***

***

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So let the rain become a raging flood
To wash away buildings and boundaries
Swallow whole the world we have known
And as the waters rise
Let the black flag fly

Looking up at me with big eyes and puzzled expressions, were two children straddling their bicycles, one training wheel on each bike touching the pavement.  Most likely there were streamers coming from the handlebars but I don’t remember that part.  No one else was around.

“Why you in the gahbawg?”

“I’m getting food for my pigs.”

“You pigs eat gahbawg?  That’s gross.”

“Naw, they like to eat this stuff.  It isn’t really garbage; I’m just trying to help them out.”

“How big you pig?”

“About this big…” I approximated the length and width of the pigs with my arms.

“Oh…and they eat gahbawg.“

I had quick thoughts of what it might look like if the parents of these kids came around the corner to see some guy with mud on his pants standing next to a dumpster talking about how big his pigs were.  And the truck was still running.

Nice to meet you kids, but it’s time for me to go.  Hope you learned something?

So I edited and added and doubled the length of the original.  It was eventually rejected for the compilation because there was not a personal story involved.  I am working to fix that by writing another bit on my own journey to this point, but the original essay will most likely have a new life as the preface to my photography book project.

So, here it is for your review, the new and improved New Blood For the Old Body, a “Farm or Die” screed for those of you stuck in Accounts Payable or the IT Department or some other place where you know you don’t belong.  Join us in the creation of a new agrarian experience…

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Many of us never meant to become farmers. We had our ambitions to enter the world as accountants or lawyers or teachers or some other clean, respectable professional. We never really thought about the origins of our food or questioned the intentions of those who screen out the realities of farming; we always knew that the supermarket shelves would fill themselves, food came in boxes or cans ready to serve and farmers were simply one dimensional photographs in the mix of a hot new marketing campaign. Sustainable and industrial agriculture held meaningless differences, no more distinction than competing national brands of light duty trucks or diet soda.

But then something happened. In the previously steady route of our lives, a shift occurred. The soil moved under us somehow, got stuck in the creases of our pants, in the ridges of our shoes, in the lines of our palms. Suddenly white picket fences, situation comedies and mutual fund returns didn’t seem so interesting anymore. The big ball game and the driving range became distractions from the reality of a new love affair. We got hooked on the possibilities of growing our own food and also providing that food to others.

The epiphany was likely different for many of us. Maybe a friend took us to a farmers market. Maybe someone had a plate of local hamburgers or collards at a picnic. Maybe the news of some global food disaster made us question the monocultures piled high on our plates. Maybe a real life farmer entered our life.

For a few of us, those with farming in our past – a childhood spent in the fields of the big farms or the family plots, throwing rocks into the hedgerows for little or no pay or watching over milking machines in the stench of industrial sized barns – there was no love, no kind of encouragement, no appreciation for our part in the dynamics of food production. We were simply limbs and calluses then, small gears in a giant cranking clock. We left the farm to pursue something else only to be pulled back hard when it became apparent that we could abandon everything that farming once meant to us. We could make it ours.

Still others came to farming from DIY and anti-authoritarian backgrounds, building urban community gardens or putting up food in anarchist collectives. Gardening always had a community aspect to it, but we wanted something more. We knew that we could do the work, that we had the right vision and skills. We just needed the access and the resources to get started.

Regardless of how we arrived at this point, here we are; we will call ourselves farmers from now on. We are transplants from cities, dropouts from university systems and ex-corporate shufflers. We are mothers and sons and grandparents, masters in communications, colorful documentarians, shy propagandists. Most of all, we are teachers and students inhabiting the same bodies and breathing the same air.

Our young and new farmer movement is made up of many itinerant folks, traveling to places we want to see, gaining knowledge we never thought we would need and forming the basis for our own theories on agriculture. Our commonality with the landed and the stable is the soil and its layers. More specifically, our bond is in the ways we approach that soil and our desire to grow food in a way that builds on a sense of the farmer never dying. The immortality is not functional but symbolic – if you imagine that you will need to use a piece of soil forever, you will never intentionally do it harm.

This intentionality is not a new idea, but neither is it very well known in the information age. It is buried in our collective past, not necessarily waiting to be discovered, but intact and beckoning nonetheless. To get to the guts of it, we are throwing away the agricultural methods of our parents and grandparents, even subverting our great-grandparent’s proud thoughts of survival amidst the coming surpluses. Things may appear as cobbled together bits of dust and weight and worn out shovels, but its functionality in an agrarian way of life is apparent with very little inspection.

We stand in the books and plots and ideas of the past, pulling out the rusty pages and diseased cells in order to build something practical from the obsolete and misinterpreted, rewiring the seed catalogs, rewilding the crosswalks, reconnecting the pastures to the kitchens.

So here we are, doing more than is required of us, daily pushing the boundaries of our bedtimes, our muscle structure, our hunger pains, our balance of minimalist living conditions with the reality of satisfying relationships. We don’t need justification for living this life, but that rejection of validation won’t feed or shelter our families or protect our chickens from roaming dogs. We have concrete needs – access to land, to capital, to markets – but we cannot ignore the bounty before us as we seek to satisfy these needs.

We have to live farming as it happens, at our level, at the pace that we can move. The weeds don’t and won’t pull themselves; the new beds won’t magically appear out of spilt potting mix or the crumbs of a quick dinner of sandwiches among the paths. Anyone who tells you that growing food is simple is a lunatic. Anyone who tells you that having animals lessens the physical workload is a liar. But we stick the possibilities of a simpler, easier way of life in the context of the larger ecology, the massive inebriation that defines the world and my generation. If we are to sober up, we need to get moving.

We are bridging eras, going about tasks the hard way but with newer tools and even newer outlets, burrowing into ancient methods and supplementing with our own big-brained flourishes. A generation of reclamation, telling our story to groups of people that may have never been inspired to so much as think about how a piece of grass might pop from a crack in the sidewalk. The whisper is that we are here to exploit those cracks, get our dirty fingernails scratched with asphalt and debris while attempting to save the disorientated souls of the material apocalypse. We young farmers have the double task of growing food for the community as well as being able to communicate about the process and our decisions in spaces that are new and possibly uncomfortable.

The pictures we take of ourselves hang in art shows and stand out in glossy magazines; our recipes are printed on cardstock and handed out at tradeshows; our words bring excitement to readers wishing that they too could participate in the riot that is small scale sustainable agriculture. This riot exists outside the handshakes and millionaires of the agra-political grease machines, knowing, with the certainty of the tides, that the transactions we despise will occur no matter how long we scream, no matter how far we march, no matter how many letters we write. It is not defeatist or abandonment of the successful tactics of the past, just recognition that we can do much better with the actual actions of farming in sustainable ways, demonstrating to the consumers and wholesalers and value-adders that we are successful despite their dismissals. We cannot change the culture without changing the culture; yelling and otherwise carrying-on never has set a sweet fruit or fed a piglet, and I will bet it never will.

We love this life – we have to – but sometimes we can feel that we don’t own it, that it owns us and grips us in a way that will never shake us loose. In those moments of weight we can only shrug, pull on the rubber boots and move deliberately until the fireflies speckle the whippoorwills’ breaths. Throughout all the highs and lows we can look at ourselves over and over again knowing that, if we stick to our ideals, we can do noble and appropriate work no matter what happens.

We are the new blood in the old body.

This first photo is from just after I bushhogged the area last Winter:

Then we get on the building of hugelkultur beds.  You can see the lean-to shed in the background for reference:

Present day (well, two weeks ago) - the potatoes are towering in the hugelkultur beds.

When the next photo comes out it will be off harvested potatoes and the planting of a fall crop.

I have been a strong proponent of the young agrarian movement, writing essays, giving interviews, taking photographs. The Crop Mob is the physical realization of all those words and images, the sinew, muscle and breath behind the imagination.

With the Crop Mob there exists the possibility of something beyond what we usually perceive of as farming.

The idea is bigger than barn-raisings, more technical than workshops, more thoughtful than textbooks. It is guerrilla agrarianism in the information age. Maybe that isn’t an apt description, but when I watch shovels hitting dirt on a foreign farm with a crew assembled using email, social networking and word of mouth, it surely feels like it.

The Crop Mob is unstoppable, yet flawed on some levels.  Reciprocity from the farmers we have helped is greatly lacking.  We are all busy, yes, but if we are to keep donating our labor, the labor pool must continue to snowball and include previous beneficiaries of that labor.  On that end we can improve our pitch, farms can understand better what they are getting and everyone involved can get what they need out of the day.

We are not unskilled; we bring decades of combined experience in dozens of areas - bed building, fencing, transplanting, harvesting, permaculture, food/farm activism, media outreach - so we are capable of making substantial impacts in a handful of hours.

Where to from here?  The next step may be to franchise the idea or mutate it or trim it down or use it differently.  In the meantime we will continue to do what we have been doing - showing up and getting shit done.

We (Danielle, Gray, Kristin, Noel and Trace) at Circle Acres farm are planning a work weekend for May 22nd-24th.  We are also calling out for a Crop Mob on Sunday the 24th from 10-3.

We have plenty of camping space available for both Friday and Saturday nights.  Parking at the farm is interesting, so please fill vehicles to the max…

Here are some of the things we might get into -

- sheet mulching “lumps” for the pumpkin patch
- removal of privet and bio-char demonstration
- building sheet mulch beds
- prepping land for a living fence
- untangling and testing used drip tape
- plugging mushroom logs
- pulling new electrical wire in the house
- ripping out plumbing
- digging a gray water trench
- building a solar shower
- playing around with cob mixtures

For food, please bring snacks, drinks and whatever you think you might want to have on hand for the weekend.  We will cook for the Saturday dinner and Sunday Crop Mob lunch; we’ll do our best to provide for other meals, but any help is appreciated.

Please RSVP as soon as you can and let us know what days you will be at the farm.  Also let us know if you have any special needs, dietary or otherwise.

One last note - please leave your dogs at home.

Floretta had her baby, Madeline, a few weeks ago.  Madeline is growing her horns and is old enough to be separated from mom for the night.  That means milk in the morning for the human animals on the farm.

The milking process starts out easy enough and gets progressively more interesting.  Especially when one of the morning helpers (me) does something dumb.  It goes something like this -

1 - Clean out the milk container and strainer.  A glug of bleach will do it.  Or a drop.  Or a quarter cup.  Or don’t worry about it.  Sources of information vary as with anything else you attempt to research on the Internets and apply to do-it-yourself type situations.

2 - Fill up the feed basket with corn, oats and hay.  Floretta really loves corn, so you have to hide it under the hay in order to slow her down.  That said, she knows where the corn is from the moment it leaves the bag and will be ready for it whenever you are.  And she’s feisty.

3 - Get Floretta onto the scrap wood milk stand.  Fairly self explanatory but not necessarily easy.

4 - Lock the head gate and get the feed bucket ready.  Floretta will want to get to the feed bucket before you are ready to give it to her no matter if she is attached to the head gate or not.  If an eye pops out just stick it back in and put bleach on it.  Or don’t.

5 - Lock in the feed bucket.  Watch your fingers.

6 - Start milking and hope Madeline keeps quiet…

7 - Trace has disturbed Madeline, so she is getting very loud, and Floretta is getting antsy, so Noel milk faster! before she kicks the damn bucket of milk over, oh come on be quiet Madeline, sorry just isn’t good enough Trace, you idiot!

It didn’t really go like that, but it felt like it to me.  Madi got very loud prompting Floretta to get agitated.  The milking was cut short during this little demonstration session.

8 - Madeline won’t shut up.  Reunite mom and kid before something breaks.

9 - Drink milk.  Try again in the morning.

The more I read about using pigs as tillers, the more I realize that they need to be in a smaller space for an extended period of time in order for the process to be effective.  I may start moving them around in fifty by fifty sections in the larger fenced area.  This will concentrate their rooting and digging efforts.

I’m thinking that if left in the large area, they will focus on the easy spots and basically defeat the purpose of having them on pasture.  They may just wait for me to come feed them, loaf off the rest of the time, occasionally digging up a worm here or there to satisfy some instinctual piece of evolutionary memory.

But maybe I’m wrong and the pigs know what they are doing.  I mean, they haven’t even been with us for a week, and I can already tell where they have been working.

Kristron - ‘We need to get out more.’

Me - ‘We are out more.  We’re all the way out back.’

The whole dichotomy came into focus (again) as I was hauling ten pounds of bananas out of the dumpster, taking in a nice and cozy 2600 mile diet subsidy.  We are building a farm with a focus on self sufficiency.  Since that goal is way off, we rely very heavily on the waste stream.

I have written about dumpster diving in the past, but the level of food and resource rescuing we do now is pretty unprecedented.  The chickens eat it (bananas and melons are their favorite), the goat eats it (cabbage trimmings are always available) and we all certainly do our part to go through as much of the food as we can.  The pigs are coming soon; they will eat whatever we other critters cannot get through.  Clothing, shelving, buckets, cardboard, wire, dishes, and a billion other things get converted into feeders, mulch and everyday farm equipment.

Artichokes, red peppers, starfruit, melons, red bananas, eggplant, avocado, asparagus - a sampling of the seasons from around the world, all held up by petroleum and horrible working conditions - picked, packed, shipped and then thrown away while still edible.  It is basically a punch in the face of all the work done … The wasteful practices are illustrated over an over again by the sight of good food going to the landfill.  But we intervene, daily, breaking the waste chain, feeding ourselves and others while the world dies around us.

Yesterday - in ten seconds in the grocery store dumpster - I pulled out an entire case of tomato sauce.  Twelve jars with an expiration date sometime in 2011, undamaged and unopened, thrown away simply because it was delivered to the wrong store.  So it gets thrown away.  Not donated, not given to employees, not sampled out.  If a punk wasn’t there to rescue it, it would be on its way to the landfill at this moment, the jars broken on the sides of the trash truck and contents stuck on the gears and plates and pieces of a wasteful world.

But if that waste stream stopped suddenly (like we want it to), our current food paradigm would change radically.  We are not yet growing enough to feed ourselves.  Entire subcultures are built on the availability of trashed food, websites and blogs are devoted to one thing only -

Every year in the US nearly 100 billion pounds of edible food are sent to landfills by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. It’s also estimated that only about 4 billion pounds of food would be necessary to eliminate hunger in America.

Don’t get me wrong, a huge pot of dumpster veggie soup is delicious, but with Trashy Gourmet I hope to show that dumpsters offer an endless array of options for your culinary delight. So start diving, get cooking, and stuff your face while you help save the world! Eating against capitalism tastes so good.

Can we eat our way out of capitalism?  Can we reconcile our goals with our current actions?  Pass me an avocado and we’ll talk about it later…

Quitter: Good Luck Not Dying: Compendium of the first five issues of Quitter zine, in a nice hand-sewn hardback, with dust jacket and stickers. Trace’s essays wander appealingly and wittily around, as he searches for something real in our cosmetic world. Issue #2 is the standout: Trace flies over the Midwest, musing over cultural impermanence. I liked this greatly, but however nice the book and stickers are, $19 is more than I would have paid for it.

Making books is not what I’m looking to do with my Spring and Summer.  It is more of a Winter project, a project that I failed with horribly this year.  I am behind on books - way behind.  If you ordered a book recently, you will get it within the next few weeks.

So I am again looking into getting the book printed in softcover, either through a self-publishing avenue or by a publisher wanting to run with it.  All options are open, but I simply can’t keep up with a hand made book…

If anyone out there knows of a publisher, is a publisher or just wants to help out, let me know.

I will continue to offer the paperback version as well as individual issues, but I am taking the hardcover version off the shelf.

Kristin moved up in November, easing the loneliness and becoming an inspiration to get some things done.  We split wood, carried cedar posts out of the forest and tried to get our little room in order.  That continues as Kristin builds kitchen cabinets from scratch.

A few weeks ago, Gray came to live with us.  Then Noel started living at the farm most of the time.  In a few days, Danielle will be here and the farm will have its full crew.

The animal workforce - in addition to the human mules - is trickling in to the farm.  A few weeks ago, Noel brought five barred rock chicks home.  Gray built them a small chicken sled, which is a variation of chicken tractor but without wheels.

We use our daylight free time to watch the chicks’ evolution from little puffballs into dirt scratching, bug eating, fertilization helpers.  Their first contribution to the farm is their crap, with eggs still months and months off.

Oh, and just so you know, the chicks are Bosco, Scritchy Scratch, Rufous Beaver, and Peachy Tips.  One remains unnamed, but Kristin wants to call it Mike Slaton.  I said it might be confusing when it comes time to put Mike Slaton in a roaster.  People might get the wrong idea about us if they overheard the conversation…

Speaking of Mike, he is hoping to raise up turkeys on some adjacent land:

If you are interested in having a delicious, pastured, naturally raised, Heritage breed turkey on your table for Thanksgiving this year please consider purchasing one from me.   Here is how we are going to do it:

In order to meet everyones’ demand for a turkey this year, a CSA type situation would work best.  In order to help me as a farmer with the initial costs, including buying the poults, feed, structural needs, etc.  These considerations and processes are starting now, because it can takes up to 7 months to raise Heritage breed turkeys to maturity.  If you are interested please let me know and we can discuss the CSA process (which will more than likely be an initial $25 payment up front, and the rest being paid upon pick up or delivery). Depending on your desired weight, etc.

As of right now the breeds I am highly considering are:

Bourbon Reds (Originally bred in Bourbon County, KY. Bluegrass region in the late 1800’s)
Narragansett (Brought to America by English and European colonists in the 1600’s)
Black Spanish (Originated in Europe as a direct descendent of the Mexican turkeys carried home with explorers in the 1500’s)

Each of these varieties size up to be beautiful, heavy breasted table birds with a very rich flavor.  Your interest and support in this venture will be helping to promote raising livestock sustainably, on pasture, just the way they were meant to be.  While also supporting locally, environmentally responsible young farmers!  Please feel encouraged to contact me with any questions about this CSA program, Heritage breeds, etc…

Mike Slaton - Sustainable Farmer - Pittsboro, NC

Last Sunday I helped Gray put in the last row of posts for the new goat fence.  Floretta the goat arrived Sunday night, but the fence wasn’t finished for her arrival.  It still isn’t…

Floretta is getting into her new surroundings and her new collar, eating up the tall grass and pine saplings.

She is also getting used to the dogs, which she has headbutted a few times.  The dogs got the message…

Farming was at best some idyllic retirement scheme, never a seriously considered career possibility.

But then something happened.  In the previously steady route of our lives, a shift occurred.  The soil moved under us somehow, got stuck in the creases of our pants, in the ridges of our shoes, in the lines of our palms.  Suddenly white picket fences, situation comedies and mutual fund returns didn’t seem so interesting anymore.  The big ball game and the driving range became distractions from the reality of a new love affair.  We got hooked on the possibilities of growing our own food and also providing that food to others.

The epiphany was likely different for many of us.  Maybe a friend took us to a farmers market.  Maybe someone had a plate of local hamburgers or collards at a picnic.  Maybe the news of some global food disaster made us question the monocultures piled high on our plates.  Maybe a real life farmer entered our life.

For a few of us, those with farming in our past – a childhood spent in the fields of the big farms or the family plots, throwing rocks into the hedgerows for little or no pay or watching over milking machines in the stench of industrial sized barns – there was no love, no kind of encouragement, no appreciation for our part in the dynamics of food production.  We were simply limbs and calluses then, small gears in a giant cranking clock.  We left the farm to pursue something else only to be pulled back hard when it became apparent that we could abandon everything that farming once meant to us.  We could make it ours.

Still others came to farming from DIY and anti-authoritarian backgrounds, building urban community gardens or putting up food in anarchist collectives.  Gardening always had a community aspect to it, but we wanted something more.  We knew that we could do the work, that we had the right vision and skills.  We just needed the access and the resources to get started.

Regardless of how we arrived at this point, here we are; we will call ourselves farmers from now on.

Our new loves – with their sharp hooves and unfamiliar odors, bright green leaves and bee covered flowers – give all the confidence to continue and pursue every goal we can imagine.  Our new hates – hail, crop failures and rain on market days – fully test our tolerance and keep those same goals in the territory of attainability.  Throughout all the highs and lows we can look at ourselves over and over again knowing that, if we stick to our ideals, we can do noble and appropriate work no matter what happens.

Local and sustainable farmers are our peers and our heroes, the most supportive, loving and steadfast community we could ever hope for.

We young and new farmers have the opportunity to change the features of the agricultural systems we have come to inherit.  Through the way we speak, act and work we can change the old infrastructure, market by market and county by county.  We have the time and ability to influence extension agents, educational systems and other institutions to make them function the way we need them to function in order to attain a sane and purposeful community based food system.

We are the new blood in the old body.

With the beauty of the snow in NC comes the problem of clearing it from the roads and the ridiculous frenzy and panic of the local population.  Just the threat of snow is enough to close all schools and most businesses.  Bread and milk flies off the store shelves, people forget how to drive and banks close their doors.  It took me three days to make a deposit at the local bank branch; even the day of the deposit had a delayed opening.

Snow plows are in very short supply around here, and it can take a day just to clear a major highway.  We live on a side road off another side road off yet another side road and then down a dirt road, which basically means that we never see the snow plow anywhere near our home.

It is nothing like New York where the plows come fast and often, their sounds destroying the quiet of night.  I wrote about the plows in Quitter #5.  Here is a taste -

Oh, How Long December…
During a snow storm, the plows mostly come at night.  In the sturdy, hoary months of childhood in Western New York, I would lay awake listening as the distant scraping of the plow brushed its steel blades over the roughly poured asphalt.  In the dry winter air, the low hum could be heard for miles, the flashing orange roof lights of the plow radiating off the lumbering snowflakes, themselves moving unpredictably towards any available surface, wrestling the wind’s vacillating directions.

First the plow would pass to the south of our house, down the thin Barville Road, then up North Byron Road and finally across our unmarked, no-shoulder road.  As the sound grew closer I would pull my face up to the window, watching the coming lights reflect off every available inch of ground, the thick cover of flurries yielding very little until the massive vehicle was right in front of my eyes.  A wave of snow and rock passed over the giant chisel, driven by a mass of grinding metal and boiling oil, echoing brutal noises off the aluminum siding of the house.  The sound and lights would fade as the driver made way through the expansive grid of rurality, on and on towards the gawking of other children unable to sleep.

***************

In Chatham County we are blessed with the ability to grow food all year round.  With this blessing comes the curse of trying to fool the natural cycles either through the creative use of energy (wood stove in the greenhouse) or by the less intensive means of row covers and low tunnels.

Yesterday’s snow meant that the folks at Piedmont Biofarm had to battle the flakes in order to keep their crops alive.  I found farmer Doug Jones busy in the storm sweeping off his row covers with a push broom.

Even he had to admit that it was a losing battle.  A day later, he and a few of his interns finished the work, clearing the snow and ice by hand.

***************

Yesterday ended up being a half day of work for myself and Kristin.  The first snow at the farm was an event for me even though snow and cold and ice is basically in my blood.  I haven’t studied an icicle in years.  The icicle is an indication of poor roofing and a lack of insulation, but let’s leave all that for the adults to think about…

One thing you don’t usually see is a Magnolia grandiflora full of snow.  The evergreen leaves stand out during the brown of our short Winter, but they really stand out against the cold white of an even shorter and rarer snow fall.

And what would the short work day be without a little snow fight action?

We threw snowballs at each other and at 80 (our doggie).  But she was busy with work most of the afternoon, and could barely be bothered to play along.

Her “work” mostly consists of chasing mice in the back field and running around like a crazy person.

This work keeps her occupied and healthy, alert and slim.  It is almost a script - the mice run; she follows their scent, bouncing from grass clump to tree stump, digging up rocks and fallen branches all day long.  The mice run some more.  Repeat.

80 doesn’t really come off as a killer.  Now I’m starting to think that I should be cheering her on.  After all, with a depleted mouse population, we may be able to lower the tick infestation in the Spring.  Mouse blood is the gateway drug for young ticks.  Damn delinquents…

After she caught the mouse (the first one I ever saw her catch), I basically took it away from her.  Later on in the evening I thought that it probably would be best if she had been allowed to eat her catch.  We live in the middle of nowhere, so these field mice are not eating poison.  Kind of a waste of protein.

From now on at Circle Acres, the number one rule for all of us is “You eat what you kill.”

For several reasons, we can afford to mess around (within reason) with nutritionally superior, fun to grow and aesthetically amazing food all while building the soil.  As Noel says, we’re soil farmers first and foremost.  And we have an amazing array of soils on our little twelve acres.

Our land is basically split down the middle into two basic soil types.  To really geek out for a minute, the west half is a Cid Lignum complex or CmB.  The east half is Nanford Badin complex or NaB.

The Cid series consists of moderately deep, moderately well drained or somewhat poorly drained soils on Piedmont uplands. These soils formed in residuum weathered from argillite and other fine-grained metavolcanic rocks.

Soils of the Lignum series are deep and moderately well and somewhat poorly drained. They formed in the residuum weathered from Carolina slate or other fine grained metavolcanic rocks.

Soils of the Nanford series are deep and well drained. They are on uplands and formed in material weathered from argillite and other fine grained metavolcanic rocks of the Carolina Slate Belt.

The Badin series consists of moderately deep, well drained, moderately permeable soils that formed in residuum weathered from fine-grained metavolcanicrocks of the Carolina Slate Belt.

So basically CmB and NaB are combinations of these two soil series.  What does that all mean?  From what I interpret it means that NaB is the preferable soil type.  But the thing is that each soil type can be modified significantly (at the top level) by adding organic matter.  The subsoil will remain as the identified complex.  Keep in mind that I am not a soil scientist, so I could be completely wrong.

Beyond those two types, a half dozen areas of the property have top soils with different characteristics.  In the northwest corner of the below picture, dense orange and gray clays are dominant.  Gray clay is generally nutritionally inferior to the darker orange clay.  Both drain poorly though and dry into hard clots if tilled when wet and left bare.

In the northeast, the soil has more organic matter and crumbles unlike the clay.  This is most likely a former garden site that has had organic matter added over time.  That are will be the start point for production.  The rest will go into cover crops and mulching.

So, for 2009 a few things are changing.  For one, the price of the hardcover is going up to $18.  I am not looking to get rich with this effort (it is working so far, right?) but the process should at least cover the associated costs.  In addition, I will also start printing a softcover version for around $8, give or take, that I can start shipping really soon.  The softcover will also be full color and individually numbered just like the hardcover.  Both versions should be available through The Abundance Foundation pretty soon.  In the meantime, check out the Quitter page to order.  If you live in Chatham County North Carolina, I’ll take payment in Plenties at the old hardcover price of $15 (1 and 1/2 Plenties), paperback at $5 (1/2 Plenty)!

If that were not enough, the ideas for Quitter #6 are rattling around in my head, on scraps of paper thrown all over the heres and theres of my life or sitting alone somewhere, talking to themselves and waiting for me to go pick them up.  I’ll get on that shortly…

And finally, I hope to commit issues one through five to audio in the very near future.  Look out!

Traveling back is usually a culture shock.  I don’t use television, microwaves, automatic dishwashers or disposable plates, but those are just the basics of my family’s lifestyle.  Christmas morning, Uncle Television screamed as we opened gifts and tried to talk to each other.  It didn’t really faze anyone else, but Kristin and I realized that no one was even watching the stupid thing.  That morning was the first of many where I asked that it be turned off.

We watched my brothers play video games for days.  Guitar Hero and some other games for the Nintendo Wii shared time with random shows about how peanut butter is made and Shirley Temple movies.

I gave in and played some bowling on the Wii.  It was pretty fun - all the fun of bowling and you can quit any time you want.

Discussion of taxes crept into every daily conversation.  A new “obesity tax” on soda drinks proposed by the governor of New York has members of my family up in arms.  My response - “don’t buy soda” - was met with weird looks.  The best anyone living around there can do is complain, stay uninvolved in any decision making process, watch television, eat crappy food, and complain some more.  It drives me insane to see so much apathy attached to so much moaning and groaning about the state of things.  And no proposed solution makes any sense to them.

“Food is too expensive”. Have you tried growing more of your own?  “Vehicle registrations are going up in price.” How about ditching one of your vehicles?  “The gas taxes are crazy.” How about driving to town once a day instead of four?  It is always the same whenever I visit; nothing is ever good enough or cheap enough or easy enough.  My response can only be that we live in a world of our own making.

I had some complaining to do myself.  Besides the television being on all the time and eating on Styrofoam, I had issues with the same old racism and homophobia that plagues my family.  Not much to do with that except argue and inject some acidic comments into the mix.

As if all that were not enough, a ten acre field of carrots rotted in a field across from the house because the industrial sized farm (where I worked as a teenager, by the way) had met their quota at the cannery.  As an aside, my father insisted that the owners of the farm didn’t receive much of anything from the federal subsidy system.  A quick search of the federal database says that each of the four brothers received $52,000 in subsidies last year.  So the farm received a total of $208,000 last year.  That seems significant to me.

Tons of carrots will stay in the ground not because there isn’t a market or people aren’t hungry, but because an arbitrary threshold has been crossed at one processor.  All the labor, fuel, time and thought that went in to tilling, planting, weeding are wasted.  Not to mention all the energy that went into growing and shipping the seed…

We managed to rescue a few carrots from the field for our salads, but most were so large as to be impractical for anything but the processing facility.

For food, we made a pumpkin lasagna based on a recipe from a recent local lunch.

On the way from the airport we stopped at Lexington Co-op to get the needed supplies, looking out for local ingredients.  Local milk, acorn squash and butter made it into the dish that we would end up eating for four meals.

The alternatives were not appealing:

I’m not sure which pie bakers ended up with dates, but I don’t think that was really anyone’s intent.

With pies filling bellies, it was time for the entertainment to begin.  A puppet re-enactment of the victory over the police, presented in three hysterical segments…

Then on to some anarcho-country folk punk from Dan Mac.

My favorite song from Dan was about liberals, their hypocrisy and how they are part of the problem and not the solution.  My distrust of the right is often eclipsed by my distaste for the inaction, posturing and verbal drooling of the left.

i’m sick of you
and your goddamned hypocrisy
if peace is patriotic
i’m starting a fight

they’re not my soldiers
and they’re not my astronauts
we can all be leaders
and we don’t need fuckin’ cops

clear cut the forests with hybrid machinery
Brutus and Judas have nothing on us
don’t say the “R” word, just write to your congressman
we’re here and profiteers, traitors of trust

The recent Obama selection of big-ag, cloned meat cheerleader, GMO loving, ethanol guzzling, bio-pharmaceutical conman, and all around jerkstore cowboy Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture illustrates the last verse perfectly.  When you trust a politician, sooner or later you lose.  Now we’re losing sooner - maybe there won’t be rainbows, peace on Earth and gold raining from the sky on January 20th after all.  Thankfully, we can still rely on each other instead of the so-called representatives.  Can we just call them “self-described representatives”?

Anyway, the last band to play was From the Depths.

Their set was energetic, but it was the crowd that made the show.  Animated and dynamic, many of the folks were pulling out some of the old dances, but I saw some new things during the show as well.

Intensity was not lacking…

During the From the Depths set, someone said that they voted for Obama because he promised to make punk lyrics understandable and audible.  They are going to hold him to that promise…

From that seed
A mighty root
And it grew

Yeah, capitalism is dead to me, but mine is a minority opinion.  I’ll dance on that grave someday, and my own grave too, thank you.  But what happens when people decide that a symbolic gesture is in order, a mock procession of ecstatic mourners cheering the burning hulk of centuries of mistreatment?  What happens when a funeral for capitalism gets disrupted by folks who simply don’t want to believe it is dead?

To back up, in late November Kristin and I were planning to go to a street party in Chapel Hill to celebrate the death of capitalism.  The plan was to have a funeral in the street and then dance in the same street.  But that night was cold, so we decided to stay home, stoke the wood stove and get under the blankets.  We figured the industrialists, et al wouldn’t miss us at graveside.

Many other folks thought it too cold for a funeral as well, but eventually enough people showed up to actually make the party go on.  The cops didn’t like the idea, started shoving and pressing and yelling and spraying and doing all the things that annoy all the people like me who have any sense of the rights and responsibilities of anti-authoritarian living.  Just try to get your dancing condoned in the streets of Chapel Hill!

Police Chief Brian Curran said his officers dealt with the situation appropriately. He said police do not condone dancing in the street and had not issued a permit for the protest.

As the clash went on, several un-arrests were made, but one person was taken to jail.  It is that one person that brought about the need for another party.

Nick Shepard, 24, the manager at International (sic) Books on Franklin Street, was the only person arrested. He was charged with assaulting an officer.

This is where the story pretty much starts for me.  I love knowing that if I were in a similar situation, a hundred people have my back even if they don’t know me very well or know me at all.

Friday night Kristin and I went into Carrboro for a benefit event billed as “Punk ‘N Pie”, a date auction where the winner of the pie gets a blind date of their choice with the pie baker.  After the auction would be a re-enactment of the defeat of the police using puppets, then a smashing of a capitalism pinata and finally a bunch of bands.

Yeah, we made a pie - a chunky, buttery, local sweet potato pie made with Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes, local honey, local eggs and sweet cream butter from Homeland Creamery. No, it wasn’t a vegan pie, but I wanted it to be different and supportive of local farmers.  Local fat is hard to come by unless it is from a creature.

There were a dozen or so other pies on the table when we got there, many with multiple bids on them.  There was the dumpstered pie with the added slogan “Let’s Paint the White House Black” with a black flag decorated on the side.

There was the giant apple pie with a heart cut out…

…a vegan pot pie and several cookie pies.

Then there was the “Let’s Make a Pie Together” date pie…

…and a Mud and Flowers pie that was really a pie pan filled with mud, leaves, sticks and flowers.

The auction raised several hundred dollars for a legal defense fund for Nick.

Kristin won our pie despite some other pretty high bids.  So I got that date going for me.

More to come…

All that said, I have to admit that my local food habits hit a rut when I first moved.  I was eating peanut butter and canned crap for a good four week period before I realized that I was missing out on what the new circle held.  I started eating five mile salads and thirty mile meats.  Locally grown and milled flours, grits and rice made their way back onto the table.  I also found my way back into a box of Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes.

Through Eastern Carolina Organics, I also have access to produce from the entire state of North Carolina, from Valle Crucis to Ivanhoe, Edenton to Hurdle Mills and back to Bakersville.  Occasionally things get culled due to poor quality and I of course get my hands in the boxes just like back in Wilmington.  My scavenging eyes are returning and - without my staff discount from the coop - I am looking for ways to slim down the food budget.

Basically what I am getting at is that I am back in the food bubble.  I am also looking forward to producing more of my own food in the coming year.

An outsider would question our motives as would some cynical old-timers or jaded sustainable agriculture veterans.  I wouldn’t even bother with those folks.  My main thought is not on convincing the skeptics that our agenda is one of filling a need, but rather my main thought is Where do we go from here?

Three months out of Wilmington and it is finally settling in that I am in a very different place.  Things move quickly here and things get done by folks who say they will do them.  I can feel some of my own cynicism fading away as I leave behind some of the vapidity of Wilmington, its slow moving, energy-sucking ambivalence flaking away like dead skin.

I am starting to warm up to the people that spin around in my daily interactions.  I’m trying to build the sorts of friendships that emulate family.  The Crop Mob is helping me with some of my apprehensions about new people and my own motives for entering a new world as an automatically standoffish person.

I have had a hard time, wondering how I would fit in when my experiences with building community in Wilmington often met with horrible failure.  I came into a ready made yet evolving community, ready to take my place yet unsure of what that place would look like.

It seems that my role here could be one of role model or experienced advice giver, but mostly, in the first few months, my role has been that of a lost explorer.  Things that I know how to do - cook, forage, dumpster dive - have been lost temporarily as I try to figure out the basics of living.

Cooking without anything resembling a kitchen has been frustrating; washing dishes without a good source of water makes cooking more of a chore than it needs to be.  What that has to do with the Crop Mob is beyond me, but it does affect my interactions.  It has also made my first impressions harder to shake.  Adah (pictured above) has tooled on me about my peanut butter and white bread lunches, but for me that meal has been easy, quick and comfortable in this time of transition.

Now that some of those issues are worked out, I feel like I can join this community in a functional capacity, sharing what I know and accepting learning opportunities as they present themselves.

And yet I am still not a talker.

To bring it back to the Crop Mob, the rhythm of the work is often set with old camp songs.  The one I have heard at both mobs is about sweet potatoes and biscuits -

Sweet potato biscuit that’s what I said
sweet potato biscuit dancing through my head
went to the cook’s table askin’ for some bread
found me a biscuit but the cooks was all dead

Sweet potato, sweet potato biscuit on the run
gotta find me a biscuit, gotta get me some of them
Sweet potato, sweet potato biscuit on the run
gotta find me a biscuit, gotta get me some

Standin’ on the lookout since the day before last
saw a line of biscuits stretchin’ into the past
Jesus on the hillside you know what he said
he said take this biscuit this sweet potato bread

Standing on the banks of the river wide
hop on a biscuit and catch yourself a ride
ride to the devils house all the way
share a biscuit with the devil on the judgment day

Sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit
sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit

sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, biscuit
(whispered) sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, (shouted) BISCUIT!!

Our little “apartment” holds the wood stove (our only source of heat), our new fridge, toaster oven, bed, two tables, a dog, a cat, and the day to day possessions of the two of us.  The place is pretty snug, but we are getting used to navigating it.

We now have running water, but no hot water heater.  We also have power, but only one working outlet.  Small steps seem to take forever, but in the larger picture the pace is not really all that bad.

The rest of the house is in a state of rotten.  The floors collapsed or were in the process of collapsing.  All of the timbers that hold up the house frame have been eaten away by water and termites.  They literally crumble into dust when touched.

The original construction of the destroyed parts of the house was done with any available materials.  The pilings that hold up the place are merely stacks of field rocks and random bricks.  One section of the house is held up with two scrap pieces of firewood.

In order for Noel and Danielle to take residence in the upstairs portion of the house, the bottom level has to be rebuilt in order to hold the weight of two people and their stuff.  At the moment it would be sketchy to even think about living above the disaster.

I’m not sure how the stairs are even held up.  They float above the dirt floor like a ghostly transporter to the upper floor.

The large chimney was built on top of a pile of rocks with no other support.  It is no wonder that the chimney itself is turning into its own pile of rocks.

The floors came out pretty easily with the help of a sledge hammer and reciprocating saw.  Mike and Noel tore it up in a short period of time.

We found evidence of other residents.  A pile of deer ribs, half a corn cob and a turtle shell told the tale of a scavenger living among us.

Another entrance to the house has been consumed by water damage.  A ruptured pipe under the house and a leaking roof provide plenty of standing water and rot.

Outside the house Danielle, Noel and I also found time to scour the woods for downed cedar trees.  These will be used for fence posts to hold in the goats and keep out the deer.

Planting time is coming soon, and the decision to take on a farming apprentice in February (more on that later!) is making the house and land preparations all the more urgent.  I have been hauling horse manure and cardboard like a crazy person, getting the building blocks for the farm beds together.  Let’s start the countdown…