From Gardening to Homesteading, Part 1

Morning temp: 50F
Afternoon high: 71F
Tonight's projected high: 40F
Humidity: 24%
Moon: Waning, 27%

Today was utterly clear with a strong West wind at 17 mph. Sunny, cool and entirely ordinary, I hope some of you decided to stick around for it. Regrettably, I was unable to visit the Garden today whatsoever, as M was scheduled for dental surgery, which went very well, and she's comfortably resting and happy to have it over with.

1. Home Depot has been running a charming little commercial in which somewhat drab, unremarkable backyards (rendered in black and white) are magically transformed into colorful, flowering affairs through the happy introduction of various plants, shrubs and trees. The commercial sings the praises of the casual, weekend gardener, and so do we. Working cooperatively with nature is no doubt an inherently good thing, both for us and for our back yards! For M and I, however, our attempt at gardening - from digging our beds, building our compost and starting seedlings - represents far more than a casual pastime (in truth, neither M nor I do casual pastimes particularly well, we're either into something deeply or not at all). For us, these things represent our attempt to utterly rethink and reconstruct our lives.

It all began with a book, The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living, which M had read many years ago as a teenager, and which she got me to read on a fateful Summer camping trip nearly seven years past. This trip was "fateful" because, not only did we meet our dog Helen (yes, named after Helen Nearing), but we also decided that we would pursue a Nearing-like, Homesteading-based life as vigorously as possible, even if it took us many years to fully untangle ourselves from our contemporary cultural pattern, which seemed to demand, in exchange for what it called "the good life", a number of concessions, for instance, that we exhaust ourselves working in highly specialized professions paying off tremendous financial debt incurred so that we could enjoy a handful of comforts, including new cars, a big house, hired help to mow our lawn, clean our house, vacations abroad and so forth. Like the Nearings, we felt uncomfortable making these concessions, and suspicious of the assumption that the good life was in fact to be found in this way.

The Nearings tell us, "we moved away from New York City to a farm in the Green Mountains of Vermont. At the outset we thought of the venture as a personal search for a simple, satisfying life on the land, to be devoted to mutual aid and harmlessness, with an ample margin of leisure in which to do personally constructive and creative work." We feel similarly, hopeful that, if thought-out and executed with care and discipline, we could live a simple, self-reliant lifestyle. Indeed, the Nearings encouraged us to think so, insisting that, "a couple, of any age from twenty to fifty, with a minimum of health, intelligence and capital, can adapt themselves to country living, learn its crafts, overcome its difficulties and build up a life pattern rich in simple values and productive of personal and social good." Of course, we are far from alone. Many have successfully walked the path the Nearings laid out, and many others are adapting this path to urban contexts, forging a kind of "urban homesteading" (see, for instance, http://www.pathtofreedom.com/). This past year, M and I have talked many times about suburban homesteading, that is, purchasing my family's home here about 30 miles outside our major city in Zone 7b. But this is not proving economically feasible - once J and C decide to sell the family propoerty, probably in one or more years, we'll leave the suburbs for far more rural, and far less expensive, surroundings, where keeping our expenses low is an attainable goal.

So, what specifically do Homesteaders, whether urban, suburban or rural, do? To start with, Homesteaders grow as much of their own food as is possible, and all of it organically. What they are unable to grow, they purchase from local growers and producers found among Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), food cooperatives and farmer's markets. They are also likely to build and make as many of their own things as their current skill levels allow, for instance, clothing, furniture, tools, and what they cannot build or make themselves, they are likely to seek in barter from others, or seek to purchase used. In a sense, Homesteaders are highly conservative, in that they want to conserve as many resources as possible, including their own time, energy, money and of course natural resources such as wood, metals, fuels and so forth. Hence, they tend to be very interested in alternative construction methods (such as earth-sheltered homes, cordwood masonry, composting toilets, grey-water systems) and energy sources (solar and wind-based power). Homesteaders not only want to have these things, but they want to learn to do the hands-on work necessary to create and maintain these more ecologically and economically sustainable practices. Indeed, Homesteaders see their "chores" as part of their vocation, and hope that such a lifestyle will provide them with greater opportunities for avocational pursuits (such as reading, writing, music, arts) then is currently offered by the dominant culture.

We are definitely on a Homesteading trajectory. We see our current work in and around the Garden as necessary preparation for the "next stage" of our experiment, most likely to be carried out way up in Zone 4 (not far from the Finger Lakes, in upstate New York), where, by the way, it's still snowing. Yes, we've been tracking the weather there for the past nine months, which may be best described by a simple.... Burrrrrrrrrrrrr, though they say that the Summers are glorious!