flooding | Renovations & Relationships

As anybody who’s seen my computer knows, I always have no less than a dozen or more tabs open in my web browser at any given time. The reason? I’ll often stumble upon news or a recipe or a well written blog that I want to spend time reading but don’t have time at that the moment, so I leave it open to come back to later.

You can learn a lot about what’s going on in my life by looking at my open tabs. When I started this post, I had 17 tabs across the top of my screen. Three are constant – even necessary – in my day-to-day life: Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs (where I store documents for work and for personal use). Another one is nearly necessary: Pandora. When I need news in my aural environment, I choose VPR. But when I want music, it’s Pandora. Recently I’ve been really enjoying meditating to music, so I have a Zazen station on Pandora that is my go to morning meditation station. Along those lines, two other tabs also relate to meditation: an interview with Jack Kornfield I want to revisit, and this, an article by karen maezen miller entitled rules for a mindful garden, that I just can’t seem to let go of. Get it? I have an attachment to mindfulness articles. Ha. But I digress…

Another topic of my recent web-browsing and, perhaps more significantly, real live conversations, has been the Keystone XL tarsands pipeline (proposed to carry crude oil from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast) and the ensuing two weeks of protests in DC. Don’t know about it? Check out some of the tabs I currently have open (listed below) or an informative Wiki article here.

The White House and the Tar Sands – article on CommonDreams by NASA Scientist James Hansen
Inspiring photos of those involved with the Tar Sands protests in DC for the past two weeks.
Moving Planet – Global day of action on Sept 24th to demand solutions to the climate crisis

Maybe my better half will write a guest post about his involvement in the protests – the biggest civil disobedience action this century on this continent. In the meantime, those articles will have to do. Right now the world is watching as Obama decides who he truly represents: citizens who demand a clean energy future, or industry pushing for business as usual and a continued reliance on polluting fossil fuels.

Again, I digress…

From the remaining websites I have open, I bet you can tell what else is on my mind:

Pear Ginger Compote that looks great
Pickled Beets recipe that I will make once we harvest beets
Preserving Fruit with Alcohol article from NYT
Pear Brandy recipe with great photo set on Flickr
Zucchini Fritters that I can’t wait to try
Bread and Butter Pickles that I just made tonight
Cucumber Vodka – I think I’ll try that!

It’s that time of year: preserving and putting up food just feels right. Now that the heat of the summer is waning, it’s finally conceivable to spend hours in the kitchen over a boiling pot, handling hot jars of food. Like a busy little squirrel stashing his nuts for the winter, I’m harvesting/trading/buying fresh produce and putting it by for the coming winter. This year we’re experimenting with food preservation techniques that don’t involve typical canning – like freezing, preserving in alcohol, and cooking-then-freezing meals. Less labor – and heat – intensive, and usually less sketchy on the other end, months from now, when it’s time to eat the food. (The truth is, we’re scared of foods we’ve canned. Even though we followed the recipes and directions on length of time for the boil, it’s scary to think that some lethal bacteria could be present and we wouldn’t even know it by smell or initial taste!)

…

As Mark would say to my blog post thus far So What?

Here’s what. I’m on information overload. And I suspect I’m not the only one. My way of dealing with it has been to keep the information I’ve found close at hand, so I can return to it with one click if needed. Often, the sites I’m attached to require some sort of action, and I’m either not willing or able to take that action right then, so the tab stays open, waiting for the day when I return to it. What do I mean by action? Making the recipes, for example. Or this, the final tab of the 17 I mentioned, a link to continuing education classes offered locally this fall. We’ve already signed up for one each: basic plumbing and basic electricity. But if I’m not done deciding on classes, I’ll keep the tab open until the thought is complete.

Here’s what else. I think this snapshot of information in my life is symbolic of the bigger picture. I keep coming back to the fact that my life – all of our lives – are both global and local. I can preserve my harvest in order to secure my own future, but this only works to a point. Regardless of whether Obama approves the XL pipeline, we all have an uncertain future. The devastating flooding in Vermont after tropical storm Irene is a poignant example of how climate change is literally changing the game for life on this planet. As author/blogger/climate activist/Vermonter Ben Jervey said in a recent OnEarth article:

If there’s any lesson to take away from the devastation in Vermont, it’s that these “one-in-100 years rains” seem to be happening with increasing frequency, and that urban and rural areas alike need to take steps to be better prepared. Climate adaptation is an advanced and respected discipline in much of the developed world, but here in the United States, it hasn’t yet been taken very seriously. If extreme weather events really are becoming the “new normal,” then we have a ways to go to prepare and build better resiliency into our communities and our infrastructure.

The saying think global, act local could not be more relevant than it is today.

The weather in Vermont the past few weeks has been unpredictable at best, catastrophic at worst. At times the rain comes down harder and faster than I’ve ever seen it before. I haven’t seen the sun in days. We had a week or so of respite from the wetness (during which time I tried to plant as many seedlings and seeds as I could) and then the rains came back. Here’s what the weather forecast looked like a few days ago.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though. Sunday’s forecast is 79 and sunny. Perfect!

Thankfully we live far enough from the Lake to not worry about its’ historically high levels threatening our house but close enough to have very sandy soil that can soak up all the precipitation sent our way. Many folks in Vermont (and along the Mississippi of course) aren’t quite so lucky.

All the rains have been helping me realize, more so than ever before, how weather-dependent gardening and farming is. Okay, “duh”, I know. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been gardening long enough to know that plants need a few basic things: good soil/nutrients, water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide. The “right” amounts of these elements will differ from species to species, even plant to plant. But the plants typically grown in home gardens don’t like extreme elements (with the possible exception of tomatoes and peppers which are tropical at heart and adore as much heat as they can get). Okay, okay, there are other exceptions too – like kale which would survive (if not thrive) in near-freezing temps indefinitely, but really, other than Vermonters, who grows kale as a common backyard garden veggie anyway?

All this rain has set back our planting dates: I fear they’ll be washed away, or the continued cool soil temps have prevented seeds from germinating, or we can’t prepare new beds as the soil is too muddy to turn over. Flooding at the Intervale (where we have about half of our productive land for growing) means most farmers are set back weeks in their schedules, and makes us question whether it would be better to turn the area into rice paddies, as some farmers in Vermont are doing, than wait for the waters to recede.

The realization for me is that farmers put their entire livelihoods in the hands of mother nature. There are elements of the environment that can be controlled, to some degree, but nothing that I know of that can help you run a tractor in 1′ of standing water above your soil or harvest the grains from fields in Louisiana when the floodgates are opened.

Even here in our backyard where it’s not flooded, we can’t always provide exactly what our babies need: we either lack the technology, time, or other resources to make the perfect environment to coddle them. Maybe one day we’ll have a one acre movable greenhouse like Eliot Coleman, or a better grow light system to keep them alive and well indoors longer, or more time and love to give them.