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.

Unplanned and Unprepared. Life Happened.

 It's been a bit.   When I started this blog I was in a stable place and a stable condition.   I thought that I was done with moves and surprises.   I would have been perfectly happy to just work for another five or ten years till I retired.    If I'm being completely honest with you but since moving back to Western PA just about six years ago, things have been odd at best and difficult at worst.   I've questioned why we moved but for better or for worse, this is home. Then I lost Facebook and that was one of the drivers, if not the main driver that drove people to this site.   Then my job situation changed drastically.   At first it was fine but it was clear that the company really didn't have a spot for me, and as they transitioned from "work from home" to "return to the office" it became hard for me to justify a commute of over 100 miles each way.   The jobs that I worked after that were temporary in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Acting in our best interest.

** The majority of this column was written nearly two years ago, however for a lot of reasons, has been updated and ready for publication now.** Recently a friend of mine and I were talking about some changes in our area.  We have had three solar farms built recently and there is talk about a wind farm. She brought up how wind turbines are responsible for killing birds.  That's a known fact that everyone can agree to, however exactly how many birds and what to do about the bird strikes is up for debate.   This conversation tells us a bit about the type of people we want to be.  We are going to have to make trade offs in the future and we need to determine what those tradeoffs will be.   Wind turbine's are constructed in a location that meets certain criteria to meet it's full effectiveness.   What happens if location X is also the breeding ground of a nearly extinct bird?  Can they still breed if the tower, or solar panel or geothermal ...
Post a Comment
Read more

This Inevitable Ruin. Is there hope in the darkness?

I consider myself a smart and well read man, so up until recently I was surprised that I had never heart the the the concept of "This Inevitable Ruin" before.  It's an idea or concept that downfall and destruction is unavoidable.   That chaos is an unchangeable outcome no matter what actions we take.   That what ever victory we obtain will have a high psychological and moral price, and may be short lived.    As my own family, friends, and readers face an unknown future on so many fronts I wonder if  such "Inevitable Ruin" awaits us?  If it awaits our country or even our world? I am not a nihilist  but the concept has been ringing in my ears lately as we seem to careen from one crisis - be it personal, economic, local, state wide, natural or global.   This article has started and stopped many times, yet I can't seem to get it right.  I even played around with an AI program to see if it would help focus my thoughts, it did n...
Post a Comment
Read more