In silence the grey steel hatch slowly swung up. There was a bit of rust but no squeak as the hand on the, wheel like, 'dog' pushed into the morning air. It had rained and the air was fresh and cool. "That smells good", thought our intrepid prepper. As he rose out of the hatch he could hear the faint sounds of a vehicle far off on the county road. The silence was further disturbed by the Fee-beee, Fee-beee of a chickadee proclaiming his territory. It was the greenness though that overwhelmed him as he twisted and stretched unused muscles.
Ah look, the apple tree has ripe fruit on it. I'll pick some he thought and load them into the old truck to sell at the farmers market. The market was opening he'd heard on the CB radio. Ewww the truck, he'd have to attach back up the battery and check that brake fluid that had been low back when he had sheltered in. He smiled as he thought about the bumper sticker he'd put on the truck and sell at his little stand with the apples.
" Oh Lord just give me one more quarantine
and I promise I won't piss it away"
Yeah that's the way it always starts in those Sci-Fi books. Now mind you it's a Sunday morning as I write and it did rain last night, so it is rather quiet and green outside my window. So, perhaps the chickadee is real but the apples on the tree was a bit of a literary stretch. I do have an apple tree, mind you. It and it's sisters are about the length of my little finger. So let's give it a few years before I count on fruit (and oh yeah it's May not August, so fruit - really Doug!)
From Edan till today apple trees are always a good place to start. First however Cooper needs his walk, there's half a pile of wood chips that need to get spread before the day heats up and it doesn't look like Deb is going to make me those blueberry pancakes I ordered up. (I think I actually heard her eyes roll when I told her a good wife would make 'em!) So, a bit to do and I'll be right back.
I think I told you about my little Albert Etter Pink Pearl apple tree that I had planted a couple of years back. Pink Pearl was a variety Mr Etter had breed back in the late 1800s in his orchards in California. It's fruit was a translucent skinned, red fleshed apple that in the pictures I saw was a real beauty. It was considered more of an apple for baking than fresh eating. More beauty over flavor.
Long story short it died. My desire to have a unique apple tree certainly didn't. Stark Bros and a host of other nurseries carry most of the common varieties you can buy and taste in the store, and that's good. It is hard to invest the growing time in a fruit tree with only a catalog description of what the apple will actually taste like. If you've got a hundred acre orchard - sure, easy to take a flyer on a variety. Apples, do vary tho' in flavor and if you're only growing one that is a big bet. The Pink Pearl had enticed me to give it a try purely on the uniqueness of it's red flesh.
After losing the Pink Pearl I learned that my niece would be going on a church mission. Part of her trip would land her in Kazakhstan, birthplace of the modern apple. I asked her to get me some apple seeds. I figured there had to be some interesting apples piled up in some little backwater market stand. Some tree known only to the grower with lineage right back to Eden. Plus throw in a story about "Oh yeah, my niece got me the seed for that tree on her trip to Kazakhstan" and even a so so apple would have cache. Well, a nasty little pandemic started circling the world about the same time as my niece. She got back safely but never touch down in Kazakhstan. My dream of a unique apple tree stayed on hold.
Meanwhile, just up the street Vitamin Cottage (the local health food store) got it in their heads to bring in for a brief visit a large variety of heirloom organic apples. Names I'd seen described in catalogs and articles. Names like Ananas Reinette, Cox Orange Pippin, Orleans - Wait go back one, Cox Orange Pippin, yeah that one. I'd come within a hare's breath of buying that one from Stark Bros. I'd shifted directions and gone for the Albert Etter mystique over a catalog described but unknown flavor. A half dozen little brown bags and my own little apple tasting session later. I was standing in my kitchen holding a core and extolling to Deb what an outstanding apple I'd just eaten. Not a big apple and russeted to an extent that it would likely get passed over sitting next to a display of Galas or Macintosh, but man what a flavor. Stark Bros was going to get an order in the morning. Heck I was tossing this core in the compost and placing the order right now! Yeah well you likely guessed it the cheap old Scotchman in me saw that core and realized those are seeds, plant 'em!
I've read enough about apples to realize that growing from seed is at best a crapshoot. Virtually all apples you see and buy are grown on grafted trees. Nurseries use a known and strong rootstock and graft a scion (branch from an existing tree of a known variety), essentially the old tree is cloned. Here I had a handful of seeds with their pollen source unknown added to whatever natural variability the other half of the DNA had hidden in it. But the seeds got planted and with our warm spring virtually everyone has sprouted in the garden. I'm not simply cheap, I have a gardeners heart. If you sprout in my garden I'll figure out how to work my garden plan around you're growing. So, I did transplant 'em from the horrible spot they were started but I guess I'm once again growing an apple tree.
"Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth". Mike Tyson elevated himself from pugilist to poet with this keen insight into the changing nature of life in this world. He's not known for a lot of other quotes but this one certainly hits these 'interesting times'.
Long before I began this blog I was keeping a garden journal. It was a suggestion from about every book, article, and blog on gardening. It was purported to have a variety of purposes. Mostly though I wrote it with some vague belief that it would be a resource to aid the future gardener, me. I created both a daily written log and a reference map of sorts. Honestly, I rarely referred to the map and almost never to the log.
Sure, when spending a bored winter day planning and dreaming of the next great garden I pull it out. But as a reference guide I pretty quickly have to throw it to the side with the recognition that the 'facts' recorded weren't always the facts in the literal ground. See quite often I'll plant something and it just doesn't make it. In it's place something else gets put and the garden reality moves along leaving behind a rather poor official record.
This year I tried to at least fix the factual nature of the 'map' by splitting it into two pieces, a planning map and an actual map. The plan allows me to wile away winter days comparing suggestions of various companion plants and a host of other thoughts on which beds would best grow which veggies. Planning is good. It forces you to think and it's pleasant. The actual map will, I hope, tell me what I planted where. Still this won't give me a good record of how the plant actually produced or if it died and was replaced with some thing else or hail hit or.... Mother Nature can throw haymakers, and she's always throwing you little jabs. She's not being mean just doing her job. Thanks for planning now duck, adapt, or die.
This year's adaptation in the garden seems to be an early spring. Slowly warming soil of spring but still spring. So the snows of my last blog were mixed with fairly normal freezes and the odd 80° day. I still am not sure if the nectarine tree survived this confusion having bloomed and started to leave out only to freeze three times. I saw two little pink blooms the other day but it still looks rough and the blooms could have been a death throe or maybe there will be nectarines - we'll see. Just as confusing while I was spreading wood chips this morning I saw a squash that had sprouted on it's own. Now the bed it was in was intended to be planted out with Butternut squash and that could be what it is, but it just showed up in some random compost. I didn't plant it. More to the point I was planning to start my squash tomorrow, indoors. It's four weeks before I would plant out my squash. Squash and most veggies seem to rely more on soil temperature and compost heats things up where as fruit trees seem to be more sensitive to ambient temperature. My planning tends to look more at the calendar with Mothers Day being our average last freeze. Should I just be thankful for the extra space in the sunroom and start jamming seeds in the bed. Heck an extra 4 weeks of a growing season would be great but the plan says otherwise, so...?
Lakewood the city I live in is a city by legal designation but a suburb in reality. These last two months my little piece of this 'burb has done a pretty good imitation of that little fictional city of Mayberry. Gardening and dog walking have, for most of the time I've lived here, been preoccupations of myself and a very few others. Now everyone has the toddlers in a little red wagon with husband and wife walking the dogs. More gardens have been spruced up and been created than I've ever seen. Perhaps most noticeable very few cars and if a car drives by they actually wave back. If you go back to Robert Moses and the other earliest creators of suburbs this pleasing two months is what they planned for and expected of suburbs. A great place to raise the kids and a family life of clean air, friends and a little garden out back. Suburbs too often were quite the opposite of the plan. A place where you drove into the garage, ignored your neighbors, ordered take-out and dropped the bored teenagers at the mall or let 'em go smoke pot and drink in some, little hidden from adults, spot. Thus these last two months have in some very real ways, for me, been an Eden.
Now I'm a heathen so I don't think the pandemic was the work of some plan by demons in an underworld ala Milton's Paradise Lost. Very real humans have however quite likely had a hand in both exploiting and perhaps creating this virus. I have to stop there for a moment and say that in my last blog that I put the blame on China for this virus. I was unsure if it was a 'natural' creation in an unsanitary meat market or a laboratory creation, but China.
I have changed my mind. I've changed it in two ways because of this article from Newsweek and a number of derivative reports. If this article is correct Dr Fauci and the US government funded a portion of the research of the Wuhan Chinese government lab to specifically 'study'/create enhanced Corona viruses. That is pretty demonic! Yeah I know they had a plan. This was going to be used to prepare us all in case Mother Nature did something stupid and unlikely - like creating this virus. Thing is they forgot to do half the work. Yeah they did the fun stuff that earns them the big bucks and accolades they did the research and wrote the papers but didn't make the public safe. No stockpile of masks and respirators big enough to fit the need, just wash your hands and shut down the economy. Poor planning or evil hmmm!
I have been noting, as I've written and offered links, of the other earthly planners who had likely no hand in creating the problem but are actively using it for their own purposes. Civil Liberties to these people are simply an inconvenience to their profit and power. You can go to Walmart but not church. Your Right to travel is not simply impeded but tracked via your phone. Open records and meetings are closed while literal trillions of dollars are created and distributed, dollars that you owe.
I like Mayberry. I liked every single show in each of the series and it's spin-offs. It offered an aspirational view of a world that we should reach for. I worry that as we leave the Mayberry period of this crisis not simply will the traffic increase and the waves decrease with the gardens and little red wagons. I worry that "for the public good" our Bill of Rights will be left shredded and our currency and economy will be whatever is worse than shredded. All that is left for you and I is to make a plan should that come to pass.
Chris Martenson has long spoken of 8 types of capital and the importance of each type to survive tough times. He talks about things like your health capital. This blog is titled and about small gardens and small governments as such I keep my focus mostly within a small portion of those 8 types of capital. One I rarely if ever have touched upon is financial capital. If you believe as I do that the wild printing of currency endangers your financial health trade your currency for money (and yeah there is a difference!). Do it soon. This is the fellow I use. He writes a fairly technical blog (and the subscription is free) but I use him because his history shows him as a man of principle and character and he is good to his word and expects the same.
Unless you believe this is the literal end, we are it would seem doomed to plan for the future. Part of that future, I hope, will be much smaller government. Government too small to trample your Rights or endanger your finances. That hope sprouted a small seed this week as Justin Amash announced he was seeking the Libertarian Party's nomination for President. Mr Amash is a sitting Congressman from Michigan (and now the 1st sitting Libertarian in Congress) and will likely bring to the race the much greater possibility of voters hearing the ideas of small government. Will he win? Honestly, it's a tiny tree, it will need to grow for a bit before it bears fruit. Winning would be anything which brings that future closer. I hope he'll earn your vote and support.
Plant an apple tree and show your hope for a future. Plant a garden for right now. Doug A.
Ah look, the apple tree has ripe fruit on it. I'll pick some he thought and load them into the old truck to sell at the farmers market. The market was opening he'd heard on the CB radio. Ewww the truck, he'd have to attach back up the battery and check that brake fluid that had been low back when he had sheltered in. He smiled as he thought about the bumper sticker he'd put on the truck and sell at his little stand with the apples.
" Oh Lord just give me one more quarantine
and I promise I won't piss it away"
Yeah that's the way it always starts in those Sci-Fi books. Now mind you it's a Sunday morning as I write and it did rain last night, so it is rather quiet and green outside my window. So, perhaps the chickadee is real but the apples on the tree was a bit of a literary stretch. I do have an apple tree, mind you. It and it's sisters are about the length of my little finger. So let's give it a few years before I count on fruit (and oh yeah it's May not August, so fruit - really Doug!)
From Edan till today apple trees are always a good place to start. First however Cooper needs his walk, there's half a pile of wood chips that need to get spread before the day heats up and it doesn't look like Deb is going to make me those blueberry pancakes I ordered up. (I think I actually heard her eyes roll when I told her a good wife would make 'em!) So, a bit to do and I'll be right back.
I think I told you about my little Albert Etter Pink Pearl apple tree that I had planted a couple of years back. Pink Pearl was a variety Mr Etter had breed back in the late 1800s in his orchards in California. It's fruit was a translucent skinned, red fleshed apple that in the pictures I saw was a real beauty. It was considered more of an apple for baking than fresh eating. More beauty over flavor.
Long story short it died. My desire to have a unique apple tree certainly didn't. Stark Bros and a host of other nurseries carry most of the common varieties you can buy and taste in the store, and that's good. It is hard to invest the growing time in a fruit tree with only a catalog description of what the apple will actually taste like. If you've got a hundred acre orchard - sure, easy to take a flyer on a variety. Apples, do vary tho' in flavor and if you're only growing one that is a big bet. The Pink Pearl had enticed me to give it a try purely on the uniqueness of it's red flesh.
After losing the Pink Pearl I learned that my niece would be going on a church mission. Part of her trip would land her in Kazakhstan, birthplace of the modern apple. I asked her to get me some apple seeds. I figured there had to be some interesting apples piled up in some little backwater market stand. Some tree known only to the grower with lineage right back to Eden. Plus throw in a story about "Oh yeah, my niece got me the seed for that tree on her trip to Kazakhstan" and even a so so apple would have cache. Well, a nasty little pandemic started circling the world about the same time as my niece. She got back safely but never touch down in Kazakhstan. My dream of a unique apple tree stayed on hold.
Meanwhile, just up the street Vitamin Cottage (the local health food store) got it in their heads to bring in for a brief visit a large variety of heirloom organic apples. Names I'd seen described in catalogs and articles. Names like Ananas Reinette, Cox Orange Pippin, Orleans - Wait go back one, Cox Orange Pippin, yeah that one. I'd come within a hare's breath of buying that one from Stark Bros. I'd shifted directions and gone for the Albert Etter mystique over a catalog described but unknown flavor. A half dozen little brown bags and my own little apple tasting session later. I was standing in my kitchen holding a core and extolling to Deb what an outstanding apple I'd just eaten. Not a big apple and russeted to an extent that it would likely get passed over sitting next to a display of Galas or Macintosh, but man what a flavor. Stark Bros was going to get an order in the morning. Heck I was tossing this core in the compost and placing the order right now! Yeah well you likely guessed it the cheap old Scotchman in me saw that core and realized those are seeds, plant 'em!
I've read enough about apples to realize that growing from seed is at best a crapshoot. Virtually all apples you see and buy are grown on grafted trees. Nurseries use a known and strong rootstock and graft a scion (branch from an existing tree of a known variety), essentially the old tree is cloned. Here I had a handful of seeds with their pollen source unknown added to whatever natural variability the other half of the DNA had hidden in it. But the seeds got planted and with our warm spring virtually everyone has sprouted in the garden. I'm not simply cheap, I have a gardeners heart. If you sprout in my garden I'll figure out how to work my garden plan around you're growing. So, I did transplant 'em from the horrible spot they were started but I guess I'm once again growing an apple tree.
"Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth". Mike Tyson elevated himself from pugilist to poet with this keen insight into the changing nature of life in this world. He's not known for a lot of other quotes but this one certainly hits these 'interesting times'.
Long before I began this blog I was keeping a garden journal. It was a suggestion from about every book, article, and blog on gardening. It was purported to have a variety of purposes. Mostly though I wrote it with some vague belief that it would be a resource to aid the future gardener, me. I created both a daily written log and a reference map of sorts. Honestly, I rarely referred to the map and almost never to the log.
Sure, when spending a bored winter day planning and dreaming of the next great garden I pull it out. But as a reference guide I pretty quickly have to throw it to the side with the recognition that the 'facts' recorded weren't always the facts in the literal ground. See quite often I'll plant something and it just doesn't make it. In it's place something else gets put and the garden reality moves along leaving behind a rather poor official record.
This year I tried to at least fix the factual nature of the 'map' by splitting it into two pieces, a planning map and an actual map. The plan allows me to wile away winter days comparing suggestions of various companion plants and a host of other thoughts on which beds would best grow which veggies. Planning is good. It forces you to think and it's pleasant. The actual map will, I hope, tell me what I planted where. Still this won't give me a good record of how the plant actually produced or if it died and was replaced with some thing else or hail hit or.... Mother Nature can throw haymakers, and she's always throwing you little jabs. She's not being mean just doing her job. Thanks for planning now duck, adapt, or die.
This year's adaptation in the garden seems to be an early spring. Slowly warming soil of spring but still spring. So the snows of my last blog were mixed with fairly normal freezes and the odd 80° day. I still am not sure if the nectarine tree survived this confusion having bloomed and started to leave out only to freeze three times. I saw two little pink blooms the other day but it still looks rough and the blooms could have been a death throe or maybe there will be nectarines - we'll see. Just as confusing while I was spreading wood chips this morning I saw a squash that had sprouted on it's own. Now the bed it was in was intended to be planted out with Butternut squash and that could be what it is, but it just showed up in some random compost. I didn't plant it. More to the point I was planning to start my squash tomorrow, indoors. It's four weeks before I would plant out my squash. Squash and most veggies seem to rely more on soil temperature and compost heats things up where as fruit trees seem to be more sensitive to ambient temperature. My planning tends to look more at the calendar with Mothers Day being our average last freeze. Should I just be thankful for the extra space in the sunroom and start jamming seeds in the bed. Heck an extra 4 weeks of a growing season would be great but the plan says otherwise, so...?
Lakewood the city I live in is a city by legal designation but a suburb in reality. These last two months my little piece of this 'burb has done a pretty good imitation of that little fictional city of Mayberry. Gardening and dog walking have, for most of the time I've lived here, been preoccupations of myself and a very few others. Now everyone has the toddlers in a little red wagon with husband and wife walking the dogs. More gardens have been spruced up and been created than I've ever seen. Perhaps most noticeable very few cars and if a car drives by they actually wave back. If you go back to Robert Moses and the other earliest creators of suburbs this pleasing two months is what they planned for and expected of suburbs. A great place to raise the kids and a family life of clean air, friends and a little garden out back. Suburbs too often were quite the opposite of the plan. A place where you drove into the garage, ignored your neighbors, ordered take-out and dropped the bored teenagers at the mall or let 'em go smoke pot and drink in some, little hidden from adults, spot. Thus these last two months have in some very real ways, for me, been an Eden.
Now I'm a heathen so I don't think the pandemic was the work of some plan by demons in an underworld ala Milton's Paradise Lost. Very real humans have however quite likely had a hand in both exploiting and perhaps creating this virus. I have to stop there for a moment and say that in my last blog that I put the blame on China for this virus. I was unsure if it was a 'natural' creation in an unsanitary meat market or a laboratory creation, but China.
I have changed my mind. I've changed it in two ways because of this article from Newsweek and a number of derivative reports. If this article is correct Dr Fauci and the US government funded a portion of the research of the Wuhan Chinese government lab to specifically 'study'/create enhanced Corona viruses. That is pretty demonic! Yeah I know they had a plan. This was going to be used to prepare us all in case Mother Nature did something stupid and unlikely - like creating this virus. Thing is they forgot to do half the work. Yeah they did the fun stuff that earns them the big bucks and accolades they did the research and wrote the papers but didn't make the public safe. No stockpile of masks and respirators big enough to fit the need, just wash your hands and shut down the economy. Poor planning or evil hmmm!
I have been noting, as I've written and offered links, of the other earthly planners who had likely no hand in creating the problem but are actively using it for their own purposes. Civil Liberties to these people are simply an inconvenience to their profit and power. You can go to Walmart but not church. Your Right to travel is not simply impeded but tracked via your phone. Open records and meetings are closed while literal trillions of dollars are created and distributed, dollars that you owe.
I like Mayberry. I liked every single show in each of the series and it's spin-offs. It offered an aspirational view of a world that we should reach for. I worry that as we leave the Mayberry period of this crisis not simply will the traffic increase and the waves decrease with the gardens and little red wagons. I worry that "for the public good" our Bill of Rights will be left shredded and our currency and economy will be whatever is worse than shredded. All that is left for you and I is to make a plan should that come to pass.
Chris Martenson has long spoken of 8 types of capital and the importance of each type to survive tough times. He talks about things like your health capital. This blog is titled and about small gardens and small governments as such I keep my focus mostly within a small portion of those 8 types of capital. One I rarely if ever have touched upon is financial capital. If you believe as I do that the wild printing of currency endangers your financial health trade your currency for money (and yeah there is a difference!). Do it soon. This is the fellow I use. He writes a fairly technical blog (and the subscription is free) but I use him because his history shows him as a man of principle and character and he is good to his word and expects the same.
Unless you believe this is the literal end, we are it would seem doomed to plan for the future. Part of that future, I hope, will be much smaller government. Government too small to trample your Rights or endanger your finances. That hope sprouted a small seed this week as Justin Amash announced he was seeking the Libertarian Party's nomination for President. Mr Amash is a sitting Congressman from Michigan (and now the 1st sitting Libertarian in Congress) and will likely bring to the race the much greater possibility of voters hearing the ideas of small government. Will he win? Honestly, it's a tiny tree, it will need to grow for a bit before it bears fruit. Winning would be anything which brings that future closer. I hope he'll earn your vote and support.
Plant an apple tree and show your hope for a future. Plant a garden for right now. Doug A.
Love to read your stuff, Doug. It's not the end, but it for sure is a diminishing of some of our liberties, compliments of the governments of the world. Blame could be rightfully placed on the WHO who declared it a pandemic and suggested the only way to stop it would be to lock ourselves up. Who is WHO? Well, seems the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is like the main financial supporter! Well, enough said! My vote will once again be for the Libertarian! I have voted Libertarian for the last few elections!!
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