errantember

The first of each month I only eat or drink things I've raised or brewed on my property. This month I was worried, because while my potatoes are going gangbusters, they're definitely nowhere near harvest. I did start mounding up the dirt around the leaves today, though!



I had 5 eggs in reserve, and some very scrubby carrots and tiny sweet potatoes from last month. I also had salt, pepper, and butter that I had previously traded worldmegan kombucha for. I also had kombucha, but it's very *bad* kombucha. I drank some anyway. At least it's fizzy! Here are some shots of my biggest meal. More info and tales of dearth if you click on the pics!

Happy New Year!

One major change this year is that I will only be eating what I grow for one day out of every month. To kick off this new habit, I will be fasting on New Years Day!

While I'm supposedly a "Permaculture Designer", I've really been a dilettante in terms of actually, say *growing* *food*. I've set up several gardens, but I've never really had more than a 20% success rate with anything I've grown, and I sure as Hell am not growing enough to feed myself, much less the other four people who live at my house. By insisting that I starve if I haven't produced anything to eat that month (or stored something from before), I am seizing the issue and smacking it down Front and Center in my life.

*SLAM!*
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The collective effort of Flagship Suburbia has resulted in 60 sq. ft. of intensely planted garden bed. It's the most ambitious planting here so far. Most of them are heirloom from the seed exchange, so we'll be able to harvest our seeds for next season. Included are carrots, broccoli, fenel, kale, radishes, marigolds, spinach, and two varieties of lettuce. Planting and some wall building were both braved at night in the rain, but it was worth it, because it's done.

This is also the earliest we've ever gotten spring planting done, and I'm excited to finally be able to beat the heat!

My puggle Louie has been looking unusually healthy recently. The reason?

Fresh chicken eggs. Lots of them.

I've been free-ranging the chickens in the yard for the past few weeks, and although it's great in every other way, they have unfortunately gotten into the habit of laying eggs in the yard. I've managed to eat precisely *one* of these eggs.

Louie has probably eaten about five. Maybe more. Who knows? We haven't seen an egg for ourselves in about a week.

So, for the time being, the chickens are being confined to quarters to enable the creation of human-destined eggs. A week long phone-tag exchange finally resulted in the original owner of two of the chickens getting his egg boxes into Austin where I could pick them up. Unfortunately, it also was where someone *else* could pick them up, which, evidently, they did.

Back to Square One.

Today I built this hoop house over my front garden bed.



It will need a little adjustment, but overall it's a success. With all my tomatoes finally producing like gangbusters, the last thing I want is for some random freeze to come in and wipe them out.

So I've had this tomato and pepper garden up front for this season. I planted my out-of-control seedlings just in time for the temperature both day and night to stay above the ones necessary for fruit set. As a result, I've had an entire summer of healthy blooming with virtually no tomatoes. My Sweet 100s have produced two or three tiny, .05 oz cherry tomatoes now and then, but every other variety I've had in the garden has been virtually 100% tomato-free. However, in what I'm hoping is a wild change in trends, I saw my very first fall-season non-cherry tomato set today! I'm very excited. It was on my Better Boy tomato plant, and it's already about the size of the tiny cherries I've been ironically logging weight on all summer.

I'm also having somewhat of a crisis in choosing food-growth methods for the future coop. The entire point of a permaculture coop is to show people how to live with as little impact on the land as possible, preferably being a positive force for soil and habitat restoration. In pursuit of that, I've been researching different food-growing methodologies. In addition to a long-term permaculture plan including fruit trees and perennials, I had decided to do Biointensive gardening. It's main advertised feature is high-density food production in a way that actually restores soil and doesn't require very much outside input (except labor) once it's established. It was specifically designed to help people grow foods and restore soil in hostile environments. It's a complete gardening system that tells you how to do just about everything. However, it has it's detractors and critics, among them a local permaculturalist for whom I have a great deal of respect. Any kind of gardening methodology requires a great deal of commitment, so I'm kind of hemming and hawing, my natural state of Action-Taking.

You may recall the Angry Remake of Forward Zone Alpha.

God knows I do.

I've had about 14 plants staring at me balefully from on top of the mailbox for about three weeks or more now. Evidently they're getting tired of their tiny 4" pots, and are ready for dirt. Every day, as I walked outside, they would say "Hey pigfucker! Where's the dirt?"

They actually used the word "pigfucker," which is a first for me.

Well today, *finally*, they got some dirt.



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After awakening from a nap after a great day with Kat, I discovered the forecast had not only dropped to below freezing, but was to include freezing rain and sleet! I had already moved my citrus trees inside to protect my tiny orange and grapefruit harvest from the weather, but the flimsy torn-up garbage bags I had thrown up over my vegetables were suddenly completely inadequate to the task of saving my future food supply. Headlamp piercing through the not-quite-freezing-yet rain, I placed tarps over all my vegetables, almost completely covering them, including my climbing sweet peas. I overturned plastic pots on my strawberry plants, then bricked down a tarp over them, too.

Hopefully it will be enough. I can't believe it was in the high 80s a few days ago!

In other News, I've finally been Assimilated. I've somehow managed to live without an Ipod until now, but with the anticipation of professionalizing my firedancing and photography, it was time to bite the bullet. I managed to score a 30gb Ipod with Video for about $180 delivered on Ebay, and it arrived in a shockingly short period of time. I also got a new stereo for my car with a full Ipod interface, allowing me to browse my collection from the stereo. Finally, I checked my Sony AV cable, and, as I suspected, you can use it with the Ipod as long as you realize the red wire is now the video and the yellow wire is one of the audio signals. I didn't bother to test which audio signal was which, but I added tape markers on the cable so I can tell at a glance which one to use with the Sony and which with the Ipod. I also downloaded a copy of iSquint since I had video encoding problems with iTunes.