Posts Tagged compost heap

Inherently Impermanent

Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Burning Man, Homesteading on June 15th, 2010

Gardening is filled with such extremes of emotion for me. Successes really fill me with joy…

First batch of cucumber pickles is sitting in the fridge…

Yellow squash and zucchini are producing really a ridiculous amount of fruit. Say what you will, you can always rely on squash to outgrow your garden beds and outproduce everything else on the planet. It’s too bad that, somehow, I ended up with about four yellow squash plants to every one zucchini. Zucchini is really much more delicious IMO, especially breaded and fried.

The butternuts are starting to set fruit. It’ll be a loooong time before they’re ready to harvest, but it’s still nice to see.

But then the setbacks just crush me. We had a big windstorm roll through yesterday and then again today. Just amazing gusts of wind knocking tree limbs down and damn near capsizing our baby walnut tree.

The corn got mowed down. I’m leaving it along to see if it manages to recover. The roots seem to be mostly intact and the stalks, for the most part, don’t seem to be broken, but it’s just heartbreaking.

And then there’s some kind of fungal disease or another eating at and rotting away at least some of damn near all my plants. I swear, sometimes I want a do-over so bad. As if next time I’ll get it exactly right. But of course, that’s not how it’ll go. Next time there’ll be some other problem to solve.

A lot of energy in modern life is spent trying to get rid of undesirable outcomes. Really, most of you readers, and myself of course, live in an extravagantly refined environment that nearly-instantly caters to our every whim. Temperature and humidity are controlled. Food of any sort is at our reach, whether it’s a frozen treat, a cold glass of milk, a bowl of cereal, or a tropical fruit. Want to see a movie or talk to a friend? Television, cell phones, home entertainment systems, and the Internet are here to serve. From this perspective, the unpredictably catastrophic nature of farming is completely alien—which is not to say that the same, “cater-to-your-whim,” attitude doesn’t exist in agriculture. For every fungus or insect you don’t like, there’s a chemical from Dow or Monsanto to treat it, but in trying to garden simply and organically, I’ve decided to try other approaches first.

And so I accept that, maybe, despite my best efforts, I’m going to lose every stick of corn I planted to a wind-storm. Maybe that harvest of beans was the last one before fungus turns the plants to mush and I have to pull them out of the beds and burn them to keep the spores from propagating in the compost heap. Maybe I won’t get a single tomato because they’ll all get blossom end rot or early blight or who-the-hell-knows-what other of the thousands of maladies that can afflict a tomato plant. And you know what else? Maybe my house doesn’t have to be 72 degrees 24-hours a day (well, it’s not, because we’ve decided not to use central air).

This outlook seems very consistent with my participation in burns. We build an enormous effigy every year only to light it on fire and burn it to the ground, and I see that as an incredibly subversive act in a world that attempts to preserve everything—youth, money, status, posessions—indefinitely. It’s not wanton destruction to me. It’s a statement that nothing in the world is permanent, and the things that we value most can be taken away by sheer chance, without our consent or participation or culpability, and that’s okay. It has to be okay, because it IS. And acting as if what IS is not is a sure way to bad outcomes.

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Pig Appreciation Moment

Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading on June 5th, 2010

Today, Issa and I mucked out the pigs’ stall for real. She had cleaned out the bedding before, but it was in need of a thorough mucking. More in need than we had realized. There were some spots where the pigs had urinated in the stall, and we had thrown down some more hay or straw on top of it, not realizing how deep it really went. When I dug into the area with a garden rake, it became clear that the entire top inch of dirt was soaked, had been for a while, and was happily composting.

Well-balanced compost has basically no odor at all. Un-balanced compost, like a pee-spot that has had bedding thrown on it a few times, smells… well, it’s a special smell all its own. We thoroughly raked out all the wet dirt and threw it on the compost heap. It turned out that much of the left side of the pigs’ stall had been used as a bathroom. Pigs normally don’t do that where they live, but the stall is big enough that they still had plenty of room to stay away from the bathroom areas, so I guess they figured why bother going out in the hot sun?

After cleaning out the stall, we raked some hay from the field and threw it in big, deep piles in the stall, covering the areas where the pigs had been peeing. We’ve learned that we don’t have to spread bedding at all. Just dump it in a pile and the pigs will have a grand old time rooting through it and spreading it all over the place. The sweet smell of the hay happily contrasted with the previous smell. The pigs seemed to agree. Instead of getting excited, they were very calm and contemplative, laying in the soft hay and quietly munching on it.

Here’s a video. Nothing exciting, just two adorable pigs, happily laying in some fresh hay, munching and being pigs. As mundane as that sounds, it’s quite novel to me, and maybe it will be to you too.

Times like this, I feel really privileged to get to know these animals. They’re really delightful in every way, and nothing like the stereotype that I had in my head. It’s stupid that it never occurred to me before these pigs that food animals could have wonderful personalities, could express happiness, curiosity, playfulness, and so on. I woke the pigs up this morning with some bok choy from the garden. They sleepily wobbled out of the stall, yawning and groggy, and I could almost hear them mumbling, “Must… make… coffee.”

I realize that the “privilege” of getting to raise these animals is very concrete. I’m privileged to have the money to buy property where I can raise pigs. I’m privileged to be able to afford the animals in the first place. I’m privileged to have a work-out-of-the-house job that lets me spend so much time enjoying them. Not everybody can have that experience, even if they want to. That being said, I think it’s a real tragedy that so few of us get to know that the animals we eat are capable of being like this. Having known these pigs, I am more motivated than ever to find ways to opt out of the factory-farming system.

For comparison, here is how the pork that you and I buy at the grocery store and in restaurants is probably raised:

Before I knew Hampie and Yorkie, I was disgusted by images like that. Now, it just breaks my fucking heart.

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