Lifescapes

On the needles

The current sock project, in Hook 'Em Horns tweedy orange. (You Texas fans will understand.) I confess, though, that I've been carrying this second sock around in my knitting bag so long that I've forgotten the pattern. Before I pick up the needles again, I'll have to hunt up my notes (I've got a little knitting notebook where I write down pattern names, needle size, yarn, etc). Love doing socks, almost as much as I love wearing them.

Also on the needles: a "spontaneous" blue scarf, done in seed stitch on #8 circs with homespun and bits of other yarns. Photo coming as soon as I get the time to weave in a few ends. You know how that is.

Reading Note: The End of Food

To encourage myself to blog more often (and maybe a little more systematically), I'm planning to begin a series of brief blog posts on my reading (mostly quotes and short comments); plants in my garden and growing wild here at Meadow Knoll; recipes; and maybe my fiber crafting. I may not be able to make regular posts right away, since I'm still working on deadlines. But coming soon...

In the meantime, I'll start with a reading  note from Paul Roberts' excellent study of the modern fossil-fueled food system, The End of Food, which clearly lays out the challenges that we'll be facing in the next several decades and suggests that unless our food culture can embrace a sustainable paradigm, we're in for some serious trouble. Here are a couple of paragraphs to think about.

What is needed [to mitigate the pending food crisis] is an aggressive and coordinated effort by all players in the food system itself--not just ecologists or sustainability hand-wringers, but food companies, food scientists, and food policy-makers--to assess how and whether the current food ecoomy can adapt to so many challenges on so many fronts, and if it con't, what alternatives might be feasible in a world that will be fundamentally more constrained than the one we acknowledge today.

"We know that climate is changing, and we know that oil could very easily be at $250 a barrel tomorrow if the Middle East blows up, [Leopold Institute sustainability expert Frederick] Kirschenmann told me. "So if we are really scientists, we should at least be asking ourselves what kind of agricultural system could produce the food and fiber we need in a world where oil is $250 and where we have twice the severe weather but only half the water that we have now. What kind of agriculture could we come up with? It's an entirely reasonable question to ask, and yet, no one wants to touch it, because when you get down to it, no one has a clue."

Essential garden tools 2: Garden pH test

We garden in an ancient seabed. Over sixty million years ago, what is now the Texas Hill Country was covered with a warm, shallow sea. Our legacy from this geological past: a shallow, rock-studded alkaline soil, created from the chalky remains of calcarious marine life--anything from diatoms to oyster shells. I learned to garden in the deep loess soils of the Midwest, and when I began gardening in Texas, I could see that soil-building was my first job. I've been at it now for over twenty years, making compost and cycling dirt between my compost-fed dirt pile and the raised beds in my garden.

One of the most important tools in this soil-building effort is something Bill showed me how to use: a pH test. The pH of our garden soil is too high (too alkaline) for many garden plants, and we've spent a great deal of effort to bring the soil into the neutral range. The pH test tells me that we're getting there. Bill has mixed soil from the garden with distilled (pH-neutral) water in a little jar. He dips a strip  of pH test tape into the jar. The color of the tape shows us that the soil is just about pH neutral (7). Yay! It may not seem like much to you, but it feels like a giant step forward to me. I love a tool that tells me that I'm heading in the right direction. I know that I still need to adjust mineral and nutrient content--working on that now. A very positive sign: the wildlife in the garden soil, including worms!

Garden notes. The rain we got from Hermine (about 7") did wonderful things for the fall garden. The winter greens (spinach, chard, kale, beets) are coming up. The summer squash is bearing (the straight-neck is living up to its name: Prolific) in spite of the cabbage loopers (picking them off, spraying with pyrethrum). The fall tomatoes are starting to ripen, and the McCaslan pole beans have topped 8 feet and are flowering. Hoping for five-six weeks of productivity before our first frost.

Book report. An Extraordinary Year arrived last week, and I love it--it's truly a beautiful book, in its design and layout. I'm very grateful to the staff at the Univ. Texas Press for doing such a gorgeous job. I'm still slugging along with The Tale of Castle Cottage, hoping to wrap it up in another two weeks. We were deeply saddened by the death of David Thompson, friend of two decades and enthusiastic bookseller at Murder by the Book in Houston. Yesterday, we joined his many friends and bookstore family to say goodbye.

One more book event this year: at Elgin Public Library, Sunday, Oct. 3. If you're in the area, I hope you'll come!

Reading report. Just finished Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweeteners from Saccharin to Splenda, by Carolyn De La Pena, for review (when I get time to write it!) at StoryCircleBookReviews. Listening to the audiobook of The End of Food, by Paul Roberts--to my mind, the best book in the current spate of critiques of our industrial food system. And just started The Witch of Hebron, James Kunstler's second novel in his World Made by Hand post-apocalyptic series.

Reading note. Seen on a sign in a recent documentary about food production: PROMOTE GLOBAL WORMING! [That's "worming." Read it again and smile.]

Essential garden tools

You thought I was going to post a photo of a trowel or a spade or even a rake--right? Yes, they're essential. You can't garden without them. But over the years, I've learned that a notebook and pencil might just be my most essential tools.

I start a new notebook (or open a new section in the previous one) for each gardening season. Every morning, I take it with me into the garden and make notes about what's happening in every bed. I'm gardening in a dozen raised beds (numbered in my notebook), so it's easy to record the plant, the place it's growing, and what's happening in its vegetable life.

The garden is an ongoing experiment that teaches me something new every day, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not so much. This morning, for instance, I noticed a dead squash plant--fine yesterday morning, dead as a doornail today. There was a white fungus-y material on the stem. Yuck. Pulled up the plant and jotted down the description in my notebook, along with a record of the green peppers I picked and the health of the McCaslan pole beans that are growing gangbusters up their cane poles.

My notes don't stop in my notebook, though. Back in my study, at the computer, I enter the day's observations in my garden journal, which is organized not by day (like my notebook) but by plants: beans in one file, squash in another, and so on. I keep photos there, as well, and weblinks and plant info from various garden sites. It was on one of those sites that I found out that the white fungus is probably Southern blight, and that there's not much I can do about it except to let the area dry out a little. (Hermine romped through here last week and left the garden pretty damp.)

Gardening here in Central Texas is a huge challenge, especially if (like me) you grew up gardening in the Midwest. The seasons here are different from Illinois, the soil, the water--and the plants I'm growing are different, too. (No sweet corn, sadly: it's a water hog!) And of course, things change, year by year. This year's garden is nothing like last year's, when we were still in drought. If I don't write things down, I forget them. Hence the notebook and pencil, and the computer journal. And this blog, too. Essential garden tools.

Book report. The Tale of Oat Cake Crag is out, and the blog tour is wrapped up. Thanks for clicking along with me, everybody. (Drawing winners are posted here and the posts are still available, if you want to check them out.) I'm told that An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days will ship next week--fingers crossed, and sorry about the delay. I've got a couple of weeks more work on the final Beatrix Potter book: winding up the series has been an interesting experience, in ways I didn't anticipate. I'll have to write about that at some point.

Events. I'll be at the Lake Travis Community Library next Saturday, for a book talk and book sale. If you're in the area, come out and join us. Also, for those of you who haven't yet heard, David Thompson, manager of Murder by the Book in Houston, died suddenly on Monday. He was extrardinarily helpful and supportive to all mystery authors. He will be deeply missed. His many friends will be celebrating his life next Sunday.

Reading note. The problem with our current food system: it is a monoculture economically, as well as on the ground. We have to let a thousand flowers bloom. We want to have many different food chains in this country because some of them are going to fail. We want to know that if there's a problem with organic, that we have local. And if there's a problem with local, that we even have conventional. We’re not looking for the right answer, the single answer for all of us, in all places. It's going to have to be locally adapted. And the more different food chains you have, the more resilient your food economy and the less likely you are to go hungry.--Michael Pollan, NPR, "Science Friday," Aug 21, 2009

Let's Boogie!

I'm taking a little tour around the Internet this week, blogging here and there, to celebrate the launch this month of The Tale of Oat Cake Crag, the seventh Cottage Tale. You're invited to go along and learn a little of the backstories behind the writing of the Cottage Tales series. Check out the tour schedule, click on the link to the appropriate day, and you're there. We'll have a drawing every day for a signed first-edition copy of Oat Cake Crag (the drawing is open through noon on the day after that blog post), and a grand prize drawing at the end of the week. Included in the prize pool: the names of the people who entered all five drawings.

Okay, here we go, gang. Let's boogie!

Fall, maybe?

Garden notes. This is the prettiest, coolest morning we've had since . . . oh, late April, maybe, or early May. It rained on Thursday night--about 3/4", ushering in September and raising hopes that fall might be on the way. As you can see, I've been working in the garden. The spring garden is kaput, except for a few leftover tomatoes (pruned for fall, fingers crossed) and sweet pepper plants, still bearing: the tiny fruit of the tail-end of the crop, but they're tasty, and I don't need the space for something else.

A quick tour of the photo above. Left foreground, teepees for Amish vining snap peas, planted this  morning. Left far background, teepees for McCaslan pole beans, interplanted with winter squash. Right foreground, those  hopeful tomato plants, beginning to blossom again.

Another view. Right foreground, a couple of Cocozelle zucchini plants--the rest of that bed will be planted in pole pees, with another couple of teepees. The tray held tomato seedlings that went into the ground last week. The bed to the left is all sweet potatoes. The teepee was supposed to be Kentucky Wonder pole beans: they came up but the tiny plants have disappeared. I suspect pill bugs--they lurk under the sweet potato leaves. I'll replant this evening. Far right background, more sweet potatoes, more pole peas.

I've gotten really excited (can you tell?) about open-pollinated vegetables, so everything in this fall garden is non-hybrid, which means that I can save the seeds. A couple of good seed sources for me: Southern Exposure and Baker Creek. I've been reading Carol Deppe's very good book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. Don't be scared by the title: Deppe simply believes that all gardeners ought to be plant breeders too--ought to wrestle back control of our food sources from the corporate interests that control them. I especially like what she says about finding the plants that naturally belong to your own "regional food base," choosing a few, and learning to grow those well and saving their seeds. So that's what I'm doing. Focusing on a few things that ought to do well here. And keeping a garden journal, with planting info, weather, etc. That's a big part of the fun for me.

Book report. But hey--I'm still a writer! The Tale of Oat Cake Crag is out next week. If you ordered through the website (your purchase supports Story Circle--thank you!), I'll be signing/shipping your book early in the week. Also out this month: An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, my journal of 2008, which was a wild, wild year. The Tale of Castle Cottage (the last in the Beatrix Potter series) is the current project: I'm about 75% finished with the book and aiming to turn it in by the end of the month. If you're in the Houston area, I'll be at Murder by the Book next Sunday. I'll also be visiting a few blogs the week of September 13-17, with book drawings every day and a grand prize drawing for the people who make it to all five blogs.

Reading. I'm still making my way through James Speth's Bridge at the Edge of the World. Also reading Ruth Rendel's last (as in "final") Wexford mystery, The Monster in the Box. Bought Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners, by Suzanne Ashworth, as a companion to Deppe's book. I'm in the garden for an hour in the morning, at the computer all day, and usually have various writing chores that bring me back to the computer after supper, so my reading gets tucked into the last two hours of a long day. Don't know about you, but I do so look forward to those hours. A book beside me, knitting in my lap, dogs asleep beside me. Pure contentment.

Reading note. Crop varieties incorporate the values of their creators....Today's professional plant breeders--university and corporate--are breeding plants to facilitate and serve the modern megafarm agribusiness pattern...It is time for new patterns--new patterns for agriculture, and new patterns for plant breeding...It is time for farmers and gardeners everywhere to take back our seeds, to rediscover seed saving, and to practice our own plant breeding. It is time to breed plants based upon an entirely different set of values.--Carol Deppe