For those who read the tiny stories in the back of the Finance section of world newspapers, a recurring theme is apparent. Yet another internationally owned central American mine development has been held up by those blasted peasants. Strangely, these people prefer to cling to their primitive ways rather than move into the shanty town created for them down the mountain. They’re building makeshift roadblocks and sending their grandmothers out to stand in front of the giant trucks. And on our side of the great divide, it’s holding up business and upsetting the investors.

On the one hand, environmentally attuned Canadians feel empathy for these people, who have been managing to live in a modest manner yet fill their needs. But on the other hand … how are we going to keep buying all our gizmos if we haven’t got those metals? We need more little tools than ever to get by. In the old days, a telephone and a typewriter got us through. Now we need phones that takes photos, printers to print them, laptops and blue tooth headsets and flash drives and rechargers and ipods and cables.  And we need a lot of them. They don’t have to last – we can afford to buy more if these break down. They’re cheap.

Somewhere, a bulldozer is poised at the edge of a jungle. Somewhere, a family stands at the edge of their farm where the tailing pond is going to be.  I hope these people know this is for a worthy cause. I hope they know that little sis is able to download all her favourite music now, and that brother Jim can now play computer games lying down on his bed instead of sitting up at a desk. I hope they realize that mom can just phone home from the grocery store instead of making a paper list, and that dad can keep all his addresses in one tiny handheld device. And that everyone can turn the TV channel without even getting up.

They’d understand if they knew all this, wouldn’t they?

Oh wait … if I was on a desert island, I wouldn’t need a bunch of gardening/food security books, would I. It would probably be one of those “single palm tree” islands, too, and I would be the one with the hammock. So let’s move this fantasy along – I chew the single palm tree down with my bare teeth and float it to a nice wooded island off  the British Columbia coast. That’s better – Marine zone 8 – something I can handle. I would drag my trusty palm up onto the beach, unzip my waterproof book bag, and there would be …

The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery. Instructions on raising chickens, growing buckwheat, food preservation, fixing fences, tending goats,hydroponics, making cheese, raising bees …complete with joyful comments from past readers. It’s been out forever and deserves to live on. Order it from your book store.

Making Plant Medicine by Richo Cech. The very best beginner into mid range herbalists’ handbook for all the main medicines, and for understanding the plant uses (with the often overlooked time of harvest), and he has kindly worked out lots of messy proportions for us. www.horizonherbs.com , or I usually have a few in stock if you’re by.

The Encyclopedia of Edible Plants of North America by Francois Couplan, Ph.D.  Once you know what plant you’re looking at, this book will tell you what part is edible and how to prepare it. An amazing number of ornamental, wild plants and weeds have edible parts. Would be great to have this in an emergency. Order from your nearest bookstore.

Gaia’s Garden, A guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway    Just in case you want to understand permaculture more deeply without actually having the need for three months on a desert island to absorb Bill Mollinson’s  Permaculture Designers’ Manual.  Easy to find in the bookstore.

Oh … Food Security for the Faint of Heart by Robin Wheeler.  Easy to read book on how to prepare for hard times, maximize garden space, glean from the ocean, eat weeds, get through an earthquake, make teas and more. Order from your bookstore or from me at www.ediblelandscapes.ca, or I usually have some at home.

You may have noticed that I haven’t suggested you buy from Amazon or Indigo. These giant book buyers may give you a deal, but if you want your favourite authors to survive, you’ll buy from an outfit that will give them their whole 5% of cover price … which the big box stores will not. As far as I can see from my contract, the sale price is coming out of the authors’ hides.

There. That’s a pretty small bookbag, but it contains a huge span of information and ideas. And give me a break –  I was trying to row a palm tree!

(thanks for the idea, Christine!)

Well, I’ll admit it. I had quite the downer moment last week. And nothing much has changed. There are hours of work to do in terms if pushing a constitutional food challenge forward.  But within moments of my last blog, Denise forwarded this:

 
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I was cheered by this. And then I had a phone call with a local native elder, and she reminded me that we are due a plague, and how nicely that would bring balance back to the world. So many angles! And all about equilibrium.

Because I’m a good Canadian, I try to be nice. But sometimes things just hit a fever pitch and I have to dump. So I’m going to ruin your day.

Here’s the latest influx of food politics –

Monsanto, Bayers and friends are preparing to register over 1600 new plant patents for North American food plants. And not just the plants themselves – they want to patent the characteristics of the plant – drought resistance, for instance. Seed companies have already successfully sued NGO seed banks for competing against them, so guess what will happen when all these plants have patents on them?  And now that they are successfully ridding Europe’s shelves of those oh-so-unregistered alternate medicines, they are turning their eyes back to North America for that as well. For our safety. And I was just told, now that people are turning to organic and ethically raised meat animals, that abattoirs in BC will no longer be accepting pasture raised pigs. They have to be raised indoors. And small BC pork producers are being paid to stop raising pigs.  Leave it to the big guys. That leaves only factory farms. And I have been told that back east, even sheep are on the list for factory farming – must be indoors. And chickens – laws are in the air to keep them, even our small flocks, inside as well. For our health. Of course, on the big farms these animals will now all need medicating – 70% of our antibiotics go into our meat animals … and then into our water systems. But that’s okay – the pharmaceutical industry is working on something to fight the superbug.

Now, I could be freaking about this, and I should be. But I realize I live in what is termed a democracy, and the masses will win. On hearing the above, the common person will sigh and lift their shoulders and go back to buying their Maple Leaf bacon and factoried chicken. And I realize it is not the large corporations I am fighting, it is the nice Canadian, the broken American, who will not fight their way free of this. 

A man on Vancouver Island wants to challenge the Constitution in terms of the existing meat laws that restrict our freedom to consume preferred farm food. But he can’t get help. No one is sending money; affected farmers cannot even raise the energy to send in affidavits to support his case. Communities are not rising up. He needs support right now. Our tiny group, the Farm Food Freedom Fighters, has three active members. And I’m pooped. I feel too tired even to explain to the few people who might respond to this what this man needs in the way of help, because I will doubt they will follow through and my time will be still more empty air.

I need a job. My pipes are frozen. The car needs work.  I’m burnt out. That will leave two Freedom Fighters. Everyone else is “busy”. We are “too busy”.

We live in interesting times. We get the world we deserve. We don’t know how to fight. But there is still a lot of fun to be had out there. I think I will go have fun.

That will leave two.

But I’ve depressed you. That’s not very nice. So let’s try this. Let’s imagine we live in a giant cycle, and that this is a part of a cycle of power. And it will end. We don’t know when, but it will.

There. I feel nice again.

Timely Action mid November

It’s another very mild day here on coastal British Columbia. But I spent a bit of last evening reading about snow predictions for the winter and I’m just peering about the yard, wondering what problems can be averted with a little attention now. One pattern I’ve seen too many years in a row is fences getting overgrown with matted blackberry or hops vines, then the snow piles up on that and pulls the fence down. It’s definitely a good time to get out there with the loppers and cut the bush back on each side of the fence – this will save lots of hours rebuilding in the spring. And while you’re walking the fence line, make sure your fence posts are perfectly perpendicular – if one is out of alignment, a good wind will pull more of them out kilter, and then a whole section will come down.  Driving rocks of different sizes down into the post hole so the fence is upright and solid is a really worthwhile thing to do.

Scott and Hayley started off the process of putting all my potted nursery plants away for the winter. That helps a lot with cold stress. All potted plants are vulnerable to cold from all directions, while plants in the ground only suffer from cold from above. It’s a good idea to cluster your nursery plants under a tree, a work bench or picnic table so that only the outer ring suffer the effect of outside cold. You’re also preventing snow load problems – the constant dark, damp pressure that can rot crowns out of plants so easily. I do tuck plants into my greenhouse, but I’m careful now. I’ve forgotten about them, and have had them dehydrate to death before I rediscover them in spring. At least the outdoor plants have all that humidity! Tender plants like lemon verbena and passionflower do get brought into the greenhouse, and then I try like hell to remember them about the end of February, when they’ll need a good soak, but still need protection from outdoor freezing. Having a good stock of winter greens in there with them will assure I make more visits and tend to everyone’s needs.

Most garden beds have been put away for the winter, with layers of cardboard and then straw.

Tools. Still a few lying around and I can’t find my precious tree planting shovel! All my best attempts at good habits fail, because I hear an expected phone call or a car pulls up, and a tool gets dropped to the ground. I know they need bringing under cover, and to have soil washed off, perhaps a good oiling is in order as well.

And remember where your important tools are – that rake you might need to pull snow off vulnerable roof tops – where is it? Or the shovel to get into your crawl space for emergency equipment – nice to have these things hanging near at hand and not behind the farthest barn!

Now – all I have to do is take my own advice!

And the plants. We now know of and measure the electromagnetic energy, the humidity, the heat, the hormones, the volatile gasses and sensuous resins that a plant emits from all of its parts, and we know that nearby plants react to these signals constantly. And we know that we ourselves undergo change to our brain chemistry when drifting through these signals. And the plants respond to us, too.  Their chemistry is affected by our electromagnetic energy, the heat of our bodies, our hormones.  A whole flicker of conversation shifts when we enter a clearing, and our body knows it is happening – it is part of the conversation.  But sometimes it takes our minds a long time to catch up.

One day I discovered a rat in a live trap that I had set in my crawl space. We both jumped when I opened the crawl space door.  And then I spoke in surprise, and the rat relaxed its body and came to the wires and looked curiously at me. I went upstairs to get it some food and returned, and hand fed it slices of banana through the wire bars. It ate its banana pieces calmly and I ate some too, and I thought, “This rat knows my voice and my scent, probably grew up knowing me. Hears me on the phone, smells what I am cooking for dinner, knows where I have been by the tang of my boots and hand tools. I am part of its world and it is at ease with me. How can I not know a creature who knows so much about me?”  And the squirrel knows me and my habits and has learned to co-exist. And of course the birds in my yard know me, and the raven who flies over the garden and yells at me knows me.  One day, it dropped a whole muffin beside me in the gravel as it flew the length of our very quiet road.

Why do I think I am alone?

It took a while for me to see that, in my early desperation to be with humans, I would sometimes be bored and disgusted with the drunkenness of the bar, the banal chatter of the coffee house, and that the place I was becoming more content was with my bees, my angry squirrels, my thousands and thousands of plants emitting their daily gasses for my brain and heart to absorb. Now I try to be more considerate of how I affect them, as well.

It wasn’t a pretty time, living through that early loneliness. And I still get bursts of angst at what the local flora and fauna are not providing me.

But I often wonder if the cure for the human condition – our constant disconnectedness – is only as far away as the nearest stump.

Pat and Ken have returned to their travel trailer in my driveway for the night, and I sit surrounded by what they left behind them – hundreds of packets of potential life. Pat has given me one of her life’s work – her seed collection of over 250 varieties of herb.

Pat connected with me last year and told me of her extensive collection of plants on Saltspring, and that she sold the seed and plants. I was a bit miffed that almost under my nose, someone was having amazing luck with sometimes touchy plants and then growing them out successfully all over her property. I wanted to know how she was doing this, and gahhhhhh …. I can hear the dry howl of a plant keener … I wanted some of those plants! They were on my list.

I immediately made plans to get my anxious mitts on some of that precious gene pool.

It is inevitable that one day, the pharmaceutical industry will find a way to reduce the capacity of community herbalists. It will become more and more important that live plants exist in every community so that individuals can make up their own mind about how they want to address their medical needs, and then to have access to the plant they want. We need many pockets of plantings, and a wide variety of gene pool, and someone has to know where it is.

But time after time, my efforts to get some of Pat’s plant material met with failure. Something was wrong, for sure. There was the hint that major illness had struck, and this seemed to continue through visits via friends as well as through inquiring phone calls. And then Pat called me back herself. She was better, but knew she could not continue handling and saving hundreds of plants a year. Would I like her seed collection?

Naturally, my heart gave a huge leap, and then twisted through various loops of thought. Wow! No more counting my pennies as I dreamed my way through the Richters catalogue. I’d have access to many plants I had never even seen! But … but what a responsibility. There are not many collections of this size in BC. And I was to mother this one. How could I keep all these species alive? Could I afford one more really huge project? Or was this it – my job of the decade? And I knew clearly the work involved. I only save about two dozen types of seed a year, but find the task tedious. Harvesting. Cleaning, labelling and storing, year after year. So I started trying to sell the seed, thinking the money would make it worthwhile, but I sell almost nothing and was ready to give up. It is a labour of love. Now – add a couple hundred more items to save?
As you have figured, I said yes to Pat, honoured to be considered and knowing that somehow I would find a way to grow into this. And tonight she showed up with her husband, Ken, to hand over her decades of work. Pat is still weak from the series of illnesses that plagued her, and she admitted to shedding a few tears as she packed up the seeds. Seeing the many racks of carefully and painstakingly preserved seeds, I can only stand in respect of the many hours spent keeping these plants available to all.

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. But I keep handling packet after packet, feeling all the little pulses of energy. Pondering. Pondering how energy gets passed on and around. How these seeds have persisted and been passed onwards for centuries. How things we love get passed onward and how flow and life just keep skidding and bumping along … right into my house.

I’ll worry about the logistics tomorrow.

Brett from Rolling Earth was by today and we mulled over the problem of keeping mobile homes warm in the winter. It’s supposed to be a doozy this year, with the coldest weather in 50 years. If we all prepare like little ants, that will just about guarantee balmy weather, so let’s all pitch in. If it freezes up hard, I’ll know someone out there slacked off.

I bought a mobile because it was the only home I could afford. She was an old hulk in a corner of a mobile home park when I first laid eyes on her. She had rust running down her flanks, had wires sticking out at strange angles, dissolving windowsills and cracked steps. She was almost 45 years old at the time, and beyond some tar being poured onto her badly dented roof, apparently had never been maintained. I loved her and pleaded to buy her on the spot. Bruce Lasuta, my real estate guy, argued for rationality. Go inside first, look around, ask some questions, he said. But I didn’t care. I could afford her just as she stood. She had walls and a roof. She had a flush toilet and drains. I could fix the rest.

I’ve had her for 14 years now and she has been worth every bit of work. She has protected me from snow storms and bears, has helped me welcome spring and prepare for fall and I never owed another penny on her, fixing her up as I got $30 or $50 to spend. But golly, this old babe is cold. Her skin is thin – metal sheets over three inch insulation, single ply windows in aluminium frames.

I’ve had lots of time to consider her strengths and weaknesses. Her strengths – you can drag her to a patch of land and have most of a house in one day (I’ve done this to her twice now). She is built on sturdy steel H beams and could be built from the floor up again if I really wanted to.  She could be jacked up for a decent crawl space or basement, or have a frame built over her for a second floor. If she leaks, you pour some tar on her and it stops. Oh – and I could afford her – did I mention that? I got a whole house for the price of a car.

Weaknesses – she needed some work, that’s for sure. the carpet needed reaming out and replacing, it took layers of paint to cover the nicotine dribbles, her pipes run almost horizontal to fit into the subfloor, and her door sills are made of plastic. And she’s cold. But the cheapest fixes have been very helpful, to my immense glee.

Having a two inch diameter hole drilled through the wall behind the woodstove really has reduced drafts. It seems crazy to create still another hole in the colander-like carcass of the normal mobile, but when a fire can pull all the cold air it wants from a couple of feet away, it doesn’t have to yank it from all the way down the hall. The wind chill factor has dropped accordingly.

Skirting the undersides in was a big and instantaneous help. It did cost a lot to hire a friend to create the skirting, but much of the wood sheathing was cut from dismantled equipment cases from Howe Sound Pulp and Paper. I will continue to seek used Styrofoam to insulate the inner skirt one day. The difference this skirt makes is so distinct that if the small entry door is left open on a winter day, I can feel the chill seeping upwards right away.

Lots of heat is lost through windows. I certainly do put plastic up over single pane windows. I don’t care if that only helps by a degree or two – every bit counts. And I close my curtains at night as my depression era mother taught me to do, to create that envelope of still air for another couple of degrees.

As for the windows, for Christmas each year, my parents have been buying me a twin seal and now I only have two old ones left to exchange. 

Another tip – We’re told to close up unused rooms to conserve heat, but in the Wild Wet Coast, that leads to a lot of mildew and rot. Leaving a light on in a closed room really does help keep the humidity down.

We’ve been told to avoid incandescent lights because they emit heat – but I was pretty excited to hear that they could warm and dry as well as enlighten, so now I leave a couple of incandescents on during the day all through the rainy and cold season. They do not draw as much electricity as a heater does, while helping with the chill and damp factor. Even a fan in a closed room would keep the rot down.

One day when I’m rich and famous, I’ll have the underside of the mobile thickly insulated, and maybe have a roof put on, and thick siding installed. But for now, I’m getting by with my blankie, woodstove and cat.

I have just returned from Seven Springs in Pennsylvania, where I was invited by Mother Earth News to do workshops at their giant organic farming fair. I had great trepidations about the journey – I live very happily alone in a quiet clearing and it is all I can normally do to handle the calls and visitors that flood through in a week. But I knew I was looking at a chance to see exhibits of every sort, to hear speakers of renown, meet other New Society writers, and oh, I must say it out loud … I wanted a hotel room. I wanted a space that did not leak, was not salted with mouse shit, where chickens did not squabble and tomatoes did not rot. Where someone would make my bed, rinse the coffee maker and put my shoes back in the hall. Where dinner is always ready and there are no dishes to wash. How about four days of heaven?

It obviously was not real heaven, but it was extremely close. Almost 10,000 people flooded through the maze of halls and outdoor tents during the weekend, and it was all I could do to remain composed and centred amongst the heaving and shoving, loudspeakers, crying babies and flood of sensory messages. And it is true that I would run down the halls early afternoons to the far end of the hotel, the very quiet part, and lock myself in my spacious suite (which did not have buckets of rainwater to step around), throw myself onto the king size bed (recently remade, that no cat had puked on) amidst the masses of pillows completely unstained by well water, to realign my molecules in quiet, untomato scented peace.  It occurred to me that I had a hedonist hiding in me, very close to skin level. Very close.

But the hobnobbing. The shoulder rubbing. The sheer delight in drinking and dining with fellow writers, studiers of ethanol and wind turbines, of communal living and straw bale building. Of electric cars and organic cotton. Living historians for the Whole Earth Catalog and creators of The Farm. I skirted around their outer fringe for a day before being sucked into the vortex.

By day, between my own workshops, I visited booths that promoted farm stays and herbal medicines, and I met and traded information with seed collectives. I watched dogs push sheep through metal gates with only the flick of a hand for direction, and scratched the necks of patient alpacas. Real food was almost impossible to find. Lineups were horrendous and I resorted to a habit of grabbing a cookie at the almost empty bakery and waiting for late afternoon for the beer and hobnobbing to begin, to end in late evening with a shared and noisy restaurant meal. I slurped down more beer in four days than I normally drink in several months, and loved every drop and had no hangovers.

On my last bleary eyed morning, I could barely force another info-crammed CD or booklet into my bag. I realized I may be patted down at the airport for holding farm material up my sleeves, seed brochures in my underwear, chicken books down my pantlegs.

And flew home overstuffed, temporarily sated, exhausted and happy and amazed at the humans in the world and in our common battle.

And entered my silent home, emptied the rainwater basins, shook the mouse shit out of my facecloth, and observed my heaving travel bag.

I have a lot of unpacking to do, in so many senses.

(sending thanks to Erin, Heather, EJ, Ryan and Sarah for helping to make this possible!)

Some times I hear something that just fills me with glee. Harry Burton, Apple Guru from Saltspring, was doing a workshop here this summer and handed me a piece of delicious, life affirming info. I was apologizing to the crowd as I showed Harry a small apple tree with a serious case of scab. Harry got excited pointing these dark, hardened patches to the crowd. Scab is a symptom of exposure to fungi. And this stimulates salvestrols, which are cancer fighting elements that occur in fruits and veggies that have never been exposed to fungicides. So here we had evidence of which apples were most likely to contain salvestrols.  Scab – one of the conditions that we've been trying to breed out of apples for decades, in fact could be slowing or preventing cancer cells from establishing! I love a twist in the plot. It reminded me that many plant constituents exist to save the plant from viruses and other attackers, so sometimes the mostly motley of them are fullest of the constituents that saved them – and will save us. I chose my herbs a bit differently now that I know that.

My second bit of delight occurred when Ian Lai was giving us a workshop on fermentation. He was teaching us how to make vinegars and fermented beverages without resorting to store bought assistance. How can we start our fruit fermenting? It turns out that darn fruit fly carries a compound on the base of its minuscule little feet that start the process. Hence, if wanting to ferment something, just let the fruit flies have a few minutes with it, and then go about your business. I loved that, too. I got curious about how many other "bad" things were wonderful. Probably lots of them. Based on what an old-timer here said, there is a chance that apple scab, which is caused by fungus, actually helps fight cancer in humans.