Tales from the Dirt Side

I love this book! I'd had it on hold at the library for some time and it came available just in time for the long hours I logged travelling to visit family for the holiday weekend.

It is sooo good. It's the tale of three women who each run their own successful, organic farms on Vancouver Island and together own and operate Saanich Organics which distributes local, organic food through a box delivery program and to restaurants and grocery stores.

The book literally gives the reader "all the dirt" on how they do it. There is a chapter written by each woman, devoted to their own farm enterprises, how they started out, what they learned along the way, mistakes they made and rewards they reaped. Rather than being repetitive, these chapters reflect the individual personalities and styles of the women, and their unique approach to how they farm. Chapter four is a discussion of organic farming in general and why they are so passionate about it. Chapter 5 covers the details of their co-owned business.

This book is incredibly rich and full of so much invaluable information, but it's not at all a dry nuts and bolts manual. It is alive with personal stories, humour, blood, sweat and tears. It feels almost as if you are an apprentice on one of their farms, working along beside them while they share their wisdom and experience with you.

I love how open and forthcoming they are with all that they know. There is no hoarding of proprietary knowledge or trade secrets. They genuinely want to see more farmers growing healthy, organic food and make a decent living from it and they are happy to support the movement every way that they can.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in small-scale, organic agriculture. Even if that is not your plan, it's still a great read for learning about organic farming, getting good gardening tips or just to be inspired by three beautiful, strong, smart ladies who are doing amazing work in the world.

Wes and Wendell

Early morning yoga by candlelight + a conversation between Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson = a blissed out way to start the day!

Some particularly blissful gems:

"We have to look to nature to learn how to farm."

"If we can begin to think about running agriculture on contemporary sunlight with no soil erosion, I think we have the basis for a new set of metaphors and we can begin to think about the end of economic growth."

"We are the environment. We are embodiments of the environment...We take our measures of the work we do...from the place we're in."

"We are embedded in a structure that gave rise to us. We didn't give rise to it."

"The only safeguard of abundance is temperance."

Two great minds there. Verily.



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Revealing the Hidden Harvest

These people are my friends. I heart them. They radiate awesomeness. And so does their new project.

"Ensuring Ottawa's fruit and nuts are valued, picked, and shared.

Hidden Harvest Ottawa is a social enterprise launching this spring, supporting Ottawa's urban orchard through planting trees and organizing harvest events.

We will be seeking lead volunteers to organize community harvest events (training provided), as well has volunteer harvesters and tree owners who would like the bounty from their edible trees to be put to good use.

Sign up to be the first to hear when we are accepting applications for volunteers and harvest locations.

Together we will make good use of healthy, local food. We will be addressing climate change with our forks, and building community by sharing our urban abundance!"


If you live in Ottawa, you should check it out!

The Meadow in the Sky

Posting is thin of late because my laptop has been in the shop for a week getting some repair work done. Hopefully I'll have it back soon!

I thought I would feel much more set adrift without a constant and steady internet connection at home in the evening, and though there have been times when I wanted to do a search for something online and I am getting behind in my botany course and favourite podcasts on herbalism and permaculture, I haven't missed my computer as much as I imagined I would.

I've been doing a little cursory reading on agroforesty, the art of coppicing, the polewood economy and the potential for developing these practices in a modern, permaculture context. One article I read talked about the use of pollarded, or high coppiced trees for livestock fodder. It was a common technique once used to provide high protein food to animals, especially through the winter. It was sometimes referred to as 'cultivating the meadow in the sky'.

I read that line and just about died and went to heaven. I mean how lovely is that? Cultivating the meadow in the sky. It's poetry. And from what little I know, it sounds like an incredibly elegant and regenerative approach to woodlot management.

Anyway, I just wanted to leave that wonderful visual here for you all to imagine, while I wait for my laptop to be fixed.

Oh and speaking of wonderful visuals, I've also been drooling over master woodsman Ben Law's home. Have a look!

Well now, that's handy!

I just finished reading this book by Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing fame and Make Magazine. While it seems that he approaches DIY and maker culture from a different perspective and perhaps with other motivations than say the Transitioners, permies, peak oilers and zombie apocalypse preppers among us, he treads a lot of common ground and the end result is the same, namely, a greater sense of resilience and control over one's life, a better appreciation for the resources used and waste produced by consuming 'stuff' and "a deeper connection and more rewarding sense of involvement with the world around us."

One of his main goals is "to improve my family's home life by taking an active role in the things that feed, clothe, educate, maintain and entertain us", and to that end he takes on a number of DIY projects, some of which include planting a garden, raising chickens, keeping bees and fermenting sauerkraut. He encourages people to not fear making mistakes, but rather see them as an essential part of the process. He frames everything within the context of a busy family life, raising two small children. And he focuses an articulate, critical lens on a consumer culture that is overly saturated with designed-for-the-dump, low quality goods.

He also profiles some really great DIYers, some familiar and many new to me, and shares stories of their projects and expertise. I loved the list of Mister Jalopy's Maker's Bill of Rights, which includes things like:

• cases shall be easy to open
• special tools are allowed only for darn good reasons
• if it snaps shut, it shall snap open
• screws are better than glues
• ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought

At the end, Frauenfelder reflects on his DIY adventures, musing, "Now that I am making and fixing some of my own things, I've developed a more meaningful connection to the human-made objects and systems I use...The small degree of autonomy I've attained as a DIYer has had a big payoff...I like knowing I can make something that way I want it to be."

This was a fun and informative read. Well worth a trip to the library!

On Hold

I heart my public library!

Why?

I'm not a wife, I don't have children, and I divide my "punk, DIY housewifery" time with my job, but I am so relating to just about everything in this delightful, declarative post, over at Apron Stringz.

Lengthy excerpt (but please do read the whole thing):

"Let’s be frank.

I believe the world is fucked up. We have ravaged the wilderness into near oblivion, sucked the life out of every arable piece of land, bombed and enslaved our fellow humans, all in order to provide for our extremely decadent first-world lifestyle. I know I can’t change things to any significant degree, but neither can I turn aside and pretend I haven’t noticed. I cannot, in good conscience and healthy mental condition, proceed at full speed...I am guilty of participation at every level, but I cannot reconcile a life that does not at least try for something better. If I am weary with effort, I will know I am doing what I can do.

And here’s what I can do.

If I believe that massive-scale agriculture is defiling our land, and corporate food products are defiling our bodies, I can base our diet instead on whole foods from local farms.

If I believe that using fossil fuels supports global bullying and violence, not to mention environmental degradation, I can make the time to walk and bike whenever possible.

If I believe that the immense resources sucked down and shit out for every piece of plastic crap we think we deserve is inexcusable, I can mend broken things, reuse materials, buy second hand, do without.

But you know damn well those choices are not so simple, and that is where the skill and craft and countless hours of housewifery become meaningful. After the romance of changing the world has subsided, it all comes down to the number of hours in a day and the number of dollars in your bank account. In case you’ve never been to a farmer’s market let me tell you that local, sustainable food is enormously more expensive. If I want to be able to afford the luxury of responsible purchases, I need to defray costs by cooking everything from scratch. Creativity in the kitchen is worth money– stretching that costly ethical meat by picking every last shred off of last night’s roast chicken and cooking the bones into stock; planning ahead for variety and convenience so that we are less tempted by the many corporate foods surrounding us on a daily basis; and ‘adding value’ at home by making our own jams, yogurt, granola, and bread.

Although cooking tends to monopolize my own housewifery, cleaning up after everything is a law, like gravity. It has to be done, and someone has to do it. The infinitely humble task of washing dishes is radical political action, because after cooking your ethically and sustainably raised chicken into stock to make a second or third meal out of it so that you can afford to keep supporting that righteous local farmer, there is a pile of greasy dishes to be done. If a=b and b=c, than a=c."

Amen. And now back to my dishes...


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If You Post It, It Will Come

I recently started a tumblr blog that I'm calling A Small House and a Large Garden, which is a reference to the Abraham Cowley quote on the sidebar of this blog and at the top of my new one.

The plan is to simply curate images that reflect how I aspire to live in the world and gather visual ideas for crafting a way of being and creating home. I'm making big changes in my life this year, leaving my job and moving, and I don't have a neat, step by step plan or specific goal for determining what's going to come next. But I do have a pretty good idea of the direction I want to move in and a growing vision of how that might unfold. Posting these images will continually remind me of that vision and add to it.

Maybe it's the Sci-Fi/Fantasy I've been reading lately (I'm thoroughly enjoying this library read), but I feel like maybe I might be able to work a little magic here. With JPEGS and pixels, perhaps I can conjure up my dream life and make it happen. Or, at the very least, get some decorating inspiration for my new place, wherever it may be.

If you don't find anything new here, I've probably posted something over there.




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Victorian Farm Christmas

I spent the better part of last winter deep in hibernation mode watching the wonderful and delightful series Edwardian Farm, Victorian Farm and Victorian Pharmacy (all available on youtbe). I escaped into the daily lives of Alex Langlands, Peter Ginn and Ruth Goodman, and it was good. So good.

So you might be able to imagine how over-the-moon happy I am to discover that there are three whole episodes of the Victorian Farm that I haven't seen! Folks, there is a Victorian Farm Christmas series and you can watch it right now on TVO. Right now!! Happy days!

Producing a Life

"Radical Homemakers are aware of the misplaced priority on increasing the bottom line. Quite often their incomes are significantly below the norm. But that is because they have learned that there are two ways to make a living. In one method, the convention of our culture, substantial money is earned and then spent on purchasing life's necessities. In the other method, significantly less money is earned, and basic necessities are produced or otherwise procured. Packages from the mall, plastic-wrapped food, designer labels and television sets are seldom seen inside these households. Rather, they are filled with books, simmering pots, some dirty dishes, musical instruments, seedlings, wood shavings, maybe some hammers or drills, sewing machines, knitting baskets, canned peaches and tomato sauce, jars of sauerkraut, freezers with hunted or locally raised meat, and potted herbs. Outside the door there are no multiple new cars or manicured lawns. Whether in the country or the city, one is likely to find a garden plot or potted tomatoes, fruit trees, bicycles, probably a used car, shovels, spades, compost bins, chickens, maybe a wandering goat or some other livestock, and laundry blowing in the breeze. These people are producing their life, not buying it."

~Radical Homemakers,p. 208

Lining up for the radical, homemade Kool Aid

I heart Radical Homemakers!

"RADICAL HOMEMAKERS: RECLAIMING DOMESTICITY FROM A CONSUMER CULTURE

Mother Nature has shown her hand. Faced with climate change, dwindling resources, and species extinctions, most Americans understand the fundamental steps necessary to solve our global crises-drive less, consume less, increase self-reliance, buy locally, eat locally, rebuild our local communities.

In essence, the great work we face requires rekindling the home fires.

Radical Homemakers is about men and women across the U.S. who focus on home and hearth as a political and ecological act, and who have centered their lives around family and community for personal fulfillment and cultural change. It explores what domesticity looks like in an era that has benefited from feminism, where domination and oppression are cast aside and where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity, or relentless servitude.

Radical Homemakers nationwide speak about empowerment, transformation, happiness, and casting aside the pressures of a consumer culture to live in a world where money loses its power to relationships, independent thought, and creativity. If you ever considered quitting a job to plant tomatoes, read to a child, pursue creative work, can green beans and heal the planet, this is your book."

Yes! Yes! Yes! Totally radical dude.


Thanks to Homegrown Evolution for posting about it. I heart you.

Updated to add long excerpts from this article by the author.

"The Radical Homemakers I interviewed had chosen to make family, community, social justice, and the health of the planet the governing principles of their lives. They rejected any form of labor or the expenditure of any resource that did not honor these tenets. For about 5,000 years, our culture has been hostage to a form of organization by domination that fails to honor our living systems, under which “he who holds the gold makes the rules.” By contrast, the Radical Homemakers are using life skills and relationships as replacements for gold, on the premise that he or she who doesn’t need the gold can change the rules. The greater one’s domestic skills, be they to plant a garden, grow tomatoes on an apartment balcony, mend a shirt, repair an appliance, provide one’s own entertainment, cook and preserve a local harvest, or care for children and loved ones, the less dependent one is on the gold.

By virtue of these skills, the Radical Homemakers I interviewed were building a great bridge from our existing extractive economy—where corporate wealth has been regarded as the foundation of economic health, where mining our Earth’s resources and exploiting our international neighbors have been acceptable costs of doing business—to a life serving economy, where the goal is, in the words of David Korten, to generate a living for all, rather than a killing for a few; where our resources are sustained, our waters are kept clean, our air pure, and families and can lead meaningful lives.

In addition, the happiest among them were successful at setting realistic expectations for themselves. They did not live in impeccably clean houses on manicured estates. They saw their homes as living systems and accepted the flux, flow, dirt, and chaos that are a natural part of that. They were masters at redefining pleasure not as something that should be bought in the consumer marketplace, but as something that could be created, no matter how much or how little money they had in their pockets. And above all, they were fearless. They did not let themselves be bullied by the conventional ideals regarding money, status, or material possessions. These families did not see their homes as a refuge from the world. Rather, each home was the center for social change, the starting point from which a better life would ripple out for everyone."

I heart Neil Young

"It's about where it came from and how it was grown."

Wendell Berry, "A Native Hill"

"We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us... And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity- our own capacity for life- that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.

We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contraty assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it."

Pge. 20 The Art of the Commonplace

More from Wendell Berry's "The Whole Horse"

"What, then, is the countervailing idea by which we might correct the industrial idea? We will not have to look hard to find it, for there is only one, and that is agrarianism...

The fundamental difference between industrialism and agrarianism is this: whereas industrialism is a way of thought based on monetary capital and technology, agrarianism is a way of thought based on the land.

Agrarianism, furthermore, is a culture at the same time that it is an economy. Industrialism is an economy before it is a culture. Industrial culture is an accidental by-product of the ubiquitous effort to sell unnecessary products for more than they are worth.

An agrarian economy rises up from the field, woods and streams- from the complex soils, slopes, weathers, connections, influences, and exchanges that we mean when we speak, for example, of the local community or the local watershed. The agrarian mind is therefore not regional or national, let alone global, but local. It must know on intimate terms the local plants and animals and local soils; it must know local possibilities and impossibilities, opportunities and hazards. It depends and insists on knowing very particular local histories and biographies.

Because a mind so place meets again and again the necessity for work to be good, the agrarian mind is less interested in abstract quantities than in particular qualities. It feels threatened and sickened when it hears people and creatures and places spoken of as labour, management, capital, and raw material. It is not at all impressed by the industrial legendry of gross natural products, or of the numbers sold and dollars earned by gigantic corporations."