Here There Be Hares

from Avalus,

more photos from my way to and from work, this time it is all about hares. They languish in the fields in the morning and the evening.  They are also clearly uncomfortable about people stopping to take pictures from 20 m away. With their brown fur, they are pretty hard to spot if they don’t move.

Hare 1 ©Avalus, all rights reserved

Hare 2 ©Avalus, all rights reserved

And for comparisons sake a rabbit. Note the much smaller ears.

Fun fact: In German the ears of hares and rabbits are called “Löffel” which means spoons.

Rabbit ©Avalus, all rights reserved

The Art of …

The Art of Book Design is changing. I’ve become bored with just books, and there are lots of other things I’d like to explore and share with you. So, I’ve decided to turn the basic concept into a daily surprise. The title is being shortened to simply The Art of …, and I’ll post a daily something art-related. If you want to know what that something is, then you’ll have to tune us in. There will still be books, but also posters, fine art, folk art, sculpture, architecture, museums, and anything else that piques my interest. I’m starting the series with an Indigenous artist whose work I enjoy.

So today it’s The Art of… Tony Abeyta

Stormy River Bend by Tony Abeyta. Image courtesy of tonyabeyta.com

 

 

Where in the World are Voyager and Jack

Bubba takes a dip in the murky creek ©voyager, all rights reserved

Here we are, at home like most people during the pandemic, but it’s been a tough summer for Jack. He hasn’t coped well with the heat, and many days he was only up for short walks down the street very early in the morning or late at night. Usually, we spend the summer on the east coast where it is cooler and Jack can swim every day. These humid and hot Ontario summers don’t agree with him. Or me.

Also, the past few weeks have been very busy for me. I’ve been organizing my pantry (a cupboard in the basement) and my freezer (also in the basement – I’m up and down as often as a new bride’s nightie) in preparation for the second wave, which is already starting slowly. The Globe and Mail said this morning that our curve is no longer flattening and are blaming “pandemic fatigue.” Great, just as our public schools are due to open next week. They are combining on-line learning with in-class and are staggering school days. One half goes Monday, Tuesday and the other half Wednesday to Friday, then switch back and forth. Masks are mandatory at all times. It’s a plan, but none of the teachers I talk to are feeling confident, and neither is the public. So, I’m putting us in lock-down until the end of October and possibly longer than that. Mr. V has a bad heart, so we can’t afford to take chances. I have until the end of this week to double-check the plan and shop for any gaps. After that, I won’t be going out except to the mailbox and to walk Jack. Socially distant visits with friends will be outdoors only.

The good news is that it’s cooler and Jack can get out every day. Some days, he still wants only a short walk, and now that he’s 12, I don’t push him. On those days, we take 3 or 4 shorter walks just to the end of the street and back, and he seems content. Most days, though, Jack still likes a bit of adventure, and in the cooler weather, he can make it all the way around his favourite trail in the woods. That’s the Fairy Woods, which brings me to a piece of news. Jack’s Walk will now be only Jack’s Walk. Any fairy stories that find us will be posted under a new title – Tails in the Wee Woods. With that change, we’ve decided to go back to posting Monday to Friday. We’ve had a lovely break, but it’s time to get things back to normal.

This labour day, I’d like to send a good word out to Giliell, who is back to school in these uncertain times. Stay safe, my friend. That message goes out to the rest of you, too. Stay safely vigilant and don’t give in to “pandemic fatigue.” Here at Jack’s Walk, it will always be a safe place to come and take a deep breath.

Oh My Potato!

There is a lot of talk about sustainability and growing your own food etcetera. So I wish to share this year’s results of our efforts in this regard, specifically potatoes.

In the spring we bought 20 kg of potatoes for about 40 € including shipping. We planted them to a patch approximately 40-50 square meters and now my father has great fun harvesting them.

Typical potatoes, ones that go into the cellar for storage look like this.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Then there is also a lot of “beads” which are very small potatoes, and a lot of potatoes that are damaged by weeds, slugs, bugs etc. Those need to be consumed first. But this year it looks like we do get reasonable amount of big potatoes in good condition. And whilst the saying in Czech goes “Čím hloupější sedlák, tím větší brambory” (“The dafter the peasant, the bigger his potatoes”), I think that saying just reflects the enviousness in human nature. Because getting reasonably big potatoes, regularly, is not easy.

The main problem with potatoes is that they need light, humous soil, and the soil in our garden is more like heavy clay. In the vegetable patch, it is a lot better, because that soil is a result of careful cultivation over several decades of tilling the clay with compost, manure, wood ash, and fertilizer. Still, it is far from ideal and way too sticky. So this year I have tried to improve the soil further by adding a lot of organic material directly around the potatoes during planting, specifically crushed reed stalks from my sewage water treatment facility. It seems to have helped – a few plants were planted without the reed stalks and their potatoes were visibly smaller. Also, the soil with the crushed reed is easier to tilt and falls easier apart. So it seems I have a use for the reed stalks, which until now were a waste-product.

But even without those, each year when we grow potatoes, there are outliers like this ca. 500 g (>1 pound) specimen.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Pieces like these bring great joy to my father, who currently really has fun with garden fork tilling the patch and getting the potatoes out. We have a small tractor, but my mother has urged me not to use it and leave my father to do the work manually – he needs the exercise and enjoys doing it. And although he impales some potatoes on the fork, the damage is smaller than the plow would do. For example, this 950 g specimen got impaled and needs to be eaten asap, but a plow would probably just cut it in half.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Well, that one is really an outlier. It can feed the whole family for a day. It would be great if they were all like that, but that is alas unattainable.

Ok, enough bragging and back to the sustainability issue and soil care a bit.

We have planted circa 200 plants. We get at least 120 kg of potatoes from it, so on average 600 g from each plant. That means we could, theoretically, set aside 20 kg for next year and still have 100 kg to eat. So how does that help us re: self-sustainability? It is just about 600 g of potatoes per week per person in our household, so two-three servings. That is a lot, being a significant money saver. But it still does not bring us anywhere near to being self-reliant.

The first obstacle to that is of course the sheer amount of land needed for true self-reliance. I almost have the land, but the soil quality on most of it is very poor and it would take years of back-breaking work to bring it up to scratch with the vegetable patch.*

The second obstacle are nutrients. Potatoes have about the highest yield per area of all crops that I can grow here, but they also deplete the soil of nutrients really, really fast, and can destroy it. I do not need to go too far to see a real-life example of this – my neighbor does not make compost, does not take care of her vegetable patch the way we do, and she did grow potatoes always in the same spot for many years. The soil got sour, and the potatoes were getting so small it was not worth the effort anymore.

The third obstacle is pests and diseases. We solve this problem by twofold approach – we spray the potatoes against mold and beetles, and we only grow them every second year. It seems to work out well, but should we try to be self-reliant, it would double the needed land again. We alternate them with onions, pumpkins, and legumes, which also produce reasonable harvests, but nowhere near to be significant on the same amount of land. Alternating the crops also reduces the amount of pesticides we use, since onions and legumes do not need to be treated.

The fourth obstacle is the sheer amount of work needed. My father does most of it, with me only doing the most difficult parts like plowing, and it takes a lot of time and effort throughout the year. To feed all three of us that effort would be tenfold.

This makes me highly skeptical about growing your food on the windowsill or front porch. But even so, I think it is a great idea to plant some vegetables in pots on your windowsill or front porch if you can, just do not expect any wonders regarding the amount you will get.

What you can expect though, is great taste. Supermarket bought vegetables cannot hold a candle to anything you grow by yourself.

  • The poor soil quality around here is one of the main reasons why many fields were converted to pastures and meadows after the Iron Curtain has fallen.

Mind your Words: Why mainstream journalism often fails us all

Maybe you heard it, but last weekend there was a demonstration of Nazis and people who march with Nazis (esotherics, anti-vaxxers, naturopaths, …) in Berlin. Beforehand there was lots of discussions and an attempt to ban the whole thing because the last time they ignored all the hygiene rules meant to keep Covid from spreading, but a court overturned the ban, because the organisers had promised, pinky swear, that this time they’d follow them, which just proves that Germany is a totalitarian dictatorship where a court will guarantee your right to free speech.

Of course the whole thing ended as foreseen: Distances and mask regulations were ignored and police ordered them to stop, but miraculously all the water throwers they have whenever some schoolkids protest climate change as well as the riot police that was all too present for the BLM protests seemed to be unavailable (well, they probably needed a day off because in order to participate in the protest). The whole thing culminated in a disgraceful “storm on the Reichstag”, where a whole lot of three police officers were charged with protecting the building. The images of people raising the Reichsflagge (long considered the legal substitute for the illegal swastika flag) in front of the parliament obviously shocked mainstream politicians more  than Nazis murdering people, but that’s a topic for another day.

Personally I’ve been wondering what those people thought would happen if they manage to go inside? Did they think both federal and state governments would just shrug, say “you won” and abdicate? What would they have done once the snack machines were emptied? Anyway, this is just the background to my actual topic: How journalists use words as if they’d never gone to school.

Throughout mainstream journalism they never said “Nazis”, “fascists”, or even “right wing protestors”. They took great care to explain that there were also the people who are not Nazis but who sure have no problem marching with them (or as I refer to them: the people who are running the trains to Auschwitz and the people who are just making sure that those trains are running on time). Instead they used the nonsensical “Corona opponents”, “Corona protestors” and “Corona critics” as if that makes any fucking sense? Like, who isn’t opposed to Corona? Have you ever met somebody who says: “having a deadly pandemic is sure cool shit”? And what does a virus care about your criticism or protest? It’s not a sentient being and much like the people in those protests it can’t be reasoned or argued with. It’s more absurd than Dadaism and waiting for Godot combined with a good measure of Ulysses thrown into the mix as a means for communicating factual information. It makes those people look like having a legitimate cause instead of bloody fascists who want to kill their opponents, who publicly say so, and actually do so.

Card Weaving

kestrel is graciously sharing her woven artwork with us, and she’s taken the time to teach us about how this type of weaving is done. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s fascinating.

 

Card weaving (or tablet weaving as it’s also called) is a very ancient craft going back quite a ways. A very wonderful find was the Oseberg ship with two women buried in it. Among the many textiles found, there was also a loom with the warp still attached to the weaving cards. However historians believe card weaving is much older than this 9th century find. Card weaving was a technique people used to create very strong and sturdy as well as ornamental bands. Some of the very ornamental bands seen in religious textiles were created this way. 

 

Although I used to weave quite a lot, for whatever reason, I had never tried card weaving. I’d had to give up weaving (there was no room for my very large loom and I had to sell it) but recently I decided I wanted to weave again. My big loom was gone, but you don’t need much to do card weaving. 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

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