Out of the human hive and into the Wilderness

Last Sunday, I embarked upon a journey away from the human hive that is NYC to the outer peripherals of the state. I have been planning to purchase a piece of undeveloped land for well over a year now, and the time is ripe to set the plan into motion. With rising gas prices and a collapsing housing market, having a fully owned forest or agricultural parcel could have profoundly beneficial effects for one's health and future. So off I went to look at a few properties in upstate New York. At 6am in the morning, I moved myself out of bed, went through the regular motions, and headed out of my apartment. The city scape was largely deserted at this hour. A fine morning fog shrouded the distant skyscrapers, dimming and softening the edges of the horizon spanning mega-city. The metropolis appeared largely deserted, almost ancient in a sense that I found very hard to grasp. The scene from the nearby subway terminal was one of uncommon stillness. For some odd reason, NYC( the economic heart of human civilization) felt a bit like the abandoned Anasazi ruins that I visited 4 months ago. Shaking off such absurd thoughts, I walked down the subway entrance wondering how NYC would look like if 99% of it's population simply vanished.

With great alacrity, I made my way to the Port Authority and onto a Greyhound bus, five hours of road time took me 300 miles west of the city into the small, peripheral center of Utica. From there, I met up with the real estate agent and went to see several properties. Most of these land parcels were heavily wooded with entry points on seasonally maintained roads of dubious quality. I needed an area with some basic qualities: reliable ground water, ample and mature hardwoods, agriculturally productive soil, and (if the gods are kind) surrounding wildlife and fishing resources. Most of the properties seen came far short of what I required.

Finally though, we came upon a very interesting place. The land at first glance appeared to be heavily forested. As I made my way through the forest, I noticed long stretches of low stone walls along the lengths of the forest. I made my way through several hundred feet of heavy woods, the foliage screen suddenly lifted. Before me stood this high, circular, and oddly regular-shaped hill. The hill top was flattened into a plateau of scrub and tall grasses. Making my way to the hill top, I was astounded by the panoramic vista before my eyes. The hill overlooked miles of the surrounding countryside and valley.

I could see the extent of the forests that I had just walked through, the farm next to it, and even the farms and forests far from the main road that led up to this land area. Less than a mile away, there stood this huge derelict-looking radar dish on yet another oddly regular hilltop. The structures upon this land felt subtly strange and even a bit alien to me. It felt as if it was touched by the passing of generations, as if the land itself was shaped by countless hands whose owners I would never meet. Yet at the same time, I felt as if I remember this place somehow, but the memories were jumbled beyond recognition. As we walked back to the car, the real estate agent casually mentioned that the radar dish was built by the military in the 1960s and that it has long since been deactivated. The man then went on a rant about how this wouldn't affect the real estate's future value and such. And all of a sudden, EVERYTHING fell into place.

There was the forest at first. Then men came, with stone hatchets the forest was turned into farmland divided between incessantly warring tribes and confederations. The land that I stood on was part of the vast the Oneida confederation, a polity that spanned a third of this state. To the East they faced the Mohican tribes, to the West there was an alliance of Huron chiefdoms. The mound that I stood on was an old Oneida military hill fortress. For centuries they fought their savage wars, and then a great sickness spread across the land, cutting down the populace like weeds. For a century afterwards, the few people that remained lived by hunting, gathering, and limited gardening. The forest swallowed this land. And then other men came, waves of Anglo Saxons, followed by Germans and European lowlanders. After many bloody wars with the first settlers, the Germanic peoples were victorious. The forest appeared virgin to them, and they proceeded to clear the trees with steel and grit and put the country to farmland once more. Using muscle power alone, these Germanic peoples built the old stone walls which marked the boundaries of their farms. Generations passed, and change swept the land yet again. The industrial revolution was upon the land. The descendents of these farmers could not keep their ancestors' small farms. They were thus pushed into the teeming cities. Generations passed and the forest once more swallowed the achievements of man's labor. And then once more people came, this time the world was divided between two great nations. Proud and hostile, they tried to gain dominance over one another through the possessions of nuclear tipped missiles. The Americans rebuilt a paved road into this forest, they saw the hold Oneida fort hill, and placed a radar installation on top of it's summit. This radar, along with many other, created a vast sensory network. The Soviet ICBMs could thus be monitored coming over the Northern polar cap and a prompt retaliatory strike launched in time. The war never came and the radar along with the land fell into disuse. The forest came once more and cleansed all.

So trapped was I in the depth of my own ruminations that I stumbled upon stick bushes filled with raspberries and blueberries. Between the berry patches were trees growing hundreds of green crab apples. I picked pounds of the delectable berries and apples and took them all home with me. It was a good day!

Garden update...and some bartering :)

A great deal of food has been produced this week by the tiny organic garden. Since, I'm away in the city, my parents have been harvesting from the beds on a daily basis. The 4 green onion plants continued to produce at a brisk pace. 2 pounds of onions were harvested this week. The pole beans are producing at a furious pace. Over the last week, over 20 lbs of pole beans have been harvested. The two tomato plants have begun producing in earnest.



























32 Tomatoes(12 pounds) were harvested in the last week. There are roughly another 180 hanging on the vine.


























Our neighbor Jeff has taken a keen interest in the organic garden and has started one himself this year. His set of food crops were a bit different, with way more cabbage, squash, and cucumbers than beans or tomatoes. As such Jeff had a surplus of cucumbers while we had an excess of beans. A quick bartering session resulted in 5 lbs of pole beans for 8 lbs of cucumbers.

Beans, beans and more beans!!!

The European pole beans have entirely displaced the North American Kentucky variety within the garden. The new bean seedlings have grown remarkably fast within the last week. The Japanese beetle threat seems to have greatly diminished. With the potato harvested and the Native American bean plants consumed to death, the beetles seems to destroyed their own food supply. Within a week, what had once been a population of hundreds of eating, fighting, and mating beetles have been reduced to just a handful.

With the beetles gone, the surviving European pole beans are now producing in force. The trick to harvesting large amounts of beans is to not allow the seed pods to grow large and harden. If that ever happens, chemical changes will alert the bean plant that it's reproductive cycle is complete. And when that message is communicated, the bean plant will cease to produce any more beans for us to eat. By harvesting young and tender beans, the plant is tricked into producing more and more offspring(beans) to make sure that some of them will make it. This of course produces great yield.

So over the last 4 days, the garden has produced a total yield of 3 pounds of beans. This trend will hopefully continue until September. By late August, the new bean plants set down a week ago(on the potato bed along with the turnips) will compensate for the declining yield of the first wave of beans planted in May. This type of succession planting can serve to ensure a very stable and reliable supply of a protein rich food.

The Potato Harvest and Friends!

I decided to head back to the burbs this weekend to harvest my potato crop. On saturday morning, I glanced at my organic garden after a 2 week hiatus in the city and saw a blend of the expected and not so expected. For one thing, the potato plants have more or less browned out, the later maturing varieties looking obviously healthier and less aged than the early maturing breeds. All 3 Potato varieties were ready for harvest. The Corn was looking gloriously vibrant, a dozen man-height corn stalks shot out of the square meter garden bed. The beans were not doing so well. Most of the beans have been damaged by potato beetles, for some reason the pests prefered to eat the bean leaves over potatos. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the native American Kentucky Wonder pole beans were almost entirely wiped out by the bugs, while the European pole beans were only lightly damaged. The discrepancy was glaring, it seemed that just about 1 out of every 2 beans plants have been reduced to skeletonized leaves. While the native American bean plants were all looking like the living dead due to these Eurasian pests, the Eurasian bean plants were only slightly pockmarked by the same beetles.

In short order, I got into the act of harvesting the potatos. It was moderately back-breaking work. Each potato plant was first yanked out of the soil with much of it's root structure. The smaller and moderately sized potatos usually came attached with the plants' roots, the larger potatos were at least dislodged. The individual potatos were collected, and the potato leaves/roots/stems carefully sequestered into it's own pile. It was of utmost importance to remove as much of the potato root structure as possible from the garden bed. The roots, if left in the earth, acts as a disease vector for potato family crops. However, it is also important to maintain the clover and onion ground cover on those same garden beds thus complicating the harvesting effort. After half an hour of harvesting, I had unearthed the entire potato crop.

The 3 breeds of potatos planted all had very specific individual traits. One can almost see the engineering trade-offs made as each variety was selectively bred by humanity. What traits were picked and which ones were discarded all depended on what the people were seeking in their environment. The Yukon Gold breed of brown-skinned potatos clearly scored highest on total yield(over 30% more than the other 2 types), but took weeks longer to mature and showed noticeably more susceptability to beetles and fungus. The Roten variety matured the quickest, demonstrated great pest resilience, and produced a good yield of big, red, and super-starchy taters . But those advantages were offset by the fact that each Roten potato plant was 30% larger than the other varieties, thus decreasing the total number of potato spuds that can be efficiently planted on the same surface area. And then there was the Kennewick breed, it was relatively slow maturing, it's yield was the lowest, it showed the most pest/fungus damage of all. To top it all off, the potatos seem to grow really deep under the plant structure, thus making it a pain to dig out. However, there are redeeming qualities to the Kennewick. These pale white potatos are, without exception, very well proportioned(not too big or small), unlike the other breeds. The Kennewicks are also possessed of this very smooth, almost tender white skin that contrasts very sharply with the rough and thick skins of the Yukon Gold and the Roten. One could almost imagine that the Kennewick variety may have been selectively breed as some sort of elite status food. I gathered up the potatos and put them onto a flat bench in my garage to dry off. After half a day of drying, those potatos can be put into the cellar and kept for many months. All in all, the yields were 31 lbs of Yukon Gold, 23 lbs of Roten, and 19 lbs of Kennewick, a total of 73 pounds of potatos cultivated from 2.5 square meters of earth.

With the potato harvest completed, I decided to see if I couldn't recoup my bean plant losses. After seeing the selective damage done by the Japanese beetles, I launched a genocidal campaign against these bugs. Gloves in hand, I combed through the entire garden and killed every single Japanese beetle that I found. I gathered hundreds of their tiny corpses in a cup, mixed in a bit of water and grounded them into a fine paste. Most of this liquid fertilizer, I dumped into the compost mounds, but some of it I saved for what I had in mind. I quickly replanted European variety pole beans at the sites of the dead Native American bean plants, And to jump start the bean growth process, I added some of the diluted beetle puree to each bean seed as I planted them. As the beetles have so heartily fed on the defenseless beans in life, so shall they, in turn, be feed to the beans in death. As I was doing this, I harvested about half a pound of pole beans, 2 fallen green tomatos and a pound of green onions.

With the bug-fighting campaign out of the way, I started working on my hot composting bins. Taking the 2 potato growning containers, I methodically applied a layer of dirt followed by a layer shredded potato plants/lawn grass/leaf clippings/kitchen vegetable clippings for some 4 iterations per container. After which, each container was given a cups of diluted urine to jump start the decomposing process. Finally gallons of water was applied to each compost bin, and then both bins were covered with hemp fabric to keep it extra warm and toasty inside. Last summer I was able to see some luminous biomatter coming from the compost bins during the hottest summer months. This year, I plan to get a few snapshots of it. So it was not too bad for a day's work in the garden.