Today's Small Contribution: Water Conservation

Installed a dual flush toilet with a simple $40 adapter kit. We depend on our well for water, and after two summers of drought, I'd like to conserve this precious resource wherever possible.

Speaking of water: We plan to set up a rain barrel system along the south side of the barn this spring to get water to the gardens--preferably drip irrigation. We moved here from the desert, and it looks like some of the best practices there might become necessary here.

Life on the Farm: The Sequel

It is now just over two years since we moved to our Indiana homestead next door to my parents. With the sale of six acres to our neighbors on the other side comes an official re-appraisal of our home and time to take stock.  

We are extraordinarily lucky to be here: our buying 21 acres, a house and barn was financially unlikely. Acquiring this place came together through an uncanny confluence of events. 

And we took immediate steps to make our home more sustainable. We insulated every inch, with emphasis on attic and crawl space. We put on a metal roof, which will last longer (no asphalt shingles in the landfill every time it hails) and reflect heat in the summer. Our new carpet was made from recycled bottles, our new wood floor was sustainably-harvested bamboo. 

The triumph of 2012 was installing a geothermal heating and cooling system. This meant goodbye to propane altogether, and ahead of schedule!

The problem with making such progress so quickly is that you eventually slow down. The beginning runner knows improvement like the experienced runner will never see again ("I cut my time in half!"). Now we are running out of money and what we have won't go toward solar or wind energy, like I dream about, but to necessary maintenance on the house. Fixing the old and rotting windows and the damaged gutters--these are also investments, but more about preservation than cosmic improvements. I always raced like that in cross-country--no sense of pacing, I shot out in front of everyone for the first mile, then watched everyone pass me and dragged myself to the finish line.

But we are lucky. My dad (here he is, above, in plaid in 1979, teaching me to rake leaves) had a stroke that grounded him from flying a year ago. He was a test pilot who dreamed his whole life of farming. He recovered marvelously, is in great health and now has time to grow more food, help me with projects, play guitar and even write songs! My mom sews--clothes, curtains, pillows, purses, lampshades, cloth napkins--and we reap the benefits. The "family-share model" I envisioned works well. There is far less commuting (fewer fossil fuel emissions!) when one family can pick up groceries at the store for the other. And of course there is sharing the fruits and vegetables of our labor.

So this year, lacking sufficient funds for ambitious plans, we will nevertheless continue to put hard work into the place. There will be plenty of greenhouse, gardening, and landscaping projects. We will get those chickens we meant to get two years ago. Yes, chickens--who inhabit more and more urban backyards--will finally have a place on this homestead. It's back-to-basics, and that was always part of the plan.

Another thing: One watches the weather differently from a rural county road. When I first described the move here, we were experiencing a once-in-a-generation winter, punctuated by a treacherous but breathtaking ice storm. Since then, in the summer of 2012, we have seen a drought that rivals the 1930s, with more days over 90 degrees and less rainfall than 1936. 

Drought-ravaged corn along County Road 200 West, July 2012. 





It's hard to know for sure how the native grass and wildflower field of 7 acres, planted summer 2011, fared in the 2012 dry spell. The grasses are drought-tolerant, but they take several years to establish themselves above ground. I have my fingers crossed that they were busy building deep root systems this past summer. I suppose that's exactly where I stand: with the grasses. It's hard for me to tell whether I'm going to thrive here or not, and I'm just hoping that I've been building an impressive root system. As an Air Force Brat, I was never practiced at putting down deep roots. I came here with an admittedly romantic notion of the hyper-local: that I would take a small piece of land, care for it, leave it better than I found it, and through my actions feel a deep sense of connection to it. For the grasses, we hope for summer rain. For me, it's less clear. I wrote before that the move here was sudden and yet it had been building for years. I'd like to trust those seemingly contradictory circumstances that brought us here, so that finally, being here will be like the end of a good poem as my mentor Tom Andrews defined it: both surprising and inevitable. 

A Model for the Destruction of Hard Things

A woman studying the fracture properties

of coconuts may insist that nature

breaks its own structures reluctantly, along fault lines

of hard resin on fibrous interiors. 

She might apply that principle to apples,

animal horns and wood,

profile a pineapple so that she might

learn something about destruction.

You stand alone at the edge of ice, push

a half-submerged tree branch deeper into a hole.

Your branch a lever, the entire frozen pond reacts:

you recognize, (with iterations!) Mandelbrot sets

forming across its surface.  It crackles

loudly beneath you, obeying symmetry,

brokenness: illusions begin

to thaw as water seeps into lines from below.

Coconuts have nothing to do with ice.  Levers

do not determine fault lines.  The sound of wood

splitting has nothing to do with the smell

of a forest in January.  Wait.  Apples just might

have everything to do with a pond in winter.  I’m suggesting:

a woman in a lab, chiseling antlers to celebrate

breaking, has everything to do with you

standing in the cold wood, holding a tree branch.

--First published in Fourth River, Autumn 2011

Song for the Troubled Mathematician Who Confronted Remote Infinities

Cantor was depressive, too. Paranoid,

he believed he heard God’s voice reciting

theorems—divine mathematical whispers.

Here, birds eat, drink, and mate on the wing. Such

aerial existence has a certain

disadvantage: come what may, we all end up

on the ground. But the air has substance.

The spaces between stars are filled with dust

and gas. Large African antelope can survive

indefinitely without drinking. Saw off layers of

antlers to find the atheism of dry things. Still,

—and this explains a few things—

stars coalesce from dust and gas; God’s word

is flexible. Cantor had proof. 

---

[1] Georg Cantor (1845-1918), whose work implied “an infinity of infinities.”

--First published in Fourth River, Autumn 2011

Thank you, again, Tom Andrews, for continuing to answer my questions long after your passing. 
I've been struggling with what to hold constant with all the possibilities for experimentation. Today, re-reading an essay after Codeine Diary, I found this:
"...so much is open-ended when you write a memoir--I'm thinking of the 'writerly' decisions you make: about tone, pacing, structure, diction, repetition, what's left unspoken, and so on. The facts you're writing about, however, are 'closed,' even though there is plenty of room to approach them from different angles, or to acknowledge that you remember them differently at different times, within the memoir. But, in the end, the facts ...are the only 'closed' element amid all the open-ended ones."

"Light, Pinned and Singing": with attributions.

* Originally published in The Fourth River, Issue 8 (Autumn 2011). The borrowed phrases (italics) and credits didn't make it to print.*

http://fourthriver.chatham.edu/index.php/new-poem-by-jessica-reed

Light, Pinned and Singing

I am finally present. As Virginia said,

My eyes are hard. Years ago now,

in optics lab, my partner’s strange

pronunciation of ‘frosted glass’.

We were looking at spectra then: glass-
shattered light lines. But I couldn’t focus.

Those radiant projections—just as dazzling

as their sources. The glisten of one borrowed

from the other. And elsewhere, gaseous auroras

both southern and strange. They’d been there

the whole time. Facts may not shimmer,

but they are star-like occasions for metaphor. Even

if I have to bend them a little. That white

celestial thought. Virginia warned us

all: the light is fitful. White beams of winter,

wind compresses snow into hard

barricades. Shakespeare said fires singe

my white head! In kitchen sinks and pressure

chambers, we manufacture fourteen shimmering

forms of ice. See, I believed Tom when he said

There is indeed some light in us. We seek

to explain it, lest our own fitful light dissipate,

star-like in its collapse, with each

photon no longer so startlingly distinct.

Bruce Bond for "pinned and singing"; Virginia Woolf; Tom Andrews; the “white celestial thought” is Henry Vaughan.

Planting Native Grasses

I was warned: there is virtually no time to write in the Spring and Summer on a farm.


Still, I am an archivist by nature, so at least I documented the process of planting the warm-season native grasses with pictures. Establishing these grasses is expensive and elaborate; that is especially daunting for someone like me, who thought grass was grass until just under a year ago. They say that during the first few years, the grasses are establishing strong root systems and may not grow very much above ground.

This translates to: your field might be very ugly for three years, and only then will you know for sure whether the grass was a success. That's partly why the practice typically involves adding legumes and native wildflowers into the mix. Thankfully, it rained an inch and a half two days after drilling, and one day after broadcasting the remainder seed by hand. This is perfect to pack down the seeds.



One plants these warm season grasses both to control erosion (they have massive root systems) and provide critical wildlife habitat. This album shows the critical two days of planting the grass seeds, mostly Little Bluestem. We started spraying the field two months before (in this case, chemicals are the ecologist-recommended route). Despite all the spraying, the field still looks very grassy in places. Just looking at the unevenness of the field, it's hard to believe the no-till drill will work. The fluffy seeds can't be planted more than about 1/8 inch deep, and one should be able to see 30% of the seed on the surface after planting.

Dad (our neighbor!) supplied the tractor. We rented the drill. The ideal drill in this situation is a Truax, but because there are so few rangeland drills in the state and it was getting close to too-late-to-plant, we ended up with a Great Plains. We were not able to calibrate it like we would have liked. (I had a great video on calibration--free from the US Forestry Service, but this drill was missing the parts to do it right).



Insights about life on this farm will be better after a few years of perspective. At least I've got a few pictures in a Picasa album. I even had time to add a few captions.