Renaissance Garden

Monday, January 7, 2013

Still Learning

Yesterday was my first internet "sabbath" and it worked out well. I was able to review an entire book on farmers' markets and take extensive notes. Bill and I are having a farm leadership "retreat" this weekend where we discuss all things pertaining to this year's farming business. I put together an agenda of things to discuss, ideas to toss around, etc. There were a couple of times I was tempted to consult the Google but didn't and really didn't miss out on anything. It's actually nice to escape the black hole of cyberspace sometimes.

My blogger friend EcoGrrl blogged a while back about alternative educational opportunities - go here to read a very thoughtful post - and as a result I've decided to enroll in a course called Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention through Coursera. The class begins January 28 and is offered for free through the University of California San Francisco. Students even get a certificate of completion when it's over. I'm hoping to get some great info to pass on to our farm's customers. There were several courses I was really interested in but didn't want to overload myself. There are a couple more courses where the start date hasn't been announced so I went ahead and put myself on the roll for those classes. I can always unenroll if they start at an inconvenient time.

Poem: New Year Resolve

Photo taken on our farm

New Year Resolve

by May Sarton

The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.

Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.

Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Quote for the Day

One cannot disdain all other living beings, grind mountains to extract minerals, build roads without a thought for habitat fragmentation, design gardens to please only human aesthetics, or harvest monocultures that serve solely human needs, and expect one’s world to continue for long. There is room for humans at Earth’s banquet, but only those who have lived in place long enough to have learned the contours of their terrain, the language of their plant and animal neighbors and, more than anything, the needs of non humans."

~Dady Chery

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Next Christmas

Source: USA Today

Now that the dust has settled from the holiday shopping frenzy - stretching from "Black Friday" until the day-after-Christmas sales, it's time to get out your calendars and make some notes for shopping in 2013, especially around Christmas time. Think about the gifts you gave and the reactions of the recipients. Did they really seem happy to receive that gift - or did they put on a show of loving that new whatchamacallit? Better yet, think about gifts YOU received. Did you really love/need/want them all? Or did you immediately begin thinking about how you could regift it or how soon you had to hold onto it until you could unload it at a local thrift store?

Studies have shown that approximately 83% of Americans report receiving a gift they neither wanted nor needed. Further, of all the things we buy, only about 1% is still used six months after purchase. That's an obscene amount of waste.

Last year I blogged about seeing a stack of boxes that contained a product called "Easy Feet," designed so you wouldn't have to bend down to wash your feet in the shower. This year those items were again being sold at our local CVS store. Apparently, since our real needs are already met companies have to invent *needs* for us. This article at Alternet.org talks about the madness of our shopping habits:

Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production. We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility. Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us. [Emphasis added by me.]

The Alternet article goes on to point out how the U.S. government is always working on ways to simulate spending. This policy is unsustainable. We cannot endlessly spend and consume - needs and resources are finite. We've got to come up with a better way of life.

An example of how far we've drifted from rational thinking is this Mazda car commercial:

Selling a product in conjunction with a movie with an anti-consumption message - and using images from that very movie? Really? Really?

Do yourself, your family, and your planet a favor and get out your calendar right now. Make a note in November to remind yourself to opt out of the 2013 mass holiday shopping frenzy.

Friday, January 4, 2013

Farm Friday

Source: Amazon.com

I hope everyone had a happy and productive start to the new year. We ended up unexpectedly having our granddaughter for another long weekend - we took her home on New Year's Eve. And our daughter returned from her birthday celebration in New York. She and I have been trying to make up lost time by watching the new-to-us season of NCIS (we watch on DVD so are always a season behind).

We seem to be having yet another "mild" winter - not mild to this Southern California/South Florida girl but mild for Virginia. The positive side is that we're still getting produce from the garden - broccoli, cabbage, rainbow chard, collards. The negative is that the bugs - both those that haunt the gardens and those that haunt us - will be back with a vengeance come spring.

I'm been on a decluttering kick (again), trying to eliminate things from our house that we haven't used in the last year or so. I have taken some inspiration from Bea John son and the Zero Waste Home. Of course, we'll never get down to that level of minimalism and waste reduction but I want to get to a level that is right for us.

On a sad note, we lost two of our goats this past week. We don't know what happened, although one seemed to have a broken leg or hip and the other just never seemed to thrive. Boer goats can be very frustrating; even our vet said he dislikes them because you often don't know they're even sick until it's too late. Rowan, on the other hand, seems to be recovering nicely from his wound and I suspect he likes showing off his scar.

I continue to bake fresh bread on a regular basis and, since we really don't eat sandwiches, I haven't needed to buy store bread in a while. As we speak, I'm also making a blueberry lavendar compote to try on the bread. Blueberries and lavender, two of my favorite things.

I also started experimenting with sprouting and have decided to make it a regular part of our diet. Sprouts are easy to grow and packed with nutrition - and a great way to add more fresh food to a winter diet. I'm coveting the strainer lid pictured above as right now I'm using cheesecloth on my sprouting jar. I actually have a couple of designated sprouters - one of clay and one of plastic - but I've found that I prefer using an old fashioned mason jar. (I just might have to treat myself to one or two of those lids and declutter those sprounters.)

Have a great weekend!

Thursday, January 3, 2013

2013 Goals

Source

It seems like just yesterday that I was working on some goals for the first quarter of 2012! For this quarter, I haven't come up with many concrete goals, but I'll share the few that I have. In order to be successful with my goals, I will use the SMART criteria. That is, I need to make sure my goals are: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound.

I'm going to read an interpretation of the Qur'an (anything not written in Arabic is considered an interpretation). Over the last few years I've heard pastors and other leaders in churches share information about Islam that I just knew was false, yet I never felt I was in a position to correct them since I haven't studied that religion. By reading an interpretation, I will get a better understanding and so can more intelligently defend false statements when I hear them. For this goal, I will give myself a time-line for finishing the reading, with a daily page quota that is realistic.

I'm repeating myself this year with the desire to stick more closely to a vegan diet. I'm still undecided on the issue of eating eggs from our farm but I will cut out dairy. I've never been a big milk drinker - it's cheese that has been my downfall. However, I don't eat that much cheese anymore, so it really won't be a huge change in my life. My plan is to go dairy-free for 21 days - and, if I choose to eat eggs, to not eat anything containing eggs from off our farm.

I'm also going to implement a media Sabbath. One day a week, I will refrain from going on the internet for a 24 hour period, probably from Saturday night to Sunday night. The internet is such a time killer and I would rather be actively doing something rather than passively absorbing information. I've pretty much abandoned social media (i.e., facebook) as I realized I really don't get anything out of it. There are a handful of people I want to keep up with but actually most of my friends aren't even on facebook or are like me and use it very infrequently.

A couple of months ago I looked at the way we were living and realized some of our actions didn't match our beliefs. The main problem was driving - consuming precious fossil fuel while at the same time contributing to the pollution problem. I talked the talk about energy conservation yet made frequent trips in the car, sometimes to just accomplish one thing. We've been grouping our errands and planning better so we're only making one or two car trips a week. I want to continue with this habit as a way of living my values. Of course, I will continue to monitor other daily choices and purchases to strive for less impact on the environment. I need to make the goal of more sustainability fit within the SMART guidelines.

Beyond goals, my wish for 2013 is to become part of a community of like-minded individuals, people who are concerned about things like the environment and social justice, people who actually think through a topic or issue and don't spew out the rhetoric they've heard in the pews or on FOX news - or even the official stance of the Democratic party. I want to discuss things rationally, using facts, while at the same time keeping a human face on issues. I want to talk to people who know that prayer alone isn't the answer - that WE are often the answer to our and other's prayers - and that you can pray any time and anywhere, even when you're actually DOING things. It's not an either/or situation. Earlier this year I became tired of tip-toeing around certain issues and trying to use the "right" language to express myself among some groups of people - each group and denomination has their own set of words that should be used or cannot be used. When I first moved here, I had a brief friendship (she moved away) with a woman, a pastor's daughter. She said she was tired of the "language" issue in this part of the world. She just wanted to have a normal conversation and be able to say things like, "I read something interesting" rather than "The Lord led me to read this...." I hesitate to even speak sometimes because I might say something as simple as "I wish" among the wrong people. I don't know if such a community is possible but I'm hopeful.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

A Year in Review