Don't Just Do Something... Sit There! (Winter in a Myrtle Wonderland...)

When we tell people that we are still harvesting tomatoes and peppers in December, folk from other parts of the country (or even other parts of the planet) are not surprised, because there is this mistaken impression that Texans need suntan lotion and iced beverages 12 months out of the year.  Yes, we are hotter than y’all, more than likely, wherever you happen to be while you are reading this… but let’s not get carried away.  Our seasons are nothing at all compared to places like New England or the Pacific Northwest, or Prague, or Tokyo, but we do in fact have seasons, provided you don’t blink.

The first overnight freeze in the lower Brazos Valley takes place on average during the second week of December.  This is the point at which most local gardeners put away their shovels and hang it up until March.

We think this is a big mistake, and not just because it is possible to continue getting tomatoes and peppers – although it is, and it isn’t that hard.  No, it’s a mistake because gardening in this not-quite-temperate, not-quite-arid, not-quite-subtropical less-than-paradise is a year round sport, and what one does in winter affects the whole rest of the year.

This is the point in the diatribe when your usual suspects in the “I’m going to tell you how to garden” business start going on about turning over your soil, making it weed free, adding compost, and all that other stuff.  Well, some of that is useful, no doubt, but it is not really the direction we’re going with this.  We’re more interested in the psychological and philosophical questions which can only be answered by living in the dirt all twelve months of the year. 

We aren’t telling you to be perfect; we’re asking you to be aware.  Big difference.

To give you some idea of what we mean, let’s go back to those peppers and tomatoes.  The first frost of the year happened the last week of September.  This being Southeast Texas, we have only had a handful of other frosty mornings since then, and never more than two in a row.  Just because it got cool enough once or twice to dust the car windshield with a very thin patina of ice does not mean Old Man Winter is moving in – if you thought it meant that, you must not be from around these parts.

No, it simply hasn’t been that cold yet.  But how did our solenaceae survive even this small amount of frost?  An exposed tomato or pepper will burn with the tiniest amount of frost, and the jig is up.  Well… our tomatoes and peppers weren’t exposed.  We let them trail on the ground, not putting them in cages or trellises.  And we stopped weeding them after about two or three weeks last Spring, so not only are they crawling along the ground, they are under a rather tall stand of hay – what other folk call “weeds”. 

There are those who would call us lazy for not having weeded our gardens last Spring, Summer, or even earlier this Fall.  Those people are not eating garden fresh salsa this winter, is what we have to say in response.

There are other reasons to continue living in the garden during December-January-February, of course, which can be exercised regardless of how closely you adhere to the  “Do Nothing” farming methods of Masanobu Fukuoka.  Broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, carrots, spinach, chard, collards, mustard, garlic, wild lettuce, cabbage… the number of winter greens which go hog wild in a Brazos Valley garden in our so-called “colder” months is almost limitless.  And even if you are from the Neil Sperry school of straight row gardening in perfectly weed free, chemically fertilized plots, you can get them to grow.  We hope you forego the monotony and the chemicals, but at the very least, we’ll be happy to see you out and about, with dirty fingernails and happy salad plates.

This is also the time of year to be planting fruit trees and berry bushes, and plotting and planning for shifts in the Spring landscape.  For fruit in particular, it is important to spend time outside – yourself, physically, in the flesh, standing out in the garden – getting familiar with what your plants are going to be going through.  There is no bigger mistake made by prospective fruit gardeners than ignoring the extremes (both high and low) their new plants will be experiencing prior to putting them in the ground.  The wrong variety of peach or plum may grow and not produce fruit, or it may produce fruit in one season, and then die to the ground the very next Winter, or shrivel in the heat the next Summer.

The big chain hardware stores are in particular guilty of stocking the wrong varieties of tree for the regions where they will be planted.  A perfect case in point is avocadoes – the avocado tree you are most likely to get if you find one at “the big orange store” is a Haas… which is fine if you live in Southern California or Southern Florida.  Pretty much anywhere else in the country, though, that is one dead tree the minute temperatures dip below 30° Fahrenheit.  You need one of the varieties from the mountains of Guatemala – Fuerza, or Bacon, or any of about a half-dozen others which can withstand temperatures down to about 26° or so… and even then, you’ll need to find a protected warm microclimate within your yard where you can warm the tree up if necessary.

Better still?  Plant a tree that is native to your area.  Not too many folk in the Brazos Valley have the native persimmon variety, but it would be a solid choice of fruit tree.  So would a wild black cherry, though you may need to plant four or five to guarantee you have one which ends up producing fruit.  Many people are unaware of this southern variety of cherry, which was once common as far south as Monterrey, Mexico, though it has been driven from its native habitat by environmental changes brought on by development over the last 150 years.  Much the same can be said for the evergreen huckleberry (a wild blueberry indistinguishable from the cultivated variety once it’s in your pancake batter), native to Oregon and lowland Northern California, though once found in wild stands in East Texas alongside the more familiar dewberry.

Some non-native plants are nice, too, on the condition that they are compatible with your particular microenvironment.  If it grows in Sicily, it ought to do quite nicely in the Brazos Valley – hence the presence in Myrtle’s garden of pomegranates and Arbequina olives.  We have met several folk with citron plants that fruit out well; there are some other hardy citrus varieties useful for cooking and juicing which will provide a nice back porch decoration in addition adding flavor to your cooking, and a lovely citrus scent to your outdoor living spaces.  If you want comestible oranges, either use a greenhouse, or move to Brownsville, that’s our advice.

The more soil amendments a plant needs – we’re talking about you, blueberry – the less worthwhile it is.  That may be our “do nothing” prejudice at work again, but it is our firm belief that what folk really ought to be putting in their garden is not things that they can grow well, but rather things that they have a hard time killing.  That is not just because of a persistent preference for inactivity on our part – we intentionally don’t weed much, after all – but rather because life in the 21st century is very, very hard for plant life.  No matter how attentive we are as gardeners, climate change and variable availability of sun, nutrients, and water mean that plants more than ever have to be adaptable, or they will perish.

We have interfered enough as a species – we are, after all, responsible for much of the difficulty plants are now in – so asking what we can do to help out is somewhat too little, too late.  The best thing we can do at this point is get out of their way.  The secret to a happy garden, we frequently tell people, is chicken poop and neglect.  We have to do more work to get the chicken poop out there than Fukuoka suggests… but we believe strongly in an active sort of neglect, of which we think he would have approved.  It’s not enough just to plant your fruits and veggies and herbs, you have to sit and watch them grow, too.  And Winter is a great time to pull up a chair and just be with them.

Happy farming!

Tastefully Vegetarian

"Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second."
--Edward Abbey

Taste is everything in modern life.  It is also missing, from practically all our food and beverages.  This is our rule and measure, and our curse.  Prepackaged foods are heated in microwaves with perhaps a dash of processed salt and pre-ground black pepper for seasoning, and this passes for food preparation.  And it is usually bland and tasteless.

We at Myrtle’s place have gone as close to vegan in our daily fare as we can reasonably do, and while there is a long history of veganism from which to draw inspiration, and a large swath of literature describing much of what anyone could desire in terms of tastiness, it has nevertheless not been easy.  In the modern context, most people are frankly incapable of being vegan for one simple reason – prepackaged vegan foods prepared using the aforementioned convenient methodology taste even worse than prepackaged fatty meats.

Trying to be vegan under such circumstances would inevitably be counterproductive, given the high incidence of bisphenol-A (BPA) in the packaging, and the chemical alteration of food cooked in microwave ovens, and the lack of flavor, leading to a lack of satisfaction.  No satisfaction?  Higher sugar and fat intake.  Higher sugar and fat intake, even in vegan households, means weight gain and health problems.

The solution – and thankfully there is one – is to think about the coffee/gasoline conundrum described by Edward Abbey.  Obviously, coffee is good for a body, and gasoline is bad.  Why is the gasoline getting into the coffee?  Solve that simple problem, and you go a long way towards solving the more general problem of why vegetables and fruits and whole grains don’t taste as good as cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

The reason coffee tastes like gasoline is because it is all too often in close proximity to petrochemical inputs.  Either it is brewed in a gas station, or drive-through restaurant, or it is pre-ground, packaged in plastic, and brewed in a plastic container, or (worse still) turned into dehydrated flakes to be reconstituted in a microwave oven, where it comes out as something almost like coffee, but just slightly off, as you could tell either by examining it under an electron microscope, or (if you absolutely must) by tasting it. 

And in all these scenarios, we haven’t even touched on the fact that the coffee is likely made with municipal tap water which is rife with chemical additives – yes, the chlorine and fluoride kill off most of the bacteria, but… what about all the unnecessary chlordates, and all those bizarre salts your body is simply not designed to ingest?  Not to mention all the beneficial bacteria in your body which the chlorine and fluoride will kill off once you actually drink the noxious stuff!  It is, quite frankly, amazing that anyone anywhere has ever had a good cup of coffee.  (We’ll share the secrets of how to make a good cup of joe some other time…)

Likewise, it can only be expected that it would be difficult to get children to eat their vegetables. 

Take a good look inside the can from which all too often our peas, beans or tomato paste have come.  At first glance, one thinks, “Big deal, a tin can.”  Only, it’s not tin or aluminum; it’s also not stainless steel, or any of a dozen other metals you can readily name.  No, it’s a proprietary blend of metals formulated by one of a handful of chemical companies who have learned how to maximize the tensile strength of the material while minimizing its weight and cost; the interior surface of the can has been lined with – wait for it – a plastic film containing our old enemy bisphenol-A, which leaches out in the presence of many of the amino acids found in foods which (prior to being exposed to this BPA can lining) were putatively healthy.

Someone who eats food stored in this manner on a regular basis will develop a dullness to their taste buds which matches almost exactly the taste insensitivity of a heavy cigarette smoker.  However, take a culinary purist who lives on fresh fruits and vegetables and give them a sample of canned peas, and they will likely spit them out, complaining of the metallic patina.  There is a similar taste sensitivity difference in the meat-eating world, too; organic, grass fed beef is vastly superior in taste to the factory-farmed variety, fed a slurry of god-only-knows-what.  We prefer to have no meat at all, but clearly the difference between home-grown and factory grown supports our overall theme.

What makes us even bring all this up?  The answer is revealing as a study in the dietary habits of the modern American.  When we decided to cut butter and other sources of animal fat from our already veggie-centric diet, we talked to as many vegan friends as we could about strategies for making complete and healthy meals. 

One such friend is a failed vegan – that is, she tried going vegan, and then a few months later went the entirely opposite direction and is now on the heavy-meat, low-carb Atkins diet.  When we informed her of  our new direction, she immediately gave us her old vegan notebook, including much material we already possessed, and some new items, including a recipe for vegan pumpkin muffins.

Pumpkin muffins?  Sounds good, right?  Especially entering this time of year, when pumpkin is everywhere.  The only problem is that on this list of ingredients, we weren’t advised how much pumpkin to use in terms of cups or ½ cups.  No, the recipe called for a can of pumpkin pie filling.

We are not surprised our friend is now a meat eater again.  The taste was not there for her in her vegan days, so she never really stood a chance of staying on such a diet.  We evolved with a craving for fat, the hardest nutrient to acquire on the African Savannah a million years ago, and that craving has never gone away.  In the absence of satisfaction, we revert to our cravings.  And there is nothing satisfying about canned fruits and vegetables.  No, to satisfy one’s hunger, one has to eat food that tastes good.

If you’ve ever had fresh baked pumpkin straight out of the garden, you know what we are talking about.  Fresh pumpkin is orders of magnitude better than canned pumpkin.  You can eat a roasted or broiled pumpkin off the shell with a fork or spoon, and hardly need it to be baked into anything else.  It is a meal by itself, without any other accoutrement.

The same is true of every other veggie you can name – kids everywhere tremble at the thought of eating bland, stringy, soggy spinach from a can.  Fresh spinach, cut from a plot right outside your kitchen window?  It tastes divine. 

Mushy, coppery, fibrous-but-not-in-a-good-way asparagus from a can?  Blech.  Fresh asparagus, sautéed in olive oil with fresh onions, garlic, lemon and peppers, or maybe with freshly picked oregano or basil or rosemary?  Yummm!

And if you’ve never had a peach straight off the tree, particularly in the Texas Hill Country, you don’t know what you’re missing.  Fresh peaches are as different from peaches canned in syrup as Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco is from Justin Bieber’s Baby, Baby, Baby.

We have not been able to utterly eradicate the presence of plastic packaging in our pantry, but we have gone a long way.  Grains and legumes come home from bulk bins in plastic bags, and are then immediately transferred to glass jars.  We do occasionally indulge in things like frozen veggie-crumbles, which also come in plastic packaging.  And frequently pasta will come from a bag rather than a box.

However, as much as possible, we prefer fruits and vegetables which either come straight from the garden, or come straight from a local vendor – either a farmer’s market, or a market with a history of being friendly to the locavore community.

This also applies to another aspect of improving the tastiness of meals – the copious use of herbs.  Prepackaged herbs are not a source of evil in our time, but they are an inefficient tool in the fight against boredom on our plates.  The difference between fresh basil and dried basil flakes is like the difference between a performance of La Boheme at the Met, and a performance of My Ding-a-Ling on a kazoo on a kindergarten playground.

And the smell of bread baked with fresh rosemary is truly one of life’s great pleasures.  But you can’t have fresh rosemary without having rosemary plants nearby.  And if you’ve planted rosemary, you may as well go ahead and plant a full herb garden, right?  And once you’ve got a full herb garden, you may as well use it to improve the flavor of practically everything you make, because if you’re not going to take the time to make your food as delicious as possible, then what on Earth are you eating it for?

Which brings us back to pumpkins.  Yes, they are traditional for this time of year.  For the most part, though, what you’ll see in stores will be the carving varieties, which make great jack-o-lanterns, and even as uncarved doorstops they are attractive enough all Autumn long.  They do not, however, make for the best pies, or pumpkin bread, or pumpkin soup.  For that, you want the smaller varieties, and for that, you will more than likely want to think about devoting some more garden space next Spring and Summer.  Because taste matters.

 Happy farming!

End of the World? Not As We Know It!

"The thrilling sensation of getting lost in a blizzard, of freezing to death in the woods and having to eat your friend's buttocks to stay alive. That is lost on many people."
--Michel Gerard, concierge and sometime foil of Lorelei Gilmore on The Gilmore Girls

Survivalists manage to weasel their way into the news on a semi-regular basis.  We’re never really sure why, except that fearful non-conformists exhibiting odd behavior are always seen as good filler on a slow news day.

We find, however, that our little experiment in urban homesteading is (with disturbing frequency) often confused with the aims and objectives of these sad little people.  We are asked by those who learn we are keeping a “Mormon pantry”, and that we distill our own drinking water, and that we grow as much food as we possibly can, whether we belong to such-and-such a survivalist listserv, or whether we have such-and-such caliber semi-automatic weapons, or how deeply our bomb shelter is dug, and where did we find the radiation-proof lead with which to line it.  That we would be more in sympathy with Michel Gerard, and less with James Wesley Rawles seems unimaginable to such folk, who either have all-too-clean fingernails, or all-too-black fearfulness.

Let us once and for all put these comparisons between our humble home and the encampments of the eschatologists-on-a-bender to rest:  we are not “survivalists” and we do not believe “the end of the world” or “the end times” or anything even remotely as childish and silly as that are upon us.  Apocalyptic thinking has a long history, which if you think about it, is rather ironic.  Apart from being puerile theology, however, it is also the exact antithesis of the driving force behind our attempt at urban homesteading.

There are several fundamental differences in our plans and designs which should make our philosophical differences self-evident, should any observers wish to discern said belief structures:

• Myrtle’s place is right smack dab in the middle of town.  Most survivalists choose to live well outside of city limits, beyond the reach of things like municipal planning commissions and city code enforcement officers.  They think they are safe from looters in such isolated locations.  Bully for them.
• Myrtle’s place is currently supplementing grid sources of water and energy, but has the eventual aim of lobbying for universal replacement of grid-based distribution of water and electricity.  Survivalists make most of their plans on the assumption that the grid will eventually fail, and everyone will be on it and dependent on it, and all heck will break loose as a result.
• Myrtle’s place eschews canned goods as much as possible, due in great measure to the dangers from chemical seepage into food.  Survivalists think c-rations are just peachy keen, and envision surviving a nuclear holocaust by holing themselves up in human-sized sardine cans.
• Myrtle’s place is a weapons-free zone.  We are mostly plant eaters, with the occasional fish finding its way onto our plates.  The last we heard, shooting catfish is not the most efficient means of harvesting them.  And anyone who wants to steal from us has clearly found the wrong address, because we haven’t got the newest, shiniest, most expensive of whatever it is thieves typically look for.  And if someone were here to steal food, the odds are pretty good that the residents of Myrtle’s place would have offered them some long before they had a chance to steal it.  Survivalists, of course, are armed to the teeth and live in constant fear of predatory theft.

We could go on, of course, because the number of differences between our approach to life and that taken by survivalists is a rather lengthy catalog.  We have no bomb shelter.  We have no problem with paying our taxes, getting licenses to drive, getting permits for our chickens, checking with the city code office on the acceptable height and location of our fence, or a whole host of other compromises with communal authority which drive survivalists to distraction.

The reason is because we actually like living in society.  The problems our species will face in the coming decades are very real, and very significant, but it is our belief at Myrtle’s place that either we all face them together, or we simply will not solve them in any way particularly helpful to anyone.  We would rather be right in the middle of town, showing a way forward for those who will observe, than be huddled on the outskirts, living in armored bunkers and (frankly) exhibiting a pathetic ethos not equalled in the history of homo sapiens.

Survivalists generally fall into one of three categories:

1)    Theological survivalists:  Usually some flavor of Protestant Christian – who believe that the second coming of Jesus, and the fire and plagues described in Revelations (a ridiculous book whose inclusion in the Christian canon has always puzzled us) are imminent, and who believe they might somehow survive these scary events unscathed if only they store enough canned goods and ammunition.  Why they believe the scary bits in Revelation and not any of the redeeming bits from the red-letter portions of the Gospels is a mystery best left to the study of psychiatry.
2)    Anarchist survivalists:  The most famous modern anarchist survivalist was Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, known more popularly as “The Unabomber”.  His manifesto is actually full of stunningly accurate insights into the dangers of technophilia on the part of society at large; however, his “solutions” to the problems of humans living together under increasingly difficult conditions and with increasing damage to the environment which sustains them involve, essentially, giving up, chucking the entire human experiment, and living in isolated shacks in the woods.  Oh, and killing people, mustn’t forget that last part.
3)    Paranoid survivalists:  We recognize that this description might include the other two categories, as well, but we reserve it for the various political perspectives used as justifications for survivalism – there are neo-nazi survivalists, white-supremacy survivalists, libertarian survivalists, politically-unaligned-except-we-really-hate-communism/socialism/monetarism/President Obama/the post office/census takers survivalists… again, we could go on forever.  The distinctions these people draw up to dilineate themselves from each other… we don’t understand, and we don’t want to understand.  Their unifying characteristic is that they do not trust other people.

The Myrtle experiment, conversely, can best be summarized as an attempt at good citizenship.

• We believe human beings are first and foremost social creatures, who do and should form collective units such as families, neighborhoods, towns and cities, counties, states, nations and global alliances, and as such we ought to do everything we can to contribute to the health and well-being of other people in each of those social units.
• We believe that there are limits to economic growth, and to the amount of natural resource use which our species can sustain, and that we are living in the decisive century for humanity to come to grips with those facts, but that the solutions to these respective crises is not hermit-like retreat, but rather a collective response.
• We believe there is less to fear from vagrants and criminals than there is to fear from isolation and loneliness.  Friendship and fellowship are more important in times of crisis than at any other time, and may best be found by living with other people, even people who have less than we do, than by living behind barricaded walls.

Mostly, though, we believe that there is almost definitely not an “end game” being played out – humanity will continue, in one form or another.  The right call, therefore, is to be good team players and try to make the future brighter for everybody.  Survivalism is all about the selfish desire to “protect me and mine”.  We want no part of that way of life.  Rather, we’re all about protecting “us and ours”; the happier folk we know are all of like mind.  We invite you to join the tribe, wherever you are. 

Pull up a lawn chair, grab a lemonade, and watch the chickens be silly.  Even if it is the year of the Mayan apocalypse, we’re still going to be making plans for the fall garden, next spring’s garden, and maybe even how we’ll build a bridge over the fish pond next summer, and add a decorative trellis or two, in addition to more permanent seating out under the arbor for the occasional party.  It just seems like more fun than contemplating life in a gopher hole.  And if history does, in fact, repeat itself, Myrtle’s optimism will more than likely be redemed, sooner rather than later.

Happy farming!

If You See the Buddha on the Road.... Peck Him!

“So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much.”
--Ajahn Sumedho

On one level, the Buddhist injunction to simply accept the fact of our existence as an individual cell of awareness, lonely and immutably unsatisfied, holds a certain intellectual honesty which can be very appealing.  External gratification, in the form of a real and palpable knowledge that someone out there loves us, is at the core of 99% of what people have always done once their basic physical needs (food, shelter, health) have been met.

We are lonely, and we want to be loved, or at the very least accepted without judgment – wants which seem simple enough in the abstract, but which run smack into the brick wall of frustrating reality, when there are bills to pay, children to raise, employers to please, neighbors to appease, and a whole host of other pratfalls of living in society.  The Buddhist importation recognizes that we can be one with the universe, or we can be one apart from the universe, but we are most assuredly just one, either way.

So how does this relate to chickens? 

Glad you asked.  The pecking order of a flock of chickens provides endless food for thought; musings on the nature of loneliness and togetherness are perfectly natural in the context of a family of birds whose entire world consists of each other and their relatively small stomping grounds.  They are seldom “alone” in the sense that they are always around each other; however, it is very easy to spot a lonely chicken in the midst of a throng of hens.

To begin at the beginning, chickens are quite obviously not Buddhists, or at the least, they are very poor Buddhists.  The idea of eating a vegetarian diet would strike a chicken as an absurdity.  Sure, grass, veggies, grain, bread, weeds, roots, etc. are all tasty enough… but toss them a piece of fish, a bug, a worm, a frog, or even a wounded fellow chicken, and see how long their peaceful, fun-loving vegan outlook on life lasts.  These are the closest living relatives of Tyrannosaurus Rex, and despite their diminutive statures, they won’t let you forget it if you dangle red meat in their faces.

Chickens are not particularly peace-loving, either.  Certainly their default setting is to not raise a ruckus, because ruckus-raising heightens their evolutionary memory of jungle dangers.  In the wild woods of Indonesia, Gallus gallus runs the risk of being taken down by a wide variety of predators if interflock squabbles last too long.  However, just because they are not always fighting each other does not mean that they won’t fight each other.  Who gets to eat first, who gets to sleep first, who gets to lay eggs in the prime nesting spot, who gets to make fun of whom first, these are all questions settled by a good swift nip at the neck.  His holiness the Dalai Lama would never act this way.

This is to paint as ugly a picture of chicken society as you might wish to see, and we won’t blame you if you choose to ignore these uglier aspects of capon personalities.  Don’t worry, though, there is a happy side of the coop, an element of chickenhood which can serve as inspiration rather than as just so much more grist for our cynical mills.

Chickens are fundamentally social.  A lone chicken is a miserable chicken.  We have witnessed time and again how a chicken who is in any way separate from the flock simply will not thrive.  However, when that lone hen is incorporated into the flock, she not only thrives, she essentially swells.  (Yes, Myrtle, yes, there have been numerous examples of Homo sapiens swelling, too, we know; it was not meant to be insulting.) 

There are a wide variety of reasons why this social character evolved in Gallus gallus, and why it remains important for Gallus gallus domesticus, including but not limited to defense of the flock against predators and incursions of territory by other flocks, improved heat-retention for the flock during roosting time in the middle of winter, and (my personal favorite) an extension of health-self-monitoring – by observing the relative health of those above and below themselves in the pecking order, as determined by the brightness and size of their “red flappies”, a chicken is able to determine more or less how healthy they are.  Of course, we assume this is some kind of ingrained behavior, because, let’s face it, chicken brains are not particularly complicated…

Which brings us to a further consideration – an individual chicken is, and there is no polite way to say this, a dumb creature.  A flock of chickens, on the other hand, can be counted on to behave in a manner which is more or less beneficial for the whole. 

Oh, if only people were like that…

Still, this social cohesion on the part of the chicken comes from a necessity which humans, lonely as we may sometimes feel, do not necessarily share.  While we do not know precisely what degree of self-awareness our avian friends possess, we can be fairly certain it does not match that of a human being, at least a human being who is subsisting higher than the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 

And precisely because chickens are not self-aware, they are allowed to more or less “step skip” on this hierarchy by means of being collectively aware.  Chickens respond more or less proportionately to real or perceived dangers – if a possum or a raccoon breaks into the coop, the lead hen makes a great deal of noisy fuss and bother, and either all (or most) of the hens escape, or the invader flees, or the farmer is awakened and comes out (albeit in bathrobe and flip flops) to groggily shoo away the unwanted guest.  Whatever the outcome of this decision tree, order is very quickly restored, and the event is completely forgotten.

Humans are different.  We hang on to irrational fears much, much longer.  We have observed many times in the last decade how disproportionately Americans have reacted to the terrorist activities on September 11, 2001.  In a nation of more than 300 million people, less than 3,000 were killed in an attack the nature of which made it unreplicatable for most of the population of the country – that is because of those 300 million people, very few actually work in high rise buildings in cities where terrorists would be likely to strike.

So, yes, the murder of many of our fellow citizens was an emotionally charged and tragic event, requiring a response.  But how long should fear of this event have taken hold in places like Laramie, Wyoming, or Llano, Texas, or Bangor, Maine, or Eau Claire, Wisconsin, or any of hundreds (nay, thousands) of communities all across the country, where visceral emotional responses to the attacks by a subset of fundamentalist Muslims (renounced time and again, by the way, by mainstream practitioners of Islam) still resound?

In some places, Islamophobia has actually gotten worse as the years go by, not better.  We could write a fairly long treatise on that subject, of course, but the point here is actually about something deeper – the isolated feeling that keeps individual people, in this case millions of individual Americans, stuck on the “safety” level of the needs pyramid.  The plain and simple truth is, we know several Muslim Americans who have been every bit as fearful of attacks on American soil by Islamic extremists as any dyed-in-the-wool White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant could be.  Sometimes difference is enough to ignite irrational fear; in this case, it is not the difference, it is the violent imagery which was timed perfectly to exploit pre-existing insecurity.

We suspect 9-11 might not have had such a lasting impact if it were not so vivid a symbol of more general fears – terrorism is something you can point at as a specific threat, however worries about our health, our jobs, our families, whether we will have housing, food on the table, or even clean air and water… these are things which Americans have grown accustomed in the last half century to not questioning.  But even before those four jets were hijacked, and we watched as 3,000 of our fellow citizens perished in a wanton act of violent murder, we were already fearful of creeping, nameless erosions of our feeling of safety.

If we were chickens, we would have been paying attention as those stout and healthy scientists and social observers with their bright red flappies were clucking significantly to warn us of degraded standards for our food, water, climate, social safety net, and financial controls.  Instead, though, we are dependent entirely upon the collective ability of each of us to individually navigate the sometimes overwhelming mountains of information necessary to evaluate what, exactly, is happening.  Little wonder we retreat to “reality” TV and turn to infotainment instead of actual news.  If we forget how to seem, we put on generic clothes (or opinions, as the case may be) and just hope for the best.

Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge” ably westernizes several Buddhist concepts, but the best takeaway from the story is the idea that “Anybody can be a saint on a mountaintop.”  It takes coming down to the cities to prove that you are able to live among your flock and make everyone around you better off for your having achieved individual enlightenment.

Chickens don’t have that burden, but by watching them nip and peck at each other, we think maybe, just maybe, we humans can make our own version of flock behavior work out a little better than we have up ‘til now.  It’s worth a shot, anyway.

Happy farming!

It's Summer in Texas.... Again...

“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”
--General Phil Sheridan

The Climate Prediction Center has good news and bad news for the next several months, depending on your point of view.  And there is good news to read between the lines, if you are willing to make predictions which could possibly be wrong – something climatologists have become a little gun-shy about.

The La Niña event of last year, in large measure responsible for the brutally hot and dry summer which, given that you are reading this, you presumably survived along with us at Myrtle’s place, has definitely desolved into ENSO-neutral conditions.  The odds (according to CPC) of the El Niño Southern Oscillation effect trending towards El Niño or statying ENSO-neutral are about 50-50.

Of course, we at Myrtle’s place put a lot more faith in the notion that things tend to change, and that inertia is the dominant feature of the universe – meaning in context that because we have just come out of two consecutive La Niña events, and water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have been trending in the direction of an El Niño event, those temperatures are more likely than not to continue trending in that direction.

We could be wrong, of course, but we don’t think so.

We are more confident than the CPC, therefore, in predicting that the months of June and July will be brutal here in Texas, but that starting in August and September, that brutality should be replaced by more or less “normal” (by Texas standards) dog days.

Throughout much of the southern half of the country, and particularly here in Texas, temperatures will probably be well above average (both daytime highs and nighttime lows) for the next 8-12 weeks, and lingering effects from La Niña will keep the chances of precipitation fairly low during that time as well.  It may very well look and feel a lot like last year’s drought, frankly.

But there will be a couple of fundamental differences.

First, while the ground is still relatively dry, the fact that much of Texas has already received more rain in the first part of 2012 than it received in all of 2011 significantly reduces the chance for a repeat of last year’s self-perpetuating cycle.  The ground will not bake nearly so easily this year as it did last year, making it possible for scattered afternoon thunderstorms to develop in a pattern we remember fondly from yesteryear – and the cooling outflow from those storms mean even folk who don’t get rained on will at least get occasional relief from the heat.

Second, because La Niña has broken, the jet stream will not be so ridiculously absent from the Northern Plains during Summer 2012 as it was last year.  The infamous Butterfly Effect may be a bit too abstract for some to understand, but it should be easier to see that the lack of drought upstream from the Southern Plains makes it more likely that water will flow into the Southern Plains.  Further, on those occasions when the Jet Stream takes a slight detour southward from the Canadian border, it weakens – ever so slightly – the death grip that the summertime high pressure system which sits over the central United States exerts over our weather.

This anticyclone is the dominant feature of June-July-August forecasts, and is responsible in large measure for the fact that any storms which develop in these months are likely to be scattered and short-lived in nature.  Picture the region from Kansas south the the Gulf of Mexico as a giant crockpot (no, not “crackpot” though it is easy to see why you draw that connection); in the summertime this crockpot has a 10-ton elephant sitting on it.  That’s the summertime high pressure system.  Our pot of beans is not boiling over, no matter what.

Enter the third major difference between this year and last – if, as CPC hints, and we at Myrtle’s place firmly believe, El Niño makes an appearance starting in August of this year, that high pressure system which is usually huge (centered anywhere from Dallas to Topeka, and radiating outwards to include everything from Brownsville to Fargo) will shrink dramatically, and drift eastward.  That will mean instead of 105° August and September afternoons, we may be looking at a chilly 95° for the dog days.  Not much relief as far as a Yankee might be concerned, but danged if we Texans won’t be pulling out our long-sleeved shirts a few months early.

There will also, under this model, be increased chances for relieving rains during the August – September – October timeframe, though still not particularly high.  The real soaking rains from an El Niño don’t arrive until December and January.  So long as we get a repreive from the heat, we won’t be complaining.

Happy farming!

Sorry, Charlie... (Or, "What to eat when you can't see the sea")

“Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it's tuna, but it… it says ‘Chicken of the Sea’.”
–Jessica Simpson

After a recent client visit – a thankfully rare occurrence in his day job – Mr. Myrtle Maintenance stopped for lunch at a sandwich shop he had never before frequented (for the simple reason that it was in a neighboring town we seldom if ever visit), wherein he discovered with great pleasure that the calorie content of each sandwich on the menu was listed in big bold numbers.  And, shocking though it may seem to some, tuna salad (a favorite of dieters for decades) turns out to be a heftier chunk of the alotted calories permitted for Mr. Myrtle Maintenance than the modest avocado and swiss with assorted veggies for which he ultimately opted.

So, tuna is not especially diet friendly; but wait, dear tuna lovers, the news gets juicier.  Now comes word this week that bluefin tuna from the Pacific have been shown to be contaminated by radiation from Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant, damaged by last year’s massive earthquake.  6,000 miles away from Fukushima, off the coast of California, tuna were discovered to have levels of radioactive cesium 10 times higher than the amount normally measured in these fish – still considered “safe” by the U.S. and Japanese governments, but… really?  Safe? 

Atlantic tuna are, of course, no better.  While those who think about tuna at all think of them as inhabiting the colder waters where only deep-ocean fishing trawlers dare venture, the truth is, these huge fish are migratory predators.  They are near the top of the ocean food chain, fearing only the largest species of shark, and feasting on everything smaller than themselves (which includes all manner of squid, smaller fish, and who knows what all else), making them the perfect species for the concentration of pollutants, including those in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil spill which is slowly but surely receding from the oh-so-short-term attention span of modern society.  There are still huge plumes of oil in deep pockets of the Gulf, and they will be affecting the food chain – bottom to top – for decades.

We don’t mean to bring only bleak news, of course.  It’s a big, dangerous world out there, but we actually want to emphasize the dangers of consuming a food source which literally spans the globe for a more hopeful reason, totally unrelated to the sadistic pleasure some bloggers have in giving people the willies.  We only wish to highlight the undesirability of searching for food thousands of miles away from our plates.

There are alternatives.

We have frequently written about our preference for locally grown foods, and have emphasized that there is nowhere as local as your own yard.  “Chicken shot in the yard,” as one of our more colorful friends describes such food.

The trick, of course, is how to make such a local source of sustenance work on a quantitative and qualitative level.

We have an answer for you there, too.  Permaculture is a word that gets thrown about at the kinds of parties we prefer to attend, where there is a superabundance of home-crafted beer, homemade breads, pita chips and hummus, one or two salads made from ingredients of which we have never before heard, carnivores and herbivores living side by side in peace, and all the guests standing in awe of the hosts’ garden, art or music collection, or grasp of local politics or ancient philosophy (and in the case of some of our favorite hosts, a combination of all of these things).

Permaculture has the unfortunate fate of being a catchy word, like “paradigm” or “meme” or a thousand other irritating words of the day which have come and gone, but it represents such an important concept that we feel inclined to drag it out one more time. 

The idea is simple:  “permanent culture”.  In a universe in which change is the only constant, this seems impossible, but that is taking the concept too literally.  What is meant by “permanent culture” is not that everything stays exactly the same; instead, the idea is that everything in a given living system (or “culture”) is sustainable, or perpetually capable of self-contained organic continuity.

For a garden, this means from year to year, you might (nay, you will) see new plants and new growth on old plants, but you will also see the same fundamental processes in play from season to season and year to year, and the evidence of outside intervention will be sparse at most.  And incorporating livestock into the scene makes it a self-contained ecosystem, as much as possible.  Not counting wildlife, of which we have an abundance, chickens currently comprise our entire menagerie, though we will be adding fish and crawdads soon, and will possibly be adding ducks or geese, as well.  Some permaculture enthusiasts have added goats, cattle, llamas, butterflies, worms… pretty much anything that has ever walked, crawled, flown or swam.

There are as many different interpretations of how to reach this utopian vision of a self-contained world as there are advocates of permaculture; even among the earliest proponents of this concept there was considerable diversity of opinion.  Probably the two greatest thinkers regarding permaculture as it relates to food production were Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese visionary whose system was often referred to as “do nothing” farming, and Bill Mollison, an Australian who once remarked that on international flights he would observe that he was often the only person aboard with properly dirty fingernails. 

Mollison spent much of his time protecting “bush country” where any intervention at all by humans invariably led to loss of diversity – though an avid gardener, his philosophy was so anti-development that he was often accused of being an agricultural agonist.  Fukuoka had great respect for brambles and weeds on farmland – it must be noted that Fukuoka never had to deal with Texas sticker grass, but that is an argument for another time.  Fukuoka’s One-Straw Revolution laid out his method, declaring that the object of agriculture ought not to be food production, but “the cultivation and perfection of human beings”.

The great gift these early thinkers passed down was a set of creative ideas – not so much principles by which to guide one’s gardening behavior as much as a series of useful and practical observations.  For example, biodiversity seems greatest on the boundaries between microenvironments – in other words, at the edge of the forest, or on the shore of a pond, or along a fenceline or a creekbed, there is an almost explosive mass of plants and animals not found in the middle of any of these features.  Edges, regardless of the question “Edges of what?”, are where the action is.

Other similar observations relate to ideas such as what defines “healthy” for a fruit crop – traditionally, shoppers walk into a grocery market and want the biggest, brightest, most unblemished peaches or melons or apples, etc.  However, in nature, the “healthiest” crop – the fruit which is most likely to have seeds which perpetuate the species – are frequently the most wrinkled, often not the largest, seldom without blemish.  This is because nutrient content is more important than visual appearance, and under natural conditions – drought, for example – the fruit will be more concentrated, and the meat of the fruit will pull back from its skin or shell, causing it to be easily bruised or “damaged” in the eyes of traditional shoppers.

We at Myrtle’s believe in a hybrid system.  We don’t exactly “do nothing” as Fukuoka would have it, but we try not to intervene more than absolutely necessary, either.  Worrying about the pollutants in tuna from cans on a shelf is bad enough – worrying about chemicals in plants we have grown ourselves would simply be more than we could handle.  So we grow our fruits and vegetables entirely without any sort of supplementation, other than composted leaves, food scraps and chicken poop.

We also believe that artificial edges are every bit as effective in creating the biodiversity Fukuoka, Mollison et al. observed in natural edges.  As such, we feel perfectly at ease with our man-made ponds, and with trellises to hold our pole-beans (Mucuna pruriens, about which we have spoken before), and we will eventually be enclosing our garden plots with low berms and thus creating raised beds, all of which represent transitional zones from one kind of environment to another.  In fact, our trellised velvet beans give shade to our solenacea (tomatoes and eggplants), meaning our spring salsa garden survives the brutal Texas summer and produces again when cooler fall temperatures come around.  This is how these plants “behave” in the wild in subtropical regions; it is also how they behave in the microclimate of our backyard.

We have planted as many perrenial plants as we can manage, and will be planting still more as we encounter them – in addition to our peaches, plums, grapes, and blackberries, we will be planting evergreen huckleberries, and strawberries as a groundcover.  We have numerous perrenial herbs including rosemary, oregano, sage, etc.

Additionally, there are a wide variety of self-seeding annuals in our garden – we do cultivate our amaranth, but we have volunteers scattered willy-nilly, and we encourage them.  Likewise, epazote, catnip, basil and sunflowers come up all over the place, and we happily let them do so.

Our object, long term, is to structure a system in which all of these chaotic elements find a way to coexist and reproduce themselves year-after-year with as little intervention on our part as possible.  Some folk focus on the “do-nothing” part of Fukuoka’s description of such a design, and come to the mistaken conclusion that permaculture is all about not bothering oneself with traditional farming tasks such as weeding or pruning or pest control.  Nothing could be further from the truth – we work our fingers to the nubs in this system, and we do it because “food shot in the yard” is much, much less likely to be contaminated by nuclear radiation from thousands of miles away, or even by an oil spill just a few hundred miles away, or even (hopefully) by exhaust fumes from a few dozen feet away.

Sorry, Charlie, who needs chicken of the sea, when we can see perfectly good chickens out our kitchen window?

Pulletpalooza: A Great Place to Meet Chicks!

The 3rd Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza has been scheduled for Sunday, November 18th, 2012, and we couldn’t be more excited.  Four families have already confirmed to be on the tour, and we are expecting numerous others to confirm before too terribly long.  Counting the six families from last year’s tour, and the several interested parties we have spoken with over the last few months, we could easily be in double-digits this year.  We also expect one local business for sure to sponsor the tour, and will be angling to get several others on board.

We are expanding our marketing efforts this year, too.  T-shirts, bumperstickers, the whole ball of wax.  We’ll advertise on local radio, television and print media, too.  We have gone from an exceptionally modest tour a couple of years ago to a legitimate Brazos Valley happening.

This year, we have moved the date from early December to the middle of November for a couple of reasons – first and foremost, it seemed that no matter how hard we tried to avoid it, we seemed in previous years to unavoidably run into scheduling conflicts with Christmas festivities, and this simply will not do.  Second, we would like to have this event occur when many of the coops on our tour will also be able to feature elements of the fall garden to help demonstrate how seamlessly chickens fit into the typical homescape.  If any frost hits local pumpkins, it likely won’t happen before we get a chance to show off our hens.

If you have a chicken coop and would like to participate in the tour this year, please email us at motheromercy@yahoo.com.  A few things to keep in mind:

• The City of College Station will be invited to participate this year.  We are asking the friendly animal control officer who inspects Big Myrtle’s coop every year to drop by and chat with our visitors about responsible bird ownership in the city.  This means if you have an unregistered coop in College Station, you might not want to be on the tour.  Bryan is lucky – y’all don’t have nearly as stringent  a set of rules as we do in College Station.
• Families last year reported that anywhere from just a handful of visitors at some coops to well over fifty people at others stopped by; please make sure you are prepared to deal with lots of folk traipsing through.
• There is no set “program”; some of us hand out fliers with lots of information, others have colorfully decorated coops, others offer treats, and some just show their birds.  Whatever you are comfortable in doing, we are thrilled to have you do.  We’ll want a register of who came by, but otherwise, there’s not much work required.
• We have a pretty good showing from numerous Bryan families, a family in Kurten, and two coops in College Station.  We would love to get more College Station coops on the tour, and also we’d like to hear from folk in the surrounding communities.  Summerville?  Carlos?  North Zulch?  C’mon, we know some of y’all have chickens!

More information, particularly about possible sponsor discounts and planned Pulletpalooza merchandise/advertising gimmicks will be forthcoming.

3rd Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza:  A Great Place to Meet Chicks!

Just a Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Poison Go Down

“There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known. It's called sugar. If you look at the history of imperialism, a lot of it has to do with that. A lot of the imperial conquest, say in the Caribbean, set up a kind of a network... The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans, and it was done largely to pacify working people in England who were being driven into awful circumstances by the early industrial revolution. That's why so many wars took place around the Caribbean.”
--  Noam Chomsky, 2002 lecture at The University of Houston

We have watched with admiration and horror as the giants of industrial agriculture have attempted to sway public opinion with their “corn sugar” campaign, designed to convince us that corn syrup is “just like any other sugar”.  This is patently false in most respects, of course, as corn syrup is addictive and without nutritional merit of any sort, while some sugars are more reasonably amenable as a part of a balanced diet, but it is true in one sense:  we eat far too much corn syrup, and we eat far too much refined sugar of other kinds, too.

There was a time, not too terribly long ago as human history is told, when table sugar was a luxury item.  Olde tyme recipes and nostalgic literature such as the Little House on the Prairie books make it clear that having sugar on the table was not something folk took for granted.

The advent of huge agricultural concerns and rapid transportation have changed all of that.  These days, having sugar on the table is still rare, but only because all the sugar a body could ever want is already in whatever premanufactured food item most of us are putting on our plates – from chocolate frosted sugar bomb cereals, to sports beverages, to bacon, to peanut butter, to loaves of bread.  Sugar, sugar, everywhere.  It’s enough to drive one to drink!

According to the USDA, the typical American consumes one hundred and fifty six pounds of added sugar every year, of which only 29% is in the form of traditional sugar.  Just eliminating the table sugar would mean, therefore, that the typical American diet would still comprise approximately one hundred and eleven pounds of added sugar, all other things being equal.

If you eat prepackaged foods, or eat in restaurants, you have no choice.  You will eat too much sugar, whether made from corn, or made from beets or sugarcane, and like it or not, you will get fat, bloated, unhealthy, pre-diabetic and probably pre-cancerous.  It is really as simple as that.

“But Myrtle, we hardly ever eat dessert, surely there’s not sugar in everything else!”

Sorry to burst your bubble, but practically everything in the typical American diet has added sugar.  Seriously.  From bacon to salad dressing, from ketchup to crackers, from flavored yogurt to spaghetti sauce, big agribusiness knows how to keep the hooks in their clientele.  Drug pushers are rank amateurs compared to Monsanto and Archer-Daniels Midland.

If sugar is so ubiquitous, then what are our alternatives?  Fortunately, escaping from this dangerous drug is really not all that complicated.  Eating fresh fruits and vegetables instead of prepackaged varieties accomplishes a great deal in the battle against added sugar.  For starters, getting away from the sugars involved in the canning of these foods reduces the added sugar total a tremendous amount right from the get-go.  In addition, fresh fruits and vegetables are filling foods, and the more of them you eat, the less desire or ability you have to eat sugar-heavy foods like cake and cookies.

Then, too, the sugars found in nature (is there anything sweeter than a peach fresh from the tree, or a watermelon straight off the vine?) are much easier for your body to deal with than the refined sugars processed in industrial vats.  In contrast to industrial sucrose and related sugars, fructose in its natural form is so easy to digest it is frequently absorbed too quickly to be registered as fermented detritus in the lower portions of the alimentary canal (graphic descriptions avoided intentionally; some of us like to snack while browsing the web, after all…)  That rotten something in Denmark?  It all comes down to how you frost your danish.

Finally, there are natural alternatives to refined sugars for those moments when you simply have to give in to your sweet tooth.  Honey and other natural sugars such as maple, sorghum, etc. are all more or less as dangerous as industrial cane and corn sugars in terms of their caloric content, and if one were to consume as much honey as one had been consuming corn sugar, this would be a real problem.  But it doesn’t happen that way.  A little honey or homegrown molasses now and then is better tasting and more satisfying than a much larger amount of industrial sugar.  A little bit goes a lot further.

That is, it goes a lot further if you get off of the industrial white powder altogether.  Cane and corn sugar are addictive; unless you quit them cold turkey, you will find yourself continuing to crave them, and you will continue to be in the clutches of the worst drug dealers the world has ever known.

We are anxiously awaiting the day when we harvest the first honey from our top bar hive; we are also looking around for a local retailer with stevia cuttings so we may grow our own table sweetener.  Until such time as we are able to finally become self-sufficient in our fight against sugar, however, we urge you to join us in supporting alternatives – buy local honey, and use natural sweeteners in place of sugar.  And above all else, eat lots of fruits and veggies!

Happy farming!

God's House Doesn't Have a Roof

"Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person."
-- Robert Heinlein, Glory Road 

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently made waves with comments about the “false theology” of those concerned with environmental degradation. One hardly knows where to start with so patently absurd a series of claims as can be heard coming from Mr. Santorum on a regular basis, but the subject does dovetail nicely with something we have been thinking about – a lot – at Myrtle’s place for a while now, which is the relationship between being a good neighbor and being a good person.

Now, living in the buckle of the bible belt, we are routinely regaled with chapter and verse on the subject of faith versus works, and we are surrounded by folk who sincerely believe that it is “not enough” to be a good person, one must recite the magical incantations from the New Testament (and make sure it is the correct translation!) or the pearly gates will remain shut to you, you gnasher of teeth and wailer of wails.

So our musings are somewhat out of place geographically, even if we believe them to be of paramount importance ethically, spiritually, and communitarianily (if you will allow us a neologism or three, we’d be most appreciative).

In short, those whose theology answers questions like “What must I do to be saved?” (presumably from damnation for the crime of having been born human), or even the more benign “What must I do to go to Heaven?” (though how any theoretical divine realm could be any better than the dinner table set by Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is beyond our comprehension) are already on the wrong path vis-à-vis real wisdom. Punishment and reward are not the proper sphere for a discussion of God and morality. Punishment and reward are the proper sphere of the kindergarten teacher and the local constabulary.

Any religion worthy of the name has as its basis two senses which ought to be engaged: a sense of awe, and a sense of obligation. Anything else is gafla – the great “noise” or “distraction” – a concept, by the way, which is clearly delineated in ancient Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic and Muslim texts, but which is only hinted at by Jesus in a few parenthetical asides in the Gospels, and absent altogether in the legalistic screeds of the epistolary apostles. We have always suspected Jesus spent a great deal of time talking about the subject, but his more metaphorical-minded Jewish audience was too busy being flogged and starved by colonial Rome at the time to take proper notes, so we are left only with the more literal-minded renderings of whatever it is he may actually have said. But we digress…

The original point for which we were attempting to provide elucidation is just this: no matter what God you may worship – or even if you worship no God at all – the point of theological musing ought not be “What’s in it for me?” but rather “How do I make sense of all this wonderful stuff of which life, the universe and everything is made?” and “How can I best serve those around me, so they can appreciate all this wonderful stuff, too?”

This, of course, is as abundantly rife with what Rick Santorum calls “false theology” as it can be, particularly since it does not even require the existence of God. But we retort that the God described by Mr. Santorum and his like is so small it is blasphemous. If God really were so petty as to judge so arbitrarily and cruelly as does the character described by authoritarian fundamentalism, it would be a moral imperative to rebel against Him. If God exists, then surely [S]He is more mature and emotionally secure than we are.

Otherwise, what purpose does this creature serve?

Praise of God is fine, so far as it goes, but without defining the term in a meaningful way, we find it offensive. If your God is an abusive father who abandons the people of Darfur to genocidal rampages, what good is he? If his only purpose is to allow your team to score more points than their opponents, again we ask, who cares?

If, though, your God only makes an appearance when someone, anyone, notices the pain and suffering of others (be they human or otherwise) and decides to do something about it, then we at Myrtle’s place say “Now you’re talkin’!”

It seems to us, simple backyard chicken raisers that we are, that we are in an interdependent web, and just as we require much from our surroundings for nourishment and comfort, there is every likelihood that our surroundings, in turn, need to be nourished and comforted. At least, it seems that way every time we feed the chickens, or better still as an example, when we feed the cat. Ungrateful though she may seem most of the time, she expresses great degrees of warmth and feeling when her dinner bowl is filled.

Whether gardening, volunteering at a food bank or homeless shelter, reading to a child, paying the toll for the car behind you in line, picking up litter in a state or national park, riding your bike instead of driving your car, or just smiling at a stranger, everything you do which makes life a little more pleasant for those around you is fundamentally moral. By contrast, anything we do which detracts from the lives of others, and makes their very existence a little more difficult is immoral.

God, if there is a God, must needs function on much the same plane. We submit further that any activity which tends towards the care and feeding of others is by default the only kind of prayerful or worshipful activity worth condoning, regardless of what any particular texts may or may not say about the subject. You want to know what is “holy”? It’s a lot like the judicial wisdom on pornography: “I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.”

To that end, we find it truly shocking that a candidate for President of the United States of America would call any endeavor to clean up our national parks – let alone any attempt to prevent calamitous increases in greenhouse gas emissions, or a whole host of other environmental damages done by our rogue materialistic culture – “false theology”; there is more spiritual wisdom in an Ansel Adams photograph than in a dozen papal decrees.  And there is more piety in handing out blankets, or peanut butter sandwiches, than there would ever be in a million pompous speeches about "pure" Christianity and the dangers of letting women decide what to do with their own bodies.

But what do we know, right? We’re just a bunch of heathens. Sigh.

If Rick calls, let him know we’ll get back to him; we’re out back, praying. Or, as some might call it, gardening.

Happy farming!

"Wise Food" (or.. "Vegetarian Without Vegetables")

"Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness."
--Michael Pollan, The New York Times Magazine, Unhappy Meals, 01/28/07

The health benefits of gardening are legion, including but not limited to an increase in exercise and a decrease in stress, but the chief and foremost thing we think of when the subject is vegetable gardening is vegetables.

Even without our mothers’ voices in the back of our heads telling us to eat all our vegetables, we know instinctively they are good for us. And gardening is, quite frankly, all about growing as many of them as we can, and subsisting off of them as much

as possible.

Yet most people do not eat vegetables in sufficient quantities, often by orders of magnitude.  This fact was brought home in a scandalously obvious way recently when Mr. Myrtle Maintenance skipped his lunchtime jog due to soreness in his knees (getting old is a bad idea –we recommend not doing it), and ate lunch with several co-workers.

The lunchtime topic of conversation? Vegetarianism. Mr. Myrtle Maintenance and one of his coworkers are vegetarians; the vast majority of the table, as is true of the vast majority of the population of Texas, comprised not just omnivores, but practical carnivores, whose only nonmeat intake consists of potatoes and processed white flour products, with heavy doses of dairy fat and processed sugars. Throw in a few pickles and onions, maybe a slice or two of tomato, and some ketchup.

You know the kind of meal we are talking about.

“I could never be a vegetarian,” one person said. “It’s not so much that I have to eat meat. It’s just that I don’t like vegetables.”

The kicker? Mr. Myrtle Maintenance’s vegetarian co-worker replied: “I don’t like vegetables either. I don’t really eat that many of them.”

Now, we are hardly fundamentalists on this question. Obviously, as prominently as chickens feature in our homescape, you can reckon right off the top of your head that we are, at a minimum, oviverous. And we really, really like cheese. So, call us lacto-ovo vegetarians, just as a starting point. Throw in the fact that we will eat fish on occasion, and we are already all the way out to the realm of pescetarian, so we are a long way from your dyed-in-the-wool raw food vegan purist. We are only “vegetarian” in the sense that, unlike your typical denizen of Texas, we don’t actually have raw, bloody red meat dripping from our slack-jawed maws at the present time.

That having been said… we find it incomprehensible that you can be a “vegetarian” without eating vegetables.

How in the world is that supposed to work?

When you stop to think about it, though, this bizarre concept is more than possible. Not healthy, sure, but perfectly plausible. The amount of prepackaged food out there comprised almost entirely of processed flours and sugars is almost limitless. Throw in a few soy-based meat substitutes, some tomato paste, and some high-fructose corn syrup, and you’ve got yourself a McVegetarian feast.

You also haven’t solved much in the way of health problems, which brings us back to the garden….

We have not invested a lot of time in research on the “Slow Food” movement, but that is not for a lack of sympathy. The idea that a revolt against fast food – started almost as a joke in an Italian community fed up with McDonald’s attempt to ‘feed them up’ – should be named “Slow Food” is too delicious for a couple of English majors to pass up. It’s just that the time spent reading about it would tend to detract from the time involved in actually living it. We don’t do the whole scrapbooking thing for similar reasons.

Still, a brief perusal of slow food articles turned up the Michael Pollan quote we started with, and since he is one of our favorite food and garden writers, we’re running with the idea he has so ably expressed: healthy eating is not about marketing or packaging. Healthy eating is about healthy food, and healthy food is best harvested from healthy plants, which are found in healthy gardens.

This idea is not limited to vegetarian food, of course. Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma describes the difficulties involved in choosing to eat meat – and led to harsh and, we believe unwarranted, criticism of Pollan from vegetarian purists – but those difficulties are not excessively onerous, if you are so inclined to overcome them. The bottom line, though, is that whether animal, vegetable or mineral (well, maybe not mineral…), the good stuff is produced at home. Barring that, it is produced close to home.

Our 2012 New Year's resolutions, like many folks’, deal in great measure with personal health. We are looking into all sorts of unexplored corners of our personal dietary habits to ferret out the improvements we know we need to make. Among those things Myrtle Maintenance Personnel will be doing more of this year:

• Getting off of sugar. As much as possible, we aim to use stevia and honey instead. To that end, we will be planting stevia in the herb garden a little over a month from now, and the minute our tax refund was deposited, we built a top bar beehive.
• Maximizing veggies-shot-in-the-yard in our diets. We currently have spinach, arrugula and chard in harvest, but this is as barren as we plan on being for… oh, the rest of our lives. We had tomatoes ripening on the vine as recently as the week before Christmas, and this next fall we intend to start making use of a low tunnel to keep right on going straight through the moderate freezes which are the worst we can expect in our garden.
• We will be harvesting broccoli, carrots and kohlrabi in few weeks, with fava beans coming maybe a week or two after that, and then pretty much a full menu of produce for the foreseeable future.
• Eating as much fruit as we can lift. We have not yet solved our winter needs, though some potted citrus that we can move in and out when we have sub-freezing temperatures are on the “to do” list; otherwise, we have various berries or fruit coming in from late April through October. Blackberries, peaches, plums, pomegranates, and several varieties of melon all fit into any dietician’s list of “yes, you can have as much of that as you want” and, apart from the labor involved in planting and harvesting, they are all free.

There are a ton of other items on our respective health checklists, but none strike us as being quite so easy – and enjoyable – as those related to food we raise ourselves. As a caveat, that food which we cannot grow on our own, we plan to purchase in increasing quantities from local sources. Where local varieties of food are not available, local distributors will be our vendors of choice (ex. The Farm Patch on College Ave. in Bryan carries items which are not always local – like pineapple, for instance – but is a preferable source of produce when compared to the large chain grocery stores).

Whatever your food preferences, we urge you to be as deliberate as possible in the new year in making them as good for you as you can envision. Happy eating, and…

Happy farming!

A Fool and His Garden... Or Something Like That...

“Fools ignore complexity.  Pragmatists suffer it.  Some can avoid it.  Geniuses remove it.”
--Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming

Gardening in the 21st century is an exercise in programming rather touchy liveware.  We misdoubt much that Alan Perlis, the first winner of the Touring award for advances in computer programming, would know one end of a shovel from the other, but his advice to programmers rings true for gardeners, as well.  Simplify, simplify!

The size and scope of practically any book on the market regarding urban homesteading, urban farming, backyard vegetable raising, square-foot gardening, or any other system or nomenclature you care to use, suggests that there are an infinity of issues involved in growing one’s own food.  This is an inescapable truth, made only more mind-boggling by things like climate change, land degradation, water, air and light pollution, urban heat sinks, and whatever the Kardashians may be up to these days. 

“Keeping it simple” has seemingly never been harder.

However, there are a few guidelines we have come to live by over the past five years of attempting to recreate our grandparents’ idyllic country homes here in the middle of the city.  We hope you find them either useful or at least mildly entertaining:

Don’t bother experimenting.  Just dive in to full production, and adapt on the fly.  We have noticed that those projects where we just dabbled, like our first attempt at water collection, were too timid by half, and have had to be redone entirely.  100 gallons of water in barrels is nowhere near enough to maintain a full scale half-acre garden, and we are totally redesigning the gutters on the roof and the outlets from which they drain accordingly. 

We would have been better off just going for broke and hooking the whole thing up to our pond from the get go.  The pond, meanwhile, is not an experiment, it is a completely nutty idea that we just said “What the heck, let’s do it” about, and it is fast becoming one of the better decisions we made – it will provide all the water for our garden this year, and will keep our bees cool througout our brutal Texas summers.

The amaranth which is the pride of our garden from May to November is another example of our having skipped any empirical research and gone straight into production – we just dove in and planted it everywhere, and the results speak for themselves.  We have tasty greens for the six months out of the year when our neighbors are paying the most outrageous prices for greenhouse greens or, worse yet, trucked in greens from cooler climates.

Anything worth doing is only worth doing as well as you have to.  Put another way, don’t try to make anything in your garden perfect – the best garden, like the best manufacturing process, or the best sports team, or the best computer network, train system, school of fish, etc. – is not the one with the best individual parts, it is the one with the best relationships between the parts. 

In other words, a crooked row here or there, a few more weeds, a few extra bugs in your tomatoes, or a few more dried branches on your perennial herbs – really, any little blemish – is not nearly so important as the overall theme of “how does the whole thing look and feel?” 

The best example of this is weeding – getting all the “non-edible” plants out of your vegetable beds sounds like a good idea when an expert tells you to do it, and they put all sorts of justifications for it in their big hardcover books which sell for $29.99 at Barnes and Noble, but… they’re wrong.  Leave the weeds.  If you do anything to them, cover them up with dead leaves and such.  At worst, pull them and feed them to your livestock.

The healthiest soil is soil that is allowed to be a living, breathing system, and so-called weeds are part of that system.

Don’t give up too soon.  About the time you feel so hot and dry in the middle of a Texas drought that you say, “The heck with this!  I’m not even bothering with a fall garden!” is abou the time that you need to be putting in a fall garden, because you’ll invariably end up with the sweetest, most nutritious fall veggies you’ve ever had, right when your neighbors are paying through the nose for bland, flavorless imports from parts unknown.

Yes, it can be frustrating, but slogging through is just about always worth it.  We discovered this last fall when we were ready to pull up our tomato plants, which had somehow survived the brutal summer, but were not putting out any fruit… we were too lazy to get around to actually pulling them up out of the ground, though, and the end result was some rather tasty tomatoes around Christmas time.

We currently have a wide variety of winter goodies growing – fava beans, several kinds of spinach, kale, lettuce, chard, kohlrabi, broccoli, carrots – but we also have some other things growing, too.  Sunflowers.  Sunflowers?  Yes, sunflowers.  Who knows whether they’ll actually bloom, or if winter weather will intrude sometime in the next few weeks to kill them off, but either way, they have been a fun trap crop to watch as our tender winter greens have struggled to get going, and other than the initial effort of scattering the seed, the sunflowers haven’t actually cost us anything.

In a similar vein, we intend to scatter “lazy” crops throughout the garden this spring.  None lazier than amaranth, we might add, which will probably grow all over the yard whether we do anything about it or not, since the seed was scattered far and wide, willy-nilly, this last summer/fall.  That’s as it should be.  Masanobu Fukuoka would be proud, even if messrs. Perlis and Touring would be utterly befuddled.  And we are 100% certain they would not want to hear our theories about “debugging” either.  But to each his own, we suppose.

Happy farming!