Garden Expansion Update!

I finally managed to obtain some seed potatos today at a rather remote Agway near Lancaster. Three different potato sub-species were obtained to create 3 successive harvests stretching from june to october. Interestingly enough, less than four centuries of selective breeding by Gardeners had managed to produced dozens of potato breeds. Each one adapted to a particular growing region. In the colder regions, potato strains were selected for the ability to mature quickly in the short growing season. In warmer areas, traits such as higher yields and disease resistence were more favoured by pre-industrial farmers. On the way home, I picked up some peat moss to provide drainage for the 2 potato growing containers.

Saturday afternoon was spent with the Garden expansion process. Two additional garden beds were hacked out of the lawn. The work was of course very tedious. At times there seemed to be more rocks than there was dirt. At a certain point, I could no longer extract the mischievous stones with the shovel, so I called my father out for some "father-son bonding!"

Of course by bonding, I meant mutual participation in back-breaking manual labor. The large fist-sized rocks, I removed with the trusty pick-axe, while my dad shoveled out the loosened soil. Two hours and 50 pounds of compost later, we were finished. While much has been written about the hardships of peasantry, one has to comment upon the flip side. There is so much innate joy in creation, even if it involves just a few garden beds. We had turned a large stretch of grass into the beginnings of a huge organic garden. A large block of suburban monoculture has been transformed into a canvas of sorts. A canvas in which a tapestry of life and happiness can be cultivated. Isn't saving the planet fun?!!

Massive Garden Expansion Underway!

Over the winter, I've finally convinced my family of the value of organic gardening. A single 2 square meter plot had managed to produce over 100 lbs of food last year using permaculture methods. As such I got the go ahead to expand the area of my little gardening experiment by four folds. So on sunday, I made a go at it. And it was rough going to be sure.

First the old plot had to be enriched. The two square meter plot was dug up to a depth of some 6 inches. The top soil was collected into a huge pile besides the plot. Then a layer of leaf mulch weighing some 30 lbs was packed into the plot and beaten down with the handy shovel until it was compressed firmly along the ground! Now this technique accomplishes two things. The packed leaf mulch(which had been composting since last november) provides a hard base with which weeds will have trouble breaking through. Additionally, over the coming months, worms will eat through the decomposing leaves and return the nutrients back into the soil, adding to the amount of top soil on that plot by several inches. After this was done, the removed topsoil was mixed with 40 lbs of black organic compost(half a bin) which had been sitting in the 2 composting bins for the last 9 months. This blended mixture was then applied back into the packed garden bed. The resulting garden bed was then lightly tilled to an even depth of 8 inches of topsoil/compost mixture. This took some 2 hours of hard digging and tilling.

After a short lunch break, I began the construction of a second garden bed. The progress was quite slow. Each and every shovel brought forth a broken piece of turf about 6x6 inches in area. The square of turf had to have it's attendent sod shaken out by hand. The sod is of course valuable top soil that needs to be collected to build the bed. At the end of all the extraction, the piece of turf was just a tangled mass of grass and roots with a little bid of soil left. Under the hot sun, the manual labor was quite exhausting. This de-turfing took over an hour and resulted in some 30 pieces of turf along with it's attendent soil. Then came the painful process of digging up the actual bed. Some six inches of soil had to be removed from the garden bed. That translated into over 60 lbs of top soil. Unfortunately, the geography of the Northeastern U.S dictates that the soil be rocky as all hell. A single 2 square meter garden bed yielded over 20 lbs of rocks(lodged in hard to extract angles) which had to be tediously levered out with the trusty spade.

After the top soil had been extracted into a nearby pile, the packing begins anew. Instead of wasting the valuable turf, I chose to put it towards good use. Take a piece of turf and turn it upside down, there's exactly enough flipped turf squares to cover the garden bed. This packing accomplishes 3 things at once. Firstly, it inhibits weed growth. Secondly, it attracts beneficial organisms such as worms and arthropodes. Because the upside down turf dies within a day, that entire layer becomes in effect a compost pile. Both worms and centipedes eats the decaying matter and produces valuable organic fertilizer. And lastly, the packing of the turf inhibits one dangerous organism, the tiger beetle larva. These little critters specializes in the consumption of living roots. The turf, once flipped and packed, can no longer serve as a viable food source for them. Thus, within a week or so, all the tiger larvas must either move away from the area or starve to death. After the packing was finished, I spent another hour mixing the extracted top soil with the remaining half bin of enriched fertilizer with the handly rotational plow. After the mixing, there was only some nitrogen rich sludge at the bottom of compost bin number 1, I had exhausted 50% of my compost supply with the 2 garden beds. The soil/compost mixture was then placed back onto the packed bed and roto-plowed to break up the larger lumps of soil. After this step, the bed was tilled to an even depth.


The 2nd bed took over 4 man hours to construct from start to finish. After the deed was done, I drove to the local Agway to buy some heirloom saplings which had been started off in green houses. Vegetable/flower saplings, thus started, could mature earlier and produce food several weeks earlier than normal if transplanted into the garden beds. While there I picked up some onion chive flowers and cabbage transplants for 4 dollars of hard currency. These saplings I'll have to keep indoors for another 2 weeks before the transplant can occur. Here in PA, killing frosts usually dissapear after mid april. That's it for this week. Next week I shall begin the construction of two new garden beds!

Energy Efficient Light Bulbs!

After much heated debate last month, my family had finally allowed for the replacement of every incandescent light bulb in the entire house with an energy efficient Florescent or LED light. If one considers the unstable and diminishing nature of our world's energy supply, it makes much sense now to become as efficient in the ultilization of electricity as possible. A gradual "power-down" through more efficient and sustainable technologies is much preferable to an abrupt crisis in energy services. If our civilization is to last the ages with our culture and technology intact, it is of paramount importance that every individual do their utmost to conserve our valuable supplies of non-renewable resources.

It is thus worth mentioning that an NVision Florescent bulb can deliver the illumination of a 60 Watt conventional light bulb while consuming only 14 Watts of electricity. So we replaced some 24 light-bulbs in the house with this efficient bulb. And this month, vindication has arrived in force. Our monthly electric bill has been slashed by over 40 percent! My goal is to reduce the house's total( grid-derived) electricity usage to 1/3 that of the usage volume last year by 2008.

Grand Canyon Expedition...Part II

So the next day, we decided to take a trip to the Indian Ruins at Tuyusan. Now, it is without doubt that the environment of the canyon is rather inhospitable to human life. There simply is not enough rainfall here to support large populations of either human or animal life. The geography of the region is also rather daunting, it's filled with steep ravines, deserts, and mesas. In fact, the immediate surroundings of the canyon somewhat resembled the past martian landscapes that one reads about in science fiction novels. I can imagine just how difficult it would be to transport raw materials and goods across even short distances here. For stone age peoples, a high material culture would hardly be sustainable from such a barren resource base. Yet, the Pueblo tribes that inhabited this area in the 1600s were inheritors of considerable cultural sophistication.



When European explorers first reached the area, they encountered groups of Pueblo dwelling tribes which, among others, included the Hopi, the Zuni, the Navajo, and the Hosni. Now these tribes built relatively sophisticated multi-level buildings from sun baked mud and stone. Their pottery and jewlery making technology was literally centuries ahead of the tribes around them. But the most interesting technology was that of the solar calendar. These primitive peoples built a solar calendar out of stones and used that calendar to synchronize their plant growing seasons. Now, sophisticated pottery and precise solar calendars don't usually come to primitive stone age tribes, actually they almost ever do. But in the case of the pueblo builders, their material culture benefited from a neighboring high-culture that has unfortunately dissapeared from history.

Some 1000 years ago, the landscape of northern Arizona was a bit wetter than it is now. South of the modern day Pueblo builders, there existed a high culture of great sophistication, the Anasazi. Now the Anasazi built large cities fed by spring water. Their original center at Chaco Canyon had enormous forests of cedar trees. With such a resource base, the Anasazi had the material wealth to build up their culture and technology. Over centuries, their cities and settlements expanded in all directions until they reached the Grand Canyon in the North, and the salt river in the south. Their agricultural system was of course entirely unsuitable for the environment that they lived in, but during that period of benign conditions, their unsustainable methods would've produced the kind of manpower that allowed them to expand their culture far and wide.

In anycase, the Anasazi civilization eventually expanded to dominate the tribes of the Grand Canyon. In the process of expansion, they gained the resources to develop a stratified society of priests, kings, craft specialists and peasants. It was during these period of growth and expansion that the "advanced" technologies such as gold/turquoise jewlery, slipcast pottery, solar calendars, and multi-level buildings were developed. It was also during this time that the Anasazi elite gained a taste for treating themselves to the benefits of "civilized" society. Benefits such as huge palaces and temples with scores of rooms, expensive jewelery with thousands of precious stones, and of course, lots and lots of slaves.

Needless to say, the Pueblo cultures supplied the Anasazi hegemon with timber, chert, turquoise, goats, slaves, and other natural resources that the Canyon provided. In exchange, these tribes gained a measure of the cultural and technological sophistication from their southern neighbors. Unfortunately, the Anasazi completely deforested the areas under their immediate political control. The trees and shrubs which had served the vital purposes of water retention and soil enrichment were largely gone by the 1300s.


When the severe droughts of that century hit, the Anasazi high civilization collapsed into anarchy and cannibalism. Within a generation, the Anasazi were gone. Their cities and temples remain as a silent testament to their greatness...and foolishness. The pueblo cultures survived the disaster however. By using a combination of sustainable dry bed agriculture, hunting, and gathering, they weathered the massive climate change. By keeping their population in check, they never deforested their environment to the point where water retention became impossible. In the wake of the Anasazi collapse, the entire region swept into a kind of dark age. Tribes of cannibals from the plains states to the north swept down the now depopulated region and devastate the few surviving settlements. The Pueblo cultures largely survived the ordeal due to a combination of their harsh environment and superior technology. While there is much to be said for greatness and ambition, it would appear that in the case of this area, humility translates into long term survival.


When I picked up some local pueblo pottery from the Indian gift shops, the sophistication of the culture that inhabited this land a thousand years ago really stood out. It is up to us to make sure that our culture doesn't suffer the same fate as that of the Anasazi. Perhaps a degree of long term consideration should be factored into our daily decisions. This has been a very educational trip indeed!

Grand Canyon Expedition....Part I

During the deepest months of winter, a good friend and I planned a journey to the Grand Canyons of Arizona . As such, we made good upon that plan and flew to Arizona last friday. Aboard a jet aircraft, some 2600 miles of North American continental vastness was bridged in 4 hours. Upon arriving at Phoenix, I was quite surpised by the vastness of this city. Of particular contrast, was the lush(almost tropical) city scape when compared with the semi-arid desert which surrounded the metropolis. I saw a series of well maintained canals which undoubtedly supplied the city's million or so inhabitants with potable water. Of particular note is the fact that the canal network was originally built by the pre-literate Hohokam culture. That group of people, through a centuries long construction effort had enabled the Phoenix area to be inhabitable in the first place. Unfortunately Hohokam society unraveled and perished due to the decade long droughts which hit the region in the 13th century. Basically, the canals dried up, Hohokam agriculture collapsed, and their society soon followed.


In anycase, we drove some 270 miles across the desert Friday night. We passed the night in the small town of Williams. On Saturday morning, another 60 miles of barren desert and scrubland was crossed to reach the Grand Canyons. It dawned upon me that the desert effectively served to isolate the early Native American societies of the region from each other. This must have been a great inhibitor on the spread of ideas and technologies between the various regional tribes. It is doubtless in my mind, that the indigenous peoples of these lands must have been extremely clever and adaptable to have survived at all in the harsh landscape. But I do surmise that the isolation of the desert prevented the emergence of a literate, high civilization in these parts.


The Grand Canyon was of course as awe-inspiring as the advertisements promised and more. After some preparations we began our hike down the cliff-side to the bottom of the Canyon. The trail was of course narrow and quite slippery at certain points. The Canyon floor, some 5 miles away, was approached at a steady pace of 2 miles per hour. Along the way, we encountered many other hikers going in both directions. The Canyon cliff top where we started is a vetical mile above the canyon floor. Thus, as we descended upon these heights, the surrounding climate and vegetation began to change very significantly. The cliff-tops were predominantly alpine in nature, but the vegetation gradually transformed into a kind of bushy scrub as we went lower. The temperature of rather cold at the top and of course got higher as we went ever downwards.

Along the narrow trail, there was a rather constant stream of dung and other wastes emitted by the mule teams that walked up and down the canyon. At the higher elevations, this was rather endurable since the lower temperatures kept the smell down to a minimum. Near the valley bottom however, the scent of mule dung permeated the entire trail. In some areas, the dung was grounded into a fine greenish paste which was subsequently sun baked into a distasteful(literally) powder which of course was carried everywhere by the dry wind.

Along the trail, I noticed several rather interesting cliff-side paintings. Of worthy mention, was one such portrait depicting the pursuit of a mountain Ibex by several paleolithic bowhunters.
Of course these hunters belonged the little-known Mogollon culture. The Mogollon tribesmen of this region were of the hunter gatherer type found in so many other primitive cultures. They hunted mountain Ibex, collected berries, and lived in the hillsides. When the droughts of the 1300s hit, their small populations were significantly impacted. Their enviroment effectively collapsed. When the droughts finally ended, a new tribe of part-time cannibals(whose descendents were destined to become the Apache, Kiowa and other plains tribes) migrated here from the northern grasslands and effectively wiped out the remnents of Mogollon society. Coincidentally, the mountain Ibex prey of the Mogollons has outlasted their hunters by some 700 years.

And speaking of the Mountain Ibex, never in my life have I seen a breed of goats as fluffy and lovable as these. In fact we bumped into several of them along the trail. They would come to within a few feet of us and just stand there. I surmised that they were begging for food or candy of some sort. In anycase, these goats had hooves that looked like tiny claws which effectively allowed them to grab onto small stones and bits of turf along the cliff sides. These goats were able to nimbly scale up and down cliffsides with the kind of speed and agility that no human could match.

After 2 and a half hours of hard hiking we came down to the valley floor. It was more or less a desert. The dry wind swept away any sweat that had accumulated on a person's skin. Thus I had to drink water every so often to prevent dehydration. We stopped at a camp called Indian Garden to grab a bite to eat from our backpacks.


After the refreshment, we immediatly headed back up the cliff side. Since it was already 3pm in the afternoon, we did not want to be caught scaling a cliff after sunset. Going up seemed to be twice as hard as coming down. The relentless pace of progress only exacerbated my discomfort. And the occasional passage of mules certainly didn't help the situation! By the end of that 5 mile upward hike, my back, my calves, in fact my entire lower torso felt like a huge burning mass of cramping muscles. But we had made it back to the top before dark!

Rustic Wood Chopping

Over the last couple of weeks, the North Eastern States have gone through an extremely severe ice storm. What compounded the situation was the bouts of relatively warm diurnal weather after the storm. Snow would melt during the day and freeze overnight, thus causing much damage to the local flora(as well as roads and powerlines). Of much notice was a large white pine tree in my backyard. The geological processes of thawing and refreezing seemed to have caused a large section of the tree's branch structure to snap off on friday night. Now under normal conditions, a wood removal company would be called over to haul away the broken subsection. But there seemed to be no reason why I should pay someone else to take away such a fine supply of wood. Alas, American society seems almost to have been made for such wasteful activities.

Thus saturday was largely spent with the act of wood chopping. I decided to split and cord the broken wood without the use of power tools. Taking only my home-forged axe, I set off at once to work. The smaller branches and pine needles were first sequestered and applied to one of my leaf mulch piles. In due time this acidic material will decompose with the leaves and create a fine organic fertilizer for the growing of berries and tomatoes. The larger section of wood proved to be a tougher job to tackle. With my iron age axe, I hacked away at the pine wood for an hour until I had about 60 lbs of small pine logs. These I set aside directly under the now smaller pine tree. I have yet to decide what to do with this stockpile of wood. One possible use could be as a base for the growing of shitake and other mushrooms. But I suppose some of the larger logs can be used for woodworking as well!

Spring Hunting Season is here!!!

After a relatively uneventful winter, I've begun preparations for the taking of spring season small game. After checking my inventory, it struck me that several of the wooden arrows that I crafted last spring has warped over the winter and are now unusable, this leaves me with only 14 good hunting arrows left. Both of my crafted longbows were warmed besides the heater and then rubbed down with animal fat to restore wood elasticity. After such preparations, archery practice have resumed with renewed vigour on saturday.

The underlying trick to accurate primitive archery seems to be constant practice. After 2 months of neglect, I could barely hit the 30 yard target with 5 out of 10 arrows. Nevertheless the launching of handcrafted arrows from a handcrafted bow is a true joy to behold.

Return to Leather working...

Now that my garden has shut down for the winter with all of the attendent grunt work complete, I decided to continue a previously aborted attempt at leatherworking.

I had decided to embark upon the mystery of leather working last spring, but my attentions were quickly diverted towards the arts of bow-crafting and metal working. Thus, after the consumption of enormous amounts of food over thanksgiving, I clumsily traversed down the basement of my house to fetch several pieces of cleaned rawhide, which had been drying for the last 5 months.

Now animal hides naturally contain high levels of collagen, the elusive protein that tends to make hide twist and contort in many different directions. Obviously we want fabrics to be smooth and pliant, thus more or less fashionable into clothing, containers, shoes...etc. Thus, rawhide needs to be purged of it's collagen, that is, it needs to be tanned. Pre-industrial societies around the planet found several ingenious ways of acheiving this result, none of them are very pleasant to the senses however.

Stone age North American Indian cultures tanned their leather by smearing a paste made of animal brains all over a wet piece of rawhide. Apparently, certain enzymes within brains neutralized the contorting effects of collagens. Europeans of the Middle Ages figured out that the alkaloids within wolf dung did much of the same thing...thus your average middle age tannery consisted of strips of hide being smoked by a dung fire.

And then there's the middle eastern method of tanning. They apparently figured out that the bark of certain trees contained tannins which easily leached out the collagens within rawhide. Unfortunately, the leather thus produced were more than a bit poisonous to eat.

Thus, when all things are considered, I took the middle eastern option. I gathered all the left over maple and oak branches and shrubbery from last week's compost making and boiled them down. To this potion, I added sheets of rawhide. After hours of this boiling, the hard rawhide absorbed the reddish brown tannin elements and became soft and pliable. Drying took hours more.


I took a small strip of this leather and quickly fashioned the material into an ancient shepard's sling. The leather was very workable. It was easily cut into the right shape and held it's shape and dimensions with surprising durability. Just playing around with the sling, I managed to easily chuck stream pebbles out to 100 yards with it. The creation of the leather took at least 20 man hours of scraping, cleaning, boiling and drying. But the actual utilization of the material to create a very functional tool/weapon took less than 10 minutes.

Primitive Leaf Compost Heap

The annual ceremony was replete with the usual assortment of suburban pagentries. Here in the northeast, the first weekend after all of the foliage have fallen is the weekend of the great gathering....the great leaf gathering that is. Armed with leaf-blowers, lawn-mowers, and an arsenal of rakes, the neighborhood happily proceeded to do away with kilo-tons of fallen leaves. Our entire block ringed with the sound of humming machinery, gossipy chattering, and radio broadcasts of the latest football game. As the day wore away, every house around us accumlated dozens of huge black bags, stuffed to the brim with leaves.

Obviously, tremendous amounts of effort would be spent by all parties, and a great sense of accomplishment is felt at the end. After all, the lawns are no longer marred by heaps of unsightly brown leaves. But what exactly are we doing every year? Well, we're extracting fine organic compost from our properties at great cost, and having them shipped away to be burnt at an even greater cost. Knowing this, I decided to try something different this year. After reading a few chapters from the Rodale's book of composting, I decided to create my own leaf compost mounds. Compost mounds works by the same basic principles as my existing hot compost bins. The mounds are usually vastly larger than bin-based compost heaps. They are uncovered year-around and uses the natural process of decay. The mounds utilize the slower method of cool composting versus the rapid hot-compost method of the bins. Hot composting involves the injection of water and baterial laden animal wastes into a ventiliated humus-rich compost heap. It also involves periodic rotation of the compost layers either through manual labor or through biological organisms(worms, centipedes). With the cool-compost method, none of that effort is required, you just gather the biological materials into a pile, water it, and leave it there. The catch is that cool-composting takes four times as long as hot-composting. So the compost mounds that I set down now, will produce the black compost that I need by the spring of 2008.

Books and theories aside, building the actual mounds were incredibly labor-intensive. Firstly, about 200lbs of leaves were manually gathered into a huge centralized pile. A leaf-mold was used to compress sheaves of foliage into dense layered leaf-packs. Hundres of such leaf-layers were manually constructed. Then another 100lbs of dirt and brush were gathered with the handy shovel and brush-clipper. Then the process of applying a layer of dirt, a thick layer of compressed leaves and a layer of brush were repeated 10 times for each mound. The dirt served to weigh the leaves down, while the brush provided the ventilation structure to let in oxygen and let out the bacterial-processed methane. After the construction of a mound, about 10 gallons of water was poured upon it to fix it's structure and kick-start the decomposition process. I opted to not use any petro-powered machinery for this task. And obviously, I suffered greatly due to that decision. By saturday evening, my entire back felt like a single burning mass of cramped muscles. By the time I finished everything this evening, my entire body was stiff with pain.

After all is said and done, however, I had constructed 4 huge compost mounds, enough compost generation capacity to power a garden 20 times my current plot's size. These compost mounds would be renewable, since every year I would need to only take the processed compost from the mounds, and add in the year's new fallen leaves as replenishment. A garden that uses the entire output capacity of these mounds plus my hot compost bins should be able to produce some 50% of a person's minimum diet. Thus with the completion of the compost mounds, I've taken one giant, joint-stiffening, muscle-cramping leap towards self-sufficiency.

Ripening has taken it's course

The final batch of green tomatos have ripened in the cellar. Over 70lbs of tomatos were harvested this year, which is quite impressive for the two dollars and 50 cents spent on 2 tomato saplings. I covered my square meter garden with leaf molds to prevent soil erosion over the winter. The weather is getting progressively colder here in the northeast, though with stark exceptions. I have to give some small iota of thanks to Global Warming for the 70 degree weather last week.


In anycase, hunting season is in full swing, and I have made a new heavy hunting bow for the task at hand. It has a draw weight of 80 lbs and can pierce an inch thick oak board from 20 yards away. My archery skills are still not up to the task. I have taken multiple shots at small game in the last several weeks without once hitting the target. What really stings is that I've been practicing archery for years. And in this time only 2 rabbits have fallen to my missiles. It seems absurd that humanity had once relied upon hunting to survive. But with hindsight it is clear that as the last Ice Age ended, vast regions of tundra were replaced by forests and the grass-fed Megafauna were consequently replaced by smaller, more agile creatures. Thus man must have been FORCED into agriculture as a way of supplementing the ever diminishing animal resources that were obtainable by his primitive weaponery. The longbow, though elegant in it's design and function, is still outmatched by the cunning and agility of woodland game. While my arrows are fast, they are still not as fast as the speed of sound, and animals like deer and rabbits have more than once dodged the missiles in mid-flight. Moreover, the motion of drawing the bow to loose the arrow more often than not served as early warning for the animal targetted. Thus, successful bowhunting requires great stealth, coupled with extreme accuracy and speed of release. And these skills will take me many more seasons to master.

The last pillaging

Another dozen tomatos were ripened in the cellar. My garden, otoh, has been entirely ravaged by squirrils and rabbits scrambing to fatten up for winter. All the winter kale seeds and turnip saplings have been chewed up. Hunting season has begun in earnest,all of my weapons have been polished and honed to take on a lethal edge. I'm almost certain that I can deliver one rabbit/squirril BBQ by year's end through my skills with the bow!

Autumn Mosaics

The vibrant foliage of autumn speaks volumes about the austere and often transient nature of beauty. For half a year, the flower beds of our neighbor provided a most pleasant atmosphere when working in the garden. Behind the pretty tulips and perennials stood groves of trees: oaks, pines, and a smattering of willows. Throughout those warm months, the trees served as a stage of the flowers, an unassuming curtain of green. Now though, the brides-maid has outshone the bride herself in splendor. What is truly amazing however, is that while the flower's greatest beauty occurs during the xenith of it's youth, the leaf's moment of majesty comes just ere the darkness falls.

As the days become shorter and colder, my garden has become dominated by turnips. The cabbages simply couldn't withstand the onslaught of the rabbits, who cleverly chewed through my snares. The green tomatos in my cellar continues to ripen, I collected another half a dozen rosy ones today.

Cornucopia of food and pests...

Some 40 lbs of tomatos had been ripening indoors for two weeks. Wrapped in newspapers, these tomatos are kept warm and free of pests. Today, I harvested 10 beautifully ripened tomatos. When kept from the harsh autumn environment, the green tomatos are ripening indoors as flawlessly as they had outside at the end of summer. The full measure of ripening would be complete within a month. Of course, we have far more tomatos than we can readily consume. So a good number of them will have to be canned to last us the winter.

The dwarf kale, which had gotten off to a great start, was abruptly ravaged by a family of rabbits. These marauders had intruded upon my garden one night and nibbled off dozens of the tender cabbages at the bud. By the time I found their paw-prints, almost half of the kale buds that I had back-breakingly cultivated were destroyed. If I was to sentry beside the garden, no rabbit would escape my arrows, but I can't be there all the time. As such, a bit of ingenuity was required upon my part. After some educational reading, I proceeded to set several snares along the garden fencing, hopefully, I can trap a few of these vermin while egressing out of the garden.

The turnips were spared by the local wild life for some reason. As such they have prospered beyond my wildest expectations. The turnip section of the square meter garden had turned into a patch of broad, lush green leaves. The turnips are naturally cold-resistent and fast maturing. All of it's heat-loving wild competitor weeds were either dead or going into dormancy.

It's only garden rival, the kale, had been badly mauled by furry pests. Thus with almost no competition, and abundent resources, the turnips are growing like wildfire. In less than a week, the turnips have taken over almost a quarter of the garden area intended for the now weakened dwarf kale. The area that these plants have already conquored was further thickened with hundreds of new turnip green leaves. As such, I collected 5 lbs worth of the largest turnip greens today. When steamed, these greens had the delightful texture of butterhead lettuce interlaced with a spicy undertone, they were absolutely delicious. And if the winter is mild enough, continuous cultivation of these greens can be maintained until late december. That should produce enough fresh greens to strech through most of winter!

Coming of the frost...

Last week the autumn's first hard frost came one night. The end was swift and sudden for the tomato plants. Fundementally, life is composed mostly of water. Plants in general can be looked upon as billions of packets of water held together by thin walls of cellulose. The water pressure applied upon those walls gives the plants shape and structure. When the ambient temperature dipped cruelly below the freezing point, those packets of water turned into razor sharp blades of ice crystal. These crystals stabbed clean through the cellular structure of my tomatos along the entirety of the plants. The final stake was of course to be struck in the morning. With the coming of the sun, the temperature rose above freezing point, thus melting those ice crystals. In a matter of hours, the life blood of my tomato plants leaked out of a billion microscopic cuts. What had been in full bloom the day before was transformed into a dark, shrunken, and collapsing mass of plant matter.

I did my best to salvage the remaining tomatos on the vine. The tomato plants have apparently devoted the last iota of their energy onto their offspring. A dozen tomatos had to be thrown away due to frost damage. A handfull of semi-ripened tomatos went to the fridge, and about 30 still-green tomatos joined their siblings down in my basement cellar to ripen indoors. Of the plants themselves, I promptly proceeded to cut and shred into pieces. This green manure, I applied to the compost bins. What came out of the good earth shall be returned back into it. And the land that the tomatos had occupied was quickly replowed. I threw upon that land a fine layer of my own compost and then proceeded to sow seeds of winter dwarf kale. In the days since the sowing, the kale had been growing like weeds. Dwarf Kale, along with turnip have special enzymes within their cellular structure that serves as a form of anti-freeze. Thus, for all intents and purposes, these plants are nearly immune to the cold weather that we get here in the Northeast.

Tomato Destroyers....

This morning I woke up to a terrible deed. 5 fully ripened tomatos were snatched from the vine, crushed and dumped on the grass besides the garden. Words does no justice to the rage that one feels inside at such waste. Only someone who doesn't realize the pains of producing food would destroy another man's crops so carelessly. I know that I'm being irrationally mad here, but one really can't help it. This could be the work of children from this neighborhood. In anycase, this incident along with frost warnings for early next week prompted an emergency action on my part. Every large tomato on the vine whether ripened or green has been harvested. The 7 ripened tomatos are going in the freezer and the 30 some green ones are going to be wrapped in newspaper and ripened in the safety of the garage. I left more than a dozen small green tomatos on the vine. These fruits are probably too small to notice, let alone be worth destroying. Next week, the entire tomato plant will be mulched and it's plot of ground planted with more winter kale.

Peak Tomato!

The two tomato plants have given their utmost this weekend. I've harvested 37 tomatos today. There are still over 20 tomatos left on the vine. If the weather would but hold out for a few more weeks, all of them can be naturally ripened. The turnips are doing quite nicely in the recent cool weather. Next week, if the garden gods are kind, we shall have fresh turnip greens in our salad bowls!

Nomadic Vacation 9/29-9/31 Conclusion

On the last leg of this journey, my ethanol powered vehicle ventured near the population centers of NYC, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C in that order. Cities always possessed a kind of fascination for me. They are such complex mega-systems, magnificent and at the same time fragile. I was going to these cities to drink and party with good friends and colleagues from days gone by. One must keep in mind that for most of the last two weeks, I've been traversing the under-populated regions of the Northeast. The largest number of people I had seen had not exceeded the population of a small village or town. Thus seeing legions of people densely packed into small areas were quite disconcerting initially. But as food and liquor flowed, and stories exchanged, one cannot help but miss the social aspects of life. Though too much drink could've been consumed, I do not believe that humanity evolved such a proclivity towards alchohol without due cause. However, good friends and good company are essential components of life, and as such, I thoroughly enjoyed these last few days of vacation.

Nomadic Vacation 9/25-9/27 Carp Dreams

The vacation continued with renewed vigour on monday as I drove vaguely northwards towards Cape Cod in Massachusetts. My goal was to eventually see the humpback whales that are rumoured to be prowling those northern waters. With ethanol mixed fuel in the engine, my Honda civic meandered in fatigue ever northwards. I passed through New Jersey and into New York. As usual the course took on a very irregular pattern. Stops were made here and there. I watched some loggers busily at their work at the shire of Woodbridge. Observations were made on some farmers harvesting corn outside the Village of Gardiner. Finally, after hours of random driving, I drove over a bridge near the town of Wytheville. As I drove by, I saw these incredibly huge fish swimming underneath the bridge. Obviously, one cannot let such a good opportunity pass by. So I parked the car nearby, grabbed my rod and went fishing.

The giant fish turned out to be Eurasian carp, an aquatic nuisance species that is devouring entire marine ecosystems along the eastern U.S. There must have been dozens, scores of these huge carp swimming lazily under that bridge. Trouble was, I couldn't catch them! I tried every lure and bait line that I had to no avail. The huge critters simply won't bite.

Along the way I caught a whole lot of other fish, but no carp. That night, at a local Hostel, I researched Eurasian fishing methods in regards to capturing carp and also of the carp species itself. This Eurasian species apparently reproduces four times faster than native American fish of the same weight class, it is a carrier of waterborne diseases that wipes out other fish, and it eats everything, including grass and garbage. I learned of the hair rig created by the English, and of various chumming techniques mastered by the Chinese. Next morning, with these new tools in hand, I went back to that bridge. I chummed the waters with hundreds, nay, thousands of kernals of corn, and I used the English hair rig. But the fishing gods were unkind that day. I caught dozens of other fish, but the carp just won't bite. No wonder they are so bloody effective at wiping out other aquatic species here, Carp is simply far superior at surviving human predation. In anycase, I managed to acquire:














15 Black Crappies
5 Sunfish
3 White Perch
2 Pumpkinseeds
1 Small Mouth Bass
1 Yellow Perch
1 Catfish

Roughly 30lbs of fish were thus harvested. I wandered some more before heading back to home. My plans of seeing those whales will have to wait.

Nomadic Vacation Hiatus 9/22-9/24

I spent a good 3 days to rest and recover from the boar hunt. Back at home, the garden was in a fine shape. The tomato plants were hanging on strong due to absorbing the warmth generated from the compost pile. The turnip seeds had all sprouted into 3 emerald rows of turnip leaves. Turnips being a cold-resistent plant will continue to grow even during the harsh autumn and winter months here in the North East. The beauty of it all is that turnips serve 3 purposes. It grows fine white tubers which are edible, it's leaves are also edible, and it's non-edible roots fix nitrogen into the soil, thus making it more fertile for next year. Turnips are perfect crops to improve the conditions of the soil. Since next year, I plan to triple the total surface area being farmed, the turnip land will make a fine base to grow a heavy feeder such as squash or sweet potato. I added on another layer of fresh grass and leaves to my manure bins and topped it off with heavy helpings of water and half-rotted grass clippings. The bins are now up to the brim with rich black compost. This fine compost will be made richer one's the leaves start falling. Next spring there will be enough of the black gold to fertilize some 9 square meters of garden land!!!



I gathered some 10 tomatos on saturday. There are at least another 40 tomatos still on the vine. I plan to transplant the remaining green tomatos to an indoor location within the next two weeks, before the first frost sets in. It is critical that the green tomatos not be exposed to a frost since that would induce rotting rather than ripening. However, detaching green tomatos from the vine would immediately stop these tomatos from growing any bigger. Thus a careful balancing game must be played to maximize the number of big tomatos ripened.

On the fishing front, a quick trip to the lake on sunday netted 3 sunfish and 1 yellow perch.

Nomadic Vacation 9/20-9/21....The Boar Hunt

I woke up at 6am Wednesday and prepared myself. A wild boar's best sensor is his snout. Thus, I gave myself 2 separate showers with de-scenting soap to remove all traces of human scent from my body. I hadn't eaten anything in 12 hrs so as to minimize scent from breathing. My camo-suit had been resting in an air-tight bag from the rest of my clothing, that suit I now stuffed with leaves and pine needles from the surrounding forest. The suit's charcoal linings will capture the sent of the local vegetation and allow the wearer(myself) to blend in with the scents of the forest. At 7:30 am, my guide Lathern arrived at the lodge. We quickly gathered our tools and weapons and headed out into the forest. After about 20 minutes of hard trekking, we arrived at an open area where I proceeded to test out my weapons.

Lathern produced a pie-sized target that was covered by a hard bony plate, and he set that target some 25 yards away from us. He then told me that to safely hunt wild boar with the bow, my arrows must pierce that target completely. With that in mind, I drew my longbow to it's fullest extent and loosed three of my best arrows upon that target. At 25 yards, all 3 missiles flew straight and true. Unfortunately, none of them managed to penetrate the bone plate. I tried again at 20 yards, to no avail. Finally, at a range of 5 yards, my arrows did indeed pierce the target's armour, but it did not penetrate all the way through the target. Alas, my longbow was simply to too weak to fatally wound a boar. At best it would have inflicted a broken rib on the boar, but more likely, my sharp arrows would only produce mere cuts and bruises on those beasts. I should've brought my 80 lb warbow instead of the 55 lb light hunting bow. So after little debate, we decided to go with the rifle instead.

Off we went to the ambush site. The weather was glorious, and the mountains of Tennessee was indeed very beautiful. The ambush site was simply a camoflouged tent placed some 40 to 50 yards behind a clearing in the forest. We laid down about 50 pounds of corn at the clearing as bait for the Boars. With that deed done, we got into the tent and waited for boars to show up. And we waited and waited and waited. Morning turned to noon, and we waited. Noon turned to afternoon and yet we were still waiting.

Late afternoon was turning into evening, and in the gathering twilight, I was drifting in and out of conciousness. A greyish/blackish figure quietly emerged from the tall grass around the clearing, it made almost no sound. I would've missed it had it not been for that sudden contrast in color at the periphery of my field of vision, it jerked me into full alertness. I looked next to me, Lathern was fully alert and intently gazing at the clearing as well. That greyish figure was a boar for sure but almost as soon as we spotted it, the beast faded back into the tall grass. For the next 15 minutes, we didn't see a soul, by then I was beginning to doze off again. Suddenly, I heard very quiet foot steps coming towards our tent from behind. Very slowly, the steps came closer and closer until I was sure it couldn't have been more than a few feet behind us. There came this heavy breathing sound from behind, and a hideous warmth resulting from that breathing permeated the thin fabric of the tent right onto my back.


The tension at that point was thick enough to cut with a knife. Needless to say, my free hand was grasping my hunting blade so tightly that it was turning bone white. Lathern mouthed the words "don't breath, don't move" as his hand silently unsheathed his hunting knife. Every single nerve within my body seemed to be anticipating that boar charge into our tent. I wanted to scream out and run for it. But obviously, I held myself as steady as a stone, my hand never leaving the blade. After about a minute, we heard the foot steps softly move away from our tent. Less than a minute later, the boar re-emerged into the clearing from the tall grass. It was a huge beast, and far quieter than it's size would've ever suggested. Twice, nay, three times it looked at our tent and took a few steps backwards. But eventually, it headed towards the corn bait, lowered it's gigantic head and began feeding. At that point, my last shreds of self-control seemed to rest on that trigger finger. "Take him now?" I whispered to Lathern, "take him out!" was the reply. My bullet thundered out of it's barrel at supersonic speeds. In the blink of an eye, the projectile had bridged the distance to bite into that boar. It chewed through hide, bone, and flesh to reach the beating heart of the beast. Once there, it's poly-carbonate tip unlocked an expanding core of copper alloy which caused a miniature explosion in the boar's chest cavity. The boar's heart was shredded by that rotating disk of death into a ghastly puree of blood and muscle. The mighty beast grunted with sudden agony and charged off into the forest.

Almost at once, we were out of that tent in pursuit. Night was emerging and it should've been cold, but my body felt like it was on fire. I could hear every little sound, I could see colors as vivid as broad daylight in that spreading gloom. The 20lbs of gear in my hunting vest felt like nothing, as I ran like a madman through the trees in pursuit. The hunting rifle that usually weighed so heavily, it was a mere twig in my arm as I charged towards my dying prey. I was in rage, I was in ecstacy, I felt like a white-hot jet of molten steel, it was a feeling of ungovernable, uncontrollable, unintelligible anger and joy and dominance all at the same time!

100 yards into the deep forest, we found our prey. The boar died in an orgy of it's own blood. The blood was everywhere, it covered half the beast, it was splattered on trees and bushes, pools of the dark liquid were all over the ground. We tied the animal up a tree branch and took some photos. Afterwards, the boar was disembowled on the spot and it's organs heaped into a steaming pile on the ground. As Lathern torn out the beast's stomach, liver, and intestines in great handfuls, using my hand and the blade I clumsily ripped off the Boar's genitals. That I placed on the nearest tree as an offering to the Guardian Spirit of the Hunt. We dragged the corpse out of the woods onto Lathern's truck and eventually handed it over to the local Butcher at Robbins. Afterwards, Lathern told me that two years earlier, he had been on a similar hunt. Only in that hunt, the hunter had breathed. That boar picked up the scent, charged into the blind, mangled up the hunter's arm, and put a tusk through Lathern's leg. After hearing that story, I felt lucky to be alive. This was a very fair hunt indeed. I gave my boar the chance to strike me down, his mistake resulted in his death.

In anycase, the next day was quite anti-climatic. I spent thursday morning stalking deer with the longbow, to no success. At mid-day Lathern arrived with 70 lbs of de-boned pork straight from the village butcher. I took the pork, thanked the guide, and drove 12 hours back to PA.