Archive for July, 2010

Of Oil: Harvest Time

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

We have counted our blessings in our country garden now. Even though animals pretty much cleaned out my cukes and tomatoes (that’s an OLD picture), the jalapeños and sweet Italian peppers came in a bonanza. The pumpkins might make it, but if not, I’ve learned a good amount about how to fence to prevent digging animals.  We’re getting some butter beans and squash, and the rain barrels have been topped off by thunderstorms. Now it’s time to supplement our pantry with locally grown produce while the prices are cheap.  Just ask at any farmer’s market for a box of “canners” and you may get 25 pounds of good tomatoes for less and 50 cents per pound.  Act quickly and try the recipe for sauce I’ll include in this post.

In our city garden, I’ve actually harvested slicing tomatoes for the first time in a few years. It took some ingenuity and expense to surround the containers with hardware cloth and put a little chicken wire on top, but so far the squirrels are not eating the tomatoes: we are.  We’ll repeat that process on a larger scale next year, and although one ground hog died on a fiendishly hot day in one of my live traps, and two raccoons (likely rabid) and one fox (definitely rabid) had to be shot in the country, I’ve let the animals win this year until I put in better fencing.  They need the food, in any case, in the ongoing drought.

Rain barrels have been our garden-savers this year. We have about 170 gallons of capacity in town, so we can be lavish enough to water ornamentals as well as food.  Our basil and parsley have been welcome companions on our table, especially for Lebanese dishes like tabouli and the weekly pesto night.

All of these simply pleasures locally, despite the sickly heat and dry soil, come against the denouement in the Gulf as BP claims to have the situation at the Deep Water Horizon under control.  Let’s hope so, and even more importantly, let’s hope the public has a longer memory for this disaster than it did for Katrina or Prince William Sound.

While we cannot individually stop the flow of oil, we can, as individuals and families, learn from our gardens and lean on them, too. My advice in this post focuses on talking stock of where we live as the time of oil depletion approaches and making stock, in the form of a lowly tomato sauce, to get us through the dark half of the year.

A Vision of Transformation: A trip to the Short Pump area (I get there about once per year) showed me both the foolishness of our past practices and an odd hope. In a time when cars will be nigh impossible to operate, the “Towne Center” of such shopping malls may actually become just that. The sidewalks are already there, and multi-lane roads beg to become bikeways. As a locus for local production, the old commercial buildings will host workshops for making things, stages for cultural events, a farmer’s market, and a range of businesses selling with a post-oil economy will need: crafted metal, simple tools, salvaged electronics, locally crafted furniture. People will walk there or use whatever public transit emerges with the end of cheap oil.  It need not look shabby, like some half-wrecked Roman forum of the 6th Century. The artisans among us will have to bring forth new beauty and the craftsmen will build upon the bones of our 20th Century civilization.

Enough of the land remains unpaved around this particular suburban nexus to revert to farmland and feed a village-in-the-making. Will live theater come to the old cinema complex? Will live music be performed where piped-in music now plays? I think it will in some places, after a terrible time when the American Dream of Hyper-consumption gives way to a local and sustainable reality.

What happens at your suburb, city neighborhood, or small town will be up to you and those you know. Get to know them now.  And give thanks to the Goddess who spun the galaxies and, to me, left the rest in our hands, by using your hands joyfully to put away some of the harvest. Feed some neighbors, and they’ll be more likely to remember your name and be there to help if you ever need it (and we all will).

The recipe that follows uses many ingredients you can grow yourself or find from a local grower without too much difficulty. Making your own sauce and canning it, something our grandparents took for granted, can become a subversive and spiritually rewarding act.

Burdock’s Tomato Sauce

  • 10 pounds tomatoes, cut into eighths
  • 1 large onion, chopped medium to small
  • 10 sweet Italian peppers or 2 bell peppers, chopped small
  • 1 tsp dry hot pepper (optional)
  • 1/2 cup dry basil (whole leaves stripped from stems)
  • 1 tsp oregano (whole leaves stripped from stems)
  • 1/4 cup honey (dark honey like buckwheat or sourwood are superb)
  • 1 tbsp salt
  • 1 tsp black pepper
  • 6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped (or more, you nuts!)
  • 1 tbsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp allspice

Add tomatoes to heavy saucepan. Press down with potato masher to make juice. Grind basil and oregano in a spice grinder or in batches between your palms and add to tomatoes. Add other ingredients, stir, and bring to boil.  Reduce heat to simmer, stir occasionally, and cook 2-3 hours (or more, depending on your stove) until sauce is thick and not watery.

Serve as-is over pasta or with sauteed okra, sausage, beef (cubed or ground) or cubed lamb, depending on your intentions. This sauce works great with Middle-Eastern dishes (use lamb), over pasta or gnocchi, or over rice.

Add meat (optional), pintos and kidney beans, plus chili powder (1 tbsp per gallon of saurce), plus a square of unsweetened baker’s chocolate,  to make delicious chili.

Canning Advice (and Philosophy):

The sauce can be canned; I put away at least a gallon every summer to get us through the winter. I add more salt to each pint or quart (usually 1 tsp canning or kosher salt per quart).

I use a pressure cooker because of the peppers and onions.  In fact, except for tomatoes and a few high-acid or pickled foods, I use the pressure cooker for everything, though I’m going to dry some figs this year as a first step in learning how to dehydrate fruit.

While a good canning pressure cooker seems expensive, ours has paid for itself after three years. Don’t use your cooking pot; it lacks the crucial pressure gauge.

A warning on canning: it is not an art. It is a science. Bacteria do not care one iota about your sacred or secular intentions.

Check your canner’s instructions or the USDA’s publications found at U Georgia’s site on preserving food . When using books, follow modern recipes online or in excellent books such as Susann Geiskopf-Hadler’s Putting it up with Honey (about all sorts of canning, not just with honey). Do not go by granny’s recipe or a 1950 cookbook. We know more today about the pathogens in fresh food, and the experts have changed processing times for both the boiling-water and pressure-cooker methods.

Canning like an artiste may result in a lingering and painful illness, if not death.

That fear may be why so many folks look at me as if something were growing from my head when I say “I’m doing my canning now.” They wonder why we don’t spend hundreds on a chest freezer or just go to the store.  One power failure ends the bounty of a freezer, and I can only imagine the expense of buying so much sauce, pickles, and veggies in winter. Besides, they’d not bring the pleasure or flavor of what we grew ourselves.

And, damn it, I make a statement, with every pint or quart jar, about my choices in a crazy society based on debt-driven consumption.

My pantry is my hope in a better future, as well as an insurance policy in case the lights flicker and go out for a while.

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Of Oil: Glory Days, Chaos, Community

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

It’s hard to realize that we live in a time of decline. I don’t mean the temporary decline in our employment levels. I mean the decline of a nation that still considers itself the greatest power ever to stride the earth.  I mean the end of American primacy.

We’ll recall the Deepwater Horizon spill as a punctuation mark in an ongoing story that, in my mind, began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy but included events as disparate was the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the 2000 election, the oil embargos of the 1970s, the resignation of Richard Nixon, Woodstock and other monuments to the 60s Counterculture, the backward thinking of a resurgent New Right, the rise of anti-scientific thinking at home and apocalyptic fundamentalism in the Middle East.  Our victories in this era were signal and I hope they will endure: the women’s, civil rights, and environmental movements.

But the punctuation mark that sticks with me most over the years is the Apollo 17 moon landing.

Why that mission? Its commander, Gene Cernan, has said as much on several occasions, but it marked the end of America as explorer.  It saddened me as a kid, and it still does. I was 12 then, but I felt that the glory days were over. We’ve never gone out so far with human beings again, and I doubt we will in the sort of civilization we now have. While the moon landings may have spent too much money on what could have been done cheaply with robots, they provided me and many others with a sense of wonder, a look above events on a very troubled horizon, one that has only become more troubled since 1972.

What we live through now may not be the long-predicted “Decline of the West,” but it may be “the rise of the rest” as America’s and many European economies come to terms with living far beyond our means, at both the governmental and personal levels.  It’s going to be hard to claw our way back to Kennedy-era prosperity without cheap and easily extracted oil, and if you’ve been following my and others’ writing about oil depletion, you know that those days, like tail-fins or moon landings, are relics of our national glory days.

When oil drilling begins in the Gulf again–and it will–the anti-environmental Right will forget the killed animals, lost jobs in fishing, the soiled coasts. It will be “drill here, drill now, pay less” again, even though those who place those stickers on their bumpers take it on faith that enough oil can be gotten if only we forget about Mother Earth. It’s doubly ironic that they won’t make any leap of faith to see the realities of climate change, even though that is backed by good science and the evidence of our senses. Scientists are to be trusted only when they confirm what we already believe.

I predict we’ll see a time of chaos, even worse leadership than we have seen, and shattered hopes until those in denial about the glory days fade from view–the Right is old, after all–or change their hearts.

That time will call upon us to build communities like never before. No one who is unconnected to others will have the spiritual resources, let alone the financial and material ones, to weather the rapid decline of our society into something that looks more like the 1890s, or if we are lucky, 1930s, technologically. I figure we’ll have survivals of high technology such as local electrical grids, locally made fuels, and, I hope, Internet connectivity to remind of that another world exists over the next range of hills.

Now that Deep Water Horizon is capped, one hopes forever, it’s time to take stock of our pantries and our circles of friends.  My spouse has been, in her quiet way, preparing our “hurricane pantry” for a longer time without trips to the grocery store. We work with a few very skilled and talented friends to prepare retirement land in the country, and we hope to find community there, and in our walkable and sensibly designed urban area, when a long motor trip will be a luxury to be done once a month.

Food is all around us now at the time of first harvests, so in my next post I’ll dedicate a more upbeat column to harvesting and storing food without refrigeration. That’s a skill each of us should have.

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Of Oil: What I Learned from a Ginkgo Tree

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

As the disaster drags on in the Gulf, complicated by the start of the hurricane season, it’s easy to grow despondent. Our species can act so stupidly, and on Independence Day I don’t feel independent.  In America we’ve chained ourselves to a way of life utterly dependent upon the passenger car. And while I really enjoy cars and driving, I don’t enjoy the more quotidian uses of the vehicles for most Americans: commuting and running errands.  In fact, those activities, to me, take the fun out of being behind a steering wheel.

The nation won’t give up its motorcars easily or painlessly. Imagine your own life without access to a car; many of us live far enough from shopping, schools, and our places of worship to quickly elevate vague concern to active alarm. Then imagine the US Southeast without readily available air conditioning, from a series of brownouts or an aging electrical grid.

Our entire civilization is one oil crisis away from something I cannot predict, though many writers I admire have given this a try. The best treatment of such a world–and by far not a bleak one–is James Howard Kunstler’s fine novel World Made by Hand. The folks in his fictional Union Grove, NY make do. They get by. They’ve learned something we soft Americans have forgotten.

In my last post, I noted a few simple things we all can do as we prepare for what I believe will be a time of privation and uncertainty. I don’t know that my advice implies a philosophical stance, and while I might turn to Marcus Aurelius or the Taoists for the fine expressions of Stoicism, I need only look out the window. That’s where I see a Ginkgo tree.

In the spring, the city planted a Ginkgo biloba across the street from us. The home owners are new to gardening and lack proper tools for tending their yard in very dry weather. I volunteered to do a deep-watering treatment with a watering probe, something that saved a few saplings of mine over the years.  The neighbors knew they were going to lose their shade tree, so they were happy to have my help. Now the little tree should live–one hopes, in this awful heat–to adulthood in a city with a climate markedly warmer from today’s.

Facing climate change and the looming end of cheap oil, I stare at the little tree. If you don’t know about the Ginkgo, do some research. It’s a living fossil, as shown in the photo a plant common in the Eocene Era, a period of time stretching from 56 to 34 million years ago. That era ended with massive extinctions caused by impacts of meteorites, one of them in the Chesapeake Bay.

And the Ginkgo survived it. In fact, it’s a tree ideal for the disturbed soils, dirty air, and baked conditions of cities. It has no other living relatives on Darwin’s Tree of Life. It comes down the eons to us intact.

Whenever I see the fanlike leaves, identical to those leaves browsed by the first mammals on our planet, I take a very deep breath. I’m in the company of Deep Time, the sort denied by the fearful and overly literal of our time. Yes, the Earth is many many times older than the 6,000 or 10,000 years they claim. And the Earth will be here after 2012 and the Apocalypse of those who misread the meaning of the Mayan calendar.

For these reasons, the Ginkgo gently mocks us. It will be here if we bake the world and our civilization vanishes.  What if we hairless apes could be so persistent? What if we could adapt to changing conditions and live down the eons gracefully?

That’s our challenge as the oil gushes from the ocean floor and the temperatures soar. I don’t know what our specific “Ginkgo Strategy” should be, but in the end, the tree reminds me that survival is not only possible but inevitable for those who can adapt.

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