Plants Rule the World

Gary Pollan, in his Botany of Desire, demonstrates how plants, with their ability to mutate and change rapidly, have secretly manipulated human behavior. We are simply so much better at spreading their little seedies than those dumb animals that just eat them and poop them out. Just think about maize corn, which has progressed from a wimply little local grass eaten by a few gatherers to THE agricultural crop that single handedly determines a huge slice of US politics. Now that it's going to fuel our cars, woohoo, the sky's the limit! When you couple Pollan's book with Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, a look at how civilization has spread and developed (follow the spread of food crops!) you realize that most of our human history has been secretly controlled by plants.

I think maybe they've decided that we have proliferated too fast, folks. This is not good news. I noticed in this weeks' Science News that the E coli and salmonella outbreaks in produce recently aren't just from bad hygiene among all those field hands who don't have any chem-toilets in the fields. Oh no. Apparently both E coli and salmonella are now capable of colonizing fresh produce (notice that it's fresh produce? Not the stuff like stringbeans that we normally cook?). That means they don't wash off. Forget all those spendy and environmentally safe veggie washes. Boiled lettuce salad anyone?

Hey, looking back at history, if the plant world wants to reduce our numbers is there any hope for us????

Happy Halloween and don't turn your back on those pumpkins!

Sheep Shuffling

I don't usually brag about my dogs on my blog. We work, we enjoy working. But I'm just really pleased with Annie, my three year old Rottie. She started working sheep last March, when DJ, my 5 year old sheep hand, was diagnosed with bone cancer. She stepped right up...'Hey, I'm ready, I'll fill in.' A working sheep dog is a really something impressive. It's a running conversation based on hereditary preditor/prey knowlege on the part of both dog and sheep. Every minute includes maybe a hundred conversations between sheep, dog, and often you, the handler. 'I'll go there to get away from you, no you won't, oh, I'll go there now, no you won't, I don't want to go there, yes you will...' It's a flowing dance of eye contact and body language and when you step into this dance you get caught up, swept away, you become total awareness...of sheep, dog, obstacle, gate, pressure from that scary looking shed, draw to those ewes in the back pasture...You can't think clearly, you simply see and react and anticipate. Hopefully correctly! (Not always!)

I was loading three wethers born this spring. St. Croix hair sheep, they are more like wild deer than the tame woolies you might be used to. They can leap straight up about four feet (duck!) and if you push them, they either run into fences (broken necks are not fixable) or go over the fence (not helpful if the trailer is in the other direction).

I had my misgivings about Annie, aka 'Rocket Dog' and these super light, super upset (Mom is in the back forty) lambs. But she had been working the light lambs, so I took a deep breath and we set to work. That included gathering the sheep out of the big back pasture, and bringing them into the paddock. (They didn't want to go...this was not normal! Something was up!). Then she had to put them in the barn (see previous). There, I sorted out my three wethers and she got to put the rest back into the back pasture. When I let the wethers out of the barn, I was eye to eye with hooves as they leaped straight into the air. Let's see, why again did I decide I wanted St. Croix???? Now, all I had to do was herd the upset wethers away from their moms, up the fenced alley and into the trailer. Without sending them over the fences or into the fence to break their necks. It was way too warm to butcher sheep today, sigh.

Annie was a gem. She bellied down, doing a pretty impressive Border Collie imitation for a Rott. Flanked slow and easy, positioning herself to push them toward the gate leading to the alley. Never once did she charge in or dash around...which would have sent them bouncing like rocket propelled super balls. She kept her eyes on them, using her stare to push them through the gate. Then she eased along behind them, so gently that they even nibbled at the grass as she urged them toward the trailer gate.

No running, no panic, no crashed fences. And this is a Rott, not a Border Collie. Although I think Annie might have been a Border Collie in her last life... With a huge sigh of relief, I closed the trailer gate and it was done.

So the lambs have been safely moved, we're all set for winter, with the hay stacked, plenty of wood for the fire. The ewes can happily grow next year's lambs and Annie can make sure they all go where they're supposed to go.

She had a ball. And she is now crashed like road kill on the living room floor. Dreaming of new, flighty wethers, I'm sure.

Rainbows, Wildfires, and the Reincarnation Rollercoaster

I put in hay today, got it in just before the showers started, so it's all nice and dry, stacked up and tarped against any rain or drifting snow that might make it into my barn. That hay represents past and future. It's a past of sun, irrigation water, sweat, and yes, diesel, alas, because alfalfa grows in eastern Oregon. It is stored summer. It represents a future of lambs, more breeding ewes, dinner for some folk. It is stored food. As I finished with the unloading, the sun set, the showers moved on and a rainbow graced a nearly clear sky just after the sun had set. Ephemeral color caught in a few brief moments between day and night.

I had emailed a student of mine living in one of the burned areas in San Diego. Worrying. Today, I got a reply. She was evacuated and as she unpacks in her thankfully! unburned home, she is finding revelation in what they threw in the car and what they left behind. Global warming? Or just a bad, dry year? My son emailed me a NY Times article about the dry future: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html?em&ex=1193284800&en=adc25155e153a757&ei=5087%0A

I find a lot of comfort in the small cycles of life: alfalfa growing, storing up sunlight and water and summer heat in green leaves, the growth of lambs in the pregnant ewes, nourished by that stored summer, the nourishment of human lives by those as yet unborn lambs. I look at the climate shift and the international waffling that is going to allow it to continue and I see another, larger cycle. Maybe we, humans, Homo sapiens, are only going to evolve through a very long process of civilization growth and the crash that comes when you don't work together to suit your environment and technology. Maybe this is just the first rise and fall of a very great roller coaster, eh? And where will it end?

Cycles.

It's a theme I've been looking at in my SF lately. Where will we go, as a species, and what is our ultimate evolutionary goal? I wonder.

Atisnal Cheese in the Back of Beyond and Venison Steaks

I just got off the phone with some good friends of mine. They have cows and have been busting their butts to be able to produce and sell their very high quality milk legally. It is not easy if you're not a huge commercial dairy, and the task has taken them from Washington to Colorado, to Oregon, and now back up to Kettle Falls, Washington (about an hour from Spokane). They're only weeks away from getting their commercial license to sell raw milk. And their milk is wonderful. David bends over backward to make sure that each and every cow, each and every milking's worth of milk is pristine. And it is. His raw milk outlasted the commercial, pasturized stuff in the fridge every time I got it.

Aja, his wife, works for a small natural food store and they're going to expand their cheese section, offering artisnal cheeses. Now this is not a metropolitan area with a lot of middle class buyers looking and paying for upscale products. This is VERY rural. People there, Aja tells me, are willing to pay more for organic, high quality, local, and artisnal stuff. Not everybody, by a long shot, but enough to keep the store going. And hopefully to keep the dairy going.

That fills me with hope. :-) I have loved the artisnal and local foods movement, but I was afraid it was a figment of the moneyed middle class. Let's face it, small scale produced food is simply not cheap. You have to grow very large scale with a minimum of labor hours in order to produce food at the cost you're used to seeing it in the grocery store. I couldn't sell my veggies at grocery store prices and survive. But oh, do you pay a price for cheapness. You pay it in quality of the product -- you've got to use a lot of chemicals in order to eliminate all those expensive hands weeding and removing pests -- you pay for it terms of animal welfare. It is not really possible to raise animals humanely on the scale required to produce cheap meat and eggs.

It's a tough choice to pay more for something you could pay less for. I'm really pleased to hear that people who do not live in the suburbs of Seattle or Portland are willing to do that. I was thinking about this as I cut and wrapped the venison steaks from those mule deer hindquarters David lugged back from eastern Oregon. I caught some flack from someone who wasn't at all happy that I was eating deer. Not a vegetarian. That person just figured it was better to eat that nice, plastic wrapped chuck steak than Bambi. I don't buy commercial beef. That buck didn't suffer much. David is a good shot and a consumate meat hunter. The steer who went from calf operation to feed lot to slaughter house had a tougher time. The lambs I raise don't know what is in store for them and it's over before they figure it out. It's unpleasant, messy, hard work, and of course you have to do the killing, but I'm happier this way. I know they had a good life, both the lambs and the deer. Well, when it's all said and done, a whole lot of tiny critters will get to eat me, so what goes around comes around, eh?

Hunting Season

Well, fall has arrived. Officially. I planted my garlic today and that ends the garden season until I plant peas and fava beans and start my early broccoli and cauliflower next January. Right now, it's the revered Hunting Season. I was passed by two young guys in a big pickup towing a muddy jeep on a trailer. Two deer in bags were seatbelted into the front seats, heads and racks protruding, wearing sunglasses. The back of the Jeep was piled with kids' bikes and trikes. I guess the moms were pulling the trailer with the kids.

My sheep herding and wood cutting buddy, David, 76, I think, this year, (maybe older, I've never been quite certain) was finally persuaded by his son to head out Nyssa (east Oregon, almost Idaho) for a few days. I assured David that Annie and I would look after his sheep and keep all Dangerous People from breaking into his house (it is NOT a house that looks as if treasure lies within). After much coercing from son Bobby and I, he finally went. Two days later I had to assure him over the phone that Everything Was Fine.

That was three weeks ago. :-) A very nice big buck who had been happily fattening himself on farmer's corn and some good bass fishing sort of muted the homing instinct. And he worked on putting a new roof on his son's place. Annie was happy. She got to go hold his sheep off the feeder every day while I put out the feed. And David's sheep are a bunch of sneaky old Suffolk ewes so Annie had her work cut out for her. I think they all enjoyed the dance, since everybody thought they won. (Annie held the sneaky ewes off until I called her to quit and the sheep got the feed in the end).

David finally got home today and of course I got paid well. He arrived with two very nice hindquarters of that big buck, aged two weeks in a walk in cooler, (just starting to grow that green hair that means 'prime' in a restaurant) a big bag full of doves, a slab of the halibut son Bobby brought back from Alaska, and, of course, a lot of fresh bass, caught yesterday evening. (That was dinner and a lot of eating for the rest of the week. I do not freeze fish if I can avoid it!) The Bad Guys did not break into the house, I had all his mail, and the resident coyotes who had been disrespectful in his absense will have to behave themselves. To add to the day, we noticed that the oyster mushrooms were budding on some of his alders (this is a GREAT mushroom year) so strolled into the woods to check and found a downed alder fat with oyster mushrooms and a flush of shaggy parasols. So I added a bulging sack of fresh mushrooms to the plunder. Alas, my favorite mushrooming woods got sold to a developer and bulldozed. Progress marches on.

We still have to cut and wrap the venison quarters (the dogs can't wait!) but my freezer is looking nicely full of protein, and I have this big pan of sauteed mushrooms and all that bass, baked with lime-pepper.

So the wood is all in, I've got the last planting in the ground, and the fall meat harvest has been accomplished with style. Only the coyotes will be disappointed. They'll have to stop taking their dumps in David's front yard now. Life is tough.

Rain Dance

I drove up to Olympia to help put on a herding trial with the herding club I belong to. It was a fun weekend, we worked out butts off, entrants and their dogs worked, had fun, were elated and disappointed, depending on the run. But the herding world is mostly very friendly and supportive, so it was more fun than tears, even if things didn’t go well. (Hey, mix spooky sheep, an excited dog, nervous handler and things often go…well…in unexpected directions. Literally.) We stayed in a motel because if I’m going to work in the freezing wind and rain all day putting something like this on, I am NOT sleeping in my unheated van, thank you! Annie had never done this and was all eyes as we went upstairs to the second floor, down a hall full of parents with kids stopping over on the way home from Gramma’s. Obadiah did all this with his breeder earning his championship so he ignored the kids, bounced into the motel room, and instantly hopped onto a bed. ‘This one’s mine!’ Annie was still mooning over the kids with those nice, nose-height faces just asking to be licked...pleading even!

The skies didn’t open up until Sunday afternoon, so final awards were presented in a barn full of wet dogs and wet handlers. Which smelled worse? Well, we all smelled like wet sheep by then, so who’s counting?

On the way home in the downpour, my beloved and elderly Eurovan sloshed across the Glen Jackson bridge over the Columbia, drenched by sixteen-wheeler walls of spray and kindly waited until I was close to the first exit before the driver’s side wiper quite working. Ulp. Do you know what you can see at night in the pouring rain with no wiper and headlights coming at you? Yep. Precisely nothing.

I got off fast and pulled over. The nut holding the arm to the spindle was loose. And I did not have a socket set with me. All I needed was a 13 mm socket. One small technological glitch and all kinds of things fall apart. It was late Sunday night. What’s open? So I drove home, leaning WAY over (ouch, my back is sore) to see through the wiped passenger side glass on the well lighted 122nd Ave with a bright white bike lane newly painted (thank you Portland!). I DO have a 13 mm socket in my glove box now.

Ah, we do live in a technological house of cards, don’t we? No electricity and what stops working? No socket wrench and that simple spindle and nut are not going to work (no, the pliers couldn’t grip it – it was set into a recess just larger than the nut). We DO live precarious lives don’t we? Keeps life interesting, eh?

Yesterday Sidetrip

I had a Craigslist adventure yesterday. I bought a baby Childrens python, needed a larger tank for a permanent home and found one listed for a good price. Turns out it was over in an apartment complex right behind Reed College. Talk about a trip back in time! They built that complex back when I was going to Reed and the owner torched it for the insurance. I was living a few blocks away and remember the HUGE firestorm vividly. The complex hasn’t changed much…it was rebuilt and is bigger now, the area is more built up. But the inhabitants are the same, mostly students or young couples just post college or having quit college, working mostly service sector jobs. I had the unnerving feeling that I was stepping back through a very thin barrier into the past.

You know something? Things have changed some. I was in this place, at this age, but futures I brushed up against here, the expectations, were different. I guess back then you could do a lot more with a college degree or even some college. It wasn’t a horizon of ‘want fries with that?’ or minimum wage competition with Bangladeshi call center operators. What is your future now if you’re 20 with maybe a BA or a couple of years of community college? Where are we going as a country? These kids aren’t going to be able to buy those development houses they’re putting up all around me. They’re not going to be able to pay for the 2007 version of the American Dream working at MickyD’s, not even if they manage a store and the expectation of what is ‘necessary’ for a good life – the car, big cell phone plan, expensive cable – keeps getting more expensive. I had a Craigslist adventure yesterday. I bought a baby Childrens python, needed a larger tank for a permanent home and found one listed for a good price. Turns out it was over in an apartment complex right behind Reed College. Talk about a trip back in time! They built that complex back when I was going to Reed and the owner torched it for the insurance. I was living a few blocks away and remember the HUGE firestorm vividly. The complex hasn’t changed much…it was rebuilt and is bigger now, the area is more built up. But the inhabitants are the same, mostly students or young couples just post college or having quit college, working mostly service sector jobs. The gal who was selling the tank had just been laid off, was between jobs.

You know something, things have changed some. I was in this place, at this age, but you could do a lot more with a college degree or even some college. It wasn’t a horizon of ‘want fries with that?’ or minimum wage competition with Bangladeshi call center operators. What is your future now if you’re 20 with maybe a BA or a couple of years of community college? Where are we going as a country? These kids aren’t going to be able to buy those development houses they’re putting up all around me. They’re not going to be able to pay for the 2007 version of the American Dream working at MickyD’s, not even if they manage a store and the expectation of what is ‘necessary’ for a good life – the car, big cell phone plan, expensive cable – keeps getting more expensive. The gal who was selling the tank was between waitressing jobs, laid off.

So I paid cash for the tank and took it home and I hope this gal sharing that one bedroom has a future than includes more for her than waiting tables or cashiering at Winco, or maybe sees her future as something other than those over priced development houses with the hummer out front. That would give me hope. We need a new American Dream and we need it really fast. For our sakes and for the planet's sake.