The Suburban Agrarian

End of Nature?

2009-01-01T17:10:00.005-06:00

Over the past week I read The End of Nature by Bill McKibben. It was written in 1989 so many of the environmental issues that he talks about have either happened or are happening. It is interesting, if not depressing to read something that lays out and predicts catastrophic occurrences, while realizing there were few things done to prevent those occurrences. I would strongly recommend someone to read it provided that they are not on any depression medicine. You do not walk away in a cheery mood.

Near the end of the book McKibben addresses the fact that in all reality nature is dead. Sure you can preserve parts of the planet, but the real independent nature is either almost dead or dead. In place of Nature we seek to control it and modify it. Whether it is genetically engineered food so that there is more protein and less fat in a chicken, or an engineering structure such as a dam to block up a river. We have, through our needs and wants, destroyed the once symbiotic relationship between humans and Earth.

We all know growth is good, but there has to be an end to growth. What are the consequences for growing too big? One may only have to look to the obesity epidemic that has hit many in America. What happens when you become obese? Your body systems do not work properly and will shut down if nothing is done. This is what we have to look forward to with too much growth. The Earth's systems will not be able handle the multiple of human needs/wants. This is happening already. For example the droughts in the Southwest use to happen and it was no big deal. Now we have so many people living in the southwest that we need to build dams to block the rivers like the Colorado. However, the regular ice melt that use to fuel the mighty Colorado River are decreasing due to global warming. This is just one example. There are other places all over the world that are suffering from the same overload. The great Pacific Garbage Patch, the ever growing death of the coral reefs, I could keep going.

So you might say. "Hey, we are smart beings we should be able to halt the global warming process through technology? If something goes extinct we will just clone it ." I do not doubt that we have the potential to halt or even reverse global warming, but the problem is that it is not the same. It is not natural. Nature is: The material world and its phenomena, untouched and uninfluenced by civilization or artificiality. What would it be like to walk through a genetically engineered forest, and see cloned or genetically engineered rabbits and squirrels. How much would we really cherish those things. In essence the sacredness of their existence would cease to be. We would cherish them no more than we do our cheap plastic stuff we buy at Wal-Mart. When we do not want it anymore or need an "new" one we discard it. Would we really put that much care into a creature that was grown in a laboratory that if it dies, we could just make a new one. That is the real second danger here. That we lose our values of things that are real not just manufactured.

So the question is do we have the ability to stop the end of nature? To allow it to flourish on its' own? No. I would cherish the moments we have with it. Have your children immersed in it now while there are still some vestiges of real nature left. Because there may be a day when there will be a loss of memory of what real nature was. McKibben gives an analogy of that once we realize it is dying there may be a reluctance to become attached to it. Like one has a reluctance to choose friends that are terminally ill. However, I say that we should choose this terminally ill friend and spend as much time with it as we can. Perhaps in doing so we can slow the inevitable end of nature.

What Would Jesus Buy?

2008-12-25T03:19:00.006-06:00

Over the past few years Christmas has become a bittersweet holiday. On one hand I do enjoy making it magical for my children, but on the other hand I think capitalism has killed Christmas. I came to the realization that Christmas is the penultimate catch 22 of our consumer culture.

On one side you have the religious institutions proclaiming that we must capture the "true" meaning of Christmas which is the birth of Jesus. How God gave his only son to us to be a testament of his love for humanity. We are told not forget this, usually as a cursory prayer or reflection prior to a meal or opening gifts. So my question is if that is the "true" meaning of Christmas, then why all of this anxiety over buying things for people. Why did people have to die this year when the "official" start to the holidays began on Black Friday? Isn't this season about sharing your happiness about the coming of the lord through prayer, singing, giving people your time, giving to people who are less fortunate then you?

That was the question I posed a few years ago and when I did, people called me a "Scrooge". The epitaph was thrown at me in order to shame me by creating a sense of guilt for questioning the modern consumption behavior.

Thus the catch-22. If you want to celebrate the real meaning of Christmas, shopping has very little to do with it. However, if you don't shop then many will view you as a scrooge, lacking the "Christmas spirit". So damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Which brings me to the topic of my post. If Jesus was alive today, what would he buy? And who would he buy if for? I hardly think he would purchase a Wii for one of his disciples. I can't quite see Jesus sitting down with his 12 followers, shopping bags filled with stuff from Best Buy, Gap, and Target. Although I am amazed that no store has used that in the advertising campaign. I am sure it would get a lot of attention.

This question was asked in a film aptly named "What would Jesus Buy?' Which follows an activist group as they travel across the nation during the frenzied holidays. The fictional character, Reverend Billy visits, Starbucks, Mall of America, and Disneyland and preaches his gospel of stop shopping. It is a very humorous movie, but at the same time very sad.

One part that really hit home for me was when they interviewed a pastor from a church who works with Chinese Christian dissidents. He was given a gift of a 10 Commandments sculpture. He turned it over and ....of course it was made in China. He thought it was rather ironic that a religious artifact like that was made in a country that persecutes their citizens for being a Christian. They interviewed a Chinese girl from the church who had been imprisoned by the Chinese government for being a Christian. She was beaten severely and had an electric shock stick used on her numerous times, which included having it inserted in her mouth and getting shocked inside her mouth. As part of her punishment she had to work at a labor/manufacturing camp where she spent over 14 hours a day making Christmas lights. She saw the irony in it and in her misery she felt some happiness knowing that those lights that she was making would bring joy to someone. However, she made it very clear that she would never buy Christmas lights in America. So the next time you see lights on sale and when you look at all those glittering houses, think about her and where those lights came from.

As you can guess this had a great impact on me emotionally. AS a result, when my kids opened up several gifts that were "Made in China" I had to fight back the tears thinking about who the person was who put their toy together. How old were they? How long were they working? How much did they get paid? Could they even afford the toy that they were manufacturing? These questions will go through my head, every time I see something that is not made in America.

If I depressed you too much for Christmas I apologize. Flip on the T.V. and look for "Its' a Wonderful Life" that should cheer you up. Merry Christmas!

Harvest Time : Part 2 Garden of Plenty

2008-11-08T09:53:00.006-06:00

Here are some semi-official numbers of the amount of food grown this year

Onions-1Lbs Planted -15 Lbs Harvested. I just ran out 2 weeks ago

Potatoes- 2 Lbs Planted 37 Lbs Harvested. I still have lots to go

Tomatoes-4 plants from seed. 40 Lbs Harvested. Grown in Earthboxes

Green Peppers- 4 plants from seed. 7 Lbs Harvested

Misc Hot Peppers-4 plants from seed. 2 Lbs Harvested

Blackberries - N/A. 16*Lbs Harvested

Grapes - N/A. - 5*Lbs Harvested

Peaches - N/A. -10 Lbs Harvested

Corn -30 seeds planted. - 0 Lbs Harvested. Big bummer!!!!

* the blackberries is a general estimate due to the weight of the pints collected and obviously I can not weigh the ones that were eaten right off the plants by myself or children.

I am pretty happy about the numbers. The potato and onion yield was lower than I had wanted, but that was because of some mistakes from me.

For the potatoes I needed to plant them lower in the wine barrel so I can create more layers as they grow up.

As for the onions I did not fully till the bed for them so the ground was too hard for them to get big. The few that had softer soil were double the size of the ones in the harder ground.

The blackberries had A LOT of dieback this year. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of berries that came in. There was prolific growth this year, so I am expecting a bumper crop next year. In addition to that there were a few that crept into my aster bed. I will leave those alone and they should produce a fair amount of berries too.

The grapes and the peaches got effected by squirrels so I have to figure out a way to stop them or at least slow them down. I know....stopping squirrels. Stop laughing!!!

My blueberry plants are growing ok but are still too young to produce a measurable fruit yield. I will be transferring them to Earthboxes next year to help them grow stronger. It will keep the soil the perfect acidity for these temperamental shrubs.

Corn I usually planted in the earthboxes and I have had excellent results. This year I moved it to a raised bed. It grew fine, but it tasseled way before it silked. So as a result when the silk came up there was no pollen left so fertilization could not take place. No fertilization. No corn.
Next year the corn goes back into the EB.

Also next year I will be putting the peppers in the EB too. It will be interesting to see the difference in the yields.

Harvest Time:Part 1- Halloween Pumpkin

2008-11-01T14:15:00.003-05:00

I am back posting. It has been a while with getting things cleaned up and other fall activities. Honestly, the weather has been so nice that I find it hard to stay inside when I do not have to.

This year we only had one pumpkin plant survive and actually bear fruit. I had two that I started by seed. They got mowed down by my uncle while we were on vacation. So I bought two more plants and they never quite thrived to produce fruit. The one that did survive was a castoff from last year's pumpkin that I threw by my raspberries. I guess it found and nice little place between the bricks of my house and the dirt and the rest is history.

Since this one plant only had one gourd on the vine it grew pretty well. My daughter had a delightful time checking on it every other day and watching it grow from a small little golf ball to a huge sphere. As Halloween approached the pumpkin was still green in several areas, but she decided we should cut it and carve it before Halloween and not wait until it was fully orange.

My eldest son helper her cut it from the vine and she estimated that it would weigh a 1000 lbs. It seemed like a logical number for a four year old. After washing it off, it officially weighed in at 20 lbs.

Once weighed, my three children started a lively discussion about what we were going to carve into it. Would it be a cat, a flaming skeleton, words, a traditional pumpkin face? That is the problem with having three people and one pumpkin, no one is going to get exactly what they want. In the end they decided on a Pikachu from Pokemon.

I looked at some pictures of Pikachu and decided a simple one would be best. I drew the design on the pumpkin and my two sons carved it according to the design. My daughter did not want to touch it. You can see how it turned out below.

We were all happy how it looked.

There were a couple of interesting things that I noticed upon growing and caving my own pumpkin. First when we opened it up, it didn't have that nasty rotting pumpkin smell. You know that smell that makes young children flee in horror when you start actually carving it. The second thing that stood out was it actually smelled like a cantaloupe. So I ate some raw. So did my eldest son. It wasn't bad. I usually hate any pumpkin taste, but this fresh pumpkin tasted like a mild cantaloupe. It was a pleasant surprise.

Right now the seeds are outside drying out and I am hoping to use them for next year's pumpkin. My children want to plant a whole patch that will cover the yard. I told them that they say that now, but will probably be against it when they are dodging pumpkins while running around next summer. I told them we will bring it up in the spring.

Why is it only jesters can speak truth to power?

2008-09-04T22:45:00.001-05:00

This is why I love John Stewart and the Daily Show.

Why can't real news shows do this?

Baracky II

2008-08-17T14:48:00.001-05:00

This is just plain funny!
Enjoy!

Mystery Sovled

2008-08-16T01:19:00.002-05:00

After calling about 3 different agencies I have finally discovered what the tagging information meant on the bird.

The AU is the symbol for the American Racing Pigeon Union. I never knew about this organization. I have heard of homing pigeons but I did not know people race them. I read up on it and it sounds pretty cool. Maybe something to get into when my kids get older.

I called the American Racing Pigeon Union and told them that I had a band number from one of their birds. They asked for the number. EHC-13 is the symbol for Elgin Homing Pigeon Club. They people at the American Racing Pigeon Union were very kind and said that they would contact the club and inform them that a bird of theirs was not returning home.

I feel sorry for the person who lost their bird. Since I have always had pets (dogs, cats, fish, tortoise, etc.) I understand the emotions one goes through when they lose a pet.

The mystery of AU 2008 EHC-13

2008-08-12T00:43:00.003-05:00

We had a pleasant day at the Morton Arboretum today. Lots of activity in the maze, on their playground, and in their wading stream. When we returned I decided to pick some blackberries. Here is an example of the size of my blackberries.

I picked about half a quart and then I decided to check on my onions. I have been harvesting them over the past week as the shoots dieback. As I was digging them up I noticed a large amount of feathers between my onion bed and garlic bed. I went to investigate the mess. I found a large bird foot about 3 inches long with talons about 3/4 of an inch long. Attached to the leg was a green band which had the letters/numbers AU 2008 ECH-13. Wondering what had happened, I searched the area to see if I could find other body parts and piece together the events that lead to this bird's demise. After exploring the general vicinity I found more feathers near the parkway and then in the street. I am assuming that a car hit this bird and that some creature (cat, dog, raccoon, etc.) finished it off.

I called the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and asked if there was someone who could help me identify the codes on the band. They directed me to the wildlife department. It was close to 5:00 so I just got their voice mail. I left a quick summary of the events on their voice mail and that is where we stand now. I will keep you updated on what I find out. Here are some of the bigger feathers I found next to the foot.

Bee Movie and misconceptions

2008-08-09T21:11:00.008-05:00

I just got back from spending a day with a beekeeper at Long Lane Honeybee Farms. The owner was very gracious, knowledgeable, and patient. I had a million and one questions and he answered them all and gave me a very thorough tour of his operations. We also open about 4 or 5 hives so I could get some real experience with the bees. I wore only a veil and he did not wear any protective gear. We did use a smoker. No one got stung and there were no killer bee attacks!!! Amazing. Not that I thought that there would be, but I would say 80-90% of the people I talk to about starting beekeeping go into a apocalyptic tirade of how they will swarm all over you, kill you, and anyone who comes near their hive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some real cool things I learned.

How to spot the queen in a hive (you have to really look hard)

Flight patterns of the bees change can change throughout the day because of where the foragers find the nectar

A hive can have 6-7 queens laid.

If a queen is not producing enough eggs the workers may raise a new queen to take over the hive.

When a new queen emerges it makes a noise to alarm the old queen to get out or die.

The different textures of honey cells, brood cells, and drone cells (and pollen cells)

What the eggs look like in the comb.

What capped and uncapped honey cells look like.

How to process the honey

How the hives are built

How to introduce a queen into the hive.

The bee's "GPS" system is so exact is so exact that if you move the hive 20 feet during the day, the foragers would never find the hive and would die.
Bees are great predictors of weather.
And much more!!!!

Here is a cool little movie I shot. About 4:00 the hives went crazy. Dave said that many times in the late afternoon the hove will find a very strong nectar source (it could be that the plant produces more at that time) and they will go into heavy honey production. Take a look there are bees crawling up the hive. That is because there are so many coming in (landing) that they can not take off from the usual spot. They need to climb the hive and then take off. Think of it as O'Hare airport if you combined Thanksgiving, Chistmas, Labor Day, Memorial Day and Spring Break into one day. Crazy! You can hear the massive buzzing. It was cool because it started at this hive and withing 10-15 minutes 3 other hives started to do this.

When I got home I was talking to my 10 year old who wanted to know about my experience. It was very sad that he too had a lot of misconceptions about bees. What was sad was how he got them. I have educated him with the facts and fiction about bees. All that was trumped when he watched the Bee Movie.

I know, I know this is a comedy and not suppose to be realistic. But what is sad is that for many children this is their first introduction to bees (Very sad isn't it). I saw the movie too. It was cute. I understand they were telling a fictional story, and for the most part they portrayed bees in a very beneficial light. Misconceptions that my son had from the movie

Smoking the bees does not knock them out. In reality most scientists believe that it creates an alert for the bees that there is a fire (like a forest fire) and they start gorging themselves on honey in preparation to leave the hive and start a new hive.

Bees will never have so much honey that they stop foraging for nectar. You can raise a hive without ever harvesting the honey. The honey is a natural process of the bees survival and does not need humans to help them "get rid of their honey".

When you see a bee you should not scream and swat at it. You should stay calm and let it fly around you. Unless you are dealing with African Bees or are being swarmed running is not good.

Beekeepers are not evil who enjoy torturing their bees, only looking to make money from the honey. The goal of the beekeeper is to keep their bees as healthy and happy as possible. If they are they make more honey and they get a better crop. Do some beekeepers stress out their bees and treat them as a throw away commodity?? Some may, but none that I talked to.

Hoped this dispelled any misconceptions that you had. Oh! One more thing. The mosquito in Bee Movie should have been a female since male mosquitos do not suck blood.

Who do you look like?

2008-08-07T10:09:00.000-05:00

This is a cool website I stumbled across. MyHeritage.com. It is a genealogy website. The really cool thing about the site is that there is a section that has a face recognition program where you can see which people you look like. Here is who I look like

70% Mike Oldfeld

66% Mother Teresa

62% John Ashcroft

61% Max Von Sydow

61% Elton John

61% Pierre Boulez

59% Marguerite Yourcenar

58% Jean Paul Sartre

Personally I think I look like this....

Which eye is mine winners!!!

2008-08-06T09:33:00.001-05:00

The results

Eye 1 = 0%
Eye 2 = 57%
Eye 3 = 14%
Eye 4 = 0%
eye 5 = 28%

Eye 2 Won!!!! The question is did they really. Look below for the owners of the eyes.

Harrison Ford

Neo-Agrarian (Me!!!!)

Johnny Depp

Gizmo from the movie Gremlins

Jude Law

T. Boone Pickens sees the light or ....

2008-08-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

A very interesting theme started to emerge as I browsed about T. Boone Pickens. One that has to do with his current drive to create renewable energy. No doubt you have seen his add on TV proclaiming that we need to get off the addiction of foreign oil. The add is below.

However, I ran across this article on Business Week about him trying to acquire water rights. It seems that the water rights he was trying to acquire seem to line up with the land he wants to get for the wind turbine corridor. Coincidence??? Read the article below and then read the article on Pickens from the Wall Street Journal.

The Business Week Article written by Susan Berfield

There Will Be Water
T. Boone Pickens thinks water is the new oil—and he’s betting $100 million that he’s right

Pickens hopes to run a water pipeline over 250 miles and 650 tracts of private property from the Texas Panhandle to thirsty Dallas Nancy Newberry.

Roberts County is a neat square in a remote corner of the Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling hills, tall grass, oak trees, mesquite, and cattle. It has a desolate beauty, a striking sparseness. The county encompasses 924 square miles and is home to fewer than 900 people. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the oilman and corporate raider, who first bought some property here in 1971 to hunt quail. He’s now the largest landowner in the county: His Mesa Vista ranch sprawls across some 68,000 acres. Pickens has also bought up the rights to a considerable amount of water that lies below this part of the High Plains in a vast aquifer that came into existence millions of years ago.

If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. The electricity generated by an enormous wind farm he is setting up in the Panhandle would also flow along that corridor. As far as Pickens is concerned, he could be selling wind, water, natural gas, or uranium; it’s all a matter of supply and demand. “There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That’s the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing,” he says.

In the coming decades, as growing numbers of people live in urban areas and climate change makes some regions much more prone to drought, water—or what many are calling “blue gold”—will become an increasingly scarce resource. By 2030 nearly half of the world’s population will inhabit areas with severe water stress, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. Pickens understands that. And while Texas is unusually lax in its laws about pumping groundwater, the rush to control water resources is gathering speed around the planet. In Australia, now in the sixth year of a drought, brokers in urban areas are buying up water rights from farmers. Rural residents around the U.S. are trying to sell their land (and water) to multi- national water bottlers like Nestlé (BW—Apr. 14). Companies that use large quantities of the precious resource to run their businesses are seeking to lock up water supplies. One is Royal Dutch Shell, which is buying groundwater rights in Colorado as it prepares to drill for oil in the shale deposits there.

Into this environment comes Pickens, who made a good living for a long time extracting oil and gas and now, at 80, believes the era of fossil fuel is over. So far he has spent $100 million and eight years on his project and still has not found any city in Texas willing to buy his water. But like many others, Pickens believes there’s a fortune to be made in slaking the thirst of a rapidly growing population. If he pumps as much as he can, he could sell about $165 million worth of water to Dallas each year. “The idea that water can be sold for private gain is still considered unconscionable by many,” says James M. Olson, one of America’s preeminent attorneys specializing in water- and land-use law. “But the scarcity of water and the extraordinary profits that can be made may overwhelm ordinary public sensibilities.”
THE BIGGEST PUMP WINS

Pickens, an Oklahoma native, geologist, and someone who calls himself the luckiest guy in the world, is the quintessential entrepreneur. He started as a wildcatter in 1956; three decades later his Mesa Petroleum was the largest independent exploration company in the U.S. But that’s not how Pickens made a name for himself—it was his hostile bids, one after the other through the 1980s, for oil companies far more powerful, far wealthier than his own. Pickens thought they could do more for their shareholders. He never took over any of them. He did, however, push them into deals they might not have considered otherwise, which helped reshape the oil industry.

He did, sometimes, make hundreds of millions when he sold his stakes. And shareholders did, often, benefit. He was briefly the most famous businessman in America, a corporate raider who always wished people would call him a shareholder activist.

By the mid-1990s, though, Pickens had fallen. After a brutal and expensive fight with Unocal, he gave up his raiding. He lost control of Mesa Petroleum after a series of financial and managerial miscalculations. He went through an expensive divorce from his second wife and retreated to his ranch. It was in the midst of this that he acquired a newfound regard for water as a commodity that should be bought, sold, and traded for the benefit of those who own it and those who can afford it.

In 1996 a local water utility made its first big purchase of groundwater rights in the Panhandle. The utility, known as the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority (CRMWA), bought nearly 43,000 acres of water, some of it just south of Pickens’ ranch, for $14.5 million. (Property owners in Texas, and elsewhere, can sell their water separately from the land above it.) That Roberts County would become the stomping ground for the Panhandle water wars was perhaps inevitable. Underneath it lies one of the world’s largest repositories of water, moving slowly among layers of gravel, sand, and silt. The Ogallala Aquifer stretches from Texas to South Dakota and contains a quadrillion gallons of water—enough to cover the U.S. mainland to a depth of almost two feet. Yet the extensive irrigation necessary to grow corn, cotton, and wheat in west Texas has left the Ogallala nearly depleted in some places. It is not an aquifer that is easily or quickly replenished. But the land in Roberts County is unsuited for agriculture, and so the Ogallala there is largely untapped.

Since the early 1900s, groundwater use in Texas has been governed by what’s quaintly called the rule of capture, otherwise described as the biggest pump wins. It lets landowners pump as much water as they can, even if doing so drains neighboring properties. This put Pickens in an uncomfortable position: If he didn’t sell his water to CRMWA, the utility could potentially suck some of it right out from under his ranch. So he tried. But “they told me to kiss off,” he says. Kent Satterwhite, who was then assistant general manager, says: “Boone was fairly insistent that we buy his water. It made him mad that we didn’t have the money to buy it.” That was the first of several contretemps between Pickens and various local water authorities. Pickens next approached the city of Amarillo, which also had begun to acquire water rights in Roberts County. It wasn’t interested, either, though it did purchase water from several other nearby landowners. “Amarillo was pissed off at me,” says Pickens, who has a long and fraught history with the city. When Amarillo turned him down, Pickens felt surrounded. “I had to find a buyer for my water,” he says, “or I was going to be drained.”

LANDOWNERS DIVIDED
There’s a saying in Texas: “Whiskey’s for drinking. Water’s for fighting.” Pickens decided to fight. In 1999 he created a company called Mesa Water and began to accumulate water rights so he could strike a deal with another city altogether. The hell with Amarillo. Pickens was confident he could sell his water: The population of Texas was expected to jump 40% by 2020, mostly in urban areas one dry season away from drought.
Pickens’ decision to get into the water business was regarded by some in the Panhandle as nothing more, or less, than a shrewd move by a man who knows the value of commodities. The economy of the High Plains region is based on people taking out the natural resources and selling them. If water that can’t be used for farming ends up in the taps of city residents hundreds of miles away, that’s fine. Pickens says he’s buying stranded, surplus water that needs to be rescued. Kim Flowers, who runs an 8,300-acre ranch in Roberts County, speaks for many landowners when she says: “People can do with their water as they wish as long as they’re not wasting it.”

In all, Pickens, CRMWA, and Amarillo have spent about $150 million to buy up nearly 80% of the water rights in Roberts County, undermining and outbidding one another along the way. One unsurprising effect of their competition is that the price of an acre of water has in some places doubled, to $600. That’s something in which Pickens takes pride. Much as he did in the 1980s, when he went after big oil companies he believed weren’t doing right by their shareholders, Pickens now talks about creating value for Roberts County landowners. They make money from selling their water while continuing to live, run cattle, and hunt on their property. “I told them I was going to raise the value of the land, and I accomplished that. The landowners are all tickled to death. I made our water worth something. And anybody with any sense would sell it.”
Not all Roberts County landowners wanted to do business with him, though. Pickens intended to pull water from an aquifer that is pretty much the sole source for the Panhandle, and that isn’t refilled quickly, and sell it to a place like Dallas, whose water use is the highest of any city in Texas. This seemed ludicrous, even reckless, to some. C.E. Williams runs the Panhandle Groundwater Conservation District, which is responsible for managing the competing demands on the region’s share of the Ogallala. He puts it this way: “As a district, we cannot pick and choose where the water goes. But personally I am concerned. I have a son who is an irrigated farmer, and I have grandkids, and I want to make sure that they can conduct commerce when they want to.”

Pickens has a way of dismissing the complexity of a situation, sometimes even the possibility of an opinion contrary to his own. In this case, any opposition to his plan from anyone who is not a Roberts County landowner, who is not essentially a shareholder in this venture, he deems irrelevant. Williams, he points out, doesn’t himself have any property. “Water is a commodity,” he says. “Heck, isn’t it like oil? You have to come back to who owns the water. The groundwater is owned by the landowner. That’s it.” When it comes to potential buyers, Pickens cares about only one thing: how much they’re willing to pay. “Do I care what Dallas does with the water? Hell no.”

Republican State Representative Warren Chisum is a Roberts County rancher who owns 12,000 acres next to Pickens and sold his water to Amarillo in 2001. He would seem to be a natural ally. He’s not. “My water will remain local,” he says. “It’s controversial to ship it out of the Panhandle. When we run out, we’re done. The long-term value is to keep it here. That’s contrary to what Pickens wants to do. It’s his water. But he won’t be here in 50 years.”

In 2002, Pickens began approaching several of Texas’ sprawling cities, all of which share one defining feature: Their populations are growing so quickly that they are constantly in need of new supplies of water. But with water, as with so much else, location is critical. And Pickens’ water is far, far away from anyplace that might buy it. Pickens knew he’d have to build a pipeline, and to do so at anything resembling a reasonable cost, he’d need the power of eminent domain—the right of a government entity to force the sale of private property for the public good. Water utilities have that right. If Dallas agreed to buy Pickens’ water, it could extend such authority to him. But Dallas deemed Pickens’ price too high and declined to do a deal. So Pickens and his executives tried to create a Fresh Water Supply District—a government entity that would have that power. But they couldn’t get it through.

Over the next several years, Pickens continued accumulating water rights and began to lease other land, this time with the idea of creating the world’s biggest wind farm. “One of the great wind areas is right up where we are,” says Robert L. Stillwell, Pickens’ general counsel. “You can set it right on top of where the water is.” And since, one day anyway, Dallas may well buy both, Mesa could use a single right-of-way for the water pipeline and the electric lines.

In Roberts County there would be real economic benefits from the wind farm. “The wind is meant to sweeten the deal,” says Representative Chisum. “The big money for Pickens is in the water.”

It had been a decade since Pickens first realized the potential value of the water deposited eons ago in the sand below the High Plains. Now it was time to employ the one resource he hadn’t yet used: his lobbying clout.

POWERFUL LOBBYING
In January, 2007, the Texas Legislature convened in the grand statehouse in Austin. The 80th session turned out to be very productive, and one person who kept busy during that time was J.E. Buster Brown, a former state senator and one of the most powerful lobbyists in town. Among Brown’s clients is Mesa Water. “My job is primarily defensive,” Brown says of his work for Pickens. “I’m watching to make sure there is no legislation passed that creates obstacles to Pickens doing what he wants to do. I’m supposed to make sure nothing bad happens.”
Brown did more than that: He helped win Pickens a key new legal right. It was contained in an amendment to a major piece of water legislation. The amendment, one of more than 100 added after the bill had been reviewed in the House, allowed a water-supply district to transmit alternative energy and transport water in a single corridor, or right-of-way. “We helped move that along,” says Stillwell. “We thought it would be handy and helpful to everyone.”
After the bill passed, Tom “Smitty” Smith, Texas director of Public Citizens, an advocacy group, says several legislators were drinking coffee and reading through it. “Uh-oh,” one said. They’d just realized the amendment would help Pickens build his pipeline. “Many legislators were watching for this play,” Smith says, “and it still snuck by.” State Senator Robert Duncan, a Republican who represents Lubbock, says: “It probably should have raised our suspicions, but we were moving a lot of bills. And it would have been hard to hold up this one even if we’d discovered the amendment.”

Pickens still needed the power of eminent domain if he was going to build his pipeline and wind-power lines across private land. And by happy coincidence, the legislators passed a smaller bill that made that all the easier. The new legislation loosened the requirements for creating a water district. Previously, a district’s five elected supervisors needed to be registered voters living within the boundaries of the district. Now, they only had to own land in the district; they could live and vote wherever. The bill, as it happens, was put forth by two legislators from Houston; Brown says he and Mesa had nothing to do with it. “That wasn’t our bill,” says Brown. “I wish I could take credit for it.”

Pickens moved quickly to take advantage of the new rules. Over the summer of 2007, he sold eight acres on the back side of his ranch to five people in his employ: Stillwell, who resides in Houston, two of his executives in Dallas, and the couple who manage his ranch, Alton and Lu Boone. A few days later, Mesa Water filed a petition to create an eight-acre water-supply district with those five as the directors and sole members. On Nov. 6, Roberts County held an election to decide whether to form the new district. Only two people were qualified to take part: Alton and Lu Boone. The vote was unanimous. With that, Pickens won the right to issue tax-free bonds for his pipeline and electrical lines as well as the extraordinary power to claim land across swaths of the state.

No one at Mesa regards Roberts County Fresh Water Supply District No. 1 as an unusual arrangement. “We’re no different from any other water or electricity supplier,” says Stillwell, meaning they, too, would use the power of eminent domain only as a last resort and for the public good. As for the suggestion that he wouldn’t have qualified to be a board member under the old rules, Stillwell says: “It doesn’t matter that I’m on the board. It would have been another me, just a local me.”

“WE’RE NOT HAPPY”
Pickens was ready to reach out to landowners along the route. In April, 2008, Mesa sent out some 1,100 letters to people along the 250-mile proposed right-of-way, from Miami, Tex. , to a town called Jacksboro, just short of Dallas. The letters included a Texas landowners’ bill of rights, information on the condemnation procedure, a map of the route, and a list of open houses they could attend for more information.

One stifling evening in May, about 50 people showed up at the Twin Lakes Community Activity Center just outside Jacksboro. When the ranchers arrived, more than a dozen of Mesa’s public-relations consultants, hydrologists, and land men were waiting for them. Standing behind tables laid out with pens, cups, hats, and bags with the District No. 1 logo, the officials were available to answer questions about the 250-foot-wide corridor Mesa would use to construct, maintain, and possibly expand the pipeline and electric lines. While this arrangement allowed everyone to get information specific to their property, it also precluded any public questioning of the Mesa standard-bearers. This did not go unnoticed by the ranchers. “We’re not happy,” said one. “Pickens is pushing his power trip on us. I can’t fight his money. But if he asked first, I might have thought better of it.” Another said: “Land goes way back for a lot of people here. If you tell people you want their land, Texans raise their guns.” At the end of the evening, most of the pens and hats and cups still lay on the tables.

Pickens isn’t bothered that by his invoking the right of eminent domain, Mesa has inflamed landowners up and down the route. “It always does,” he says. Mesa expects to acquire the land it needs in the next 18 months and pay about $30 million for it; Pickens wants to begin construction on the $1.2 billion pipeline right afterward. It should take about three years to complete. If all goes according to plan, Mesa will be able to pump enough water to satisfy the needs of some 1.5 million Texans every day.

Pickens hopes to strike a deal with Dallas or the urban areas around it before Mesa starts building the pipeline. “Eventually they will need it,” he says. So far, though, the talks might best be characterized as preliminary. “We continue to meet with Pickens’ staff and engineers to get a better understanding of the proposal and so they can understand what our needs are,” says Mike Rickman, assistant general manager of the North Texas Municipal Water District, which supplies water to 13 cities north and east of Dallas. “Mesa has a lot of water. But how much will it cost to buy it and deliver it?” Rickman says that at some point he would have to consider the consequences for the Ogallala: “Does it make sense to take water from an arid portion of the state? We don’t want to harm our neighbors out there.”

In Roberts County, people hold on to the hope that pumping from the Ogallala can be controlled. In 1998, as Pickens and local water utilities began buying up water rights, the groundwater conservation district placed some restrictions on the rule of capture that it calls the 50-50 rule: Anyone who receives a new permit to pump can draw down the aquifer by only 50% over the next 50 years. Later, an additional limit of 1.2% per year was set. These essentially manage the depletion of the Ogallala under Roberts County; there, it is replenished at a rate of only 0.1% a year. Williams, who put the rules into place, says: “It’s like taking dollar bills out of your bank account and putting nickels back in. Even with a big bank account, there’s an end. That’s pretty much what’s happening in the Ogallala.”

Pickens has promised to abide by the 50-50 rule. “I don’t have any concerns about depleting the aquifer. All I’m doing is selling surplus water,” he says. “I’m not about to drain all the water out of Roberts County. I have my ranch there. But I could sure take it down 50% and not hurt anybody. And it could make a lot of people a lot of money.”
Berfield is an associate editor at BusinessWeek .

Wall Street Journal

Boone’s Farm: Oilman Asks Feds to Help Distribute His Wind Power
Posted by Keith Johnson
C

ongress spends a lot of time talking about how to deal with the energy crisis. Today, it got down to the nitty-gritty: how to make alternative energy actually work.
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources tackled the transmission problem—that is, how to get electricity from the remote places it’s usually generated to the built-up places it’s used. The U.S. Department of Energy last month said lack of transmission is the biggest obstacle to making wind power a major source of electricity in the U.S.
There’s your fix for oil (AP)

While a parade of experts from the DOE to wind-energy lobbyists testified, the choicest remarks came from oilman-turned-clean-energy maven T. Boone Pickens.

Mr. Pickens, who’s building the world’s largest wind farm, in the Texas panhandle, cut to the chase: America can curb its dependence on foreign oil by adding more power lines. His idea? By making wind power a bigger part of the electricity mix, other generation fuels will be freed up to power cars, cutting oil imports:

If we take the natural gas we’re using for electrical generation and move it to transportation, we can replace 38 percent of our foreign oil imports. And that, sports fans, is a real number.
Mr. Pickens figures that would save the U.S. about $300 billion a year, in addition to cleaning up the environment. But there’s a vicious circle in place: Wind can’t become a bigger part of the electricity mix until there’s a new batch of transmission lines, and nobody is willing to foot the bill for new power lines until there’s a lot of juice to move. Plus, a lot of communities hate the idea of big power lines plowing across their land. Mr. Pickens says he’s ready to pay for his own private transmission lines to get his wind farm spinning.

So far, the U.S. has been relatively successful tackling the issue on a state-by-state basis. Texas also has its own transmission program in place. As a result, even as federal subsidies for clean energy hang in the balance, the U.S. has led the world in wind power installation for two years running.

But to really take off nationwide, wind power needs a national solution, the Senate heard. Western governors are teaming up with counterparts in Mexico and Canada to build their own clean-energy networks across state boundaries. But so far, the patchwork of federal and state regulations and permits is acting as a brake on wind power’s growth. That means Washington has to act, Mr. Pickens said, by tackling prickly questions like eminent domain and right-of-way across big swathes of federal land.

But even if it does, that still leaves the prickliest question of all: At a time when power bills are already climbing across the country, who’s going to pay for all the new lines?

Do you hate mowing your lawn???

2008-08-04T11:30:00.004-05:00

I do not hate it but it is one of those chores I would prefer to do only every 3 weeks or so. Here are some ideas for reducing your endless cycle of lawn mowing/watering/fertilizing/mowing/watering.......

1.) Create larger perennial beds where your lawn is. You can do this rather easily over the winter by putting down the black weed barrier on the area you would like to turn into a bed. In September mark out the area and put the barrier down. Next pile grass clippings, dead leaves over that area. Make sure it is about 2-3 inches thick. Let it sit over the winter. In spring rake off the mulch and pull up the weed barrier. Your lawn will look like chocolate cake. Use a tiller and till the soil. Then plant whatever flowers you want. I have used this method several times and it works like a charm.

2.) Do the same as above but plant vegetables or fruits. A large patch of thornless blackberries or raspberries really are summer treat. If you check out the different varieties you could finish your raspberries as the blackberries just ripen. Good timing for your zone is essential.

3.) This is the one I am currently working on. Add Fleur De Lawn and Herb de Lawn to your current lawn. Let these spread. They are designed as an alternative to the "traditional lawn". You can read more about it at Protime Lawn Seed. Prairie Nursery also offers a no mow lawn mix here. Although theirs you have to start from scratch. The Fleur De Lawn you could start from scratch or incorporate it into your lawn in the spring. If you live in a uppercrusty neighborhood this is probably not the best solution for you. The neighbors can get a little "on edge" if they see something other than the endless carpet of green around them. And heaven forbid there be flowers IN the lawn. Aren't those called weeds?????

Good Luck!

Lots of cats on the dill

2008-07-29T01:17:00.009-05:00

Not normal cats, but caterpillars. About 3 years ago I planted dill in my herb garden. I saw a black Swallowtail hovering around the dill. Sure enough it had laid a single egg. After watching it for a few days, I saw the baby caterpillar on the leaf and brought him in to raise. It was my first experience raising swallowtails. The early stage the cat mimic bird droppings.

As it grew I became quite fond of the species. When it was nearly ready to form its' chrysalis one of my kids wanted to pet it. That was when we were introduced to osmeterium. They are small orange horns that shoot out of their head an emits a foul smell.

The chrysalis is way different from the monarchs that I raised. It anchors itself onto a surface and it has 2 threads of silk to suspend it in air. It looks like it is cantilevered on the surface.

It is pretty cool that the chrysalis is different colors depending on what it is attached to and the orientation. Green to mimic a leaf

Brown to mimic a branch.

As the years passed I have noticed that the amount of swallowtail eggs and cats have increased exponentially. Just the other day I found 7 baby cats on one plant(with more eggs on the plants). I have already raised 4 to full fledged butterfly this year. It is strange how 3 years ago there was only 1 and now they just keep coming.

Some varmint is eating my peaches!!!!

2008-07-27T20:49:00.003-05:00

My peaches were saved from the frost and they have spent the past 3 months developing nicely. No birds, bugs, or other creatures attacking them. Now when they are just days away from being ripe something is eating them on the tree. My guess is either a squirrel or a raccoon. I have lost 3 so far (or at least that is all I have seen). They are chewing them right on the tree. A friend of mine suggested a baffle around the tree. I have sprayed the base of the tree and half way up the trunk with Shotgun Repels All and Hot Pepper Wax (which worked very well against the invading hordes of Japanese Beetles on my grape vines and cherry trees). I also used the Shotgun Repels All on my pond. There were some neighborhood cats and I spotted a raccoon around it in May. I sprayed some on the rocks around the pond. It worked against the raccoons and cats (at least to the best of my knowledge). I am keeping my fingers crossed that it works. I will also be hanging cds on the trees in hope that the reflections freak them out.

To Bee or not to Bee?

2008-07-19T13:25:00.004-05:00

When I tell friends and family that I am planning on starting an apiary next year (or the year after) the first thing they say is you can't do that it is illegal in the suburbs. After I tell them that they are wrong and that beekeeping is perfectly legal in our town as long as you get a license by the state of Illinois, they ask aren't you worried about them swarming and attacking you? It seems that a large number of people have a very unhealthy fear of bees. Maybe we could trace it back to Hollywood, their childhood, the media but it comes from somewhere. It is certainly does not come from reading and education. Beekeeping can have some dangers, but in all the books and people I have talked to the bees aren't some crazy specter of death that is just waiting to destroy humanity. If anything it is the reverse, considering the dramatic reduction of bee colonies from year to year.

What is it about the bees that makes people freak out. They are like any other creature, if you leave them alone they will leave you alone. You bother them they will bother you. Many people think of the wasps in fall and how they attack your picnic and associate them with the honeybee. They are quite different in looks and behavior

I have signed up to take a beekeeper class in downstate Illinois in the beginning of August. They offer one around here but it is during the winter and I want to get more hands on experience. I am keeping an open mind about this whole adventure. I may go to the class and find out that this is not for me at this point in my life with kids and all that. If anything I will come back with a better understanding and appreciation for bees.

I have decided to pursue the Top Bar Hive if I do start this endeavor. From my research it is more natural for the bees, easier to keep it organic, and relatively easy to harvest the honey(you need less too). Here is some information on the Top Bar Hives. There are many videos of people harvesting honey from a TBH with only a smoker, no veil or other protective equipment. I am not quite that brave yet.

My new poll lets you weigh in on my beekeeping decision. Vote and tell me what you think.

Plant Spotlight: Queen of the Prairie

2008-07-18T09:52:00.007-05:00

In my opinion this plant is underused in gardens. It blooms in mid summer with foamy flowers of deep coral/pink to light pink. Filipendula Rubra is part of the rose family and grows to about 3-6 feet tall depending on the light conditions. It prefers moist soil (I have mine by a downspout and a sump pump output) and will spread best under those conditions. Various species of bees collect pollen from the flowers and probably are the most important pollinators. Beetles and flies feed on the pollen. This uncommon plant is listed as 'threatened' in Illinois and there have been efforts to reintroduce it in restoration projects.

The stems have a reddish tinge to them as well as the leaf veins. The leaf are large. Huge lobed and deeply divided. It looks very similar to that of a maple.

Early settlers and the Fox Indians in Wisconsin used root for heart problems and in "love potions." Due to high tannin content, root used in folk medicine for astringent properties in diarrhea, dysentery, and to stop bleeding.

Some good companion plants are Wild Quinine, Joe Pyeweed, and Wild Bergamot, Switch Grass, Big Bluestem.

Plant Spotlight: Wild Quinine

2008-07-11T23:56:00.008-05:00

Now is a great time for the Native/Prairie garden. There are so many things that are blooming. One seldom used plant is Wild Quinine (Parthenium integrifolium). This plant is part of the Aster family and is also referred to as American Feverfew. It has a very strong tap root but spreads through rhizomes. It grows about 3 feet high and is a good companion flower for Purple Echinacea, little bluestem and Sideoats Grama. It will stay in bloom for some time, for about 2 months. The white flowers are a very compact and small and look like small cauliflower heads. They hold their color and form very well so once they have bloomed they still have a creamy color to them . While there is no noticeable scent with the flowers they tend to attract a large variety of insects. It is wonderful to watch the different types of insects that are drawn to the flower. Sometimes it looks like the skies of O'Hare airport.

Below is some medicinal information from Altnature.com.

"Wild Quinine is a very valuable medicinal herb. It is used as an antiperiodic, emmenagogue, kidney, lithontripic, poultice. It has traditionally been used in alternative medicine to treat debility, fatigue, respiratory infection, gastrointestinal infection, and venereal disease. Wild Quinine is currently being used with great success by hundreds of herbalists throughout the United States and Europe for diseases such as lymphatic congestion, colds, ear infections, sore throats, fevers, infections, and Epstein barr virus. The tops of the plant have a medicinal "quinine-like" bitterness and are used to treat intermittent fevers. This earned the plant one of its common names, "wild quinine." Parthenium has been studied in scientific laboratories and clinics across Europe. Findings from these studies indicate that this medicinal herb stimulates the immune system. This herb also contains the four sesquiterpene esters which include: echinadiol, epoxyecinadiol, echinaxanthol, and dihydroxynardol. These constituents increase the ability of the blood cells to digest foreign particles and aid in the stages of healing wounds in living organisms. It appears to be a liver-stimulating bitter that promotes blood detoxification; thus the common name "snakeroot." Parthenium has also been shown to both mobilize and activate natural killer cells and other immune cells. Wild Quinine herb has been commonly sold as (or mixed with) Echinacea purpurea for more than 50 years. They are both in the sunflower family and their roots bear an uncanny resemblance to each other. Many people have been using these parthenium products, however, and receiving benefits. European settlers of the midwestern United States discovered this herb to be used for coughs and sore throats by the Native Americans. The Catwbas tribe used its fresh leaves as a poultice on burns as well. "

Reclaiming the untamed garden

2008-07-09T18:10:00.012-05:00

I am back from vacation in the sunny state of Florida. It was a great time. The kids got to go to Disney World for their first time. We saw a lot of dolphins when we went jetskiing. We even saw a manatee when we were kayaking through the mangrove trees. However, the fun had to end (at least that is what my back account said)and we are now home.

We got back in the evening around 10 PM and even in the darkness I could tell that we had had nice weather and sufficient rain. The pillars of shadowy foliage was quite distinct in the moonlight. As I unpacked the car I knew that there was a great deal of yard work for me to do this week.

The next morning I surveyed the yard and broke things up to order of importance. After a full week I mostly have everything under control (at least the little control I have over nature). Most of the work was just maintenance that I would do each day, 10-15 min of trimming, pulling weeds, training vines, deadheading, etc. But since I was got 16 days and we had such great growing weather my yard looked as if it was on steroids.

In addition to the new work my garden had created for me, it also held a great deal of pleasant surprises too.

The praying mantis eggs hatched. I found some in the spiders web by the egg sack, but I could also find small praying mantis in any garden bed I looked.

My raspberries which were late blooming were just ripening when we returned. I have been able to pick off at least a pint each day.

There were still strawberries to pick. I thought were going to be long gone. Not quite the bumper crop of last year but I will take what my garden gives me.

The Potatoes plants were 3 feet tall and flowering

Peaches on the peach tree were still intact.

I found Anise Swallowtail caterpillars and Monarch caterpillars. My kids love them.

The lawn is a sea of white clover flowers. I know a lot of people will think that is bizarre but I find it very pretty. Especially at night in the moonlight. Plus they have a wonderful smell to them when it is in mass.

Another nice surprise was my experiment with the Earthbox. If you do not know what one is, check out their website. It is truly amazing. I usually plant corn in my EB, but this year I thought I would try my corn in my raised bed, and put tomatoes in the EB. The corn is now half the height that it was in the EB and is now tasselling without silk. Not a good sign for the corn. The tomatoes in the EB are huge. I started them by seed nearly a month after starting my other tomatoes. You can see the difference in the size. Also there are tons more flowers and baby tomatoes on the EB plant. I am now a full EB convert. They are rather pricey but the yield you get out of them will pay for itself over 2-3 years. Right now I am planning on redoing my vegetable garden design with multiple EBs in the design. Below are the tomato plants in the EB.

Below is the a tomato plant that was started by seed nearly a month before the EB one. That is my corn behind it (No the corn is not blocking out the sunlight)

I know I have to catch up with my plants of the week posts (which should have been labeled plant of the month). I hope to do that with the next few days. Happy gardening.

Ex Post Facto

2008-06-01T15:28:00.004-05:00

Ex Post Facto is a term I frequently use in my job with kids and with my own children. It is Latin for "After the Fact". There have been many times throughout the past several years that something has upset me with either my own children's behavior or that of a student I teach and I have given them a consequence that was totally created on the spur of the moment. After I have calmed down, I realize that what I did was create a consequence that was "Ex Post Facto". The rule or consequence was not in place before the situation took place. It was created after the fact.

This happens all the time with children when they play self created games. There are general rules but as the game develops some of the rules change,usually to suit the person who is changing the rules. I have pointed this out to my kids when this happens so that they can see how others view their dramatic shift in rules and how it can create resentment. As a result, my kids generally iron out all most of the rules of a game before playing it. My eldest has become aware of it to the extent that when I end up angry and making a rash consequence he will speak up and say "Hey Dad. That was an Ex Post Facto decision." Nine times out of ten he is right.

It is interesting that my child can see this and yet about a half of the Democratic party can not. At least that is what I saw on Saturday. I have always like Hillary Clinton and I have heard her speak when she was the First Lady. I had a lot of respect for her. However, during this campaign that has dwindled. It is not that she ran negative ads on Obama or her tactics while campaigning (that is to be expected). It was the constant shift of what the goal line should be for winning the nominations. When it started to become evident that she was going to lose the nominations the shifting of the finish line began. It was delegates that decided the nomination, then super-delegates, then who won the most states, then who won the big states, then popular vote, then popular vote in non caucus states, then the vote of white people, then this sham about Michigan and Florida.

I am sorry. I understand that people in those states are angry, but they were told before they voted that their primary was not going to be counted. They voted anyways. The decision that happened yesterday (while both sides are in favor of it) never should have happened. Clinton acknowledged that the primary in Michigan would not count and she should have been taken to task for that comment. She agreed to this rule. Period end of story. This is the same kind of bull$hi# that I and many others are sick of in politics. Play by the rules and if you don't win you should act like a grown up and accept defeat. Do not try to change the rules midway through a competition. It is the same way I lost total respect for Bill Clinton. When he started to question "It depends on what the definition of "is" is." The time has come for change. While Clinton brings some change, what we need is a metamorphosis and Obama can provide that. Clinton can not.

The killing joke!

2008-05-26T00:38:00.003-05:00

First Huckabee joked about a gunman shooting at Obama

Then Hillary mentions the assassination of Robert Kennedy as "reference point" and reason why she is still in the race.

Now we have a person at Faux News woman Liz Trotta jokes about knocking off Obama

Can anyone point out a time when so many people joked about killing a candidate?

No, there is no prejudice in America.

Nothing to see here.
Just move along.

It makes me sick!

Beggar Thy Neighbor

2008-05-23T23:41:00.005-05:00

My friends over at We Don't Buy It! posted a video by Al Jazeera network that looked at the presidential race in Kentucky in a very unflattering light. The report had journalists asking blunt questions to the people in Kentucky and they responded in the same manner. The sad part about this is that both groups (the coal miners and African Americans) should be class allies but unfortunately they were driven apart by mining companies.

Here is a quick history lesson. The coal industry was in high demand in the mid 1800's and through the early 1900's . As the newly emancipated slaves migrated to find jobs and a new life. The mine owners used them as a leverage point against the increasing movement for the miners to form organized labor unions. As miners started to organize strikes for better working conditions the mine owners brought in the African American strikebreakers. Mine owners used agents to entice African American workers to the mines. Throughout southern states there was a concentrated effort to arrest African Americans, give them excessive sentences, and then lease them out to the coal mining industry. The situation was not helped by the early organizers refusing to allow African Americans into their labor union.

Unfortunately this lack of seeing the common ground between themselves and the newly freed population created a rift that we are still seeing today. The even greater tragedy is that this type of behavior is running rampant in today's working world. I can not tell you how many times I have heard people complain about how certain organized work forces should lose their pensions, overtime pay, vacation time, etc. just because they do not have it in their occupation. Instead of trying to make their occupation a better place to work they fight very hard to take away benefits from another group. Who wins then?? Not the workers but the corporations and the owners. You would think that over the past 160 years workers of all levels would see the advantages that unions have made. However, it seems that people tend to forget the past and rather quickly (look at the parallels of Viet Nam war and our current Cluster F$#K in Iraq).

Perhaps this year will mark a change of the wind.
Perhaps this year people will become tired of using their fellow brothers and sisters in the work force as scapegoats for their problems.
Perhaps this year we will stop blaming other nationalities for taking our jobs
Perhaps this year we will stop blaming other countries for our problems.
Perhaps this year we will stop the beggar thy neighbor mindset and demand fair living not just for their families but for all families.

For those who would like to get a grasp on the organized labor movement and how many people sacrificed their lives for many of the laws that are part of a majority of the American workforce, read Death in the Haymarket by James Green. It is a quick read and very enjoyable. It may even cause you to celebrate Labor Day on the real Labor Day, May 1st.

Honeybees - Colony Collapse Disorder report 2008

2008-05-18T13:48:00.004-05:00

A few days ago this years report on the honeybee's colony collapse disorder came out. The results were not good. Of the beekeepers surveyed they reported a loss of a little over 36% of their hives. This is an increase of 13% from last year. This was the article by Agricultural Research Services

Surveyed beekeepers reported a total loss of about 36.1 percent of their honey bee colonies, up about 13.5 percent from the previous winter. Losses attributed to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) appear to be about the same, with just over one-third (36 percent) of the operations reporting some lost colonies in which all adult bees disappeared, a primary symptom of CCD, according to Jeff Pettis, research leader of the ARS Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. The combined survey, which was conducted by telephone interview, checked on nearly 19 percent of the country's 2.44 million colonies. ARS is continuing to vigorously seek the cause or causes of CCD. One issue complicating such research is that, so far, researchers only have samples taken after a CCD incident is reported. With just the one set of samples, especially since the adult bees have disappeared, researchers cannot look for specific changes in affected bee colonies preceding the collapse. To deal with this, in February 2007, Pettis and cooperators from universities and states began taking samples about every six weeks from cooperating migratory beekeepers who move their colonies to provide pollination. Two of the apiaries being sampled had suffered outbreaks of CCD in 2006. Some of these apiaries did have a CCD incident in late 2007 or early 2008. The stored samples will hopefully give researchers an opportunity to see what changed, and more direction to find the cause or causes.

What is interesting is that last year organic beekeepers reported no loss. I am still awaiting their 2008 report to see if this trend still hold true. I was just reading about how organic beekeepers view the whole hive as an organism and an ecological system not just the single bee. They do not use antibiotics or pesticides, to treat the bees. They strive not to stress the colony by timing honey harvesting to times of the year where it is most appropriate. Organic beekeepers do not discourage swarming pointing out that it adds to the genetic diversity of bees. What has happened is that we have taken a species that have adapted very well over 1,000's of years and we have made it nearly dependent on us. Feeding it sugar water, giving it antibiotics and, using pesticides on the colony to ward off mites. This is not a way to keep a species strong and healthy. I recent quote that I read by Josef Graf hits this idea "If you wanted to degenerate a species you would start by eliminating it's principal shepherd of strength, the predators. Then you would coddle its weakness, put it on antibiotics, and other artificial substances to prop it up, to toy with its biotic form (hormones, etc.) confine it to over-crowded conditions, ignore its spiritual aspect, treat it as a commodity, and feed it non-organic monoculture crops or even worse, GMO fodder."

I am currently wrapping up my research on my backyard apiary and I am almost all ready to start next spring. I brought up this whole issue of the colony collapse disorder to a neighbor of mine who stopped by the other day to chat. This neighbor is one of the few people within the block who shares a lot of the political views as I do. However after the chat it was still quite apparent that (s)he could talk the talk about change but was still not quite comfortable with actual change. In a nutshell this is what happened. I informed her/him about the colony collapse disorder and my plans to start a apiary and why I plant so much clover in my yard. First s(he) freaked at me having a beehive in the backyard. When I asked why (s)he was so afraid of one (s)he could not give me a straight answer. I asked if (s)he was allergic to bees. The response was "no". (S)He just hemmed and hawed about how it was so different. The next thing that (s)he pointed out was that the clover on my lawn could be upsetting to her/him if I lived next door to her/him. When I asked why (s)he said because bees are attracted to it and kids might step on them and get stung. It is very apparent that even when I find people in my neighborhood that share similar ideas the commitment to change is lacking. It is great to talk a good game but when do you actually move into action???? That is one of the reasons I really admire the family at We Dont Buy It. They actually are doing something not just talking up some hollow philosophy. I will leave you with this cartoon I found in Permaculture Activist Magazine that sums up my point.

Soldiers give up their life and Bush gives up....golf!

2008-05-14T22:48:00.004-05:00

Latest special commentary from Keith Olbermann. Once again very well done.

Garden - Late April

2008-04-27T18:39:00.008-05:00

Here are a few pictures of my garden right now. Today I pruned back the blackberries and finished getting rid of the English Ivy (man that tokk a long time). Even though the ivy looks gone, I realize I will be battling it for at least a few years. The pond is going strong and the fish are enjoying their spring and summer home.

English Ivy before:

English Ivy After:

The onion and garlic field is growing strong.

Now that my peach tree is blossoming it is time for a frost. Which has killed off my peaches for the last two years. This year I have a lot of blossoms. We are suppose to get a frost tonight and tomorrow. I decided to tarp the tree and attempt to save some blossoms. At this point I will try anything. You will also see my corn covered to the left. Wish me luck.

Biofuel research that almost killed the planet?

2008-04-25T16:30:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago I heard on a radio program about some research and development that was done in the 1990's to change some bacteria in the soil to help plants decompose. The rapid decomposition of the plant material would be used to produce alcohol from it (by increasing the production of lactose fermentation of agricultural wastes); then we'd have a win-win situation. A sellable product to get rid of plant residues quickly and we could add it to gasoline. We could even use it as cooking oil. They took a common bacteria that is found on the root systems of almost all plants, Klebsiella planticola, and thought if they could genetically engineer it to increase the production of lactose fermentation of wastes then they could increase the used of biofuels. Scientists took genetic material from another bacteria and modified Klebsiella planticola (SDF 20). They were excited about the results and were going to test it in the fields. Luckily Dr. Elaine Ingham of Oregon State University got wind of this and had them hold the field test until more studies could be done to see what the result of this genetically modified bacteria would be. After she ran her own tests she realized that some startling results. In a nutshell, if this new genetically modified bacteria was let loose, it would destroy almost all land plants on earth. Disaster was averted this time. However, Dr. Ingham points out, especially in this current political administration, that the lack of pre-market safety testing on other genetically altered organisms runs the risk that future biological monsters may be released into the environment. To read Dr. Ingham's report click here.

Best soil around

2008-04-13T12:21:00.002-05:00

About 2 or 3 years ago I read a newspaper article about the quality of the soil in Illinois. This was done by a study of United States Department of Agriculture. Only patches of farmland in Argentina, southern Ukraine, and China (along the Yellow River) have soil as rich as northern Illinois. A close second was Iowa. Most of the soils composition is due to the glaciers. The large sheets of ice protected the ground and in essence made it 15,000 years younger than the soils that were not covered by glaciers. When the glaciers melted the lack of vegetation and the strong winds that followed helped blow dust/dirt from the newly formed river beds for 100s of miles. Thus creating a very fertile topsoil. This is combination of the prairie ecosystem that took hold where the root structures/natural burnings/decay of organic matter continued to add to the richness of the soil. Now if it will ever get warm again I will enjoy working in one of the best soils on the globe ;->

What country do I live in?

2008-04-05T00:55:00.005-05:00

If you have been following news other than the sports and weather you are probably familiar with the John Yoo memos that have come out this week. Essentially coaching certain governmentally agency how they could legally respond if they were charged with torturing someone. Bringing the issue of torture to not something that was an isolated event done by rogue soldiers but a systemic policy that was approved of by senior officials. If you have not read them I would urge you to do so. Here is a link to an article about the memo. It is sad that we have allowed our country and government to sink to this level. Just when I thought I had heard it all, I heard an interview with John Yoo in Chicago from January 8, 2006.

In explaining the Yoo Doctrine, Yoo made the following statements during a December 1, 2005, debate in Chicago, Illinois, with Notre Dame Law School Professor Doug Cassel:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Audio Link

The answer he gave shocked and disgusted me as an American and as a human being. The above plus a rerun of the Death of Habeas Corpus tonight has left me in a somber mood for the night.

The world needs....

2008-03-30T22:12:00.000-05:00

more of this.

God bless the arts everywhere!!!!!

My back hurts!

2008-03-29T23:48:00.006-05:00

Today I was trying to get rid of English Ivy that I foolishly planted 3 years ago. Not thinking about how evasive it was and forgetting my native plants principles. I got about 1/5 of the way when I felt a twinge in my lower right back muscle. Needless to say I stopped. I did not want to completely stop working in fear that the muscle would really freeze up so for the next hour or so my two boys helped me plant three rows of onions (about 60 plants). We now have a nice looking onion patch on the south side of our house. I will let you know how they turn out this fall.

When can we get out?

2008-03-29T21:48:00.007-05:00

My kids have asked me several times when this mess in Iraq will be over. They have heard Mr.McCain's jingoistic comments of being in Iraq for the next 100 years and him singing "bomb, bomb, bomb,.. bomb, bomb, Iran." and worry about yet another war being started in the near future. Although I would like to tell him that we should leave as soon as possible, I can not be Pollyanna about it. I answer, "As soon as we are energy independent with renewable sources, we will be able to leave the Mideast mess." Their are things happening in Iraq that mirror some of the strategy of View Nam. I am too young to remember all the intricacies of that war. Heck, I was only 6 when we finally withdrew from it. However, as a lover of history, I like to look at the past in order to try and avert crisis in the present. If my account of history is accurate in 1975 we had a similar strategy of creating a safehaven (AKA Green-Zone). It was called Saigon. And as we all know that worked out really well for our troops.

Now flash forward 33 years and we are faced with a similar situation. There is a fraction of the population that say we can not pull out because if we do the terrorist win. There is another group of people who say reduce the troops there until it resembles post World War II Europe, where we have bases and a presence in the area. There is a large group of people, like myself, that say pull out as soon as possible. But As I look at who we are as a culture in America and how addicted we are to cheap oil my answer has to change from idealism to realism.

I think that the next president, if it is a Democrat, will reduce the troops in Iraq, but probably not eliminate them as I would hope. As I stated earlier, the reason for this is our country's addiction to cheap government subsidized oil. Some people are aware that the government subsidizes the oil companies and as a result they make huge profits but it also keeps oil at $3-4 a gallon. If it was not subsidized by the government, then we would be seeing prices similar to Europe of $8-11 per gallon. Now think what would happen if gas was that much. First there would be a huge calling for renewable energy sources and as a result the oil companies would be eventually be the big losers (Financially in terms of a reduction of people buying their product.). I believe that the reduction of forces in Iraq must be paired with a real dedication to alternative renewable energy sources.

One company that I just recently became aware of is nanosolar, you will see that there has been some dramatic improvements in photovoltaic cells, creating paperlike panels that are lightweight and very efficient. They are sold out for the next 12 months, and a great deal of their merchandise is being bought by European countries. Many countries are investing heavily in renewable energy sources because they see what the cost is and will be of Mideast oil in the future. If Germany and Denmark can do this why not America? We were once looked as the country of "movers and shakers". The country that could do anything. What has happened to that attitude? It comes down to perception and right now there is not a perception that we need to do something different by more than a handful of people. Until the masses realize that it is in everyone's best interest to become energy independent, we will continue to be bogged down in endless conflicts, the dollar will continue to slide downward, and the cost of living will rise exponentially.

And then there was hope.....

2008-03-27T00:59:00.002-05:00

While clearing out some of my beds today I noticed this

Proving that spring is coming. About 3 years ago I planted crocus' in my yard that spelled out "Happy Spring". It wasn't long before the squirrels put an end to my messages written in blooms. The lone crocus that I found in my bed is one of the last survivors of that endeavor.

Time to start sowing

2008-03-26T00:58:00.007-05:00

After the past 2 weeks of truly horrible weather, I keep on asking myself, what month is it? It does not seem like late March in the Chicagoland area (Certainly not spring). Last weekend I felt it was December with over 6 inches of heavy snow on the ground. Today I got out of the funk by getting a start on my garden by planting the seeds in my seed starter bins. My kids helped me out in putting the seeds into each planter cell and adding water to the reservoirs. As I write this the basil seeds have already become swollen. If you are interested in starting seeds indoors Parkseed.com has some really nice seed starter bins. The one I use is pictured below. The Bio Dome.

The whole family decided on the following plants in the garden:
Thai Basil
Italian Basil
Tomato - Viva Italia
Tomato - la Rossa
Tomato - Plum Dandy
Tomato - Plum Crimson
Tomato - Margherita
Green peppers
Red peppers
Sweet banana peppers
Jalapeno Peppers
Kung Pao Peppers
Cayenne Peppers
Habnero Peppers
Cilantro
Cantaloupe
Parsley
Okra
Summer Squash
Incan Golden Berry
Summer can't come soon enough.

Time to Rethink Ethanol...Sorry Illinois

2008-03-15T00:17:00.004-05:00

Today I read an article about the rise in food costs partially because of the price of gas but also due to the demand for Ethanol. You can read the story here.

This is a nice overview of the Ethanol Debate which gives studies that are Pro Ethanol and Con Ethanol. You can decide. But if I had to choose between keeping low economy cars like SUV's running and feeding my family.... I'll take the food thank you ;->

Scotts Lawn Service Tries to Cajole Me

2008-03-14T20:37:00.005-05:00

A while ago I wrote about my very unpleasant run-in with the Scotts Lawn Service man. Now I got a form letter from their company saying "Some time ago, you expressed interest in joining the family of Scotts Lawn Service customers, however you elected not to do so at the time." WHAT??? When did I express an interest? I love the way companies market their subpar product to people. Also when did they become a "family" of customers? Join us!!!!!

The letter then continues on using some tactics to stir up some fears and try and get you to call them and set up a "detailed" lawn report. Here is the shtick.
"What is wrong with your lawn? What do you need to do now to protect your lawn from unsightly weeds (which may actually fix the nitrogen in your soil), insects you can't even see(many of which are either beneficial to your lawn, garden or the environment), and damaging turfgrass diseases (much of it caused by the overuse of petrochemical-based pesticides and fertilizers) ..." EEEK my lawn has some weeds. It has bugs in it. Scotts Lawn Service save me!!! Give me a break.

Now I actually have to give Scotts some credit here. Last year they released a natural lawn fertilizer. I will applaud them for trying to address the use petrochemical-based treatments for lawns. You can check out the chemical compositions for their Organic Fertilizer vs. some other fertilizers.
Scotts Organic Natural Lawn Fertilizer
Scotts Step 1
Scotts Step 2
Scotts Step 3
Scotts Step 4
Milorganite
Chem-Lawn

If you have ever used Ironite here is an interesting article from the Dirt Doctor about the ingredients in fertilizers.

One of the easiest fruits to grow....Blackberries

2008-03-14T20:13:00.002-05:00

I have talked to many people who wanted to grow a certain type of plant or vegetables, but they said that they have a "Brown Thumb". Anything they plant dies. Well if you want to take the plunge into gardening and want to grow something that almost has a 100% success rate, try blackberries. I first grew these in my old house in-between my house and my neighbors. I planted them next to my garage and they grew very fast and large. They started getting very long and straggly when I had the idea to put up some lattice on my garage. I did so and sure enough I had blackberries covering the wall of my garage.

When I moved I had my friend build a grape arbor for me. On the south side of the arbor I planted grapes and on the north side blackberries and hardy kiwi. They quickly covered the lattice on the arbor the first year, and for the past 4 years I have had huge crops of blackberries. When they ripen I can pick about a quart a day for about 3-4 weeks. The trick is planting varieties that successive ripening times. That way you will have a longer season to enjoy fresh blackberries. If you train the canes up and down the lattice the shoots will drive back into the ground and start to sprout roots and will eventually be new shoots for the upcoming year.

The other thing I would suggest is to purchase thornless blackberries. I bought 2 regular blackberry canes with thorns just to see if there was any taste differences. There wasn't. The thorns on blackberry canes are VERY sharp. You need heavy duty gloves if you are going to be picking berries from them. I have now dug up the thorned variety 3 times, and they still keep coming back. So I would not recommend planting those.

The End of Suburbia????

2008-03-02T11:16:00.005-06:00

Last week I watched a documentary that was called the "End of Suburbia" and for the first time in a long time I was actually depressed for a while. After a couple hours of feeling like the world was going to hell in a handbasket and everything was coming to and end, I decided to refocus my energies and thoughts to what solutions there were to the problems posed in the film. For those of you who have not seen it, in a nutshell it deals with what will/could happen when the peak oil crisis comes. According to the research peak oil (that is the point in which we will be at the highest point of oil production and then it will begin to decrease) will be within 5-7 years. How does that effect they way we live? Oh let me count the ways. Your jobs, vacations, food, goods, heating, electricity. Everything will be effected, because we have no efficient way to produce the amount of energy we consume after cheap oil is gone.

The film focuses on suburbia as a living community that was created because of cheap oil. Suburbia is the posterchild for unsustainable living community. The food and goods are produced far away, the jobs that employ the suburbanites are far away, and the land that is in suburbia is poorly used. Let me ask you at what price does using oil/gasoline/natural gas become to costly? When gas is $10 a gallon will you still drive 30 miles to work everyday? When gas is $15 a gallon what will your food cost in the grocery store? When gas is $20 a gallon what will your heating bill be for the winter (yes I know they are different but they are correlated in price increases). Now I don't want to be chicken little yelling that the sky is falling, but this is a problem that needs to be addressed and more than just in my little blog. I have started a meetup group called Arlington Heights Post Carbon Planners. With this meetup I am hoping to gather people who are interested in urging local city councils to start to adopt laws and codes that start to create permaculture. Where food, goods, and energy are all created locally. I would also encourage you to visit the Post Carbon Cities Guidebook website. Here you can see what are some steps you can take to prepare yourself and your community for living in a post carbon world.

Plant of the Week: Tall Ironweed

2008-02-24T21:01:00.005-06:00

Now I am highlighting weeds??? Technically a weed is any plant that is unwanted or a nuisance. So things such as Ironweed or Milkweed are only weeds if you don't want them. See who does not like Ironweed here. Plants that are considered a "weed" also grow very quickly and seem to have high sow rates. So it will come to no surprise that Tall Ironweed grows very fast and will spread through seed it is a member of the Aster family. It is a very tall plant that can reach about 10 feet with a medium stem thickness that is as stung as "iron". Some early settlers used the stems for the frame of kites. Also Native Americans used the root for relieving pain after childbirth and restore regular menstruation. Some species of Ironweed have been used to treat stomach problems and as a mouth wash to treat gum disease.
It will grow in sun or partial shade, in moist or dry soil. Huge cluster of purple flowers bloom from late summer into the fall. Monarchs can not resist it. It is a great nectar flower for the early fall when the Monarchs are on their way south to Mexico for the winter. Since many rich nectar flowers are starting to fade, Ironweed, along with any of the other Aster family are a welcome site to the traveling butterflies. If you want a plant for a small space, this would not be the plant for you. Although I have a grouping of this on the southeast corner of my house and it hasn't really spread. Although I have some of its' "children" 30 feet away in another planting bed. I would allow an area for this plant to spread through seed or plant it with some other vigorous growers like the Cup Plant that I highlighted last week. Tall Ironweed botanical name is Vernonia altissima. The genus Vernonia is named for English botanist William Vernon. The species name altissima is Latin for "highest".

No immunity for telecom companies

2008-02-24T16:57:00.002-06:00

The Protect America Act lapsed last Saturday February 16th and yesterday President Bush continued to preach fear to the American people by telling us "Somewhere in the world, at this very moment, terrorists are planning the next attack on America. And to protect America from such attacks, we must protect our telecommunications companies from abusive lawsuits."

Part of the rush to give them retroactive immunity is because Attorney General has stated that spying outside of FISA is illegal. Given the fact that the Bush Administration has been doing that for the past few years, doesn't that force the Attorney General to investigate this "criminal activity"?

Find your representative in Congress and call and email him or her every week or every day and urge them to stand strong on their decision not to give telecom companies immunity (retroactive or in the futire). Tell them that when a politician tells a business to break the law, their responsibility is to the LAW not the politician.

Plant Spotlight: Cup Plant

2008-02-17T20:04:00.003-06:00

This is a great plant for a sunny spot with a lot of room. This plant grows quickly and is a beautiful specimen. It grows about 8 feet tall and blooms The stem has a square like structure and the petiole (the area of the leaf that connects to the stem) is very short and collects the dew and rain. Pioneers use to use these plants to gain a quick drink in their journey across the prairie. I often see birds (mostly finches) using these little water basins for a quick drink.

The other wonderful thing about this plant is the profusion of yellow flowers July and August when the summer heat is at its highest. Once the flowers are gone there is another show is just about to begin. Goldfinches!!!! They go nuts for the seeds in the fertilized flowers. I have spotted 10-12 goldfinches at once on my grouping of cup plants. Give them room because they will spread by seeding. The first year growth they are a little thin and may need support but by year 2 and 3 they are wonderful columns of green. Cup plant is called Silphium Perfoliatum. Silphium is the ancient name of a resinous plant. It was given to this group of plants because of their pine-scented, resinous sap. Perfoliatum is from the Latin for "leaf surrounding the stem so that the stem perforates the leaf"

Go native!

2008-02-17T18:35:00.003-06:00

Although some will first think of going half naked dancing around a fire, I am not talking about that kind of native. Come on, the title is "Suburban Agrarian". With all this rain this is a good time to start planning where you could plant native prairie plants in your yard. I friend of mine told me they had some sewer work done in their backyard and we were discussing what a perfect opportunity to go native with the landscaping. The "no mow" lawn is a great idea if you have an area you still want a carpet of green for entertaining purposes. The site preparation and first year are critical to its success. If not I would start looking at the amount of light certain areas of your yard gets per day. Is it full sun, partial sun, full shade? This seems to be a strange topic for the second week in February, but all this rain and my current topics of water made me think of how prairie plants are perfectly adapted to this type of problem.

Native plants are a great way to combat the climate change that many areas are experiencing. First they are a great carbon absorption. The root structures of many native prairie plants extend deep into the ground, unlike most non-natives (see picture below). This root structure allows the native plants to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon is one of the major constituents of global warming and removing it from the weather cycle slows the warming process. Prairie ecosystems are one of the main carbon "sinks" where carbon is stored. Carbon sinks store more carbon than they emit. In addition to helping reduce the carbon prairie plants also build the soil. About 1/3 of their root system die within the year. When they die they decay and turn into compost. This adds to the fertility and the capacity of the water the soil can hold. Their dense root structure acts like a sponge and helps filter rainwater back into the groundwater aquifer, this in turn reduces runoff and flooding. Prairie plants are quite frankly the workhorse of the Midwest garden.

Our cup runneth over

2008-02-17T10:35:00.000-06:00

Just 2 days ago I wrote about the problem with fresh water becoming more and more scarce. Today there is a flood warning in the following counties around Chicago

Boone County in north central Illinois...
DeKalb County in north central Illinois...
La Salle County in north central Illinois...
Lee County in north central Illinois...
Ogle County in north central Illinois...
Winnebago County in north central Illinois...
Cook County in northeast Illinois...
DuPage County in northeast Illinois...
northern Grundy County in northeast Illinois...
Kane County in northeast Illinois...
Kendall County in northeast Illinois...
Lake County in northeast Illinois...
McHenry County in northeast Illinois...
Will County in northeast Illinois...

Looks like our cup has runneth over this winter. Hopefully any readers in those areas will be alright. Pray your sump pump and any back up sump pump keeps working through the day and night.

Let it snow. Let is snow. Let is snow.

2008-02-15T21:31:00.000-06:00

If you live in Chicagoland, this is the time of year where you have had enough of the cold weather and the snow. This year has been a record year in the area of snow, with 2007-2008 being one of the top 9 "snowiest" years in Chicagoland history. This is a bittersweet statistic. While I dread shoveling, plowing, and driving around in the snow, it has created more fresh water for our rivers, streams and Lake Michigan. Why is this important? Because fresh water is a natural resource that we can not live without, and looks to be a resource that is soon to be more scarce as the global temperature rises. When I say soon, I am not talking within 2-3 years, but more like 15-25 years (soon in geological time). A couple of articles that I have read within the week deal with some pretty startling statistics. While the Great Lakes will not be as impacted as other regions it is still a cause for concern. Especially considering that Lake Superior is nearing record low levels.

One area of big concern is the American west. After reading this week that Lake Mead, one of the main water sources for Las Vegas has a 50-50 chance of running dry by 2021. This made me think back to an event that happened a little over a year ago. I had a neighbor that sold their house and was building a their second house in Arizona. When I asked him why he was leaving this area for good, he said, "The weather was better Arizona." He was the type of person who had one home in low elevation for the winter and another house in high elevation for the summer. Very convenient if you can afford it. I then asked him about the water situation out west. I asked with all of the people that have been moving out west, don't you worry about the water supply? He responded that the builders there have to provide proof that there is a 100 years worth of water for every subdivision they build. I am not one to start an argument about builder's "guarantees" so I just nodded my head and kept my thoughts to myself. The probability of a builder being able to guarantee 100 years of water was close to zero.

With the record amount of snow this will help slow the rate of the loss of fresh water from Lake Michigan. Hopefully, there will be many years like this so that at least in this area we will not be subjected to issues that will soon face those in the Southwest and a crisis that many are facing right now in the Southeast. So the next time it snows, rains, hails, whatever kind of precipitation it may be, pause and think that it could be worse. You could have no water. For a look at what life would could be like for millions of Americans read about Orme, Tennessee. Even though we seem to have an abundance of fresh water, every individual can conserve water. The following comes from a water conservation website:

Ten ways that will save the most water:

1. Water your lawn only when it needs it. Step on your grass. If it springs back, when you lift your foot, it doesn't need water. So set your sprinklers for more days in between watering. Saves 750-1,500 gallons per month. Better yet, especially in times of drought, water with a hose. And best of all, convert your lawn to native plants.

2. Fix leaky faucets and plumbing joints. Saves 20 gallons per day for every leak stopped.

3. Don't run the hose while washing your car. Use a bucket of water and a quick hose rinse at the end. Saves 150 gallons each time. For a two-car family that's up to 1,200 gallons a month.

4. Install water-saving shower heads or flow restrictors. Saves 500 to 800 gallons per month.

5. Run only full loads in the washing machine and dishwasher. Saves 300 to 800 gallons per month.

6. Shorten your showers. Even a one or two minute reduction can save up to 700 gallons per month.

7. Use a broom instead of a hose to clean driveways and sidewalks. Saves 150 gallons or more each time. At once a week, that's more than 600 gallons a month.

8. Don't use your toilet as an ashtray or wastebasket. Saves 400 to 600 gallons per month.

9. Capture tap water. While you wait for hot water to come down the pipes, catch the flow in a watering can to use later on house plants or your garden. Saves 200 to 300 gallons per month.

10. Don't water the sidewalks, driveway or gutter. Adjust your sprinklers so that water lands on your lawn or garden where it belongs--and only there. Saves 500 gallons per month.

Conserve in the bathroom:

1. Put a plastic bottle or a plastic bag weighted with pebbles and filled with water in your toilet tank. Displacing water in this manner allows you to use less water with each flush. Saves 5 to 10 gallons a day. That's up to 300 gallons a month, even more for large families. Better yet, for even greater savings, replace your water-guzzling five to seven gallon a flush toilet with a one and a half gallon, ultra-low flush model.

2. If you're taking a shower, don't waste cold water while waiting for hot water to reach the shower head. Catch that water in a container to use on your outside plants or to flush your toilet. Saves 200 to 300 gallons a month.

3. Check toilet for leaks. Put dye tablets or food coloring into the tank. If color appears in the bowl without flushing, there's a leak that should be repaired. Saves 400 gallons a month.

4. Turn off the water while brushing your teeth. Saves three gallons each day.

5. Turn off the water while shaving. Fill the bottom of the sink with a few inches of water to rinse your razor. Saves three gallons each day.

Conserve the water in the kitchen

1. If you wash dishes by hand--and that's the best way--don't leave the water running for rinsing. If you have two sinks, fill one with rinse water. If you only have one sink, use a spray device or short blasts instead of letting the water run. Saves 200 to 500 gallons a month.

2. When washing dishes by hand, use the least amount of detergent possible. This minimizes rinse water needed. Saves 50 to 150 gallons a month.

3. Keep a bottle of drinking water in the refrigerator. This beats the wasteful habit of running tap water to cool it for drinking. Saves 200 to 300 gallons a month.

4. Don't defrost frozen foods with running water. Either plan ahead by placing frozen items in the refrigerator overnight or defrost them in the microwave. Saves 50 to 150 gallons a month.

5. Don't let the faucet run while you clean vegetables. Rinse them in a filled sink or pan. Saves 150 to 250 gallons a month.

6. Use the garbage disposal less and the garbage more (even better--compost!). Saves 50 to 150 gallons a month.

Conserve water outside

1. Put a layer of mulch around trees and plants. Chunks of bark, peat moss or gravel slows down evaporation. Saves 750 to 1,500 gallons a month.

2. If you have a pool, use a pool cover to cut down on evaporation. It will also keep your pool cleaner and reduce the need to add chemicals. Saves 1,000 gallons a month.

3. Water during the cool parts of the day. Early morning is better than dusk since it helps prevent the growth of fungus. Saves 300 gallons.

4. Don't water the lawn on windy days. There's too much evaporation. Can waste up to 300 gallons in one watering.

5. Cut down watering on cool and overcast days and don't water in the rain. Adjust or deactivate automatic sprinklers. Can save up to 300 gallons each time.

6. Set lawn mower blades one notch higher. Longer grass means less evaporation. Saves 500 to 1,500 gallons each month.

7. Have an evaporative air conditioner? Direct the water drain line to a flower bed, tree base, or lawn.

8. Drive your car onto a lawn to wash it. Rinse water can help water the grass.

9. Tell your children not to play with the garden hose. Saves 10 gallons a minute.

10. If you allow your children to play in the sprinklers, make sure it's only when you're watering the yard--if it's not too cool at that time of day.

11. Xeriscape--replace your lawn and high-water-using trees and plants with less thirsty ones. But do this only in wet years. Even drought resistant plantings take extra water to get them going. That'll save 750 to 1,500 gallons a month.

12. When taking your car to a car wash--a good idea for saving water--be sure it's one of the many that recycles its wash water.

13. Dispose of hazardous materials properly! One quart of oil can contaminate 250,000 gallons of water, effectively eliminating that much water from our water supply.

The check is in the mail

2008-02-09T23:47:00.000-06:00

Now that the tax rebate has passed both the House and the Senate a large amount of people will be getting some sort of "rebate" check from the government sometime in May. I predict that there will be numerous sales coming out around that time to help Americans unload those checks back into the "economy". What is sad is that most people will use there windfall to purchase things they really don't need or partially purchase things that they can not afford. If you look at the graph by U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, our % of personal savings is around the Great Depression level.

This, in addition to the increase amount of debt, that most Americans carry, can be the harbinger of bad economic times. Like most people, I fell into the credit card trap in my young adult life. I hope through teaching my children about debt and the type of rat race it creates, I can help them avoid some of the stupid things I have done. However, I realize that some things will only be learned by experiencing the stupidity first hand. As I tell my kids the smart man learns from his mistakes, but the truly wise learn from other's mistakes. I just think of how much more ahead of the game I would have been if I contributed more to my retirement plans when I was younger, if I bought everything with cash, if I never began the credit card trap.

So with this in mind I urge you to watch the ads and commercials right around the tax "refund" time. There are many companies that would love your money. As for what my family is planning on using with the money, we are going to put some in savings and the other part to paying of some more debt (not credit card). We are committed to becoming debt free as soon as possible. Right now we have cut back on all things except the bare essentials. No newspaper, no netflicks, basic TV, no magazine subscriptions, and perhaps the hardest for me was no comic books(Boy that was a difficult one). But we have to get extreme if we are going to live debt free.

A lot of people will say, " the cost of living is so much higher now than before." This is true to an extent. Things like gas, milk, etc. have risen in price and the average income has not necessarily risen to match it (that has a connection to politics and people voting against their own self-interests, but that is for another post). There are also "essentials" to living today that did not exist 10 years ago, such as cell phones and the internet. How can a family not go into debt? There is debt that is acceptable (mortgage) and then there is debt that is excessive (credit card, car payments, and many more) What can a family do? I would encourage anyone reading this to check out some of Dave Ramsey's books in the library to really get tough on getting rid of debt and achieving financial freedom. I will give you a hint, getting more stuff is not part of the equation. I am not there yet, but I hope to be someday. I will leave you with some shocking stats that I have read lately:

90% of people in our culture buy things they can't afford.

80% of graduating college seniors have credit card debt, before they have a job. 45% have debt over $3,000.

Over 97% of people don't systematically pay extra on their mortgage.

49% of Americans could cover less than one month's expenses if they lost their income.

60% don't pay off their credit cards every month

78% of American said they would borrow on their credit card for a rainy day.

68% have saved nothing- or close to nothing- toward their child's college education

People under age 25 make up the fastest-growing age group filing for bankruptcy.

Scotts Lawn Service Hates Me!!!

2008-02-08T23:53:00.000-06:00

A great way to get bothered by the Scotts Lawn Service people (or ChemLawn- what a great name), is to plant White Dutch Clover into your lawn this year. I did this about 2 years ago because of the benefits I learned about clover. Nodules on the roots of clover fix nitrogen from the air. Up to 1/3 the nitrogen your lawn needs can be obtained from white Dutch clover. If you sprinkle it in patches throughout your lawn, you can use less organic fertilizer than without it. It grows very rapidly in a variety of soils and the rabbits eat the clover rather than going after my fruits and vegetables. The flower has a slight sweet fragrance, so when it blooms in patches you get a wonderful smell. Clover is a host plant for many smaller butterfly larvae, food for wildlife, nectar source for bees and butterflies. Honeybees are especially attracted to it, which is a good thing (see my article on Honeybees and CCD). Every year Scotts or Chem lawn come knocking on my door asking if I need their weed control services. As they work with the Lawn-nazi's that live around me, they spot my yard where heaven forbid, it is not pure Kentucky bluegrass. There are patches of small white flowers all around the lawn. The sales people can not comprehend that something like this can exist in suburbia. Who does not want a perfect carpet of green lawn? Unfortunately my wife is usually the one who is home when they call, and she is a lot nicer than I am. Last year she literally had to tell the Scotts Lawn guy to leave our property. Even if we were think about using their service , does this salesperson really think his obnoxious sale techniques would make us WANT to use his service? I pray that someday I am home when they call.

Politburo, Super-Delegates, and Donkeys oh my!

2008-02-08T22:59:00.000-06:00

Politburo - is short for Political Bureau. They are seen as "the vanguard of the people" and therefore usually have the power to control the state, and the non-state party officials in the politburo generally hold extreme power.

Super-delegate. This is a word that many people have heard a lot about lately. If you have not heard about them yet, you should. For those who do not know what they are, they are a select number of governors, and congressmen/women that endorse a candidate. The Democratic National Committee explains it as:

"UNPLEDGED AND PLEDGED PARTY LEADERS AND ELECTED OFFICIAL DELEGATES A. The procedure to be used for certifying unpledged party leader and elected official delegates is as follows: Not later than March 1, 2008, the Secretary of the Democratic National Committee shall officially confirm to each State Democratic Chair the names of the following unpledged delegates who legally reside in their respective state and who shall be recognized as part of their state’s delegation unless any such member has publicly expressed support for the election of, or has endorsed, a presidential candidate of another political party;

The individuals recognized as members of the DNC (as set forth in Article Three, Sections 2 and 3 of the Charter of the Democratic Party of the United States); and,

The Democratic President and the Democratic Vice President of the United States, if applicable;

And, All Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives and all Democratic members of the United States Senate; and,

The Democratic Governor, if applicable; and,

All former Democratic Presidents, all former Democratic Vice Presidents, all former Democratic Leaders of the U.S. Senate, all former Democratic Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic Minority Leaders, as applicable, and all former Chairs of the Democratic National Committee."

There are 796 of these superdelegates. Why is this an issue? A candidate needs "2025 delegates are to win the democratic nomination. However, more than 40% of the needed delegates are so-called "super delegates". This means they are free to pledge their votes to whomever they please, and don't have to vote for the winner of the given caucus or primary. This "safety valve" was implemented to prevent candidates from fundamentally changing the system."

If you calculate what number of votes that one delegate represents, a superdelegate represents about 10,000 votes. Should one person who was not elected as a representative from a caucus or a primary really get 10,000 votes?????? I do not think so. If you think they people should be the ones who choose the nominee then I would urge you to contact the Democratic National Committee. Contact Chairman Howard Dean. Tell him that you do not approve of the idea of the superdelegates ability to essentially pledge their vote to whomever the "party" believes should be the nominee. Ask the question "Are we the Politburo Party, or are we the Democratic Party?"

You may want to contact your own super-delegate and ask them if they intend of supporting the candidate that the people in their district/state chose as their candidate. If they cannot answer that question, inform them that there will be another election and that you will be watching how they vote. If they do not follow what the people have voted for, that they will not get your vote ever again.
Super-Delegates from Illinois are:

Targeted to pledge support Obama
Gov. Rod Blagojevich (IL)
Sen. Barack Obama (IL)
Sen. Dick Durbin (IL)
Rep. Melissa Bean (IL)
Rep. Jerry Costello (IL)
Rep. Danny Davis (IL)
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (IL)
Rep. Phil Hare (IL)
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (IL)
Rep. Bobby Rush (IL)
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (IL)
DNC Constance Howard (IL)
DNC Margaret Blackshere (IL)
DNC Hon. Emil Jones Jr. (IL)
DNC Hon. Iris Martinez (IL)
DNC Tom Hynes (IL)
DNC Willie Barrow (IL)
DNC Michael Madigan (IL)

Targeted to pledge support for Clinton

DNC John Rednour (IL)

A Plethera of catalogues

2008-02-08T21:56:00.000-06:00

I know that spring is right around the corner when the garden catalogues start coming in the mail. This year has brought a new surprise to my mailbox. A virtual cornucopia of gardening catalogues. It seems that my name has gone the rounds in the gardening circle because I have been averaging 4-5 catalogues every other day.

At last count I have received 45 catalogues. 45 CATALOGUES????? You may ask. YES! Like you I didn't know that many mail order garden companies existed. It seems like they are coming out from every nook and cranny of the USA. There are several reputable garden catalogues (which I will mention later), but the alarms should be going off when the catalogue is full of cheesy drawings showing the plants and the unbelievable results of their plants.

A few years ago when I lived in another house I took a chance and ordered from one of these catalogues. The plants that arrived were either dead or close to it. They did not last more than 2 weeks after I received them. When I contacted the company they sent replacements which were no better. Eventually I cut my losses and chalked it up to one of the many stupid things that I have done in my life. Vowing never to do it again.
So now you know what to look out for in mail order catalogues. The dangers also exist on the internet too. I know that is a big surprise to you. Below are some photos from an internet nursery site. I have not doctored these photos in any way. I will not use their name because of legal reasons. As you look at them, one has to question what are they selling.

What great looking uh....raspberries!!!

What a nice strong uh .... trunk on that dogwood.

Great lemons!!!

I guess they are marketing to the lonely gardeners out there.

As I promised earlier I will now tell you companies that I have used and would not hesitate to use again.

Their plants were shipped in a timely manner.
The plants were in excellent condition
If there was a problem they either issued a credit or shipped out a new plant.
Prices were reasonable

Native Plants
http://www.prairienursery.com/ - Great plants but you will pay for it. They give nice discounts for ordering in large quantities
http://www.prairiemoon.com/ Excellent for seeds. If you are cheep like me this is where you want to go.
http://www.americanmeadows.com/ - One of the few nurseries I actually visited. Very nice seed mixes.

Food Gardens - seeds
http://www.gurneys.com/
www.parkseed.com/
http://www.tmseeds.com/

Live Plants
www.waysidegardens.com/
http://www.jacksonandperkins.com/
www.logees.com/ - This is a tropical plant store for the more adventurous. I have a soft place in my heart for Jasmine plants. So this is where I get mine. Yes I know it is not native but the fragrance is unmatched by anything.

Bulbs
www.brecks.com/ - This is the place for bulbs. Nice selection. Great discounts for large quantities.

Fruit trees
http://www.starkbros.com/

What can $25 buy???

2008-02-04T23:15:00.000-06:00

It depends on who is using it. A few months ago I was touched by a person on a radio show telling his story of giving a small amount of money to an organization called Kiva (This is a website that manages small business loans to people in poverty around the world.). His story in a nutshell told about how he had contributed $75 to a man in the Philippines who was trying to set up a small shop. He set up the shop it had enough success that he paid back the loan and in the first time in his family's life he was able to build a house for them. When I say a house it was not the house that comes to mind as you drive through suburbia USA. This was a simple one room house made mostly of aluminum and wood, but to them it was everything.

If you missed the recent news where people in Haiti are eating mud pancakes to survive. These consist of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening. The recent rise in food prices in Haiti have caused the people to resort to thie diet in order to survive. Think of your typical supermarket in America and the abundance of food. Even small amouts of food we take for granted would be a feast somewhere else in the world (Especially what our children or we throw away every day). The same goes for our shrinking dollar. While people complain that it buys less and less, in other parts of the world it is still mighty powerful.

I would encourage anyone who reads this to check out http://www.kiva.org/ and consider participating in this noble cause. Now the cynic might say, "What about taking care of people in the USA?" You can do that too, however in these countries a little money goes a long way. I believe that helping people should not be based on race, ethnicity, etc. but on need. There are many organizations in the USA that help people who are down on their luck. I am not saying ignore them. Check out Kiva, you will be inspired.

Maybe Batman is Running for President too!

2008-02-03T01:58:00.000-06:00

After seeing the picture Of John McCain in the newspaper after his win in Florida, his exaggerated smile looked very familiar to me....

Then it came to me.... Being an avid comic fan since I was young.....

Why didn't I see this before? It all makes sense. Then I noticed that Mitt Romney looked a little familiar too....

Ahhhh... Yes.... Two-Face. Wow! How uncanny!

Who will help the honeybees?

2008-02-02T14:30:00.000-06:00

I am pledging to!!! After viewing Nature's the Silence of the Bees special, I feel that if I want to leave this planet in better shape, and one in which my children can survive in, I must help champion this cause of helping stop the Colony Collapse Disorder within the honeybee colonies. As quoted from the show

"The role honeybees play in our diet goes beyond honey production. These seemingly tireless creatures pollinate about one-third of crop species in the U.S. Honeybees pollinate about 100 flowering food crops including apples, nuts, broccoli, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, celery, squash and cucumbers, citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, melons, as well as animal-feed crops, such as the clover that's fed to dairy cows. Essentially all flowering plants need bees to survive."

There was a very dramatic segment that showed farmers in Sichuan Province, China, hand-pollinate their pear trees. This was because they had lost all of their honeybees to pollution, pesticides, and other factors. It was very labor intensive and I would bet you the vast number of people in this world would not be willing to do this to have fresh fruit.

What was really staggering was the progression of the CCD in honeybees and the projection that if it is not solved or reversed that we could lose all of the honeybees within 10-15 years. Help out the honeybee. Click on the link on my page which tells you simple steps to help out this important species.

Planning for spring

2008-02-02T14:01:00.000-06:00

This year I am planning on expanding my crops of peppers, tomatoes, and melons. Two years ago I cut out two big sections of my lawn and created some beds on the south side of the yard. In the past two years I had some flowers there to attract honeybees and butterflies. However, with the prairie garden taking a strong hold in the backyard (it takes about 3-4 years for it really to establish itself), I am taking out the flowers and adding onions and garlic into those beds. I will also be putting in potatoes in the bed in the back.

Since this will be the 4th year of the grape vines I will need to prune them this year. The variaties that I grow are :

Neptune grape

Reliance grape

Glenora grape

these are good seedless varieties that if you live in Illinois give you a nice size crop and resistance of diseases. I just have to make sure I get to the fruit before the racoons do.

This winter I have started my research stage on creating an apiary in the backyard. For those not aware an Apiary is a fancy name for a beehive. I am trying to help the organic bee population by starting my own colony of bees. This year I will be looking into costs, placement, etc. I also would like to attend the beekeeping classes at the Morton Arboretum.

The other thing that we are doing is liquid composting. My wife got a vitamix last summer and we learned that it can liquify all of your organic waste. With that we don't need to mess with the compost pile/bin. What an advantage!!!

What is a Suburban Agrarian?

2008-02-02T11:27:00.000-06:00

Well most people when they think of Agrarian, the think of farmers and working the land. Which is usually pretty close. However, Suburban Agrarianism, is trying to reclaim the land for use and not just for leisure. It tries to take a small plot of land and use it to its' fullest potential. It is also trying to become more independent and self-sufficient by trying to follow rhythms in nature and shy away from the superconsumeristic vices of capitalism. Something that we as a county (yes even myself) have a difficult time with. So what does this entail? Let me first explain how this idea started to bloom and for me it started with the garden. When we moved into our house four years ago it was your typical suburban home. Shrubs and lawn.

Many people do not know that the origin of the lawn comes from the French Aristocrats. They had lawns to show that they had so much land that they could waste it on growing something that had no value. One has to wonder why Americans have an obsession with a perfect lawn which is not only costly but detrimental to the environment.

However, I digress, the low maintenance yard I moved into was practical for someone who does not want to trouble with yard work but very little of the land/soil was actually being USED. Over the past four years I have made some changes so that not only we could get more use out of the soil but nature could. Part of this included getting more species of plants in the area. The landscaping in the area was very monospecies. Not good for the soil, the insects, or the wildlife. So I looked at where I could change and I began to. Unfortunately since we have 3 kids we had to leave some areas of grass. Once they are grown, I plan on transforming those areas into more productive uses.

Growing more food that our family eats and preserving them for use in the winter. Such as raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, grapes, hardy kiwi, strawberries, tomatoes, watermelons, corn, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, wild ginger, cranberries, and many herbs.

Growing native plants for ornamentals. Since I live in Illinois growing prairie plants not only saves on the watering in the summer, but eliminates the need for pesticides, and helps return the soil to its' original fertile state.

Using organic fertilizer (compost) for feeding fruits and vegetables.

Planting host plants for butterflies. When we moved into our house 4 years ago there were virtually NO Butterflies in the area. Now they criss-cross the yard in large numbers.

Raising Monarch and Anise Swallowtail caterpillars.

Is this self-sufficiency? No not quite, but it does begin to reduce our families dependency on some food, water usage and eliminates the lawn services.

Enlightenment begins....at least for me.

2008-01-06T22:26:00.000-06:00

This blog was created about 2 years ago, but I really never got it officially launched (until tonight when a friend finally gave me that push to just do it!). The catalyst for its' creation 2 years ago was driving by a church on my way home late one night and reading "Try wanting what you have.". It was a simple statement but it rattled around in my brain for the next few days and I really started to reflect on what was I doing with my life. Not only my life but that of my family's. Was I becoming the product of consumerism always wanting more. I had always thought I was not falling into the rat race trap, but as I realized that I was. That began the journey to simplify my life. After many conversations with my wife over the past two years we have made some major changes in the way our family opporates. While my wife has always been the enemy of consumerism, I have had to fight it. Now I feel that I am on my way to breaking free of being a hyper-consumer. What exactly does this have to do with the agrarian lifestyle? That will be explained in the next post.