Ides of March

Above is the main garden bed.  By all accounts, this group of veggies is going wild.  The first tomatoes are growing and looking great.  A few little bean pods have made their presence known, the vanguard of many more to come.  The corn is looking strong.  Early on, some slugs were having their way with the sunflower leaves and the bean leaves.  They seem to have consumed their fill and moved on.  I’m hoping that the sunflower recovers.

The Pea Patch above.  This plot has been slower coming along as many of the first plants were choked off at the base and withered.  Some kind of blight got hold of them and right as they were transplanted.  The first little pea pods are coming along on the most mature plant. 

Pumpkin Patch.  This is the plot that we created this year and now have planted both little pumpkins and full size plants.  Both years that I have gardened, some type of plant simply gets planted in outlandish numbers.  Last year, it was 17 tomato plants.  By the end of the season, it was laughable how many plants there were.  If there had been time for the fruit to come in, we would have had enough tomatoes to kill a horse.  This year, it’s pumpkins–I have 13 pumpkin plants.  When I was seeding and transplanting these, it never occurred to me that this would be a lot of plants.  Now, I am beginning to wonder.  I just have a hard time plucking a good plant and sending it to its death.  But, I’m imagining this tangle of pumpkin plants once they all start to spreak out and do their thing.

The North 40.  This small patch next to the house contains some green beans and a pumpkin plant on each end.  We took a few odd-shaped bricks that were laying around to spruce things up a bit.  The  soil is pretty poor here and the amount of light is limited by the large pine tree in our yard so this plot is more of an experiment to see what will actually grow.

Well, there is a garden this year. After a late start due to us moving in June last year, I threw together some tomatoes, green beans, peas and a sickly green pepper plant. Since then, I had been composting like a madman, doing lots of reading and fantasizing about what could be this year. I even began preparing a new garden bed during some nice weather in April. All of this would soon be interrupted by a construction company that buried electric cable. They brought this bright yellow dream-wrecking backhoe and dug three of my garden beds right out. They were supposed to put things back the way they were, but instead placed sod where the bed across the sidewalk was. And, since these were fairly shoddily constructed raised beds, once they had been torn up there was hardly anything to put back in place. So, only one of the beds was put back and it was filled with some really crappy fill dirt full of rocks. Needless to say, this was a real dent in my hopes for gardening. Due to busyness and also the repressed anger at have my garden plundered, I shelved my gardening for a few months. Eventually the spirit caught me again and I got some seeds going for sweet corn, green beans, tomatoes, peas and even some pumpkins. I wanted to document the progress this year so i took pictures of the four beds.

This bed has the corn, beans, tomatoes, one dwarf sunflower and the frog standing guard.

These are the peas. I transplanted them after starting them in cups. I have since sewn some more seed in the rows. Peas have proven themselves to be pretty hearty in the past.

We just made this bed using a railroad tie and some bricks. This replaces some of the square footage lost when the cable was buried. This will either be pumpkins or more green beans.

This had a few plants in it last year. We’ve already spruced it up some with some bricks. Trying to make the place look a little better.

All of these pics were taken on June 20. I’ll post a late July update. Things have already grown quite a bit as we have had wonderful sunshine in the last week.

I just finished watching the movie Even Money, which is essentially a story about gambling addiction and the lengths people will go in order to get what they want.  There are some big names in this movie about small people:  Forest Whittaker, Danny Devito, Kim Basinger, Kelsey Grammar, Ray Liota amongst others.  I struggled a bit with the acting and the notion that there is apparently little history to these people’s gambling problems.  I would suspect that there would be a greater history to the gambling addiction especially in the characters of Forest Whittaker and Kim Basinger and more anger on the parts of their family members that were asked to play a part or politely ignore their gambling.  The longer I think about this movie, the more that I can appreciate, though, the sloppiness and darkness of the characters.  The actors captured that part of addiction well—an addict can no longer carry off the pretense that there is no addiction.  And there is a juvenile hope that just around the corner they will break even and then it will be done, “I’m out”, moving away, gonna start over.  But, no one stops.  And, the icy, dark character of Victor portrays the violence of not only a bookie, but of addiction itself.  Every time someone encountered him, they came away bullied, bloodied or dead. 

One theme that stood out to me after watching his movie was that of community.  So many good movements are in place in our world today for people to experience more community and togetherness—this is a primary need that is lacking for many.  I was in a class a few years ago and the topic of negative “community” came up.  How can negative community be defined?  I think Even Money provides a good description for me—a group of people wherein individual acts of integrity actually serve to disintegrate the community.  The hopes and connection of the people at the end of the movie all hinged on deceit for personal gain–an inside tip on point-shaving will save everyone.  This begins to unravel the moment Clyde Snow (Whittaker) overheard his brother’s coach confronting him about point shaving.  He has now seen the effects of his dark addiction on another–something of care and concern for another has the potential of trumping self-concern.  When the Whittaker character tells his brother to not fix the game, there is both a sigh of relief that he has acted with some sanity and the somber knowledge that he has just signed his death warrant.  With this action and the subsequent outcome of the basketball game, this interdependent community of gamblers violently disintegrates.  And what follows is part fairy tale (Kim Basinger magically finishing her book and potentially getting her marriage back), part Gospel (Whittaker’s character taking a bullet to save his brother’s career and life) and part old West (bodies everywhere).

In my first post on the issue, my thoughts were more focused on the farming end of the issue of agriculture and the movement toward ethanol.  I want to say a few things about the consumer side of things as well.  I was not planning to wait this long between posts, but life got busy in the mean time.  What’s interesting, though, is that the issue of crop choices and crop failures and the effect on food prices has become en even hotter issue since my last post.  Now there are Congressional hearings and a much larger interest in this topic. 

I don’t want to say tons other than this is a complex issue.  I mentioned several of the upsides of this issue in my previous post.  I want to mention some of the complicating factors of the increased planting of corn over other crops (wheat, barley, etc.) and the increased diverting of corn from some markets (feed for livestock, food for humans) into the fuel market.  One is that the use of ethanol as an efficient fuel that can move the U.S. away from our dependence on foreign oil is still very much in its infancy.  Secondly, we are starting to see some major ripple effects from the choices of farmers combined with natural problems (droughts and low harvests).  Check out this video of a friend of mine, Nate, which was featured on the news out here in Seattle back in March.  Here also is a newspaper article articulating some of the same ideas on a little bit broader scale.

We are discovering just how interconnected we are economically as choices made in the area of food production are effecting people across the board.  Also, as a homebrewer and beer lover, I am seeing the effects of these choices in the price of beer.  While some may scoff at a mention of beer in this discussion, I think bringing in quality of life issues becomes important.  The price of malted barley has doubled in the past year, partly due to the planting of more corn for ethanol.  Also, the price of hops has nearly tripled due to the conversion of hops fields to grain and also one of the largest hop crop failures that Northern Europe has seen in a long time.  I bring this into the equation as a personal example of how the price of food items is hitting home.  Any trip to the grocery store recently will yield similar information. 

I am somewhat apprehensive to see how the issue of food costs plays out.  I have read some lately that the price of rice is going to really jump which will hit rice-dependent countries extremely hard.  In fact, it may not even be a factor of price but moreso that there will be no rice to be had.  I may have some more on this as time goes by.

I’ve been thinking and hearing a lot about the overall economic effect from changes in crop production and crop failures. What specifically I have been hearing about are the ripple effects of the movement toward ethanol production in the U.S. The desire for ethanol has led many farmers to move away from wheat and barley production to corn production. The resulting decrease in acreage devoted to these crops is linked in turn to the increase in their scarcity and price. I find these topics of interest not only as a consumer, but also due to my upbringing on a farm and my homebrewing hobby.

There has been much excitement over the construction of a huge ethanol refinery no more than twenty minutes from the house I grew up in. Much of the benefit has been touted to be the addition of some good-paying jobs, benefit for farmers in the form of higher corn prices and money flowing into the local economy. But, after the plant had been built and many more like it either in the works or already in existence by now, there has begun to be some questions about this whole-hearted move toward ethanol production. It’s so exciting to think of our country, our economy being much less linked to petroleum. However, what will happen as we make the turn from an economy where petroleum fuels us and agriculture feeds us to one where agriculture ostensibly does both? I’m thinking in terms of a) ripple effects and b) who will get screwed in the mean time.

My existence is in two worlds—one is the agriculture-rich American Heartland full of thousands of small farmers that could use good news in an era of increasing corporate farming. The other existence is my current one, living in the Pacific Northwest, separated from major agriculture by a mountain range and feeling the economic effects of farmers’ choices in what they grow (but, more on this later). Thinking of where I come from, I see the faces of men and women that bust their asses in the spring and the fall and the rest of the year watch market prices and the skies and hope that harvest yields enough to pay off loans, feed families, repair equipment, etc. They are the ones buying into the gamble that is ethanol and fill their fields with corn in the hopes that this all pans out in the long run. Their margin for failure, however, is much smaller than corporate farms or those plunking down the huge amounts of capital to build plants like the Andersons Clymers Ethanol Plant.

These same folks, however, are also the beneficiaries of government intervention via price supports and incentives. The push for ethanol production has led the U.S. government to favor the production of corn. The one plant I mentioned above is taking in 40 million bushels of corn per year. Forty million bushels. That’s a hell of a lot of corn that used to go to produce food for people and animals. And it’s also a lot of acreage that used to be planted in something else. If that’s happening in a lot of places, which it is, the effects on the food supply could be huge. I want to say more about that in my next entry.

I love that there is increased interest in what’s being planted in American fields. In places that are commonly derided as “flyover country” and touted as “Jesusland” in election cycles, the decisions of farmers are mattering more than ever before. I’m glad folks are paying attention to farming again (yeah for the farmers!). I also think there should be some more serious discussion of a movement away from price supports in agricultural markets. More on my thoughts on the consumer side of things in the next post.