Tag: Sustainability

Categories
Environment Work Life

Hay Feeder Rings

Photo Credit - Tarter Farm and Ranch Equipment
Hay Feeder Ring Photo Credit – Tarter Farm and Ranch Equipment

Something is wrong when the garden produces tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in Iowa the fourth week in October.

I’ll dice tomatoes for breakfast tacos later this week, Bangkok peppers are in the dehydrator, and cucumbers and jalapeno peppers in the icebox waiting to be used. There is chard and kale, oregano and chives. Those leafy green vegetables usually survive until November, but tomatoes and cucumbers?

Call it what you want but something is happening and we know exactly what it is.

I spent most of Friday working with hay feeder rings.

After re-resurfacing the outside lot where farm equipment is displayed at the home, farm and auto supply store, I assembled and re-merchandised the stock of feeder rings.

I don’t know if it was a day’s work, but spent a day doing it, working slowly and as safely as possible. I was tired after the shift with a hankering to leave everything and head west to work on a ranch — day dreams of a low-wage worker.

The garage was cluttered after a summer of intermittent work.

I checked off each item on the to-do list on my handheld device before heading to the orchard for a shift. I disassembled the grass catcher and stored it; re-mixed bird seed and filled the feeder; checked the air pressure on our auto tires; brought in salt and paper products from the car; stored 40 pounds of coarse salt in tubs for winter ice melting; cleared a work space on the bench; and swept the entire floor. It took about two hours. I wanted more, but time ran out.

Yesterday’s political events had me thinking of Gettysburg, Penn. My parents, brother and sister went there before Dad died. I remember reading President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on a placard near where he read it himself. With deep roots in rural Virginia, and ancestors fighting on both sides of the Civil War, it was a seminal experience for me. It began the process of turning me from being a descendant of southerners enamored of romantic notions about plantation life to being an American eschewing the peculiar institution and those who stood for it. To my mother’s probable dismay, I brought home a Confederate flag and hung it in my bedroom. Visiting Gettysburg helped me understand the reality of the Civil War and those who fought and lived through it. I was coming of age.

My parents pointed out the house and farm where Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower lived after his presidency. Eisenhower hosted world leaders there, including Nikita Khrushchev, Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill. He also raised Angus cattle. We thought favorably of Eisenhower even if he was a Republican. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II he was a well known part of our culture. Seeing his farm enabled us to touch reality in his celebrity.

My life is here in Big Grove. I’m not heading west to work on a ranch. I don’t display the Confederate battle flag or think about it much any more. I will re-read the Gettysburg Address as I did this morning and wonder how my ancestors got along with each other after fighting in the Civil War. Perhaps there are lessons for the United States in 2016. I’m certain there are.

Categories
Writing

Sea of Humanity

Work Bench
Work Bench

Each week I dive into a sea of humanity and end up alone, in the morning, writing about what I have experienced.

Whether the output is political, journalistic, scientific, culinary, agricultural or just being alive, what I write is grounded in a contemporary life viewed through sixty-plus years of personal experiences. It’s all the same process.

Humans are a rough and rowdy bunch. It’s challenging to capture modern life in a way that does justice to its complexity. Photos are not enough, naturalism is fraught with issues. Endemic to it all is the platform and perspective our lives create which position us to view society in the raw.

It can wear a person out. It can also invigorate us.

Each week I’ve been exposed to thousands of people from all walks of life. It is difficult to understand every experience, nor would I want to. It is hard not to cling to positive experiences and ignore negative. Some I meet don’t get outside home much. Others spend much time in the public arena. There are friends, neighbors and relatives with everyone mixed into a seasonal soup of life. Each week represents different ingredients, different flavors.

What matters more to a writer is having something unique to say. We know better what is not unique — set pieces, articles written on contract, photos of cats posted in social media. What it is, and should be, is articulation of experience that creates an understanding of an aspect of a complicated society on our only home and water planet.

It is modern to take raw materials of life and craft them into something readable, usable, and of value. The process is not always positive and writers should be cognizant of their impact in a constantly changing society.

I recall June Helm with whom I studied anthropology. It is impossible for an anthropologist not to influence the culture he or she studies, Helm told us. I took two lessons from this. The transient writer must tread lightly where we travel and work hard to do justice to what has been studied and experienced. The emphasis should always be creating something of value to subjects and readers alike.

As I prepare for this week’s dive into humanity I’m not nearly rested enough. My bones and ligaments ache from age and overuse. My cardio-vascular system seems okay, but one never knows. I can’t see as well as I once did and the looking I’ve developed has me ignoring much that would engage me previously. Imperfect though my platform and perspective may be, I’m ready to jump from the cliff it represents, hoping to avoid the rocks, and go deep into the sea of humanity once again.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Garden Plot Two 2016

Frost Under the Locust Tree
Frost Under the Locust Tree

Garden plot two was productive this year.

Nothing but prairie grasses was on this, or any of the garden plots when we moved here in 1993. Shortly after we dug plot two, I planted mail order trees about 12-inches tall to grow them for transplanting. Due to neglect, the locust trees grew and grew and became a 40-foot giants. One of them blew over in a 2013 extreme storm that passed through. I cut it up and sold it for firewood. The remaining locust tree provides shade for the three northern plots, and adds value to the backyard landscape.

Hosting the two compost piles, the locust tree, and a bed of day lilies, plot two is challenging because of the tree root structure. Pieces of roots as big a two inches in diameter had to be removed for planting. The tree suffered no apparent ill effects after cutting some of the roots.

Radishes and turnips were the first crop, followed by onions. All produced well. After the root vegetables finished, I installed four four-foot tall meshed wire containers to grow cucumbers — pickling and slicers. They produced well. High winds blew one tower over, pulling the roots from the ground and killing some plants. Lesson learned from this experiment is to spread the cages out more and better stake them. After 2016 there is no question cucumbers grow better in the air than on the ground.

Kennebec and Yukon Gold potatoes were planted in big plastic tubs as an experiment. I got the tubs from a friend who gets them with her animal feed. The technique served the purpose of keeping rodents from eating the mature vegetables before I did. Production was okay, although we don’t eat a lot of potatoes in our kitchen. It was enough. I’m not sure the soil composition in the containers was the best. It was mostly compost with some dirt spaded in. Harvest was easy once I turned the weighty tubs over and picked through the dirt for the potatoes. There was no fork or shovel damage to the crop because of the technique.

Burying four more containers about 12 inches in the ground, I planted four types of carrots. The purple ones were a disappointment, but the others produced enough to justify another year. I made a second planting of daikon radishes which produced enough for eating fresh and pickling.

Plans for next year: think and plan more about this plot; move the compost bins to different locations; dig up and move the day lilies to a more decorative place in the yard; plant Belgian lettuce and other early greens; re-mix the soil in the containers and move them along the southern border of the plot for potatoes and carrots; plant radishes and turnips again, adding beets; a second planting is in order after the greens and root vegetables: more thought needed on that. These ideas may change as I give the plot additional consideration.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Garden Plot One 2016

Bur Oak Acorns
Bur Oak Acorns

It’s time to write about this year’s garden — plot by plot.

Dedicated gardeners reflect on the past year and I am mostly serious about gardening.

As the garden has grown, so has my knowledge of how to care for the soil and grow crops. Evaluation of the year just past is part of learning.

Plot one was the first dug during spring 1994.

It is dominated by three Burr Oak trees planted from acorns collected the year our daughter graduated from high school. One tree for each of us. It is adjacent to a row of lilac bushes plants in 1994.  As drought conditions often plague Iowa, accompanied by scorching heat, it is better to plant some vegetables in a partly shady area. Shade creates a longer growing season for lettuce and reduces the amount of watering needed. The three oaks and lilacs are staying for now, although eventually may be thinned.

On the north side of the plot are some spring flower bulbs transplanted from the Indiana trucking terminal where I worked. They grew in the ditch near Highway 41 and were likely planted by a previous owner. They bloom faithfully each year and need to be dug and separated.

Next to the flowers is what used to be a row of iris. They are dying and what’s left needs to be dug and separated. Only an occasional flower now appears.

The rest of the plot was planted in garlic rescued from the town library. It eventually spread to cover the entire plot. A few years ago I placed tarps over the middle of the garlic patch to store stakes, cages and fencing. Each spring garlic pops up around the tarp perimeter. I harvest it for spring garlic, otherwise let it grow wild.

This year I pulled up one of the tarps and planted Turk’s Turban and Acorn squash. Both produced and some wait on the counter to be used.

This is the first year I tried an annual crop in plot one, and based on the results, I might try more. The near continuous shade makes crop selection the essential dynamic. While we enjoy the spring garlic, we should convert production to a regular, annual cycle of planting and harvesting garlic cloves. It is not too late this year, but with continuous daily work outside home until November, it is doubtful I’ll get a crop in.

Plans for next year: dig up the bulbs, separate and move to a more decorative spot in the yard; try an early spring crop like turnips, beets or radishes; till the entire plot after spring crop, evaluate, and likely plant beans to fix nitrogen in the soil; plant garlic in the fall.

Categories
Environment

Letter to the Des Moines Register

(EDITOR’S NOTE: I send more letters to the Des Moines Register than get printed. This topic has been well covered in the news, so I doubt they will run it. Will post a link if they do).

There’s a bitter irony in the letter Iowa’s two U.S. Senators sent the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Sept. 27 regarding $73 million in funding for a Cedar River project for flood risk management authorized but not funded by Congress in 2014.

The tough, clear message from Senators Grassley and Ernst to the Corps is find the money for the project in your budget. The irony is there will be no specific appropriation by the Congress to meet the needs of Iowa’s second largest city.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources indicates on its website that eastern Iowa can expect increased frequency of precipitation extremes that lead to flooding. The need for the project is real.

While Iowa’s Senators have taken the Corps of Engineers to task for not prioritizing the Cedar River project, their effort to tie the Corps to the whipping post are transparent in this election year.

The letter is what austerity policy looks like. It’s not good for the people of Cedar Rapids or for other flood impacted areas in Iowa.

Instead of drafting terse letters, show us how Cedar Rapids gets funding for the Cedar River project.

Categories
Living in Society Social Commentary

Can Hipsters Live With Congolese Cobalt?

Youth cleaning cobalt ore Photo Credit - Getty Images
Youth cleaning cobalt ore
Photo Credit – Getty Images

The lithium ion battery is becoming ubiquitous.

These rechargeable, portable batteries power our mobile phones, tablets, laptops and cars, providing longer battery life, low self-discharge, better recharge life and comparatively low weight.

Many of us take these benefits for granted, not thinking much beyond the brand of our phone, computer or car — other than the fact it is better with a lithium ion battery.

There are issues with cobalt, a key element in lithium ion batteries, mined and produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to the Washington Post,

The world’s soaring demand for cobalt is at times met by workers, including children, who labor in harsh and dangerous conditions. An estimated 100,000 cobalt miners in Congo use hand tools to dig hundreds of feet underground with little oversight and few safety measures, according to workers, government officials and evidence found by The Washington Post during visits to remote mines. Deaths and injuries are common. And the mining activity exposes local communities to levels of toxic metals that appear to be linked to ailments that include breathing problems and birth defects, health officials say.

“60 percent of the world’s cobalt originates in Congo — a chaotic country rife with corruption and a long history of foreign exploitation of its natural resources,” Todd Frankel of the Washington Post wrote. “A century ago, companies plundered Congo’s rubber sap and elephant tusks while the country was a Belgian colony. Today, more than five decades after Congo gained its independence, it is minerals that attract foreign companies.”

Image Credit - Washington Post
Image Credit – Washington Post

Cobalt is not covered under U.S. law regarding conflict minerals. When Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, it directed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to draft rules for companies that use conflict minerals — tantalum, tin, gold and tungsten — when deemed “necessary to the functionality or production of a product.”

“Congress enacted (this section) of the Act because of concerns that the exploitation and trade of conflict minerals by armed groups is helping to finance conflict in the DRC region and is contributing to an emergency humanitarian crisis,” according to the SEC web site.

Some advocate inclusion of cobalt in Dodd-Frank rules.

Conditions among cobalt miners in the Congo are deplorable compared to hipsters who use phones in part produced by their hands. Can hipsters live with Congolese cobalt?

Our social responsibility regarding Congolese extraction and production of cobalt is unclear. Like much of the work that supports our global supply chain cobalt mining has been out of site and out of mind. There is no adequate, intuitive answer. Nonetheless, users of lithium ion batteries share responsibility for the conditions in Congo whether we are aware of them or not.

To learn more, read the entire Washington Post article, The Cobalt Pipeline: Tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers phones and laptops, by Todd C. Frankel, Michael Robinson Chavez and Jorge Ribas.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Categories
Home Life Writing

Last Bits of Work

Bangkok Peppers
Bangkok Peppers

Two hours before my shift at the orchard I was feeling punk. I went to work anyway.

While ringing up a dozen customers I felt light headed and a bit nauseous so my supervisor sent me home. She didn’t want whatever I had to infect other workers. Good call on her part.

After two four-hour sessions of sleep, I feel much better and am ready to head over again later this morning. Before I do, some last thoughts about this 96-hour staycation in Iowa.

I’m lucky to have worked a full career that paid our mortgage and helped put our daughter through college. There are plenty of people who work low-paid jobs like mine who don’t have that kind of financial platform for support. To make up the difference between income and operating expenses we’ve taken on some debt. We feel it’s manageable and have a plan to pay it off. Like most anyone should, we watch our cash flow. We also have been able to weather multiple challenges in recent years that would have sent others to the poor house if such a thing still exists.

Everything on my “deal-with list” has been addressed. Some things — car repairs, understanding and signing up for Medicare, writing about the Cedar River flood — came easily. Others — financial planning, longer writing projects, producing value from life as a sixty-something — present longer term challenges. What I wrote on Sept. 11 proved to be useful.

The key to dealing with this and everything else on my deal-with list is to take care of myself and not freak out. That I have this blog helps with the not freaking out part. There is solace in work.

I haven’t freaked out and am taking better care of myself as the staycation ends.

Sliced Red Zeppelin Onions
Sliced Red Zeppelin Onions

Canned goods were moved to the lower level where the storage rack is once again full. The production was less than in previous years, but focused on items we will use well over the coming months. Gardening is a perpetual process and this year produced in abundance. The trouble was August when I worked four jobs without adequate time to reap what I sowed. It was a learning point more than disaster and local farmers helped me make up for what was missed at home.

Remaining is fall yard work, home maintenance, financial planning, and most importantly writing. The reason for retiring in July 2009 was to enable my writing. I’ve gotten better at it and am ready for something longer, maybe book-length, which can be promulgated. That and ensuring our sustainability in a turbulent world remain on the deal-with deescalated to to-do list on my white board.

Better prepared to tackle today’s challenges, I’m hopeful. Hopeful about the lives of family members. Hopeful about the community of friends and acquaintances we’ve built here in Big Grove. Hopeful our country will make sound decisions during the Nov. 8 election.

Whatever the outcomes, the brief vacation this week helped get me back to who I am. I’m thankful for that and ready to engage in society again.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Vinegar Time

Apples
Apples

With the apple harvest comes an opportunity to make apple cider vinegar.

Since 2012, when I began to wake up to local food, I’ve posted about vinegar twice: Bottling Apple Cider Vinegar in 2013, and Making Vinegar in 2014.

Without a home apple crop, this year’s batch is a little different.

The continuum of vinegar making goes back a long time: it’s the mother. Mine was procured from a neighbor and has been present since I began home fermentation of apples. His mother of vinegar had been in the family since the 19th century when Iowa was first settled. Traces of vinegar have been found in Egyptian urns dated the third millennium BCE.

The recipe for vinegar is simple. Keep a container of vinegar with the mother in the pantry and add apple juice from time to time. Cover with a cotton cloth for ventilation and let it ferment. After the bacteria have converted sugars to alcohol, then alcohol to vinegar, it’s ready to bottle and use. Currently there is a gallon ready to use and a gallon just started this year. At least one jar never goes empty to preserve the mother.

My production is small compared to the orchard where I work on weekends. We both use the same mother, although he uses brewer’s yeast to hasten production of alcohol. My method, using apples from my back yard and no yeast, works as well but takes more time. Making vinegar is about time more than anything.

This year I stopped at a shop that caters to people who ferment their own beer and wine to ask about brewer’s yeast. The proprietor said I was the first customer to arrive asking about making vinegar. Not a lot of people make their own.

After studying a few things on the internet he recommended a yeast made by a major company that would produce about 14 percent alcohol. He said too much alcohol may kill the vinegar bacteria. Both of us thought the low end of alcohol production would not. The $0.99 packet I bought will ferment a lot of apple cider.

Without a crop at home, I’m using cider from where I work. It is flash pasteurized, which will allow my bacteria to drive the process. I hope it is a better result. I bought half-gallon Mason jars  for the project and have two started about 3 weeks apart.

I trimmed the mother with a pair of kitchen scissors and put part in the jar. I added a scant half gallon of cider and let it warm to room temperature. I added a 16th teaspoon of yeast which began producing alcohol within a couple of days. The liquid tastes more like hard cider today with hints of vinegar. The process appears to be working.

I organized and bottled last year’s production and am ready for winter. I’ll keep making it and making pickles and dressings with it.

Making apple cider vinegar is one way we emulate an agrarian life in a modern kitchen. It’s also how we sustain our lives in a turbulent world.

Categories
Home Life Writing

A Place To Work

Garage Selfie
Garage Selfie

Only after a couple of days away from daily routine can a person begin to be themselves.

That’s where I am this morning.

I crave a place to work.

Desire is a blessing and a curse. When we want something, we set ourselves up for disappointment. We may get it, but can’t always get what we want.

It is a difficult path to nirvana. I do my best to void consciousness of self. It persists. There are selfies.

Like Eugene Henderson we feel restless and unfulfilled, harboring a spiritual void that manifests itself as an inner voice crying out I want, I want, I want.

Work is a cure for that.

Busy hands make happy children and happy children build a new world.

That’s where I am this morning.

Childlike and craving a place to work.

Categories
Environment

After the Latest Flood

Cedar River at Iowa Highway One Sept. 27, 11:36 a.m.
Cedar River at Iowa Highway One on Sept. 27, 2016 at 11:36 a.m.

The Cedar River crested in Cedar Rapids at 21.91 feet at 11 a.m. yesterday.

As the river recedes over the next few days the temporary flood wall and earthen berms built over the weekend will be monitored for breaches.

They held during the crest, protecting people and property from damage. Here’s a link to a news story about the flood.

State Senator Rob Hogg announced a “Flood Relief, Recovery and Resilience Tour” of  Cedar Falls, Waverly, Clarksville, Shell Rock, Charles City, Vinton and Palo today and tomorrow. Hogg hopes to learn about the damage done, what kind of help people need, what worked and what didn’t work, and how we can do more together to reduce future flood damage, including better flood mitigation infrastructure and better watershed and floodplain management according to the event page on Facebook.

The City of Cedar Rapids knew what to do when flooding was predicted after heavy precipitation events upstream. Over the weekend officials executed a plan to build a temporary flood wall, evacuated low-lying areas and ramped up emergency services to prevent large-scale damage to homes, property and people living in Iowa’s second largest city. News media stories focused on the human drama of reaction to the impending flood. There has been little coverage of the causes of the heavy precipitation events that produced rain that caused the flooding in northeastern Iowa.

“Iowa is already experiencing the effects of climate change,” according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources website. This includes “increased frequency of precipitation extremes that lead to flooding.”

Flooded Farm Near the Cedar River, Sept. 27, 2016
Flooded Farm Near the Cedar River, Sept. 27, 2016

Because this is the second major flood in Cedar Rapids since 2008, solutions to protecting people and assets going forward have been discussed and are clear.

Senator Hogg outlined three essential strategies: get Congress to help fund permanent flood protection that has already received state and local funding; better upstream watershed and floodplain management to reduce peak flooding; and action on climate change to stop extreme precipitation events from getting worse.

U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst sent a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers “demanding answers on why they have neglected to complete flood mitigation projects in the Cedar Rapids region and have put the public’s safety at risk.”

They wrote:

With all due respect, it is no longer sufficient to say that your hands are tied and that nothing short of a congressional earmark can help communities like Cedar Rapids that have lower property values. You have some discretion to help and have simply made the decision to forego the assistance even though the community endured a 500-year flood event in 2008, worked with the Corps to develop a project to address that flood risk, and worked with Congress to get it authorized. Due to your refusal to budget for this project, Cedar Rapids is now facing another major flood event without the needed levee improvements.

Hidden in this tough language is a bitter irony. Congress won’t appropriate money for the project, yet the senators expect the Corps of Engineers to find it somewhere else in their budget. This is what austerity policies look like and they are not good for the people of Cedar Rapids and other flood impacted areas.

While Iowans impacted by flooding are concerned, in the upper atmosphere carbon dioxide levels maintained a level above 400 part per million according to monitors in Hawaii. Atmospheric carbon dioxide level is a key contributor to global warming which increases the intensity of precipitation events that have led to Iowa flooding.

“September is usually the month when carbon dioxide is at its lowest after a summer of plants growing and sucking it up in the northern hemisphere,” Brian Kahn wrote in an article on Climate Central. “As fall wears on, those plants lose their leaves, which in turn decompose, releasing the stored carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. At Mauna Loa Observatory, the world’s marquee site for monitoring carbon dioxide, there are signs that the process has begun but levels have remained above 400 ppm.”

Why is 400 ppm important? The lower limit of the safe operating zone boundary for carbon dioxide on Earth is 350 ppm. We passed that level in 1986.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth Assessment Report notes that, “continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

That means more flooding in Iowa similar to this week’s event. While politicians like Senator Hogg are well-attuned to the urgency of this climate crisis, too many politicians and public officials are dismissive of climate change.

Governmental action to mitigate the effects of climate change is needed. If our current crop of politicians isn’t willing to take action, we should replace them with people who will.