blog maintenance

With the little princess both teething and suffering from a cold and low fever, I’m stuck indoors today. I’d hope to finish pallet stacking the 60 square meters of free brick pavers that are to be hauled up to the garden. My wife’s sister just bought an old house and needed a brand driveway. So if I’d just come dig them up and haul them off they were ours. A win win. I’ve come across lot’s of material that way, often times listed in the local classifieds. These pavers are considered down right luxurious for a colony garden.

But since I’m home, and Sienna is finally sleeping, I thought I’d log on and do a little blog maintenance. Johanna and I just threw this blog up after a brief email exchange, wrote a few posts and that was that. But, busy as we both are, I think we’re going to make a semi-serious go at it. Just how many transatlantic Texas/Danish cooperative garden journals are out there? Yay, now all three of our readers, assuming you all came back, can look forward to our quirky but ultimately not-so-unique offering to the blogosphere!

Upcoming topics are anyone’s guess. We’ll be playing with the layout, adding links and other typical blogging thingies as we find time and energy. On that note, one of my recent lazy surfing habits has been to simply bookmark interesting pages for later investigation without taking the time to file them categorically. I’ve got to clean up my bookmarks before they consume me. And as I go threw them I’ll introduce some of those links here. I bet you can hardly wait!

Because I’ve only been online maybe an hour a week of late I didn’t see that there were “comments awaiting moderation.” We don’t intend to moderate anyone’s comments. So I’ll get that fixed today. Then I’m making pear and apple sauces, cracking walnuts, and looking after baby when she wakes, anytime now.

a rouge non-consumer with 500 kilos of apples

With my father-in-law’s help this morning, we harvested 500 kilos of apples from our coveted Belle de Boskoop tree. Tomorrow we’ll have our annual supply of pure, unmolested apple juice! I say unmolested as I’ve been thinking a lot about how corporations basically control our entire food chain and how our humble garden provides small yet meaningful spaces of resistance at the margins of our predatory economic system. Plus, I finally got around to reading Joe Bageant’s Dear Hunting with Jesus.

I’m too busy, and mostly too tired to log online these days, much less write blog posts.  Don’t know when I’ll get around to the next one either but here goes…

The exhaustion stems mostly from the unbelievably tiresome task of being a “stay-at-home dad” with our 6 month old. When she does this, like today, I get a little work done. Walnuts, check. Potatoes up before the frost, check. Finish siding the house, check. Replant the blackberries, not yet. Prepare for next weeks lecture that’s been on my calender for four months, oh hell no. So I’m “working” tonight.

I check my email about once a week, if that. I hardly have time or energy to read a book, especially after all that heavy duty cramming for Ph.D. research grant applications a few months back. And I can’t remember the last time I actually completed a movie from start to finish before passing out on the sofa. Auchentoshan has got my back tonight! But I finally figured I should start reading more than wonderful Julia Donaldson stories to my two year old so I grabbed some “light” reading from the library. Actually, I reserved it through the national public library system (which includes university libraries!) which mailed Dear Hunting from the Royal library to our little podunk branch in the sticks– free of charge. Every book anywhere in the country is available to anyone with a library card in the country. And if it isn’t in Denmark then they’ll borrow it from one of their Scandinavian neighbors and send it to me. Oh, those fucking commie, socialist, Nazi bastards! What will they think of next, universal health care? So, we do have a few systems where the social contract isn’t based on some Hobbsian dog-eat-dog free for all. But the freakonomic neo-liberals are definitely here! And outside the well established social democratic institutions, privatization and consumerism order our lives here as well.

My wife asked me, “what the hell are you reading” after looking down at the title she reads it out loud, each word slow and deliberate; Dear Hunting with Jesus: Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America. “This doesn’t look like the typical academic crap you read.” I say, “just some light reading.” And Bageant’s style is light, and tragically witty too. But this is heavy stuff, like David Harvey in Redneck drag. Camilla was not amused. So she says, “hey, my uncle says he heard you’re giving a presentation next week to the local Rotary Klub.” We live in a small town. “Yeah, how did he hear?” “He’s a member, he’ll be there.” She says he’s looking forward to my talk on “Obama and US/Danish foreign policy.” I’ll be making most of it up over the next few days. Then she says I should really get in good with them because they fund all the exchange student programs to the US for the local high school kids. She’s obviously thinking ahead. But I don’t need my kids doing an exchange student program to the US. I figured summers with their uncle in Texas, an Austin bartender, should give them all the cultural exchange they’ll ever need. Besides, most of the European kids who’ve done the exchange trip tell me horror stories of being stuck with fundamentalist Christians or no dancing Mormons, or worse. A summer with Uncle Scott could save the kids from such a risk. He could tell them stories instead of our own born again Catholic childhood over a few cold Shiner Bocks at his Congress St. bar. Mama aint hearin it. Fuck, I gotta do this damn gig.

After Camilla walked on, I surfed over to Bageant’s blog, thinking I might pick up a rhetorical bomb to throw out at this group of unsuspecting civic business heroes next week. Instead, I got sucked into today’s “letter to Joe.” I didn’t find anything too clever to add to my PowerPoint presentation. However, reading his pessimistic reply to Carol’s gloomy letter our garden, and this morning’s apple harvest came back into focus. Bageant doesn’t hold out much hope for social movements or grassroots politics. But he does offer a theory of resistance:

However, I do believe that rediscovering the natural self and truly discovering that there is a whole wide world outside the national hallucination liberates the individual and pokes a stick in the eye of authority. Admittedly a small one, but if there are enough of them. A liberated individual does not consume very much, nor succumbs to the sales job that permeates our consumer society, and therefore does not own or purchase very much. Nor pay many taxes, since he or she does not need to earn anything near the national average, being the worst kind of rogue imaginable by the state — the rogue non-consumer.

This is as good a reflection as any of my philosophy (and desire) of colony gardening and its potential for liberation. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in Self-Reliance, “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” It’s the kind of Thoreauvian economic logic I strive for at brief interludes during the day but forget once I’m home, falling asleep to re-runs of Camilla’s Desperate Housewives. Yes, I too am in danger of becoming a desperate housewife! What would would Emerson say about that? I know Thoreau disapproves. I’m probably as consumer rogue as Sara Palin’s lipstick.  But hell I’m trying. And the man aint gettin a dime of juice money from me this year! Resistance is not futile.

A Little Fall of Rain

Coming out of what seemed to be a longer than usual summer, with months of no rain, Roy and I were very happy to see the baby plants of fall pop out of the ground.  The summer garden gave us banana and bell peppers and some okra for much longer than anyone else we know.  My gardening friends abandoned their efforts about midway through summer.  Maybe they were disheartened by the long dry hot summer days of south Texas.  We weren’t immune ourselves.  There was one day in July that I remember being 104 degrees.  The grass turned brown that day, plants and flowers died, and the tops of the okra and peppers burned.  Keeping them alive was a matter of strategic watering.

Watching the weather is all a part of the strategy.  The first phase of the fall garden began weeks before that long-awaited first rain.  Roy opted not to use the tiller because the ground was so hard.  He used the hoe and chopped the dirt by hand-old school style.  We planted green beans, snow peas, tomatoes, purple hull peas, swiss chard, spinach, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kohlrabi, burpless cucumbers, acorn squash, cueshaw squash, butternut squash, yellow squash, white scallop squash, shallots, onions, egg plant, zucchini, carrots and cantaloupe.   And, we continue to pick from the peppers and okra.  Roy did a lot of work in the garden.  I know this because I witnessed him myself, while sitting at the picnic table under the shade of the pecan tree while I sipped my sweet iced tea.  His timing was perfect.  The rain began to fall only hours after the seeds were in the ground.  Our boys Tyler and Alan at 19 were so elated they decided to play frisbee in the rain and it took only one night for the seeds to begin to sprout.  It was a much needed relief for south Texas.

We are now in the second phase which involves ensuring that the babies become healthy adolescents.  This entails a lot of weeding, chopping, watering, and yes-spraying pesticide periodically.  The types of pesticides that we use vary.  We are currently fighting army worms, cut worms, cabbage loopers, grasshoppers, cucumber beetles, ants, mole crickets and stink bugs.  We have chickens that will eat some of the pests but we have to make sure they don’t eat the plants and we also have to watch the dogs so they won’t eat the chickens.   It’s not that we’re not willing to go organic.  We’re definitely open to suggestions.

We’ve picked some small yellow squash so far and it made for a nice side with the shrimp stir fry mixed with green beans and carrots from the freezer (home grown, of course).  It shouldn’t be too much longer before I find myself in the kitchen blanching and freezing again.  It’s a lot of work that goes beyond what some might call a hobby.  It’s a way of life.  The benefits surpass those of food for survival.  My children have been exposed to a way of life that is harder in some ways and simpler in others.  This hopefully instills in them an appreciation for life and a work ethic that many kids will never know in this day and age.  And, the food tastes better too.

Once we start (and I do intent to help this time thanks to Stuart’s friendly suggestion of using a stool) picking, I will have more to share about the progress of the garden.  Not everything will make it.  Hurricane season is here and there’s always the possibility that some type of weather disaster will strike.  Such is life in south Texas.  But, if something like that happens, I’ll take it in stride and look towards the future, there’ll always be next year.

More nuts!

Tuesday I harvested about 20 kilos of walnuts, with mabe a few more kilos yet to hit the ground. I didn’t get a photo this year like the one above from last October. Needless to say, we’ll be eating lots of nuts over the next few months. And I particularly like to roast them and throw them in a vegetable wok fry. Next up, figuring out how to relocate our fine blackberries which now stand shaded behind the new cottage. I’ve found some helpful resources online but I’m still uneasy about the process.

suburban retrofit

via Adam at OL, an interesting discussion thread to consider.

There is a good piece in this month’s edition of Atlantic Magazine in which Witold Rybczynski, a professor of urbanism at UPenn, argues the case for “returning to cities” if we really want to fight climate change. In it, he argues that our response to climate change has been too oriented towards “accessorizing” green features and less towards behavioral, systemic change. He also argues what we know- that living in cities creates a far smaller carbon footprint, and that a skyscraper with zero green features beats a suburban office park with solar panels, because of the people working in it and how they get to the office.

There are many great comments worth considering, in particular, BruceMcF’s linking to his post, Rapid Streetcars and Suburban Retrofit, focuses the discussion around the dimension more central to my concerns within the city vs suburb development paradigms. I’m often thinking (daydreaming) about how I might apply the local provincial Danish grid onto an American city like say, San Antonio, Tx. And of course, my little colony garden experience always seems to  feature in the solution.

the world’s at large but I remain

I have several upcoming lectures over the next month for which I can’t find motivation to begin preparations. Though I’m officially on paternity leave, I still have a few pre-agreed-upon engagements; which at the time seemed prudent as my “academic” CV could use some padding.

So I took to the garden, Sienna in tow, thinking I’d clear my thoughts and refocus. In stead, I found myself cleaning weeds out of the herb bed, trimming, pruning and thinking about the next building phase on the house. As the mint residue on my hands triggered a constant craving for fresh Mojitos (anything but lecture planning), the Autumn breeze tugged me back to reality, reminding me that those days are numbered. There’s yet too much work to be done and the days are getting shorter! So the prudent thing would have been to sit down with notepad and pen, and start writing. But I put off the intellectual work yet again, doubling down in the garden, digging potatoes and parsnip while Modest Mouse played on the iPod and Sienna slept. The world’s at large but I remain.

Hazelnut Harvest

Hazelnuts

Well, while trying to think about how to get started before Johanna gets here I thought I’d post this image of our modest hazelnut harvest. Last year the two bushes didn’t produce at all, so this was a pleasant surprise as I was contemplating cutting it down after this season. No way! Turns out it fruits biannually.

Now, we obviously can’t survive off our hazelnuts. Our walnut tree on the other hand provides more than we could ever eat, and we do get creative. But these hazelnuts, with a fresh green and slightly tangy and smooth earthy taste, were perfect atop a fresh tomato/cucumber salad accompaning the oven roasted pork tenderloin.

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