Tools

I have wondered what our world would be like if we CHOSE to build tools that only used human power to do the work they assisted us with.

No pollution and no need for a gym membership, or the vast
amount of entertainments that we currently use.
(picture taken from internet)

This seems like a reasonable choice.  We'd still mine and smelt ore.  We'd still manufacture things........
But,
Instead of a leaf blower we'd use a rake.

Instead of a car we'd use a bicycle, or maybe a horse.

Instead of a dryer we'd hang clothes in the sun, or by a wood stove.

In so many ways we might remove so many of the problems that we have created with machinery.

We might have less traffic fatalities due to high speed collisions, and we'd have less pollution from cars.  True we'd have do deal with horse shit if we used them for transportation, but that can be absorbed by the earth and even used as fertilizer, adding to the quality of the soil.

We'd need more people to do the work that is now done by machinery.  The jobs are traditionally less paying but then maybe the goods made would have to cost more to balance out the whole system.

Owners of farms have said that they can't afford to pay workers, but that is a construct of man.  If the food cost what it does in labor to grow it then the price at the market should reflect that.  What choice is there otherwise, not to eat.  Each laborer on the farm should be able to eat well if he, or she, is in fact doing the work it takes to grow the actual food.  Doesn't that just seem reasonable?

I'd rather here my neighbor's rake dragging across his leaf and stone than the whining motor of his leaf blower.

letters to friends

Xxxx,

......It is too bad you don't have the farming/gardening bug, but I don't have it either.  I'd rather be sailing.  I'd rather be traveling and seeing things like the high latitudes, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand.  I'd rather be in my Vanagon traveling to Patagonia or back out west to hang out with the families.

I don't garden because it is a bug I caught, or even an obsession, like sailing and boats are for me.  I do it because I think it is the right thing to do, a responsible way to live and eat and think.

  Most all other living things, actually all other living things, spend their time and energy trying to get food, shelter and sex.  All you have to do is look around to see it.
     Look at a plant, any plant, or a bird, or a raccoon, or a fly or a mouse, or a fish.  Not much time spent watching YouTube for these beings, nor do they spend their time writing emails. Because of the lack of time spent doing these things, and all the other things that only humans do, they don't have the infrastructure needed to support these activities, or the industry that creates them, or the resource exploitation required to supply the raw materials to manufacture them.  They don't build fires to melt ore, or even, to keep themselves warm.  They don't unleash fossil particulates that have been sequestered for thousands of millennia, into the atmosphere while creating fuel to get them from one place to the other.  They aren't so stationary and concentrated in there living situation so as to piss and shit themselves into disease.

I don't garden because it is the only thing I want to be doing.  I do it because no matter what else I change in my life to be reasonable about what I take from the planet, and how I live on it, food is still the one thing, the first thing, I must get and how I get it matters.  

Everything I eat has to be hunted, gathered, or grown or raised.  Most of the food that is in the grocery store is grown or raised, processed and prepared, packaged and transported in ways that are very harmful to all of us.

When I say that  this food is harmful to all of us, I mean all of us, the entire living planet, plants and animals included.  It seems almost impossible that with so many species of living things on the planet, just one of them, humans, could live in a way that is so out of alignment with the system we find ourselves in, that we could threaten most of the living things currently in it, including ourselves.  Yet, this is where we find ourselves.

When we bother to think about how that one little box of cereal came into being, all of the farm land, tractors, pesticides, fertilizers,packaging and transportation used to get it to your table, we should loose our appetite.  If you put some milk on it and think about the way dairy cows live, what they are injected with, subjected to, and the amount of shit they produce, in concentration, then you might just skip your breakfast.

It doesn't have to be this way.  That's why I garden.  That's why I keep a few chickens at home, on my .8 acres of sloped rocky soil that I call home.  All of our waste, stays on site, except for the little bits of plastic and metal that, try as I do, seem to make it to our home and to be way too much.  Most of that is recycled.
     A good portion of the energy we need to live comes from our property too.  The goal is to either get more energy from here and/or, use less.

The positive thing about your 17 acres of land and not gardening, is that you have 17 acres of land that is not being leased to energy companies or logging companies or being razed to create more houses or factories for humans.  That land evolved, over a very long time, to work for the living things that inhabit it and the rest of the planet and continues to.  It is a bit of a preserve in that way.  It is actually working in opposition to all the destructive ways humans are living.  Trees, soil, water, animal life are all existing in a manner that promotes life rather than degrades or destroys it.

You don't have to have the gardening bug to dig up a few feet of earth outside your kitchen door and plant a few beans or carrots or squash.  All you need is to have a bigger view life, and an honest assessment of what each penny you spend supports, where each calorie you burn comes from.  Not only does growing a few vegetables give you a bit of food to eat that has not had to use petroleum to get to your table or be petro-chemically fertilized, but it also puts you right up close to the other living things that have to share this planet with us.  It promotes the nurturing and compassionate side in us.

  

There are great lessons to learn when you put a seed in the ground and water it, and watch it grow.  You have to put it in the right spot for sun and drainage, give it the right environment.  You may have to watch a beetle or a fly or worm or groundhog threaten it and then decide what to do about that.  Do you kill or hurt the thing that wants to feed on your tomato or bean, or do you let it get it's food, just the way you are trying to get your food?  Those "pests" didn't force the cucumber plant to grow here, you did.  They are just hunting and gathering from what is available, the way that their kind and all other kinds, except humans, have always done.  It is then that you will have to decide what kind of person you are willing to be.  

Most of us decide, even though we our lives are short, that our lives, and more importantly, our lifestyles, trump all other lives.  Not just the ones in front of us now, but even those we don't see, don't know, will never know and that will come after us.  If it were just thinking about our own personal lives, instead of our lifestyles, being the most important thing to us, we might act differently.  Then when that groundhog or deer come into your garden to eat your tomato, you'd probably just kill the animal and eat it.  But instead we poison the ground with pesticides that kill other living things that we don't even eat and that don't come chasing after us.  We want it all for ourselves and we want it the way we want it and we don't share well.  

But just because we can do something doesn't mean we should do it.

     I know that my garden doesn't feed me completely.  I don't get all of my energy needs from here at my home.  I use things that are made of plastic and other materials that come at high costs to others and the environment, like this computer.  But I am trying to use less and I am aware of what I do use.  

     Every bean that comes from my garden, or even a bean I buy from a local and ethical farmer, is one less that is shipped from far away, in trucks and trains and boats that pollute the air.  It seems to me that if we all made efforts to reduce the harmful tolls we take on the planet, then we all might still be able to enjoy the real and good and meaningful benefits of innovation and technology, without the huge negative affect we have had on the planet over the past century and without threat to the entire system.  

     All it would take is each of us trying to live a reasonable life, walk a Reasonable path.

Peace,

R

P.S. 

I know that reason is subjective, but, the negative affects upon all life, from the way humans live, is not.  We are in a time that is a bit scary.  People in powerful positions hide behind superstition and ignorance in order to sustain and justify their lifestyle.  Some of these people are highly educated and because of that and their money, many align with them.  The polarization that is growing in the world might be largely economic but it has foundations in a philosophy about life and humanity that is short-sighted, simple minded, egotistical, and destructive.  It threatens another dark age in the midst of a technologically advanced society.  So much power, but without the wisdom to use it well.

Barrel Hoop #1

Barrel Hoop MicroFarm

Barrel Hoop Micro-Farm or Macro-Garden

This entry and others with the Barrel Hoop title will be a bit of a separate blog running parallel and within "reasonable Path".  "Barrel Hoop Micro Farm" is what I call the place we live.  When clearing the land we found a set of old rusty barrel hoops.  I put them on each of the gates as decor, and then realized that they were our 'logo'.  We are working to make it into as much of a farm as you can have on 8/10ths of an acre of sloped, rocky, clayey, land crawling with deer, chipmunk, squirrels, woodchucks, snakes, black bears and coyotes, to mention some of the wild life that want to share our harvest.
I'd like to use these entries to keep track of the practices and events that occur for us on the "farm". 

Right now the farm is just a plant based experiment, but we are trying to get some chickens going here for eggs.  I am in the process of building a coop from reclaimed wood and trying to decide the best place to situate them.

(78'f, passing clouds, humid)
Today, we finished putting in borders on the downhill side of two long garden beds, in the main plot.  Each bed is about 50 feet long and about 3 feet wide.  They are terraced and have walking paths between them of about 20 inches.  The wood for the borders is cedar decking reclaimed from my neighbors deck.  It has paint on one side and I put that side to the dirt facing uphill so that it might last a little longer.  the stakes that support the cedar are scrap from wooden pallets I get for free from a local lumber yard.

main plot 2010

The borders are to help reduce erosion from the steep slope.  After those were complete I was able to turn over the cover crop  of  Hairy Vetch, yellow peas, and alfalfa, (green manure from Johnny's Seeds Johnny's Selected Seeds – Superior Seeds & Gardening Tools  ) that has been growing there for about a month.  I mixed that in with buckets of compost.  Our soil is full of rocks (Rockland County, NY) and it also has a lot of clay.  It has been a will be a multiple year process to get the soil into really good condition. In a few weeks we can plant in those beds.

This planting will be later that it could have been by about 3 weeks.  I just didn't get it all together when I would like to have.  Other beds are already seeded and have a good amount of growth already.  A pepper plant already has blossoms


Downhill of the to beds I turned over today are about 10 "finger" beds that run uphill and down.  They are smaller, each about 3 by 5 feet.  Today, in the last finger bed, we put in the a few squash seedlings.  that completed the bed for this year.  It is the "3 sisters bed" with corn, pinto beans, and squash.

We also got squash put in a few other places on the farm.  We have to give a lot of thought to where we put all the plants but especially the ones that will vine out over the ground long distances.  Our space is challenging in many respects.

We have already gone thru our Asparagus crop for the season.  We enjoyed about 5 meals with them as appetizer or as a part of the main meal.  They are so sweet that we don't even season them, just steam for about 3 minutes and then eat!  The ones we get from the local farms I prefer to season with a little sea salt, cracked black pepper, and a hit of lemon juice.  Toss the ingredients and then eat!  Now we have the beautiful asparagus ferns to look at while waiting for the strawberries to come in.  They share two terraces with some lettuce and lemon sorrel,  and a few left over garlics and one chard.

I didn't get the rest of the corn put in.  The seedling sit in their trays in the low tunnel and will eventually be transplanted to the southern most beds, we call the "terraces", to grow next to some sunchokes, and probably some more beans.

Kitchen plot 2010, with low tunnel frames 

I will try to get some more pics up soon.

The Earthy Mind

Being that about 72% of the earth is covered in water, maybe the idea that something is "earthy" should include that element.

Aboard Uncas

Traditionally, while voyaging upon the ocean, the sailor will be sailing 2 boats at once.  The first is the one that rest between him and the deep blue sea.  This is the "real" or tangible, yet frail, vessel that literally supports him.

The second, is a 2 dimensional boat that exists on a chart, or in his mind.  This is the intellectual understanding of where, and when, he exists in the world.  This boat can also be understood to be fixed, and the understanding is more about where and when the world exists around it.  Included in the identity of this little ship, or big ship, or simple raft, is the understanding of it's state of existence.  For instance, "this ship is 27' long it has full sail up and the wind is force 3, the hull is sound and without leaks or other known weakness, the tanks have water and the lockers are full of oatmeal cookies."

These two boats exist at once and are often thought of as one.  To sail successfully and comfortably it might be required that they are though of as the same.

And so it goes with me on my journey.  It was an important realization that the imagined division between my intellectual self and my physical self really was not very satisfying or helpful.  I have come to see that the division between physical and spiritual and intellectual is a limitation, and maybe even a destructive misconception.  I found this to be especially so when it pertained to action.  You must have heard the saying "Walk the Talk",  I think more so I needed to  "Walk the Thought".

I suppose the reasonable path I am on has allot to do with joining together of my "charted course" with the one that surrounds me.  One of the important things to think about when setting out on an ocean voyage is provisioning, sustenance, or food and water.  With out these the trip will not be good or lasting, or it might end up being the last.  So it goes with the rest of my life.  This seems to have been the beginning of my path, getting my supplies in order, my food and where it comes from, how it is attained.  This has become it's own path or at least I find it much more satisfying to give it a very great importance, because, it is of great importance.  Thus, began the steps to growing my own food.

2010 garden patch

People have asked me why I choose to be a vegetarian, "Is it an ethical choice or a health choice?"  In truth it is both, and more.  It is economic and political.  It is pleasurable and educational.  I am sure there are even more reasons, including a rebellious and subversive quality to it.

It is not convenient being a vegetarian in this country.  Right now, it is the energy corporations and the insurance corporations and the pharmaceuticals who have the sway and who are making the big dollars.  Once when the American cowboy was becoming a formative part of our identity in this country, it was the cattle industry.  That influence has never really left.   It is still the driving force in how we in this country seem to define a meal.  "meat makes the meal!"

During one weekend, after reading the book "Diet for a New America" by John Robbins, and seeing a movie about a corporations doing drug experiments on poor African people, and one other book or movie, that I can't quite remember now I am sad to say, I just made a decision to change the way I ate.

There was a health influence.  There was a political influence.  There was also an ethical influence.  Only later did I realize that all these influence really were absolutely connected and even stronger when seen as such.

It is a similar situation with my decision to try to grow as much of my own food as possible, and to use as much of my lawn and property to do it.  This choice cannot be reduced to one simple answer, but it can be expanded to many good reasons.

Today we turned the green manure (peas, vetch, alfalfa) into the soil and mixed in some compost from the local municipal facility in order to build a healthier soil.  That will sit for a few weeks before planting the crop for the season.  It is a little late but it seems that everything on our property happens a few weeks later than the rest of the region.  We live in the woods and have tall trees that limit our sun.  We have to adapt our growing patterns to what this property can support.  It is different from properties a mile away.  Eat local, grow local.