Tony and Rocky have been getting out a bit more lately. One day last week, we found them climbing in the oak trees in front of the house.
It scared Vickie a bit… they got twenty feet and more up, and their inexperience shows… they were on little twigs as small as a pencil…. I wandered under the trees ready to catch them if they fell. We had a pretty good time. It made me laugh, because just three months ago, when we got them, we were concerned when they crawled out of their little box we kept them in. We were worried they might fall six inches… but they were little itty bittie things then. Now they are starting to toughen up a bit.
It’s a bit sad in a sense having animals…. we can’t take them to the vet like we’d like…. our animals will get torn up by some wild critter, and there’s not much we can do other than to doctor them ourselves the best we can. I try to assuage my guilt by rationalising that these are all animals that wandered in from feral parents, or were found orphaned somewhere and we rescued them… if we had not taken them in, they’d have died long ago. One thing I’ve noticed about our animals… they are all really tough and durable survivor-type creatures. If they were not, they’d have never made it as far as to our door.
Often I will watch our critters doing their thing in the wilds…. and I have to say, they really do have a good life. They have plenty of little things to stalk, deer and foxes and other animals to watch (and be aware of). Our animals for sure do not live in gilded cages.
Here’s some photos of these little kittens in the tree.
There are a great many styles of foods around the world… there are also new philosophies regarding food acquisition also. A new style of eating has taken to the stage the last few years… ‘Locavore’ is a term to denote someone who tries to procure most of their foods grown from sources nearby. Many people will set a limit on the maximum number of miles they desire their food to come from. Such a figure might be 25 miles, or 250 miles.
I suppose I keep track of this issue more than most people. For those of us who grow and ship across the country, these figures become problematic. We might have a food they desire, but if they are in New York State, they are likely not going to be getting fresh locally-grown cactus regularly. A way around this might be a hothouse setup, natural gas can heat the enclosure, and the cactus or tomatoes might be harvested and sold locally. The problem with this is the amount of resources needed to maintain a hothouse in a New York winter. Such an alternative might lead to more fuels used than having the cactus trucked in from California along with 40,000 pounds of other materials…. those big-rigs move a huge amount of freight for a relatively low use in fuel on a per-pound basis.
Forbes Magazine (Capitalists Tool) has a great article examining some of these conceptions and problems with the locavore movement. Now, actually, I subscribe to a great much of the locavore thinking. I went by our local store recently, and saw a table of produce from Australia. I was a bit surprised, because they were mainly apples and citrus fruits… and we have such great local produce of those types (we’re super-lucky having the great produce we have in California). I don’t see any advantage in eating an Aussie citrus when our local stuff is already in season and super fresh and tasty. But there might be times I’ll eat something grown far away. If it weren’t for our transportation and trade abilities in the modern world, we would still be eating pretty much just the items we can grow ourselves. I was reading an article about the nineteen twenties… the article went into the foods the people of that time mentioned in their diaries…. to us it would seem quite bland, and unappealing. There was very little variety during the season…. you ate what grew then, or you ate the foods you’d been able to dry or can in previous seasons.
With our modern transportation system, we can have fairly fresh foods delivered to local places around the country, and then disseminated from that point… giving all those who wish it, fresh food, of many varieties, in much of the year…. at fair prices. Yet it is sad to think of some of the ‘miles to table’ data given with various foods. When you can, there’s nothing like fresh produce grown in the right soils, at the right season, and eaten very soon after picking.
Mirrors on the ceiling
and pink champagne on ice
she said “we are all just prisoners here,
of our own device”
And in the Master’s chambers
they gathered for the feast
they stabbed it with their steely knives
but they just can’t kill the Beast
Welcome to the Hotel California
such a lovely place
such a lovely face
Forty two years ago this summer, a fortuitous series of events delivered me to California. California… like nectar rolling off the tongue… the name itself is exotic… unreal. And the place is mythos. There is hardly a day I don’t realise my great fortune at being able to live here… and the great places I get to see. I am so blessed, and it is on the efforts and exertion of others that I was allowed this opportunity. Thank you to my parents for all the work they did, to get us to this place.
The world is big and huge, and getting smaller every year
A good example of this is the collaboration between two fellows who’ve put up a great cover of ‘The Eagles Hotel California’. The unique thing about this collab is the fact that these fellows have never met… one lives in Colorado, and the other in the Netherlands (Holland).
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Dani California
~Red Hot chili Peppers~
Getting born in the state of Mississippi
Papa was a copper and mama was a hippie
In Alabama she would swing a hammer
Price you gotta pay when you break the panorama
She never knew that there was anything more than poor
What in the world does your company take me for
Black bandanna, sweet Louisiana
robbin’ on a bank in the state of Indiana
She’s a runner, rebel and a stunner
On her merry way sayin; baby whatcha gonna
Lookin’ down the barrel of a hot-metal .45
Just another way to survive
California rest in peace
Simultaneous release
California show your teeth
She’s my priestess, I’m your priest
YEAH, YEAH
She’s a lover baby and a fighter
Shoulda seen it coming when it got a little brighter
With a name like Dani California
The day was gonna come when I was gonna mourn ya
A little loaded, she was stealing another breath
I love my baby to death
California rest in peace
Simultaneous release
California show your teeth
She’s my priestess, I’m your priest
YEAH, YEAH
Who knew the other side of you?
Who knew what others died to prove?
Too true to say good bye to you
Too true, too sad, sad, sad..
Push the fader, gifted animator
One for the now and eleven for the later
Never made it up to Minnesota
North Dakota man was a-gunnin’ for the quota
Down in the badlands she was savin’ the best for last
It only hurts when I laugh
Gone too fast..
California rest in peace
Simultaneous release,
California show your teeth,
She’s my priestess, I’m your priest
YEAH, YEAH
I’ve lived in Alabama and North Dakota
and they are both beautiful places..
but yeah, I like California best.
“Once,
Long Ago,
Something Was Made,
That Would Change the World”
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“Standing like tanks on the brow of the hill
up in the cold wind facing
in stiff battle-harness chained to the world
against the low sun racing
Bring me a wheel of oaken wood
a rein of polished leather
a heavy horse and a tumbling sky
brewing heavy weather
Bring a song for the evening
clean brass to flash the dawn
across these acres glistening
like dew on a carpet lawn
In these dark towns folk lie sleeping
as the heavy horses thunder by
to wake the dying city
with the living horseman’s cry”
~Ian Anderson~
‘Heavy Horses’
45 Degrees outside…. chicken baking in the oven to warm the house…. soon I will go out and pull leaves off the yukka plants. But now, with the odor of herbed chicken, knowing that potatoes are baking, and soon we’ll fry green beans and squash in butter on the stove…. all is well.
And we can listen to the beauty of Loreena McKennitt…. merged with the stunning visuals from Lord of the Rings….
It is in mixtures that we often find the most value…..
A red painting is just a red canvas…
but mix in blues and the other colors, artfully applied, then you have a painting
The chicken is just a chicken… but add the potatoes, and the beans, the herbs and the fats… and you have a meal.
Nothing is whole just on its own… everything needs the complimentary elements that complete it, and make it whole.
Both of my parent’s families farmed with livestock. My dad used to plow with mules as a kid in Missouri…. my mom’s family used the heavy European horses on their large farm in Hungary. My great grandfather would cut trees in winter, and haul the lumber to Budapest on his wagon pulled by horses. One time while loading lumber onto the wagon, he was late coming home…. his wife sent my twelve year old grandmother to the woodlot to remind him to come home before dark…. she came upon the wagon overturned upon the ice-glazed shoulder…. him crushed under the load, and already frozen solid.
Yes, farming and rural living does have its dangers.
The song ‘Heavy Horses’ by Jethro Tull is an homage to the large work horses… and a sad realization that the end of an era has come….
But yet, one day the big horses may once again be of value in farming….
If history teaches us anything, it is that nothing ever stays static, what happens now will not likely remain so…..
There is a species of yellow jacket wasp that gives our cactus fruits some real problems. The wasp is a predatory creature that enjoys meat for the protein while raising young. The insect also needs a lot of sugars for the energy. In the spring, the wasp larvae secrete a waste product high in sugars. This high carbohydrate source is eagerly taken up by the adults who tend the young, feeding them the meat they have prepared for them through mastication.
In the late summer the wasps have no more young, so they aren’t getting the sugars they need. This is also the time our cactus fruits start to ripen. The wasps will cut holes through the rind of the fruit, and a dozen wasps will sometimes occupy it to gorge on the sweet juice of the cactus fruit. Needless to say, this bothers me considerably. So I start a trapping program whenever I see the wasp population swell. I like to reduce their numbers before the fruits ripen. I use various lures depending on the season. In the spring and summer, they like meat, and they seem to have a special liking for the odors of some of the canned cat and dog foods we feed our animals. Once the cactus fruits start ripening, I’ll take any that become pierced by wasps, and use them for bait.
Most of the traps come with a pheromone lure. I’ve found that the pheromone combined with cat food or cactus fruit works best.
We can catch some large numbers of wasps pretty fast here.
Masanobu Fukuoka was a pretty big influence on me. He was a fellow who’s family owned one of the larger and more prosperous farms on his native island in Ehime Prefecture, Japan. Early in the 20th century, he received university training to be a microbiologist. It was while looking his dad’s farming business over when he came home from university that he realized that his family’s farm which was considered to be a relatively prosperous farm was actually continually on the brink of insolvency. I imagine most family farms in the rest of the world would ‘know the deal’.
He realized that the ‘inputs’ his family was using through the modern chemical fertilizers and pesticides being developed in the forties was not helping the farmer in a monetary sense. The huge investment in materials and special equipmentwas outweighing the short-term monetary return. He wanted a way his family could farm without wasting effort, grow the appropriate species and varieties for the seasons and area, and not require a large outlay in equipment and labor. Through decades of study from both a scientific perspective, and a zen-like philosophical sense he developed a method of farming he called ‘Do-Nothing’ farming. In this method the grower tries to not till the soil… natural materials are left on the surface to shade and shield the soil, and they will rot into the soil increasing the carbon ratio, and helping the microbiological balance which he took to be the key to a healthy and productive soil.
I think there are no hard-and-fast rules in his methods as far as techniques. It mostly comes down to understanding that the grower must be ‘attuned’ to nature itself. Because even though in many ways, any farm is a departure from nature, still the forces of nature and soils themselves are based on laws of nature and genetics. So the trick is to understand the needs of the plants and the entire bio-system of the soil. Eh, it can get a bit complex… really, maybe the best way to do it is to imagine the soil… to let yourself get into it and be a tiny creature on a speck of soil…. or be the feeder root to some plant… or be the sand particle, nestled between the spongy humus particle, and the flat clay particle… be the tiny molecule of something that exchanges cations with another molecule depending on local PH and temperature and moisture levels…. you have to get into the soil in a mind-sense… you have to feel it… and understand it. And it’s so complex you can never really ‘get it’. But it is a wonderful world, deep and complex, full of mysteriouscreatures and plants, and mixed with the detritus of the world above. I wrote an article that explores how to get into the soil in your mind, some people say it is a very good way to explain the soil and illustrate some of the many interactions that occur in the microcosm of ‘the soil’.
Quotes from Masanobu Fukuoka:
“Although natural farming — since it can teach people to cultivate a deep understanding of nature – may lead to spiritual insight, it’s not strictly a spiritual practice. Natural farming is just farming, nothing more. You don’t have to be a spiritually oriented person to practice my methods. Anyone who can approach these concepts with a clear, open mind will be starting off well. In fact, the person who can most easily take up natural agriculture is the one who doesn’t have any of the common adult obstructing blocks of desire, philosophy, or religion… the person who has the mind and heart of a child. One must simply know nature… real nature, not the one we think we know!” ”Many people think that when we practice agriculture, nature is helping us in our efforts to grow food. This is an exclusively human-centered viewpoint… we should instead, realize that we are receiving that which nature decides to give us. A farmer does not grow something in the sense that he or she creates it. That human is only a small part of the whole process by which nature expresses its being. The farmer has very little influence over that process… other than being there and doing his or her small part.”
But it takes both a bit of scientific study involving soils, botany, biology and chemistry along with some imagination to see the interactions under the soil, that have so much impact above the soil. Many plants have the majority of their mass under the soil….. roots will form the majority of the plant cells. This is no different than a human having to be taking up more than half their waking hours at work to make a living. And soil is like life, it is like a bank account… you can’t keep taking out from the bank and not putting back in. If you continue to kill the micro-fauna and flora in your soil, you are withdrawing funds from your accounts without putting anything back.
The specific techniques he outlines in his three books might be especially appropriate for his temperate wetter-than-California climate of Japan. But they don’t all work well in our hot and very dry climate in the California coastal hills. Yet again, his philosophy in this regard follows the simple prescription of knowing your local environment on all levels. Using this knowledge you can determine a practical path to walk…. although, just like walking an un-tracked alpine wilderness, you will have to know from the beginning that there are many trails you will walk, and there will be several ways to get to the end camp. In wilderness hiking you must be willing to go left or right when you come upon a rock… the same goes for growing anything. You have to be able to see the changes in every element that takes a part in this big huge ballet we call ‘agriculture’. And it’s a wonderful dance that mankind has been participating in for ten thousand years. Long may the band play on.
The Fukuoka website also has a series of pages giving quick overviews on the different systems of farming used today… what is a ‘bio-intensive’ farm? What is the definition for ‘organic’, ‘sustainable’, a ‘natural farm’ etc? You will find many answers in these pages.
You can find one of Mr. Fukuoka’s books ‘The Natural Way of Farming’ for free download from the Agricultural Library Index. In that collection you can find some of the classic soil and agriculture books from Cato of ancient Rome, to a soils book by Charles Darwin, and several books by Albrecht Howard. Yeah, people have been growing things for a long time now… and writing about our foods and how to grow and market it has been a long-time pre-occupation for many people.
Dang, we’re a bunch of rabble-rowsers here in the states. Since the inception of this nation…. we’ve had a problem with authority, while at the same time we fight and die to preserve the institutions that keep ‘The Man’ in power but at least a little from just rounding us up wholesale in giant Pogroms such as you see in so many places. We suffer a dichotomy from our own love of the nation and people, and the same forces that keep us a bit secure yet ever-suspicious of those who hold the reigns of power…. sometimes our own personal feelings rub a bit with the authorities…. but what’cha gonna do?
My mom is from Hungary and went through some of the issues with the Nazis and later the Russians…. in either case they just ‘went along with the program’ until they could get the hell out of there. My dads’ family has been here since the late 1600′s, and some from before as Native Americans…. they fought against authority from the beginning, even while they were being rounded up in Scotland and Ireland in the ‘Clearances’ and sent here to ‘The Colonies’. There’s been folks from my family that have died in every war this country ever fought.. as Forest Gump said…. “He had a long family history to live up to”. Family lore has it that my granddad Lilburn and his brother used to run moonshine into Saint Louis in the prohibition days. I don’t know how much of that is true…. but knowing my family… I kind of believe there’s some credence to it. I’m sure he only did it part-time though.
You can see the video here…
embedding disabled by request.
It’s a great video.
Copperhead Road (Steve Earle)
Well my name’s John Lee Pettimore
Same as my daddy and his daddy before
You hardly ever saw Grandaddy down here
He only came to town about twice a year
He’d buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine
Now the revenue man wanted Grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It’s before my time but I’ve been told
He never came back from Copperhead Road
Now Daddy ran the whiskey in a big block Dodge
Bought it at an auction at the Mason’s Lodge
‘Johnson County Sheriff’ painted on the side
Just shot a coat of primer then he looked inside
Well him and my uncle tore that engine down
I still remember that rumblin’ sound
Well the sheriff came around in the middle of the night
Heard mama cryin’, knew something wasn’t right
He was headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load
You could smell the whiskey burnin’ down Copperhead Road
I volunteered for the Army on my birthday
They draft the White-Trash first,’round here anyway
I done two tours of duty in Vietnam
And I came home with a brand new plan
I take the seed from Colombia and Mexico
I plant it up the holler down Copperhead Road
Well the D.E.A.’s got a chopper in the air
I wake up screaming like I’m back over there
I learned a thing or two from ol’ Charlie don’t you know
You better stay away from Copperhead Road
I’ve been a bit pre-occupied with the nearby La Brea Fire, which is finally going to be put down due to the efforts of the firefighters and the co-operation of the weather. We’ve gotten a rare occurrence… rain in August. We’ve had no rain since May… now while a firestorm is raging… in comes some rain to dampen the fire. I can relax a little now.
Now I can listen to one of my favorite songs without breaking into a sweat and starting to catalogue our possessions and plan escape routes.
The original lyrics are from the Marshal Tucker Band….
but I do like the banjo and mandolin in this version by the Roundhouse band.
Plus, the stunning visuals in the video are great.
‘Fire on the Mountain’
~Marshal Tucker Band~
Took my fam’ly away from my Carolina home
Had dreams about the West and started to roam
Six long months on a dust covered trail
They say heaven’s at the end but so far it’s been hell
And there’s fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
We were diggin’ and siftin’ from fiveto five
Sellin’ everything we found just to stay alive
Gold flowed free like the whiskey in the bars
Sinnin’ was the big thing, lord and Satan was his star
And there’s fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
Dance hall girls were the evenin’ treat
Empty cartridges and blood lined the gutters of the street
Men were shot down for the sake of fun
Or just to hear the noise of their forty-four guns
And there’s fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
Now my widow she weeps by my grave
Tears flow free for her man she couldn’t save
Shot down in cold blood by a gun that carried fame
All for a useless and no good worthless claim
And there’s fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
Fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
Waitin’ for me there
Europeans often say we in the US have no history to our country and culture. I disagree completely.
My dad was a youngster in the early forties when his great grandfather was on his deathbed on a farm near Troy Missouri. Each day the family would gather dressed in black, and they would all sit around the bed quietly. The boys of course were restless and fidgety. One thing that always impressed my dad about the old man, who was born in the 1850′s was his revolver he kept hanging on the corner post of his bed. He’d kept it there always, even when civilization came to Missouri at the turn of the century. My dad says it was a huge gun… he was of course young and small.. and just like the snowdrifts over my head I recall as a child… when you grow up the scale of things changes.
My great great granddad had told my dad that in the old days “life was cheap. Men would get killed in the saloons and alleys of Saint Louis, and every morning a wagon would roam the streets to pick up the men who had been killed overnight and thrown into the streets.”
We’re all descended from people who’ve gone through hell.
We’ve had some issues with coyotes the last few days.
Sure, we know we live in the wilderness… but for the most part, the wild critters don’t mess with our animals, and we supply food and water to them by our plantings… anything not behind a seven foot fence is very likely potentially lost to intense browsing.
Luckily, the local mountain lion kept the deer population low… it killed one in our back yard once… it tried to eat me another time…. whatever. I don’t have hard time having a lion around…. once it ate all our goats, all that was left to eat was us and the cats…. the cats can hide in places a lion can’t get them… and we can stay in the house… the lion won’t likely come in.
Having the lion around was fine, it was a savings for us, the lion killed nothing of ours, and it gave us benefits… a low deer population, so they ate less of the foods we try to grow….and no coyotes… the lions love coyotes when they can find them.. so areas with a lion visiting regularly may keep coyotes away (nothing’s fool-proof, but it worked for us).
But now, it’s been two years since I’ve heard a lion scream. And while I don’t get that spooky feeling that happens when I hear the lion scream by my house, and I have to walk in gathering dusk to the source of that sound just so I can get home, I’ve taken a pitchfork home before as a weapon in those instances.
Te problem is, the last year we’ve had some coyotes move into the area. I admire coyotes, I love them a lot, on a ranch where I used to work, I would sing to them, and they would sit and watch me. Yeah, coyotes are pretty cool, until they start to eat your friends. Yep, the neighbors had one dog disappear a few days ago (Scooter the tire biter), and yesterday the other neighbors had one dog attacked and carried off from ther porch. Other neighbors came by and found the dog in the arroyo where the coyotes evidently carry some of their kills… it was in shock, bitten.. but they were able to chase the coyotes off and carry the dog back home.
This morning I heard Chica yelp, and when I dashed outside, she was face to face with a coyote with a swirl of dust surrounding them from their energetic movements. I chased the coyote off, and Chica seems to be unharmed, but her shriek sounded as though she were being mauled. I’m glad I got there when I did.
But now… I want to look up predator rifles. I have an attachment to lever-actions since I fire left handed. Sure, I know there’s left handed bolt-actions…. but dang…. Chuck Connor sure did look right with that Winchester.
Looking up lever actions, I came upon an article about the Henry 22 Magnum lever-action….. but it is less of a technical article… it is about much of what has made any country great and strong, the story is good… it is old-time Americana….
There’s a lot of benefit to moving around a bit and seeing different cultures. I kind of started life out that way being the son of a Southern farm kid and a Hungarian farm girl. There’s been enough cultural differences in our family, that it makes you look at things perhaps a bit differently than many folks.
I was thinking of this while looking at recipes and thinking about differences in culture, and I thought I’d pass along two incidences in my own family showing wide differences in culture….
My dad grew up in the Ozarks on a small farm (80 acres).
Durin the Great Depression and WWII all of their meat they grew or hunted. Squirrels,
rabbits, coons and opossum were their regular meat. They usually only ate
chicken on Sunday… his mom knew which one was no longer laying (they had
over 100 chickens and sold eggs)… that would be Sunday supper. My Mom is
Hungarian, he met her in Germany after Korean War when serving there. When
she first had him over for supper, he stepped into the kitchen and smelled
chicken soup… oh yes, a smell like Sunday supper at home, not the
mess-hall he’d been eating in for a few years. She smiled, happy he liked
the smells, then she uncovered the pot to show him the chicken, she reached
in and pulled the entire chicken up by it’s claw, it still had its feet, head and
wattles! In her family, they ate all bits of the animals, and the eyeballs
and fat from the feet and head were preferred portions. This kind of
shocked my Redneck dad…. they fed the offal to their dogs, cooking it with
bread into biscuits they served once daily to the dogs mixed with
fresh-from-the-cow warm milk.
A few years later my dad had married my mom and brought her to the USA.
He wanted her to meet an uncle of his who lived alone with his wife on a
small island. They pulled up to the small lake… it was dusk. They honked
their horn and flashed their lights…. soon out of the darkness they heard
the swish of oars in the water.. and from out of the gathering evening mist
came a figure, bent to the oars to gather them. My mother had a hard time
walking in the small boat in her fanciest shoes, the only high heels she had
she’d worn to show off as well as possible to the Americans (I suspect she
was rather shocked at the rural life and personages of the relatives she had
married into). When they made it into the simple two room log cabin, the
aromatic smells of baked meats rose from the wood-burning stove. Proudly my
dad’s aunt opened the oven to show the ‘foreign lady’ the food she was
cooking…. my mom almost fainted, she thought it was a huge rat… it was a
opossum!
Decades later I was stationed in Germany with the US Army… I’d often visit my grandmother in her village Eberbach. There were a few times she had the fish-farm guy drop a big fish off….. it’d be alive and swimming in the bathtub. She’d have me kill and gut it for supper… then she’d bake it. She liked me to keep the head on the fish… and when she baked it, she’d take the head for herself and let me have the rest of the fish (I was a big eater).
Yeah, there’s a lot to be said for cultural enrichment.
