Skip to main content

Mistakes are already being made. Putting in the garden in and thinking about....nothing and everything

 To be honest I don't consider myself a homesteader or even a gardener. To be blunt about it I could have easily spent the rest of my life in Florida with a small container garden on our back porch.  I would have been happy to have had a few beers at my favorite bar, enjoyed good food at my favorite restaurant and fade into the background as the fat and happy hedonist I am.

The One with glasses does look like me

Life had other things in store for me.   Now I find myself; perhaps not in the proverbial boondocks but with enough distance and space to force the "City Mouse" into considering how to do things differently...and not really having a clue about how to do it.

Living in the country does change your viewpoint and your habits.  It's very easy to fall into cliche's and all cliche's have a kernel of truth to them...but country life does change you.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm always had an interest in things like permaculture and self sufficient living.   However in the 57 years of life that I've lived, I've largely been in the middle to upper class economically, a city dweller and a privileged one at that.  It's one thing to know about something intellectually...and another to actually try to live it.

As someone pointed out (rightfully) to me in another forum regarding my last post.  (I'm) intellectually disorganized and over-engineering simultaneously.

It occurs to me that yes, I don't know what in the H - E - double hockey sticks I'm doing.

I'm okay with that.  It is part of the fun and adventure.

Now I do have this vague goal in the back of my head that I have roughly 30 years to generate a food forest.  In the simplest sense that basically means planting some native trees, some bushes and other perennial plants that will support each other naturally and that some future forager will find.  

Perhaps I've read way to much dystopian fiction, but those few apples and grapes, nuts and berries can sustain them for a few days more.  

This is my legacy. 

 

Yes, I would love to reduce my carbon footprint to zero and do X, Y and Z to live closer to nature.  

Sue and I are already moving that way by making our house super insulated; another on going project, and reducing our carbon footprint.

I'm not sure how to get there...so for now I bumble along from project to project and hope for the best.  Some ideas get filed away to be started later or to be further researched.  At the end of the day...I'll leave something for someone.  

It's not that I'm losing hope for mankind, I've actually had my hope for humanity restored by the actions of various young people and groups, but I'm also a realist.  Things will get bad before they get better.  I'm hoping to bypass some of those problems now by being prepared for them.  I would rather make those mistakes now than make them later when the consequences of bad choices will be that much more epic.

It does seem that Sue and I are not on the same page at times and this is something we will need to discuss more in depth.   For example, she went out and bought these planting boxes that I'm not sure are going to meet our needs.  However they are going to save our knees and backs in the long haul.

I also know that due to my wonderful cats all our seeds that we started indoors found themselves on the floor and then decided to dig into the dirt and damage destroy a large portion of what I had planned to grow.

Happy?  No.  

But we will save what we can and start the planting next week.  We hare having a bit of cold front pass through in the next few days.  I feel that the last frost will be this week, I'm itching to plant, to start...to grow something.

I'm not happy about losing a few weeks of work and having to go out and buy already started plants.   I'm reminded of a book I read entitled the $64 Tomato and I fear that we may be going down an expensive path.

No matters what happens however we are on a path that we can't change.   Their is simply no other direction we can go other than forward.

Sure, mistakes will be made.  We will learn from them and tomorrow's garden will be bigger and better than it is today.  I'll add to the edible lawn here and there and even though it's not going to be great...it's going to be okay.

Sometimes that's all you can hope for. 


Labels:
Location: Stoneboro, PA 16153, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

What all the cool kids are reading.

Calling in the professionals

 I come from a long line of guys that call in professionals.    Part of that reason is my own lazy nature, part of that reason is that I would rather have it down right the first time.  Everyone has their own skills and abilities, so why not call in an expert to have it done right the first time? In this case; why not seek advice in the battles against the invasives that have not only invaded my yard, but also a nearby piece of property that my neighbor simply refuses to take care of?  I find myself in a bind of my own design. I let part of my property "go wild" in the first place because that area had a lot of exposed roots, stumps and rocks.  At the time, I was not expecting a bunch of invasives, of which Mulitfora Rosa  is the worse of the bunch, to be a problem.  Yet, here we are. I decided to let parts of my yard "go wild" back in July of 2021.  It has proven to be a mistake, and in order for me to ensure that the invasive plants st...
Post a Comment
Read more

A sense of time in place - traveling in Central PA

One of the first items that Sue and I bought as a couple all those years ago was a grandfather clock.  We used to snuggle under the blanket and listen to the chimes on the hour, the sound filling our house with a warmth and resonance.   That clock is nothing special, being simple in its design and technology.  It's accurate because of the beauty of physics and math...and is a lost art form in its own right. I thought a lot about time and place as we traveled this week.  I thought a lot about place.   Sue and I finally took a brief vacation recently.  Due to circumstances beyond our control, every plan we had made to get away earlier in the year came to naught.  My father became ill and ended up in the hospital which we decided to stay home "just in case."  He ended up in the hospital at least three times this past year, and I decided to spend what time I could with him. Family, after all, is what brought us back to Pennsylvania. We had p...
4 comments
Read more

Rebirth has come at last - reason to hope on Earth Day

I could not let this Earth Day pass without acknowledging some things.  So let's talk about success stories, and why we should have hope for the future. For the first time in a long time I have hope in the environmental movement.  Yes, there are still a lot of climate change deniers out there - and they are becoming more doomsayers than anything.   I used to be one of them, a doomsayer, meaning that I didn't have much hope for the future, and would gladly tell you we were fucked six ways from Sunday.   We still are in a lot of ways...but like the first flowers that are poking through their lovely heads through the ground...we have reasons to hope. In some ways I believe that the pandemic was a shot in the arm for the environmental moment.   Bird watching boomed.  People had time to watch nature shows and documentaries.  Home cooking became something pleasurable for people to do again.  Frankly my interest in cheese making flourishe...
1 comment
Read more