Tag Archives: growth

Another Season Up

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The other day I sat on the couch with my daughter, laughing. She had grabbed the wool beanie cap from my head and popped it onto her own head. She took a bunch of selfies and cracked herself right up. And it cracked me right up. And we laughed about it.

She isn’t small anymore. That happens, of course. All those trite things other parents say are true after all. “They grow up so fast!” and all that crap isn’t wrong even if it is hackneyed. That moment laughing over the silliness of a hat was a gift. I’ll be sticking that one in my wallet to carry around.

The sun rose in the east today. Exactly in the east. No northeast or southeast about it. Spring rolls around, even if if feels like winter. At least the sun is higher and stronger. The blackbirds seem to notice that. Every day is just a little bit different, sweeping through the seasons. Day to day I find it hard to notice the difference, but I keep looking. That is the way with all of us. My daughter changes but not enough from yesterday to notice. I change too. That is why marking the moments, like the equinox or laughing on the couch, is important.

Tucked in the corner of the yard, under the big spruce, old toys lie scattered. Those toys were once a world. Now they are forgotten, not even seen they have been there so long. The sun bleaches them and the grass grows around them. What day did they get left there? What story was created just before they were left there for the last time? How many days, how many seasons, have passed since that world was real?

Frost melts in the new spring sun. Green shoots push aside last year’s dried stalks. My children will be taller today than they were yesterday. Those toys will fade just a little more. One day I will pick them up and find a place for them. One day my daughter will head off into her own Spring. I should pay attention. I should notice the days. I should hold onto the stories so they do not fade. I should enjoy this glorious day, today. The sun is high already.

How Do You Spell That Again?

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A Few of the Many

I had wanted to plant only three plants. I figured that might even be too many, but I wanted to be safe. So I planted three, and they grew well. Then I gave my children one of the beds to grow some things. They picked zucchini as one of the things they wanted to plant. So now we had four plants. Then, a couple of days ago, as I was inspecting the pumpkin plants, I was amazed yet again at how huge one of them had become. When I turned back the leaves I saw not a small pumpkin forming, but more zucchini. Somehow at least one zucchini seed got mixed in with the pumpkin seeds. They are kind of hard to tell apart, especially if you think they are all pumpkin seeds. Apparently I am not very adept at telling the plants apart either.

So we picked some of those green squashes two days ago. I picked about ten of them. I immediately grated a couple of them to make some zucchini bread. I sliced three more to grill for dinner. Yesterday I picked more. We have a dozen now sitting on the counter, waiting to be turned into something. I will have to grill more tonight, freeze some, make more bread. And more is out there, waiting to ripen. It could be a heavy responsibility, all this food.

Any vegetable gardner knows the joke about zucchini, that it is so prolific that it is difficult to give away. It is way easy to grow, although last summer we had almost none, thanks to our friends the cucumber beetles. I have a summer gratin that is about the tastiest thing around, so I need to whip up a couple of those. Maybe I can bake two and freeze one. It won’t be quite as good after being frozen, but I need to take care of this green invasion so I don’t waste any. Winter is long and some summer food pulled from the freezer always is a comfort on cold days.

So I will keep picking it, along with the cherry tomatoes that are just starting to ripen. Peppers are getting bigger and the full size tomatoes will be ripe before long as well. I have picked  basil and garic and whipped up basil. Our broccoli (what is up with all these double letter Italian words that are a challenge to remember how to spell?) might be too assaulted by the rabbits to produce any food for us. If they ate some of the zucchini plants, we might strike a deal, but I want all the broccoli I can get.

Damn bunnies.

What Am I Doing?

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This summer I read an article in Orion Magazine that has really stuck with me.  It was Forget Shorter Showers by Derrick Jensen.  Here is an excerpt:

An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

He goes on to talk about water (more than 90% is used by industry and agriculture), energy (individual consumption is 25% or less) and waste (municipal waste accounts for only 3% of the total).  The message that I took away was not that what we do doesn’t make a difference.  It does, and we need to do it.  But if we want to make the kind of change required to address climate change, then tackling it by recycling and carpooling won’t cut it.  We need change on a bigger scale.

The basis of our economy, of any capitalist economy, is that we need to grow and grow, endlessly.  A business is seen as a failure if it fails to grow.  Making a profit isn’t good enough.  We ask that businesses make more profit every month/quarter/year.  The GDP needs to grow, employment needs to grow, sales need to grow, new home starts need to grow.  We can never have enough.  That is the problem.  I love to get a raise, but when I’m told I can’t have one this year I make do.  My home doesn’t need to get bigger every year.  I don’t need to gain weight.  In many spheres of our lives, we know that growing is not always good–it comes with a price that often we don’t want to pay.

So why is it that we need to keep growing, in the big picture, in our economy?  The idea is so ubiquitous that it isn’t even questioned.  We hear regular reports on the news about “the economy,” as if any of us really know what that is.  The “economy” isn’t growing so things must be bad.  No, people are out of work, so things are bad.  People are out of work because we constantly depend on growth.  When growth turns into shrinkage, people lose jobs.  We don’t work with a sustainable model where our economy is flexible enough to accommodate fluctuation.  Or at least our values aren’t there.

We need to deal with climate change, but with a mindset that we need to keep growing, it is difficult to talk about shrinking carbon emissions.  I keep hearing talk of the search for some technological silver bullet that will allow us to keep up the same habits and yield lower carbon emissions.  It’s not going to happen.  We need to make major changes to how we think about our economy, agriculture, transportation, everything.  Changing light bulbs isn’t enough.  Changing systems is what we need.

This morning I heard the mayor of Pittsburgh, Luke Ravenstahl, noting how the city has been trying to change its image from dirty and industrial to “green.”  The very next sentence in the story noted that the city has this huge supply of bottled water ready for those coming to Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit.  Excuse me?  You just said you are going for a green image and you are offering bottled water for a summit where world poverty, which commonly involves issues of access to fresh water, will be a major topic of discussion?  Um, bottled water has too many issues to list.  Am I the only one to see the irony here?

After seeing the film The Age of Stupid the other night (moving and powerful and a must see for anyone who isn’t a climate change denier), and continuing to ponder Jensen’s article, I have been thinking about what the heck I might do.  I have made personal change.  That is necessary both to send a message to others that one is serious and to actually make a bit, however small, of difference.  I have changed light bulbs and I use the clothesline whenever I do the laundry.  I try to limit waste.  I compost.  I grow some of the food we eat.  I also, however, have been writing to my congressional representatives.  I at least need to do that.  If I want us to make big changes, I have to let some of the people in a position to make those changes know what I think.

What else might I do?  I am not all that sure.  That is one of the problems here.  We all need to stand up, to get involved, to cry for something bigger than tax incentives for solar panels we can’t afford even with incentives.  We need to get out there and take action now.  Climate change is a problem that won’t wait for us.  I’ll start by writing.  I will write on October 15 about climate change for Blog Action Day.  You should, too, if you have your own blog.  And I’ll talk to people.  I need to do more and I will figure out my place in the solution to this problem as I go.  I’m getting started.  We all need to.

Pumpkins Up, Frost on the Way

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The kids planted pumpkins in their corner of the garden.  A couple of days ago they busted through the soil.  We were close to a frost last night.  My daughter covered the tender sprouts with plastic potting buckets.  She uncovered them this morning on the way to the bus.  While temperatures stayed above 32 degrees last night, tonight it looks like frost for real.  We have a freeze warning in effect since our average last frost date has passed.

I figure we are safe from frost around Memorial Day.  Apparently our average date for that is sooner.  Planting things like pumpkins this early is a risk.  It means remembering to cover young plants.  The only other plants coming up at the moment are peas and carrots.  I’m not worried about them.  The rest of the vegetables are still inside, or I planted them two days ago.  They are safe.

My daughter covered the pumpkins again tonight.  She and her brother will get some early squash out of those plants.  Later this week the weather should turn.  We might have temperatures in the 80’s.  That ought to get the cucumbers considering leaving the womb.  Hopefully they won’t have to worry about frost.

I planted a few things this past weekend–cucumbers, pumpkins, butternut squash, lettuce, summer squash–and I wanted to plant more.  The freeze warning for last night kept my ambitions in check.  Next weekend I will get on it.  That will be Memorial Day weekend.  I want to plant corn and basil but the soil just isn’t warm enough.  That will have to wait until June.

We also cleared a spot for an herb garden.  We cut down an evergreen shrub (I never learned what kind it was) that was just about dead from a fungus.  I want to plant rosemary and sage and thyme and chives.  And perhaps some other stuff.  I can’t wait to get things in the ground.  But I can’t do it all at once anyway.  Not enough time and all that.

So the pumpkins are safe, as are the herbs plants I never purchased.  I will go on a planting spree later this week.  Later this summer I want to be able to paraphrase the Lorax:  And then Oh Baby Oh how my garden did grow.  Of course, I will say it anyway, but it sure would be nice to be able to mean.