Summer Choices
July 31, 2012
Tags: radical homemaking, sustainable agriculture, family farming, Tuesday Post
Rain has fallen here nearly every day for the past week, offering welcome refreshment from this summer’s drought. Several hours of steady deluge Sunday had serious implications indoors. Comforters, blankets and pillow cases were pulled from the beds, sheets were stripped, towels yanked from the racks, backed-up laundry dumped from an over-filled hamper, and the bathroom filled with mountains of fleece and fiber queued up for a long over-do rendez-vous with the washing machine. We washed the dog beds, we washed the dogs, we washed the kids.
Everyone around here made choices this summer to cope with the drought. Potted summer annuals were left to wilt, the sound of lawn mowers became non-existant, folks thought twice before flushing. In our house, we made choices, too. Laundry was limited to only the most essential clothing. We bathed in the farm pond and filled bottles if we were running the tap awaiting hot water for washing up. We slapped an old toilet seat onto a 5 gallon pail, put it just outside the screen porch and explained to the girls that they should only use the indoor bathroom for solids. Everything else was collected for nitrogen fertilizer.
Households had to decide what was most important. For some, flushing and hot water for bathing took precedence. At the farm, priority went to the livestock and the vegetable garden. At our house, we chose to irrigate our fruit — to allow our young blueberry bushes to have a full season of growth, to watch the grapes plump up in the dappled summer light beneath their lush foliage, to enable the raspberries to fill with sweet juice as they ripened under the constant summer sun.
And yet, Bob and I hardly eat any fruit. We sell a little surplus at our farmers’ market, but the proceeds are minimal and would be easy to forego. Common sense might suggest that we should have enjoyed a nice hot bath and a flushing toilet with that water instead.
But we didn’t begin growing fruit for the financial profits. We wanted to create habitat that would support Bob’s honeybees. But more importantly, we wanted to have something valuable to offer in our small community for exchange. …..
The remainder of this essay has been removed for editing and inclusion in Shannon’s forthcoming book, From Here.
Comments
July 31, 2012 10:08 AM EDT
Comment? — Simply to bow to you for your blog, your open-ness; integrity; hard work; community spirit; and opting for the bees.
Gratefully
Woodstock, NY
– jude asphar
July 31, 2012 5:26 PM EDT
What a wonderful system! We are experiencing a record drought here in Canada too – we smashed the previous record from 1932!
– Grammomsblog
July 31, 2012 11:20 PM EDT
I commend your efforts and community mindedness! Even though the City hasn’t enforced water restrictions here in years I always keep a 5 gallon bucket in the tub in the summer to catch the cold water while waiting for the hot to come in so I can water my flowers out front until monsoons arrive 🙂
– Chelsie
August 1, 2012 7:35 AM EDT
The weather we see outside our windows is the result of a warmer atmosphere and climate change. This has been brought about by the millions of small instances where we release greenhouse gases into the environment. Since we have no coherent plan to reverse those impacts in place, we can all expect to develop coping strategies to adjust our lives to new weather patterns. Local food, household and community resilience are key areas to focus on. In Colorado where we live, after a long string of record high temperatures since 2002, we have just had the hottest month (July) ever recorded.
– Luther Green
August 1, 2012 7:32 PM EDT
A small contribution, but in the hot weather, when the air-conditioner is pumpin’ away, we collect the water that drips out of the back of it in the watering cans to drench the potted plants on the porches.Every drop counts-
– Kate Jocelyn
August 18, 2012 1:39 AM EDT
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