Horseradish Hill Homestead

• The worms thrived over the winter in their bins, and today I harvested the last of about 7 cubic feet of the good stuff*
• The garlic is coming up lovely, around 25 German White and about 18 Spanish Red.

• Planted two apple trees, one Macoun and one Red Rome.
• Planted two O'Neil bluberry bushes.  Fenced the four of these against deer, rabbit, and other undesireables.

• Finished constructing a 4' x 8' "square foot garden" a la Mel, using 1/3 compost (from the worm bin), 1/3 peat and 1/3 vermiculite. Gonna plant red and green lettuce, basil, sweet and hot peppers, 'maters, cukes, melons, savoy cabbage, other stuff I'm not recalling now.
• Had a local herbalist come by to see what grew wild, and she found chickweed, motherwort, english plaintain, a buncha raspberry bushes,
• Acquired the absolute bitchinest bike ever created by homo speedicus, an '07 Honda Sabre fit for the gods themselves to ride. A ting of beauty indeed.

On a break at work, I find myself worrying about my worms.  I’m not the worrying kind, but these worms put me in an ethical bind from the beginning, and now it’s pricking me again.

You know how everybody has one or two (or more) topics you just can’t talk to them about because they’re plain crazy when it comes to those things, how you can’t really talk rationally to them about those specific things?  With me, one of those things is around humans dealing with animals, the whole keeping them and raising them and eating them thing.  I acknowledge up front I find it hard to be perfectly logical about this, and no one can claim to be consistently consistent, but I’ve done my best not to be connected to keeping animals in captivity, or using them for whatever reason. Don’t think it’s right, wouldn’t want them to do it to me.  So, the idea of keeping worms, as much as I wanted their castings, posed a moral obstacle.

I got through it by making the outdoor pit, so in theory they’re free to go where they want; making a warm, food-filled place for them to be; and doing what I could to see to their mortal needs.  Nonetheless, red wigglers do not thrive out there in the wild where I live, so there’s really nowhere for them to profitably go, and there’s the deeper issue of actually buying them and transporting them no differently than slaves (yes, I said slaves, why dither?).  I want to keep bees, too.  I’d be a bee pimp, no?

I’m J, and I write this on November 3, 2007, anniversary of Lynn and my wedding.  A good day to try and describe what brought us to the back-to-the-land project this blog is based on.

Lynn calls us “fringe negroes,” two nappy slackers with more of a taste for the slow scenic route than the rat race.  We’d always talked about someday having a place in the boonies to drop out on, but this isn’t how we planned it, and the journey till now has been wild, fuhgettabout what’s ahead.

In 300 words or less: My sister G introduced Lynn to me eight years ago, and it was love at first sight.  On my part, anyway.  I moved in to the Brooklyn coop she and her son JR (now 11) were living in, and we’ve been tight tight together ever since.  This 2 bedroom coop apartment Lynn had bought in 1994 as a foreclosure, for around $45,000.  Prospect Heights, like most of the rest of Brooklyn, has seen unbelievable rises in real estate prices.  Today that apartment would sell for over 10 times her purchase price.

Lynn had the idea of using some of that equity to buy a house in the Hudson Valley where I’d gotten work.  The result was in fact two properties: one three-family Victorian in midtown Kingston where we’ve lived for the past three years; and Horseradish Hill, a small farmhouse on 2.68 hilly acres, also in the City of Kingston.  Used to be a horseradish farm some time ago, Raditz’s Radishes, I think.

From the beginning the plan was to subdivide the land into three or four more lots and sell the properties.  It's a beautiful plot of land, but we were in it for the money.  Not greedy, just trying to run a business.  For the last three years we pursued that plan, pouring our own and other people's money into following that route, till we were ready to sell about a year ago... right around when the real estate market tanked, and we couldn't sell it no matter what we did.  And of course by now we'd borrowed around six figures against the place, so even if it was foreclosed on, we'd still owe tons.  Finally, when we'd depleted all our lines of credit and the bank was about to yank it back, we decided to move into the tiny basement apartment of the farmhouse ourselves with tenants in the main apartment upstairs, and try to hold on at any cost.  This is how we do it...

Spent the afternoon working on the winter compost pit.  There are so many things that need to get done over the next couple of weeks, and since I’m planning to visit Mama next weekend, yesterday, today and tomorrow are about all the time I’ll have to get them done.  Nonetheless, I’m spending most of this weekend building this pit.  I tell myself it has to be built before the ground freezes and so the right time is now, but I also feel like I should be doing MORE! FASTER! SOONER!  I soothed my anxiety by putting the second coat of paint on JR’s room’s trim.

There’s this really nice kid in the family next door, he skates too so JR and his friend Che went over while we were there.  Hannibal, the boy, came up to invite the boys to dinner.  It was a real neighborly moment, and it felt we’d made a step into that romanticized vision of country living and kids eating dinner at the house down the road.  With that thought in my head I read an article Lynn sent me – The Back to the Land Movement: Why it Failed and Why we Need to Try Again Anyway by Alice Friedemann - about the failures of people who went back to the land in the 70's and the need to do so again in the face of impending Peak Oil collapse.  Nicely balanced thoughts, those two.

October 20, 2007

Dug the winter earthworm composting pit today. 9x4 feet. I dug it on some already tilled soil that maybe wasn’t placed perfectly because of the slope but it was easy digging and that’s a lot of earth to move. Took picture of everything for the blog on this beautiful day. Made me feel like a real farmer in the making.

Steve (upstairs tenant) came by after I told him what I was doing he said “Go to it” with a doubtful look on his face.

Took a side trip to Home Depot to buy the cement blocks and the screens to keep the moles out. Moles love earthworms. I don’t know if we have moles around here but I’m not taking any chances. I bought the eight inch thick cement blocks but now I’ve changed my mind. I’ll use the ones I bought for something else (one run was only 22$) and I’ll use some thinner ones to leave more space for my compost. With a raw vegan in the house I predict a lot of organic kitchen waste.

My shovel chopped one worm in half and I drew blood from a second.  It reminded me that I can't live without killing something.