What the (Frugal) Poor Man Knows

The frugal man knows that his “ fast foods” are soup and salads. Soups are made from vegetables from his garden and cooked in large batches. This is how the frugal made it through the Depression.

The frugal man knows if company comes you add water to the soup.

The frugal know that oatmeal, rice, and barley all soak up a lot of water.

The frugal know for the price of one large soda a bottle of lemon concentrate can be purchased to make a month’s worth of lemonade.

The frugal man knows that with a fifty-cent, day old French bread loaf sliced in half, he can use his own home made salsa sauce and  a little shredded cheese, to quickly bake or microwave his own pizza stromboli.

The frugal man knows that a toasted cheese sandwich fried with butter and dressed with dill pickles, mayonnaise and garden tomato and lettuce is almost as satisfying as a cheeseburger.

The frugal man knows hot buttered toast with fruit jam is similar to a doughnut shop pastry. Likewise, canned biscuit dough baked on a pan with butter, brown sugar and nuts is as good as cinnamon rolls.

A frugal man knows that a box of overripe bananas can be bought for a pittance then peeled and frozen and put into a food processor to make a nutritious smoothie to match any milk shake.

In short, the frugal man knows how to make inexpensive substitutes for overpriced goods.

Planting Tomatoes like Trees

We have moved quickly from a glut of summer squash in June to a glut of tomatoes in July. Actually, a lot of different vegetables came to the table in July. We have already managed to get tired of corn on the cob. When I realized what my wife (i.e. chief cook) was doing, the first thought to pop into my mind was “cop out soup”. I had brought in new potatoes, onions, peppers, corn, green beans, the last of the summer squash, and tomatoes. I thought we had an understanding that since she was now retired, she would be willing to process my garden produce… but like to tango, it takes two to have an understanding. She had decided to “make soup” and everything along with beef and broth was going into one super-sized slow-cooker crock pot. She was killing seven birds (vegetables) with one stone by making soup. To me vegetable soup is something you make and eat in winter.  Anyway, it turned out I was surprised; with a tall glass of iced sweet tea on one side and a plate of cold salted watermelon on the other, a bowl of black peppered vegetable soup actually was a very satisfying summer meal …correction, a whole week of  savory summer meals, since she had made so much. We froze some of  it.                                                                                                    Getting back to the tomatoes, I planted some Celebrity variety tomatoes, a truly prolific hybrid, to use as a standard of comparison for several heritage tomatoes. Someday I want to find a really good heritage tomato and be able to save my own seed. In general, hybrids (of which Celebrity is one of the best) are considered to have better disease resistances and be more prolific, i.e. more tomatoes per plant, whereas the heritage varieties have better flavor. I started off by planting all the tomatoes like I had seen directions for planting young trees…in large holes. I skimmed off the ryegrass cover crop and laid that turf to one side. Next I dug out the hole to a depth of over a foot and two feet in diameter, chopped some of last year’s tree leaves into the bottom, and then replaced the  ryegrass sod inverted grass-side down into the hole to act as a sponge and hold water for the roots when the August drought came.  I added a good soil/compost mixture with a handful of bone meal thoroughly mixed in. I left the top three inches of the hole unfilled so I would have a convenient watering basin. I stripped all but the top leaves off the transplants and planted the stems horizontally with only the top leaves above ground. I put a cage over the transplants and that was it. I believe the bone meal really did the trick because we had many large (hand-size) green tomatoes.

                The Cherokee Purple heritage tomato did not compare well on my soil to the Celebrity hybrid. The Cherokees were large but very gnarled and knobby, tended to have rot spots (most ended up on the compost pile) but did have a somewhat better flavor than the hybrid. I won’t try Cherokee Purple next year, maybe Green Zebra instead.

                I planted a heritage Chocolate cherry in front of the old Amish heritage Brandywine thinking that a cherry tomato would have a small vine. Small tomato, small vine…WRONG! The Chocolate cherry (also called black cherry, I believe) had good flavor, better than the Celebrity hybrid; the tomato was about golf ball-size and there were a gazillion of them…definitely the most prolific output of the varieties. The huge vine was very invasive, covering much of the Brandywine despite the fact that there was a two-foot space between the cages. Still the Brandywine produced large well-shaped and good old- fashioned tasting flavorful tomatoes. The chocolate cherry was early ripening and the Brandywine was quite late to ripen. Since I am into organic gardening, I try to pick all the large tomato varieties either opaque green or at first blush of red and wrap them in newspaper to ripen in the house. If allowed to vine ripen, some grasshopper or stinkbug will take a bite and rot will set in. Greenness is the tomatoes own defense against most insects (but not the horned tomato worm). I am interested in giving Brandywine another try next year.

                Because I was comparing several types of tomatoes, we ended up with a glut; what do you do with all those tomatoes? Fried green tomatoes are delicious in June. We eat a lot of BLT’s and fried ham and cheese sandwiches with big slices of red tomatoes, tuna salad with tomato slice and also toasted cheese, mayo and tomato in July.  Tomatoes make a good side dish just salted and peppered. Green tomato pie really does taste like apple pie. If all else fails, MAKE SOUP!

Wild Rabbits, Righteous Women, and Potatoes

                Women (i.e. wives, and I don’t want to mention any specific name but her initials are M.I.N.E.) have this really irritating habit of being habitually right, even though we men/husbands have logic and mathematical precision on our side. My wife was going into town to shop so I asked her to stop by the local nursery and pick me up FIFTY Beauregard sweet potato sprouts. Logically speaking, fifty is the number that I planted last year and the year before, and that number had perfectly served our own needs through the previous two winters and still allowed us to give a few away to the kids. Mathematically speaking, in March I had gone out and dug under rye grass cover crop and made a total of fifty feet of sweet potato ridges in three separate rows; I planned to plant slips one foot apart. 50X1=50. When my wife came home with 75 slips, rather than create a major row over a minor issue (i.e. choose your battles wisely), I just muttered under my breath about it “being a waste of money” and now I was going to have to “find a place to fit them” into my already preplanned garden space. I felt justified in my grumbling because logic and mathematical precision were afterall on my side. I was a little peeved and she returned the favor due to my ingratitude for her having shopped for me.

                Enter the plague of wild rabbits into the picture and my garden. I had bought some short fencing from one of the major box stores thinking it was designed specifically to keep critters out of vegetable gardens. I thought 2’x4’ weave would stop the rabbits, but they can run right through it without even changing pace. My garden became a rabbit sanctuary. And the one plant they loved above any other was sweet potato leaves. By the time I got some semblance of control with spraying soapy water on the sweet potato vines to change their flavor for the bunny palate, a third of the plants were eaten. Her 75 slips ended up being my 50; She was right on despite my logic and mathematical precision. And, yes…it is really irritating!

                While we are on the subject of “potatoes”, they (both white and sweet) form the backbone of my “Plan B” garden. Plan A is just using your income from job or retirement nest egg to go purchase groceries from the grocery store, i.e. living the American dream. Plan B assumes that hard times come a knockin’ and we like much of the rest of the planet are forced to live a more vegetarian existence relying on our small garden produce. Plan B assumes that western drought causes irrigation reservoirs in central California and Texas graze lands to dry up, skyrocketing the price of produce and beef. (Like that could ever really happen!) To the western drought and wild fires throw in several major hurricanes on the Florida peninsula and gulf coast. Plan B assumes that there might be a major financial crisis, another Great Depression, with banks failing, large corporations going bankrupt and many workers unemployed. (Like that could ever happen in America!) Plan B assumes that in order to stop bleeding red ink, the Federal Government reduces Social Security, Medicare, Welfare and Food Stamps. (Like aren’t we entitled to our entitlements whether the government has money to pay for them or not!) So despite the probability that a need for a plan B garden will never occur and Plan A will continue to function just fine, I went ahead and expanded my vegetable garden to include a Plan B section about 25’x50’. Even if there is no catastrophe, it is still a good skill to learn and should reduce our grocery bill.

                As I said, potatoes are the backbone of the Plan B garden. I planted two twenty foot rows Yukon Gold in mid-March as my early potato and harvested them in late June to make room for a second crop in their area, probably fall carrots and keeper beets. Yukon Golds are delicious to the point that my wife will not let me not plant them. These harvested Yukon Gold potatoes should get us through a good part of the summer. In mid-March I also planted two twenty-foot rows of Red La Soda potatoes which are much more prolific and suited to hot summers and sandy soil. These main crop potatoes will be harvested in late August and their area replanted to turnips for a fall crop. I will also plant some over- wintering spinach to harvest next spring. The Red La Soda should provide us with a healthy carbohydrate through the fall and early winter. The sweet potatoes on the opposite end of the garden will be dug in early October and will be our main carbohydrate in late winter through till next June when the Yukon Golds again come in. So the two white potatoes are on one end of the garden and sweet potatoes on the opposite end. Since whites and sweets are from two totally different botanical families, I think I can get away with rotating them end for end.

                In the ten-foot center of the garden between the sweets and whites on either end, are 12 “holes” that I have dug out to over a foot deep and filled  half-full with inverted rye grass sod and then added several inches of compost and soil mixed with bone meal for phosphorus. After being thus filled each “hole” still has a large basin/depression to hold water.  Eight of these holes have wire cages over them. Six of the caged holes are planted to varieties of tomatoes and two to cucumbers; a couple uncaged holes are planted to bell peppers (3 or 4 to the hole), two more are planted to zucchini. As an experiment, I’ve planted spring cabbages around the base of the tomatoes. The tomatoes give some shade to the cabbages and (I hope) deter the white cabbage butterfly.  The cabbages shade out the grass at the base of the tomatoes.

                Along the back of the garden is a 3-foot wide, 50-foot long bed of onions which I harvest as needed during the summer and then dry and store for winter. I plant 20-foot double rows of bush green beans at about three-week intervals through the summer, so I am always harvesting snap beans but never too many. Snap beans, sliced bell peppers and shredded zucchini are three items which we freeze for winter use. Since the sweet potatoes are planted in mid-May and then sit around for another month before they begin to spread, there is both time and space between some of the ridges for a springtime salad garden of over-wintered spinach, radishes, and scallion onions planted from sets.

                So there you have the Plan B garden; Soups from root crops in winter, salads and cooked greens with stored yams in spring, summer and fall bounty until frost. Horticulture is the poor man’s agriculture. I hope my wife doesn’t disagree with anything I’ve written because I definitely have logic and mathematical precision on my side.

Grandma Kept It Simple

                During this brutal winter in which “polar vortex” has become a pejorative term, I have had a chance to peruse and enjoy a number of gardening “how to” books. It’s been cozy reading by the fire. Quite a few of those books begin with stories about the authors’ grandmothers (and occasionally grandfathers’) who “came over on the boat” or “out on the railroad.” My sense is that there is a great affinity with grandma and gardening.

                My grandparents lived on one of those 100-acre self-sustaining, self-sufficient farms that still existed in the 1950s of my childhood. On that farm grandma was in charge of the garden. As I read the seed catalogs and “how to” garden books this winter I began to realize there was one major difference between my grandmother’s garden and these books and catalogs. The books are full of types of vegetables and varieties of those types whereas grandma grew only a few types of vegetables, but she grew those few vegetable types very well and in great quantity. In truth in my own little garden, I surely have twice the types of vegetable as she, a seasoned gardener, did.

                In terms of root crops, I only remember her raising two- onions and potatoes…lots of potatoes; I recall going down into her basement with her in winter to get some for a meal from what looked like a wagon-load pile. Besides potatoes, the only other member of the nightshade family in the garden was huge beefsteak tomatoes …no bell peppers, no egg plants. The only member of the cucurbit family she grew was cucumbers…no pumpkin, no summer squash, no winter squash, no melons…just cucumbers.  The seed catalogs and gardening books are full of “greens” and brassica family members. Grandma only grew cabbages but she grew them well and in large number. In the legume family, grandma grew lots of peas and lots of pole beans. I remember the peas because her method of keeping boys out of mischief was having us sit on the porch swing and depod peas for a meal. On the north side of the garden  there was a long permanent row of asparagus plants that we kids thought looked like little Christmas trees…to the west side was a permanent row of Concord grapes. Both of these permanent crops probably also doubled as garden windbreaks. The whole garden amounted to maybe a half acre. There were separate blackberry and sweet corn patches…probably a quarter acre each.  By keeping it simple and specializing in these eleven crops, Grandma was not only able to feed her family, Sunday visitors, my uncle who worked the farm and his large family but she also sold vegetables on her “egg and butter” route through the west side of Evansville. I still recall her weighing out green beans and sweet corn on the spring scale they hung on the back of their black van truck. I recall too that the boxed blackberries were especially popular with the ladies on the peddling route.

                So Grandma grew large quantities of a few vegetables…but that is not my main point. My major point is that grandmas cooking did not seem to suffer from the lack of variety of vegetables; rather there seemed to be a certain seasonal succession to eating. First of all the ‘50s were the meat, potato and gravy days and on the farm plate there was always fried chicken, beef with dark gravy or pork chop with white gravy to go with the ever-present potatoes. There was also some variety in the potato serving since in addition to mashed potatoes, grandma also served them country fried with onions, baked potato wedges with ketchup ( think big French fries), boiled new potatoes, and best of all as German potato salad.  After the potato and meat were on the plate, all that was needed was an in- season side vegetable. The cabbages made wonderful Cole slaws in summer and fall and krauts in winter. In late spring there were asparagus and by early summer peas with baby onions. Next came fried green tomatoes; then came cucumber and onion sweet vinegar salad, followed by tomato-onion sweet vinegar salad, cooked green beans, and sweet corn with butter. Fill in this “seasonal eating” with a little canned corn, canned green beans, some pickles, homemade bread with black berry and grape jams during the week and grandma’s famous baked kuchens and chocolate cakes for the week-end meals and it is easy to see that the lack of variety in the garden did not affect the quality of grandma’s cooking. I never heard anyone complain and I did see Sunday visitors unhitch their belts at the table.

                There is a real marriage between gardening and cooking; learning to grow a few vegetables really well and keeping it simple makes good sense. 

Just Desserts

When I plan my garden I think of my plate…and my bowl. In regards to the bowl I consider what vegetables I need to grow in order to make hardy winter stews and soups. On my plate I envision one third containing a healthy starch, (one of those tuber crops I discussed in the previous blog.) I think of another third of the plate as holding either a healthy cooked green such as cooked cabbage, spinach, asparagus, etc. or a healthy colored vegetable like tomatoes, corn and so forth. Thus what I want on my plate determines what I plant; I hope to grow two thirds of what goes onto my plate and only buy the meat portion. I’ve tried to keep my garden quite small so that most people could try something similar even if they do not live in the country; a 50’X25’ plot should fit in a suburban back yard or on a vacant city lot. Either that or I kept it small so I could water my whole garden without moving my chair.

I have a terrible sweet tooth and so I feel the small garden should also provide year-round desserts. Not everyone has room to plant fruit trees. The southwest side of my garden is semi-shaded because of an old apple tree. I noticed that raspberries were volunteering under the tree so I planted a 25’ row of raspberries along the fence on that end of the garden along with several thornless blackberries. I stretched hay bale string taut between the fencepost and trained the bramble into it. Behind the raspberries (to keep grasses and weeds out of them and to give me a clear walking/picking path) I laid a three-foot wide piece of old carpet. Volunteer butternut squash also liked the semi-shade and grew to cover most of the carpet then climbed over the raspberries into the garden. Just inside the garden fence I mulched up to the raspberries with cardboard weighted down with leaves. Before I put the cardboard down I dug bushel basket sized hole that I worked my best compost into and planted half a dozen rhubarb plants. So on this one end of the garden I have the makings for berry cobbler in the late spring, rhubarb pie through the summer, and squash pie in the fall and winter.

During the heat of July and August I eat the cantaloupe and early Crenshaw melons that usually grow in front of my sweet corn; we can freeze some of the melon balls for winter consumption. Waltham butternut squash can be grown in every other corn row and still allow room to harvest the sweet corn before the squash spreads to cover the entire patch by late summer. Waltham butternut, unlike other squash and pumpkins, is very bug resistant so that is all I grow for winter storage. It tastes like pumpkin but without the huge seed cavity. Of course the sweet potatoes can be made into sweet potato pie which can taste like pumpkin pie to pecan pie depending on how much butter you put in it.

My main point is that a small garden can serve you up something to satisfy your sweet tooth year round and still have plenty of room for your other vegetables too.

Roots

I’ve been pondering my roots lately…both the ancestral and garden varieties. First the ancestral. I remember one winter as a young lad going down into the basement cellar of my grandparents’ big white two-story old farm house. I discovered in one room down there a huge pile of potatoes, about a pickup truck load, lying on the concrete floor. These were the fruits of my grandmother’s gardening. This was in the early 1950’s when Americans were meat, potatoes and gravy eaters so in the corner of that cellar was a good portion of my grandparents’ and their Sunday visitors’ eating until new potatoes came in the following year. Mashed potatoes and country fried potatoes were a mainstay on grandma’s dining room table. From an early age I was impressed with my grandparent’s self-sufficiency on their small integrated farm.

Fast forward to my own gardening experiences with root crop for this year. Part of my self-sufficiency gardening plan worked and another part did not. The part that did work was that my stored sweet potatoes from last year did last through the winter until early summer when my new white potatoes matured; the white potatoes in turn have lasted until my crop of sweet potatoes have come in for this winter and next spring. So my idea of succession eating of some root crop year round has been a success and I have been able to microwave me a hot potato for buttering any day of the year. This winter my wife will help me to explore the versatility of sweet potatoes in varied recipes. We are most interested in oven baked sweet potato “fries” spiced with red pepper and also with using sweet potatoes in soups, stews and pies.

I dug my sweet potatoes a little early this year and did not leave them in until the approach of the first frost. It was a trade off; I lost a little in the size of the tubers so I could plant my cover crop of annual rye grass before really cold weather stunted its growth. I really appreciate rye grass as a winter cover crop; it puts down so much root growth deep into the garden so easily. Those root systems produced over winter will be the soils organic material for next year’s garden. It is very easy and cheap; $5 worth of ryegrass seed transported in the back seat of the car. Despite digging them a few weeks early, some of the sweet potatoes were still large enough that one tuber could feed four people for a meal.

The part of my plan for root crops that did not work this year was my delusion that I could plant a succession planting of sweet potatoes in ground where white potatoes came out of. The reality was that the white potatoes were harvested in early July and I planted the sweet potatoes in late April. So successive eating worked but successive planting did not. Still I haven’t given up entirely on successive planting of root crops. White potatoes could be followed with beets, carrots and those huge rutabagas for November harvest. Sweet potatoes (which just sit on their mounded rows for a good month before they begin to spread vines) could be preceded by a quick growing spring turnip like Tokyo Cross® or onions in the valleys between the raised rows. My wife did make some borsht soup with the few beets that I did raise this year and I really liked the flavor so that could become a winter staple. Borsht seems to me to be a stew where the potatoes have been replaced with beets. Good cooking in the kitchen and good recipes are what make self-sufficiency vegetable gardening work.

I have mixed emotions about root crops. They produce huge quantities of food in a small area, they are easy to grow, they store well for long periods and they can be made into a variety of delicious recipes. But they are also inexpensive to buy in the grocery and normally I prefer to grow something expensive like watermelon or cantaloupe or sweet corn. With all the craziness that is going on in the world today maybe it just makes me feel a little more secure knowing there are tubers in the back room and beans and rice in the pantry.

Tight or REALLY Tight

How can you tell if you are just cheap…oops, I mean tight… or if you are REALLY tight? Here are a few examples to help gauge your level of parsimony.

If you grow and dig your own potatoes and add the potato vines to your compost pile and smash any grub worms that you come upon while digging with the back of your shovel then you are being frugal. But if you save the marble-sized new potatoes to be seed for your late straw potatoes and put the grubs in a recycled butter container to use for fish bait and bury the fish heads and bones deep in your garden, then you are really tight.

If you organically grow your own tomato plants and prune the vines to encourage more fruit production and throw the prunings on your compost pile then you are economical. If instead you replant and water the pruned cuttings to try to get a second harvest of free tomatoes just before frost hits, then you are really a tightwad.

If you find a seed company which offers $25 worth of free seeds or plants (Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Co.) and you get seeds for your garden for just the price of handling and shipping then you are pretty parsimonious. If you get several of your siblings to also get the seed catalog and offer for your benefit and buy asparagus spears and blackberries and other perennial plants which may produce food in your garden for the next twenty years then you are truly tight.

If you have your wife give you a buzz hair cut at home to save giving the barber $15 and paying for the gas to get to his shop, well that is commendably thrifty. But if you scoop up the cut hair to put around those afore-mentioned free asparagus plants to act as a high nitrogen, long lasting mulch and also as a human-scent deterrent to keep any deer from bothering your garden patch well that is getting darn near being really tight.

If you ask your significant other to make melon balls from excess melons that would otherwise go to waste so that you can enjoy melon frozen desserts in mid-winter, that’s laudable. However when she’s completed the task if you hint that she should also pickle the rind and parch and salt the watermelon seed then (trust me…) you are truly pushing the envelope.

I could go on with other examples but I think you get the idea already. I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m one of those FANATICS! I wonder if she could boil the watermelon juice down to make pancake syrup…..

Bees and the Beans

Plants talk to me. Seriously. I planted and heavily mulched four thornless blackberry plants and four raspberry plants in fertile soil in the back yard. Despite regular watering, seven of the eight were dead within a couple years. Meanwhile volunteer raspberries (and lots of them) kept appearing under my apple and apricot trees next o the garden. One day one of the volunteers looked me in the eye and said, “Hey moron, we like the semi –shade; that is how bramble grows naturally in the wild.” So I dug up some of the volunteers, stretched several rows of taut straw baling string between the fence posts at the south end of my garden and replanted the bramble just outside the garden fence under the shade of overhanging apple tree limbs. I intertwined the bramble volunteers in the straw baling string and laid a three foot wide strip of old carpet just behind them as a permanent mulch weed control which also served as clean picking path just behind the row of plants. “It’s about time!” the plants said and took off like gangbusters to form a permanent hedge demarcating one end of the garden. They were receiving both the shade of the apple and the fertility of the garden.

Then the butternut squash made eye contact and said, “Us too…We want the semi-shade too.” I had bought a super hybrid butternut squash and planted it in the field; every plant withered and died without bearing any fruit. There was a volunteer which came up with some cucumbers I planted near the apple tree. Since I didn’t want it choking out my cukes I treated it as a weed and ripped part of it out. It came back. It grew up the carpet behind my raspberries and then climbed over the fence and into my garden. Okay, I get the message; next year you go between the sweet corn rows where you can get both dappled shade and garden fertility and watering.

I didn’t know if cabbage would grow in my type of soil or not so I planted some this spring as an experiment. The plants seemed to love the soil and grew very quickly and I lost every plant. One of the hole-ridden dying plants spoke to me, “Cabbage is a fall crop; do not plant us until you have seen the last white cabbage butterfly.” So I noted that the cabbage butterflies were all gone by the beginning of August and will plant accordingly next year. One of the best organic methods to control pests is to watch their life cycle and try to grow plants out of step with the insects’ natural life span. For a lot of plants that meant planting early in my sandy soil which drains and warms up early but for cabbage it means planting later. Either I use a floating row cover or spray BT or else I plant the main crop behind some earlier crop for fall harvest.

Well, that brings me back to the pole beans. They are trying to tell me something but I can’t quite make out what they are saying. I put in some ten-foot poles. The beans grew to the top of the poles with lush vines and then turned around and headed back down, hanging almost to the ground. The vines were covered with blossoms and insect damage and plant disease seemed to be minimal. But not a single bean has developed…not one. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones…I can’t get no…pollination. They say that things go in cycles. Last year we had honey bees galore…so many that I could not help but commit apiscide as I trench composted over-ripe water melons into the garden from the melon patch last fall. (When I was a kid we didn’t have fancy terms like “trench composting” or “French Bio-intensive Gardening”; Mom just told us to “bury the garbage.”) Anyway a lot of bees got buried last year because they could not resist watermelon rind; this year I bet I haven’t seen two honey bees all summer. This year I purposely laid out some exposed rinds on the compost pile next to the beans to try to draw in a few scout bees but nothing resulted. This whole episode has given me a greater appreciation for garden produce which is not dependent on insect pollination like potatoes, sweet potatoes, lettuce and sweet corn (wind pollinated). I continue to tell myself that honeybees are a European import and there must have been native pollinators before the colonists brought their bees over.

I strongly considered just yanking up the beans and cantaloupe plants and tossing them on the compost pile but if I cannot understand what the pole beans are saying to me, I can certainly understand what my wife is saying (she has a somewhat irritating habit of being too right too often.) She says let everything be until we get a return to cooler weather after this prolonged heat wave. Maybe Mother Nature will make a last ditch effort to produce fruit when cooler days and longer nights return. Straight-faced farmers tell me “you planted under the wrong sign of the moon,” but I think they may just be secretly poking fun at a greenhorn.

Mother of Compost

I lied. I stated in an earlier blog that after I dug my early potatoes in June I was going to replant that spud area in bush beans and get a second crop. We had some bush green beans in the freezer and the pole beans were covered with promising blossoms and I had run out of bush bean seed and would have to go into town to buy more etc., etc. so I changed my mind (that sounds much better than plain old “I lied”).

I had not gotten any free composted horse manure this year. As I looked at the empty ground where my potato patch had previously been, I decided that there was a silver lining in this grey cloud of no manure; there was an opportunity to be more self-sufficient and independent of outside help here. My garden now was considerably more fertile than the pure sand I had begun with in the first year of my retirement but still nowhere near what I wanted and needed. What I wanted was enough organic material mixed into the soil to give me a rich foot deep top soil. Yes… this empty potato patch would be where this year I would build the mother of all compost piles. From what grew mostly on my own property I would get the fertility up to a level where it would only need small increments of green manure and cover crops to maintain it in future years.

Compost requires both brown material (high in carbon) and green matter (higher in nitrogen.) For the brown material I had the weathered leaves that fell from my maples last fall. I also had about eight bales of straw that I had set melons on to sell by the roadside last summer and then used as winter insulation behind my north side crawlspace entry and snuggled around some outdoor water spigots to prevent freezing. This combination of brown material I laid about one foot deep over the bare potato patch. As for the green material, a garden, especially a melon field always has culls and bad plants which are a simple wrist pitch away from the compost pile. Cooking from garden produce leaves a lot of rinds, peels and cores; this is always a good addition to the pile. We only eat a small part of a corn plant, so once we had eaten or frozen the sweet corn, the husks, cobs and chopped stalks were all added to the pile. To chop the stalks I laid them all in the same direction on top of the compost pile and then went at them with a sharp hoe. The key word here is “sharp”.

I always let my lawn get a little tall before I take the riding mower to it, partly to save on high- priced gas, mostly because extra work is against my retirement religion, but also so I can get some nitrogen-rich grass clippings to rake up for my vegetable garden. Grass clippings work great as green material to heat up the pile and towards the end of the summer that is where they go. Earlier in the summer I prefer to use them as mulch around heavy feeding and perennial plants which need a mid-summer feeding side-dressing to keep producing, notably rhubarb and asparagus. Grass clippings are my manure substitute and a mulch to keep weeds down. After that purpose is served it can go in the compost pile.

My main source of green material by far was weeds, especially the ragweed (which grows rampant on our property), poke and what I perceived to be thistle plants (although my plant knowledge is so botanically challenged that in truth I cannot tell my thistle from my thassole.) Using young weeds to enrich my vegetable garden felt like a firefighter using back fires to fight fire. All the organic reading material indicates that succulent young weeds are good in the compost. Ragweed is the bane of every nasal allergy sufferer so it felt like I was killing two birds with one stone as I scythed them from our semi-wooded area and hedgerows. Scything was good aerobic exercise and I worked up a good lather when I wasn’t resting in the shade. When I say I composted weeds, I don’t mean any grasses. No crab grass or Johnson grass went into the pile. Those grasses re-root right away whereas the broad leaf weeds are fine as long as they are cut before they have set any seed.

I guess a picture is worth a thousand words so the photo shows the base of my mother of all compost piles where my early potatoes once grew. I will add material to that base the rest of the summer, till it into the soil late in the fall and then sow a green manure crop of ryegrass. Maybe I won’t sneeze quite as much either.

Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Tomatoes

As I indicated in an earlier blog I devoted about one third of my 25’X50’ garden to a combination of corn, bush beans and cantaloupe. About another third of the garden is in potatoes, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. The white potatoes and tomatoes are of the same botanical family and the white potatoes and sweet potatoes have similar fertilization and avoidance of lime needs. Having both the potato and corn areas and the remaining third of everything else the same size makes annual crop rotation on a three year rotation basis somewhat easier. So in this “spud” third of the garden I’ve grown six short north-south rows of Lasoda potatoes, a row of bush beans, three rows of sweet potatoes, and four caged tomato plants with eight small peppers in front of the tomatoes.

The whole area appears to be one mass of greenery without visible aisles; I have an obsession with getting as much produce into as small an area as possible. Actually the harvesting aisles appear and disappear throughout the season. The outside perimeter of the garden serves as four picking aisles for produce which may need daily harvesting. The tomatoes and bell peppers are along the front side so that I can gather them as they ripen from outside the garden. Next year at the back side of the garden perimeter (on the north where they will not shade any other plants) I plan to plant pole beans on perfectly vertical, cut sapling poles and then harvest daily from outside the back of the garden. When the sweet potato slips are first planted before their vines begin to spread there are natural walking aisles between the hilled rows. When the vines begin to spread after about a month the aisles are closed into one mass of vined-bed vegetation. As the white potato vines begin to wither I harvest a north-south row of new potatoes into the east-west bush bean row in the center of the garden and then dig potatoes parallel to the bush beans. As I daily harvest new potatoes I am also opening up a picking row beside the beans. After a couple weeks of picking bush beans I can pull the plants and lay them down as a mulched central garden path for the sweet potato vines to gradually spread into. Meanwhile I will replant the dug potato aisles which I used to get into the beans to a second crop of bush beans and let that aisle close up again. If I use organic mulches of newspaper topped with leaves or straw and then have this close planting of vegetables as a canopy of living mulch to shade out any undesirables I have minimal weed problems, more retention of soil moisture, more total produce etc. So mostly my rows appear and disappear as needed.

One area where I have had a weed and grass problem is in the foot tall chicken wire perimeter fence I use to keep out rabbits. Left uncontrolled these fence row grasses and weeds would set seed which would blow into the garden. We replaced our living room carpet last year so I took the three foot wide strips of old carpet and laid them up against the fence. This killed out everything in short order and then could be dragged to another problem area. The carpet strips were too heavy to be blown away in the storms and smothered everything underneath them.

I have become somewhat disenchanted with black plastic as a mulch since it seems to require drip irrigation beneath and does not allow all the natural rain water to soak down into the plant roots. I like the natural way so this year I dug four bushel basket sized holes and filled them with the best compost and top soil I had. I bought Early Girl® variety tomatoes because I wanted to harvest at the beginning of July not wait until August. I pulled all but the top couple leaves off the plants and planted the roots and stem (which should produce roots once buried) in a shallow trench. Planting more horizontal and closer to the surface hopefully would keep the roots in the warmer topsoil and let them get an earlier start. I put down thick straw mulch from the bales that had protected my house’s north crawlspace during the winter. All the rain we have had has soaked through the straw mulch and into the compost giving me the best looking batch of caged tomatoes I’ve had in my four years of retirement. Today is July 4th and the first tomatoes are turning red. I think black plastic commercial mulch with drip irrigation is good for cantaloupes grown in full sun but I probably will not use it again for tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers or sweet potatoes.

The thing I appreciate most about this potato/tomato section of my garden is quantity. There is just a huge amount of produce beneath those potato and sweet potato vines and tomatoes are always over-producers. They also provide sequential produce; potatoes and tomatoes for the summer and fall, sweet potatoes stored for winter and spring. Both types of potatoes store well. My wife let me know I wasn’t bringing any potatoes into the house for storage until the vines were completely dried up and dead. Until that time the vine is still feeding the growing tubers and they keep just fine in the soil so I only dig them as needed every day or two. With eating from a garden there is not that much variety in produce; you are probably only eating from a dozen or so vegetables. For this reason cooking recipes and varied food preparation is essential to achieving variety. Cooking is my wife’s forte and (I like to think) her hobby. She makes a hash of fried potatoes, green beans, and chopped ham which is great topped with ketchup and served with a side of cucumber and onion slices marinated in sweet vinegar brine. She makes microwaved large new potatoes split open and filled with a mixture of cooked New Zealand spinach, cottage cheese and grated cheddar cheese. (Be sure to poke holes in a spud with a fork before you microwave it.) She makes both great German and terrific American potato salads. She makes delicious oven-baked French fries covered with chipotle seasoning and cayenne pepper. I do believe she could serve potatoes fixed differently every day of the week. In order to eat heavily from a home garden, cooking and a variety of tastes are important.

Still even a plain old meal of fried chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes with black- peppered milk gravy, sliced tomatoes, and green beans cooked with bacon is not all that hard to get down. There were some good meat sales in the stores for the Fourth of July week-end. Because we have been eating vegetables from the garden a lot we could afford to stock our freezer with inexpensive pork loin and chicken. I do love the taste of pulled pork barbecue!

Sweet Corn, Green Beans, Cantaloupes (Squash)

We ate our first sweet corn toward the end of June. I wasn’t sure it was ripe but a coon got in the patch and confirmed to me that it was ready. As I got ready to plant early this spring I had doubts about growing my corn organically again this year. Everyone knows what a heavy nitrogen feeder corn is and I probably only had enough homemade compost made for my tomato holes and the new asparagus trench. I also did not get any horse manure this year so I considered adding some commercial fertilizer but eventually decided to just go pure organic another year and see what happened.

I had a good winter cover crop of rye grass and a lot of time on my hands in early spring. I sharpened a long handled shovel blade with a hand file. I skimmed off rows of rye grass sod, laid the sod to one side, and then dug a trench one-shovel deep laying the soil to the other side of the trench. To the bottom of the trench I added about an inch of old shredded leaves, a good sprinkling of wood ashes from my burn pile pit and chomped it all in with the shovel. In my mind this would form the sponge beneath the corn to prevent all the rain from draining straight through my sand soil. Next I skimmed off the ryegrass along with an inch of top soil from about one foot either side of the trench along with the sod I had laid beside the trench and inverted it all into the trench roots up, grass down. I hoed a furrow into the sod-filled trench and planted. Would that be enough fertility to raise sweet corn? I’d have to wait and see.

When the corn was about a foot tall, I hoed out the weeds and grasses and hilled it a bit. In half the rows I planted a row of bush beans about a foot out from the corn rows. The beans did well without extra fertilization and grew to thigh-high forming a good living shade mulch to keep down weeds. The corn ears and tassels were all well above the bush beans. When the beans were ready for their final harvest I just pulled out the entire plants and then picked the beans off while sitting in a lawn chair in the shade. I don’t like to be bent over a lot. The beans and the corn mature at about the same time; the corn is the heavy feeder and the beans the light feeders. We blanch excess beans and freeze them for later summer eating. Beans can tolerate some shade and the double leaf canopy of beans and corn keep weeds and grasses to a minimum; except for the initial hoeing before I planted the beans no more hoeing was required.

If we harvest corn ears down both sides of the bush bean rows and beans are planted between every alternate row then half the corn rows are available for planting either cantaloupe or butternut squash. The cantaloupe or squash or pumpkins grow undisturbed until the corn and beans are harvested and then spread to take over the entire field. I know butternut squash works well this way and I am trying the cantaloupe this year. So far the cantaloupe vines seem to be enjoying a little shade from the corn and not wilting like they do fully exposed to summer mid-day sun. The fruit may be slower developing and ripening. By the time I planted the cantaloupe seeds between every other corn row I had no compost for them and the rye grass cover crop had been scraped and given to feed the corn. The soil between the corn rows which I was planting to cantaloupe was relatively sterile and I would much prefer to put some manure under each plant but I just did not have it. Cantaloupe and squash benefit from some calcium/lime (as do corn and beans) and also have a strong Potassium need. Wood ash is strong in both of these so I went back to my burn pile where I had been burning branches and brush I had cleared during the winter and spread this ash between the rows. At present the cantaloupe appear to be doing well with only this fertilization.

This combination of bush green beans, sweet corn and squash or cantaloupe takes up about one third of my total garden space at present and I may eventually increase that up to half the garden. This combination seems to be able to be grown totally organically using the method I described and have either similar or complimentary fertilization and sunlight needs. After the cantaloupe (or squash) I can possibly get in a late crop of turnips after everything is harvested by early September. Right now it all looks like one big solid island of green growth with no visible aisles. An isle with no aisles.

Why So Small

It was the end of February. “Got any garden in?” a buddy asked me.

“I got a few early salad greens and a few peas.” I answered and then hesitated and added almost apologetically, “You know Joe…I only put out a small garden; about 25’ by 50’.”

He looked at me silently as if to say, “Frank, why so small? You do live in the country.”

“I do put out about an acre and a half of melons” I added to counter his silent question.

Joe comes from a farming community. He probably used a utility tractor to put in his garden. To put in a small garden in the country probably seemed kind of pointless to Joe. Still the unspoken question “why so small?” bothered me.

First I have neither the desire nor income to buy a tractor and implements to garden; that would be counter to my economic incentive to save money by gardening. I like to keep life simple and power equipment is all about complexity to me. I love hand tools…their quietness, low price and guaranteed startability. I’ve never taken a spade to a mechanic and told him I couldn’t get it to run. I get my exercise quota using hand tools. Some times I have to start up the old tiller to work the melon field, but I don’t like it…can’t hear the birds.

Working a small plot also allows me to concentrate a lot of organic material in a small area to raise soil fertility. Concentration is important. I don’t put the whole garden in in one day but add small sectors all through the spring and summer. I savor my time outdoors.

I’ve always admired those who produced a lot with a little, like those citizens who grew the Victory Gardens of WWII.

I think I have in the back of my mind that one of these days, maybe within the next ten years, I’ll have to leave the country to go to the suburbs to be near doctors and health facilities. I want something that will be doable (by anyone) in a city back yard lot…something I can take with me. Maybe the suburb plots will someday become the new garden lands for local markets instead of shipping produce from an average of 1,500 miles away.

So I guess I am just a small guy who likes to think small and simple. To do otherwise seems too much like work.

Slaw Praise

I harp a lot about the money saving aspects of gardening…I think a lot of that is because gardening is my chosen retirement hobby. The truth is there are a lot of really inexpensive and nutritional foods that can be bought in the grocery…perhaps so inexpensive that it is very questionable whether it would be worth anyone’s effort to garden grow them. Dried beans, dried peas, brown rice, oats, cabbage, onions and carrots are all super healthy foods that are dirt cheap. The pre-pre-prepared “convenience” foods are what make grocery bills high. Probably as much money can be saved by eating inexpensive staples and doing your own food preparation as by gardening.

I wrote an earlier blog about bean soups and incorporated a picture of a bowl of ham and beans and some dark bread. Later it dawned on me that I should also have showed a side-dish of cole slaw in the photo; cole slaw is the perfect taste complement to ham and beans. It also goes wonderfully with fish and fries as well. It is great with chicken, mashed potatoes and white pepper gravy. The same goes for beef, mashed potatoes and dark gravy. One of my favorite grade school cafeteria meals was chicken pot pie and sweet vinegar cole slaw. My parents and grandparents were the meat-and-potato generations; they were also the cooked cabbage and cole slaw eaters. Our generation is the lettuce/spinach salads generation but I doubt that these salads are really healthier than the cancer- fighting cruciferous family. Cabbage stores really well too, whereas the more expensive salad greens will go bad in the fridge crisper in short order.

Cole slaw can be made from cabbage, carrots, an onion, and sweet vinegar; all super nutritious, tasty, and cheap. Problem is these vegetables must be peeled and grated. It’s that food preparation thing I was speaking of earlier. My wife doesn’t care for this grating task so it sounds like a job for “retired man.” (For some reason beyond my comprehension she is forever using that phrase, “sounds like a job for RETIRED MAN.”) Once I am finished grating she adds her secret ingredients and we have a plastic container of slaw in the fridge to go with several meals.

Cooking from scratch and food preparation can be a savvy budgeting concept. Find some good slaw recipes. Here is one I just swiped from my wife’s kitchen counter:
Ingredients:
1 cup fat-free Miracle Whip
¼ cup sugar
8 cups cabbage, finely minced
2 tbsp minced carrots
2 tbsp minced onion
2 tbsp vinegar
Combine the Miracle Whip with sugar and vinegar in a large bowl. Mix well until the sugar is dissolved. Add the cabbage, carrot , and onion, and toss well. Cover and chill several hours. Only 57 calories per ¾ cup serving.

Spring itch

Saint Valentine’s Day is the first of those holy/planting days, the next two being Saint Patrick’s Day and Good Friday. Saint Patty’s Day and Good Friday are both early potato planting days and Saint Valentine’s Day is the beginning of planting those really early garden seeds such as lettuce, spinach, peas, and maybe radishes, in other words the salad garden. So as I began to think of gardening again (did you think I would be thinking of LUV on V-Day?),I drove my little Nissan pickup into town to the leaf dump. I wanted to make sure I got some of the leaf compost before some farmer hauled it off for his fields. In the fall the town picks up and shreds the leaves and by spring they are starting to look like peat moss. In my opinion a leaf dump is a good recycling project for any community, turning refuse into something valuable with a minimum of effort. Have you seen what they charge for peat in the garden stores? Hopefully the leaf humus will be an excellent soil amendment. I’ve gotten six pickup loads in piles around the garden. I refrained from putting it directly on the garden area because I wanted to give the cover crop of ryegrass a chance to put down deep roots and grow. My cover crop really looks anemic this year but then so do the local farmers’ rye cover crops. Worst I’ve seen in 30 years.

I knew my wife would also want a load of leaf mulch for her flower gardens, so I brought her one. When she saw her pile that evening she put on her smile and got all doe-eyed and told me she wanted MORE! I tried to beg off by saying I was broke and my truck was very low on fuel. That evening a ten and a five magically appeared on my dresser top. So I brought her another load but she still wants MORE. That woman sure does love her flowers!

It is obvious from the above comments that my wife and I are getting the spring gardening itch. Once I get all those shredded leaves turned into the soil along with the ryegrass maybe the garden will be off to a good start this year. At very least I got my exercise quota from pitch forking those pickup loads. Now I need to get those salad seeds planted (when it stops raining.)

Porkerville

I got put on the VA fat farm. The VA doesn’t call it a fat farm; they call it their “MOVE” program which stands for I don’t know what but I get the message. At my last check-up at the Veteran’s Clinic the doctor asked me my height and used that with what the nurse had just weighed me at to figure my body mass index or BMI. He looked at me kind of strange, asked my height a second time and then refigured my BMI a second time. “You don’t look that heavy” he said. Of course all of this convinced me that I had just worn too many winter clothes for my weigh-in and more importantly had developed really heavy bones from all that skim milk I had drunk over the years. Still I look at this free VA program as a real opportunity for me since I am sure I’ll feel much better at 180 than at 220.

I am sharing this boring personal aspect of my life because I am certain there are others who may have the same problem and may want to see how I progress and what the program is about. Besides, it is still a while until gardening and fishing season and if I post anymore of my personal philosophies it will be even more boring.

I am aware that a sort of perfect storm has formed, a downward spiral. First came the high-calorie holidays, then being more sedentary in winter on top of being less active in retirement. Even in summer when there is a lot of yard and garden work, I only put in half a day compared to the 12-hour days of physical labor before I retired. I have also been blessed with the curse (or is it cursed with the blessing?) of a great cook for a wife. If after nearly 40 years of marriage that is the worst I can say about her I guess I’m a lucky man. (I put that in there just in case you-know-who reads this.) Still, if I had been forced to live off my own unpalatable cooking all these years I am certain I would be leaner. Taken together, all these elements of this brewing perfect storm along with my age, I do need to be careful.

I was impressed with our first MOVE meeting with a registered dietician. The goal is simple: lose 10% of your weight in 6 months at the rate of about one pound per week. The method is simple: rid yourself of 500 calories per day, 250 calories burned from increased physical activity (we were each issued pedometers to wear) and 250 calories reduced in food consumption calories. A 250 calorie reduction in a 2000+ daily caloric consumption does not seem that tough. The plan attacks the calorie reduction at the margin, i.e. you give up the easiest 250 calories not the hardest. Butter and tub spreads are extremely calorie-dense, about 50 calories per tablespoon; there are spray-on butter substitutes in the dairy section which taste just like butter but are zero calories per serving;losing a single slice of bread can mean a reduction of 100 calories. So cutting calories at the margin by replacing spreads with the spray-on, replacing sugar in my coffee and tea with zero-calorie Splenda and cutting back one slice of bread and one cup of milk, I should be able to lose that 250 calories per day and not even feel any sacrifice. (Sacrifice is the part we all hate.) Replacing one of my daily cups of skim milk with a diet soft drink might even feel like a treat and would save me 80 calories. So cutting 250 calories a day seems very doable. It is much more a matter of awareness than of sacrifice. I think the real question is whether the 250 calorie per day reduction and 250 calorie extra activity burn will actually translate into a pound loss per week. That remains to be seen.

The day of our Move meeting I had planned to take my wife out for a pizza supper. It dawned on me that I would not have to forego this date night. If I just ordered a diet drink instead of my usual sweet tea and free refill then I would save a couple hundred calories. Ditto if we ordered thin crust instead of thick crust. Ditto if we ordered veggie lover instead of sausage or pepperoni. The only part of the MOVE deal I agreed to was cutting what I normally ate by 250 calories and we did that and still had our date night too.

As for the burning an extra 250 calories per day by becoming less sedentary and engaging in more walking, let me say we went shopping the day after the MOVE meeting. Let me also say that unlike my wife, I hate shopping and usually sit in the car working a crossword puzzle to “improve my memory” while she pokes around shopping. I decided to mentally change my viewpoint of chain stores to see them as free-heated walking venues. Instead of plodding along shoving the grocery cart and acting as the "guardian of the purse" while my wife read all the labels on all the cans in the store, I took off at a good pace looking for the emptiest store aisles to serve as my walking track and put some steps on my VA-issued pedometer. Again this may be more a matter of awareness and changed attitude than sacrifice. Time and pounds-lost will tell.
Stay tuned for Porkerville updates.

What’s Happenin’

You know you are getting old when you fall asleep during the Super Bowl and your wife has to explain to you what happened in the second half; that and the fact that you remember a lot more of the names of the players on the first Super Bowl championship team than today’s Green Bay team. But what the heck I did get a good nap out of it.

I haven’t blogged much in January because I set aside the month for putting up a tile ceiling over our wavy, uneven, unsquare bedroom ceiling (one of the joys of living in an old farm house built by old farmers not carpenters). How many retirees does it take to change a light bulb? Just one but it’s going to take him all day to do it. That is why I set a whole month aside for this simple project. That and the fact that those farmers used hard oak instead of pine for all their studs and ceiling joists and every nail I drove bent beneath my hammer and expletives.

There is a country song that is popular just now about a man who hears voices in his head, the advice of his parents and grandparents which the wisdom of his own passing years has proven to be valuable and true. When I begin a project like the ceiling or even a task as simple as washing the dishes or simple house chores, I rely on the voices of old sayings, proverbs and platitudes to get past the initial inertia of an evil living room sofa calling my name for a nap and telling me to procrastinate another hour or day.

To get me started there is the old Chinese saying that “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. I ask myself what is the first simple step I need to take to begin. (No! not lie down on the couch and think about it!) Other initiating advice is “Well begun is well half done” and “On the plains of hesitation lay the bones of countless millions” and “Carpe diem”. I find the advice of Julius Caesar especially valuable as a modus operandi in accomplishing any project: “Divide and conquer.” I think he was speaking more to Gauls and Teutons but the adage works well for any unpleasant chore or “insurmountable” problem. It is the basis for my problem solving. Divide the whole problem or project into parts and then break the parts into still smaller parts and those into even smaller parts until eventually you reach a part so microscopic you automatically assert “Hey, I can do that.” Sometimes (most often actually) I can only begin the dishes with “putting the silverware away.” If all other motivators fail there is always my wife quoting from St. Paul’s epistle that “Those who don’t work, don’t eat.”

For my next project I have set aside the whole month of February for doing my taxes. No need to get in a rush; after all I am retired.

poverty or POVERTY

Am I poor? I really don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t feel poor. All my needs are met. Perhaps poverty like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are different kinds of poverty. There is the stereotypical hillbilly poverty with a front porch full of old appliances and a front yard full of partially dismantled cars and beer bottles. There is the stereotypical ghetto poverty where kids fight over who has the correct NBA jacket and expensive sneakers endorsed by the right sports celebrity. There is the sense of entitlement poverty where people wonder why the government is slow “getting me my money” and “my benefits”. There is the Benedictine/ Buddhist poverty where men and women purposely take a vow of poverty to live a simple life. There are the back-to-the-earth/self-sufficiency types who also want to return to the simple life and opt out of the rat race. There are those who just feel that most of the economy-produced products are so much clutter in their lives and garages. Poverty can lead to simplicity and simplicity to order and order to happiness. A degree of self-sufficiency can lead to a sense of security and security to happiness.

Of course there is the government established poverty level of income to decide if one is poor or not. But this “poverty line” income is constant across the country and the cost of living varies greatly depending on the location, even from one county to the next. I had a conversation with a widow this summer who complained about paying thousands of dollars in land taxes. Judging from our conversation, her property was quite similar to what I owned. Her property is near the county I live in. “You need to move across that county line,” I said. I only pay a couple hundred a year.

Then there is the concept of land versus income as an indicator of wealth. Remember land is that stuff that they quit making. The small acreage that I own in the country would make me a wealthy land owner in Rwanda, Haiti, China, Japan or any number of other places on the face of the earth. Are people with higher incomes who live in a big city on a dab of land richer than me? Who knows? If I want anything a city or town has to offer, I just drive in and get it. I am not trying to brainwash anyone or proselytize, but if someone has adequate health care, then the simple back-to-basics lifestyle has much to be recommended for it.

I need to cut this short. I want to go out to the garage and see if there is anymore junk I can get rid of. Simplify…simplify…simplify.

Simple Winter Fare

New Year is past; each day grows imperceptibly longer now. December was the most frigid I can recall and now that we are back to average January temperatures it feels like a spring thaw. Perhaps Old Man Winter has worn himself out or there is no more cold air on the pole or in Canada to slide down into the 48. I can hope. It did get up into the 40s today and was sunny so I worked half a day pruning fruit trees. I probably lopped off more than I should have but the increased roots to branches ratio may help the trees if there is a drought next summer. If given the choice between doing exercises or doing outdoor work on a cold but sunny day I prefer to do yard work because I can see something accomplished afterward.

After the over indulgences of the holidays I am ready for the inexpensive and simple fare of winter. We eat a lot of hot oatmeal with butter, brown sugar, chopped nuts and either applesauce or home-grown cherries or store-bought raisins. A box of store-brand oats costs a couple dollars and lasts a month for two people. It cooks in the micro wave while I make the bed. When we need variety or more protein I scramble eggs and top with salsa or make French toast. Bread and eggs are also inexpensive and nourishing foods. Coffee and skim milk are our normal beverages.

My sister bakes a wonderful heavy dark bread. I like that bread with a homemade white bean soup like white chili or senate soup. (I’ll give the recipes at the end of this; the secret to any good white or navy bean soup seems to be adding mashed or powdered potatoes for thickener.) Anyway, with hot bean soup, a big chunk of black bread and maybe a small glass of left over holiday wine I feel like some monk supping in a Middle Age abbey, fortifying myself against the winter chill. Okay so I do get carried away with my imagination; still, bean soup seems a welcome break from all the sweets and pastries of the holidays.

We make soup by the pot full and then eat micro-waved left-overs for a good while so we may also have soup for an easy evening meal if we have a taste for it. If not, our supper is usually spaghetti or tuna noodle casserole or maybe salmon loaf with cooked cabbage. I try to get some omega-3 fish into our diet in winter. We still have garden sweet potatoes and butternut squash which make good side dishes with a little added butter and brown sugar. It’s a small ego trip to still be eating from the garden in mid-winter. Everything is made in large batches and refrigerated so there is very little cooking and a lot of quick microwaving.

The holidays come with guilt for me as I pack on extra pounds. Judging by the number of people who make fitness resolutions for the New Year I think I’m not alone in this. This simple winter fare probably won’t cause me to lose any pounds but it should hold me steady until spring and summer when I can. Here are those bean soup recipes:

Senate Bean Soup

2 cups dried navy beans
12 cups water
2 pounds chopped ham
1 chopped onion
2 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ cup instant potatoes

garlic to taste

1. Heat beans and water to boiling. Boil uncovered for 2 minutes. Cover with lid and let stand 1 hour.
2. Add ham and heat to boiling. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 2 hours or until beans are tender.
3. Stir in remaining ingredients. Cover and simmer 1 hour.
4. If soup is too thin add ¼ cup instant potatoes, stir until thickened.


White Chicken Chili
1 medium onion, finely chopped
3 tablespoons olive oil 1 (4oz.) can chopped green chilies, drained
3 tablespoons flour
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 (15.8 oz.) cans northern beans
1 (14 ½ oz.) can chicken broth
1 ½ cups finely chopped cooked chicken breast
In a large skillet, cook onion in oil for 4 minutes or until transparent. Add chilies, flour and cumin; cook and stir for 2 minutes. Add beans and chicken broth: bring to a boil. Reduce heat: simmer for 10 minutes or until thickened. Add chicken; cook until hot.

Economic Irrationality

Most people on the face of the earth today believe that capitalism is a system of rational economic actors i.e. buyers and sellers, consumers and producers each acting rationally in their own self interest. But an argument can be made that capitalism at its very core is irrational. No, I am not a pinko commie who is going to be quoting you Karl Marx or Das Capital. On the contrary my main source is Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations and the father of capitalist economic theory.

Economics is generally considered to be a social science which deals with the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy human wants. The allocation of scarce resources, (that is to say the inputs into the products) makes good sense; these are the scarce means to an end, that end being the products or outputs which satisfy our wants. The irrational part which befuddled Smith and other early classical economists was that the ends themselves, the outputs, the products, the wants which people sought to satisfy were also based on scarcity and not necessity. An example is in order. Water and food are necessities for human life; diamonds and other “precious gems” are not; we can live fine without the shiny rocks but it is those rocks that humans give the greater value to. Scarcity trumps necessity. Likewise gold, a soft fairly useless metal is stored idly in vaults while with the much more useful metal, iron (which has been transformed into the plow, every type of useful machinery, skyscrapers, and canned food containers) we have a hard time getting people to bother to pick it up for recycling. Bottom line is that any system that values scarcity over necessity is somewhat irrational. We see this irrationality played out in movies when people lose their lives in a quest for gold or some large gem. You want to yell out, “Hey…it’s just a R O C K!”

This inherent irrationality of capitalism, (or is it an irrationality of human nature only exposed in capitalism?) could cost us greatly if we continue to trade the health of our planet for “must have” products. Eve had everything she needed in paradise but she just had to have that “other apple”.

The Furnace and the Wife

It was midday and frigid when the furnace went out. This tended to confirm my prejudice that our appliances are too complex and over-engineered and fail when they are most needed. I called the office of our heating man. The answering girl seemed almost afraid of my response when she told me they were overwhelmed with furnaces failing in the cold snap and could not get to me until sometime the next day. We would have to spend a night without gas heat. I reassured her that I understood and tomorrow would be fine.

As I hung up I realized I would be fine...until my wife came home at least. Afterall, we still had electricity. I put a sweater over my flannel shirt and a fleeced turtleneck sweat shirt over that. I put on three pairs of socks and a second pair of fleeced sweat pants. I was warm but still had freedom of movement. I lit a candle in the middle of the kitchen table, put a teapot of water on a low burner to shoot steam away from the cabinets and into the kitchen center and I decided to cook a pot of rice. This kept the kitchen at a fairly comfortable 50 degrees as I warmed my hands over the teapot steam or wrapped them around a mug of hot tea.

The problem my wife has with such life situations is that she suspects that I am secretly enjoying them as some sort of survivalist challenge. This is pure perversion to her. As she arrived home tired from work and physically under the weather, I was secretly ready to find a hotel room if she demanded but refrained from telling her this outright as I explained the situation and how lucky we were that the temperature was only going down into the twenties tonight and not near zero as it had the two previous nights. “Well I guess you’ll have something to blog about,” she dead panned.

After a supper of canned soup over rice and the last of her birthday cake we retired to our two living room recliners with a electric space heater between them and blankets over our torsos. We watched TV until eight then turned off the heater and retired to a bed of covers and blankets which we pulled up to our chins. I put a fleeced blanket by the headboard which we could pull down over our heads so that only our noses and mouths weren’t covered. We were warm but restless all night. Frequent trips to the bathroom made me wonder how the kids in Little House on the Prairie ever made it to their outhouse.

In the morning after a breakfast oatmeal and coffee, the space heater had managed to bring the bathroom temperature up to a balmy 55 degrees and my wife spent what seemed like an hour in a hot bath. Fortunately the repairman arrived around nine AM. He immediately did more for our marriage than any marriage counselor could have. The temperature is now up to 70 and we are back to what passes for normal around here.