Some of What's on Tap...

Planning sessions are a great thing.  You sit down, you think, you scribble, scrawl, sketch, doodle, daydream, refill your tea, and sit down and start all over again.  And without planning sessions, dreams never seem to take shape -- they just sort of congeal, rather than becoming concrete realities.

About 15 years ago, our family started having business meetings that were along the lines of, "Supposing we decide tomorrow that life is actually worth living, what do we want to do with our time?"

That's pretty much the only way we can explain how we went from deconstructing the poetry of John Milton, and explaining solipsism vis-a-vis the lack of paperclips in Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle to "Honey, could you go hose down the chickens?  They look a little peaked this afternoon..."

Planning sessions.  You write down all your desires, and then ask what you have to do to make them a reality.  And if your desires are small enough, and earthy enough, you end up microfarming.

So.... what have our recent planning sessions yeilded?

• We want to harvest our own honey.  Which means we will need to build a backyard hive and then capture a swarm.  Why do we want to do something so crazy?  Because local honey is a cure for allergies, and because we want to make wine from wild grapes, which are probably not sweet enough on their own, but we don't want to add refined or processed sugar.  That's why.
• We also want to build our own windmill for aerating the pond.  This one will be a little trickier, since most information on the web is about things like "Windmills for the Tribulation" and not about something really useful.  If Jesus actually comes back and thinks about microfarms at all, we are relatively sure it won't be with an eye towards praising the paranoid.    We could be mistaken.  
• We also have plans for planting more perennials in the herb garden; hopefully some with some color.  And monkey grass in the shaded parts of the front yard.
• And, we are going to build some lawn furniture.  We've reached the stage now where we are not going to buy finished manufactured goods for the house if we can at all help it -- we'll buy tools, but not much else.

We'll keep you updated, naturally, on how all these plans are going; in particular, we choose to brag beforehand because once we tell the world what we are going to do, we'd better do it.  Myrtle would never let us live it down otherwise.

Happy farming!