End of Season Gardening Recap

My internet connectivity issues continue. This article was meant to appear last Friday.

My perpetually inconsistent pursuit of self-sufficiency in regards to food yielded some mixed results this year. Our lasagna gardening was a spectacular failure. The idea of lasagna gardening is that you place a layer of cardboard over the area you want your garden to be and then layer compost, peat moss, manure, and whatever else would normally be used in a garden on top of it. This is supposed to smother the weeds or grass underneath and give you a rich growing medium for your plants. Well it was a rich growing medium alright, the weeds absolutely loved it. Really I think it was mainly our fault for not putting a thick enough layer on top to smother everything.

But our plants did grow well too, just lost in the weeds sometimes. The onions we grew from seed did great but we harvested them too soon. The sugar snap peas were thriving until one day they completely disappeared. I think some baby rabbits got through our fence. Our peppers that we grew from seeds taken from store bought peppers didn't really grow at all, we learned our lesson there. The cantelope didn't produce anything. Our watermelon plants managed to produce one watermelon between them all which I accidentally lopped off with the weed whacker (which gives you an idea of how bad the weeds were).

This was the third year for our strawberry patch and it was relatively weed free and yielded our biggest crop yet but even so the amount of berries we got was pretty pitiful for the amount of plants we have. This was also the third year for our grape vines and still they produced no grapes. They grew a good deal but I'm not sure what to do if they still don't produce next year. It was the second year for our self-pollinating peach tree. Seventeen peaches grew on it, none of which developed into anything edible. It was also the second year for our two apple trees. One of which seemed to have died over the winter but just the other day I saw that it had begun regrowing from the base and now has a new "trunk" that is a couple feet tall so hopefully it will make it through the winter. Our raspberry crop was large as always though perhaps not quite as plentiful as last year.

Three years into all these gardening attempts has started to be a bit of a downer. Each year it seems something comes up that keeps us from putting the time into maintaining the garden like it ought to be. Two years ago my wife and I were each working full time jobs. Last year we had a new baby. This year I sprained my ankle and was out of commission for awhile.

There was one bright spot for the garden this year though. Our tomatoes came in wonderfully. We had tried doing tomatoes in hanging baskets which failed miserably because the soil would dry out very quickly if we didn't watter them every day, which we didn't. But the tomato plants that we put in the garden produced a large crop in spite of not being supported on anything and being smothered in weeds. The tomatoes and a few other vegetables from the store allowed us to make enough salsa to last a year. Before we harvested them and made the salsa I was ready to throw in the towel on gardening all together. Three years of failed efforts were piling up in my brain but the tomatoes helped place me firmly back on the course of self-sufficiency.

The American Boy's Handy Book

Ever since I can remember my mom would take all of us to a library book sale every summer. We would buy piles of books for excellent prices and spend hours of our summer evenings reading them. As the years have gone by, my love for going to book sales has not diminished. In fact I now try to make it to three local ones each summer. The prices have gone up some in recent years but are still far better than paying retail.

Every once in a while I find a real treasure amongst the thousands of books stacked in rows on tables. This year has been no exception to that either. I stumbled across a book entitled The American Boy's Handy Book by Daniel Beard. Originally published in the late 1800s it is full of how to projects that are entertaining and educational and despite the title, girls can enjoy it just as easily. Beard was hugely influential in the founding of the boy scouts in later years and you can see much of that work originated in this book. Projects include kite making, snow forts, various boats to build, many inventive methods of fishing, knot tying and much more. Beard was concerned that as times were changing, boys were spending less time in nature and he wrote this book to try and bring boys back to nature. If he thought kids were abandoning nature in the late 1800s the poor fellow would probably have a stroke if he saw how kids spend their time these days.

I just love reading books like these because even though many of the projects in the book are geared towards entertainment value, there is always an educational element. Kids who can successfully build some of the projects in this book will have a large advantage over other children when it comes to being self-sufficient.

I was lucky and managed to find a copy of The American Boy's Handy Book at a book sale for only fifty cents. You might not be able to find it that cheap but it's not much more expensive on Amazon.

Local Versus Global Economy

We live in an increasingly global world and that snowball is likely to keep rolling down the hill of society and continue to grow larger. In the United States we receive a staggering amount of our goods from countries on nearly every other continent. Large corporations have been heading down this road for decades due to cheap foreign labor looking quite attractive in the face of unions in America that have gained so much power that in a lot of cases they have a stranglehold over the operations of corporations. I remember a few years ago when the Hershey Foods workers went on strike. A couple years later the company decided that they were going to move most of the company's operations to another state and to Mexico. And is anyone surprised?

But what is appropriate for us as individuals? Should we not buy products from China because it takes jobs away from Americans and because they have poor human rights standards? Let's take a look at the first one. Companies exist to make a profit and if they are able to accomplish that much easier by using foreign labor then they are simply acting out capitalism as it was intended to be and their shareholders I'm sure have little problem with this. So what about the human rights aspect of the Chinese government? Like many others I am not comfortable with this aspect of Chinese goods but I wonder what life would be like for the citizens of China if the United States wasn't pouring billions of dollars into it's economy every year.

What if you are an individual who is trying to run a small business successfully? I know that I could never afford to have a personal assistant, but Virtual Assistants from India are cheap and do excellent work. The Epson R220 printer that I use to print my cds uses six different ink cartridges which at retail in the US costs me about $80 for a full set. More than I paid for the printer itself. Thanks to the Internet I was able to find generic cartridges that are compatible and paid $10 for an entire set. And you know what? They work great. How about a writer that wants to self-publish a book. He or She could spend about $4000 for a thousand copies in the US. Using a foreign printer however the author could get the same thing for a fraction of the cost. If the author couldn't afford local prices and so wouldn't use local services anyway, then what has the local economy lost?

On a psychological level I am all for supporting the local economy but when it comes to real life I rarely am able to support the local economy because I can't afford to. I can't help that local companies charge much more for the same thing that I can get cheaper through the Internet from another part of the country or another part of the world. Dealing in a global economy does have some inherent drawbacks that can't be ignored either though. The author getting his book printed can't easily proof the work of the foreign printer he is using and if he gets a thousand copies of screwed up books it could be a mess that costs him even more money to fix. Communications barriers are often a bit of an issue with global dealings as well but the cost savings of all the options that a global economy has to offer an individual make it hard to not go this route at least some of the time.

As someone who supports self-sufficiency I would be remiss to not mention it here. As I said, on a psychological level I want to support the local economy as much as possible but more so I'd like to just be relying on the economy of myself. But I'm not there yet and hard economic times don't always afford me the idealism of supporting local economy when there are literally billions of people around the world just waiting to do work for me for less money.

Bowing to the Oil gods

As I become increasingly interested in the idea of self-sufficiency I am taking an ever closer look at where my money goes. I came to a startling realization today when I realized just how much of my money ends up in the hands of the oil companies.

Between what it costs me to heat my house and what I spend on gas throughout the year I am probably spending about 20% of my yearly income on oil! And that is just what I spend directly on it, that's not even beginning to scratch the surface of indirect costs from other goods and services.

Like millions of others I am definitely feeling the need to begin to look elsewhere for energy. Nevermind the fact that the US has more than enough of its own oil but we can't have it because the politicians are afraid of the environmentalists.

There are a few other options out there that I am researching. I'll let you know what I find out.