Hens

My morning routine these December days is to let open my chicken coop door by the time I pour my second cup of coffee.  I've usually read my overnight emails, checkout my three or four favorite websites for the news by this time.

My five ladies always greet me with their quiet low tone clucking and pacing along the fence, once they figure out it is not a food drop but the opening of the coop door they run inside the coop and out to freedom.  Their release follows one of two routines.  The first what I call the slow dance.  It is the deliberate three scratch across the yard.  They prefer open soil so they tend to circle the back yard along the fence and espaliered apple trees.   Occasionally they hopping up on one of the raised beds where three remaining permacultured kale plants survive.  I allow that this time of the year because the bed are covered with decaying Japanese maple leaves and old straw/bedding of theirs.  I have two raised beds that are covered with plastic hoop house for my kale, lettuce and chard that I grow all winter. Another newly planted strawberry bed that has re bar wire on it and they do like that bed.

The other manner in which they exit the coop is a fast four steps out and a long low flight across the lawn to the other side of the yard near my grape arbor.  This is the perfect picture of freedom to me.  In a total of 30 seconds they has expressed the total joy of life without a fence or enclosure.  One of them gets the idea and the others follow with wings spread and flopping barely two feet off the ground.  The area over there offers them the opportunity to scratch along what was last years strawberry patch and what will be my potato patch next year. 

Their routine is to be out until they get bored and then they all come to my back door and sit, drop feathers (sometimes we track into the house).  Patiently  they waiting for me to come out and walk them back to the coop.   They always follow immediately and go in gladly.

I shocked myself when I decided to get hens.  It was the last thing in the world that would have crossed by mind.  But with the encouragement of friends I did it and now I have to say these birds added only positive notes to my life.

Tax breaks for all

Sometimes I talk to friends of mine from the Midwest and they seems to be living in a different country than the one live in.  They are convinced that the life style of American is going to continue as it has for the last thirty years, that both of the invasions of the last ten years were justified and all the problems are solvable with less government interference and more capitalism.  The cost of two billion dollars a week in Afghanistan is not on their consciousness but extending food stamps, VA services or unemployment payments makes them want less government.  

I begin to feel that I am the one of the edge of reality.  I am the one reading the wrong blogs on the Internet, watch the wrong channels for the daily news and truly, it is a waste of time, reading international newspapers.

Dmitry Orlov writes about the collapse of the United States and he speaks with much wisdom and some international first hand knowledge. He thoughts are available for free and one doesn't even have to get a copy of any his books. 

This, I know from reading him.  I would not want to live in the South or the Southwest, there is so much racism and when times get tough, people get angry and with so many guns, crime and  violence are the results.  Probably 90% of the food one would eat in a collapse economy is grown locally.  Remember the oil peak a few years ago and the U.S. imports most of it fuel, if the country as little or no credit, there will be long lines for gas.  Knowing the skills that our grandparents used daily will be of value and it will be the difference of living comfortably or just surviving. 

Sadly, this week not one adult stood up and said that this country doesn't need tax breaks for anyone.  China, Saudi Arab , Iran are among the ones loaning the money for this silliness.   When is truth to power and the public going to be spoken?  Who will listen?

the bright light of wikileaks

 Huffington Post this morning explore the Wikileaks Issue.  The blow back that concerns the US and world governments, world institutions of finance and people of power are addressed.  Shockingly, many in the American population do not even know who Mr. Julian Assange is, what he has done and what motivates him.  Unless, our citizens value truth and facts and question what is told to them, these ignorant citizens will take down this whole country.

In the 1930's Germany and the United States each went though a depression.  The Germany followed a conservative leader and the United States followed a liberal leader.  One country turned to fascism and the other remained a democracy.  The United States and Europe are about to go though another economic turn down, Aristotle line about power is very important for all of us to remember.  

 From the HP.......
""""""""""""We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years." -attribute­d to D.Rockefel­ler 1991

And here's the most important quote you'll ever read...

"What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do." -Aristotle"""""""""

Fishes and Loaves

I have just finished a book about growing food and the development of empires and the collapses of empires in relationship to food supply.   Civilizations developed and modern cities could be organized because of three things that happened around food growing.  History repeated itself time after time and  it looks like we are in the change over period right about now. The authors of  Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas have written a very readable story with the title  EMPIRES OF FOOD.


The first important thing that is necessary for a good food surplus is that it is grown by tilling virgin soil.   Tilling virgin soil means constantly clearing forest and moving the crops to unplowed ground.  Crops need the nutrients of good soil.  Nitrogen is the one element that is absolute necessary.   A major break though was discovered by the Haber-Bosch process after WWI.  Too long to explain here but the end results were that nitrogen/fertilizer could be made out of oil.  The world now oils it fields instead of using compost or animal manure. 

Second major item for food is long period of mild weather that produced consist dependable yearly crops.  Climate does change over the decades and although we currently  have experienced little of it in the last fifty years that seems to be changing in the last three or four years. We have all heard the stories about the dust bowl of the last century.  Another period of history that is not mention often is the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century.  Actually, weather patterns have changed many times over the centuries but  I don't think it is often mention as the cause of people dieing off  because of crop failures. 



The third issue is the specialist farmer.  This farmer has the oranges groves of Florida or Brazil, the corn fields of Kansas or raises the rice in the Himalayas of India, that extra produce is stored for lean years or transported to the markets around the world.

The success of these three working together has produced the current population growth, the variety that we have available at our local food market. "But none of these factors were sustainable in the long term.  Virgin land loses it potency, climates change, and the specialized farms are, by nature, vulnerable to misfortune. "

The authors explore man going from the hunter-gather to the modern day Slow Food Movement.  They discuss the health of man eating different grains and vegetables, beer, wine and tea and the effects on culture and explain that a just a half degree temperature drop in spring, shrinks the growing season by ten days. Surprisely,  there is one culture that has survived over the centuries doing food production in a manner that works and it is on Bali 

They conclude the book with holding up a mirror to our lifestyle and offer some options for a safe passage to the changes that are about to happen again in history.

Tale of two stories on Saturday

The year is 1940, a poor Dakota family heard there were jobs in Seattle so they moved and the father immediately found work at a factory building things for the war effort.  They rented a three bedroom home.  The parents slept on the sofa, the five children slept on the floors of the living room and the hallway.  The three bedrooms were rented out for income.  Those three renters also got first chance at the one bathroom, the use of the kitchen and the eating table.  They needed the money to make everything work.

No one in the family thought anything but how lucky they were to have a safe warm roof over their head, plenty of food and the head of the family with a job.

The state of Washington is cutting one billion dollars of spending before June.  After June there will be a cut of 5 billion dollars from the state budget.  I imagine my granddaughter will no longer be in a Gifted and Talented program at the public school and my brother's hospice program will be seriously changed.

Department heads of the state have been told to look for duplicates and individuals that can do two jobs.  Unemployment benefits from the state will no doubt be rescheduled  even as new people become unemployed.

I remember reading about a plane load of pallets of cash being flown into Baghdad in the early year of the war. Bundles of hundred dollar bills wrapped in clear plastic being thrown around as footballs.

That was the day, in my mind, we became a banana republic.  The nation's compass broken for good.

Bread lines in History

I started to read a book last night about finding meaningful ways of spending the last quarter of one's life.  It was written by a very well educated person and writer of many books.  It appeared very dated immediately.  The fear of changing times was missing.

It is silly sometimes the little short sentences that stick in my mind and the big overview is alittle like a cloud, it's there but hard to get a handle on it.  I have been fortunate to have a few different times in my life to visit Versailles.  Location, size and beauty of gardens are what is remembered but like a cloud if is in the end hard to put in words. I found it easier to understand when I heard this, "The new French Government began selling the contains of this palace with an auction every single day of the year for four years straight.  Of course, the French people would not buy because they did not want to be associated with the monarchy so most of the contains went to foreigners."

At a time when the price of wheat went too high to make the daily bread, the French people decided that the ruling powers had to change.  Today we have banks too big to fail much like the palace too big and important fulled with noble men too important to throw out.

When the price of wheat is too high and the bread lines get too long, the men of Wall Street  will be throw out of power.



 

The Miracle File

I have been so busy with family matters in the last month or so I have not follow though on the fall duties of my garden beds.  I did manage to build a couple frames and cover two raised beds for the wintering over of kale and some other greens but that was about it until last week-end.

Fruit growers believe in raking up all fruit tree leaves because they can host non desirable bugs and diseases over the winter.  I used the sunny day last Saturday to organize this project.  The high winds finally had made the branches bare.  The fifth trip though the back gate of the yard to dump leaves I saw something out of the corner of my eye.  I stopped in total disbelief -it was a persimmon!

I planted this tree six years ago because of the fond memories of a winter spent in Palo Alto and a tree that I grew to love while walking by each day pushing a baby buggy about ten years ago.   The corner house was originally a farmhouse and the tree was probably over fifty years old.  The house remained along with the tree but the land had became a neighborhood of tiny bungalows one of which I lived in for that winter.  The tree had so much fruit that some of it dropped on the sidewalk and, of course, coming from a long line of hunter-gatherers, I immediately would pick up all the persimmons on my pathway.  As a woman from the Midwest, I had not enjoyed persimmons often in my life but I found a real taste for them.

That first spring of buying trees for the new house in Olympia I let a man talk me into buy a Meader persimmon tree.  I viewed it as a long shot of ever producing fruit for me but it was the moment of romantic taste buds, I planted my tree.  Over the years with so much disappointment connected with my  non-producing peach trees, I passed my persimmons tree and sort of smiled at the silliness of planting it.  I also realize where I planted the tree it would not shade my gardens so it could stay and by the time it grow two stories tall I would not be gardening this plot of ground.

That one sweet persimmons was sweet, perfectly shaped and consumed in total by me.  Many things each years in gardening are disappointing but this year my gardening was a success.  2010 was a real successful year.