Integrated pest management

We don't have a lawn; we have a habitat. And I have chosen to care for it using principles of integrated pest management. This simply means a certain level of "pests" is tolerable and manageable through the controlled presence of competing species. So instead of saturating our green space with petrochemicals to maintain a narrow assortment of grass species, we are cultivating white clover and spreading milky spore. In addition, we have planted a hillside with red clover in order to build up the soil over the next few years. We are taking this approach because most problems with plant health and resilience are rooted (couldn't resist) in poor soil. Creating healthy soil takes time. Pouring fertilizer on weak soil doesn't improve it. It's at best a very short term fix, kind of like Viagra. Most lawns symbolize a triumph of chemicals and will power over the facts of nature. Integrated pest management accepts that the "lawn" is not happening in isolation, that the arbitrary space called "lawn" is a construct in someone's mind and value system separate and distinct from the natural world. Put another way, lawns don't happen in nature. They are the product of turfgrass science, which is a course of study at all land grant universities.
If we lived on a golf course, I'd be consulting daily with a turfgrass specialist. But we live in a clearing in the woods. The old ruins of former habitations on our land remind us of our own visitor status. We are stewards and we are just passing through. And to the moose and bears we may even be pests.
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Petroleum Nightmare

I'm struggling to find a way out of the petrochemical web of deceit. We aren't living in the Information Age; this is still the Petroleum Age. As we helplessly watch the Gulf of Mexico disaster expand, not knowing where and when it will stop and what all it will kill, we continue to depend on petroleum-based chemicals in all aspects of daily life. Nearly everything you purchase and use, including food, is wrapped in petrochemical-based plastic or made from it. Baby toys, baby bottles, IV bags, cell phones, computers, athletic shoes, "fleece" clothing, your car, the inside and outside of your fridge, go cups, feminine hygiene products -- I could go on, but you get the point. Your body, your organism, cannot avoid contact with plastic. Even in presumably inert consumer applications these products do leach out harmful chemicals. They are toxic from cradle to grave. Deadly oil spills, refineries spewing carcinogens, trash that will not decay for thousands of years, this is the dark side of our dependence on petroleum-based plastic. Yes, there are alternatives and some companies are using them. But you can't always find them. So what can you do to reduce your exposure?
Since you cannot eliminate the stuff, it makes the most sense to take a harm reduction approach. Try using less.

Instead of plastic landscape "fabric" make your mulch thicker and don't be afraid to spend time weeding. You'll get exercise and the "weeds" actually are nutrient rich biomass you can compost and use to build up your soil. Instead of bagged fertilizer, find a farm with some livestock and get some manure.

Let your toddler live dangerously and drink from a glass made of glass. Limit the number of plastic toys in your home. Don't bring a new one in without getting rid of an old one.

Get a fountain pen and use it religiously.

Do not buy beverages in plastic bottles. Good luck with this one. A helpful alternative practice is to drink tea brewed with tap water. It sounds ridiculously obvious, I know. If you want iced tea, store it in a glass container.

Ask your favorite deli to use waxed paper containers instead of plastic.

Buy fewer baked goods. Think about all the plastic in the bread aisle.






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Ten things rural life has taught me

1. Wood ash on wet newspaper easily cleans creosote from wood stove windows. (Lye is made from wood ash.)
2. Applewood has more BTUs than paper birch.
3. Juvenile red spotted newts, those little red efts that cross the road in droves, can be six years old by the time you flatten them with your car tires.
4. Lichens on trees indicate excellent air quality, not tree decline.
5. Bears like lobster.
6. Fresh grocery store vegetables are not fresh; the ones from the garden are.
7. The Milky Way still exists.
8. You can't have too much land.
9. Trees know more than I ever will.
10. There is no such thing as silence.

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Winter is coming

The leaves are down. The wood stacked. It's dark by dinner time. Instead of weeding the vegetable patch, we'll be reading and writing. We'll be fantasizing about making love to the garden in the spring. We'll be reading seed catalogs and gardening books like they are erotic tales of the divine among us. Because they are.

In the meantime, politicians in Washington continue to steal from the middle class and offer welfare to the bankster class. Still, I am grateful for the opportunity to grow some food and living among the trees. Small joys have always made a difference.

This winter is a great time to plan for next year's growing season and the winter beyond that. Seriously, consider what you can provide for yourself from your own plot of land. Unplug a little from the global corporate food chain. Start to declare your independence from big ag, big food, big everything. Get human. Corporations are not human beings. You are. Corporations do not have human rights. You do. Choosing to assert your smallness does not make you a denailist. Just say 'yes' to the pleasure of providing for your self and your family from the goodness of the land.

I predict that the continued unraveling of our economy will be just slow enough to stave off open revolt among formerly employed middle class people, the nouveau poor. This is my worry anyway. Suffering will increase gradually as income goes down, inflation accelerates and tax burdens increase. Because we live in the United States and have been inculcated with the myth of the boot straps and a level playing field, a lot of us will keep trying to do right by our families and kids. But simple goals of work, shelter, college for the kids, retirement with dignity will always feel a stretch.

If you want peace, prepare for war. If you want food, prepare for spring this winter.




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Local flavor in the rain

In my neck of the woods there's a quirky family-owned grocery stuck in the 1960s. It's small, three aisles maybe, the kind of place you'd get your food during a camping trip. They carry the essentials and focus on local food in season. They do not have long aisles of chips, canned stuff and processed meals. But they have affordable lobsters, mussels, asparagus and Molson. Today's fresh produce featured strawberries picked this morning after a night of heavy rain. Fragrant and swollen with last night's downpour, these berries will grace tonight's shortcake. Until I saw these berries, strawberry shortcake wasn't on tonight's menu.

And this is really the difference between shopping local and shopping at a huge chain: consumerism. Consumers are not expected to live in harmony with their natural environment. They are expected to shape it to their will and make choices independent of local weather. Their choices are conditioned by market forces or weather across the country last month. The huge chain down the road had California strawberries at a suspiciously low price this morning. But I wouldn't trade the jumbo berries from out of state for the local fruit. The California berries didn't take up the rain that kept me up half the night.

The local strawberries help me make peace with my difficult night's sleep. We both endured the heavy rain. And now I get to eat it.
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Veggies on the way

The veggies are planted and growing happily, for the most part. Spinach, beets, carrots, cucumber, chard, tomatoes, lettuce, beans, cayenne peppers, okra, brussel sprounts, yellow zucchini, watermelon, bok choy, and spaghetti squash. Only the sweet orange peppers seemed stalled, unable to commit to our climate and soil. It's been a little too cool and cloudy for their sweet selves. We are trying impromtu soda bottle cloches for three of the strongest little pepper plants.

After a very dry spring we are now quite wet. A day or two of sun would be delightful for everyone, people, plants and pets.
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Weeding a hillside

Everything here is bigger -- our grub infestation, our weed problem, the poison ivy, the swarms of black flies. This week I set out humbly to weed a hillside bed that the previous owners had dug, but not planted. In the meantime, hundreds of square feet of creeping I'm-not- sure-what have filled in a spot designated for an actual garden -- a space to be filled with the objects of our choices and affections. What makes the current plants weeds is merely that they are growing where I don't want them.

I'm still trying to identify the most persistent culprit and not sure if it is a noxious weed or a hearty native. Goatsrue, giant hogweed, oxygen weed, catclaw mimosa, itch grass, tropical soda apple. I didn't know I was supposed to worry about these things taking over my garden. If I had known, my anxiety over weeding would only be surpassed by my drive to cull every turkeyberry or liverseedgrass plant from the garden. The good news is that these noxious weeds can be replaced with interestingly named natives like bladder sedge, rattlesnake fern and nannyberry. The only catch is my inability to identify any of them -- native or noxious.

Perhaps I should spend time communing with the sprays of creeping growth, listening to their wisdom. Bob Cannard has written about a wholistic approach to cultivation, seeking to understand plants and insects as they coexist. I should be learning from the happy, well- established vines in my hillside soil, rather than spending hours bent over futilely pulling against the tensile strength of the buried runners. Snap. Dig. Snap. With every pull, they win, still rooted and ready to send out new shoots.

Why don't these vines understand what I need? At this point I'm a bit jealous of the people living closer to town center on land cultivated since the mid-eighteenth century -- land tamed and trained into lush productivity. Orchards, agricultural fields, grassy meadows for cows to graze. Up here, on Muddy Hill Road, we can dream and compost and bring in yards of soil, mulch and loam. We can raise small livestock for manure. We can rotate crops.

Surrounded by dense forest, there is a limit to what we can cultivate. In the absence of heavy machinery, the forest will always win. Even armed with a chainsaw, I cannot stop the woods. Only persistent labor can keep them at an arbitrary boundary defined by my use of the land. I am a temporary resident and they know it. And so do I.

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