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Tag Archives: garden
Take Back Urban Homesteading: Video Action Day
Today is the latest Action Day for the Take Back Urban Homesteading group on Facebook. This time around, the action centers around videos created and posted by (sub)urban/rural homesteaders. There are a variety of topics, as there always will be when you get a large group of people together. Here’s the roundup, which will be updated periodically throughout the day as more people chime in. NOTE: I’m going with first names only here, even if someone’s full name appears on their Facebook post, and with blog or company names where appropriate. There is also a playlist helpfully created here.
- Rob’s World
- Grown in the City
- Lynn
- Brian & Sundari Kraft
- Erica @ Northwest Edible Life
- Linda Ring
- Denver Urban Homesteading – Market, Dec 2010 (their Facebook page was pulled after the Dervaes sent a complaint)
- Deanna @ Crunchy Chicken
- Shannon
- K Ruby Blume (her personal video here; her organization was another recipient of the Dervaes’ nonsensical c&d)
- Echolage
- Salt of the Earth Urban Farm
- Anna
- Nick
- Urban Bee Company (Facebook link)
- Jessi
- EcoHouse Architects
- John
- Cheryl
- Kari
- Wendy @ The Lazy Composter
- April
- Rebecca
- Seonaid @ The Practical Dilettante
- Jamie @ Urban Homestead Experiment
- Carl
- Danielle @ Yellow Tree Farm
- Nika
- Naturally Simple Living
- Deanna @ Crunchy Chicken (video #2)
- Sundari
A sign of things to come
How are things looking on the ranch?
Just peachy.
Aftermath: Schadenfreude, trademarks, and staying the course
The past week has been quite the ride for anyone interested in sub/urban or rural homesteading. The previous two posts here sum up quite a bit of it, and one of the side effects of this brouhaha has been to get people interested in the Dervaes’ own history (and in particular, that of Jules). It got me interested, anyway, and I’m doing some research to put something together.
Another side effect has been to bring people together, as evidenced by the outpouring of solidarity posts Monday, with people weighing in on what it means to them to be able to call themselves urban homesteaders engaged in urban homesteading, no trademark or service marks required – and why should there be? The movement has been around far longer than Jules Dervaes’ massive ego and will continue to exist long after all of us are gone. This is as it should be: a movement like this belongs to no one person, but collectively to the people who choose to spend their time doing the things that need to be done to keep their little piece of the world out of the hands of giant corporations, keep themselves free of GMO/GE seed and livestock, and keep themselves in good, healthy food.
In my travels collecting posts for the big blog roundup, I found several instances of people saying their interactions with the Dervaes have been, shall we say, less than friendly – people who went to the Dervaes’ house to be met with attitudes less than friendly, people who have indicated the Dervaes were loathe to be included in media where other urban homesteaders would also be included, and people who saw the “You’re Cut Off” show on VH1 where the Dervaes were part of the setup and who were not particularly impressed. I also found a couple of people who said they were happy this debacle came falling down on the family’s head, simply because of the attitude they presented.
This last bit is one that creates a puzzler: is it wrong to actively cheer for a company – and have no doubt here, the Dervaes are a company – to fail or sink in stature? If this were, say, Monsanto, I doubt anyone other than shareholders in the stock of the company would be bothered by the Schadenfreude exhibited by some people. In this case, I’ve found very few supporters of the Dervaes after the actions they’ve taken, although I have found some rather baffling items from people simply reposting one of the Dervaes’ blog posts saying the cease and desist letters are a hoax and not from them (when they clearly are, and when the Dervaes have reposted the latter on their own site) and that they are “waiting to hear both sides of the story”. What side is not presented here? The Dervaes family managed to get a trademark on two common, generic phrases, and flat out lied on the application, claiming that they, and they alone, had used the terms so exclusively that they deserved to be awarded control of them. Hogwash. They then proceeded to send out cease and desist letters to various people, and when the furor began, claimed to be doing so because the recipients of those letters were “direct rivals” of theirs. Also hogwash: a blogger who received one of those letters is apparently engaged in no business activities relating to urban homesteading at all.
Let’s review that letter, shall we? The Dervaes sent a DMCA takedown notice to Google over a search return that linked to an Amazon listing of a book published two years before the Dervaes were awarded their mark. The Dervaes, in their attempts to justify this, posted a lengthy post on their blog regarding plagiarism, as if there is some rampant wholesale use of their material on sites all over the internet – something that is very hard to confirm, as it simply does not seem to be the case, and that still has no bearing on their constant defending their trademarks on these two generic terms. For those unaware, a DMCA complaint is something to be used for copyright infringement complaints, not trademark complaints. Sending one to Google over a search result is not only ridiculous, it is a misuse of the DMCA process – something that can (and should) result in penalties against the Dervaes for that misuse, although it probably will not.
There is currently a petition at change.org to revert the granted trademark, and the EFF has taken up the fight in response to the Dervaes’ insane posturing against the authors of the book linked above, as if they can somehow backdate their mark grant. The EFF gave the Dervaes until Friday, February 25, to respond. We’ll see what happens on that front.
In the meantime, people have been weighing in on the “what now?” part of this episode. For us, based on something someone posted to the Facebook protest page, that meant hastily putting up some forums, divided into regions, to enable people to find one another more easily, and beginning work on a collection of links, also divided into regions, so people would know who their neighbors are. It meant explaining some concepts of the DMCA and how some providers choose to deal with those notices. It meant other people doing their own aftermath posts about the whole issue:
It meant the Dervaes going to complete silence on the issue itself, going silent on their blog and Twitter account for days, and then, when finally posting on their blog once more, acting as if nothing had ever happened. A curious note on the latter activity: when they began to post once more (one with a sanctimonious quote from Desiderata, to lead, no less, as if they were victims rather than instigators), the first post was open to comments, yet no comments appeared. I mentioned to people that they very likely had their comments under heavy moderation. Comments on the post after that one were immediately closed – I suspect the moderated queue on the first rapidly filled with comments that were not as supportive as they would have liked.
As for the people who decided to not support any of the Dervaes’ activities in a financial sense once this fiasco occurred: that seems to be working. In the course of research, I’ve had to return to their site from time to time, and on the ever-present donation block, which constantly lists their money goal ($25K at the moment), their total collected since this dam broke has not changed from the $525 mark.
Growing
There is only so long I can wait to get things started. These were started last weekend.
Spring in winter
Today was the beginning of a nice stretch of weather for us, so I took advantage of it – and promptly overdid it, in my quest to get things on the right track for the upcoming season.
Today I dug out twelve holes: two for the new dogwoods, ten for the new blackberry canes. When you have a hole, of course you then have to refill it, preferably with a mix of good topsoil and compost, and in the case of the trees, a handful of greensand in each as well. Out back, a twelve foot, eight inch deep trench so I can lay in the barrier for the first of the bamboo that will go in. The next step there is to get the barrier buried and then dig yet another hole to plop the bamboo down in the center of the line, to allow it to spread left and right (or north and south, if we’re talking directionally) without allowing it to spread into the neighbor’s property. I don’t really care about the neighbor one way or the other, but I’d prefer not to have to deal with them at all about runaway bamboo encroaching on their side of the fenceline. Toward the end of the day, after setting the timer to water the main front garden and the garlic, I couldn’t resist pulling weeds and stray alfalfa from the frames out front. Even though my knees and my right side where the surgeon filleted me protested, the front is entirely weed and alfalfa-free, ready for whatever I ultimately decide to plop down there.
Sunday: a trip to the NOC, a short stop by the pharmacy for a prescription, and then back outside for more work: planting the aforementioned bamboo, more deep watering of the two new trees and blackberries, some touchup work on a few exposed roots of the peach and kumquat trees, and polishing off the weeding of the back garden, which has gone rather well and which is almost complete. I suppose it’s time to pull the remaining leeks from that area as well and do something with them, like cook them and eat them, since we love leeks around here.
Yesterday, I finished hanging the lights in the barn and seeded a couple of flats to throw under them. Photos of that to come tomorrow….
Dreams of spring
It’s true that every place in the world has its own seasonality. For some reason, many people, when they think of Florida, think that all of Florida is exactly the same, and that there is never a real winter here.
They’re wrong.
Northern parts of the state, while not reaching the epic lows of other places, do have their share of frigid weather (as do other parts of the state – anyone who has ever heard about risks to the citrus crops will understand this is the case). We live with it because our winter is generally blissfully short, and when spring comes, it rapidly passes through like so many birds migrating through on their way to other places: some years, true “spring” weather can be measured in weeks, rather than months as in other places.
Knowing that winter is fleeting and spring just a bit less so is a tad frustrating for those of us impatient to get seed flats started so they can be planted out to take full advantage of the long growing season we have here. Start too early, and the young plants go leggy and bound in their pots, awaiting prime weather. Start too late, and there is no proper spring period to harden them off before summer comes blazing in.
Last year, I started too early, but managed to work with the plants to keep them in shape until they could be safely planted out, and if our season here had not been interrupted by medical issues, I think we could have had quite the bounty. I’m trying not to make that same mistake this year, and forcing myself to wait until February to begin the flats under the lights in the barn. That’s made difficult when the seeds and plants start arriving, mocking the farmer champing at the bit to get moving.
This is the first round of received seed from the massive order I placed: Johnny’s, Burpee, and Territorial. The other day, I received plants from Willis Orchard, just in time for another untropical few days and nights: four types of bamboo, a couple of dogwood trees (“How can you tell a dogwood apart from other trees? By its bark, yuk yuk.”), and some blackberry canes to replace the ones the dogs ran down (long story) and the ones the redneck neighbor killed by spraying some kind of horrible chemical along our common fenceline. I’m still awaiting shipments from Fedco, Bountiful, Shumway, Gurney’s, and Vesey’s, as well as backordered and separately shipping items from the first three through the door. As you might imagine, we’re planning a big year here. There are still some things to complete, like building and filling the final row of frames for the rear garden, and I have almost convinced myself to redo the irrigation lines in all three gardens, but I have no doubt that we’ll be ready when the time comes to plant out the babies as spring makes an appearance at the ranch.
Gathering
I should say hunting and gathering, as technically I have been hunting through seed catalogs and gathering all the info into a spreadsheet for the things I want – yes, I am a geek, but it was really the only way to keep track of the things I’m ordering for this year from eight different vendors. So far, I’ve placed six of the orders, with two more to polish off this evening.
Why so many? Simple: there is no single vendor who carries (or has in stock) the things I’d like to have. The pricing can also wildly fluctuate across vendors, particularly for certified organic seed, which I order as often as practical.
Now with the bulk of the ordering out of the way, it’s time to start plotting – not an easy task. I had planned to work a bit outside today, but with the temperature not getting out of the 40s here and the windchills never leaving the 30s, I elected to stay inside instead. When I went out to put the chickens up in their coop and turn on the water by their run, there was still ice on the ground from last night’s running of the taps. Tonight we should be down in the teens, which is getting a bit overboard, I think. Mother Nature is apparently trying to shake off a few inhabitants here before releasing us into spring.
With some puppies and some homemade potato-broccoli-cheese soup, it will be nice and toasty inside, and perfect for dreams of spring.
A day like today
I do not, as a general rule, sleep well or much. My family knows this because they have to put up with my oddball hours. Friends and clients know this because it is not rare for them to receive an email from me at some horrible, zombie-like hour where I, fresh from about three hours of sleep, have logged on to see what is happening in my little corner of the world.
Most of the time, this does not bother me overly much. After all, I have a great deal many more hours at my disposal than most people, meaning I can come up with grandiose plans about various things, and also cement the reputation I have garnered of being a robot rather than a human being. Since the radiation from the cancer treatments still has not brought me any real superpowers, I suppose it’s as close as I will ever get, although I won’t be doing this anytime soon.
Some days, though, the lack of sleep brings out the cranky, especially if I am also not feeling well. Like today. This makes me want to kick someone’s ass right off the planet for tossing a nonsensical legal threat our way about information in a domain registration that she provided, even though we have pointed out what she is saying means nothing and she readily admits she doesn’t understand the “jargon” – and by “jargon”, I mean English. Apparently, she is simply terrified that one of her “fans” (she is an actress, apparently) will find out her address from a years-old cached pieced of information on google, something that we do not control, last time I checked, and do some stalker-like thing, or kill her, or both. Or something. This is the time when I want to state it flat out for people: you are just not that important. You are not fodder for the next American Justice where some crazed, obsessed person hunts you down and kills you. You may tell yourself, actress aspiring to be famous, that someone would care that much, but let’s face it here: you provided your own biographical information to IMDB which is quite handily on your own web site, and it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist or some weirdo even slightly off their meds to find you. I know: I tracked down someone, including their name, date of birth, current residence, current hobbies, other web sites they visit, and the fact that they coached little league from a single piece of information (an IP address attached to a comment they left on a blog we host). With all the information you have provided on your own, deranged psychos could track you down if they wanted. They haven’t. This should tell you something about your place in the greater universe.
A day where you think it would be nice to be able to eat and drink the way you used to. That an icy cold beer and a pile of wings would be great after sweating off a couple of pounds working on the ranch, except that you can no longer drink alcohol due to the radiation burning off the lining of your mouth and you really can’t eat wings any more because the chewing issues make it virtually impossible. That it would be great to settle in with a margarita and a blackened chicken burrito with extra sweet and hot chile sauce, but the spicy foods are offlimit now for the same reason alcohol is, and you know even as you sow the seeds in the garden that you’re unlikely to ever be able to eat habaneros or even jalapenos again any time soon, if ever.
On the other hand, on a day like today, where I’m having some trouble catching my breath and generally feeling like crap – oh, not to mention having a slight bout of anxiety over the fact that the doctor wants me to have a chest CT because of something they saw on the chest x-ray they wanted before I started hyperbaric dives after having yet another tooth pulled – it’s nice to Get Shit Done. Like sow the cukes from seed that I’ve wanted to do for several days now, for a total of about 140 seeds planted, with a little overflow from my nephew helper, who put half a dozen seeds in several holes while I tried to convince him that really, one was all that was required. I also directly sowed some more tomatoes and peppers, because let’s face it: there are rarely enough, and we intend to do a lot of preserving this year. If we have the space, I want to fill it with something. That includes the newest 8 x 4 frame I polished off today in the herb garden, with a little assist by my sister, who hauled a load of dirt and poop for me amongst the five others that I brought over and mixed in. Tomorrow, while we wrangle a scheduled CT from the hospital people and I stay out of the hyperbaric chamber until we determine what the hell is going on – and if I have walking pneumonia, I will, as I have told several people, be pissed – I will begin work on the final 8 x 4 frame for the herb garden. Tonight, I may just go ahead and sow some things in flats that really want the much hotter weather we will no doubt be heading into very soon, and set them up on the heat mats in the garage, turning on the lights for them in the morning.
It’s a day where you also get nice, chatty mails from certain clients, about their newest projects, and about being a test case who found a bad link on our site. Or from someone who understands the information (some of it erroneous) at some random, invisible data mining company is not the end of the world as we know it, which then leads in a roundabout sort of way to a discussion about critters and gardening/sustainability. Or from someone who congratulates us on ten years of putting up with all of this. Or where a pooped out puppy sleeps on the back of the couch while you work from home on a laptop, ass planted on the couch yourself, his tail slapping against the cushion now and then, his nose crinkling as he sniffs out a rabbit or turtle or whatever populates puppy dreams, every now and again his paws wiggling manically, chasing down a bird he will never catch, growling and then squeaking out what would be a bark were he awake. Or where you watch as your nephew, having discarded his swimming diaper at some point, stands on the patio in the shade, fresh from the pool, with only his water wings on, downing saltines with a slab of cheese between them, crumbs falling from his mouth and sticking to his wet chest. Or where you decide, apropos of nothing, that Saturday would be a great time for a spaghetti dinner night, and that homemade pork/beef/veal meatballs in homemade sauce, with homemade Italian bread as a vehicle for carrying butter and garlic, would be a rather fine thing indeed, even as you muse about the possibility of making homemade pasta, just to top it all off.
Or where, in general, despite never having as much time as you think even though you don’t sleep, berating yourself for not writing nearly as much as you would want to (or anything at all, for that matter), and having a list of todo items that is constantly expanding, you think this is a pretty damned good life, overall, and that you wouldn’t trade a minute of it for anything.
Forced downtime
Three consecutive days of dentist/oral surgeon visits have resulted in forced downtime for me on the ranch. On Wednesday, a visit to the dentist to address the broken tooth slated for a crown. While much of the shearing off was the buildup, some of it was the actual tooth, and what was left after that was one little stub, resulting in yet another unrestorable tooth. Luckily, we had already made an appointment with the oral surgeon for Thursday, because I could tell what was coming: an extraction of what was left.
And that’s what we did on Thursday: appointment at 10, and by 11:20 I was walking out the door, my mouth yet one more tooth lighter. This was a bit more difficult an extraction, as the top stub broke of and he wound up using forceps to dig in and grab the root, but he managed to pull the root out in one piece. No cutting! Gauze, the usual prescriptions, and off I went back to the house. Because of the additional rooting around (no pun intended) this one hurt quite a bit more than the last one, and my lower jaw started to swell fairly immediately. I also felt quite a bit more nauseated this time than last, but sleep plus the various drugs made it all slide down the list of my concerns, even if it did put me behind on various things and make me a bit foggy throughout the evening. My oral surgeon – Dr. Tayapongsak, by the way, if you’re ever in this area and need a very good one – also mentioned to me something I resigned myself to three years ago as I began the never-ending dental work: eventually, all my teeth will probably have to come out. For now, though, I’d like to retain what I can.
Friday, back to the dentist for what was actually my scheduled appointment for crown preps, now on a single tooth instead of two. That didn’t make it hurt any less, as my jaw had swollen further through the evening, but I went ahead with this appointment to avoid having the other tooth meet the same fate as the one requiring extraction. As he shaved away the buildup and shaped the remainder of the tooth, of course some of that work wound up going right along the gumline. Ouch. Then the impressions, and me trying to open my mouth widely enough to get the trays in, which were then jammed up against the teeth and held there for several minutes. Then the even greater challenge of getting the trays out through my limited opening, without destroying what we’d just managed to create. Then the temporary crown, on the tooth, off the tooth for shaping, over and over again, every time jammed up against and into the gumline until it was shaped properly.
After that adventure, off to the hospital and an EKG and a chest xray, so I can begin hyperbaric dives on Monday to promote the healing of the socket where the root had been. While I was in xray, getting lined up for the second shot, a code blue in MRI comes over the intercom. Such is the ebb and flow of the medical world.
All of this adds up to no work outside since Wednesday. My face is still swollen today, although less so than yesterday, and there is no heavy lifting permitted anyway for a day or so after the extraction, to avoid the potential of dislodging the (very nice) blood clot that formed in the empty tooth socket. Since I feel like someone has been beating me with a lead pipe – and look a bit that way, too – this is disappointing, but sort of welcome at the same time.
Tomorrow, though: full steam ahead. Lots to do. Not many people to do it. It’s time to really start ramping things up here on the ranch.