Nineteenth article in the LONL: Time goes by.

Wow. Look at that. It’s very nearly the middle of May already. Soon it will be June, then Graduation for the high school kids, then the forth of July will be here before we can blink! Then when we open our eye’s after that blink school and the fall holiday season will be starting up all over again.

Now, however, we have to get the last of the hot weather stuff planted in the gardens and harvest the end of the cool weather veggies. Then there are the things we can look forward to. Things like the graduations I mentioned above or the local Vol. Fire Departments annual BBQ dinner. That last will be this coming Saturday the fourteenth. They plan to start serving at five in the afternoon and keep going until there isn’t anything left to serve or folks stop showing up. (Just for y'all reading this in the blogosphere: The BBQ went great and tasted fan-totally-tastic! Ya shoulda been here, yum-mie! Don't know how much the VFD made on the event yet, just hope it was enough to keep the grass fire trucks on the road through the rest of grass fire season!)

I find myself working with the Community Seeds folks more than I’d planned. Brother Coop has some big plans for some things like a farmers market, organically grown produce and even vermi-composting. Things that I have been talking about here for a long time. I even have a chance to go to a conference on just those sort of things where I can learn more about them. Hopefully, I’ll learn enough to teach it to anyone I can tie down for the required amount of time. Should you be worried? Yep. I once was a Girl Scout. I know a little bit about tying knots. At least enough to know that untangling them can be tricky sometimes.

If you don’t know ‘vermi-’ refers to worms like red wrigglers and such. But of course if you’ve read enough of my articles in this paper you likely already know that.

Oh, about that conference I hope to go to with Brother Coop and another gal. If you want to find out about it just Google Growing Power. There’s some interesting information there.

I am just a bit disappointed with how many folks have adopted one or more of the nine 4x4 raised bed plots over at Community Seeds. I’ve been picking lettuce and spinach for my own use out of two of them. So Coop just told me to go ahead and pick one or two for my own. So I did. Wylie went with me this past Sunday and picked a mess of collard greens. He said they went down fine with beans and cornbread. I’ve enjoyed several tasty mixed green salads myself as well as cooked spinach.

Yeah. I did go over there and help plant the stuff. I’ve planted even more stuff since, especially some black diamond watermelons that I’m already drooling over and the plants haven’t even bloomed yet.

What I don’t understand is why some of the folks here in town who claim to be too poor to buy food haven’t lined up to get at least one of these 4x4 plots. Why they haven’t showed up to help with the tilling, the weeding, and the watering. All those things that must be done if you want to eat something that you’ve grown. I mean, come on folks! Dose the stuff out of a can really taste that much better that you absolutely have to get cash money so you can buy it at the store instead of growing your own.

Yeah, sure. It’s work. Sometimes hot, dusty and grimy. It also isn’t quick and you often have to wait for the season to be just right to plant or to harvest. To that complaint I say. SO. Get used to it. The way I see it with the budget crunch we are in there is no way the federal, state or even county government can feed us all much longer. I’m not even sure I’ll keep getting my Social Security Disability checks every month. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been wanting to turn my whole yard into a veggie garden and get chickens. Maybe this conference will give me some ideas on how to get that done.

A Community Garden at Community Seeds, and me

I keep getting sucked into these things. Only this time it’s something that I think can really make a difference in this town. The only thing that can keep it from working out is if the folks that really need it don’t participate.

What I’m talking about here is the community garden that Community Seeds is trying to get going. Coop pulled me into it because I think someone told him I like to garden. I do. My back, my knees and my feet don’t, but I really do. I also have all kinds of ideas, have found some really neat web sites and other information sources dealing with gardening and, yes, even farming. The reason I haven’t been able to put much of that into practice on my land is obvious to anyone who knows me. A serious lack of funds coupled with an even greater lack of people power. You see, a lot of the idea’s I’d like to see used require a lot of standing, walking and bending. All things I can no longer do very well or very much of.

Then along comes Coop with Community Seeds and this idea for an organic community garden that he hopes will: 1) produce enough food to help feed some of the folks here in town who are hungry, 2) will teach them, through participation in the gardening, how to grow their own, and 3) will also teach the local youth to be able to feed themselves and others by getting them involved as well.

This past fall Community Seeds set up an area for square foot gardening. It’s a small plot out behind the old school house at the end of College Street. There are nine, four by four little plots ready to be filled up with soil, compost, seeds and a little water. The only other thing needed are about eight families to act as caretakers for these plots and enjoy the harvest from them. I say eight because I’ve got my eye on one of them!

There are also plans afoot to till up a good deal of the rest of the land back behind the school for row crops. If you know about farming in this area, if you know what kind of edibles grow best here, Community Seeds can sure use your help and/or your suggestions. Just remember this is to be an ORGANIC garden. That means no pesticides, herbicides, or chemical fertilizers. Yes, such can be done. The Amish farmers do it all the time. It also makes for safer and tastier food.

Folks who have piles of already composted horse, cow, goat or chicken manure can help us out as well. That stuff makes great fertilizer! If you happen to be a Master Gardener or be trained as a Permaculture Designer that kind of help would be invaluable. After all, while I have pretensions in those area’s I am neither a very good gardener nor a Permaculture Designer. That last, in particular, requires some expensive training that I have neither money to pay for or to get to as the nearest place I could get it is in Ft. Worth. That boils down to the simple truth that while I can talk a lot about this stuff, and even might think I know about it, in reality I don’t know, well, you know what.

I am, however, dear readers, still quite full of it and will continue to voice my opinions as if I actually knew what the heck I was writing about.

Community Seeds will be working on the community garden this Saturday, the 26^Th starting at one in the afternoon. Come on by and help out. With me on board they will need all the help they can get.

As I post this, I am recovering from nearly a half day spent bending over helping to spread some beautiful soil in the nine plots mentioned above. Reverend Coop had obtained a lot of cold weather plants and seeds to put into that soil. I, and two other folks who actually garden and know what they are doing, were there along with about eight or ten teens from one of the local churches youth groups along with their adult leaders.

During the three or four hours of hectic activity, all of the plots were planted, seeded and watered. Now all we have to do is wait and let nature take it's course.

Tuesday 23, 2009

Parts of this have been edited so it makes more sense as a blog. i.e. the reference to my stats at the end.

I’m writing this on Tuesday 23 of June. It’s almost 10 P.M. and I just got back from a Permaculture/ organic gardening Meet-Up at the Half Price Book Store in Dallas. For those who might not know a 'Meet-Up' is where a bunch of folks with similar interests who've met each other online through this meet up web site get together face to face and talk about the interests they share. Two guesses what interests I share with these folks.

Yep, these are folks who also tend to agree with me about sustainable life styles as well as sustainable gardening and agriculture. Now, if only this meet up wasn't so far away that going to it totally blows any eco friendly points I might have earned going to it by polluting the air all the way to Dallas and back.

I keep finding my self wishing that I could meet with local folks who felt the same. Folks whose first answer to any bug infestation in the garden was NOT some chemical bug killer, or who did NOT firmly believe that the only way to get anything to grow was with some oil based fertilizer. You know, someone who was at least willing to try to grow food without bowing to the chemical companies or the big time seed companies.

Why do I want to avoid both of those? Well, basic economics if nothing else. With the big time seed companies you have to buy their seeds year after year. If you even attempt to grow the same plants from seeds saved from the previous year you get either a whopping big law suit or some scraggly looking whatzis that looks nothing like whatever you grew last year. As for the chemical companies. Well, chemicals are an important part of our life today, but really now, why go to the expense of buying chemical fertilizers when most of us out here in the country have all the fertilizer we really need in our horse barns, cow barns, chicken coops and most importantly in our compost piles.

Yes, yes, I know. "That stuff in the barns is animal poop! It’s nasty, smelly and full of germs!!!" That's where composting comes in. I have a huge pile of horse manure and if I had a way to turn it at least once a month I'd have some of the cleanest, best smelling high grade DIRT you ever want to see. Fact is, even now, if I dig down to just the right place in the unturned pile I have, I can find nice moist, rich, black stuff that smells not at all like horse poo but more like something dug out of a rich garden.

And about those germs everyone is so fearful of now days. I believe that problem has more to do with so few people ever really bumping into those germs any more. Everyone is so paranoid about germs that they insist on killing them off with antibiotics, and other chemicals. Therefore,we and our kids, never come into contact with them. So instead of anyone building up an immunity to these germs they curl up and nearly die when ever they do meet a germ. They get sick because their immune systems have forgotten how to work. The really bad part is that while we were letting our immune systems get weak, and lazy, by never letting them be used we have also forced the germs to evolve into something that antibiotics can't help us against.

So basically we are screwed unless we start rebuilding our immune systems, possibly by playing in the dirt and eating a varied organic diet.

Anybody out there want to get together and talk about Permaculture, organic gardening or sustainable farming or such? Contact me by the e-mail address in my stats.