I love this article

http://modernfarmer.com/2014/06/stop-romanticizing-farms/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=stop-romanticizing-farms


Great article about farming in "Modern Farmer" today.  Specifically, the article addresses the fact that in order to be called a farm, something tangible (i.e., a real crop) must be produced.  There's been an explosion of pseudo-farms, where one can pet farm animals, spend the day learning rural/homestead-type crafting, or where you can simply stay for a weekend and walk the bucolic fields, imagining you are, indeed, on a real farm.

Places that rely on writing, weddings, workshops or weekend overnight stays for the main source of their income are not farms; they are farm fantasy venues. It's an important distinction, especially for anyone interested in actual farming.  

Low-hanging fruit

When we moved here, we inherited a white nectarine and regular nectarine which were planted by the previous owners.  Both are commercially produced hybrids, meaning they've been selectively bred to produce an abundance of fruit.  I've never had much of a taste for nectarines, yet I have to admit these are pretty good, especially when eaten just this side of being ripe.  Turns out I love nectarines, as long as they are crisp, not mushy.

So the problem is not us eating the fruit.  The problem with commercial hybrids like these is that it's rare one family can put all the fruit they produce to use...plus producing that much is very hard on the tree, year to year.  Despite several rounds of thinning fruit, we have once again ended up with waaay too many nectarines.

I gave big baskets to the neighbors.  I gave bigger baskets to the kids at the winery.  And probably bushels to the birds.  And there's still more.

In another month or so it will smell like a country winery under those trees, as all the ripe, picked over fruit finally drops to the ground and begins to ferment and eventually, rot.  I will leave it there until cooler weather, when I will harvest the dried out fruit mummies and start all over again as the cycle goes around with the calendar year.  But I really do wish the previous owners had planted heirlooms, which in general have lower fruit yields than hybrids do.

Because one can only eat so many nectarines.

Spirit in the sky

Everyone sees different things when they look at clouds or contrails. Today I saw a benevolent being with its arms outstretched, as if to give a hug.

That's how I see the world, even though my sunny outlook is occasionally clouded over with disappointment or hurt, which is of course a universal experience.

Most of my universe is still good, and I'll take that hug to heart.

Off The Grid?

So I click on an article this morning that was titled "The Best Places to go Off The Grid," and when the article appears, it's actually titled, "The Best Places to Escape Civilization." It's a travel article about unpopulated vacation destinations.  Sigh.

You can't blame people, because most do not realize exactly what off-the-grid means. In an ideal world, your off-the-grid lifestyle would include close friends and neighbors as part of a vibrant, independent community, practicing the theory of strength in numbers, and bringing various individual strengths together to make a strong whole.  You cook, she cans, he forages, and those two over there fix things. Community.

But it can also mean a solo existence; living primitively in the wilds of Alaska, hunting and foraging for your food and building your own shelter.  Yet even those folks rely on the occasional visit from the bush pilot or snowmobile trip into town to replenish supplies.

So basically, "off the grid" is pretty easy to achieve, while "escaping civilization" is something we only do for short periods at a time, for periods when we need some solitude.  You can do that in your own house if you'd like, although there's nothing wrong with escaping to a place with room service or at least a good bush pilot at your disposal. Just don't call it "off the grid living," for heaven's sake.

Retirement

As I move along in life, more and more people I know have started to retire.  Realistically I know I will not be able to work at my tasting room job forever; at 52 I am already the oldest member of the tasting room staff, and at some point I will probably find the long hours spent standing behind the bar are simply too much for my hips and feet to handle.

But the other day I was in Pier One (armed with a discount coupon and looking for something fun to buy for a new a shelf we put up) and an elderly lady approached me and asked if she could help me with anything.  When I turned to answer her, I noticed she had on a nametag and a blue Pier One vest, meaning she was an employee.  She was probably between 70 and 80 years of age.

I later heard the manager reminding her to "check in" with all the customers on the floor, which indicated to me she was, in fact, a NEW employee.  I don't know the circumstances that brought her into new employment at Pier One at her age -- I only hope that it was a choice and not a decision mandated by survival.  

I see similar things going on at several retail locations throughout town, and I watch these older men and women seem to struggle a bit to keep up with the younger set, hustling around moving stock, mastering the intricacies of the point-of-sale system (cash registers as we knew them are gone from the landscape) and attempting to sell, sell, sell to a demanding and often harried public.  

I know my first few months at the winery were a challenge -- I felt like an old dog trying to learn new tricks, and they weren't coming easy.  Oh, eventually I mastered them, but I wonder how much harder it would have been had I been 20 years older, in a harsher, corporate retail environment.  Judging by how hard it was at 51 compared to 21 at the winery, I'm guessing it would have been a lot harder.

Anyway, these older workers are making minimum wage and doing physically demanding jobs at a time when our grandparents were already collected their social security. And I worry that they don't have a choice -- that something went wrong in their lives that necessitates them working until they drop.  I also worry that something could happen that would put me in the same position -- the position of having to work when my body is clearly ready for the rocking chair. 

And of course, there's always the lifespan factor.  With people living longer than ever, retirement must, by necessity, come later. When people retired at 55, they usually lived until about 65.  When we are all living to 80, does that mean we'll be working until we're 75?  Maybe.

But on the other end of the scale there is retirement, where we supposedly hang out contentedly, playing with grandchildren and getting senior discounts at our favorite dining establishments. But to me, retirement looks like the bus stop in life that comes right before death. After all, what other Big Thing comes after retirement?  There are, simply, no more big life events after it.  No babies born or careers started or changed -- it's just somewhere between one and thrity years of whatever you can afford and would like to do.  Which sounds great except for the open-endedness of it. So maybe retiring at 55 would be nothing but a colossal bore, especially if you're planning on living until 90.

Maybe Pier One is not such a bad option after all.

As I intend to keep homesteading until I'm put into the ground myself, I have no worries about keeping busy once I do retire, but something about that open-endedness scares me a little.  OK a lot. I should probably learn to live more in the present, but it does seem that our senior years are the worst time to have a lot of contemplative time on our hands, because contemplating what's up ahead can be a challenge, once there are no more career moves, no more babies to birth and eventual physical decline to anticipate.  

And maybe feeling as I do is the biggest sign I'm not ready to retire yet.  Perhaps there will come a day when that rocking chair will beckon and I will gladly sink into it, crocheting a blanket while my grandbabies play at my feet.  Or maybe you'll find me at Pier One, running the register and showing people the newest table linens.

Either way, I hope the circumstances allow me to have a choice.

Second (third, fourth....) Harvest

A few weeks ago, I cut away at my spinach plants, reaping a good harvest but leaving each stalk intact with a few leaves on each one.  Yesterday, I finally pulled the plants out and removed another big bowl's worth of spinach leaves. It was a marvelous second harvest of some plants most other gardeners would have removed after the first harvest, either because they didn't think they would produce again, or to make room for something else.

But many plants will come back again if you just harvest carefully, and leave enough leaves on the plant for photosynthesis to happen, with roots intact.

This cabbage plant is on its third season of production.  It was planted in winter 2012, and since then has produced no less than six heads of lettuce.  This started because I was initially too lazy to pull out the plant's roots, so I cut the cabbage head off and just left the rest of it alone in the bed.  Lo and behold, come fall 2013, there were another couple of heads to harvest from the same plant.  And now, in summer 2014, there are two more. The leaves may be bug-eaten and sorry looking, but the head of cabbage is still good.  Just in time for summer slaw.

And last summer, I again got lazy at the end of the growing season (if you're sensing a trend here, you're right) and left a few tomatoes on the vine, to ripen, fall into the dirt, and disperse their seeds.  And I have these volunteer tomatoes to show for it, every bit as big and lovely as the ones I painstakingly grew in the solarium this spring.

We talk a lot about the wisdom of recycling, but rarely do most of us think of allowing our plants to recycle themselves. 

For success like this, all it takes is being too busy to garden (and/or plain old laziness), some serious procrastination and some patience or just a willingness to look away for awhile while Mother Nature works her magic.

Finishing

So it's officially been two years since we moved into our home here, and during that time we've done a lot of renovation and remodeling.  We put in wood flooring, renovated the kitchen, and painted about half rooms in the house.  Gone are the cat-pee stained carpets (belonging to the last owner), the over-painted kitchen cabinets, and ugly grey walls.

But there have been a few projects we put off, mainly because they were not important to the functioning of our homestead (not that paint is, but it's a chore best tackled before you have all your furniture moved in) or they also represented more money out-of-pocket spent at a time when we were doing other things. 

Some were luxuries, like artwork on the walls, and some were functional, like expensive but effective Vulcan Vents to replace the soffit vents we currently have in our eaves, which are no longer considered fire preventative by the State of California.

I'm happy -- and relieved -- to announce we tackled most of those projects in the last week, in one final push before true summer heat sets in.  Now we have more beauty, and more safety. 

Colorful barnyard

Art, for art's sake!

We bought and hung some pieces of artwork and moved some other pieces around.  I even bought several postcards of some paintings I liked at five dollars a pop, snatched up a "4 for $20" set of frames with mattes to house them in, and arranged them to form a single, bight splotch of country color on our entry wall.

And the last thing we bought was a floating shelf, to fill a spot over the television where nothing else seemed to work.  It looks great, and finishes off the living room, which has looked half-done for far too long.

Yesterday Big Ag and I put in the 64 Vulcan Vents that will help keep fire out of our attic in the event of a wildfire.  Vulcan Vents have special screens which makes it almost impossible for embers to get in, as well as a honeycomb material inside that closes off with exposure to high heat.  I hate to think of wildfires devastating this area, but I'd be in denial if I said it couldn't happen.  (Thank you climate change.)

Stay away, wildfires!

It's a huge weight off my mind to have all these projects done, and all of them finished before summer.  With the Vulcan Vents installed, I'll be less afraid of wildfires, should they crop up in our area, and the new artwork will help give us a beautiful space to live in when the garden and pastures become too hot to enjoy.