I can't help it: back on my "the world is going to shits" mode. Went to Columbia and bought some books on Wall street, the resource based economy and a book of Rumi (but that one is pretty difficult for a square insensitve male blockhead like me).
Eh, don't worry, just let me rant for a minute, it won't last. And no it won't, maybe Pablo's will be alright yet, but whoever comes after us, ah screw em (politely), or as George Carlin says: "fuck em good". 2013 has been good to me: health, travels, relationship changes (I include my dogs here who are almost through puberty), buildings, friends, motors, friends, grants, it's all been good. We even got the O'man back in the white house, but it won't matter much. Perpetual growth on a finite planet, how come you have to be blind to rule the world? And how come we all go along with it? Just because it is comfortable. I hope next year will be less comfortable for you! We're like chickens shitting in our own drinking water, except chickens have a much higher tolerance for poop. Going for phantom wealth, which has so little to do with happiness. Not to end 2012 on a bitter note but on 9/11 thirty thousand kids died of starvation (and the day after as well). Poverty is the worst form of violence, (Ghandi). Really: can't we just cut it out already? We can spend money on paving all of Texas, but we can't get some measely waterpump put in for everyone in the world? Might cut in to the 1%. WTF, you get 250 K a year, and you bitch because your tax goes up 4% (on everything that you make OVER250K? Slow down Pieter.... There is more to life than in creasing its speed (Ghandi) The cut off for any meaningful incremental happiness/dollar is around 75000 dollar per year, after that dollars really don't help much for happiness. Every house a dish washer, 3 toilets, , our god given right... (except 50 years ago). There is sufficiency in the world for mens' needs, but not for his greeds. (Ghandi) Anyway, since the place is going to pots I figured I'd go get on a plane and go to Jamaica. Talk about ecologic footprint and indulgence. I did have the following thought though to alleviate the impact I think we should go twice as long spreading the flight damage over a longer period. So in the new world you have a mandatory stay of 4 weeks for any flight. What Ghandi thought about western civilization? He thought it would be a good idea. So hopefully next year will be as good as this year: spreading wealth, bounties and eggs, snickers and rabbits, houses and land, some of myself if I feel like it, and hopefully a few dollars trading the fruits of my labor for your labor vegetables, and all that as locally as possible. And, what really seemd to help in my life last year to make it all bearable: it is famous from Ghandi, (but he stole it from my dad) Most of what you do is unimportant, but it is important that you do it.
0 Comments
To each his own. A blizzard came through the other day. About 20 fahrenheit (equivalent of butburning cold in Celcius) and the wind was a rippin'. Flags in Hermann were horizontal, as was the snow. The snow was not coming down, it went horizontal. I can vouch: it was f ing cold. So those chickens are out there. It is just around noon, the stove is a cranking in the house, I am comfy, more than comfy actually, good book, glass of wine, tunes on the computer. But... chicken but, you can't leave the girls out there in their see through house. So for good measure I waited till the maximum wind and snow combination wind chill factor to go out there with a hammer, nails, plastic, a ladder and tin to give them a wind break. Had to go back to the house three times to defrost my fingers and refuel. In the end there was a decent windbreak on the bottom and coup covered in plastic. Them girly chickens are out there, standing on one leg, snow and rain froze on their wings, clueless. You can lead a chicken to shelter but you can't get them in there, and they didn't. No.... I am comfy here freezing my ass of on one leg. You can't fix stupid. Like you can't fix your brother if he lives a life you don't approve of. What to do but accept? So I do. Was over at a poker game last nite, and one of the guys says I should bolt down the coops because they could blow away in the hurrrricane, but I was comfy again and took my chances, and I will in the future. The coops were still in the same place this morning. So tonite, twelvish, I go out there, just to check, and there is about 40 of them sitting outside in a rugby huddle, hell no we aint going into that plastic contraption. We are waiting for the Mayan calender to come, freezing like there is no to maya. But none of them has frozen and exploded, yet. You can't fix stupid. As far as the title of this blog goes: Ladies and Gentlemen: The Beatles. The song link below is the first time Paul met John, my homey, who was impressed that Paul knew all the words to this Eddie Cochran song. So Paul was "in". So just that you know: the first song ever the Beatles played together, or at least that Paul played a song to George and John. Still ramping up: 126 yesterday,148 today.
Dogs found the stash in the cooler and ate 58 eggs. Noxious gas, dogs outside. Actually experienced the saying: "don't put all your eggs in one basket". I walked back from collecting eggs, and there are enough now that I need two baskets, when one of the handles broke. Fragile those eggs and about 40 of them, the dogs were happy, again, and again had to sleep outside. As you can tell I am still completely enthralled by the chicken activities. I have no trepidations about this grant or showing it off. As a matter of fact a local producer stopped by the other day, curious and asking. He helped get eggs and feed and water and it was a nice visit. Told him: fertilizer, reduced tillage, less weeds and you can see that. Tried to get a count on the chicks the other day, Vincent counting one coup, and I the other. Problem was we only had one bottle of wine, and since we were present the chickens behaved differently, again confirming that the mere presence of a spectator will influence the measurement. (The uncertainty principle has been frequently confused with the observer effect, evidently even by its originator, Werner Heisenberg.[5] See Wikipedia if you want the details and can't sleep). (or count chickens in your sleep, going in up a ramp, approximately 222). Chickens are getting strange: you walk up to them and they just squat and wait to be picked up, strange... It really is one of the funnest things I can think of (and I can think up some shit): a bottle of wine, friends, and watching chickens go to sleep. Actually got handshake contracts for 70 dozen a week, nice, leaves me just enough to trade with Steve Simon, the local bar owner. (Decent exchange rate: 1 draft: 1 dozen) I started this note last week and then all of a sudden it is a week later, but last week the flies were back, it was December first and I was outsided in t-shirt and shorts. Globally messed up weather. Went to town for an hour, and next thing you know it is 500 dollar later and I didn't even have any fun. Bought bits of this and that: 60 quarts of oil, it really was on sale sale, 500 lb of chicken feed, one alternator, a new O2 welding tank from MFA, (Bruce, who works there, told me that "as a kid" after a hangover he would take a couple of good hits straight from the tank to reload his oxygen carrying capacity in his blood), 4 library books, recycling and to top it off I got 15 two by four by eights. It all fit in the car, with the doors closed, except for myself. That lumber was to build some new workbenches, the building was alright but then you got to clean all the crap up again, and you found stuff, and more stuff that was so carefully hidden under benches in boxes behind more stuff. Oh, and more stuff, more stuff. So often I think about how those two suitcases I arrived with in the USA have exploded into the fourth dimension. Found a two dollar sprinkler at the 79 cent goodwill store, completely the bomb. Spinach is growing good in the tunnel, strawberries are getting covered in weeds again, but I don't mind, how can I not like Chick weed? Larkspur is coming up, some stuff is blooming into the heat, and there are still turnips and a nice salad in the tunnel. And the latest of the greatest news: I found my bathroom back again. It took 2 days, but there really is a white bathtub in my house, whooopiee! It is legal again to turn on the light and touch things. Still looking for T.P. though. Just for the heck of it... Lights in a chicken coop. It is a coup alright. My girls are doing it now: more than, drumrollllllll 100 eggs in one day.
Gave my presentation on Pok power, hoeing hens and hennabagoes at the Mercantile in McKittrick, the local food circle meeting. It went fine, especially since I brought my own computer and big screen monitor; the peripheral electronics didn't work, again. I can talk about chickens for hours: for one they are delicious for two they are really stupid and funny, and they can hatch out eggs, which I can't. So the long and the short of the movable chicken coop benefits are: weed control, 100 lb of nitrogen to the acre, less tillage and eggs. Installed lights for the chickens, on a giant extension cord. If they get 14 hours of light they lay better.
So this week I really feel like the egg man ( I am the walrus coocoo ke choo), there is an upward curve: today was a 65 egg day. Big omlet, making quiche and egg fu young right now. Eggnog anyone? For now Yellow wood farm takes what is being laid. Talking about laying, the other day, collecting eggs around 3 o clock, I open the back of the coop and there is a chicken in one of the laying boxes, working on her project. I am watching this chicken, it sits with its head upward, squatting on two leggs, and all of a sudden I hear: "pok". The sound of an egg falling half an inch on the wooden floor. Have you ever seen an egg being laid? Stranger things have happened, but still, quite remarkable. Someone asked me at the food circle meeting if they could rent one of my wagons, mind you, seriously, with the chickens in it. And, seriously, I am all up for that. How about if you rent my chickens for a week, with all the feeders and fencers and chargers and lights to clean up your yard for a bit? Slogans galore of course: egg on the neighbor, rent my hoe, dig a chick, your west county upgrade. I may just take a wagon to market and sell the farm freshest eggs ever. "You want a dozen? Just hang on a little it and listen for the cackling.". Apart from the chicks: just leisure: November 15th and 60 degrees, water that works, wood in sufficient quantities, and I got the old Dodge Neon car running. It is not a purple car: it is cranberry colored with a pearl finish, and now it runs and it is for sale. The outside is rough and the inside looks like 10 long haired dogs lived in it for a year. I should go and clean the shed, but it cools off so fast at night, maybe better to go to the bar and add some more to the tab from last week. Later gater. Proud of my couple of rows of turnips. Then I go and look at my neighbors' pasture. It looks green, lush green, the cows are in it and then I notice he has sown turnips in his pasture: cowfeed. Acres and acres, and of course they are huge.
Water issues at the house: I opened a valve next to the little pump house to activate a hydrant in the middle of the field to water chickens, anyway, something breaks. A day later I have free flowing water from a line 3 feet deep in the ground. And then you are screwed, you have seen it and you can't go back to bed. So, after half a day I now have a 3 feet deep wet mud hole. I vaguely remember plumbing this 15 years ago, and slowly the nightmare comes back to me and in this crater where you could by now bury a Cadillac, I see 4 lines come together. And if one piece breaks, it all has to be replaced, well guess what? No don't even bother. So didn't have any water for a day, neither did the mobile home, or the chickens. So I plumbed it real quick with my favorite washing machine hose connections, rude plumbing. Perfect! But how long would those hoses hold up in the ground? Cover it up and dig it up again? in a few years? AH SHIT. To break my karma and do it right... it took another foot of digging, and bailing the water out for the 10th time. Anyway, it seems to be working again. Those joys of jobs well done that no one ever will see. But through this hole runs the waste water line from my bathtub/shower and kitchen sink. Ah, let me check it. More nasties. Imagine my surprise: you drain a bathtub, the water goes out of the tub, but no water comes out of the drain. Neh, it must have gone right under the house. No wonder the house" is sinking. Fixed that right quick though, made a hole in the bathroom wall, hooked a pipe up to the tub and now it drains into the yard, parallel to the washing machine drain that has its' own pipe through the wall. Went to Columbia, gave a presentation to about 100 people about the hoeing hens. The actual presentation can be found on the page under hoeing hens. When I got there it was not so good, none of the files I had brought worked, and the computer people were not allowed to down load something or another, long story short, 50 slides made but no pictures, talk about brrrrrr..... Beautiful fall so far. Moved the chickens, impressive, the damage they can inflict. Power in numbers. Planted the other half of tunnel to miscellaneous, and found the strawberries back in the other half of the tunnel. Lookin' purty. Outdid myself, watered the greenhouse, and, AND turned the water back off. Got 5 truckloads of wood, plenty of winter projects, and water. Water is good. A long time ago I received a book from my dear friend Tim Soete. "The one straw revolution". Sounded good to me. Some japanese dude, Manasuko Fukuoka, you know the type: wise, calm, (Grasshopper in the corner), white beard, probably 129 years old, spry, twinkle in his eye. (I would totally respect him if he'd split a bottle of wine with me). Anyway, he likes the lazy gardening method, where nature just reseeds iself, you just take your share and let the rest go back. Of course it helps that he had like twenty interns that were roaming around his farm as well, but he became quite famous for his scheme.
I try that do nothing gardening a lot too, I do weed some, mow some, hoe some but then I think about the theoretical implications of the One straw revolution, the "do nothing farming" method, and I am in awe, so hoppa, lets get in the car and road trip, with a wheat straw ala Mark Twain between my lips. But kidding aside, there is some merit to this lazyness! This spring I had some arugula, mustard green (actually it should be called mustard red, because it is not green, until you cook it to snot), mizuna and lettuces in the greenhouse. Didn't harvest much of it and it all went to seed. Bout a month ago we transplanted about half the tunnel into strawberry runners stolen from the field strawberries. And now, lo and behold I have to weed the strawberries in the tunnel, not from weeds, no from those greens, they reseeded and they are thick, thick thick. Better crop the second time when i didn't do nuttin'. The chickens are doing their thing, put them on a patch of field, and as soon as they have every cleaned off I moved them. And lo and behold a week later there is developing a beautiful patch of hairy vetch (dutch: zwikke) an excellent legume, nitrogenfixing and great weed controller. The seed has been there for years, and all of a sudden I have a fine stand, and i didn't do nuttin. I had a field of wheat and milo that I mowed down one year, as a green manure and for weed control, and it comes back, and it is thick, doing nothing. Yesterday it was the pinnacle of fall here, bad ass burning trees in flaming yellow, explosive salmon, burning bourgondie, almost amazing, but I like the word GLORIOUS better. The weather was sunny, warm, wind, Watina music blasting, and I was planting some garlic, I tried the do nothing method, but it didn't work, ended up planting about 1000 cloves or so. Pablo was out the other week, and he said that my operation looked almost "legit", made me proud. So really it is looking better and better. Maybe it was the weather, but it did actually look decentish. The strawberry beds are still producing a pound here and there and are looking good, the new plantings all took, another 1200 plants I think, the wheat that I did plant ( 25 bucks worth of gas, the noise of the tractor, the dust, (I can complain but you know I love to sit on my green throne)) is up and about. Some of the garlic is coming up. The chickens are doing their thing, starting to lay, and I need to follow up on a few leads yet. A pasta maker in St. Louwie may take a pile. Oh, had the carburator for the boat (it holds water when it rains, so I assume it is water proof from the other side as well) cleaned out by Small engine Jim, and he was mighty happy to be paid in strawberries, it being October. Hauled 4 truckloads of wood from the Stave Mill, nice and soppy wet white oak, and two loads of dry seasones oak from my colleague at work, so winter, bring it on. Because wintertime is the ultimate do nothing farming. I had a very strange experience the other day.
I was laying on the trampoline, it was about 2 in the afternoon, fully committed to taking a nap, blanket underneath me, a dog here and there, the weather a perfect 78.4 degrees, the sky blue, a light breeze a string of clouds moving a long the horizon, one after the other, ... And all of a sudden I realized I was completely content. It wasn't gratefulness, (I am, don't get me wrong), but it was an intense feeling of happiness. If the tree had blown over and killed me I could have cared less. Blissfully content, not that everything was perfect, or I didn't have any aches or pains, or broken machinery or weeds or jobs to be done. It wasn't nirvana because the world was perfect, and it sure wasnt' because I was perfect, but it was. The bhudda was right, you can reach enlightenment sitting in a lazy-boy chair, or on a trampoline for that atter. But it did make me think, we are so much searching for happiness, that it is so easy to not experience it when it does come around. Take a break sometime in your pursuit of happiness and just BE happy. More happiness: two tractors that work: that start and move when you pull some levers. Joy to the world. The other day Johnnie broke down in the middle of the field, it started to run really poorly and when I opened the choke it kind of sputtered and died. And I was just having so much fun. Eventually I diagnosed and fixed it by putting some more gas in it. That was the cheapest fix ever, was I happy again. Happiness in having stuff that works. Happiness is also a short memory. And then there are the chickens and their coops. I get the biggest kick out of those chickens, at last count I had not lost one chicken to wildlife! Tadaaaaa. That electric netting really works. Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence, according to aristotle, but then again, just being stupid selfish and healthy are also good for happiness. Went to Colorado for a few days, visiting farmer John. It took a little discussing but at 3 am we came to the conclusion that there is no meaning to life other than the one we put into it. Where I usually get stuck in Ecclesiastics: ( enjoy life, strive to do good) Johnnie uses the header title. Watch out, crooked sentence coming up... He has the title to 10 acres in Trinidad Colorado (first I thought I had a pulmonary embolism because I was out of breath (eapnic) but then I realized I was at a mile and a half higher altitude than Missouri.) where he used to really grow things, now he has it scaled back to a beautiful garden with a few apple trees and a a big field of alfalfa which he gravity flow irrigates. So in a previous life I studied irrigation water management in the tropics, never did do me much good in the USA, but at Johnnies' place my heart ached for the carreer I missed. Wageningen, my student stumping grounds blundered through my head. "Art de la localitee", French for: every small farm is unique and every farmer does it a little different and there can really be an art to farming. So Johnnie lives on an irrigation ditch, the Lopez ditch, it has 20 some people on it, you get water maybe 3 out of 10 days. The canal/ ditch was hand dug in the 1850 ies and water rights have been handed down from that time on, tied to the land owners. There are the usual top/tail end problems and maintenance issues between 20 owners. The ditch has to be maintained to keep the water flowing. I walked it through to the end, and like so many things in Colorado, you can feel history. Look at those beams, the work it took to make that, and a mile or 2 at that. Any time you see something green around here it is irrigated. So Johnnie has scaled back, he still irrigates his alfalfa but has someone else cut it and deal with it. He fell of the wagon and now is a working stiff (except he doesn't have a job right now and is participating in an Indian Sundance, so not that stiff really), has a garden for the relax and the fresh. So being the good tourist that I am I wanted to see something. I thought it would be nice to take Tim's kids, 5 and 8,to a big sand box. "The beach is just over the top of the next dune". Them dunes are 800 feet tall and they are killers to climb on less oxygen, breathing treatment and alcohol. ( Have since laid off on the smoking, again, so told Ma she can't come in September unless she quits, because last time I hadn't smoked in 3months and it took my ma about 12 minutes and I was hooked again). There was a little issue with a parkranger and a rental car that was on a dirt road where you could only get with 4 wheel drives in low and good clearance. I had seen just part of the sign that said something about tire pressure, which I thought was just for woosssies, Tim and Johnnie were kind of nodding off in the back while I was racing through them potholes and sand dunes so they never saw the sign. 3 milles in a parkranger suggested a 100 dollar donation to the local law enforcement for encroachment or he could call the towing company for a discount and get us out for 500. Talked him out of it, it was tense driving on the way back, 600 bucks if you get stuck, and it was fishy terrain. Extra handicap that the ranger deflated the tires to 10 psi, so now we were really bottoming out, but we actually never did get stuck. The rental car people never did notice the missing exhaust pipe or the fish sandwich that Tim stuck under the front seat when we turned it in (standard operating procedure according to Tim). Delightful trip altogether. Oh, did visit someone with another garden. People have a different idea about gardening in Colorado. Everyone and his grandma go to a medicinal dispensery for breathing products but a lot of people also grow their own, plant a cabbage, plant a pot plant, plant an okra. They are so creative in the camouflage of plants, the helicopters are a little frustrating, but other than that everyone seems to be happy. Anyway, I came back on Sunday, worked days and today am home. Locked the grant chickens up and will move them to greener pastures tomorrow. I am really thrilled with how destructive these chickens are. Camera jammed otherwise I would show you, but really, they clean up 3000 sqare foot between the 250 of them in a bout a week. Neary a sprig of grass is showing, where I will be sowing next. I see it in the greenhouse too, the weeds that did survive after the hoeing hens are dark green, a sign of nitrogen fertility. It was nice today, weeding a little bit, walking around enjoying the chicken feeding, some music playing, the dogs playing catch, picking some tomatoes. it doesn't mean anything, but I enjoy it. |
AuthorPieter Los, born in Scotland, raised in the Netherlands, lost in the USA. . Archives
May 2015
Categories |