It's Raining, and the Dump's Open Tomorrow!

You take your pleasures where you can when you live out here in the country, folks, and there's been no shortage of pleasures lately.
The rain today slowed things down a bit. and allowed me to load up the van with garbage. The dump's only open three days a week in these parts, and finding the time to gather garbage and recyclables together, load them into a vehicle and actually drive to the dump can be a challange. Today, everything has fallen together just right, and I am a happy man, sitting here at my keyboard and thinking about all that garbage sitting in my van.
That's just a bit of local color I thought I'd offer to those of you less familiar with life out here on the farm. It may be that someday, when I'm old and haggard and sharing my wisdom with youngsters who seek me out, that garbage routine tales will be what interests them most. It's hard to tell. They may be more interested in what life was like back when we used to burn gasoline, or back before you get get organic produce in places other than Walmart. but that seems doubtful. No, it's tales of getting to the dump that will hold their interest.
We pulled two of our favorite resources of information down off the bookshelf the other day, and were struck by their differences in tone and personality, and their similarities in tone and personalities. It all started when we were looking for sausage recipes, but that's another story. When looking for vital, life saving information, we turn to Carla Emory's Encyclopedia of Country Living or to Eliot Wigginton's Foxfire Books. (Neither let us down on sausage counts.)
One is transcriptions of tales told by haggard old mountain folks, and the other is a back to the land primer for the granola set. I'll leave it to you to figure out which is which. The subject matter covered in both books is remarkably similiar, as is their effectiveness. Moreso, I find my motives for turning to either tome to be identical. Basically, there's something I don't know how to do, and maybe there's someone who does.
I'm not intimidated by planting by the moonsigns, or skinning a bear, or making soy milk. I fear not deworming a goat or drawing water from a well. All I have to do is turn to the index.

I Put The Full Resources of Let It Grow Organic Gardens at Your Disposal

TO: Walmart Intergalactic Headquarters
Bentonville, Arkansas

FROM: Let It Grow Organic Gardens
Spring Creek, North carolina

Sirs:
It was with great pleasure that I read recently that you plan to add organic produce to your already abundantly crowded shelves. I applaud this decision with great gusto! Let me be the first to say that if the vageries of the American economy causes organics to treat you anything like it's treated me, the world will be a better place!
We're pretty excited down here on the farm, and welcome you aboard the organic movement with open arms. We're always looking for additional markets, so let me say that I have mobilized the full force of Let It Grow Organic Gardens, and we will work ceaselessly to provide Walmart with the best damn organic produce that can be grown! I become teary at the thought of someday walking into a Walmart in, say, Missoula, Montana, or Pass Christian, Mississippi, and seeing a bunch of organic arugula that I grew all by myself. Don't get alarmed if one of your security cameras catches a scruffy looking guy in overalls hugging one of your associates; it's just me, unable to control my elation.
Let's get this ball rolling: I have now in my fields, ready for harvest, five, yes, five cases of lettuce, and about twenty pounds of squash. I offer these to you first, before any of my usual dreadlocked, patchouli reeking customers, before any froo-frooey restaurant in Asheville, and even before I offer it to our local co-op, because I know I can count on you for a fair price. Get back to me as soon as possible, and we can close the deal. I'll probably need directions to Bentonville, but I think I can deliver it by next Wednesday, or, maybe Thursday. Let this be the start of a long and glorious supply and demand relationship!
In closing, let me say that I've always relied on one of your many locations for the best price on socks, duct tape and motor oil. I've always been a loyal customer, and look forward to becoming a tiny link in your world wide supply chain.
Your Friend,
Frank

Time Is On My Side

The daylilies, slowly, one by oh wait for it one, are blooming.
There's a patch in the corner of the front yard that's been here since I got the place. I dug up a square yard or so of them a few years ago and put them in the side yard, and those seem to be multiplying, or, at least, I think so, when I wade through the weeds to look at them.
There's a patch of irises near them, a patch that's grown from one little bulb my friend R* gave me many years ago. Those started to bloom in May so I weedeated around them and they could be seen when you looked down on them from the hillside.
This whole ensemble is usually drawn together when the jerusalem artichokes outgrow the weeds around them and bloom above a sea of fescue.
Farmers have lousy gardens, runs the old cliche, and kill houseplants. Determined to avoid such a stereotype, I envision a lovely garden beside the house, one that will eventually run to the West behind the house, and maybe then stretch to the branch.
In eight years, I've planted irises, daylilies and jerusalem artichokes. I consider that to be a good start, Rome after all, not being ....
I can look across the broad vista that is this farm and feel like there's a hell of a lot that I've gotten done since I got here, what with keeping three acres of veggies going year after year, building a barn and a walk-in cooler, two greenhouses, a chicken coop, and keeping all the equipment in more or less fair repair. Then I wake up in a different mood and look around and see a hundred uncompleted projects and empty spaces where I wanted to do this or that or something else.
I can't do much this year but tread water, so there's time to re-evaluate. I draw no firm conclusions, though, more than standard cliches about glasses being half-planted or half-weeded. That in and of itself may be an accomplishment. Time rolls on and the planet spins around the sun, and there's no point in counting. Someone promised me some geranium seeds, so there'll be another addition to the garden soon. Unless I don't plant them.

Rolling Forward

A delivery van has come into our possession, and not a minute too soon.
It fell upon us, tossed into the air by a friend trying to clean up his driveway, and I'm left wondering why I didn't do this years ago. It's a twenty year old Toyota I'm talking about, ugly and boxy and looking like those things that Godzilla used to step on, but it holds a shit load of stuff. Flats of plants and boxes of produce and various market paraphanalia and interns, strap the tables to the roof and you're good to go. And it gets, um, slightly better gas milage than the old truck.
As for me, in my present state, its main benefits are its power steering and its automatic transmission, but I'm coming around to the notion that it is a superior market vehicle in any circumstance. It's a huge shoe box on wheels, and today, we got the radio working.
Look for us at area markets with our new van. Through internal combustion, we become more sustainable.

Loose Ends

I've been busy.
There've been a parcity of posts, lately, and this bothers me in no small way, but, as I've stated: I've been busy.
Doing just what? you ask?
Well, for starters, had I the time, I'd have posted of my trip to a Christian health food store, where I found a Bible Bar, containing all the natural sweetness of Deuteronomy, or of my trip to Tennessee, where I expected to take I* to his first rock'n'roll show, but instead endured a guy who sounded like George Jones and dressed like Elvis, or of my excitement over the promise that Wal-Mart will soon carry our squash, or of our latest marketing coup: airborne tomatoes, or of the fun I'm having with a titanium plate inside of my body.
Alas, I've done none of these things.
But, I've thought about it, and even turned on the computer a few times.
If you've guessed that this is a psuedo-non-post pretending to be something substative after all, you're right, but I'm just trying to get the ball rolling again.