Dawn.
30-Oct-11End of tomato season.
30-Oct-11
No more tomatoes this year.
My tomatoes performed well this year, producing fruit through October. Other growers had problems with some kind of late-season blight, which I think I avoided because I am so isolated from other growers. But diseases of this sort get harder to avoid the longer you grow things. I move my plants to new soil every year, but I’m not sure I can keep them disease-free forever. The plants died with the first frost and snowfall, which was October 28th this year. On the 25th I picked a gallon of ripe tomatoes, and on the 27th another gallon of ripening tomatoes, though I’m not entirely certain they will all sweeten properly. Now I’m working on eating them. Far and away my best performer this year was “Ping Pong,” which produced good-tasting (slightly mild), disease-free firm fruits in superior abundance.
Walnuts.
30-Oct-11I
Husking the walnuts.
Snowy days and evenings are perfect for reading and writing, but still you feel that some kind of manual occupation is necessary; so after cleaning and organizing my kitchen area a bit, I put a big basket of black walnuts in front of the wood stove and began husking. Like all true nuts walnuts come with an enclosing fruit, in this case a green-black splotchy affair about the size of an apple. I slice the husks open with a knife and then peel them off the nut. The husks can be used as a furniture stain, though I have used them only on a small scale, to fix light-colored nicks on stained wood (for which the husks work very well).
After husking I ideally let the nuts dry a bit before attempting to crack them. But cracking them is difficult under almost any circumstances. I have heard that a vise is the best way of doing it; but having neither vise nor good work table to mount one on, my usual procedure is to put a board over the nut and whack it with a hammer, which usually results in a mess of walnut and shell fragments. I still find the procedure worth it, though, for the unusual flavor of the nut, which to most people tastes like a walnut soaked in furniture stain, but to me has the bracing distinctiveness of true nutrition. (Different strokes for different folks; there are many flavors I can’t stand, but this is not one of them).
I do not live in good walnut country; they like river-bottoms and deep soil, but they were an important food source (and lumber source) for farmers and old ones can be found on good farmland. Since most people cannot be bothered to harvest or open the nuts, they are available to foragers such as myself without too much difficulty. “Qui vult nucleum, frangere nucem oportet.” “If you want nuts, you gotta crack husks.”
How odd, the way things turn out.
28-Oct-11Seeing the picture below make the rounds on the internet, I was struck by the fact that Obama has been the president George Bush should have been: steady, stable, conservative, tepid, showing all the stability of someone immersed in the system, effective on foreign policy and not screwing up anything notably. There are people saying that this is a stupendous achievement, and perhaps “he screwed up nothing in particular” is all that we can hope for nowadays, and it is such an improvement over the previous president, but still, it’s an odd twist of history. 
A decent piece – it gets better as you go along – on the growing inequality in America that has made politicians rich paid servants of the rich. And indirectly a rebuke of Obama, who has no obvious relevance to this problem at all.
Between 1979 and 2006, middle-class Americans saw their annual incomes after taxes increase by 21 percent (adjusted for inflation). The poorest Americans saw their incomes rise by only 11 percent. The top one percent, meanwhile, saw their incomes increase by 256 percent. This almost tripled their share of the national income, up to 23 percent, the highest level since 1928. The graph that shows their share over time looks almost flat under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, followed by continual spikes under Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton, and the younger Bush.
Some argue that this inequality was an unavoidable result of deeper shifts: global competition, cheap goods made in China, technological changes. Although those factors played a part, they have not been decisive. In Europe, where the same changes took place, inequality has remained much lower than in the United States. The decisive factor has been politics and public policy: tax rates, spending choices, labor laws, regulations, campaign finance rules. Book after book by economists and other scholars over the past few years has presented an airtight case: over the past three decades, the government has consistently favored the rich. This is the source of the problem: our leaders, our institutions.
But even more fundamental than public policy is the long-term transformation of the manners and morals of American elites — what they became willing to do that they would not have done, or even thought about doing, before. Political changes precipitated, and in turn were aided by, deeper changes in norms of responsibility and self-restraint. In 1978, it might have been economically feasible and perfectly legal for an executive to award himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while shedding 40 percent of his work force and requiring the survivors to take annual furloughs without pay. But no executive would have wanted the shame and outrage that would have followed — any more than an executive today would want to be quoted using a racial slur or photographed with a paid escort. These days, it is hard to open a newspaper without reading stories about grotesque overcompensation at the top and widespread hardship below. Getting rid of a taboo is easier than establishing one, and once a prohibition erodes, it can never be restored in quite the same way. As Leo Tolstoy wrote, “There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.”
Snow Indeed.
28-Oct-11
Snow!
27-Oct-11We’re supposed to have snow tonight. Probably nothing like the 16″ we got on October 28th three years ago, but we’ll see.
Sales Resistance and Killing Chipmunks.
27-Oct-11Wendell Berry says that in the preface to his very interesting book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community that his book about “sales resistance,” a term which I think he never uses again (I do intend to look at the book again and review it). I presume he means by this term a life less economically mediated: where your happiness and survival depends less on actions whose medium of exchange is cash. This is one of the great pleasures of life in the woods, where you grow your own food and gather some calories as well, where your heat and water are not paid for with anything but labor, where you are constantly scavenging for free things that just might be useful.
One of the problems of course is that we are utterly without experience in such a life: all the little solutions other generations came up with we now no longer have access to. The other day I passed one of my water buckets and found a chipmunk dead in it, as occasionally happens: they jump in looking for water, and find no way out. It reminded me of a friend who was having problems with chipmunks eating his tomatoes. He wanted revenge: traps, poisons, something. But before he spent his little money he wanted to know what would work best. I told him that buckets of water are cheap and effective if he needed to rid himself of them, though I live in the Hong Kong of chipmunk density and while I lose some tomatoes and lots of strawberries, I thought they were generally animals I could live with. But that said, I do have water buckets out already.
Sales resistance, though, is still one of the most effective means of reducing your tax burden, if you’re a teapartier and that appeals to you, and for whatever reason solutions, even ineffective ones, are more satisfying when they are free, just as food you grow tastes better than food you purchase – this may be just vanity, but it feels almost like the original, Edenic purpose of vanity, a worthy pride in the process of being alive.
Applejack.
27-Oct-11
I’ve written before about home-fermented beverages, and how I’m especially partial to apple-fermented drinks, because they are entirely local and use the tons of otherwise unharvested apples around here. Pictured here is a bottle of applejack (“Jersey Lightning”) made by my sister’s father-in-law. She was quite willing to part with some of hers, due to the noticeable “dirty socks” aftertaste – details, details, say I. The stuff definitely gets the stomach rumbling, and appears to merit the traditional name “rotgut.” But nothing could be more soporific: after a day of hard labor in the cold autumn rain, I come home, heat up some fresh cider on the stove, then add a shot of this moonshine, some honey, and squeeze a third of a lemon into it. I wake nine hours later.
Wendell Berry on why I live the way I do.
28-Oct-11“However destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the corporations, the root of the problem is always to be found in private life. We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand. There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful people need the help of countless ordinary people. We acquiesce in the wastefulness and destructiveness of the national and global economics by acquiescing in the wastefulness and destructiveness of our own households and communities. If conservation is to have a hope of succeeding, then conservationists, while continuing their effort to change public life, are going to have to begin the effort to change private life as well.
“The problems we are worried about are caused not just by other people but by ourselves. And this realization should lead directly to two more. The first is that solving these problems is not work merely for so-called environmental organizations and agencies but also for individuals, families, and local communities. We are used to hearing about turning off unused lights, putting a brick in the toilet tank, using water-saving shower heads, setting the thermostat low, sharing rides, and so forth – pretty dull stuff. But I’m talking about actual jobs of work that are interesting because they require intelligence and because they are accomplished in response to interesting questions: What are the principles of household economy, and how can they be applied under present circumstances? What do people already possess in their minds and bodies, in their families and neighborhoods, in their dwellings and in their local landscape, that can replace what is now being supplied by our consumptive and predatory so-called economy? What can we supply to ourselves cheaply or for nothing that we are now paying dearly for? To answer such questions requires more intelligence and involves more pleasure than all the technological breakthroughs of the last two hundred years.
“Second, the realization that we ourselves, in our daily economic life, are causing the problems we are trying to solve ought to show us the inadequacy of the language we are using to talk about our connection to the world. The idea that we live in something called ‘the environment,’ for instance, is utterly preposterous. This word came into use because of the pretentiousness of learned experts who were embarrassed by the religious associations of ‘Creation’ and who thought ‘world’ too mundane. But ‘environment’ means that which surrounds or encircles us; it means a world separate from ourselves, outside us. The real state of things, of course, is far more complex and intimate and interesting than that. The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us. We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is also a Creation, a holy mystery, made for and to some extent by creatures, some but by no means all of whom are humans. This world, this Creation, belongs in a limited sense to us, for we may rightfully require certain things of it – the things necessary to keep us fully alive as the kind of creature we are – but we also belong to it, and it makes certain rightful claims on us: that we care properly for it, that we leave it undiminished not just to our children but to all the creatures who will live in it after us. None of this intimacy and responsibility is conveyed by the word environment.” – “Conservation is Good Work”