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.

Maybe we need to rethink invasive species???

Hi. As the writer of the post and feel that I need to clarify something. I do not advocate the planting of invasive species. The point that I'm trying to make, and clearly didn't, is that perhaps we should be thinking about an invasive species in a different light. Apples, figs and other crops are clearly non native to America and Europe but are widely cultivated because they have use to humans as a food source, animal feed, etc. Kudzu is an edible plant and although it is clearly harmful can it be used someway by humans? It's a food source, it's been used as a cloth and is showing some use as a building material. All I'm trying to do is to create discussion on how we can use invasive plants in new ways.   It's mid April here in Western Pennsylvania and so far it's been warm and wet.  The buzz of lawnmowers fill the air as I gallivant through my back yard collecting dandelions to make some tea and bread with them.  I had always known that they w
Post a Comment
Read more

Why didn't Erie, PA develop into a bigger city?

          Recently I had to travel up to Erie, PA for business.   It's about an hour north of me and is a rather small city, having just under 100 thousand people living in it.   It played an important role in the founding of America,  - where it was the headquarters for Oliver Perry's flagship Niagara during the battle of Like Erie in the war of 1812 .            It was also a important shipping center, being Pennsylvania's only access to the Great Lakes which was the easiest way to trade with parts of Canada at the time as well as move goods to the cities of Detroit and Chicago, which in the mid to early 1800's were just starting to develop.  It was also directly north from Pittsburgh which was a major industrial city at that time.     Yet Erie never really grew beyond it's humble beginnings and I wondered why.   Like any good sleuth I turned to the internet where I found mostly wrong answers.    Many people thought the port of Erie was to shallow to handle most
3 comments
Read more

Don't leave the rural areas behind.

This blog was started because I had lived most of my life as an urban dweller; I wanted to record my adventures as I tried my hands at different things and I never pictured this blog would become what it did. Country life suits me in some ways.   I'm at a point in my life where I can appreciate looking up into the night sky and seeing thousands of stars, just like I did as a kid.   I just love how the moonlight bathes my beautiful sleeping wife in a creme colored light.   Country life is more peaceful and a lot more hard work than I would have ever expected.  While my neighbors and I may not agree politically or philosophically, my new lifestyle has given me insights on how they view the world. This brings me to my main point.   Here in rural America we simply don't have public transportation, nor do we have a lot of manufacturing or diversity or hospitals or even great education...and if we are going to move forward with a brighter greener future that we all want then we canno
2 comments
Read more