Little is finer than a country meandering to wake your spring wellspring!
Playing in the creek is still GOOD TIMES around here!
And to celebrate spring you just might have delicious, unadulterated, natural spring water closer than you think.
A public natural spring near Frankston, East Texas
Www.findaspring.com
As I recently wrote, ‘taking the waters’ was considered a health and leisure pursuit in this area, and many others around the region. Taking the Waters
The dogwoods are particularly showy this year
The grapevines already coming in, this could be a good year for our locals wines!
The ‘flare’ is part of the trunk, not the root, and should be exposed to air, which is a very common modern myth, according to Malcolm Beck. The old adage rings true it seems: “Plant too low, it won’t grow, plant to high, it won’t die.”
I learn so much everyday just by traveling in tandem from nature to cyberspace! What miraculous times we have here to explore!
Spring foraging is lovely here, just made a huge batch of chickweed chimi-churri, YUM!
The Girl Scouts was as close as this suburban girl ever got to learning any kind of traditional skills growing up.I quit it early on, considering ‘badge earning’ to be well beneath my expanding “cool kid” facade.
But if there’s a badge worth earning, midwifery would be up there with the loftiest of them. I’m humbled and proud to say I got to experience it last night for the first time.
I bit of critical background:I’m squeamish.Considering we didn’t have children of our own and I didn’t have my own dog to take care of, let alone any pet previously to our dear Papi, at about age 42, it seems to me squeamishness pretty much comes with that territory.
It’s because I was well aware of this personal limitation that I NEVER imagined we’d have so many animals.
Chickens, for us and many other clueless homesteaders, are the Gateway Livestock.Then came ducks, turkeys, sheep, pigs, and more dogs.But we both swear we’ll never get cows or horses.(Ahem)
Considering my penchant for ‘Too Much Information’ I’ve now been acclimated to loads of poop, vomit, blood and morbid sounds of all sorts.It also got me scared, very scared, about all that can go wrong with pets and livestock.And how painful that is, and knowing this truth in advance is useless.It does not help the pain by expecting it.It does help though to be prepared.So far I give us a C+ on that when it comes to the critters.
My TMI penchant leads also to so much online and in books about serious diseases and awful complications and the myriad very dirty deeds endemic in the farm life.Talking to others more experienced will also always bring sad stories and sometimes tragic ones.
Maybe I don’t quite deserve my badge just yet, but I’m fairly certain I saved our ewe and her young lamb last night by being at the right place at the right time and doing my usual C-level work.🙂
When our ewes have lambed in the past I was not there to witness the actual event, only woke up to find the lambs delivered, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.On one occasion I found one mutilated by our young puppy and I had to kill it.I cannot speak about this moment still today a year later without tears.It was the most confusing, stressful, tragic, sorrowful day of my life.Like most in the so-called advanced economies, we grew up very sheltered from death and from the act of killing.Hubby would’ve handled it far better had he been home.I was alone and a basket case.
I was alone again this time when Buttercup gave an unusual and very loud bark audible from inside the house that clued me in that something was going down.I went to the stalls and saw mama was in labor.I was determined to watch it all and learn.
I was hoping and intending to remain a bystander to nature’s miracle.
Take a bow, Buttercup!
As it happened I could tell something was wrong right away.Then I doubted myself. Then I went back and forth a dozen times, yes, no, yes, no.
Then I concluded, no, something’s really wrong here, get help.Help?Like from who?I called two friends with more experience and they didn’t answer.I looked through our book on sheep, panicky by that time.I call Hubby.He calls his folks and searches online while I pace waiting for the bread in the oven to finish so I can go back to the stalls.
I muse, even in this stressed state: “Oh, we’re both waiting on buns in the oven.”Yes, that’s how I cope with stress, and most things really, goofy humor.
It doesn’t occur to me again that the fetus that the ewe cannot seem to push out is in fact dead until hours later.Yet, I felt it, even considered it immediately, instinctually at the very first moment I saw it. I just tried to over-ride that feeling with too much doubt and reasoning and wishful thinking.
On the phone with Hubby we decide there’s really nothing I can do alone in the dark with no experience and no equipment and no nearby vet.Then he calls back and has changed his mind.He urges me to go back out, put on some rubber gloves, and see if I can help her.
And he was right!As soon as I touched the fetus it was obviously dead and my foolishness at waiting hours to “realize” this washed over me.I strained, along with mama to get it out, knowing if not she would surely die as well.
At last it came free, followed by another smaller, but wonderfully alive little treasure!
We did it!
I’m happy to report as of this writing about 16 hours later, mama and babe are doing well, eating and drinking and getting to know each other.
Yes, I was alone, but really, it was very much a team effort. Thanks y’all!
A short break from the heavy subject of addiction to share some homestead updates lately as well as highlights and misfortunes from the last year.
Naughty, naughty!
Starting with the good news, we have two new happy thriving lambs!
They are the first of the year with two more mamas looking full and ready to follow with some of their own any day now. Or more likely, since today it is beautiful and sunny, it will be the next time it’s pouring rain and freezing cold.
Their first day roaming the land with the herd.Last winter’s model looking great
Almost there, so close, but not close enough
That was the weather once again for this rough start. Unfortunately, our permanent corral space is not yet finished.
I had to cancel a holiday trip at the very last minute and I spent a lot of time stressed and worrying. I couldn’t handle a repeat of last year, which is such a tragic story for me I haven’t yet been able to tell it publicly.
It was nearly a repeat. Hubby was at work again, and to keep it short and simple, I found one of our not-so-well-trained LGD (Livestock Guard Dog) had jumped the fence, grabbed one just after birth, jumped the fence back and was ‘guarding’ it until I found it barely breathing and injured.
Luckily there was a completely unplanned, last minute visit that cheered me up after my canceled trip.
Pappa Chop getting friendly!It’s hard to think of anything sweeter than kids and animals!
And it’s hard to think of anything worse in the garden than poison ivy and wasps!
Poison ivy in the same spot 3 times, many weeks of torture.And wasp stings 3 different times, miserable.
And my bee colonies didn’t even last the summer. This is an enormous disappointment. But I don’t give up easily and have next spring’s bees on order, locally sourced this time.
Last spring’s packages brought home from Arkansas
Additional misfortunes include the duck that was mysteriously fried by our electric pole in the front yard. And another incident that shot an electric impulse through my hand, up my arm, and landed in now nearly 2 months of stabbing shoulder pain. Then there’s the ram that’s butted me 3 times and therefore will meet his demise prematurely ASAP.
I don’t think Hubby shares this sentiment, but in my case, I’ve definitely had better years.
Here’s to better fortune in the coming year, for me, and for all y’all!
Part 2.1 Misunderstanding and Misdiagnosing Addiction Part 2.2 The War on Drugs vs The War for Drugs
Intro:
My friend Rick is an addict who is helping me understand addiction to a degree I’d missed before, despite concerted effort on my part. I’ve known many addicts and addiction has had a profound effect in my own family, something which I’m sad to say most reading this can surely relate.
Most of us in the US know an addict in our intimate circles. In my family we lost an addicted cousin far too young to drunk driving. There were several from my university circles who were in and out of rehab, a few also succumbing to relapses that led to their premature deaths.
Because there are others from different parts of the globe who will not fully understand without some background context, let me give the 2-minute elevator pitch to precede what we are about to present, Rick and I.
Imagine you live in what is referred to in the US as ‘the Bible belt‘.
You go to church every Sunday. Your familial social life revolves around church and your festivities around the church’s calendar. Every motel you have ever visited, probably from your traveling sport team or summer camp or girl’s or boy’s scouts, or other state-sponsored extra-curricular activity, until age 12, minimum, has a Bible in the nightstand drawer.
You are surrounded with billboards and slogans of “Jesus loves you” in various verbiage. You say the pledge of allegiance in your public school, which is of course a place you are required by law to attend.
And, most importantly, you live in a ‘dry county’ and all the counties around you for a good distance are also dry. Dry, as in alcohol is illegal.
Alcohol.Allow that to absorb a moment please for those of y’all who aren’t familiar with this reality. Not just marijuana is illegal–Not just heroine or barbiturates or Heaven’s-to-Betsy ecstasy-like designer drugs–You can’t even legally buy WINE!
Tartuffery–look it up!
Ok, just let that sink in a spell, because we still have some here in the south up until this present day, though the bulk of them lost social credit in only the last 5-10 years!
As of those ‘previous’ days, from the 1980s, “Dry” counties started hauling drugs through them suddenly so thick it was like stink on a possum.
Do possums do math?!
And still, your parents drink. Right? You live in a dry county, but your parents drink.
Yet, they can’t comprehend how illegal drugs infiltrated their Sunday-service-oriented Bible-pumping counties.
How their children and children’s children succumb to addiction in such astonishing numbers is as strange and as believable the man on the moon.
Right?
Meanwhile the music goes from Tiptoe through the Tulips to MORE MORE MORE MORE!!!
To now, cultural death by a thousand paper cuts.
How does this happen?
Cultural conditioning? Social engineering? Brainwashing? Epigenetics?
“I come from a good family. They did the best they could. They had no idea they’d given birth to a bouncing baby addict,” says Rick.
Of course not, how would they?
One becomes an expert at walking the line, or a hero in crossing it.
And the prisons get filled and the poems get writ.
And some do it solely for the money.
Sarah Silverman’s finest hour
“I’d sell my soul for you, babe. I give you all and have nothing. MORE MORE MORE!
A rebel yell?
She want more. Oh yay the little angel, she want more . . .
“According to the report, over the past decade, the number of Kentuckians who have died from drug overdoses has steadily climbed to more than 1,500 a year.”
“Countering prevailing notions of addiction as either a genetic disease or an individual moral failure, Dr. Gabor Maté presents an eloquent case that addiction – all addiction – is in fact a case of human development gone askew.”
Rick, in his own words.
Let me say that I come from a good family, my mother was a school teacher who later became a high school guidance counselor and is well educated with a masters degree, my father was a farmer in the beginning but later worked for the Commonwealth of KY.
I believe as do many addicts that I was born with the disease and it laid dormant until I took that first one, which happened around 10 – 12 yrs of age. My father not realizing the magnitude of his actions gave me a drink of this beer which changed my life for ever because this started the chase, it was the end of my innocence, It was like I had opened a window that I could never close.
From that point on I would sneak and take drinks from his beer every chance I got and the fact that I was sneaking tells me I knew it was wrong. I started sneaking and acting out in other ways as well, like smoking cigarettes, if it was wrong I was drawn to it It was also around the time in elementary school that I changed and my grades started to go from straight A’s to B’s, C’s and D’s and I was always into mischief.
I drank heavily in high school every chance I got but swore I’d never use drugs, that lasted until my freshman year in college when I met a girl who introduced me to marijuana and just like the beer I liked it right away. And just to be clear, my brain doesn’t know the difference between alcohol and drugs all it knows is that when I use any mood changing or mind altering substance it’s pedal to the medal and I don’t know how to stop. Looking back I would say addiction happened pretty quickly although I denied it vehemently, I was no addict. A drug abuser? Sure but not an addict, and that was my stance for close to 25 years and by the time I realized I was addicted it was too late.
I was in and had no idea how to get out.”
Real folks’ stories, perhaps it’s time we start really listening?
Here’s another good one, for starters. Proud2BProfane with Ross Cessna
We just wanted to share a few updates from the wee homestead, on the winter garden and other news.
Dreary weather whiplash here, hard to say if our holidays will be white, green, gray or brown, but thankfully we still eat fresh, easily, every day.
Growin’ on now are: broccoli, lots of lettuces, carrots, cabbage, brussel sprouts, beets, kohlrabi, garlic, onions, kale, our favorite herbs–dill, chervil, cilantro–loads of collards for us and the critters, planted thick as green manure and spring bee food, too, like hairy vetch.
It’s high maintenance, we cover and uncover the boxes as weather requires, and it’s slow growing with shorter days and an abundance of overcast days.
But, the limited harvest results are DELICIOUS!
Triumph for the season:
I was interviewed about natural living on Crow777, a site I’ve mentioned here many times as a cutting edge, paradigm shifting, life affirming podcast I highly recommend.
They follow my nervous-nelly ramblings patiently and pleasantly and thankfully follow me up this week with a professional, a doctor saying exactly what I’m wanting and needing to hear!
Balneotherapy, crounotherapy, the drinking cure, taking the waters–whatever you want to call it–chalybeate pools, hot springs and mineral spas have a very long tradition behind them. And before I get accused of ‘appealing to tradition’ once again in order to assert the value of these traditions, there’s beaucoup science behind them, too.
“From the frontier years of the Republic to the postwar years of the twentieth century, people flocked to the state’s mineral waters primarily for one reason–health. In that sense, Texas springs were resorts in the truest sense, despite their relative anonymity to the rest of the nation.” (Valenza)
From the Journal of the American Medical Association, 1943: “Much of the discussion to follow on the historical background of resort therapy will be concerned with the forces which at different periods have raised this therapy to the central feature of medical care, have reduced it to the status of superstition, have diverted its main features into voluptuous cultural practices, have opposed its use on the puritanical background that its measures coddled the flesh that needed scourging from the sins of disease, have degraded it to a social fad, have allowed it to pass into the hands of the charlatan and enthusiast as a panacea, have obstructed it with the lack of economic provision for care and have brushed it aside with a disinterest that has come from attention fixed on only the novel in medicine.”
(Howard Haggard, MD) sited from “Taking the Waters in Texas: Springs, Spas and Fountains of Youth by Janet Mace Valenza
“The use of mineral springs for therapeutic purposes declined for several reasons. Many hotels burned or were washed away by floods, and rebuilding them seemed inappropriate because medicine had begun to change. With the rise of “germ theory” and the discovery of sulfa drugs and antibiotics, the belief in the usefulness of mineral water diminished. Many doctors supported water cures, but some began to eschew balneology, the science of bathing, because of some resorts’ extravagant claims. In Marlin the tradition lasted into the 1960s, primarily because the medical profession appropriated the practice and transformed it into a tool for physical therapy. Other factors, such as war and depression, also hurt resorts. The railroad guaranteed the success and demise of some resort.”
Gentlemen taking the waters in Marlin
“Texas spas were unique among Texas towns and also different from resorts in the East. Daily life at these resort towns revolved around the waters. Architecture reflected the tradition. Pavilions and drinking fountains became gathering places for local citizens, depots attracted bands and drummers to meet trains, bathhouses set the scene for private ablutions, and large hotels employed big bands for entertainment. Other diversions included domino games, burro rides, picnics, and dances. Bathers overcame the fears attendant upon the theory of miasma-that harmful vapors association with swampy waters cause disease-to seek the sanative pleasures of the springs and wells. Osmotic exchanges with the water were supposed to benefit the body. Rheumatism, arthritis, and skin diseases were reportedly relieved more often than any other condition. (Valenza) https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/sbm11
Sounds to me like getting cured was a lot more fun back then!
As for the science
It was Europeans like Ernest Kapp, an early geographer who opened the Hydropathic Institute, that brought these practices from their own countries and ancestors to ours. “Dr. Ernest Kapp’s Water-Cure Treatment included not only hydropathy, but also gymnastic exercises.” https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fka01
Viktor Schauberger was another early researcher studying the properties of water.
For the deep dive into where the science stands now, including references to the numerous studies and on-going research, I’m definitely over my head with this newish publication, Pure Water: The Science of Water, Waves, Water Pollution, Water Treatment, Water Therapy and Water Ecology.
But it’s fascinating nonetheless and certainly convinces me our ancestors knew more than we often give them credit for.
Some not-so-random quotes and links, interspersed with happy homestead snaps for better digestion.
Cleaning up the acorns on the deck, so helpful!
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
Frederick Douglass, former slave (1818-1895)
Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of deliberate climatic manipulations for military use has never been explicitly part of the UN agenda on climate change. Neither the official delegations nor the environmental action groups participating in the Hague Conference on Climate Change (CO6) (November 2000) have raised the broad issue of “weather warfare” or “environmental modification techniques (ENMOD)” as relevant to an understanding of climate change.
The clash between official negotiators, environmentalists and American business lobbies has centered on Washington’s outright refusal to abide by commitments on carbon dioxide reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto protocol.(1) The impacts of military technologies on the World’s climate are not an object of discussion or concern. Narrowly confined to greenhouse gases, the ongoing debate on climate change serves Washington’s strategic and defense objectives.https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO201A.html
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about my favorite topic, which is, the weather. Supposedly Mark Twain once famously said: “Everyone complains about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.”
If he did really say that, he was lying, or joking. Even before his day this statement would have been completely false, and he most certainly would have known this. After all, he was a newsman, and it was hot news (pun intended) and Twain was nothing if not au courant.
Weather modification began in earnest before aviation was invented and back then was publicized regularly in the newspapers. To control the weather was a dream of every farmer, military strategist, and tyrant: He who controls the weather controls the world!
“James Pollard Espy (or “The Storm King”) (May 9 1785 – January 24 1860) was a U.S. meteorologist who proposed burning forests on the west coast of the United States of America to increase rainfall on the east coast. Espy developed a convection theory of storms, explaining it in 1836 before the American Philosophical Society and in 1840 before the French Académie des Sciences and the British Royal Society. His theory was published in 1840 as The Philosophy of Storms.” https://weathermodificationhistory.com/1836-james-pollard-espy-the-storm-king/
“In the late 1960s a group of American barley growers in Colorado decided to enlist the services of professional weather consultants to assist with the control of the weather for the production of an optimum premium-grade Moravian barley grown under contract for a brewery. The required weather modification included supplementation of rainfall during the early part of the growing season, suppression of hail in mid-summer and suppression of rain during the final stages of ripening. ”
And, because a few folks wanted premium beer, the lettuce and potato farmers were screwed and so they appealed to the governor.
In the century and a half since experimentations began, they’ve come a very, very long way, and, they no longer advertise their failures, or really anything at all, to the general public. To where or to whom would you make an appeal when the officials pretend it’s not happening?
The main job of the mainstream press is to normalize these man-made creations and atmospheric and environmental experimentations and manipulations, so that these sciences can continue unabated to ruin our natural world.
It’s thanks to I-phones we’ve suddenly ‘discovered’ all these new clouds? Seriously!
They tell us it’s ‘climate change’ and “global warming’ and insist we must lower our carbon footprints, use less water, less energy, eat less meat, and on and on, and it’s all complete NONSENSE!
Feeding the hungry bees, who are certainly very confused with the weather whiplash.
The institutions are all trying to convince the aware public that geoengineering is now necessary to ‘save the planet’. This is classic ‘problem-reaction-solution’ strategy. Create the problem, get folks in a state of fear and concern, then provide the ‘solution’ which is not a solution at all, but a system guaranteed to create a whole heap of new problems for the ‘experts’ to solve.
Arecibo’s Ionospheric Heater is Boiling the Tropical Sky November 3-9, 2018
Getting educated and spreading awareness is our only chance right now, and LOADS of folks are doing this all over the web. The ‘officials’ and ‘experts’ won’t be able to lie to the public much longer.
Unless of course, so many others continue to do nothing at all and continue to let their governments treat us all like lab rats and our earthly home as a toxic waste dump.
While so many are focused on the doom and gloom of politics and environmental degradation and censorship and climate change and fake news and on and on, I am seeing glimmers of hope striking up everywhere.
Our honeybees love the morning glory in late summer, which is considered an invasive and highly undesirable weed among most farmers who kill it with herbicides and then complain there are no bees to pollinate their fruit trees in the spring. Things that make you say, hmmm . .
And this poor sod just doesn’t get it either!
“Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/
You don’t have to be waving a flag on the Trump train to appreciate a politician making a public sport of the ‘Deep State’–which is now a Front & Centerlabel in the global lexicon–thanks to his administration.
Will he manage to drain the swamp? Was that ever his intention at all?
It doesn’t matter now! He’s put language on it, he’s given the corruption a popular catch phrase, which will survive long after any degree of embarrassment or hate speech or lack of diplomacy under which the American left currently feels they are unduly suffering.
And still another delicious dose of Hopium:
This little team of prankster scholars not only provided us with some great laughs, but got some great work done in the process. This is creativity at its finest and an inspiring look at how sometimes the gatekeepers can be beaten at their own game. Some of these fake papers were then published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including a hilarious one about the rape culture inherent in dog parks.
“This process is the one, single thread that ties all twenty of our papers together, even though we used a variety of methods to come up with the various ideas fed into their system to see how the editors and peer reviewers would respond. Sometimes we just thought a nutty or inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies.” https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/
Of course we continue to have the usual misinformation and disinformation being shoveled out by the usual culprits:
These are miraculous times! On the wee homestead there’s always proof of that close on hand.
Mama Chop with 9 piglets just born
But in the attempted Globalist takeover of our cultures and our individuality it can be very tough sometimes to see past the fear-porn. And once that’s accomplished, it can be even tougher to get a personal clue as to what to do about it in whatever way one can.
But that’s happening!
Derrick Broze on 5G in Houston on DTube, not Youtube:
Folks are rapidly moving away from the corporate-sponsored programming.
They are organizing, creating new platforms, sharing ideas and truth and camaraderie. It’s now already passé to be only ‘woke’ — the new fashion is to break the chains altogether.
Folks are no longer satisfied with waking up and they are now standing up and those old neocons are dying off, but that doesn’t really matter, because it was never just about a group of white men. Just as it was never just about any one group, it’s not just the Jews, not just the Russians or Chinese, or the Communists, or the Nazis. The problem is, was and always will be the mindless, honorless order followers. That problem is being overturned on our watch and I am a thrilled witness and ardent participant in that sabotage.
What’s been revealed now en mass and which the masses have lapped up like starving kittens is the strategy. We have witnessed the Revelation of the Method and there’s no way to unsee it. Some don’t yet realize that’s what they are witnessing, they see only the chaos, they react in fear or trepidation. That’s ok.
Are you afraid of the future the technocratic Globalists have planned for us?
Late summer here is my personal version of hell and I bitch about it every year.
What better time to take a break from my current reality where I feel like an indoor prisoner and wake up daily wanting to lash out at all the idiotic Geoengineering causing drought here and weather chaos all around the globe.
I even want to take a break from my last post pondering passivity and violence and just notice for a day, or so, all the little things and little ways we have improved upon since I last felt this level of droughtrage.
I know I am just a bit more blessed this year than last, mostly by my own sheer will and resilience, and that of Hubby as well, no doubt, and that of some inspiring neighbors and cyber-friends, and perhaps if I dwell on that fact just a bit, next year will be just a bit more blessed in turn.
Last year’s late summer garden
Or rather, lack there of 🙂
Last year’s late summer garden vs this year’s, not great, but still better!
A new young friend who loves plants as much as I do helps me identify the hardy, native heat-lovers of our area, and diligently and graciously watched our wee homestead so I could join my extended family at a reunion in July. I look forward to returning the favor when her family vacations in October. This is the sort of small steps a resilient community is made of, not the top-down control of Rockefeller’s ‘Resilient Cities’, because it’s the neighborly reliance that brings real hope and treasures and peace of mind.
Collective Border Control, naturally 😉
I still don’t like okra, but I’m harvesting it anyway for the pigs and neighbors! Every once in a while I throw a few into a meal, along with other traditional Southern favorites we didn’t grow up with, but are learning to appreciate, like collards and Southern peas, eggplant and jalapenos, all which have survived the heat, but would not be here now without regular irrigation.
It’s very hard to keep up with the constant weeding and mulching requirements in such circumstances, but these plants, along with the sweet potatoes, are actually successfully competing with the grasses in some cases. Amazing!
I won’t mention the melons, because I’m hell-bent on keeping this post positive. So let’s mention instead the ‘mouse melons’, aka sanditas, or, Mexican Sour Gherkins. 🙂
Instead, let’s mention the fact that the young sweet potato vines and okra leaves are edible and quite tasty!
And the fantastic find this summer which I’m most excited to expand next year considerably, the Mexican Sour Gherkin.
Crop of the year, in my humble opinion!
Even in the dead of summer, of brutal heat and no rain, we enjoy meals raised primarily on this land. As an added bonus now my raw milk source is 5 minutes away, whereas last year at this time it was 5 hours round-trip!
The aging fridge is full of cheeses we will enjoy all winter: Cheddars, Goudas, a Parmesan and an Alpine, several Brie almost ripe, a Muenster even! YUM! Last week I taught a couple of neighbor ladies to make 30-minute mozzarella and we had such a nice time.
Next they will teach me skills they’ve acquired—spinning, dying, soap-making–a few more small steps in our agorism adventures. Skill-sharing has been such a crucial aspect of our most successful ancestors and I would be challenged to express how rewarding it is for me still, at 50 next month, to be learning so much that is new for me. It is indeed a sort of middle-age renaissance!
I also foraged for elderberries, mustang grapes and peppervine berries, dried some and made some syrups and preserves.
And, Another 400 pounds of pears, or so!
I do believe still that’s thanks to our bees. For several years we thought it was a weather issue, late frosts, whatever, but I am beginning to suspect it was a pollinator issue all along.
We will see, that’s just a hypothesis so far. And in any case we continue for another year to benefit from the cider, the preserves, the cobblers, and the pigs are getting their fill, too!
The Datura remains an absolute favorite of mine, blooming in crazy heat and exhaling the most exquisite fragrance into the evening air. The thyme, rosemary, sage, oregano are gracefully resilient as well, I appreciate all y’all!
And our dear Tori, who just as I was typing this post chased an enormous coyote off our chickens!
Tori, 2 weeks oldTori today! Rewarded Homestead Guard of the Year 2018
The blessings are very close at hand, the frustrations a million miles away. I vow to maintain that truthful balance deep in my heart as I brave the coming days.
