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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The blessings census

Blessings populate my life, so I'm going to count them. I'm going to determine exactly where they reside and then interview them, profile them, understand them. This list will answer my Sisyphusian "To Do" list with optimism. There will always be housework, weeding, wood splitting, meals to cook and serve, laundry, yes. But the census of blessings reminds me why I do it.

Here is a partial list:
Waking up every day surrounded by forest.
Birdsong.
A chance to grow what we eat.
Fresh air.
Clean water.
A magnificent spouse.
Enough of what we need.

I have never lived in a lovelier place that takes so much work. Things are just bigger here. Spaces, chores, garden beds, trees, wood piles. And so is the joy.

Every chore becomes a labor of love with the right intention behind it. The daily grind supports daily blessing. Mundane chores are actually sacred acts, which done frequently enough become a liturgy of loving care. For a bonus, mindfulness in the simple doing brings more blessing. Clean laundry and a heart full of gratitude. No shame in that.
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Tree saves dog

“We can’t move it. It’s just too big.” The birch had fallen across the road sometime since Sunday's brush fires threatened these sprawling woodland acres. We had driven through this place then, hoping – and really not hoping – to see flames. Instead, we passed under low strange smoke that dimmed the sun to a golden darkness – every shadow ill-cast and urging us away, to the other side of danger. But four days later the fires were long cold, the ground charred black, wet from ample rain, nestling white boulders bright under blue sky.

No, we couldn’t move the tree. We turned around and drove back the way we had come adding time on to our trip. Passing the burned zone again, in my peripheral vision, a beagle – certainly the lost one whose family had been looking for him since Monday. This was Thursday. He’d lasted three nights and four days alone in the woods. Jake spotted our car. Spooked by his recent days and nights and cautious by temperament, he bolted for the hills beyond the burn. Jen took after him on foot, unlikely to catch him, but eager to save a life. My beloved creature of hope. I followed her as I must.

Jake was gone.
When it was clear we couldn’t catch him, we got in the car and headed back the way we had come, realizing that we had to tell his owners the news. Though the woods and hills or coyotes could take him, or he might fall down an abandoned well, he was still alive. A curious, fragile speck roaming hundreds of acres, he was alive and we saw him.

We clocked the distance from where we spotted him to the first crossing, our road. Then we stopped at home to call his people with the mixed news. Grateful that Jake was alive, they pressed us for his exact location. We gave every detail, wished them luck and resumed our trip.

A few hours later when we returned home we saw that Jake’s people had called us and left messages of thanks. They found him. He was safe home resting with a full tummy.

If that birch had not blocked the road, our path would not have crossed Jake’s path. We would not have had good news for Jake’s family. The downed tree thwarted us, but made us available for another plan, which we could not have foreseen – a plan that saved a creature’s life. We thought we knew what was coming, but clearly didn’t. We did, however, make ourselves open to what was before us and responsive to something redemptive and far better than our plans. READ MORE...