I was thinking about the John Livingston essay again and his idea that we “downshift” into the egoic self. I had a different way of conceptualizing it flash in my mind. It kind of reverses the whole concept. I pictured the energy of Gaia as a ground beneath us, the energy of our immediate environment as another layer above that, then maybe our collective humanity as another layer, and at the top (and farthest removed from Gaia) would be our individual consciousness and ego. Expanding our consciousness is just merging back down into earth consciousness. I like this conceptualization better, because “upshifting” seems to imply effort and a striving for a new state of being. But my concept feels more natural--a surrender back to the ground of being from which we emerged.

Each individual and each living thing is an apex coming out of the ground of being, or Gaia. At the peak of the apex is that little dot of self and ego. We look all around us and it sure looks like we’re all little isolated dots. We just forget to look beneath our feet. If we did that we’d see we’re still firmly connected to something larger.

Yesterday the cumulative tomato harvest topped 50 pounds. I’m guessing when all is said and done (barring an early frost, which is quite possible considering our unusually cool summer) we’ll have a harvest of at least 150 pounds--maybe 200. That’s all from a 100 square foot bed--actually a little less because the middle of the bed contains twenty-some odd basil plants. According to John Jeavons a 100 square foot bed should yield roughly 100 pounds for the beginning gardener, 194 pounds for the intermediate gardener, and as much as 418 pounds for the advanced gardener.

The tomatoes are the only thing I’m weighing this year, mainly because they’re the major crop, taking up nearly a fifth of the whole garden. When Collin’s grown I won’t have to go so crazy with tomatoes, but while he’s still with me, I need to keep him well supplied with tomato sauces and salsa and ketchup, etc.

Over the weekend I canned our first batch of tomato sauce. I made six pints of a basil marinara (there was also an almost-full seventh pint that just went straight into the fridge). On Friday I plan to can a batch of spaghetti sauce. I figure about 24 pints total of various types of pasta sauces should last a full year, especially considering I’m also making tons of pesto. 

Then, after I have 24 pints of sauce, I’ll make a few pints of pizza sauce, then move on to ketchup. We’ve already done some salsa. I made a 1 quart jar of lacto-fermented salsa, and over the weekend Collin made four little 4-ounce jars of fresh salsa. But, if the tomato harvest holds out, I’d like to can some salsa for the winter as well. We’ve got four different types of hot peppers growing, all doing extremely well. So I’ve got to use those up.

Then, if the tomato harvest is still going strong, I like to do some jars of tomato juice and vegetable juice, tomato paste, and finally, some canned whole tomatoes. And, of course, we’ve also been eating tons of tomatoes fresh!

On Sunday we ate our first corn-on-the-cob from the garden, and also our first cantaloupe.

I spent the entire weekend in the kitchen. Saturday morning I picked, blanched, and froze the day’s green beans, then picked basil and made a batch of pesto. Then I picked chard, made the stems into lacto-fermented pickles (that’ll take three or four weeks) and put the chard leaves into a double batch of pasta. I started dough for sourdough bread, and I baked a loaf of lemon zucchini nut bread (my current favorite zucchini recipe).

On Sunday I made the basil marinara, as well as rolling out the pasta dough I had started on Saturday, and hanging it to dry.

Of course, in addition to all of this was the regular cooking of all of our meals, from scratch of course. On Saturday I made tostados, which included rolling sixteen corn tortillas, cooking each one in the cast iron skillet, then frying each one. 

I’ve been wondering about corn masa—wondering if there’s a way I can make it myself. I know it’s just corn and hydrated lime. Ironically, the process is explained in a book I just took out of the library called Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz.

Now why, you may be asking yourself, would I want to go through all of that trouble when corn tortillas are readily available and extremely cheap? And why is it not enough to buy the corn masa and just add water? Why must I soak my corn for hours, then cook for hours in a hydrated lime solution or wood ash solution, then rub off all the skins, then grind the corn, then make the dough, roll it, cook it, and fry it before eating it? 

Probably because I’m just plain crazy.  But maybe it has to do with this need to get back to the basics. There’s something important about being intimately involved in all aspects of my food production. In a spiritual sense I think we need to merge with our food--there has to be participation on many levels.

And besides that, if I do this myself, I can buy organic whole dried corn at Vitamin Cottage, and know I’m avoiding the genetically modified corn that’s in the masa from the regular grocer. Plus if I do one day go completely off-grid, I will have acquired knowledge that will be very useful.

Did you realize that without this process of soaking the corn in lime, called nixtamalization, the healthiest qualities of corn remain unavailable? Sander Katz says, “Specifically, it alters the ratio of available amino acids, rendering nixtamalized corn a complete protein, and making niacin in the corn more available to humans.”

You have to wonder what type of process led the ancient Aztecs to this process. It had to be a spiritual process, a communication from the corn.

I’m learning so much about plants these days. Actually it feels like I’m learning from plants these days. It’s hard to describe, but I can feel subtle shifts in my perceptions, in my way of experiencing the world, as I take in these different plant energies. I believe living foods share their intelligences with us.

I’ve been dreaming about plants incessantly. The one night last week (after eating an inordinate amount of tomatoes) I spent at least the first 2/3 of the night dreaming about nothing other than tomatoes. Tomato energy was coursing through me, and it wanted me to integrate that energy.

Lately, I’ve also been fascinated with the topic of fermentation, both as a food preservation technique and as a method of enhancing the healthfulness of foods.

So far, I’ve been experimenting with sourdough breads, homemade ginger ale, lacto-fermented beet juice, salsa, and chard stalks. I love the idea of inviting in the local wild yeasts and bacteria. It seems like another important way for me to participate with and merge with the local ecosystem. Eating the soil (indirectly through the plants), eating the plants, which express both the soil and the sun (and all local conditions), eating the local yeasts and the local bacteria. The only things missing are the local animals, and I hope to remedy that eventually.

We’ve become so disengaged from our particular place on earth. We’ve stopped interacting with place. Instead, place has become an insignificant backdrop for our purely human activities. We act as if we’re the only things that matter and we act as if we don’t need the earth. The reality, of course, is that we are both utterly dependent upon it and inextricably connected with all of it.

I’ve been learning so much lately. Everything is fascinatingly interconnected. It just occurred to me, for instance, this magical alchemy that occurs with corn and lime—it’s really a way to make earth and sky influences meet. Corn--all sugars and starches--a sky food par excellence, needs to merge with earth elements, in this case calcium, in order to confer its healthful qualities to humans. Left as a pure sky food it’s all carbohydrates—leading to human imbalances such as diabetes and metabolic syndrome. We desperately need to become grounded beings again, and we can do that through the foods that we eat.

I’m really starting to understand the sacredness of food, deeply understand the sacredness of food. Here I get to that point were words fail. Many people have called food sacred and for years I could nod my head that yes, of course, food is sacred. But now I know food is sacred, and I know it in a way that defies all description, in a way that is far deeper and more significant than I ever imagined possible.

Do you think the Aztecs might have recognized corn as a sky food? Do you think they intuited that earth and sky needed to meet?  That earth and sky (lime and corn) meeting in a watery matrix would bring about the proper alchemy?

I’m thinking back to my dream in March about the patch of wheat. The message that came in the dream was that in order for earth and sky to meet, a plant must be able to express its true and full nature.

I wonder if over the past 10,000 years with all of our hybridizing and selective breeding of plants we haven’t created foods that overly concentrate sky energy? Hasn’t much of our breeding led to increased sugar and starch content?

And I’m curious—I’ll have to do some research—but do plant foods with naturally high sugar content favor soil that’s depleted in mineral content? Would sweet corn grown on healthily mineralized soil be less sweet than sweet corn grown in a typical, depleted field?  I don’t know where I could find the answer to that, but I’ll have to do some poking around.

I’m really starting to think I don’t want any electricity at all when I go off-grid. To totally do that I’d have to find a property with a spring or else a shallow well that would allow hand pumping. If that presents too much of an obstacle I can settle for a solar or wind-powered pump. But that should be the extent of my electric needs, unless I absolutely need a laptop.

And still this crazy idea to have a dirt floor is holding sway—and not one of these fancy, polished dirt floors that you see in multi-million dollar “green” homes—I’m talking about plain dirt. At least to start, then maybe filling in some or all of the floor with brick or stone as time goes by.

It seems like dirt would have many good qualities. If the house was too humid, wouldn’t it absorb some of the moisture?  And likewise, if the air was too dry, maybe it would exhale some moisture.  And it would probably help to regulate the temperature too, moderating between extremes. (And wouldn’t it be wild to grow your houseplants right in your floor?)

Of course there could be some potential drawbacks. I’m thinking a dirt floor would be best in a dry climate, otherwise mold might be an issue. Bugs could be a problem too. And of course dust getting tracked around.

But, ah, just imagine always having your bare feet in contact with the earth—something in me is screaming out that this kind of contact is vital for our well being. I don’t know why—I just feel that I need to have my feet on the dirt.

And the separation of indoors and out would be minimized—you’d always be connected to nature.

I wonder if building codes require floors? Or would I have to find a place where building codes weren’t in effect or weren’t enforced?

People would probably think I’d gone off the deep end if I had a dirt floor. But billions of people have lived and do live on bare dirt. I certainly wouldn’t be without company.

Of course there’s a stigma involved with dirt-floor living. But that’s okay. We’ve been so busy getting civilized and giving up our primitive and barbaric ways that I don’t think we recognize everything we’ve lost.

“Dirt-floor poor” people are connected to the earth. The dirt-floor poor are not the ones out there plundering the earth. Is it just because they’re poor and don’t have the resources to plunder, or is it maybe because they’re still connected to the land—Mother Earth?

I keep reading up on the topic of re-mineralization. It’s such a fascinating topic. Today I found a website that talked about re-mineralization in terms of raising healthy horses—what was necessary for the soil in order to grow healthy grasses in order to have healthy horses.

I never realized (then again I don’t know much about horses) that metabolic syndrome is a major problem for horses, just as it is for people. It seems that when soils are depleted in essential elements the starches and sugars that plants synthesize cannot be built into amino acids. The minerals provide the alchemy that allows amino acids to form. So, the animals who graze on depleted pastures get too much sugar, not enough minerals, and not enough amino acids or proteins.

The author at one point said something along the lines of—the metabolism of the grass and the metabolism of the horse are one and the same. That was a powerful statement for me to read. It feels like it has really far-reaching implications—not all of which I feel able to express just yet.

But part of it has to do with my thoughts about us being emanations of the land and globules of the land and expressions of the land. We’re so ridiculously interconnected with everything else it seems absurd to act as though we’re each independent entities.

There’s such a weird blending in my mind of the factual and the mystical when I think about these things. It’s so fascinating to me and as I’ve said before this is just a totally unexpected line of thinking for me. Wisdom wants to unfold--it’s not a line of inquiry I ever would’ve planned to pursue. It just wants to be known. 

That book I took out of the library last year—The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook--comes to mind. I was reading people’s reviews of it on Amazon once and while most people loved it there were quite a few people who were put off by the author’s “New-Age”, hokey, and fruity asides about plant energies or spirits or things like that. Those critics are clearly people who have not worked with herbs, because as fruity as it sounds, when you begin to work with herbs it’s obvious that these are entities, that they have specific personalities and powers. It’s not “out there” at all—it is what is!

So, when I think about such things as herbs, it’s this weird blending of these very practical matters—what essential elements does this specific herb tend to concentrate, which essential oils are present, what kind of soil does it prefer, what habitat?—and the odder, more mystical thoughts—what is expressing itself here, why does this blending of the earth and sky manifest as this, with these particular properties, what is being communicated here? Every living thing is a communication of sorts. The land communicates through living tissue.

Plants communicate with us through dreams, imagery, and intuition. I find it odd how casually people talk about the way animals instinctively know what to eat for health and healing and yet such a fuss is made when anyone suggests that our ancestors instinctively knew these things as well. Animals know, and people know (if they pay attention) because all living things communicate. Plant wisdom is available to us simply because plants exist, they emanate from the earth, and anything that emanates by default communicates. We don’t need scientists to isolate healing compounds in a plant before we go to that plant for healing. If we listen, the plant will tell us what it can do.

I came across something interesting yesterday too. I was reading about hops and came upon a picture of the female flowers—the part that’s most frequently used. Now I’ve seen hops growing before but had never noticed the flowers. They’re shaped like little nubby pinecones, about one to two inches long!  Just like the things in my dream in January. And then I read that hops can induce vivid dreams. Remember that in my dream the nubby things induced hallucinations in high doses. Vivid dreams—hmm, could I be getting warm yet?

I poked around a little more. Everywhere I looked when it mentioned hops in the context of vivid dreams it mentioned mugwort in the same breath. My impression is that mugwort is much more powerful at inducing vivid dreams than hops is. Still, extremely interesting.

And because of that dream last January, I’ve learned at least a little bit about three different plants: buriti, hops, and mugwort.

Self-sufficiency has become an absolutely enormous obsession for me. It’s frustrating that I can’t do it all now, but encouraging because I see myself making progress in knowledge and applied learning.  I’m just doing what I can for now.

I really want to get some hens next year. Definitely for the eggs of course, but they should also make a dent in the grasshopper population should we have a plague again next year. I think I’ll probably get about ten unsexed birds to start, and butcher all the boys at around fifteen weeks. Ideally, I only want three or four hens, but you just don’t know what kind of mix you’ll get when they aren’t sexed.

This year’s garden has been so wonderful. I found the 500 square feet to still be extremely manageable—I probably average ten or twenty minutes in the garden per day—and with that I’m able to deal with watering, weeding, fertilizing and bug stomping, as well as harvesting, as necessary. These 500 square feet really produce quite a lot even considering all the losses this year due to grasshoppers and hailstorms. Raising all of my food seems quite a reasonable endeavor. I, of course, am not saying that just these 500 square feet would be enough to live off of—no, of course not.  And I don’t have enough space here to grow everything I would want to--the grains are the killer. But I’m getting a good sense of what I can produce and how much space is required.

If I get hens and rabbits and a beehive and expand the garden to a thousand square feet, I think I could reduce our grocery bill to $50 per month or less. If only I could have a dairy goat here that would reduce it to about $15 per month. And if I was able to grow all of my wheat then all I would need to buy would be spices and exotic things I couldn’t grow myself—plus maybe some other types of meat for variety. 

So, when I get back to Pennsylvania, even if I’m only able to buy an acre or two, I feel confident that I could easily disengage from the system.

Next year I might try devoting 100 square feet to oats (the hulless variety) just so I can get a little experience growing grain. I forget what John Jeavons says is the expected yield per 100 square feet for oats, but I’m thinking it’s about 10lbs. (I could be wrong—it might only be about 4lbs). At any rate, that would provide enough for the year, I think. We don’t currently go through a whole lot of oats. The nice thing is that it would also provide me with some free straw, which I use for mulch and I’ll need for chicken bedding. I’ll need to get a grain roller though, but that’s okay because it’s on the master list.

Next year I want to go vertical much more--picking pole beans instead of bush beans and climbing varieties of the cucurbits. Growing potatoes in a bin or a couple of bins, getting pole peas. Building a good tall climbing structure for my indeterminate tomatoes. I’m already using space quite efficiently with the bio-intensive beds, but I could do even better. The three 100 square foot beds I put in this year beside the house are such a hoot—it’s just one massive wall of vegetation right now.  A jungle out there! I love it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about land lately—how I’m going to afford to buy a piece of land in five years. If I give up on the idea of Pennsylvania (where land seems to be fairly pricey) I open up for myself many more possibilities. I noticed on the web that many five acre plots in the San Luis valley of Colorado sell for $5,000. Sure some of them are on the valley floor (i.e. the treeless desert) but other parcels are up in the hills. It’s not exactly the climate or place I’d ideally want to be, but if it could be had for $5,000 and I could raise all of my own food there it might not be a bad idea. Property taxes for a plot that size are about $75 per year and building codes are unenforced.

Think about it. Five thousand dollars would put me on a piece of land. I could erect a small temporary shack right away with a wood stove, a composting toilet and I could haul in my water to start. As I was able I could have a well drilled, start improving the land’s fertility, putting in the gardens, building the animal pens, eventually building the main house. It seems quite attainable.

I was reading up on soil mineralization on the web yesterday. Next year I want to get my garden soil re-mineralized, but I’ll need to get a soil test done first.

The one site gave me some food for thought. It was talking about all of the elements and how carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen come from the atmosphere and the rest come from the earth (of course, oxygen is also bound up as oxides in the earth). Ninety-five percent of our bodies and the bodies of all living things are made up of these atmospheric elements while only five percent of our bodies are comprised of the remaining elements and yet those elements are absolutely vital for our well-being.

This got me thinking about my insights (or glimmerings of insights) from earlier this year about the meeting of earth and sky within us. If the mineral elements have largely been leached out of the soils, then we are unbalanced in favor of sky influences. To be healthy and the fullest expressions of ourselves we need to feed on mineralized soils.

We are globules of earth and must carry the earth within us. The earth elements root us to the land. But instead of insuring our adequate intake of earth elements, we gorge ourselves on sky foods--carbohydrates, especially.

Healthy people need to eat from mineralized soils. They need to eat a diverse diet of plant foods—vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, grains and other seeds—as well as healthy animal foods. Each living thing concentrates its own unique spectrum of elements. By eating diversely we ensure that our own unique spectrum of elemental needs will be met.

I’m eager to remineralize the soil here and begin to become a healthier and fuller expression of my humanness.

Another thing that interested me on this website was the mention that ocean animals are always fully immersed in all of the natural elements, and that before we fouled the oceans with our toxic pollutants, sea creatures did not suffer disease or degeneration the way land creatures do. 

I realized that water is where earth and sky meet. They can’t mingle otherwise, or not readily. Our bodies are containers for holding water—the necessary medium for earth and sky to meet.

Sea creatures are bathed in the ideal medium. We land creatures are vulnerable to deficiencies because we are not.

The website mentioned the work of Dr. William Albrecht. He was the soil scientist who first recognized the importance of minerals for healthy soils and healthy people. Anyway, the website said Albrecht called foods comprised of the atmospheric elements “go foods” because they gave the body energy (which indirectly comes from the sun through photosynthesis). He called the foods comprised of earth-bound elements “grow foods” because they are necessary for the growth and maintenance of healthy bodies.

I find all of the earth and sky metaphors really fascinating because there seems to be truth lurking here. The sky is cerebral, ethereal, mental. The sky is about energy and Doing. The earth is grounded, rooted, about bodies and health and Being. Sky foods give you energy to Do, earth foods give you health to Be.

An imbalance which brings too much of the sky within us causes too much Doing, too much cogitating, too much ungrounded, disconnected action.

If we all ate properly balanced, mineralized foods would we all become more grounded and more balanced? If you fed the CEO of Monsanto healthy foods would he suddenly mend his ways? I’m sure it’s not so simple—the patterns of a lifetime probably could not so easily be changed—but I’ve no doubt he would see changes, in health, in mood and attitude, and possibly, just possibly, in more fundamental ways.

To really see changes would probably take a few generations. We raise our children from the day they’re born on healthy mineralized foods (well, okay breast milk from day one—hopefully mineralized breast milk),but we may still pass on some deficiencies to them because of our years of eating unhealthy, unbalanced foods, but their children stand a chance of achieving optimal well-being, and of expressing their fullest potential.

I struggle financially in this world because the global marketplace is at a scale that is too large for me to handle. The global marketplace hides cause and effect relationships and is destructive and dehumanizing.

I need to operate within a much smaller economy—a homestead with some local exchanges. I just need to figure out a way to earn enough money to buy some good land, build a good cabin and outbuildings, and supply it with all the tools I’d need to live self-sufficiently.  Then I’d be able to live in a proper-sized economy. The majority of our physical needs should be supplied locally. From the rest of the world we should only trade inspiration, love, beauty, culture, art, spirituality, knowledge, stories, dance, wisdom, dreams, myths, friendship, peace, kinship, sun, moon, stars, wild imaginings, and only those physical commodities that spring uniquely from the locale. Spices from the Spice Islands, Vidallia onions from Georgia, ginger and tea from China, maple syrup from Vermont, olive oil and balsamic vinegar from Italy, etc. The unique expressions of particular places should be our only commodities, and with limits. Certainly the earth should be left intact as much as possible—not ripped apart for diamonds and coal.

There’s a metaphysical aspect to gardening and eating fresh healthy foods. I’ve been experiencing this most strongly with the herbs—I feel like each one has its own personality and each one shapes human expression when ingested. Plants are powerful. It seems important to take in a wide variety of plant essences—not just for generic health but because in a metaphysical way we absorb their attributes. We will be sickly humans as long as we continue to eat the standard American diet—we will be physically sickly, but more than that, we will be diminished humans, unable to reach our full potential.

A few nights ago I had a dream that is still lingering in my mind. I had moved back east. In the dream it was Kentucky, but it looked just like Pennsylvania. I was moving into a simple, pleasant-looking house that sat on the edge of a forest. There was a front lawn that would be perfect for gardening and the woods would offer lots of wild foods and materials for crafting. I was going to be working at a Folk School of some sort. The whole feeling of the dream was one of coming home to my destiny, being where I belonged and doing what I was meant to do. And also of finally being a part of a like-minded community. I felt such deep contentment.

In my mind I can immerse myself in the setting of this dream and when I’m snapped back to reality here by some practical concern like having to move the water in the garden, the whole aura of the dream lingers and I feel like I’m a different person. If I lived in that landscape I would be the fullest expression of myself. For those fleeting moments where I’m transitioning back to reality here I am that fuller self.  It’s beautiful while it lasts, but it leaves such an ache in my heart. For a few moments, the aura of that land gets superimposed on the land here and it feels like anything is possible. I so desperately need to get back home.

The Folk School reference in the dream was interesting—and totally unexpected. It made me realize that a very core part of me is my love of traditional skills and crafts. Also it was clear that this love of mine is an expression of the energy of the whole Appalachian region, as evidenced by the Folk Schools that sprang up there.

Maybe part of my destiny there will be to teach classes. First, I will have to learn all the skills involved in self-sufficiency, but eventually I should have a wide range of hands-on knowledge to pass along.  It would be neat one day to have my own mini Folk School.

Last night I had a strange dream. I was in a forest with some other people in these wildcats chased us up the trees. These were mountain lions, leopards, panthers, etc.—the big cats except these either weren’t full grown or were just smaller varieties of each species—like medium-sized dogs, maybe.  Anyway, there was a person above me in the tree I had climbed so I was blocked from going any higher. A cat climbed up and started clawing at me. I grabbed it by the neck and kept punching and kept punching it in the face and head until it was disoriented enough that I could toss it to the ground. Then another one came up after me. This one I grabbed by the scruff of the neck and swung it around and around in circles to get it dizzy, then I tossed it. They kept coming up and I kept abusing them and tossing them away. In the end I had bloody hands but no other apparent injuries. I sensed that the cats were not going to allow themselves to continue to be harassed but would simply move on to new territory to get away from us humans. I felt sorry that we had entered their territory and forced them out—all I had intended was simply to save my own life.

The dream might simply be a metaphor for what we’ve done to so many animal habitats, but I wonder if there isn’t more to it than that.

The garden is now up to about 500 square feet, since I added a new bed for some of the fall crops—fall peas and beets are in already and there’s room for a little more of something.

I'm still thinking about expanding next year. Eight hundred square feet is sounding about right to me now. I think I could pull that off without making the whole yard look like one big garden. (If I owned the place that wouldn't be a concern.)

Next year I want to get some bean towers or rig up some bean trellises. I want to be able to grow a lot of dried beans for use in the winter. 

Herbs have begun to preoccupy me a bit. When I move back to PA, I want to have an enormous herb garden. It’s been great this year having nine different herbs growing, but I want much more than that. I really believe fresh herbs are vital for good health.

Most mornings Collin and I have been enjoying a cup of oregano and rosemary tea. It sounds a little odd, I know, but it’s really delicious. I make a decoction—just steeping the herbs isn’t enough to release the flavor—and it gets a really wonderful full-bodied flavor. It’s so wonderful to go out to that big bed of oregano every morning.

I've added a small still to my wish list now. I want it so I'd be able to distill essential oils from all of my herbs.  That would cost several hundred dollars, so it’s got to go lower down my priority list.

This month I bought a food strainer to help with the upcoming tomato harvest. And once I buy the optional screens it will be good for other things like pumpkins, berries, grapes, and making salsa.

Bit by bit I’m making progress—I expand the garden a bit, get a few more tools, learn new recipes and preserving techniques, try new varieties of veggies and herbs. By the time I move back east I should be fairly well set. It’s nice to be doing something productive while I’m here in Colorado. There’s a lot I can do already as I work towards self-sufficiency.

The garden is really starting to go crazy, even though I was so late in planting a lot of it. We've got a grand total of 448 square feet of garden this year—four 4' x 25' beds and two 3' x 8' beds. I've been having small salads every day—mostly just lettuce, spinach and chard plus a few radishes and green onions.  The potatoes and tomatoes have started to blossom, although I pinched off the first tomato blossoms. I think we have at least 30 different things growing this year: potatoes, radishes, parsley, garlic, zucchini, carrots, lima beans, oregano, red onions, cantaloupe, white onions, cilantro, chives, spinach, lettuce, Swiss chard, beets, green beans, watermelon, Roma tomatoes, beefsteak tomatoes, and a mix of heirloom tomatoes, gourds, butternut squash, basil, hot peppers, bell peppers, dill, chamomile, and pumpkins. In the house there’s also catnip and rosemary and more basil, plus some cabbage seedlings. Oh, and I forgot the two kinds of sweet corn and the pickling cucumbers (out in the garden of course!)

I keep praying a hailstorm doesn’t come and wipe it all out. We should have quite a bounty otherwise. The only major problem so far has been a plague of baby grasshoppers. They decimated the basil so I planted some more, but now the ones I thought were total goners look like they might survive. The new batch of basil has sprouted, so we could be totally overwhelmed with basil this year (or get nothing at all). We already have an absurd amount of oregano and parsley.

Next year I want to add still more types of veggies. I don’t know where I'll put them, though. I'll have to expand even more!  I still haven’t had luck getting any broccoli seedlings going. Either they don’t sprout at all or they die off as seedlings. This is the second year in a row I’ve had issues with broccoli. So I’d like to get some broccoli next year. Also, rutabagas, turnips, and parsnips, Brussels sprouts, maybe start some rhubarb and strawberries. Grow kale, collards, bok choy and celery.  Try Spanish peanuts and horseradish. Okay, so all of this would require at least one other whole bed, maybe even more space. If I could just get the side yard fertile enough to grow herbs, I could move all the herbs there. Not that that would free up a huge amount of space, but it’d make a dent.

I’ve been in another King Solomon phase again lately—what is there under the sun that is new? What hasn’t been done before and why do we keep doing the same inane things over and over again?

We went over to John's to watch movies last week and I realized there are really only a few plots out there—the great themes of human existence—just done over and over ad nauseam with infinite variations. Why do people want to watch the same thing over and over? So few of the major plots apply to me anymore so there’s really little appeal. Movies about money, riches, stealing, greed, materialism, envy, treasures, collections, fancy this, fancy that—no appeal. Murder, betrayal, jealousy, violence, war, brutality, gore—no appeal. Love, lust, sex, winning the girl (or boy), tragedy, loss. All of these basic themes over and over and over again. And none of them represent real life that sits waiting to be lived once you get off the couch. I just don’t get it. And once you do get off the couch and live the real themes of live—what’s really the point when they’ve already been lived over and over and over again in the real world just as they have been in the movies? There has to be more to it than this.

I’m at the point where I realize it doesn’t matter a bit if I live or die. I’m just one of an infinite number of processes unfolding on the earth and in the universe and death is just a transformation of my energy. I don't cling to my life because in and of itself it's not all that significant. I think it’s the ongoing process of life and transformation that matters much more.

Probably the fact that I wear my life loosely is an asset or could be if I knew how to use it. It gets back to fearlessness and freedom. With no fear of death I should be able to live fearlessly and radically. But what are these times really calling for?  What are the radical, free, and fearless acts that are needed?

I’ve been refining my latest model of the cabin I want to build when I move back east. I think I’ve got it pretty much figured out. It would be 512 square feet, strawbale on three sides (the south side will be largely windows and doors, so I will just in-fill the post and beam with 2 x 6 studs and thick insulation), there’ll be a stone floor (or possibly brick) with braided area rugs. A built-in bed, a loft above the bedroom/sitting area, a wrap-around porch on two sides, enclosed on the north side, so it could be used in three seasons and as a sleeping porch in summer, a masonry fireplace, wood cookstove and probably propane cooktop (for summer cooking), my non-powered fridge, solar and woodstove heated water, a composting toilet, a nice pantry that could easily be expanded by 64 square feet, bringing the total square footage of the house up to 576—91 square feet larger than the house I live in now.

This model doesn’t waste any space the way some of my previous models did. It’s pretty efficient, I think. At some point I’d like to build a balsa-wood scale model of it.

Speaking of using space efficiently, the other day I drastically rearranged the kitchen. By drastically I mean going so far as to move the refrigerator. There’s not really much else you could move around in there. The fridge was right next to the stove, which is always a bad place for a fridge, plus whenever someone had the fridge door open you couldn’t get past them to get into or out of the kitchen. I moved the fridge into a corner where I had some shelves and the table, moved one of the shelves where the fridge had been, moved the hexagonal table out into the living room, moved the rectangular harvest table into the kitchen and put it under the window where it fit perfectly between the counter and the fridge. What a huge difference it has made! It feels so open and airy and bright. It’s easy to move around and nobody’s blocking anyone’s way. Why didn’t I think of doing this sooner?

I was flipping through the workbook we used back when we had our little Mastermind group and I came across one exercise I had done in it. You were supposed to list your deepest urges and afterwards see if you could identify certain themes. Could some of them be grouped under a single theme, or were they quite separate? I don’t think I recognized it at the time, but what really jumped out at me when I saw it the other night was that it’s all one theme. All of my deepest urges concern occupying a particular spot on this earth and participating fully with that spot. That’s it. That’s all I really want.  A place of my own, preferably a place with some biodiversity. A place to sink down long roots. A place to get to know with great intimacy. A place that could support me—where I could raise and grow and gather all my food. A place that nurtured my soul as well. A place where I could participate in the rhythms of nature, and the seasons. A single spot on earth that I could merge with, become one with. That’s been my deepest urge and my deepest need. That’s how I can be the fullest embodiment of who I’m  meant to be.

I saw a neat plan on the Internet last night for a non-powered refrigerator. It just uses a copper coil full of refrigerant and a bunch of radiator fins placed outdoors to freeze solid a huge chunk of ice each autumn. The chunk stays frozen (or mostly so) all through the year until the next autumn when you freeze it again. More and more I’m leaning towards going not just off-the-grid, but even totally without electricity of any kind. I could have a masonry stove, wood cookstove with hot water reservoir, solar hot water, a non-electric fridge, candles, lanterns, a root cellar and other forms of cold storage, and lots of hand tools. If it was all paid for as I went and I truly could be self-sufficient I could get away with having no phone or internet. Those are the only two things I might still need if I weren’t self-sufficient and I still needed to earn some money. Of course, I’ll always need to earn enough to cover property taxes, but I could probably do that without having phone or internet.

It’d be nice to find an inexpensive piece of land and build a small strawbale cabin. I’d have a composting toilet and maybe an indoor hand pump and an outdoor one. And a gray water system from the sink, tub, and wash tub. No wiring, no septic system, no major plumbing to do.

I’m still pushing to get the garden dug. I have one more full bed to dig, plus I’m probably going to make a smaller bed for the corn. The weather’s been really rainy the past two days so it’s nothing but mud—terrible for digging, but great for all of the seeds and seedlings out there. I saw when I peeked out this morning that my mesclun salad greens had sprouted overnight. I planted them quite late, but since you harvest them so small I should be able to get something from them before it gets too hot.

I haven’t been good about getting my crops in early this year, but then again I’ve been preoccupied with digging the new beds. I think I underestimated just how huge the job would be. I gave up plugging the sod into the front lawn after I dug the first bed. It was taking way too long, so after that all of the sod went into the compost bin. At least next year it should all be a breeze.

Next week I’m going to buy materials to build some trellises. I’ll build two 7ft. stretches of trellis for the butternut squash and Collin’s gourds and then a series of horizontal trellises for the tomato bed.  I can’t afford to trellis the whole bed this year, so I’ll leave the determinate paste tomatoes to sprawl and just worry about the beefsteak and heirloom tomatoes. Next year I can expand.

I’ve eaten my first semi-wild food salad this year, and a semi-wild food stir-fry with Collin the other night. It just contained lamb’s quarters and dandelion greens in addition to our store-bought vegetables. Boy, lamb’s quarters are really delicious and I have a profusion of them in the side yard. To think I had been tossing them in the compost bin all this time. I do feel a little self-conscious out there picking weeds and then carrying them into the house for dinner. I doubt that the neighbors would even notice me doing that, but it still feels a little funny.

I’m still working on the garden expansion project. Unlike the bed I created last year, which was on bare ground, all the new beds are covered in grass, so I’ve been sod-busting—quite the slow and grueling process. It doesn’t help that I’m taking the sod and then plugging it into bare spots in the front yard. That seems to take even longer than digging it up. I’m running out of time to get it all done. It sounds like the weather’s going to be kind of lousy this weekend—we’ve had a long string of wet weekends now. But I need to push to get the garden ready.