In the bookshed: Soil Mates

Posted on February 14, 2011 by

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Soil Mates
Sara Alway
Quirk Books, 2011

Oh Valentine’s Day! What better way to celebrate than to mate your plants in a match bound for glory? That’s just the idea in the new Quirk Books release – Soil Mates: Companion Plants for Your Vegetable Garden – a visual cutie of a book with lots of good gardening advice besides.

Soil Mates is an easy entry to the world of companion planting – a style of gardening that pairs certain combinations of veggies, herbs and flowers together for increased yields and pest resistance. Included here are twenty pairings described in detail, along with recipes that use the paired veggies as main ingredients *and* advice on seed starting, natural pest resistance, container gardening and planting timelines.

Useful as all that is, what really makes this book for me is its style and design appeal. Written like a matchmaking guide to plants (with sections including turn-ons, turn-offs, love triangles, stalker alert and foreplay), Sara Alway gets away from the dry language found in many garden how-tos. The illustrations are bright and inviting and include helpful visuals for plant placement and spacing – and overall this is a visually appealing book in the hand or on the shelf. This is definitely something I would give to a new or burgeoning gardener as a stocking stuffer (or a Valentine’s Day gift) for something fun and informative (even a little romantic – gotta watch those veggie pairings before they run off and elope after all).

 

Overworked

Posted on February 13, 2011 by

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As I prepare myself for another week of work, this passage comes to mind… we may tell ourselves otherwise, but we are certainly overworked by any measure.

One of capitalism/s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit — but rarely articulated — asumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.

These images are backwards projections of modern work patterns. And they are false. Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely, the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure. When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that working hours in the mid nineteenth century constitute the most prodigious work effort in the entire history of humankind.

Consider a typical working day in the medeival period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (siteen hours in the summer and eight in winter) but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent — called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks. These rest periods were traditional rights of laborers, which they enjoyed even during peak harvest times. During slack periods, which accounted for a large part of the year, adherence to regular working hours was not usual… The pace of work was also far below modern standards — in part because the general pace of life in medieval society was leisurely.

Juliet Schor, The Overworked American

Sewing, book reviews and getting ready for the bees

Posted on February 12, 2011 by

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For your visual pleasure – here is a phone-picture of the market bags I finished this morning which are a housewarming present for some friends. I really love making these because they are so straight-forward, and the inside pockets can be customized for whatever the bag is being used for. I also managed to make a simple zippered pouch today using this tutorial. I had started with another tutorial that just wasn’t doing it for me, but since there about a hundred different explanations for making zippered pouches on the web, it was really easy to find a better one. I can’t say it turned out perfectly, but for the first time ever, I sewed a zipper into something and that’s progress in my books.

I’m hoping to have some garden pictures by tomorrow, along with some of the finished beehive because B. and I were hard at work this morning (early, before the torrential downpour started) clearing out our bee-space at the back of the garden. Over the winter it became our bucket and planter stashing spot and so we moved everything out of the way, planted a couple more vines along the back fence, and re-mulched the area with half-rotted leaves and bark mulch. Tomorrow morning we’re going to work on putting the top-bar beehive together now that I’ve glued all my wood – I’m a bit nervous about how this is going to go, but I suppose the worst that can happen is $10 of wood gets trashed and I get frustrated, so that’s not particularly awful. On the other hand, I believe my bees are on their way in the mail (c/o West Coast Bee Supply) and I want to make sure things are all set-up for when the package arrives.

And for those of you who are curious – yes, I am buying a package of bees, they come in a box with a caged queen and apparently 3 pounds worth is what I need to start a hive.

Look forward to lots of book reviews in the next couple of weeks here as well as I try to get through the stack of books for review in an orderly fashion. I’ve been really blessed lately to have a number of great volumes end up in my possession and I’m working my way through them for posting here as the spring season kicks off. Wet as it was this morning in my garden, I found myself getting really excited as we moved planters around and tidied up a bit – I’m hoping for another great gardening year with a steep learning curve on the bees and some fine-tuning of my planting plan from 2010.

Postcard Fiction: Foxes

Posted on February 12, 2011 by

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They came early spring and set up camp there, in the woods near the lake, eyed stands of hardwood they would cut to make room for the necessities of cabin and garden. Father, mother, three boys under nine and a rickety wagon that would carry them no longer. There were no roads on which to travel in any case; they stood now at the end of one.

Their livelihood hinged on the clutched deed, and despite poor soil they spent the summer cutting, chopping, digging, cursing. Father, mother and two horses doing the heavy work until one of the horses stumbled forward and died. By autumn they recognized the land’s poverty would never allow for rolling fields of grain or orchards ripe for market. Lucky to be fed the first winter on roots and stone soup. Father meditated on the possibilities of logging, trapping, and more hard-working sons as he tramped the land in search of clues to an existence.

During a breathless trapline walk there came an idea as he knelt to recover a fox, its winter red pelt all gloss and luxury. A glitter in the grey, he turned over the possibility of breeding rather than trapping and saw its value. What was more, he knew a place to keep his quarry from predators, requiring no fence or feed. A tiny island some distance from shore would imprison these pups with an aversion to swimming, and provide their small subsistence.

He trapped his foxes live, rowed them in batches to populate the scrubby island by summer’s beginning. The family worked and cursed through their second cycle on the land, another son now heavy in mother’s belly as she pulled the plow in lieu of the last horse which had died over winter. All the while father kept his foxes close in thought, felt assured by their presence nearby.

As the northern lights of November winked their last, fall turned into a truly raging winter. Buried in snow the family huddled, prayed, and wished for the life they had left in city slums. Father’s mantra, even as they hungered, stayed the same all winter long: come thaw, come spring, come pups, come pelts. He whispered by the fire, sometimes sitting up all night.

Then came the longer days and stronger light; they traversed sodden paths through the wood to the lake, finding then it had frozen solid during winter’s height. It was thin-to-melting now and in a few days father launched his rowboat towards the copper island to investigate. Surprised then to find no living animal nor carcass as he explored the rock studded with spring’s green shoots. Neither tufts of fur or blood to mark a struggle. He was puzzled.

Rowing back he realized, put frozen lake and homing drive together; saw those small red creatures skittering one by one across the ice, disappearing back into the wooded hills above the cabin. Squared his shoulders then, returned to thawing land.

(This piece of postcard fiction is based on a true family story, was submitted to GEIST’s annual contest in 2008 but won no prizes, and has no postcard to go with it any longer.)

It’s a month for loving yourself!

Posted on February 11, 2011 by

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I’m doing a weekly program at the YWCA right now which I signed up for in January to help motivate myself back into daily workouts – something I was in the groove on for almost three years before I just petered out and stopped going. Believe it! is about developing healthy habits and mindframes around our bodies and our goals – and about ten of us meet on Wednesday nights for both coaching and workouts of various kinds.

Last night we had a coaching session on negative self-talk, which is something I am *highly* aware of in myself, though I’ve never been able to put an end to it. Of course lots of discussion of inner fears and torments ensued and it really triggered me to hear that these awesome women have so much internal struggle (cue: self). But then again, as that video (which made me cry when I saw it on FB yesterday – thanks Joanna for posting it) reminded me – everything that is in my head was fed into it from outside of my head. That is, we live in a society that can be cruel, sets impossible models to follow, engages in shaming and mocking behaviours, and is generally smug in its attempts to force conformity. And in addition to internalizing that, we also engage in externalizing our own feelings of inadequacy through negative verbalizing about ourselves and others. While most of us engage in suble ways – we support a mean-spirited and money-hungry media culture to do the rest of our judging and sizing-up for us.

At dinner on my birthday, B. and I were talking about just this subject – about how I’m really content in my life and where I’m at right now – and yet I’m still nervous about an upcoming high school reunion (20 years, omfg) and whether or not other people (who I haven’t seen since I left the graduation dance early in 1991) will think I’ve made enough success of my life. Because, you know it’s not important that *I’m* happy, it’s really important that virtual strangers care about what’s going on for me. Oh, and of course it’s really important that no one think I’m fat either. Because after all this time I’m sure everyone else I went to school with is in perfect shape. Uh huh.

The thing is, this negative self-image is limiting! During last night’s exercise we had to image where we would be without one particularly destructive belief of our choosing…. but I think my answer would be the same no matter what negative self-belief I picked: Without [insert negative belief here] I would be happier, more joyful, less stressed, more resilient and less worried about the opinions of others.

(I know this is true, because already in my life I’ve done some of this work and it has lead to a more open, joyful me than I would have been otherwise.)

Over at the Fitness Cheeleader, Janice has declared February the month of self-love which is fitting in with all these other things I’m thinking about. The more we love ourselves, the more we stop judging ourselves – the more we can love other people and reserve our judgement on them.

So I’m going to start right now. One thing I love about myself is my willingness to engage with the world – with different ideas, projects, fitness classes, community groups and academic courses. And also I have a huge capacity for love. And finally, not to be too smug about it, I have most excellent cleavage.

How about you?

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