Finding Our Family Footprint

Eating Local

2011-08-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Mollie and I rode our bikes to a local orchard where we bought fresh peaches, blackberries, and blueberries and where we also picked 4 quarts of raspberries! We have raspberries in our yard that will be ripe soon, but we thought it would be nice to take advantage of the season and pick some at the orchard as well. That way we can eat raspberries to our heart's content. Raspberries are my favorite, favorite fruit.

We have been reveling in the delicious taste sensations of the berries and have been able to gobble them up by the handful. I love having so many raspberries and blueberries that I can eat and eat and eat them. I often think that a bear must feel the same way! It is also nice to know that we can eat as many peaches as we want to - and they are absolutely delicious.

We had a lovely bike ride, supported a local business, bought locally grown food (basically - the blueberries are from Michigan), had fun picking berries, and got some good exercise. Mollie said that the bike ride made her feel so much better about getting the food. Tomorrow morning we will bike down to the farmer's market to pick up our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box that will be full of locally grown vegetables from a local farm. And we are picking cucumbers, tomatoes, herbs, and potatoes out of our garden on a daily basis! Tonight everything we had for dinner was from our homegrown and right from the garden. We picked a huge tomato that melted in our mouths - I mean it was sooooo tasty!

Local food is good for the environment, but it also just tastes GREAT!

EcoVillage at Ithaca, New York

2011-07-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

We stayed at EcoVillage at Ithaca on our way to Boston and we found a wonderful place. When we checked into the Bed and Breakfast the first thing the owner did was to show us the raspberries and greens we could pick in front of the house. Then he gave us a quart of fresh sugar snap peas from the local farm that is part of the EcoVillage and a quart of fresh local blueberries. We were able to attend their board meeting in the evening and learn about some of the issues they are dealing with - how to write the lease on the land for the farmer who grows organic food on their property and supplies the village with food, and how to deal with people building campfires on the property. We also met the Executive Director, Liz Walker who wrote two books: "EcoVillage at Ithaca, Pioneering a Sustainable Culture," and "Choosing a Sustainable Future, Ideas and Inspiration from Ithaca, NY."

There is much to tell about this place, but suffice it to say that this morning Mollie and I went for a walk in the trails that they have cut through the wood and ate handfuls of wild black raspberries. As we neared the bend toward the community garden we were met by some very friendly and sweet chickens who greeted us hoping we would feed them. We also ran across a local villager who gave us handfuls of basil, some tomatoes, a cucumber, a fantastic purple onion and some fresh garlic. He just handed it to us from his garden and said he always grows more than he can use. So very nice - Mollie and I were really struck with the openness and friendliness of the community, and also with the richness of life here. It is not monetarily rich, but rather rich in life and spirit.

Compost

2011-06-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

OK, so I know that it's probably sort of weird to be really into compost - being that it's decomposing garbage and has a bunch of bugs in it, but I think that compost is the coolest thing! Mollie started several compost piles for her Science Fair project in 5th grade. This one was the pile she put small sticks and stems in. Over the past few years we have used one pile for our kitchen scraps and leaves, this pile for small sticks and stems, and then one other pile for larger wood chips and bark. This pile is now rich compost and can be used on our gardens - amazing! There is something about the cycle of life in the compost pile that captures my attention. The fact that we can throw sticks, wood chips, grass, leaves, and all of our kitchen scraps in a pile, bugs can chomp away on them, the sun, rain, and snow can do their magic, and we can end up with rich compost to put in the garden is just cool - I don't know what else to say about it!

We don't throw away any of our yard waste because we try to use it for various purposes. We put the weeds around the trees to mulch them or, if they don't have roots in them, we put them right on the compost pile. We use the sticks for kindling for our winter fires, and we use the grass clippings from mowing for mulching the garden beds. I like that we are actually using our yard for something purposeful instead of just cutting grass and throwing away the yard waste. We are using the things in the yard to enrich the soil so we can grow more food.

Back Yard Gardens

2011-06-28T15:38:00.000-07:00

Sunchokes by the creek (on the left), hardy kiwi growing on the lattice of the outdoor swing, and zucchini and cucumbers growing in one of the back beds. These are a few of the things we have planted in the last two years. We also have butternut squash, lots of tomatoes, more rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, garlic, and more potatoes. We've planted paw paw trees (a fruit tree native to this area), chestnut trees, and locust trees (for wood). The hardy kiwi (below) hasn't flowered or produced fruit and the blueberries are sort of pitiful because it turns out that blueberries are not really native to this area. But, it's a learning process and maybe the kiwi and the blueberries will produce fruit at some point.

I want to plant some more paw paw trees back by the creek and I also want to plant a few mulberry trees. Both fruits grow in the wild here, so I'd like to experiment with growing them. Paw paw fruits taste a bit like banana custard, believe it or not! And the mulberries will be a replacement for our poor little blueberry bushes.

Last week I put in a few more beds with onions, stinging nettle, Italian dandelion, brussel sprouts and burdock. These beds are sort of experimental because I had a lot of seeds left from the past few years and I wanted to get them in the ground and see what happens. I'm still experimenting and learning so sometimes I plant things just to see what they will look like!

I'm going to start some sea kale and some Good King Henry from seed and plant those once they have grown a bit. I've got the seeds and just need to get them in under the grow lights. They are both perennial vegetables and I want to get them established in the garden. I'm also going to order Egyptian walking onions because they will keep growing from year to year. I want to put in some wild onions (ramps), but I don't know where to get them yet.

I wish there were local nurseries where you could buy some of these perennial vegetables. I have to really search for them, track them down in different catalogs, and then order them. Well, I guess that's part of the fun.

Front Yard Edible Garden

2011-06-28T15:24:00.000-07:00

Our front yard garden is full of flowers that attract beneficial insects like butterflies and bees. They also attract hummingbirds and, in fact, this morning a hummingbird spent quite a bit of time feeding right next to me! It was really lovely - I don't think I've ever been quite so close to a hummingbird before.

We also have edible and useful flowers like echinacea, safflower, nasturtiums, scarlet runner beans, borage, lavender, and buckwheat. I have tried to find as many edible flowers as possible and experiment with planting them. Hollyhocks and perennial sunflowers are supposed to be edible as well, but I haven't tried eating them yet.

Other edible plants that are hidden in this flower garden are: rhubarb, potatoes, strawberries (both domesticated and wild strawberries), currents, mint, comfrey, tomatoes, blueberries, serviceberries, sunchokes, a wild plum tree, and a filbert tree.

The long term goal is to fill the yard with edible plants and have very little grass. We have about 2/3 of an acre and right now we have to spend time mowing every few weeks, but we are making progress toward our goal as you can see from the photos.

Strawberries, Raspberries, Rhubarb

2011-06-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

We have been able to harvest a lot of strawberries and raspberries this year as you can see in the photos! It rained a lot earlier in the month and the garden exploded - especially the strawberries! I have also harvested quite a bit of rhubarb and I think that will go on all summer.

One of the things I think about often is how we would actually feed ourselves with our garden. We have a lot of food in it now and we are developing some perennial beds, but most of what we eat still comes from the store. I think the reality is that if we want to feed ourselves with the fruits of our own labor it will truly become labor!

Mollie is in China right now so we have been watching a lot of movies about China while she is gone. Today I watched a movie about planting and harvesting rice, and I realized all over again how an agrarian lifestyle is really a lifestyle, not just a hobby. People have been harvesting rice in some of the established riced fields for hundreds of years and their whole lives revolve around the planting and harvesting of rice. The neighbors work together and the community is centered around the rice fields.

Saul and I work full time and Mollie is in school, so it is not possible for our lives to center around our garden. What we do is more than a hobby, and luckily I have the summers off, but we are far from true farmers.

However, right now I am sitting on the front porch looking at our garden while across the street several of our neighbors are working in the community garden. More and more people in Yellow Springs are starting to garden and we are building a community around sharing food and plants. It's not the same as the old established farming communities, but it's a good thing happening!

Permaculture & Agroforestry with Mark Shepard

2011-04-17T20:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went to a workshop on Permaculture and Agroforestry with Mark Shepard. We spent the morning in "class" listening to Mark talk and show a power point presentation and then spent the afternoon at Radical Roots Farm applying the things Mark talked about in the morning.

The things I remember and wrote down are:

Permaculture is a process, not a set of practices.
Look at the big patterns.
Do precise planning so that you can do a small amount of work that has a huge impact and lasts a long time.
Utilize the Keyline system of water management - find the natural flow of the water and then plan everything around that. This made so much sense to me after spending way too much money trying to keep our plants watered during the drought part of the summer. I am realizing that developing our water plan is one of the most important things we need to do for our garden to be sustainable. We put in about 10 rain barrels last fall, so it will be interesting to use that system, but the keyline water system using swales should also be very helpful because it works uses the water that lands all over the yard, not just in the rain barrels. The idea is to slow the water down and spread it out.
Patterns are derived from the keyline of the water system.
Use water as a resource instead of trying to get it to go "away."
Permaculture is a verb - get plants in the ground.

Being at Radical Roots Farm and listening to Amy Batchman talk about her plans was really inspiring to me. What helped me the most is that even though Amy is a much more experienced farmer than I am, she still doesn't know exactly what she wants to do and there are still a lot of issues around the farm that she needs to solve. Her openness was very generous and it pulled me more into this larger process that we are all a part of. It also made me realize that all of this is an ongoing problem solving process and that I don't need to have everything solved or know everything to be part of it. That was refreshing to me. So, thanks Amy!!

Today I planted some tomatoes to put under the grow lights. I know I'm sort of late getting them started, but I wanted to get them planted anyway. I also transplanted some raspberries because I put them in the middle of the yard when I first planted them! Every time I look at that batch of raspberries in the middle of the yard I think, "What was I doing?" But it's OK. I'm transplanting the shoots to the side of the yard and am looking forward to a whole new raspberry patch in the future! In the meantime, the raspberries are really tasty and I'm just glad they are coming up and growing. It's so satisfying to have the perennial plants come up! I just love it.

It felt good to get out and work today - am getting hooked back into being in the garden and can't wait to get out again! Yay!

Here is a link that tells about Mark's farm:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-11-12/mark-shepherds-106-acre-permaculture-farm-viola-wisconsin

Got Started - A Bit

2011-04-15T18:28:00.000-07:00

OK, so I did get out last weekend and planted a bed of lettuce and some sugar snap peas. The weather has been really nice, but I've been tired after work and just haven't been able to get outside. It's like I want to want to, but just can't seem to jump in. I'm sort of overwhelmed because we started lots of beds and now I know how much work it's going to be to keep up with them, keep the weeds out, keep things watered in August...

I'm looking forward to the strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb...all the things I don't have to plant this year!

Saul has spent this week gathering a lot of wood from a fallen tree that was cut down by the village. The pieces of wood are cut just the right length for our wood stove, although we still need to split it. He called the village and they said we could have the wood. It's a lot of work to load it in the pick-up and then stack it in our yard and then split it, but it's free wood! And our bills are so much lower now that we heat with wood. And it's recycling because this tree fell during a storm and now we can use it for fuel. So, it's sort of groovy. When we heat with wood we really have a grasp on the labor it takes to create our heat and I like that. I like that we have to work to heat our house instead of just moving the thermostat up which takes no work - or thought - at all. I like that every time we want to be warmer we have to clean the ashes out of the stove, crumple paper, get kindling, bring wood in the house, put the wood in the stove, and light the match. It takes all those steps plus all the work Saul is doing to gather and split the wood. It keeps us conscious of our energy consumption on a whole new level because we have to put out energy to stay warm.

Tomorrow I am going to an all day workshop about permaculture. Really, I just want to sleep in, but I'm sure I will really enjoy it when I get there. Part of the reason we started this blog is because we are just normal people who work and are raising a child and we don't do gardening, organic farming, canning, drying - you know all that stuff - all the time. A lot of our time is taken up with all kinds of other things, but we want to learn about how to live a more sustainable lifestyle. We experience on a regular basis how difficult it is to do that with the schedule we have. The hectic nature of life is probably the reason a lot of people don't make changes and it keeps us from moving as quickly on all this as we would like to. So, we just take it a bit at a time and do as much as we think we can. We also eat pizza and watch movies some Friday and Saturday evenings because we just need to veg after a busy week. Like I said, we are just normal people - not your radical types - and yet... It's all a balance.

So, that's what's up this week. In the garden - not much - lettuce and peas. In the overall scope of things - Saul has made lots of progress on our wood supply for next year and the year after. Tomorrow the permaculture workshop...and Mollie's lacrosse games and practices after school, my work with 60 middle school students every day, Saul's work with college students 4 afternoons/nights a week, Mollie's homework and work on her script with Cora...

Life in this modern world... Would we want to live in a more agrarian culture? Sometimes I wish our lives centered more around planting and harvesting, around a celebration of the seasons, around an awareness of the importance of water, sunlight, and soil quality. But what would it be like to live without some of our modern conveniences? What would it be like to have a life span of 45 years - or 25 years for women like it was in Ohio in the early 1800's. I think it's important to live the life we are living now with an awareness and an understanding of agrarian and indigenous cultures, but not with an idealistic, nostalgic viewpoint.

Getting Started

2011-04-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

I am having a really hard time getting started with the garden this year. I don't feel very motivated to get out in the yard and I don't quite know where I want to begin. It is nice to look through the blog posts and see how lovely the garden looked last year and the year before.

I know that I don't want to plant as many annuals this year and I only want to plant the things I have had a lot of success with: squash, cucumbers, basil and tomatoes, lettuce. I haven't had the greatest luck with tomatoes, but they just taste GOOD that it's worth planting some. I'm interested to see what perennials are going to come up and I mostly want to plant edible perennials this year. It's just so nice to see them coming up in the spring and to know that you don't have to go out and plant them! Our asparagus didn't come up last year and I'm wondering what will happen with it this year. It will be disappointing if it died, but I guess that's part of the learning curve. WHAT I am supposed to learn from dead asparagus I don't know for sure, but I'm sure I am supposed to learn something.

I planted lots of raspberries along the edge of the yard this year, so my taste buds are anxiously, excitedly awaiting to see how they will grow. And I'm even more excited to eat them, but am not anxious about that. Watching raspberries grow is not one of my hobbies - just so ya know...

I "forgot" to harvest the Jerusalem Artichokes this year - well, in reality, I don't know when they are supposed to be harvested. Maybe I should go out and check them. They might be very tasty right now. They are sort of hard to cook because they have to be cleaned really well, which is a pain, and I haven't wanted to take the time when there is so much tasty food I can get from the grocery store. That's why I "forgot" to harvest then. I'm also too lazy sometimes. Well, I am still making a psychological transition...

We got a lot of rain barrels last fall, so I'm excited (Why do I keep saying "excited"? I'm really NOT that excited! Curious maybe.) to see how they work and how much water we get from them. We seem to have a sort of drought in Ohio in August and the plants are not so happy about it. I don't want to have to spend so much money on water to keep all the beautiful plants alive, so I'm really excited (there I go again -what is with me?) to see how the rain barrels are going to help.

We are going to have a base map made of our property. It will measure and label all the areas of the yard, the trees, bushes, current garden spaces, buildings, etc. We will be able to use this for planning our edible forest garden. So, maybe that's why I'm a bit stuck - I want to get the base map made and then really do some planning instead of just jumping in and creating a lot of back breaking work for myself.

In the meantime, I'm on spring break and am looking forward to digging in the earth this week.

The other thing that's really on my mind is that I just got my hair cut and I am now in the, "Oh, my God, what have I done?" stage. Funny how our experience with our hair largely determines our mood for the day - or week, or month. I don't really like that, but it's true. So, wish me a good hair day tomorrow and maybe I'll get out and garden...

Winter Solstice

2010-12-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

On the Winter Solstice I dug up Jerusalem Artichokes, carrots and leeks from the garden. We added our garden potatoes, butternut squash and garlic to create a delicious stew for our solstice celebration. It was gratifying, on the darkest day of the year, to harvest and cook food we grew ourselves!

There were several things I thought about as I was digging up the root vegetables:

1/ These are not nice pretty veggies when you first see them! They are dirty and messy when you dig them up and it takes some cleaning and peeling to have an attractive meal. This always gives me a different perspective on food than I get when I buy the same thing in the grocery story where everything is clean and neat. I become aware of how much work goes into putting food on the shelves in the store.

2/ I wondered what it would be like to HAVE to harvest our food all winter. What would it be like if we had to be more self sufficient? It took a long time to dig up the vegetables, and clean, peel, and cook them. How would our lives be different if we had to do this kind of work every day in order to eat? Of course, we would be a lot more efficient and I wouldn't be out in the garden in my pajamas, but it would still be a much different way of life than we have now.

We had a lovely root vegetable stew by candle light and appreciated our delicious food as well as the warmth and light we were blessed with.

Forest Garden Design Class

2010-08-16T12:45:00.001-07:00

August 16, 2010

You might ask, "What is a forest garden?" Below is a quote from the book, "Edible Forest Gardens" by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier:

"An edible forest garden is a perennial polyculture of multipurpose plants.

Most plants regrow every year: perennials.

Many species grow together: a polyculture.

Each plant contributes to the success of the whole by fulfilling many purposes: multipurpose.

In other words, a forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food production."

I just finished a week long intensive Forest Garden Design course with Dave Jacke and it was truly a life changing experience! We spent a week analyzing a piece of land and then developing a detailed design for a forest garden for that site. We worked together in groups on the site and had the opportunity to learn from Dave's expertise and experience as well as that of the members of the class. We had a diverse group that consisted of people from many walks of life including professors, an architect, a psychologist, attorneys, artists, teachers, farmers, and students or recent graduates of programs in ecology and sustainability. Several people have built or are in the process of building strawbale or cob houses, and many of us are in varying stages of developing our own forest gardens. All of us are acutely aware of the issues we are all facing related to fossil fuels, food, and resources. We were very appreciative of the community we developed throughout the week, and Dave and his teaching team led us through many experiences that brought home the connections between people and the landscape/plants/gardens we live with. I think we all came to a deep realization that the scope of what we are trying to do is much broader than putting plants together to create an edible forest - although that in itself is a fascinating endeavor. Dave talked with us about cultivating a new paradigm, and I think we all became more aware than ever that we are involved in that process in some way that is exciting and mysterious.

Saul and I consulted with Dave this morning for several hours and hope to work closely with him to design a forest garden in our back yard. I hardly have the words to describe all the things we have to think about after our discussion with him! More on that in later posts!

"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings." Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution, (quote used by Dave in one of his talks)

Color

2010-08-03T16:59:00.001-07:00

As an artist I am fascinated with the color of freshly grown food. The eggplant in this picture is from one of the local organic farms, and the rest of the squash and zucchini is from our garden. The purple color of the eggplant is so vivid - I almost hated to eat it! All the colors together create a lovely palette.

I made some cheesecake with local blackberries the other day, and the blackberry sauce was a fuchsia/magenta color! Wow - it was a visual pleasure to eat! Local, organic food not only tastes good and is nutritious, but it LOOKS good as well!

The Downside

2010-08-03T16:34:00.001-07:00

Last night we went for a bike ride and we talked about the downside of this low energy comsumption lifestyle we are trying to carve out. It was sort of depressing, so I decided to take a picture of all the food I harvested today (beans, zucchini, cucumber, rhubarb and butternut squash - and, not pictured - a lovely yellow squash) as a reminder that we ARE making progress, however slow. Two years ago we didn't even really know what the plants or the seeds looked like for each of these vegetables and now we have a nice harvest.

We had to get our wood burning stove repaired to the tune of several hundred dollars, which stimulated the discussion that we are not really saving all that much money by using wood as a source of heat even though our utility bills are very low. Our level billing for Vectren is about $10/month. We had to pay for the wood burning stove (which we purchased new), have it installed and now it needed a repair because it was cracked. Once we got the stove we had no idea how to get wood (!), so we bought wood for awhile until we learned how to salvage it from Craig's List and other local sources. When we started salvaging it, we usually had to cut and split it, but we didn't know how to do that either and neither of us is too handy with a chainsaw, so we hired people to cut the wood. A very nice person here in town loaned us his wood splitter and Saul spent a lot of time last summer splitting the wood - so we didn't have to pay for that part of the process, but it was a LOT of labor.

Regarding the garden - we have learned a lot, but it has been very dry lately,so I have had to water quite a bit to keep the plants alive. Our water bill was high last summer and it probably will be this summer, too. We will eventually have a lot more rain barrels installed, but in the mean time I'm wondering how much money I should spend on water to produce a squash or two! I'm a little disappointed in our harvest so far, but I think it's because we planted all these perennials like raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries and it takes a few years to get them established. The rhubarb is REALLY growing, but you aren't supposed to harvest it the first year, so I just pick a few stalks here and there that are looking droopy. The asparagus didn't come up this year except for a few stragglers, so I don't know what that means, and the apple trees have some kind of weird thing going on with their leaves which could be a disease. All these issues...

In our discussion last night we realized that we are in the middle of a mega learning curve. We knew we would have one, and part of the reason we are doing this now is to learn from our mistakes when we have the luxury to make mistakes. If we don't produce a good harvest right now we can always go to the grocery store or the farmer's market, so we know we will have food on the table. If the time comes when it is necessary to produce much more of our own food we will have a much better sense of how to do it.

Perhaps the time will also come when we have saved enough on our heating bill to pay for the wood burning stove, the wood, and the back breaking effort to cut and split the wood. In the meantime, we will keep plugging away at trying to live a more simple life, consume fewer fossil fuels, eat nutritious food, and make a smaller footprint - despite the downsides and mistakes.

Rain Barrel

2010-07-28T10:32:00.001-07:00

We installed our first rain barrel a few weeks ago and we watered with it for the first time this week. We bought it used from someone here in town and she had all the hardware to go with it. Then we had to figure out how to attach it to our downspout. We thought it was going to be really complicated because we had to cut into the downspout, but it was remarkably easy! We thought we were doing pretty well for a couple of suburban intellectuals!

It is a good feeling to water the garden knowing that you are using rain water you have collected yourself. This summer has presented us with days of practically torrential rain and then long, hot, dry periods during which the plants really start to wither. Before we installed the rain barrel I watched the rain run out of the downspouts basically going to waste because it was only watering the grass. Green grass makes for a nice lawn, but you have to keep mowing it and you can't eat it!! I kept thinking about how nice it would be to collect all that rain for the garden, and now we have started doing that! We are planning to attach several more barrels to this one and also to utilize our other downspouts in the same way. There are larger rainwater catchment systems that are possibilities in the future, but we've started with one rain barrel and that's an accomplishment for us!

End of July - Pictures of the Garden

2010-07-28T10:02:00.000-07:00

Harvesting

2010-07-27T18:40:00.001-07:00

We harvested a lot of green beans this week and it's so nice to be eating from the garden. We realize that we have a long way to go before we could actually survive on the food we are growing ourselves, but it is still nice to eat food that we've planted and harvested with our own hands. We want to learn how to preserve the food, too, through canning, drying, fermenting, and pickling - but one step at a time. We eventually want to have both a greenhouse and a root cellar, also. Big plans!

I try to get to the farmer's market on Saturday mornings so I can supplement what we aren't growing ourselves with food grown by local farmers. That way we are still eating a lot of locally grown food. I am finding that I sometimes overestimate what we can eat, so now we have a LOT of fresh food in the fridge. Today I made some vegan cheesecake with blackberries because I had to use up the blackberries I got at the market before they spoiled. The eggplant at the farmer's market was so many beautiful colors of purple - I wanted to buy all of it so I could paint a picture of it! Instead I just bought the ones that were the prettiest color! They are so much more beautiful than the ones you buy in the store. Next time I'm going to take my camera!

Yesterday I found 4 cucumbers in the garden and I was so excited. It's amazing the things that excite you...

Gardeners Potluck

2010-07-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

In the Yellow Springs area we have a gardeners potluck that meets monthly and we have a chance to see various gardens and organic farms, and swap ideas. I've just started attending and wanted to share some of the things I saw at the last meeting.

Our friends Jenny Haack and Rob Content moved here a few years and ago and bought a small (approximately 6 acres) farm property just outside Yellow Springs. Jenny has been trained in permaculture so they started a garden that utilized the garden spaces that were already on the property. Then they worked with Andrew Maneri, a local organic farmer, to develop part of the property as a working CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm.

Rob and Jenny have been through many twists and turns in their experience with this project and I think that is as important to their story as the food and the farm are. Rob has to work long distance in Washington D.C. in order to pay the bills, so Jenny does most of the work on the farm right now with Rob helping when he can. They wanted Andrew and his wife to be able to live on the farm with them, so they built a yert with a lot of help with people in the community. However, the zoning laws make it difficult for someone to live in the yert year around, so it can't be a permanent residence. Of course they didn't know that until the yert was built, so - what a learning process! This year, because of so many changes in their lives Jenny hasn't done a lot with the garden, but she hosted our potluck a few weeks ago and she is hosting a permaculture workshop in a few weeks (which I'm planning to attend!).

I think it's important to note that we may set out on a path that we think is very important and that we are committed to - eating local food, starting a garden, living a more energy efficient lifestyle - but there are sometimes obstacles, illnesses, job losses, aging and other problems along the way that make the path different from what we thought it would be. It seems important to take note of those things because they are really a part of the path and not something separate from it. I think we have to embrace those things along the way. The yert is a beautiful structure that can be used in many ways and Jenny's gardens are productive with berries, apples, and many edible perennials even if they aren't pristine annual vegetable beds right now.

There is a woman who is keeping bees on the farm, so we had a chance to get up close to the bees. It's amazing to watch them. We buy honey in 50 lb. buckets from a local farm just outside Yellow Springs and apparently their bees aren't producing very much honey this year. I just picked up a 63 lb. bucket this morning at the farmer's market this morning,so that should last for awhile, although it's amazing how quickly we go through it.

We also had a chance to see the "no-till" style of farming that Andrew practices. He puts in beds the same way we do by laying out newspaper or cardboard and piling manure on top of it. Then he plants his vegetables, but doesn't till all around them, so you will see in the photo that there is squash growing in the midst of a lot of clover in the field. He farms this way because it doesn't disturb the ecosystem as much, it preserves the soil and the root structures of the native plants, and the native plants are good companions for his annual vegetables. At least the way I understand it!

One of the things that has come out of this gardener's network is a series of community gardens in which various parks throughout the village are being used for gardening. People can sign up for a plot and share the garden space with others in their neighborhood. One of the community gardens is right across the street from us so we see many people working throughout the week in their gardens. Also our neighbors on both sides have gardens so we talk to them mostly when we are all in the backyard weeding, watering, harvesting, and mulching. I think there is a huge network of people everywhere who are starting to tune into food production and who are learning all over again how to grow, harvest and preserve food. Tomorrow we are going to meet at the home of an older couple who move to Yellow Springs recently and built an energy efficient house with solar and geothermal. It should be an interesting gathering!

Community Garden across the street

Summer Solstice 2010

2010-06-21T10:59:00.000-07:00

Today is the Summer Solstice and we have just about finished most of our planting, at least for the time being! It is difficult to get it all in when I am working, but I finished teaching for the year the first week of June, so we have been very busy trying to get all the annual vegetables planted - beans, squash, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and herbs. We planted a huge bed of cilantro because Saul loves it, so we'll see how that goes!

This is only our second year and it is so exciting to see all the perennials that we planted last year coming up and spreading. The raspberries are multiplying rapidly as are the strawberries. The blackberries have grown quite a bit and we are seeing berries on them. The asparagus isn't doing very well - don't know quite what to do about that yet. Lots of potatoes came up from the bed last year and the safflowers and nasturtiums are happily coming in again as well. The Jerusalem artichokes are huge - we have a sort of forest of them!

This year we planted a LOT of rhubarb because it's actually a very pretty plant and it is a perennial. It seems to be very happy and it thriving.

In our front flower bed we have some of the rhubarb, edible flowers, blueberries, sweet potatoes, and potatoes mixed in with both perennial as well as annual flowers. It makes for an attractive and edible landscape!

Today is sort of stormy and rainy - my favorite time to work in the garden. It is hard to believe it is the longest day of the year in which we have the most hours of sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer has officially begun!

At Home in the Muddy Water

2010-01-17T07:05:00.000-08:00

Winter Harvest

May we exist like a lotus, At home in the muddy water. Thus we bow to life as it is.

Yesterday I harvested some carrots and then made a delicious Moroccan Carrot Salad with some fresh spelt bread for dinner. I was delighted with the sweetness of the carrots and even more delighted that they were so crisp in the middle of January! It is nice to know that some food can be left in the ground and harvested during the winter months. I have often wondered what we would do (will do?) if food couldn't be transported from warmer climates. Saul and I and Mollie want to learn more about canning and drying food, but it's good to know that we can have fresh food in the winter as well.

I am always struck by the amount of dirt that is involved with harvesting vegetables! In the Buddhist book discussion group I belong to at the Yellow Springs Dharma Center we are reading a book called "At Home in the Muddy Water" by Ezra Bayda. The above quote is recited at Zen meditation retreats after each meal. As I was pulling carrots out of the mud yesterday I thought about this quote. When I harvest food that has a lot of mud and dirt on it I become much more aware of all the labor that goes into bringing our food to the grocery store. It has to be planted, harvested, packaged, and transported. When I harvest and clean our food I realize what must be entailed in the cleaning and sorting of food on a mass scale. When we meet our food in the grocery store it is so neat and tidy, the vegetables are similar in size, the roots and tops are trimmed off, there are no bugs...

I think the connection to mud and dirt from which our food comes is actually a great loss to our collective psyche. I like the quote about being at home in the muddy water and I think it also applies to being at home in the dirt and mud that is part of growing food. The quote says that when we are at home in the muddy water we "bow to life as it is." We want life to be clean, neat, and sanitized, but that really isn't how life is at all. "Life as it is" is full of surprises, complications, ups and downs, and unexpected twists and turns. It is messy and dirty and full of bugs! Being more closely connected to real things in life - growing food, fire, animals, weather, the natural world - helps us also to accept life's more harsh realities (loss, grief, pain, suffering) with more grace. When we experience the cycles of life and the muddy water on a regular basis in the natural world, they don't come as such a surprise when we have to face them in our own lives.

We are also disconnected from the value of good soil when we never really see it. When it is all washed away for us by the time we get to the grocery store it is easier for us to build shopping malls and housing developments on essential farmland because we don't have a connection to the value of the soil. It is easier to spray pesticides on our lawns when our yard is just an aesthetic showcase and not a spot of land that is teeming with life.

The lotus is a beautiful flower that blooms upward and draws life from the sun, but its roots also extend into the muddy water where it also draws sustenance. We also draw sustenance from both the sunlight and the "muddy water", in reality and on a metaphorical level. Our dirty, muddy carrots made a delicious, crisp, fresh winter salad, but it took a bit of extra work to get them to the dinner table: bundling up, getting the shovel out of the shed, digging up the carrots on a cold day, bringing the muddy basket into the house, washing the carrots, and taking the compost bucket full of carrot tops outside. The work itself, however, had an intrinsic pleasure that was inextricably connected to the mud and dirt.

Snow Day

2010-01-08T12:35:00.000-08:00

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Henry David Thoreau

It snowed today and the school where I work was closed, so I had a day of quiet contemplation by the fire. It is so cozy to watch the snow fall and listen to the fire crackling. Mollie and I took a walk through the neighborhood in the quietly falling snow and greeted our neighbors who were shoveling their driveways. We stopped to watch some robins quarrel in one of our neighbor's trees. I went out to get wood for the stove and then shoveled our driveway. After that I took some photos of the yard because it is so beautiful when it is covered with snow. The creek in the back isn't frozen, but it does have a thick layer of ice on the top, and the gardens are nestled under piles of leaves and now snow. Later I took the compost bucket out to the compost pile. All these small tasks - gathering wood, taking the compost bucket out, shoveling the driveway - are such nice ways to make contact with nature. They force us outside because they are tasks that involve us with life outside the house. I love the connection between our daily life in the house and the life that surrounds us in nature.

Of course all of these encounters with nature occur between and amidst checking our e-mails, getting our electric garage door opener fixed, watching Jane Austin's "Emma" on DVD, and answering our cell phone and our home phone (sometimes at the same time!). Modern family life, even when attended to with conscious awareness, is bound to include all the technological means of communication and functioning that are available to us. After all, we wouldn't be writing this blog if we didn't have some of these things at our fingertips! However, I think making the attempt to connect with nature is important as we connect with the world through our computers. Hearing the water flowing in the creek and the wind blowing snow across the field behind the house is a direct experience that can't be had in cyberspace. This hearing also includes seeing the snow fall softly and silently to the ground; it includes feeling the cold bite of freezing wind on my face; and it includes the fresh feeling of breathing in the winter air. As we chat, blog, skype, twitter, download, upload, and e-mail we can also cultivate activities that take us to the life that meets us outside.

To be admitted to nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded but excludes himself. You only have to push aside the curtain.

Henry David Thoreau

Happy New Year 2010!

2010-01-01T16:54:00.000-08:00

New Year's Day 2010

I went out and explored the yard today. It is amazing that there is so much life outside even though everything looks dead and barren at this time of year. We have many perennials that will come up next spring, but it's hard to believe that they will live through the winter.

It is easy to understand why people who lived an agrarian lifestyle celebrated the Winter Solstice - the shortest day of the year which falls around December 21st. We usually try to mark that day by taking a walk in the Glen, cooking a meal of root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips), and lighting candles around the house. This year all the vegetables we cooked for our meal were from our own garden!

One of the reasons we like to pay attention to the Winter Solstice is because it is really where most of our ancient Christmas traditions come from. In fact, most religions have some kind of celebration of light around this time of year, so it seems important to give it a little attention. At the Winter Solstice we know we will begin to see more light each day and can look forward to Spring. I painted the picture below to commemorate the day.

The garden beds are covered with a lot of leaves and when I took photos of them they all looked the same! I've included a few pictures so you can see what they look like. These pictures aren't very interesting except by comparison, so I am putting pictures of the beds in full bloom also.

We went for our regular 2 mile walk as a family and then Saul and I put more wood at the back of the house for easy access when we are ready for it inside. It was cold out, but we have to spend these times outdoors in order to keep up with the wood. It is good for us to make that connection with the outdoors, even though sometimes we would rather just stay warm inside. We have used more wood so far than this year than we expected to, so we are still figuring out how to calculate how much we need for each year.

Saul's Winter Break

Firewood

2009-12-31T17:16:00.000-08:00

Firewood
We put a Vermont Castings woodburning stove in our house in 2007. I think the guy who installed it thought we were a little nutty because when he explained a few things to us it was apparent that we had no idea how to build a fire. We kept giving him blank looks and I think he left hoping we wouldn't burn down our house.

Last year it was such a big deal for us to build a fire and it took the better part of an afternoon to really get it going and start heating up the house. We have gotten a lot faster at it and we really enjoy the heat that comes from the stove. It is so much more comforting and relaxing than the kind of heat from our gas furnace. We think we have discovered that the reason the heat is so much better is because it heats everything - the bricks, the walls, our bodies - instead of just heating the air like the forced air heat from the gas furnace. There is something delicious and wonderful about connecting with the primitive nature of real fire that is truly warming when it is cold and dreary outside. It is difficult for us to pry ourselves away from the fire in the winter and I often fall asleep reading by it in the evening.

Cozy fire in our Vermont Castings stove

Some people who are concerned about sustainability have chosen not to use wood for heat because they are concerned about pollution. The argument goes that if everyone had a woodburning stove in the winter the air could become very smoky and, although trees are a renewable resource, we might use up too many of our forests. This is a fair argument and one we thought seriously about as well. However, in the end, we have chosen to use wood over gas, coal, and oil because we feel that it is a local, renewable resource, and because it puts us in direct contact with our consumption. We have to work (and we will explain just how MUCH we have to work) to heat our home by gathering wood and building the fire. This give us a direct connection with the source of our heat and with our footprint on the earth.

So, to get back to our process... the first step was to choose the stove we wanted and get it installed in our house. We also looked at pellet stoves because they are a little easier to deal with, but they use electricity to feed the pellets into the stove and our goal is to get "off the grid" as much as we can. Also, you have to purchase the pellets from someone, and we wanted to develop more independence as consumers. We chose the Vermont Castings stove and had it installed, and then set about learning how to build a fire.

But, oh - how could I forget...THE FIREWOOD!

Where do you get firewood when you are college educated teachers - intellectual subanites? We hadn't a clue! We bought some wood from the place we bought our wood stove from and we also bought some wood from a local farmer. But it started to bother us to have to pay so much for wood, so we started foraging for wood and looking for free wood offers on Craig's List. Then last year we had a huge storm caused by a hurricane in the Gulf Coast and trees were down all over the place around here. People were chopping up trees and leaving them by the curb as yard waste, so Saul took the pick-up and collected wood like a fiend. He gathered about a 2-3 year's supply of wood at least! I think collecting the wood tapped into his hunting and gathering instinct!

OK, so we had the stove, we had a bunch of wood, but we then had to CUT and SPLIT it. Oh my, what to do? We both have a healthy fear of chain saws, so we hired someone to cut it into lengths that would fit into the stove. Then we tried a number of electric wood splitters, but they weren't really powerful enough to split some of the large stumps we had. Finally, through some community networking that happens when you live in a small town, Saul found out about a gas wood splitter that someone was willing to loan us free of charge. It was a large one - 27 tons of pressure! We borrowed the wood splitter and Saul went to work...for almost the entire summer of 2009! What a job! It was a very physical job for a college professor and it was a lot of hard work, but Saul persevered and we are very well set for firewood for at least a few years.

Saul's summer vacation

The last step in the process was to organize and STACK all the firewood, which was also new to us. We had no idea there were so many things you have to do in order to build a cozy fire in your newly purchased woodburning stove! Before we could stack the wood we had to have some place to stack it, so that was a decision-making process. We learned that it's probably not a great idea to stack it against the house because of termites (which we had already done and we are using that wood up this winter), so we had to have some kind of structure to put the wood on. The first time we stacked it most of the stack fell down, which was very disconcerting, but we finally got our log stackers (which we ordered off the internet and assembled) and we got the all the wood stacked. Whew!

Sooooo....just to reiterate the things we did:
1. Picked out the stove at the store (took some doing).
2. Had the stove installed (took some doing).
3. FOUND firewood (had to learn where).
4. Hired someone to CUT the wood (the easy part).
5. Borrowed a lot splitter and SPLIT the wood (oh man!).
6. Ordered and assembled log stackers and STACKED the wood (backbreaking).
7. Learned how to build a fire and BURN the wood (took some doing).
8. Enjoyed our fire (haven't burned down the house yet).
9. Felt like pioneers from "Little House on the Prairie" (little energy efficient house in Yellow Springs)
10. Wrote this blog post (brag, brag).

Voila! Stacked wood!

The Manure Pile

2009-12-30T21:24:00.001-08:00

Building the Soil - or in other words...
The Huge Pile of Horse Crap in our Front Yard

We really are very fortunate that we live in a neighborhood where not one person has complained about the fact that we have about 3 tons of horse poop on our front lawn!

This came about because we found a farmer on Craig's List who owns 20 or so horses and wanted to get rid of some manure. He sold it for $75 a truckload - and I do mean a TRUCK load. A huge truck, not a pick-up truck. He was willing to deliver it, which we were ecstatic about because we had filled up our own pick-up with manure several times and that job - pardon my slang - really totally sucked! The farmer who delivered the manure is an older man and he didn't make it to our house for a long time, so when he finally called to say he was ready to come with his truck load of poop we were ready. He arrived with this huge truck and we realized that if he drove the truck to the back of our lawn it would probably sink into the soil and make big ruts - and he might actually get stuck. Sooooo...we decided to have him dump the manure in the front yard. We didn't really want to think about what that was going to look like - we were just excited to get started gardening.

After he dumped the first load he offered to bring ANOTHER load, and we thought we might as well strike while the iron was hot. He was such a sweet guy, and he kept telling us that he didn't feel very well and might not live much longer. That did it for us and we ended up with 3 loads of manure that day. He ended up only charging us $50 for the whole pile!! I imagine he had a lot of manure he wanted to get off his hands that day that was maybe clogging up his barn and we were willing takers. I suppose you might wonder about us a little - taking 3 tons of sh_t and paying $50 for it. But I'll tell you that the manure is black gold when you want to start a good organic garden. One friend has actually told us that she has "manure envy" because we have so much manure now!!

It helps to know that we can start another garden bed whenever we want to because we have so much good rich composted manure. We are wealthy in horse crap and are the envy of the neighborhood! Who would think!

It is interesting what one finds valuable in life, and to take note of how that can change...

Piling manure on a new bed

Lawn to Edible Garden: creating the beds for planting

2009-12-28T21:16:00.000-08:00

Creating the garden beds for planting

In order to transform our lawn into an edible landscape, we have to create garden beds where we have had grass. The hard way to do that is to dig up the grass by hand with a shovel or to use a rototiller. There is an easier way, however, using inexpensive and easily accessible materials: cardboard, old carpet, wood chips, and horse manure.

Our first step in creating garden beds is to go on a scavenger hunt around the village in search of large sheets of cardboard and old carpet. We bought a used pick-up truck for hauling firewood and gathering materials, so it is easy for us to drive around town with the pick-up scouting for our FREE materials that people have put at the curb. We usually do this on trash night and it's actually a fun routine that we often do as a family.

Once in awhile we hit the motherlode of cardboard and we really feel happy when that happens. I know that weird things make us happy, but when you can envision a large garden bed coming together easily because of your big pile of cardboard it's really quite satisfying! We pile it all into the truck and drive home, ready to work. The back of our house looked messy when we first started gathering these materials - in fact it was a little hillbilly-ish and a bit embarrassing, but we pressed on...

When we find carpet it is, of course, carpet that people are throwing out. Once when our neighbor saw us in her driveway piling her old, dirty carpet into our pick-up, she came out with a concerned look on her face and told us that we probably didn't want her carpet because it was full of cat pee! We explained what we were using it for - and that the cat pee was not a problem - and, although she was still a bit puzzled, she let us take the carpet. Now she stops often as she is walking her dog to see how our garden is coming along.

In addition to gathering carpet and cardboard, we also have to accumulate horse manure and wood chips - which is another story in itself and deserves to be told at a later time. Suffice it to say that we have huge piles of manure and wood chips in our FRONT yard and we are fortunate to live in a garden conscious neighborhood!

In order to create a bed for planting, we put the cardboard down where we want to develop the bed in order to kill the grass. We cut the carpet into strips the width of the pathways we want to have because we don't want weeds to grow on our pathways and the carpet will not only kill the grass, but it probably won't disintegrate for another 300,000 years or so. It's nice that we can use it for something useful since carpet full of cat pee isn't a sought after commodity.

Once we put the cardboard down and create pathways with the carpet, we pile manure on top of the cardboard and spread it out. Then we put wood chips on the pathways and - voila - we have a new garden bed!

Sometimes we begin planting right away, and sometimes we prepare the bed in the fall, pile leaves or straw over it so it can compost over the winter, and then plant that bed in the spring. Last summer I created a bed and planted zucchini in it the same day. We have such an abundance of manure that I can pile it on 6-8 inches deep. (I know how that sounds...6 inches deep in sh_t, but you know, we do what we gotta do - and it's all good!) I made hills about 15 inches high to plant the zucchini in so it had room for its roots. The zucchini was very happy and provided us with an abundance of tasty food into the fall.

I like the idea that we are recycling materials - carpet, cardboard, wood chips from fallen trees and yard scraps, and horse manure. It is simple and we can do it ourselves without spending a lot of money. We drive around our small village and talk to our neighbors to collect our materials rather than driving to Lowe's or Home Depot and spending money on materials that come from who-knows-where. The manure we use comes from a local horse farm and is not wrapped in plastic; the wood chips come from the local tree guy who has just used his chipper to chop up the neighbor's tree; the cardboard and carpet come from recycling bins all over the village. By using these materials we have developed relationships with a whole network of people that we would otherwise not know. The change in our lifestyle is not only about gardening, but also about relating to our friends and neighbors, using local materials, and doing our own labor. It is quietly radical on so many levels...

Changes in Lifestyle #2: Lawn to Edible Garden

2009-12-28T13:14:00.000-08:00

Lawn to Edible Garden

When we got pretty well settled into our new home, we decided we wanted to mow less grass and create a yard that was filled with edible food. It makes more sense to us to have a yard that produces food than to have grass that uses resources to be watered and mowed, but that doesn't serve a useful purpose. We used some of the principles of Permaculture and then jumped in to try our hand at growing some of our own food.

The word Permaculture comes from both "permanent culture" and "permanent agriculture" and is "a set of techniques and principles for designing sustainable human settlements" (Toby Hemenway, Gaia's Garden). We are total novices at practicing permaculture, but what we want to do is develop a yard that is not only beneficial to us, but to the plants, animals, insects - and other humans that we live with. For us that means not using pesticides and sprays, creating interconnections between the plants, animal, and insects in our living space, and using recycled and natural materials to develop the garden. It seems logical to us to create an edible landscape that is both beautiful and useful.

We started by planting fruit and nut trees, as well as berry bushes and perennial vegetables that would become a permanent part of the structure of our garden. We planted apple, paw paw, and chestnut trees, as well as blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, serviceberries, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb, and some perennial flowers and herbs. This gave us the beginnings of a structure for what some people call an edible forest garden. The picture below left is an apple tree (protected by deer fencing) with beans and summer squash growing next to it. We expanded a flower bed that was already developed as a foundational structure to plant the apple trees around as well as to plant vegetables in.

Once we had the trees and bushes planted we went about developing beds to plant our annual vegetables and herbs. We planted butternut, acorn, and summer squash, zucchini, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beets, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, beans, peas, basil, lettuce, garlic, and a variety of edible flowers. The edible flowers above were a delicious and beautiful way to add color to the bed in front of our house. We planted nasturtiums, Maximillian sunflowers, calendula, safflowers, hyacinth runner beans, scarlet runner beans, hollyhocks, bee balm, marigolds, violets, Sweet William, and flax.

We learned a lot during the last growing season and we had a lot of great food to eat straight out of our garden. It was wonderful to go gather a salad or to create a meal with fresh zucchini or summer squash. I loved picking basil and making fresh pesto, or simply putting a lot of basil in my salads. Sometimes I just foraged through the garden munching on sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes. It was satisfying to know that the work we put into our yard had a purpose, and that we could eat the fruits of our labor.

That was all great, but we have a LOT more to learn. We had to water quite a bit and our water bill was enormous! We need to learn more about collecting water with rain barrels and about mulching to hold the moisture from the morning dew in the ground. We planted some things that we aren't familiar with and that didn't grow very well like lovage, fava beans, and salvia (I don't even know what that is!) , so we will probably stick with more conventional vegetables that grow well in Ohio until we get better at what we are doing. There was a tomato blight, so our tomatoes were orange and the plants got really brown, and our corn was full of worms. I thought I could leave the sweet potatoes in the ground and harvest them this winter, so I was really disappointed when I harvested them a few days ago for our Winter Solstice meal and they were brown and weird. I was happy, however, to find that the parsnips had grown throughout the fall and were very tasty! I know that Jerusalem Artichokes are a staple of permaculture gardens because they are a prolific perennial plant, but we haven't really warmed up to eating them. I have a bag of them in the refrigerator that I harvested on the Winter Solstice, but I haven't been terribly motivated to cook them along side all of our tasty holiday food. We had a beautiful garden, but we also have a huge learning curve. We want to give ourselves a lot of time to learn so that, in the event that it becomes necessary for more of us to grown our own food, we have some wiggle room to make a lot of mistakes.

We will post more information about how we set up our garden beds, getting the raw materials like manure, wood chips, and old carpet (yes, that's right - carpet!), but I am still struggling to figure out how to upload photos on this blog and put them where I want them with the text, so...another learning curve!

Changes in Lifestyle #1 - The House

2009-12-27T18:48:00.000-08:00

Changes in Lifestyle #1 - The Not So Big House

As we began to come to terms with the changes our world is undergoing, the first major change in lifestyle we made was to sell our large home (approximately 6000 square feet) and buy a small home (approximately 1500 square feet). It sounds so simple to write about in one sentence, but in fact, it was DRAMATIC!

I should say that much of this process began when we took a course in Voluntary Simplicity. Richard Gregg, a student of Gandhi's teaching and wrote the following about voluntary simplicity:

Voluntary Simplicity involves both inner and outer

condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity

and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior

clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief

purpose of life. It means an ordering and guiding of

our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some

directions in order to secure greater abundance of

life in other directions. It involves a deliberate

organization of life for a purpose...The degree of

simplification is a matter for each individual to settle

for himself.

During the Voluntary Simplicity course it became clear to us that we needed to simplify our life, but it has taken us years now to figure out how to do that in a practical way because life - in so many ways - isn't really simple. As a part of the course, a man named Pat Murphy came to talk to us about Peak Oil and about what his organization, The Community Solution, in Yellow Springs was doing about it. It was a very interesting talk that peaked our curiosity and, to make a long story short, Saul became a board member of The Community Solution. Through Pat, his wife Faith Morgan, and The Community Solution organization we learned more about Peak Oil and Climate Change. This added to the urgency to simplify our lives that we were already feeling as a result of the Voluntary Simplicity Course.

So...what to do? We were 3 people living in a huge house with 2 kitchens, 4 bathrooms, way more space than we needed, and WAY more stuff than was necessary for a life of simplicity. We loved the house and it had a 1000 square foot studio space that I used for my artist studio, so it was not an easy decision to let go of it. Our daughter, Mollie, was born at home in this house, so it was difficult for us to give up that memory and her childhood home as well. Before deciding to sell the house we looked into what we needed to do to retrofit it, but in the end the expense of retrofitting was going to be more than we felt we should spend. Even if we did retrofit it we realized that with the rising costs of oil, gas and electricity the house was going to be very expensive to heat and cool. We finally decided to put the house on the market and went through the painful process of selling it.

In addition to selling the house we went through months of getting rid of most of our STUFF! We sold some of it, gave away some of it, made many trips to Goodwill, put it out at the curb for people to take (a long-standing tradition in Yellow Springs), and threw some of it away. Again, in a few written sentences it sounds simple, but it took months of work to lighten our load. I think we, as human beings, tend to expand into whatever space we live in, so we had filled up our large home. We had to sort through what we really needed, what we wanted, and what we could let go of. Some things were really difficult to give up, we had to sort through lots of old memories, and then we had to let a lot of things go. We did this voluntarily, but that didn't mean it was easy.

I found, once we moved, that I was somewhat identified with living in that large - and very groovy - house. It was quite unique, it had huge rooms and, as I said earlier - a large 1000 square foot art studio. It was a great space to host parties in, and to have lots of kids over to play. We had wonderful toys, doll houses, a puppet theater, and beautiful play spaces for our daughter. When we left the house I felt my identity shifting a bit - but I couldn't really put my finger on the change...

Once we sold the house we then needed to purchase or build a smaller home. Our original intention was to build a passive solar house, so we began to look for lots to build on in Yellow Springs. This was difficult to find, so we also searched for energy efficient houses to buy. In a progressive town like Yellow Springs, we thought it would be easy to find what we were looking for, but we were a bit ahead of our time - this was in 2004 - and we couldn't find homes that were built or retrofitted with energy efficiency in mind. There were a few, but they were too big, too small, or too expensive. It was a frustrating process. Any time our realtor called with a house to look at we asked questions like: "How well is the house insulated?", "What are the heating/cooling bills?", "Is it a passive solar house?" Our realtor became frustrated with us, as well, because there just wasn't that kind of information to be had about the houses in the village.

Finally, in 2007, we found a small house with an extra lot and we jumped on the chance to buy it. Saul had known the owners for many years and knew that it was a good solid house, so we made an offer immediately and bought the property - thinking that we would build a passive solar house on the extra lot and then sell the house. However, life doesn't always go the way you think it is going to go, and after retrofitting the house we began to question the need to build another house. To retrofit, we put in an on-demand hot water heater, we thoroughly insulated the house and put in a woodburning stove (bringing our gas bill to $10/month with level billing). We remodeled the house for aesthetic purposes to some extent and have plans to do a little more remodeling, but in the end it is a good house and we decided that we wouldn't get all that much benefit from building a brand new home.

About my identity...Our new home is much more humble than our huge, unique, 6000 sq. ft. home with beautiful poplar floors and large open spaces. It is a small, brick ranch home in a less expensive neighborhood. People aren't impressed with our new home in the way they were with our other home - and you can't really tell what we have done with it because retrofitting isn't really all that exciting or interesting aesthetically. I think part of what we gave up in our "voluntary simplicity" process was the identity of living in an impressive home. That shouldn't really matter, but in our culture where large homes ARE part of our identity that did mean something. As Richard Gregg said about Voluntary Simplicity, we had to have restraint in some areas in order to "secure greater abundance of life in other directions." We did have to give up a part of our identity in order to simplify our life and to lead a richer life in other ways. I do feel that our life is much richer than it was in many ways, but it took making deliberate and conscious choices about what we wanted.

There is enough in the world for man's need,

but not for man's greed.

Civilization, in the real sense of the term,

consists not in the multiplication,

but in the deliberate reduction of wants.

M. K. Ghandi

A little bit about us...

2009-12-27T18:22:00.000-08:00

December 27, 2009 A little bit about us...

We live in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a small, progressive community in the heart of the Midwest and the home of Antioch College. We have lived here for many years and love the sense of community that we find in the village. Yellow Springs is surrounded by the 1000 acre Glen Helen, which is owned by Antioch College, and another 3000 acres in John Bryan State Park. These photos are taken in the Glen where we took a walk on Christmas Day.

Saul has a PhD in Psychology and works as a professor in the Education Department at Antioch University McGregor in Yellow Springs. He is originally from New York City and came to Yellow Springs in 1969 to work for New York Encounter.

I am an artist and I have a Master's Degree in Art Therapy as well as a Master's Degree in Education. I teach language arts to gifted students at Central Middle School in Xenia, Ohio. I am originally from Montana and spent my summers growing up on an island on Flathead Lake - just south of Glacier National Park.

Our daughter Mollie is a 7th grade student at the Miami Valley School, a college prep school, in Dayton, Ohio. She loves to write and is working on a novel. Mollie thinks a lot about the topics in this blog and did a project at school to raise money for a local land trust - Tecumseh Land Trust. She also gave her friends stainless steel water bottles for Christmas!