a voice from the future...

So, it's been three years since our last post. For good or bad, we've done very little gardening and set aside entirely any thoughts of serious urban homesteading. Instead, M has refied her expertise in the field of labor and delivery, has made it about half-way through a master's program in public health, and seems to be on the verge of significant professional breakthroughs. I've completed a second masters degree (in religious studies) and entered the doctoral program in American religious cultures at Emory University. I'm currently about 2/5 of the way through, figuring out my dissertation topic and preparing for comprehensive exams while completing coursework. Since our last post, our wonderful dog Helen has passed away. Arjuna (the cat) is older and larger but well. And we have a new dog, Jackpot, adopted from a lovely family nearby.

Today, in the beautiful afternoon sun, I took down much of the garden assembled back in 2007. Over the last two years, as our gardening efforts gradually faded, the garden became severely overgrown, the untreated-bentwood fencing falling down, etc. At least for this winter, we'll have no more than a very modest herb garden, a 5'X15' bricked-in section that was within the formerly fenced-in garden. Perhaps in Spring 2012 we'll plant additional herbs and who knows, maybe something more ambitious as well.

With all the tearing down today, I'm wondering aboyt the place of serious homesteading and even modest gardening in the lives of ordinary people. When it was our sole focus, I loved it, could get or do enough regarding it. But when something else became our sole focus, that which was of ultimate concern, my interest and energy was impossible to maintain. To be this kind of person has serious advantages and disadvantages.

"Locavores?"

Well, it's been over a year since we've done anything with St. Fiacre's, but we're considering a rather bold plan: one year eating only locally grown/produced food, i.e., becoming "locavores." Since largely abandoning our urban homesteading principles (which seemed necessary with M working fulltime and my returning to the university as both instructor and postgraduate student), we've noticed a tendency toward unchecked, undisciplined, self-distructive, headonism in our diet and lifestyle. Not that we have become crack-addicts, but that, without an "organizing principle" that says otherwise, we find ourselves all too frequently sitting in front of the TV eating pizza and candy and drinking soda!

We need a much better organizing principle, and badly. Of course, we've kept up our garden, eaten many of M's great home-cooked meals, and been shopping at local farmer's markets from May - October. But we need something with a sharper edge, so to speak. We need, in academic-speak, a mythology capable of truly informing our beliefs and actions around something intensely intimate, our food.

Check out "Path to Freedom"

1. We're not only looking for ways to bring homesteading to our next home, whether that home resides in Santa Barbara, Nashville, Princeton, Boston or Chicago, but also looking for greater balance and harmony in our lives in general. For several months, for instance, we worked very hard at homesteading, perhaps too hard and perhaps somewhat self-righteously, researching and practicing every aspect of homesteading we could reasonably attempt. While helpful in some ways, this ultimately lead to an unbalanced and unsustainable approach, one we could not successfully integrate into the larger matrix of our lives. When I needed to dedicate long hours each day to the phd application process, for example, I found it impossible to reconcile this new work-load with the highly ambitious homesteading plans we'd made (e.g., maintaining a very large garden and blueberry bush grove, building an extensive garden fence from bentwood, planning and building a tool shed, learning to make our own soap, brew our own beer and wine, ordering and using a hand-washer for laundry, researching and planning an underground home, and so on). As a result, when the new work-load appeared, we cold not sustain them both and largely fell away from our homesteading activities, save harvesting from the garden through the Fall months. This was a very sad turn of events, though I suspect that we are not alone in this sort of experience.

2. Towards a far more gradual, incremental, balanced and fully integrated approach to homesteading, we're going back to study carefully those who have been more successful, for example, the Dervaes family from southern California. Their website, pathtofreedom.com, is spectacular! Not only are they highly successful homesteaders in a highly urban environment, harvesting some 5,700 lbs. of organic vegetables from 1/10 of an acre, but they have come to this point via a slow, gradual set of sustainable practices. Many people are talking about ecologically sustainable practices, but it's also worth thinking about psychologically sustainable practices, that is, practices that we can successfully integrate into the larger matrices of our lives, with all of our responsibilities, commitments, goals, and so on.

Looking forward to Lettuce

Today's Weather.
Morning temp: 30 F
Afternoon high: 46 F
Tonight's low: 31 F
Clear, NE Wind at 5 mph
Humidity: 64%

1. With 8 beds of Lettuce planted early in the first days of a new moon and a cold night last night bringing a gentle freeze, we're hoping to have lots of fresh organic greens by the end of February! In fact, if our present beds produce at anything like the one bed we had last year, we'll have a great deal of greens to share with our family members and friends!!! This is an inspiring thought! Of course, prior to distributing the seed, we turned the top 12" of soil with a D-handled fork, and added-in a small amount of worm castings and peat moss left over from last Spring. Given the very thorough "double-digging" work we've done in the past year, turning the soil was soooooooooooooooooooo easy! After spreading the seed by hand across the rows, we very lightly watered each bed, to keep each seed gently anchored in the beds (and thus protected from the wind and from blowing away).

Looking to the future

Today's Weather.
Today's high: 50 F
Tonight's low: 27 F
Clear, NW Wind 6 mph
Humidity: 52%

1. Well, M is back at work full-time, mostly healed from her injury. I am through the application process, and we're waiting more or less patiently until March/April, when we should hear from the five phd programs to which I've applied. To make money for living expenses, I've gone back to construction work I have done off and on for many years now. By mid-Summer, we should be relocated to one of five metropolitan areas: Santa Barbara (CA), Nashville (TN), Boston (MA), Princeton (NJ), Chicago (IL), depending of course on the offers of acceptance and funding we get from these superb universities. We're slowly looking at real estate in each area, and the possibility of continuing our homesteading efforts in these places.

2. Meanwhile, we've recommitted ourselves to a Winter/Spring Garden. This past weekend, M had four consecutive days off, and after she had recovered from her 17+ hour shift last Thursday night, we put in 8 rows of Lettuce seed. Each row is about 1.5 feet wide and 5 feet in length. We're experimenting with raised rows, as our earlier beds (which were 5' or more in width) were simply too difficult for M to get to for weeding and harvesting. We're also experimenting with our planting time: M has observed that Lettuce seed may need to freeze (lightly) in order to grow well, and may not at all benefit from a prolonged period of warm days and nights. Given the climate change here, we're thinking that Lettuce and greens may need to be planted quite late into the "cold" weather.

3. We've also re-instituted some of our other homesteading practices, such as composting and hanging our clothing out to dry on a line, at least a few sunny days each week. While we have certainly fallen short of some of our earliest homesteading dreams and goals, we are more knowledgeable, and live differently, than we would had we not explored this path so thoroughly over the past year.