A Living Magazine - Tap Root: Days 300 to 306 - The Difference a Week Makes

The weather has been fantastic for the last week. Bright, high sunshine was present for nearly every day except one. I am loving being on my land again, and finally, it is a visceral sensation of feeling at home.

I'm only 1 month away from my first year anniversary of purchasing the land. Only 2 years left after July 21st. For anyone with a reliable income, this would be paradise. Even for me, it comes close. But the delights of paradise on earth must await the ending of my constant dragging anxiety about money. I have the most incredibly small budget possible - practically nothing - but never have enough to feel secure. I feel like this will be rectified this year somehow. I have a writing job coming up, just as my tutoring is now over. And, I also have the tantalizing prospect of publishing my first book (which is finished and ready to go), if I can just make a bit more over living expenses. 

It is all just a long distance walk. I am in the middle of the rough route, taking each uncertain step forward toward the next town. I want so badly for the walk to be over. I can imagine the rest and comfort of a the temporary respite in that next town, but it is still so many miles away... This is how I look at the reaching-for-a-goal aspect of starving in order to someday eat securely. As I write this it is the first day of my latest involuntary fasting. Coffee helps.

View of the walk down Weeks Mills Road on the way into town.

My thing to buy when I have very little money is a chicken quarter, or ground pork. Tranten's Grocery has them packaged for under a dollar, nearly every day. One evening, after having gone without anything to eat during the day, I realized I had to eat the rest of my pork. It was only about a quarter pound, but I had some angel hair pasta, carrots, and half an onion to add too. Thankfully some wild edibles also grow all around my land. I had been picking spruce tips to bag for snacks around the yard. There are plenty of dandelion greens, violets and their greens, and I always fill a bag with apple, cherry and rose blossoms to add to a salad. But the greatest discovery of all was what are called, "live-forevers" (Sedum purpureum), a succulent available for three seasons. It's a delicious and bountiful plant. I have them all over the place. The taste is something like a mixture of green beans and spinach. It is not very bitter, being much less so than wild lettuce. Fresh, it retains its full bodied form, but when cooked it loses water and shrinks a bit, like spinach. Anyway, I add it to just about everything now and liberally chomp away on it while working around the yard...

Dandelion greens.

Violets and violet greens.

Live-forevers.

Getting back to my meal preparation, I made meat balls by adding some salt to the pork, forming the balls and then cooking them in the chicken grease I had saved. Then I diced up onions, carrots, dandelion greens, and live-forevers, cooked them in a curry powder, and set it all aside, while I boiled the angel hair...

When the pasta was done, I plated it, then placed the meatballs on top, scooped out the veggies to cover the meat balls and garnished with a few violets. Definitely looked nice, and tasted even better than it looked... 

My good friend Jason visited the next day. It was great to see him and we always have a good time going around town and doing the errands I am not able to do without a car. I spent the rest of my money on stuff to make the green house... Total? $20. But I was determined to make that investment go as far as it could.

Sometimes people think my whole thing is about choosing not to spend money and doing everything myself. But that is FAR from the truth. If I could, I would invest in more conventional things that would help develop this property. It is maddening to need a simple greenhouse and have only $20 to spend (and that is by sacrificing a few meals too). Still, I knew that if it could be constructed, a greenhouse would open up my options for growing food. Paying it forward can mean skipping today's meal for tomorrow's bounty--or so goes the theory.

Nevertheless, I was able to purchase 2, 3 mm clear poly sheets of 250 square feet each at Reny's for $6.99 each. I spent that evening and the next day wrapping what I could around the greenhouse. It was just in time too, since it was due to rain that night. I attached the pipe and filter (shown and mentioned in the last post) to the barrel, hooking it to a temporary (until I can make something better) funnel from the edge of the greenhouse roof. Just as I finished the first drops of rain began to fall. But that didn't stop me from getting a picture of the whole set up from every possible angle...

Greenhouse water barrel, set to go.

Not bad! Hard to believe that $14 worth of material could make such a relatively large greenhouse-shelter. It may be only 100 square feet, but shelving and hanging plants (like tomatoes and cucumbers) is especially possible, since the height of the roof is 10 of the high side and 8 feet on the lower side. This makes for an enormous amount of vertical space. With this, it is about volume...

I also wanted to see how the greenhouse looked with the rest of the structures...

I was glad that it din't look way out of place. I could imagine expanding the plastic to cover other parts of the log structures I made last year. But it will have to be a little at a time. I wasn't even sure how well I could grow things yet, so that needed to be the next focus.

I reinforced my work/cooking area, adding another tarp over it all to make it waterproof.

Before the rain really started, I had a chance to rope off a special part of the yard.

Someday, I'd like to put a little "Temple to the Spark" inside the inner area,

plant an apple tree there, and graft as many different kinds of apples as I can onto it.

That night there were steady showers until dawn. It was a bit disappointing, because I didn't think there would be much water collected in the greenhouse barrel. I looked, and sure enough, only about 5 gallons had been harvested. But that was better than nothing! It would be just enough to water the veggies I was just about to plant. 

The water was tea-brown from the hop hornbeam tree flowers that had been loosened by the rain and fallen everywhere. Later in the summer the water will be clearer. But my coming garden didn't care. First I planted red onions just outside the greenhouse, since theoretically they can take the elements. Then, inside the greenhouse, I arranged my seedling radishes and black seed lettuce. Finally, I created a bed for the two types of carrots I have...

Red onions.

Radish containers on the left and lettuce containers on the right.

Two different carrots, left and right.

In only a week I had gone from setting up the 5 basics for modern human survival mentioned in the last post, to now implementing the plan. I had made no extra money. I only used the last of the money I had in the most efficient way I could to get the biggest bang for my buck. 

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