Track 16: Rocks (but not rolls)

I'm at Starbucks again. I know, I know! But I honestly think it's the only coffee shop in this whole area (and I'm still able to pick up a mystery wi-fi network). And I didn't feel like sitting in my car this afternoon. The sun is too hot. Are you jealous? You should be. But then, think of me in my trailer when it's in the 40's tonight. The trailer that's situated under a tree that drops acorns that hit the metal roof with a nice little bang and then roll down the length of the roof.

So this week involved a lot of tedious physical labor. We did some more trail maintenance (last week's scratches hadn't healed yet), and then we started collecting rocks to make raised beds in the garden. This involved picking up the rocks (all around the size of a large grapefruit) in the woods, carrying an armful to the wheelbarrow, wheeling the wheelbarrow to the tractor, placing all the rocks into the bucket of the tractor, following the tractor to the garden, watching the rocks be dumped out, loading up the wheelbarrow again, wheeling the wheelbarrow to the bed being built, and building a mini wall around the bed. The beds are about 40 inches wide and 30 to 40 feet long. Then we covered the onions and garlic that are starting to come up already (always exciting!) with hay, and covered that with plastic mesh to keep the chickens and guineas from digging stuff up. We did a lot of digging this week too. My back is saying, "WTF?! First you make me sit in a chair all day long, and now you subject me to all this lifting and shoveling and raking! And sleeping on a bad mattress! This is crap!" Ah, I love imagining things my body says to me. My biceps are also saying, "Dude, rock on! I knew you hadn't given up on us."

Anyway, having Delite come to visit was awesome. We both said, several times, "This is crazy! We're both in California!" She's heading back to the midwest in a couple weeks, but hopefully I'll get down to Ceres to see the Heifer International educational center where she's volunteering.

Currently, I'm reading the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (the author of The Poisonwood Bible and many other good books). She writes about moving her family from Arizona to a small farm in Virginia and their experiment with eating only local food for a year. The books contains more than their story, however, and I'm learning so much about food production and its history. There are a few facts I want to share:

• "If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels."
• "U.S. consumption of 'added fats' has increased by one-third since 1975, and our HFCS [high-fructose corn syrup] is up by 1000 percent. About a third of all our calories now come from what is known, by community consent, as junk food."
• "It's hard to reduce our modern complex of food choices to unifying principles, but this is one that generally works: eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the body."

This book is so good, everyone. We should ALL be thinking about where our food comes from and what we're putting in our bodies. I'm not even talking about organic food. Another book that's on my list is The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which, if I'm not mistaken, makes the argument that eating a non-organic meal from a local source is actually better than eating an organic meal that's been shipped across the country. We're so disconnected with the natural rhythm of food production and what's in season. Just go to the nearest farmers market, buy something that was harvested that day or the day before, and make a meal out of it. Trust me, it'll be so fresh and delicious.

Okay, enough of my soap box. I hope everyone had a delightfully spooky Halloween!