Links to Share

Things I'm reading, thinking about, and working on this week...

- Oh boy, did I learn these lessons in a big way when I did landscape design. "Do You Really Need That Tough Customer?" by Tara Gentile

- What a lovely way to educate our young children about mega-fauna, environmental catastrophe through the ages, and the truth in myth. "The End Of A Chapter" by Brian Kallen at Restoring Mayberry  

- The Power of Concentration.

- Coming soon to an Etsy shop near you.

- How to make a notepad from junk mail.

- "...we’re not all competing for the same slice of pie." The Shocking Truth: I'm Not Your Competition by Carrie Dils

- Weirdly inspiring post from Cracked. 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person by David Wong




What are you working on this week?

Winter Solstice

pecan tree

We decided a few years ago that rather than celebrating Christmas and Easter (at least as a family... we still celebrate those other holidays with extended family and friends who observe them), which have no religious significance for us, we would celebrate the solstices (solstici?) and equinoxes. Last winter solstice was the first one scheduled and we had great plans but with a very new baby all we had energy for was cooking dinner and lighting a candle. This year Poppyseed is 1 and while we're not (quite) as exhausted, I don't have a lot of time to prep a big fiesta so this is what we did:

1. Took a walk (we do that every day but this was a festive walk!)
2. Watched the sunset to say goodby to the shortest day and hello to the longest night
3. Ate a seasonal feast (tacos with roasted duck, cabbage cilantro slaw, and roasted carrots)
4. Opened solstice presents
5. Picked greenery to decorate the house (holly, bay, and Mexican firebush)

a lichen covered stick we found on our walk

Next year, if the 2 year old allows, I hope to add solstice cookie making and seed starting to the mix. In this part of the country, not only can I continually grow kale, lettuce, and such through winter but, if I want large tomato and pepper plants to put in the ground come frost free time then I need to start them nowish (because the frost free date is only 2.5 months away)!

Here are some more pictures from our Winter Solstice.

Tiny Art Supplies

My mom is the queen of stockings. They're fantastic. Each year she finds amazing, useful, adorable, and unusual small items to fill them to overflowing. There are complex wind-up toys (some of which emit sparks!), glow in the dark decals for wellies, chip-clips that moo, band-aids shaped like monkeys...

...and tiny art supplies. Here is a selection from the past few years, shown with a spool of thread for perspective.

Yes, those are tiny tins of water colors, an itty bitty canvas, microscopic colored pencils, and slightly larger but still small (and awesome because they're twigs) colored pencils.

Can't wait for next year!

In the Meantime...

Since Poppyseed is still so young (and it's my full time job to take care of him) we're not doing much to write about (after all, this is not a mommy blog). We mostly nurse and change diapers and snuggle and sleep. 

In the meantime I'm doing some blog spring cleaning: sprucing up the look (new masthead), fixing broken links (and making them all open in a separate page), adding some tabs, cleaning up old posts and adding pictures (pretty and also Pin-able), etc. Let me know if you discover any big problems, if your subscription is no longer working, or anything else goes weird. I'll try to check in periodically with links and articles you might like, the occasional picture, or a recipe until things are back to normal.

Here are some shots of the place after nearly a year of neglect!

mushrooms and sunflowers

Stay Tuned...

For those of you who are still checking on the blog - hang in there! I hope to be back soon. I got pregnant, got sick, and haven't done anything in the past few months that is the least bit interesting (I'm sure no one wants to read a blog about morning sickness and food aversions or how much Zelda I've been playing). But hopefully I'm on the mend and I'll be back to doing stuff and posting soon.

A few posts in the works from before I got smacked down:

• The Non-Disposable, No-Waste Life and Baby
• Why I Don't Till The Soil
• Basics of Soils
• My Attempts at Fermented Pickles

 
 
Stay tuned...

The To Do List

Spring is here in coastal Texas and that means tons to do. Does anyone else have this problem? Don't get me wrong, I loooove all this work and I feel very lucky I get to do it full time but this morning I made a list of all the things that need doing and found it very hard to know where to start.

 

Some big things have already been scratched off the list: the new chicken house got wheels and is now out in pasture (I'll do a post later about building the chicken house), the property got seeded with crimson clover and rye, seeds were started, fallow garden beds got amendments and fresh mulch and a lot of cleaning happened.

However...

To Do List, Spring 2011:

• Fence lines need to be cleared
• New fence to be installed
• Old fences need some repair
• Gates need repair

• Build new beds in garden, planted with tomatoes, tomatillos, eggplant, hot peppers, ground cherry and cardboard mulched (every year the vegetable garden gets expanded)
• Winter crops out of old beds, spring crops or cover crops in
• Other vegetable beds need expanding and amending so I can plant corn, okra, winter squash, summer squash, and sweet peppers.
• Still other old bed needs to be cardboarded and mulched again so I can plant gourds.
• New trellis needs to be built and installed for cucumbers or beans
• Herb transplants go in everywhere
• More seeds need to be started

House Guests

In addition to the dog, the chicken who broke her foot, and the spiders, we have quite a few lizards living with us in the house.

This is one of the two lizards who reside in the living room.

This guy lives in our bedroom window. There is a gap at the top of the screen so I know he's not trapped... I think he just likes it where he is. When it's cold outside, he sits on the aluminum window frame (I assume because it's warm). On a nice day he hangs out on the screen. I suspect he discovered that at night the light attracts insects through the screen so all he has to do is sit there and munch. He's going to get very fat.

There is a large lizard living in my office but he's squirrely and hard to catch with the camera. Maybe one day you'll get to meet him.

I Love My Clothesline

Spring Greens

Sometimes in spring (or late winter which is kind of early spring here) the fresh growth looks so good and juicy I want to eat it. Seriously, I am tempted.

Lucky duck (Or chicken, as the case may be). She gets to munch it all day long.

Yum yum yum.

Oh! She's on to me! She knows I covet her grass.

And now she's ignoring me. Maybe I can sneak some grass while she's not looking...

On a Personal Note...

Happy birthday daddy! Remember this?

Maybe rolling one ton round bales with the lawn tractor was not the best plan :-)

something someone sent me

Some stuff a friend of mine sent me that I want to look into, which I'm putting here so I don't forget where it is, again.


Our Daily Bread: a documentary
http://www.ourdailybread.at/ - see trailers

The Rhizome Collective: Radical Urban Sustainability in Austin
http://www.rhizomecollective.org/node/3
and their RUST Manual - http://www.rhizomecollective.org/rustmanual

NE Small Farm Institute - where some forest garden research is done (for the
plant species matrix)
http://www.smallfarm.org/homepage.htm

Nepal Permaculture Project - permaculture cooperative extension increases yields
http://msnepal.org/partners/jpp/

Paradigms: The Inertia of Language - the essay we talked about
by a professor from the School for Designing a Society
http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/brun/manni.pdf

A Post-Capitalist Politics
book - http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/G/gibson_postcapitalist.html
one author - http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/graham/
Toward a Feminist Politics of Place and Post-capitalism -
http://www.nd.edu/~econrep/bios/jkgg.html
Rethinking Communism conference -
http://www.nd.edu/~remarx/conferences/2006/rethinking-communism.html

Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/sandoval_oppressed.html
"a hermeneutics of love in the postmodern world"

Perennial Kale
Brassica oleracea L. var. ramosa DC
best info: http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Brassica+oleracea+ramosa
http://www.ars-grin.gov/cgi-bin/npgs/html/taxon.pl?319631 - scroll down to see
other common names
http://www.plantnames.unimelb.edu.au/Sorting/Brassica_oleracea.html#ramosa
http://www.actahort.org/books/407/407_5.htm - includes following info:
"Perennial kale has probably been domesticated and distributed by the Romans.
Some relic populations are still being grown in various parts of western Europe
(Ireland, Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Portugal), in
Ethiopia, in Brazil and Haiti up to the present."

Blackwood Land Institute resources page
http://www.blackwoodland.org/resources.htm

Sedition Books - Houston bookstore/library/garden

/collective
http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2007/04/57691.php

Radical Encuentro - biannual Texas meetings, awesome!!
http://radicalencuentro.org/

Rising Tide North America: Confronting the root causes of climate change
http://risingtidenorthamerica.org/
anarchist, anti-racist, pretty awesome

Reclaim Power: voices from the camp for climate action, 2006
http://www.cinerebelde.org/site.php3?id_article=352 - I have this DVD (borrow or
copies)
Interview with someone from Rising Tide

UTMB Natural Step "green" building
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=8736&SnID=2
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=9183&SnID=2
http://www.eere.energy.gov/buildings/info/health/design.html - at the bottom of
the page about retrofitting

US Social Forum
http://www.ussf2007.org/

No Sustainability without Justice: A Feminist Critique of Environmental
Citizenship by Sherilyn MacGregor
excerpt from the abstract, I can email the twelve page essay if you're
interested more
"I discuss some of the central problems I see with environmental citizenship as
I see them. These problems include: a paradoxical coupling of labour- and
time-intensive green lifestyle changes with increased actie participation in
the public sphere; silence on questions of rights and social conditions that
make citizenship pratice possible; and a failure to acknowledge the ways in
which injuctions to make the green lifestyle changes (as expressions of good
green citizenship) dovetail into neoliberal efforts to download public services
to the domestic sphere."

The Diggers - dug up commons and planted corn in 1649-50 in England
basic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers_%28True_Levellers%29
detailed - http://www.diggers.org/english_diggers.htm

My Dog Just Ate a Ficus

My dog just at the ficus in my living room. That must have been where she was going! Not just the leaves but a significant amount of the trunk and stems as well. So now we know: sometimes a dog needs to munch a ficus.