNF is thinking through options that provide rapid, cheap accessibility of nutrients (unlike most of my compost that is more like mulch with benefits). I'm still early on in understanding it, but it's an interesting approach in a very different climate (though they're also into it in Hawai'i, which is also different from Cape Town but shows that some of the principals must transfer).<br />
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Also, KNF has a cult-like figure at the center of it, so I'm only into it a little bit. I tend to be suspicious when one approach seems to self-assured and confident. There is just too much we cannot know.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Buckets of.... stuff...</td></tr>
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<i><br />Volcanic rock dust/Azomite:</i><br />
This is the only input that I've purchased in terms of fertility. I bought in bulk, and I give a cup per fruit tree (and a teaspoon per seedling) when I remember. I'm not systematic about it, but I'm hoping that over time it will help to provide important minerals to our relatively ancient soils.<br />
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<i>Future: </i><br />
We have some chicken manure in places where our chickens roost, and previously I've just thrown that manure around trees, to let the nutrients gradually leach down to the tree. But as I see that the trees are needing more manure, I'm planning on soaking the chicken manure in water and giving it to the trees.<br />
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<i>Closing thoughts</i><br />
As you can tell, even with just 1 acre (and actually most of our manure and composting is focused on less than 1/2 acre still) and a lot of animals to help, a lot of thought needs to go into the soil (especially in a non-ideal farming setting like sand or drought). I suspect in a few years, I will not have to put quite so much thought into composting. A lot of people swear by one style of composting, but I think there are lots of different ways to bring fertility into a space, and each philosophy seems to have benefits that depend a lot on compost and availability of scraps/manures/etc. Also, if you just do soil without thinking about sun, wind or water, things go wrong. I think I'm realising the importance of finding a lot of ways to get water to the soil, and protect plants from wind-- they're all connected and important. If you have the capacity to completely dig up your garden, bring in a truckload of compost/woodchips, and put a lot of plants/trees densely at the get go, permaculture blitz style, I'm gradually realising that dense planting of desired plants would actually decrease the need to compost somewhat. At our scale, and my level of inexperience/busy-ness at the start, we just couldn't put in enough plants all at once (though now, inspired by our nursery, I'm starting hundreds of plants at a time).<br />
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I can definitely see why people just grab bags of N-P-K, as practicing all these different kinds of composting does take time and energy. Of things that I spend energy on, this seems like an investment rather than a sunk cost, and over time we see changes in the property and are able to grow things more easily. I don't think organic farming on 1 acre has to involve of complex composting, but I have found trying a bunch of different things, for different circumstances, appeals to me. Bringing in a lot of compost at the beginning of the farm's life will hopefully facilitate a tapering off later on.<br />
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What kinds of composting are you trying?Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-53825350957363538002018-04-11T01:08:00.000-04:002018-04-11T03:30:08.442-04:00Change, growing lots of vegetables, planning my parents' house.Our street seems poised to change from primarily rural to... we're not quite sure what. So as a psychological exercise, I thought I'd write down some of my thoughts here. Our fears are rooted in the recognition that for all our dreaming, work and building, the day-to-day stuff we can't control-- whether we get in trouble for our crazy rooster and the building material constantly piling up, whether there's bike-killing traffic, whether your kids can safely go down the street-- can start to crowd out other stuff. We have neighbours who once farmed in other parts of Cape Town, and had to leave their farms because of safety -- and where daily theft forced them to stop farming, and that is also something that is on my mind. Change can feel as though the dreams we've cultivated are tenuous somehow, that they can be taken away quite rapidly.<br />
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Which made me consider the dreams themselves. As we moved to the farm we stepped onto a particular path, not just into a particular space. The space seems deeply important-- not only our house but also our fruit trees and the work I've put into the soil. Yet what's perhaps surprising is the number of things we can take with us if we ever have to leave: we're learning and internalizing ideas and lessons about growing food, bringing up our kids, being sortof-off-grid. Year-to-year, there'll be more things that tie us to this place and there'll also be ways in which the land is giving to us gifts in the here and now, in which we don't have to worry about the future.<br />
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A friend asked if I stopped blogging regularly because all our dreams of farming or unschooling or working at stuff we enjoyed were already fulfilled, and I was thinking about how it doesn't feel like that for me-- there's constant space for growth.* It feels like over the next ten or twenty years, we can continuously create a more beautiful productive space, but each year we learn stuff, and we change whether or not that beautiful space in my mind ultimately comes to be. And each year, there are things that do well and things that fail-- things that the kids love about being here, things that they don't love.<br />
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Ultimately, this farm, and now the nursery, is under our stewardship for as long as it is given to us (we hope for a good long time-- don't worry mom!), but I don't want to feel aggressively protective of it-- I want to hold on loosely, even if it goes against my controlling personality. Maybe that's where accumulation of property or money is particularly problematic-- they become markers that signal whether our lives are going well or poorly.<br />
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In the long-term, I hope we can be progressively more radical in our understanding of growth, as these outward measures don't speak to growth in our ability to communicate, our ability to know our own heart, our ability to convey kindness, to relate to those close to us in a non-manipulative way. All these things are not things that we are born with, even if we are "kind", there are different kindnesses for different circumstances.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pig is doing very well... and has a lot of character.</td></tr>
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<i style="font-family: inherit;">All roads lead to vegetable gardening</i><br />
These days, I spend a lot of my time thinking about vegetables. I've been growing vegetables-- at least a little bit-- since I started this blog ten or eleven years ago. For a while, I gardened on our fire escape in the summers in Boston-- probably in contravention of fire code. For a while in Observatory, Cape Town, I was all about urban gardening in a very small space. Then I got really discouraged about the difficulties of how little we produced. For the last two or so years, we've been on our 1-acre smallholding, but the first year or so I did very little vegetable gardening because our hugelbeds were not mature enough and our water access presented real challenges.<br />
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This year, I've been thinking a lot about our own vegetable garden, as well as about two school vegetable gardens (one for a preschool, another for a primary school) and also about creating a market garden at our nursery.<br />
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All in all, this has involved a lot of planning and a lot of gardening relative to previous years. Absolutely NOT all successful, but still, a lot of food produced. As with everything, gardening is an exercise in grappling with control-- doing what you can, knowing what is in the realm of possibility, and leaving some stuff alone. What I'm learning is that there are a lot of ways to garden successfully, and that just trying lots of different stuff, and being willing (and lets be honest, having the time, money and energy) to keep trying eventually leads you to good things. So it's just worth just trying.<br />
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I re-read Fukuoka's work recently (and also went down the rabbit hole of Korean Natural Farming), and what struck me in re-reading was not the techniques, but the journey. I'm convinced by the idea of working with nature rather than against it, but I think the process of figuring that out for each space is actually quite winding and indirect.<br />
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When I feel discouraged, as though growing on this scale is not efficient or that I kill too many plants, I think it's valuable to remember that <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/world/smallholders-food-security-and-environment" target="_blank">most of the world's food is produced by smallholder farmers</a>, on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/28/farmland-food-security-small-farmers" target="_blank">a very small amount of land.</a> Large scale agriculture is what is inefficient and unsustainable. We often get fed a message that big farmers feed the world, but that is not true. While I don't really believe the average person can grow all their <a href="http://www.daff.gov.za/docs/Infopaks/MakingDoorGardenLnD.pdf" target="_blank">vegetables on a space the size of a door</a>, just because a lot urban agriculture pinterest boards are not terribly realistic doesn't mean you can't grow a lot in a small space, over time, once you get to know your conditions and adapt to fit your circumstances. [I also think that it is meat and dairy-based diets that need larger farms, as this is where I have found it hardest, and most inefficient, to figure out how to be self-sufficient].<br />
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When I produce yucky tomatoes, I can cut the bad bits out, give them to the chickens or ducks or pig or worms, and eat the rest. When large scale farmers produces yucky tomatoes (and I'm convinced if you're gardening completely organically, you'll always have quite a lot of not-up-to-standard tomatoes) their options are much more limited, so the pressure to produce good looking tomatoes, at whatever environmental cost, is so much higher.<br />
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On our farm, as I plan better for the future, I begin to see a way to produce all our vegetables and fruit and quite a few of our calorie crops pretty efficiently. Not all our calories, by any means, but a lot of food nevertheless, and we're creeping up calorie wise. At the school garden, suddenly it doesn't take much to produce all the greens needed for two schools for lunch for 160 kids, even if we can't produce a lot of other items just yet.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Propagation by cuttings</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">With the weather cooling down, it feels like we finally emerged on the other side of a very hard summer. Some of our nursery stock died, some survived. On the other side, I've learned about cuttings. I even have a pair of secateurs in the car, in my bag, or even in my pocket, to whip out if someone has something nice sticking out over their fence... My kids are a mixture of embarrassed and totally into it. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Propagation (and growing all our ginger and tumeric indoors, since our climate is not warm enough to grow it outside)</td></tr>
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<i><br />My parents' house: Connecting to the grid</i><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">We're looking forward to having my parents living with us on the farm, hopefully later this year. After six months of waiting, we thought our building plans for my parents little house were close to being approved, but not yet. It's been a really long and painful process.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, you ask, will my parents house be off-grid? Will it be built with mud and hay? Sandbags? Tires?No, sadly none of the above. We did pursue the possibility of building with sandbags but we weren't successful -- the combination of expertise, availability, affordability and council approval is pretty challenging to get right. I hope if we ever build another structure, I hope it will be something exciting and fun (TIRES-- earthships-- are still my favourite), but this time around we feel ok about building small, but pretty conventionally.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">On being off-grid-- sortof. We'll going to have many of the things we have at our house that only increase our standard of living (consider this the definitive list of things that won't significantly impact on your happiness): (1) low-pressure Solar geyser (water heater) on the roof, (2) household water going out to greywater systems-- moringa trees and banana trees, hopefully, (3) rainwater tanks (4) composting bucket toilet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">So I guess the main thing that isn't on there is our PV solar panels. Having those, rather than municipal electricity, does significantly impact our standard of living (no fridge or booster for the geyser on the roof, so sometimes no hot water) and we're pretty sure we're messing up our battery because in winter we sometimes want to use our computers at night. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Anyway, I'm still really excited to be hopefully close to building my parents' house, and also to growing a lot of stuff on their corner of the property-- I haven't grown anything there because we knew their house would be coming, but once their house is up we'll be growing a lot more.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah tried out his first day-camp last week, where he learned ukulele, trampoline, and hula. Felt like a milestone-- our boy is growing up...</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />*I slowed down blogging because I figure there's enough content out there on elimination communication (replace with any hippie topic), and I don't care enough to evangelize on any one life choice. I also decided around the same time that I didn't want to monetize the blog.</span><br />
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Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-41473494834805340832018-03-09T07:15:00.000-05:002018-03-10T04:55:10.981-05:00Lent, raising money, vegetable gardens<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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March is a special time for us. We started a Lenten-type practice with our old church in Boston about ten years ago. For the 40 days before Easter, the idea is to reflect on Jesus as best we can, and ask for what we truly want or need, with the premise that this is a good way to experience God’s presence. The process is profound for me because I don’t often step back, pray, or think about my deepest needs in any sustained way.<br />
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As part of Lent, Eug and I give up watching TV shows for the month of March. This year we are also doing intermittent fasting. I generally approach the fasting (from both TV and food) with vague dread. More often than I like to admit, a 40 minute show and cup of hot chocolate at the end of the day is the highlight of my day. When lent begins, I go through a slump the first few days. I find the space and silence alarming— I hate how slowly the time passes getting Hana to sleep without having our laptop open! Then suddenly, a few days in, it’s ok, sortof peaceful and calm. Eug and I talk a bit more than usual, I’m more aware of the kids’ need for some special moments in their day (as now I share this moment with them rather than seeking it after they’re asleep), I think more about the big picture.<br />
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This month, thinking about the big picture led me to <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/heart-soil" target="_blank">ask for money</a>, which is new for me and may be a bit odd and creepy. With buying the nursery, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/heartandsoilza" target="_blank">Heart & Soil</a> (Yup, now you can like it on Facebook!) there have been opportunities for jadedness, cynicism and fear to creep in. The harshness of our economic system is much more personal than previously, and not knowing how to change it in the very small, personal space of our own tiny business. In fact, it’s pretty hard not to perpetuate that system. The act of land ownership itself, one could argue, is fraught. Yet I am convinced it’s better than saving with Apple and Visa stocks because it’s right there in front of us: we’re responsible for how we treat people and how we create value, it’s not spread between a million shareholders who want to see their stock value increase. In this grey area that is ownership, there is space to make progress, to the current limits of our faith.<br />
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Here is where the narrative “I’m busy and don’t have bandwidth to take on a new project” was initially paralyzing— I am indeed busy, at least by my standards, and my worry is often that I will not be left with enough energy to give my kids and Eug. Yet there is also this subtle burden brought by the desire to limit and to say no when good things require attention. In a quiet moment I almost immediately felt this narrative of busy-ness is just one narrative-- though there a physical limits to what I can do, obviously. Being happily busy with things that one is called to is surely life-giving.<br />
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In this vein… Eug and figured out that the next step for us is converting a portion of the nursery land into a market garden. Historically, vegetables have been grown haphazardly at the nursery— between rocks and rubble, probably on the down-low. It started when one of the employees at Heart & Soil suggested that he had friends and family who wanted to buy Zimbabwean vegetables, and suggested we should grow them on site. Yet vegetable gardens are not profitable (well, nurseries are not profitable either, most of the time, but that’s a story for another day) but they can still support people, if the overhead and initial outlay can be somehow covered— support people by supplying organic greens, support people by stabilizing employment. One could argue that producing green, growing, stuff is the one thing that SHOULD be profitable. Again, I digress.<br />
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Given the out-of-pocket costs of the nursery, we had reached the limits of what we could do, and thought of asking for help. Asking for help means we need to be accountable to others in a different way than if we were doing it all ourselves, that it is not an act of sacrifice or altruism but a collective attempt at arbitrage— leveraging money, skills and social capital to do something that potentially ripples out positively. The ripples are not a sure thing, and they are little ripples not big waves. We're not trying to be heroes or save anyone. Still, I feel totally invested in the attempt.<br />
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Thank you for reading this long spiel, and for any thoughts you can send our way- I’ll keep you updated as we set up the market garden-- hopefully we'll make strides in April.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah found this gecko all wrapped up in a spider's web, wriggling around. It was incredibly hard to get the sticky net off it-- it was completely encased. Interfering with nature never felt so good (no pity for the spiders, who have more flies than they could ever dream of)</td></tr>
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Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-25143172367874789412018-02-23T06:43:00.000-05:002018-02-23T07:40:21.432-05:00January and February 2018: sharks, salty water, waiting for rainThanks to donations of large amounts of water from farmer's dams and farmers being cut off, the water situation seems... better in Cape Town as a whole, with our day zero moved back substantially.<br />
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With two acres, now, and responsibility for 2 intensive school gardens, I feel more like a farmer-- in this drought, I sympathize with farmers more and more, the more my livelihood (or at least my actual day-to-day life) feels tied up with the experiences of farmers. (side note: we have a new president! Yay! And, on the empathizing with farmers note, I feel simultaneously happy and terrified about land expropriation without compensation. YES! Finally movement on land issues! Eeek! Wait! Not my land please!) Our nursery water has turned salty, so we're trying to figure out what to do-- our nursey stock is dying rapidly and we have to decide whether to water with salt water or not water at all-- which feels like no choice at all. Unlike iron, salty water is very hard to fix... so we're praying that it is seasonal and the salt content goes back down once there's been proper rain. I've learned that having a struggling nursery is intense, even if one goes in knowing it is struggling.<br />
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But otherwise, apart from some rats eating our ducklings, the animals are well, the vegetables are relatively ok (no thanks to you, MOLE RATS) and the trees are almost through the summer. Soon, things will cool down and I believe in my gut that next summer will be easier.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hX46joKXnqg/Wo-hCGhK-nI/AAAAAAAAHZE/oH8AWUrSDZcJ9_uTrKSCXKtybfFnwaHSgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_4673.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hX46joKXnqg/Wo-hCGhK-nI/AAAAAAAAHZE/oH8AWUrSDZcJ9_uTrKSCXKtybfFnwaHSgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_4673.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We only have one guinea pig, but he's living the good life-- we've finally found an option that works pretty well. Guinea pigs outside don't work because of predators. There's guinea pig poop everywhere, but he's a very happy guy.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vZI8yLBa4BE/Wo-hWD-bo3I/AAAAAAAAHZU/hNF-3T-CmEYo7eZ4QNHoL1w5Vtze3krtwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5147.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vZI8yLBa4BE/Wo-hWD-bo3I/AAAAAAAAHZU/hNF-3T-CmEYo7eZ4QNHoL1w5Vtze3krtwCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5147.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Uncomfortable. Cat pretending to be interested in a spot on the floor. Guinea pigs knows from experience she's faking it. No, I don't know why there's bloody toilet paper in the corner. It's human blood though, if that helps.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GB1TuvjA0SQ/Wo-qZdZlbDI/AAAAAAAAHcM/EdeMVMv9OGAL1zyV8jOQHGXkYlpTciXegCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6156.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GB1TuvjA0SQ/Wo-qZdZlbDI/AAAAAAAAHcM/EdeMVMv9OGAL1zyV8jOQHGXkYlpTciXegCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6156.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bubbles gets to eat the freshest produce in the family. He has his own farm-in-a-pot.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-20C3pyb51-c/Wo-qc1p92LI/AAAAAAAAHcQ/skFc71BezKABydnKb7um8AthkikH2aLIgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6178.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="640" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At rest.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VweqA2yCUZA/Wo-hJIbl-HI/AAAAAAAAHZI/_DFDgp-RIsAOmscJIjNYuArpFskuht0LgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5046.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VweqA2yCUZA/Wo-hJIbl-HI/AAAAAAAAHZI/_DFDgp-RIsAOmscJIjNYuArpFskuht0LgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5046.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We found the body of a small shark floating in the ocean, and brought it home for further examination.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CxqKSZNXuYI/Wo-hVcnOT0I/AAAAAAAAHZM/eMj08MfwrVAHIItxk8jJVxRHyrlNShmVgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5048.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CxqKSZNXuYI/Wo-hVcnOT0I/AAAAAAAAHZM/eMj08MfwrVAHIItxk8jJVxRHyrlNShmVgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5048.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hana was convinced it was a doll for a while.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VPteWnwGPTA/Wo-nHNhAoHI/AAAAAAAAHbk/JIVpnsA87JIa5cNMcwFxEN4GESUeoZWqgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6052.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VPteWnwGPTA/Wo-nHNhAoHI/AAAAAAAAHbk/JIVpnsA87JIa5cNMcwFxEN4GESUeoZWqgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6052.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah did a dissection, with the help of Sam's dissection kit and a shark model that Meera sent us!</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4oYaXvvmgGY/Wo-nOu7k0VI/AAAAAAAAHbo/WU7QgK-xEG0_8FfrdzW6oyJnQUHTmW9PgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6055.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4oYaXvvmgGY/Wo-nOu7k0VI/AAAAAAAAHbo/WU7QgK-xEG0_8FfrdzW6oyJnQUHTmW9PgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6055.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our goose keeps nibbling everything because he's a bit blind and thinks everything is food. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pOgW220gG5g/Wo-hV_TF65I/AAAAAAAAHZQ/vwmdQ5EPNNcCj_bI5D-XaMB671OAW93pACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5080.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pOgW220gG5g/Wo-hV_TF65I/AAAAAAAAHZQ/vwmdQ5EPNNcCj_bI5D-XaMB671OAW93pACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5080.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If you're on instagram (I'm not yet...) Eug is at https://www.instagram.com/ebillustrated/ </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jPA3aG_KQXc/Wo-iBQjGckI/AAAAAAAAHZo/TSwlm8WpyD8W9wywxlk9Q-vrZAF0QQxeQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5222.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jPA3aG_KQXc/Wo-iBQjGckI/AAAAAAAAHZo/TSwlm8WpyD8W9wywxlk9Q-vrZAF0QQxeQCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5222.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our first bunch of bananas is maturing. It has taken ages and we are extraordinarily grateful...</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ryha3gz0Tm4/Wo-iFq4eHKI/AAAAAAAAHZs/1LObhw0NY3I_o_8QCodZPlUne7yublAjACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5272.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ryha3gz0Tm4/Wo-iFq4eHKI/AAAAAAAAHZs/1LObhw0NY3I_o_8QCodZPlUne7yublAjACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5272.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah remains the only person who can pick up Henry II when he ventures into illegal territory.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jp9lekbbOwA/Wo-lh4VPUBI/AAAAAAAAHa0/zbDInC_Y4PYeEaNx35Wq_d_-d_hox-M3gCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5773.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jp9lekbbOwA/Wo-lh4VPUBI/AAAAAAAAHa0/zbDInC_Y4PYeEaNx35Wq_d_-d_hox-M3gCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5773.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our male goose seems to have had a stroke. He's doing ok, but we have to nurse him a fair bit-- he's like a very old man.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lylvb6YPTys/Wo-ipQAg1RI/AAAAAAAAHZ8/zHguCkjWxbsktgw2NiBt2iTgg07uM9bhwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5672.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lylvb6YPTys/Wo-ipQAg1RI/AAAAAAAAHZ8/zHguCkjWxbsktgw2NiBt2iTgg07uM9bhwCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5672.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I3SrI3kj9UA/Wo-i-yXA_5I/AAAAAAAAHaE/4-x5X85sgpQM2qna_AiQ3L8cEqjZPhDxQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5690%2B2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I3SrI3kj9UA/Wo-i-yXA_5I/AAAAAAAAHaE/4-x5X85sgpQM2qna_AiQ3L8cEqjZPhDxQCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5690%2B2.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sometimes people say how lovely it is that our kids play outside so much etc. But I think it's worth noting that they spend a ton of time doing various things on the iPad, also. I think there's plenty of time for both. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-buX6ahT9kZ0/Wo-iogXQrLI/AAAAAAAAHZ4/L-U7-HCQIvknIgeUC8Z47bdX3iq56kXOgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5747.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-buX6ahT9kZ0/Wo-iogXQrLI/AAAAAAAAHZ4/L-U7-HCQIvknIgeUC8Z47bdX3iq56kXOgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5747.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah is really interested in photographing interesting creatures.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kWe5Le7CTLE/Wo-hCL5dTsI/AAAAAAAAHZA/6ASZohmT4Fk-x2Q91djM5J68Xe6v1g3tACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_4699.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kWe5Le7CTLE/Wo-hCL5dTsI/AAAAAAAAHZA/6ASZohmT4Fk-x2Q91djM5J68Xe6v1g3tACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_4699.JPG" width="640" /></a><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p2xJyKVaunk/Wo-mWyL5TDI/AAAAAAAAHbM/LtvWYWBsWAwFp5fEZXbMWCPuPOot6PPuACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6012.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p2xJyKVaunk/Wo-mWyL5TDI/AAAAAAAAHbM/LtvWYWBsWAwFp5fEZXbMWCPuPOot6PPuACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6012.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We have an area of our reservoir dedicated to the protection of frogs. Ok, it's just a pile of bricks. But it does the job. When we actually have water again, we'll have to figure out how to pile them up so that there's always something above the water</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k0aNSi9NxRw/Wo-kajBOi5I/AAAAAAAAHaY/qnxfyKGE14E_uC0-DruUJAMxJoCHkw8mQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5749.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-k0aNSi9NxRw/Wo-kajBOi5I/AAAAAAAAHaY/qnxfyKGE14E_uC0-DruUJAMxJoCHkw8mQCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5749.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It can be hard to find things that bring together all our kids. Noah leading them in starting a fire for tea is one of those unicorn things. a 7yo, 5yo and 2yo Starting an outdoor fire during a drought. What could possibly go wrong. We were watching.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cazUe2jeBDs/Wo-knIdy7AI/AAAAAAAAHac/K0ilD_fYZjEEghJbE0Ivu9WxZJS282XTQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5751.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cazUe2jeBDs/Wo-knIdy7AI/AAAAAAAAHac/K0ilD_fYZjEEghJbE0Ivu9WxZJS282XTQCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5751.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mint tea.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--DV-c-rN7WU/Wo-lJTMIJzI/AAAAAAAAHas/Yi-poqhLcHQOj5sa5ZT6RnQD2RcCf33OACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5952.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--DV-c-rN7WU/Wo-lJTMIJzI/AAAAAAAAHas/Yi-poqhLcHQOj5sa5ZT6RnQD2RcCf33OACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5952.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The kids are really into minecraft legos... The countdown to getting minecraft is on, and I have an alert for whenever minecraft legos are being sold second hand on Gumtree.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KhDS9tBYKXU/Wo-lSVADVxI/AAAAAAAAHaw/LNJeW05f2SoPvnnlbn8do6UVQkpT1UpggCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5969.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KhDS9tBYKXU/Wo-lSVADVxI/AAAAAAAAHaw/LNJeW05f2SoPvnnlbn8do6UVQkpT1UpggCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5969.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HlDTmqVEBW4/Wo-mNa0Fz-I/AAAAAAAAHbI/MgOYgwFb75QRIhpVBJcsJJVZ_KXlsGi8ACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6003.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HlDTmqVEBW4/Wo-mNa0Fz-I/AAAAAAAAHbI/MgOYgwFb75QRIhpVBJcsJJVZ_KXlsGi8ACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6003.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is our first watermelon of the season. I planted Sugar baby-- not sure if this is normal, but I planted 10 seeds, got 4 vines to transplant successfully, and will likely get 4 watermelons total. Which I guess is still cheaper than buying 4 at the shop, right? Right? right. What is cool is that I'm going to have a lot more seeds for next year.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oRpi7ElHGh0/Wo-no_UMYGI/AAAAAAAAHb0/C9YJfnULHzk0bYVH3hrWAqEI21hB3YnogCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6057.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oRpi7ElHGh0/Wo-no_UMYGI/AAAAAAAAHb0/C9YJfnULHzk0bYVH3hrWAqEI21hB3YnogCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6057.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My parents said they always used to store pumpkins on roofs, so I thought I'd store ours on our Jojo rainwater tank. They were too heavy, so now they're back on the table. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VteGefuhRP4/Wo-ntQ4GncI/AAAAAAAAHb4/KyemnNTdLHIc9PxNG7rFcvYJW666AWRVACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6058.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VteGefuhRP4/Wo-ntQ4GncI/AAAAAAAAHb4/KyemnNTdLHIc9PxNG7rFcvYJW666AWRVACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_6058.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We started out with a good pumpkin and butternut harvest, as well as really good amounts of zucchini, but sadly it's slowing down as disease starts to hit, and we're starting to get a lot of shield bugs laying their eggs in the zucchini and butternut. Here is where there are probably some important lessons to be learned about figuring out the best calculus between size of garden, the amount of labour available, the amount of composting materials available, and what we actually eat. I generally try to grow a lot of things that are expensive at the store (peppers, tomatoes) but these don't necessarily provide a lot of calories. Even though there's so much still to figure out, I'm so glad to be starting to actually harvesting stuff! </td></tr>
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<br />Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-62230466242202321892018-01-22T05:26:00.002-05:002018-01-24T23:41:13.279-05:00Day zero and the challenge of becoming a hopeful, non-cynical prepperThere's rising panic over our taps being switched off on <a href="http://awsassets.wwf.org.za/downloads/WWFWaterFile_FINAL.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: line-through;" target="_blank">21 April</a><u> </u>12 April, and some 4 million people going to collect 25L of water, per person, per day, from some designated taps spread across the city. Some have rightly pointed out that this is what people in informal settlements have been doing for years. There's fear of anarchy and a lot of people practicing picking up 25L containers and collapsing (I also fall over when I try to pick up 25L with one hand, but it seems ok if I'm able to divide into two buckets-- still it obviously won't be workable for a lot of people).<br />
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A couple of things come to mind in the context of this panic-- albeit from my own position of privilege. I think everyone in Cape Town should be carefully preparing for Day Zero. At the same time, it's worth stepping back and thinking, without any panic, about this crisis, and also about the next crisis, one that we can't anticipate.<br />
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There's quite a bit of overlap in the prepper (emergency preparedness)/homesteader communities in the U.S. (where a lot of blogs and videos originate, though I suspect there are many preppers in South Africa, also). Still, I sometimes distance myself from the preppers because a) I'm worried that they may support Trump, b) they are sometimes heavily armed and preparing for the zombie mob, which I think has had many negative unintended consequences in the many years when there hasn't been any zombie mob. c) they sometimes seem to hate or fear people. All of which are stereotypes, I know, so I'm sorry if it seems like I'm perpetuating those.<br />
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So in this circumstance I really appreciate some of the helpful information and ideas that preppers bring to the table. About 3 years ago, we had severe electricity shortages. About 2.5 years ago, there were a few days when we couldn't leave our street because of violent protests in the nearby township. And now, there's the possibility of us having no water whatsoever, and the type of chaos that might ensue. There are some preppers who argue that there won't be one massive mega-collapse of capitalism as we know it, but rather a slow decline. The crises of the last few years may have been a demonstration of that. That's not even including household crises-- like illness or unemployment-- that we all have had at some point. I really don't want to live in fear of the next crisis or be constantly focused on others' perceived shortcomings; I also don't think that capitalism and consumption as we know it can continue.<br />
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I think the first way to be a hopeful, non-cynical prepper is to recognize that we can't control everything, and that things might go badly, and things might be hard, but don't need to break us. (then again, they may totally break me, and that is also potentially ok, one moves on from brokenness. I'm not meaning I'm stronger than the average person here). I'm saying fearing difficult situations is not the best approach, and preparing for the absolute worst sometimes means being consumed by thoughts of the world at its absolute worst. Which I find is too depressing, and often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In my case my faith plays a role in how I think about my own limitations.<br />
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The second way is to do what we can to have systems in place for lots of different kinds of possibilities. I know I'm speaking to the middle-class here. It's really hard to prepare for crisis if you're already in crisis, so I'm not meaning to diminish that for anyone who might be reading from within a crisis.<br />
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By this I mean when it comes to security, energy, water and food, it makes sense to have several options available, or be in the process of putting options in place. Not necessarily expensive, complex options-- rather things that will help us live a better life even if there is no crisis. I'll go through how we think about each of those four areas:<br />
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<b>Security</b><br />
We don't have much in the way of security because that's not really our thing, it's a bit of a weakness. We don't want to do the scary electric fence thing, but we're gradually making our fence stronger and safer by planting thorny, hardy but still beautiful plants on our perimeter (who may die during the drought, but I think they may survive). We also stay home a lot, have a small house, and are thinking about doing something to make our doors and windows a little more secure-- in the next few years.<br />
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<b>Energy</b><br />
For energy, we have access to municipal power, we have solar power, a low-pressure solar geyser, a woodstove for winter, a sunstove for summer, and we cook day-to-day with gas, and keep spare cannisters.<br />
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<b>Water (and sanitation)</b><br />
For water, we have a wellpoint <a href="http://www.concretegardener.com/2017/11/wellpoint-electric-pump-small-harvests.html" target="_blank">(recent)</a> and collect all rainwater <a href="http://www.concretegardener.com/2017/10/manual-labour-and-meaning-drip.html" target="_blank">(to a Jojo tank and reservoir)</a>; no water that enters the property leaves, as we also have two simple greywater systems. We're also gradually putting together a two-week supply of drinking water, by which time we hope to have collected enough rain water to survive and thrive without any municipal water. We've used a composting (dry) toilet exclusively for a few years now, and I write about it a little <a href="http://www.concretegardener.com/2015/09/more-off-grid-ish-farmlike-stuff-for-us.html?m=1" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://www.concretegardener.com/2015/07/beginner-experiences-in-cape-town-small.html" target="_blank">here</a>, and <a href="http://www.concretegardener.com/2015/08/" target="_blank">here</a>. The key is that we didn't put everything together all at once-- we set up slowly, and things started to work better over time. Still, we're using our greywater reeds less as we try to not waste the little dishwater we use.<br />
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<b>Food</b><br />
For food, I'm working on improving our storage of some key groceries (I haven't preserved much in recent years), but we're also working on growing more and more of our fruits and vegetables (using stored rain water from the reservoir) and expanding our flock of chickens and ducks (and making sure we have thought through their feed, also). This might not be possible for you, or it may be more possible than you expect. We spend a few days a month organizing and distributing <a href="https://www.gfcvalley.org/" target="_blank">staples </a>(meat, legumes, dairy, grains, oil) of pretty large quantities of food, from small scale businesses and farmers, to between 20 and 30 families, including ourselves. This might get interrupted in a crisis, but I appreciate that it doesn't involve the complex supply chains of large supermarkets. For me, these are less about pessimism and anticipating doomsday, and more about homesteading in a way that adds resilience. I imagine we'll always get some food from elsewhere at least some of the time, but learning how to grow and compost adds resilience to our household and to our community. It's not just about growing, it's also about learning to cook and bake good food with few ingredients and little water and energy. All of which takes time and can't happen all at once in the context of crisis. In the crisis our fears come to the fore and it's hard to do anything other than crisis mode. A lot of learning probably also happens during crisis, but I think it's often less costly and more gentle on the environment if one changes slowly.<br />
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Resilience is also about finding ways to not contribute to the crisis (even being part of the traffic when there's a rush to the supermarket or the water line). Even not needing too much money, or having a few people to support us in our kids' learning, seems to be part of thriving independent of crises. I don't think high-tech fixes are necessarily the answer (60m deep boreholes with advanced filtration so you can still use insane amounts of water, for example). There might be cool technological stuff, but I feel like a lot of times it's about learning how to do basic things-- as much as is possible given one's current circumstances-- and finding our ways to good systems through trial and error. This also teaches us to live more simply, which I think is one key to not contributing to crises. Learning happens slowly and incrementally-- we certainly have a long way to go.Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8026557319568945115.post-25956503058786055172018-01-08T14:53:00.000-05:002018-01-23T05:20:03.639-05:00Updates: Buying a nursery, 11 year Moringas, pig, protecting chicks, school gardensSorry, this is going to be scattered because it's been so long since I last posted:<br />
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<i>Heart & Soil nursery</i><br />
We really like our area, and our mini-farm. Despite it's challenges, it feels like a good fit for who we are. Like a lot of things that have happened in our lives, our farm feels like it's a gift from God. The drought has been really hard on a lot of places, including nurseries, and one of the nurseries on our street put their land (1 acre) on the market a few months ago. We ended up buying it, including the nursery stock.<br />
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We've been thinking for a while about responsible savings. Having kids, it doesn't feel right to us (at least not right now) not to build any retirement savings if it's within our power to save, especially given our relatively tenuous work incomes, the fact we have chosen to be completely uninsured, and the knowledge that although our lifestyle is pretty simple, it still costs some money. The nursery felt like a good middle ground for where we are at: it's not giving away all our savings, but it's also not putting money into huge companies.<br />
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We want to keep the plot as a nursery, and keep the people who work/live there employed. Much of the nursery management will continue to be in the hands of an experienced nurseryman, and we'll try hard to support without being overly involved, at least while I have full time non-farm work.<br />
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Despite pretty high financial stakes (retirement no longer in U.S. Stocks!), it felt very low stakes-- the logical next step in an adventure that will inevitably have hard parts. Despite feeling this is low-stakes and good-- the hardest thing about taking ownership of this property is still facing up to fears around money. We are trying really hard to fight that idea that we own or deserve our money. Even so, knowing the nursery is not going to make money for a long time quickly brings the focus back to money as we grapple with our responsibilities for paying people. When I am focused on money, it becomes about power, and I wonder if the opposite of coercive, extractive, money-oriented power in this scenario is not powerlessness but a spirit of learning and partnership. For my part, I have an opportunity to learn about a vast, vast array of plants.<br />
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Fun fact since you made it all the way here: the nursery came with piles and piles of props from the movie 10,000BC. Giant fake trees. plastic flowers. Yup. The previous owner designs sets for movies, and 10,000BC was the big break. So it's a mess but if you wade your way through all the movie props, there's an amazing variety of plants and extraordinary plant knowledge. It's a special place for a lot of people in this area, including us. So in that spirit we present: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/heartandsoilza" target="_blank">Heart & Soil</a>. Please go and visit, or tell friends in Cape Town about us. There'll be a fake flower in it for you.<br />
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<i>11 years</i><br />
In December, Eug and I celebrated eleven years of marriage with moringa! Eug knows me too well. Well actually, I sent him a link to the moringa seeds, and it happened to be on our anniversary so we're calling it an anniversary gift (um, from both of us to both of us?)<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L6Z6cspilWw/WjtVS0TWdcI/AAAAAAAAHRI/grWbX16Y-8QpASS-0n_6ltpxUx207TPLQCLcBGAs/s1600/f4c9b244-907c-42cf-a52e-3e0449d25f26.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L6Z6cspilWw/WjtVS0TWdcI/AAAAAAAAHRI/grWbX16Y-8QpASS-0n_6ltpxUx207TPLQCLcBGAs/s640/f4c9b244-907c-42cf-a52e-3e0449d25f26.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There are definitely going to be moringa trees for sale...</td></tr>
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<i>Pig</i><br />
Right before the New Year, our neighbour brought a pig for Noah to care for. I happened to be at my desk at the time, and by the time I emerged we had a runt pig. The pig was getting hurt by his brothers and sisters, and when it moved in it was still struggling the first couple of days at our place. Now he's doing pretty well-- though he's still tiny. And very intelligent. Aargh.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ip9cS77fyxM/WlRLwdCsobI/AAAAAAAAHSs/oFvjfQu2LYUzqLpI9219tmtVClpPw_BzgCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5547.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ip9cS77fyxM/WlRLwdCsobI/AAAAAAAAHSs/oFvjfQu2LYUzqLpI9219tmtVClpPw_BzgCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5547.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">piglet likes snuggles and getting his back scratched...</td></tr>
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<i>Building new safe options for chicks and ducklings.</i><br />
It's been a little while since we built outbuildings for our ducklings and chicks, as our large structure had been working really well until recently, when mongooses or cats started getting through the mesh and killing off animals in large numbers. So we've converted the large structure into a safe/enclosed structure for young trees-- a kind of mini-nursery. In the drought, our property has much better water options than the nursery so we can keep sensitive trees here rather than at Heart & Soil.<br />
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Eug has moved the large chicken enclosure and is making a system where we have 3 small enclosures for chicks and ducks to rotate through. We're not buying anything new in doing this project, we're just trying to make a better system with what we have. It's really painful to lose 2-3 animals a night, so we're hoping this will to dissuade predators (Once they don't have success for a while, they move on-- our rats are good eating, guys!).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2wijQ9hOYtM/WlPIGadZugI/AAAAAAAAHRY/hkZdUALdttsUwE-PZLSk9cxYvB4ojWITwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5444.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2wijQ9hOYtM/WlPIGadZugI/AAAAAAAAHRY/hkZdUALdttsUwE-PZLSk9cxYvB4ojWITwCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5444.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noah made the guinea pig a Christmas tree</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-shhx7V9vBvk/WlPITcEKf0I/AAAAAAAAHRg/28HttX2850A8apFR8d2bD9IukU91unW_ACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5467.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-shhx7V9vBvk/WlPITcEKf0I/AAAAAAAAHRg/28HttX2850A8apFR8d2bD9IukU91unW_ACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5467.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Summer harvest.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WdIAipoV5Mg/WlPIMfaTyPI/AAAAAAAAHRc/exnIVdNRGUkilD3jgXfw2zHwBavEmy_1ACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5534.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WdIAipoV5Mg/WlPIMfaTyPI/AAAAAAAAHRc/exnIVdNRGUkilD3jgXfw2zHwBavEmy_1ACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5534.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Partying the New Year</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6birk4Mxxss/WlPI2Q8HrUI/AAAAAAAAHRo/Gx7MOx-GUasx9aGiUTJpw57V7SQQ3NCLwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5671.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6birk4Mxxss/WlPI2Q8HrUI/AAAAAAAAHRo/Gx7MOx-GUasx9aGiUTJpw57V7SQQ3NCLwCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5671.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">New coup (for night time, and hopefully for sitting hens)</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-01Q_eXlgcJE/WlPIpBg1eRI/AAAAAAAAHRk/zxgNHH25ET8Bkeqn-2HgvsTWMG8Dz5xnwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5677.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-01Q_eXlgcJE/WlPIpBg1eRI/AAAAAAAAHRk/zxgNHH25ET8Bkeqn-2HgvsTWMG8Dz5xnwCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5677.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A hinged tortoise arrived on our property</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Nhoq-3eEOR4/WlPJauH2aEI/AAAAAAAAHRw/muRkc3Qf8wkynjaXtLUM4iQSkoHxnKJwQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5446.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Nhoq-3eEOR4/WlPJauH2aEI/AAAAAAAAHRw/muRkc3Qf8wkynjaXtLUM4iQSkoHxnKJwQCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5446.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Very small hatch-- one of hens only hatched out a single chick. Oh well.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-tesGrhuGQhc/WlPJeMh1fmI/AAAAAAAAHR0/TWGomqi9GEE311_PcNvywTvxUxZvu_E8QCLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5449.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="480" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">These are some seeds from a seed sharing group of African women. It makes me so excited and happy to be growing some of these seeds on the farm. I'm going to save the corn for next year (when I have infrastructure), but I'm growing okra and many different beans.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our first pumpkin of the year. I can just barely carry it. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NRZv-suK6t0/WlPJl03wW3I/AAAAAAAAHR4/mH9ciYeRF8o_NnyX9AL6krimZ53fzHxRACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_5726.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NRZv-suK6t0/WlPJl03wW3I/AAAAAAAAHR4/mH9ciYeRF8o_NnyX9AL6krimZ53fzHxRACLcBGAs/s640/IMG_5726.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Our male duck, Male seems to be slowing down and we've not been getting many hatchlings from our broody ducks, but our grey duck-- Fluffy-- just hatched out eight babies. We'll keep a male from this batch so that Male can live out his days in peace and we can keep breeding ducks now and then.</td></tr>
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<i><br />School gardens</i><br />
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I've been really busy with two school gardens at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, as part of my role as a researcher. I'm not a professional when it comes to making urban gardens... I have a lot to learn, but I'm helping to start them because I'm able to leverage my time and sometimes a little funding as a researcher. If you're interested in following along, I'd really appreciate you following Nourishing Spaces, and checking out project videos that come out as the school garden work evolves. In the videos, we'll try not to make more of the project than it is-- these gardens are not going to make anyone healthy in and of themselves, nor solve systemic injustices. We'll just try to make the gardens as good as they can be, over time and through partnership.<br />
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Our kids are also starting their own channels on YouTube, so it seems to be becoming a family thing. I'll link to them once they're properly up and running. Noah and Eli really enjoy using ProCreate, an app on the iPad, to draw, and are gradually learning how to animate. Noah is loving listening to audio books, since we learned we could borrow 3 books a month from the Cambridge public library system. I've been reading a lot of Dick King-Smith and W.J. Corbett books to the boys for the last month or so. Hana is not so into books yet, but she has lots of other loves (including YouTube)!Concrete Gardenerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12368862362127742038noreply@blogger.com1