SOMETHING'S HAPPENING HERE

There’s something happening here

What is ain’t exactly clear

There’s a man with a gun over there

Telling me I got to beware

I think it’s time to stop, children, what’s that sound

Everybody look what’s going down

For What It’s Worth by Stephen Stills

            It’s not good.  

            Media’s unrelenting onslaught of “reality” TV programming and the fascination du jour with vampires, zombies, comic-book superheroes, and bow-wielding young ladies—they’re all bad enough. Throw in the insularity caused by machine-filtered quotidian human interactions, the NRA’s rantings that what this country really needs is a citizenry armed to the teeth and prepared to stand its ground (can you say “George Zimmerman”?), and a baleful sense of one’s rightful place at the center of the universe being denied, and what do you get? Mayhem. This time at a movie theatre.

            A character in an episode of the BBC series “Lewis” says, “All fantasy is infantile until it turns sinister, which it does if you don’t outgrow it. Arrested development is a dangerous thing. Nasty and dangerous.”

Even Al Franken—not someone I usually turn to for bon mots of wisdom—said, “When anything goes, everything goes.”

The Right Honourable Edmund Burke

            Edmund Burke tells us, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” He also notes that "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites." And chew on this, you NRA types: “The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again.” Too bad Burke’s not required reading, especially for politicos and firearms aficionados.  

A student of history, I have long maintained that the United States is but the latest in a long line of reruns of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. The demise of integrity in our leaders; the overweening thirst for money and power at the uppermost echelons; the contracting of the middle class; and the mob's slack-jawed, insatiable, prurient hunger for spectacle echoes that of ancient Rome around 385 AD. “Barbarians” overran the citadel in 421. Right about now, I can’t wait for our comeuppance: in fact, I’m thinking it might be a good idea to learn some rudimentary Chinese.

For what it’s worth, it took us several hundred years less to blow through our nation’s time at the global center stage than Rome did. Let’s hear it for the lickety-split lifestyle.

*****

No, I haven’t moved into a survivalist camp yet. It wouldn’t be a good fit anyway because I’m afraid of guns, and the people who love them. What did ol’ Charlton Heston say? “Guns don’t kill people; people do”? Yeah, that may be so, but I imagine it’s a lot harder to kill somebody with a knife or Aunt Millie’s brass candlestick or your bare hands than with a bullet. Seems like the former methods require some thought, however skewed. Not to mention that up-close-and-personal contact. Sorry, cowboys.

(Click on picture to read caption)

 It can’t be denied that we live in a worrisome era. Last night, PBS started promoting Ken Burns’ latest documentary, “The Dust Bowl” (airing in September on your local PBS station: talk about must-see TV!). What with so much of the country’s farmland suffering severe drought, all those acres of genetically modified crops sown in chemical-drenched soils withering away, I wonder if we aren’t setting up for another one.

Really, it’s not good.

Tomatoes galore!

In reaction to this spate of scary news, I turn to my garden for solace. Nothing unusual with that, of course. Toadflax Farm is producing away—no home-grown tomato shortage chez Fitz this year! I spend so much time cosseting the front yard, the remodeling of the rear garden has received short shrift. The plants wait in their pots on the south side for me to get around to putting them in the ground. I’ve taken to using the north side to traverse between front and back to avoid the guilt pangs the sight of them engenders. Between the heat and other projects, time is at such a premium these days.

It’s those “other projects” that are the actual subject of this post, now that I’ve vented (some of) my spleen.

Water-bath canner & equipment

People who know me express astonishment at the latest bizarre turn my personality is manifesting. Long famous for avoiding kitchen-related activities of any sort, I am currently obsessively turning out canned and frozen jams, salsas, pickles and sauces. I scour the grocery ads for locally grown produce and haul bags of it home to process with my new water-bath canner and Victorio food strainer. I’m also baking bread again, after a 30-year hiatus. Merciful heavens, what happened?

 

I think it may a control thing. I don’t want to ingest genetically modified organisms any more. Monsanto and the industrial-ag boys’ lobby has pressed long and hard to not have their Frankenfood ingredients labeled as such on the processed things they predominate in. What? You didn’t know that for the past decade or so your breakfast cereal contains GMO corn and that the sweetness in your sodas and cookies comes from genetically engineered high fructose corn syrup? And if that four-pound bag of sugar doesn’t say “pure cane sugar” prominently on the package, it’s likely from GMO beets? Even your tofu’s not safe—commercial soybeans have been GMO for a long while now. (Need to know more? Go to LabelGMO’s website, linked here, and click on “Just the Science” on the left menu.)

Homemade freezer jams

 Anyway, I’m taking active steps to reduce my exposure. Preserving food, I’ve learned, doesn’t have to be the horrible ordeal I remember from childhood. (See “Raising Cain… and Beds.”) Jams can be made by stirring together crushed fruit, sugar and instant pectin for three minutes, decanting into jars and popping in the freezer. Who knew? Small-batch water-bath canning isn’t such an ordeal either, I’ve learned: Having the right tools (especially air-conditioning) makes all the difference.

 

Pickles, pickles, pickles!

There’s a picture of my home-grown salsa above, and here are the bread-and-butter pickles I put up yesterday afternoon.

 Ball's instant pectin & mixes

These endeavors were streamlined by the Ball Company’s line of salsa and pickle mixes, which I don't consider cheating. (But then, I wouldn't.)

The labor-saving Victorio strainer

Today—maybe tomorrow—will see the inaugural run of the strainer as I teach myself how to put up spaghetti sauce without the necessity of first peeling, coring and seeding 30 pounds of tomatoes. I am soooo psyched.

Kitchen DIY guides

 Intrigued? Check out these books: Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving, edited by Judi Kingry and Lauren Devine; and Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery that Revolutionizes Home Baking by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François. The latter was a real eye-opener for one who invested the time and energy of youth baking her own breads for a year or so, back in the day before children and regular gainful employment put the kibosh on lazy days spent proofing yeast and kneading. I plan to suggest to Tim we make the six-hour drive to the Asheville Food and Wine Fest in late August for the sole purpose of obtaining a stash of locally sourced and milled Carolina Grown flours. 

In case you’re interested just how far I plan to immerse myself in self-sufficiency, I’ve also signed up for weaving lessons. I want to learn how to make my own denim. It’s gonna be a trip.

Oh, and I’m seriously considering returning to weekly yoga classes too. It’s like a very healthy sickness.

Thanks for dropping by. Ommm…

                                                                                    Kathy

TRANSITIONS

            About two weeks ago here in southeastern North Carolina, a pleasantly unusual long spring transitioned into summer. I know that because there’s no longer any discussion chez Fitz if the nighttime temperatures and humidity levels might allow both open windows and comfortable sleep: they don’t. As much as I dislike the idea of air-conditioning—artificially controlled climate negating the realities of the natural world—I have to admit I’d really miss it, especially as age has made me less resilient in the heat.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

            (In case you’re wondering, I suffer less of a moral/psychic dilemma over central heating by picturing early man huddled around a smoky fire as the cave entrance fills with snow. And I have no qualms at all about plumbing and electricity—a ten-year tenure in the Girl Scouts taught me more than I absolutely needed to know about living without those particular luxuries. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” or something to that effect.)  

*****

Image of 2004's transit of Venus

            An astronomical note:  Venus passes between Earth and the sun on June 5th, causing a visible dot of a shadow to traverse the sun’s disk from west to east.  The first bit of Wednesday’s Transit of Venus can be witnessed from North America as the sun goes down (the entire seven-hour event will be visible from Alaska, where the sun never really sets this time of year). If you’re at all interested, grab this opportunity: your next chance--and I use the second person advisedly--won’t occur until December of 2117.

            Tim and I learned about the transit of Venus from an episode of the third series of BBC’s “Inspector Lewis,” in which a bon-vivant Oxford don learns he has an inoperable brain tumor, returns to Mother Church, and jilts his long-time mistress, who then accidentally pushes him down the observatory stairs. (It’s a good series, ’way better than the schlock aired on this side of the pond.)

Jeremiah Horrocks observes the transit of Venus

One subplot pivots around Jeremiah Horrocks, the 17^th-century British self-taught astronomer and wunderkind (he died at age 22, his best-known achievement a proof that the moon’s orbit around the earth is elliptical), who first systematically observed the transit.  Horrocks’ thumbnail biography on the University of Central Lancashire’s Transit of Venus website tells us “[h]e was able to make three measurements [before the sun set on the village of Much Hoole, near Liverpool] and hence calculate for Venus its Transit path, angular size, and orbital velocity. He derived a value for the solar parallax, smaller than previously recorded, and so concluded that the Sun was further away from the Earth than thought.” Those three measurements also led him to postulate that Venusian transits occur in pairs, eight years apart, and then not again for more than a century (1631 and 1639, 1761 and 1769, 1874 and 1882, 2004 and 2012, 2117and 2125…)  

Some 75 years later, Horrocks’ work led Edmund Halley to call upon the international scientific community to compile their observations of the upcoming 1769 transit so that a greater understanding of the size of the solar system could be reached. Astronomers everywhere heeded Halley’s plea, giving rise to the first ever global collaboration and establishing the foundations of modern science.

All that from watching a little dot float across the sun. Mind-blowing, isn’t it?

*****

Other transitions are happening closer to home. 

What comes to mind when you think of the Bronx? Paul Newman’s grim movie cop in Fort Apache? Miles of blighted urban landscape glimpsed from trains entering and exiting Manhattan’s Grand Central Station? You might want to think again. June 2’s Gardening Gone Wild post tells of an Education for Sustainability partnership between Discovery High School, Rockefeller Center, the Cloud Institute, and visionary George Irwin’s Green Living Technologies (GLTi) that has transformed lives.

I recommend watching the three-minute video of Bronx teenagers planting and installing a green wall at the NBC Experience Store in Rockefeller Center, inspiring stuff at a time educational institutions in this country have lost their compass. When the last school bell rings, where does the current curricular goal of universal but artificially high levels of self-esteem leave kids who can barely read, are innocent of the basic principles of mathematics and science, have only a nodding acquaintance with history, are accustomed to receiving trophies for just showing up, and seem surgically attached to electronic devices? Education for Sustainability (as opposed to education about sustainability) might lead our over-praised, under-educated youth to make visceral connections between themselves, learning and their responsibilities to as well as their rights in the real world.

George Irwin

Gardening Gone Wild quotes Mr. Irwin (who uses as many parentheticals as I do): “The natural progression into education has allowed us to use the Mobile Edible Wall Unit (MEWU) as an educational tool. Celebrity teacher Steve Ritz (Discovery High School, Bronx NY) used the MEWU to improve attendance and achieve close to 100% passing regents scores. He credits the Edible Wall for engaging his students for bell to bell instruction.”

That's good news. Everything else aside, though, I want some MEWUs of my own. They would make nice additions to Toadflax Farm.

*****

Last Thursday's harvest

Speaking of Toadflax Farm, it’s transitioning too. If it doesn’t rain, I have to water everything every other day, the containers daily. Harvests trickle in, a colander-full at a time—tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, green and wax beans, blueberries, blackberries. The peas have finished, and alpine strawberry yields dwindled down to nothing. It's time to plant the second bean and curcubit crops (which is where those MEWUs would come in handy). The squash and melons I planted on the arbor in the New Bed languished: not enough sun, I believe. Haven’t gotten around to planting the heat-tolerant lettuces yet: if only I didn’t have gainful employment and all my other, decidedly-ungainful-but-fun writing projects requiring time and attention to deal with as well!

Toadflax Farm on May 31

But. The poison ivy rash and accompanying Benadryl-induced stupor are gone for the moment (although I just read about a product applied to exposed skin before going out that allegedly deters urushiol from penetrating skin: I hope it’s not made of tar or bear grease. If I can remember where I saw it, I’ll check it out and keep you posted.) When I move slowly—which is my wont anyway—and take lots of water breaks, I can keep going in the heat. Three of four design jobs are done, presented and paid for. Only two clients still need their summer containers changed out; they’re both on the schedule for this week. I’ve decided on the latest direction the back garden will take, a blue, white and yellow billowy theme, and have almost completed assembling the plant list. Tim bought me a set of Ball canning accessories (head-room gauge and air-bubble popper, wide-mouth funnel, magnetic boiling lid extractor), so my initiation to the wonderful world of air-conditioned hot-water-bath food preservation awaits. My first batches of strawberry and blueberry jams came out runny, but they make yummy ice-cream sauces. Best of all, this spate of activity is forging new neural pathways in my brain, staving off dementia.

It’s all good.

            By the way, if you do plan to watch the transit of Venus, use proper eye protection. Nobody needs burnt retinas.

Thanks for dropping by.

                                                            Kathy