Independence Days Update

Last updated on: March 16, 2010 at 5:00 am by Melissa Hill

Independence Days Update 2010-03-16T05:00:00-04:00 Melissa Hill

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So I’m starting my second year doing Sharon Astyk’s Independance Days Challenge. She’s an amazing woman and writer who chose to move out to a farm and find a more sustainable way to live. With climate change and the end of oil looming over us like dark clouds I think it’s so important to step up and do what we can to make the transition to a lower energy world.

So many resources go to food production. Huge amounts of water, oil to make fertilizers, oil to make pesticides, oil to fuel the trucks that ship strawberries from California to Michigan, even though we have our own thriving strawberry agriculture.

This is it for me. Previous generations worked for women’s rights, for racial rights, for child labor laws, to out law genocide, and so many deeply important issues. I am thankful for all those anonymous people who marched and argued and lived. I hope that I can do my own tiny part to reshape our world again. To make it a livable place where clean water, healthy food, and a stable climate are available to us and to future generations.

Sharon divides up the challenge into a number of categories, and each week participants report what they did in each category. For more info or to join, just click on the link above or the banner on my sidebar.

On to the Challenge!

Plant something: Peas, radishes, arugula, spinach, claytonia, calendula. there’s a photo of my seed starter below. It really helps keep the humidity up, plus the sides are lined with aluminum foil to reflect the sun back onto the seedlings

Harvest something: Overwintered leeks, now that the ground is thawed, I can pull them out of the cold frame.

Preserve something: Made a 15# batch of my saurkraut. I had people asking, and we’re almost out, so I figured make it while the weather is still cool, then stick it in the fridge for summer. The photo above shows me with my huge saurkraut crock.

Waste Not: Turning the compost, which got pretty disgusting over the winter. Made a great little seed waterer out of a non-recyclable yogurt container.

Want Not: I’ve been working on getting our rice stores in order. Since going gluten free half of my bulk good became inedible. We’re doing pretty good with rice, now I need to reorder beans since we’ve almost finished our 50# bag of pintos.

Eat the Food: Well, we had leeks in our Bi Bim Bop, but we’re still waiting for most things to sprout. The girls seem to like the radish thinnings. It makes me want to sprout radish seeds.

Build the Community: I went to a book club at a local community greenhouse. We read Food Not Lawns. I really liked it, but I found that there was a lot of resistance to it. People saw her as too radical, too out there to be truly helpful. The woman who wrote it had worked as an activist, and was involved in Food not Bombs really early on. I thought that was great and I kept getting frustrated. Finally there was one man who kept coming back to the idea of her composting her own bodily wastes and making this horrible disgusted face. So I told them that I had saved my urine myself to use on my garden. It was a lot harder to make the 5 year old eeewww face at someone sitting across the table. I don’t understand this horror of our wastes. Pig farm sewage pits are disgusting, not my pee. It’s sterile, has a high nitrogen content, and quite frankly, comes out of me. Still there were a couple of people who were really neat, and I’m looking forward to the next book club meeting.

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