SUMMER HOME

Our plans are on schedule for using our land in S.D. We have found a place to hang our hats, a second home if you will, and have begun the process of sorting our possessions to ensure that both homes are habitable. Since there are no buildings on the quarter of land in Dewey county, we feel this is a way to transition.

Isn't it amazing how much "stuff" one accumulates during a lifetime of raising a family?

SEAT ME NEXT TO THE IRRITATING TALKER PLEASE

Really, don't ever seat me next to a quiet staring person on a day long bus trip. I want to know what he's thinking.

If you have a good sense of humor, an irritating talker is fodder for a lot of laughs, while a quiet starer can only only cause intense discomfort.

SEATTLE

An exerpt from Seattle says it all:

" The bluest skies, you've ever seen are in Seattle,
And the hills the greenest green in Seattle.
Like a beautiful child, growing up free and wild in Seattle."

I love a song entitled "Seattle" originally recorded by Perry Como, because it so accurately describes the pristine beauty of the Pacific Northwest, and the feelings we Seattleites and Washitonians have for our beloved Emerald City.

SONGS TO HELP YOU THROUGH A BREAKUP

It's Over by Roy Orbison

FOUR STRONG WINDS by Bobby Bare

OVER FISHING IS THREATENING OUR MARINE ECOSYSTEMS

Just want to share an article received from Natural News, which features an interview by it's editor, Mike Adams with Dr. Boris Worm, Marine Biologist.

The interview delves into the topic of over fishing, and the impact commercial fishing has on the world's oceans. Links are provided to Dr. Worm's peer reviewed paper published in Science, entitled Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem.

The message and dire warning is posted in the following exerpt:

"The plundering of the world's seafood populations is not sustainable."

Please take time to read and download :http://www.naturalnews.com/025818.html

This site provides links to Natural News and many articles regarding sustainable agriculture and fishing.

Link: http://www.naturalnews.com/025818.html

VICTORY GARDENS WOULD SET THIS COUNTRY STRAIGHT

Enfield Victory Garden by greenbk

MY FIRST JOB, FOOD SERVICE

I thought I was in hog heaven when I was hired as a car hop at the age of fifteen at Krause's Drive Inn in Mobridge SD.

I turned down another job for more money to work there at less than $1.00 an hour, but it was a job I truely enjoyed. We laughed a lot.

Mr and Mrs Krause were kind employers, and the atmosphere was upbeat and harmonious.

My perception of the 'perks" was food at 1/2 price and an outside bench with an eagle's eye view of the 'action' in the small SD town on balmy warm summer nights.

We car hops knew what guys were in town, who was with whom, and even the county they came from because it was displayed in numerical form on the license plates.

We started each shift with $20.00 in our aprons and it quickly became a priority to count change very well, because at the end of the day the twenty went back to Krauses and anything over that amount was tips.
I counted change in my sleep for awhile.

Last summer I enjoyed volunteering at a little food stand and counting change again. It was fun all over again, even after all these years. It was a kick, not the same rush as back then, but fun, definitely fun.

CHORES

For the past few days I have forced myself to put off pleasurable pursuits, (such as blogging and playing on facebook) until several household tasks are completed. The dreaded dish washing task and kitchen cleaning must be done first and then a planned list of projects follows.

Today it was window washing. Yesterday it was bread baking and ice cream making. Yes, we had home made ice cream last night and it was very good. It was made from a Waring Ice Cream Parlor found at a thrift shop.

The recipe is from allrecipes.com and has a five star rating. Flavor for our first attempt was cinnamon and vanilla. It turned out so well that we will be making ice cream again, and trying new flavors, such as fresh strawberry, cherry and walnut banana. Can't wait for the grand-kids to come and share this adventure.

Somehow, making food from scratch lifts my spirits, and lends a sense of achieving a goal. The central driving force, (call it a passion), and motivation is the reaching for something that has been lost to many of us, a wholesome, natural, self sustained lifestyle.

I like to know what's in the food that is placed before my family and friends. Preservatives, additives, contaminants are to be avoided, and whole grains and organic produce provided.

Ideally, home grown produce is the answer, and/or buying locally from organic farmers.

Google organic produce, and put in your zip code and you will find a list of growers in your area that are certified organic. Link is: www.localharvest.org.

Other links of note are: www.grinningplanet.com and www.consumer reports.org/cro/food/diet/nutrition/organic products/.

A local (Western Washington) grower that provides home delivery is Terra Organics, located in Enamclaw, WA. We have enjoyed their produce very much.

DON'T SAY DITN'T AROUND ME...

ditn't
Ditn't and it's close relative coutn't are annoying mispronunciations of simple words. Example: I ditn't go to the opera because I coutn't get out of bed.

MY FAVORITE LINE IS FROM FIELD OF DREAMS

Build it and they will come.

I'M TURNING INTO MY PARENTS

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, I am my mother after all.

My dear old Mum can't throw much of anything away, and this tendency has been passed along to several of her children, myself included.

That's why I fight a natural leaning toward hoarding. There's always that 'some day ' logic. Some day we may need to use that old appliance, or someday I will be able to wear that suit again.

My sibs and I recognize this is a flaw and even a curse, but dealing with it is another story. It's a constant battle.

Some of us are aware that hoarding and collecting can be problematic, and others are not. Some may enjoy having large collections of knick-nacks, and other treasures, and find happiness in looking at them. That's OK. I'm thinking more of the things that no longer matter, things that have no purpose, items taking up space.

I am of the opinion that hanging on to un-needed items can lead to a disordered life and likewise, a cluttered mind. This is the voice of experience speaking to you, folks. Non-the-less, some inner feeling in those of us afflicted with this obsessive compulsive disorder causes a resistance to logic.

Have you heard the term "less is more"? Very often this is true,

When closets and dresser drawers are cleaned out, we all fell better, because the really valued items, things useful today, are so much easier to find. And we are not throwing things away; we are giving them to some-one in need.

Keeping that thought in mind, maybe there's hope for my siblings and me.

Now, I wonder, why does Hubby insist on hauling my old bird cage to the dump? What if......?

HEIRLOOMS FARM

Heirlooms is not only the name of my blog, it is the one chosen for our place in the country.

On a small scale we hope to promote genetic diversity of seeds, and implement various measures of ecological restoration. Above all, we will respect the land and the people who nurtured and farmed it before us, the Crain and Brockamp families, my husband's parents and grand-parents.

Heirlooms is dedicated to the memory of Mary Elizabeth (Crain) Brockamp, my mother-in-law.

She loved this land, it's prairie flowers and lilacs, her family and her faith. She was an inspiration to her husband, children, grand-children and great grand-children, and a true Christian.

We plan to plant the first memorial flower garden in lilacs this year.

Finally....Pictures

Managed to add a few pictures to the entry about our family vacation on the sand dunes outside of Florence, Oregon a few weeks ago. Each little nuance learned from this blogging experience is a relief, and gives me hope that it will all come together. I'm still learning, so please be patient with me.

Hubby (Jim) and I were in the sand rail. I refused to take my goggles off, so the giant bug in the rail is yours truely. Our children and their spouses and children were standing beside their quads.

This was one of the happiest days of my life. The picture of the ocean taken that day seems to me to be an example of the Lord's paint brush at work.

MY HANDINESS

I can't say I have ever completed or designed anything flawlessly.
I did put together a rabbit hutch a few years ago with only one little error.
I couldn't bear to take it all apart to make it perfect, so the hinge on the roof is on the wrong end. The bunny seemed happy in it and no one seemed to notice my incompetence, but I know.

I Have Come To Know there's a lot I don't know about setting up a blog.

 Looking through Blogs of Note, there are many beautiful sites to follow, inspirational blogs with colorful backgrounds, poetry and photographs. However, my efforts to add photographs has been for the most part, unsuccessful other than one seascape taken at the Oregon Coast last month.

This picture represents one of most beautiful days our family has experienced.  

We spent several days there, playing on the sand dunes near Florence, Oregon over the President's Day holiday week-end and Valentine's Day.  Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I will continue trying to upload the photos of Grand-Dad Jim, Grandma Cathy, and our children and grand-children riding quads and a sandrail  all the way out to the ocean.  What feeling of exhileration we had, and what a great way to celebrate Valentine's Day with those we love.  Dear Hearts and Gentle People, a song from long ago, comes to mind, when reminiscing about this  time in our lives.  It's good to keep in mind that our lives are made up of minutes, days and hours, and each one that contains beauty and joy is a bonus.   The smiles on the children's faces, the nurturing parents, and the peaceful, easy feeling we as grandparents had as we participated with them all made for an unforgettable experience,

Now that we're home, it's back to packing and preparing for the next adventure,  the summer on the land in South Dakota.  It will be just Jim and I this time as our children's work and lives are in the Seattle area.  

Yesterday, poring over Seed Saver's catalogue, we found many items to plant on the land.  Seed Saver's,  located at Heritage Farm, is a Decorah, Iowa based company that specializes in heirloom  seeds and is a long time supporter of organic agriculture.  It is also the base for Seed Saver's Exchange.  For those interested in the effort to pass along our vegetable heritage,  the address for Seed Saver's Exchange is:  3094 North Winn Road,  Decorah, Iowa  52101.  

Link is: www.seedsavers.org.

We plan to plant a lot of cucumbers;  Parisian Pickling is a our cuke  of choice.   Seed Savers carries this hard-to-find French variety. 

There is nothing like home canned pickles, and  they are quite easy to process on a jar by jar basis.   Along with the cukes, we'll plant dill and garlic.

There are several varieties of tomato that are good to grow; some for sauces, some for slicing and the cherry tomato variety for salads.  Some of our crop will be used to can tomatoes and some for canning salsa.  More about that tomorrow.... 

It's time to prepare the dough for Artesian Bread, a wonderful whole grain food.  See Kristine Farley's  Herbal Momma blog for more information about this bread, and her bread making classes.  You can find it on the blogs I follow.

A STUDY IN BIODIVERSITY AND SUSTAINABILITY

One of my favorite books is A Sand County Almanac, written by Aldo Leopold. Attached is a review of this authors essays, entitled A classic Ever New by Sherry Vance: Link is:

http://www.treelink.org/woodnotes/vol2/no1/sandcnty.htm.

Excerpts from A Classic Ever New by Sherry Vance follow:

"This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of a seminal work by a weekend homesteader, teacher, philosopher, and the man proclaimed by many as the father of the modern conservation movement. Aldo Leopold died in 1948 without seeing his book in print, but when A Sand County Almanac was published in 1949 it spoke his voice clearly and plainly, and has had a profound effect on its readers ever since. On its fiftieth birthday, there's a beautiful, hardcover anniversary edition of A Sand County Almanac available, along with a paperback edition in its umpteenth printing. If you haven't read A Sand County Almanac (or you haven't read it in awhile), get the anniversary edition or the paperback and dive in. Leopold's message is both timely and timeless, and deserves another look as we pass into a new millennium."

"A Sand County Almanac is built around three main ideas:

• Land is a community of living things. This idea argues for the study of ecology.
• Land is to be loved and respected. This idea argues for conservation ethics.
• Land yields a harvest of culture. Leopold calls this "a fact long known, but forgotten recently."

"Leopold bathes the reader in these ideas through argument, explanation, description—in essays that build toward the final section of the book, which outlines the famous Land Ethic that has so strongly shaped the modern conservation movement. But the strength of the book isn't just that it proposed an idea whose time had come (and which is still as vital as it was in 1945). A Sand County Almanac has survived because it helps the reader experience that idea. Reading this book creates a continuing awareness of land as a living community, a thing to be loved and respected, and the deepest source of all our cultural harvests."

"Vital awareness"

"Throughout A Sand County Almanac, Leopold argues for the supremacy of awareness over book learning. He describes the March goose who is "staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake...with the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges." He compares this goose to a well-educated woman who says she has never heard or seen the geese who yearly proclaim the seasons. He asks: "Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers" (page 20).

"It is to Leopold's credit that he listens to his own advice, and creates a living land in the mind to help us see the importance of a land ethic. The book begins by taking the reader through the seasons on his farmed-out farmstead in central Wisconsin, providing a rich and detailed picture of the rhythm of life on the land. In Part II the book expands in both territory and time, taking the reader to various areas of the country and describing the natural and human history of each place. By the time the reader reaches Part III ("A Taste for Country," a set of essays from Round River inserted in 1966), there is an experiential foundation for the philosophical ideas presented. When Leopold finally presents the Land Ethic in Part IV, we're fully ready to absorb it, based on the awareness created by Leopold's luminous prose."

"The culture of a tree"

"As he begins A Sand County Almanac, Leopold sets aside teaching through argument and instead uses experience to create an ongoing awareness of the continuity between human culture and the land. The simple act of cutting a dead tree for firewood becomes a lesson in the interweaving of natural history and social history. Each bite of the blade into an earlier ring of the tree gives us a story, both human and natural. And as the "fragrant little chips of history" fall (6), we see the complex and ongoing interrelationship between the tree, other trees, and the humans living around them."

"Leopold repeatedly imbues the world with deeper layers of meaning, adding the awareness of birds and animals to our own. For example, to the mouse a January thaw means the exposure of his "maze of secret tunnels, laboriously chewed through the matted grass under the snow" (4). However, to the hawk the thaw means a meal in the form of "some worried mouse-engineer." To the hawk, "a thaw means freedom from want and fear" (5). Calling the mouse a "sober citizen" who is grieved by the thaw is surely anthropomorphism, but it is of the best sort. It attempts to make us see meaning in nature as it affects the animal, rather than making animals illustrate what our values and meanings are, as animal personifications usually do."

"Wild beauty in words"

"The sense that land is to be loved and respected, one of Leopold's basic tenets, is created not by argument (how can one prove an idea like this by logical proofs?), but rather by letting us experience the wild beauty of his land. There are descriptions that take the breath away. Leopold lets us see and feel the leaving of geese in November:

The flock emerges from the low clouds, a tattered banner of birds, dipping and rising, blown up and blown down, blown together and blown apart, but advancing, the wind wrestling lovingly with each winnowing wing. When the flock is a blur in the far sky I hear the last honk, sounding taps for summer (71)."

"Or listen to his description of finding a hidden bay in an otherwise drab lakeshore:

You are seized with an impulse to land, to set foot on bearberry carpets, to pluck a balsam bed, to pilfer peach plums or blueberries, or perhaps to poach a partridge from out those bosky quietudes that lie beyond the dunes. A bay? Why not also a trout stream? Incisively the paddles clip little soughing swirls athwart the gunwale, the bow swings sharp shoreward and cleaves the greening depths for camp (178)."

"At the crux of Leopold's argument is that we need to broaden our view of value beyond economics, so that we can see the immense intangible values associated with the land. He begins the book by observing that "society is like a hypochondriac—so obsessed with its own economic health that it has lost the capacity to remain healthy" (xix). True health comes through the knowledge and experience of things that can't be accounted in a bankbook; as Leopold states, "things hoped for have a higher value than things assured" (57). He argues for a "revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude toward land" (203), but rather than merely providing an argument, Leopold helps us feel the rush of beauty in moments that defy any economic attitude:

What one remembers is the invisible hermit thrush pouring silver chords from impenetrable shadows; the soaring crane trumpeting from behind a cloud; the prairie chicken booming from the mists of nowhere; the quail’s Ave Maria in the hush of dawn (57).

In these moments of beauty, Leopold helps us see that the land is the bedrock and source of all human culture. Man and the land are interwoven as a community, and this fact creates a powerful motivation for living by a land ethic that preserves diversity, wilderness, and the entire spectrum of life whether or not we see any immediate economic value in it."

"Thinking more deeply about "improvements""

A Sand County Almanac provides abundant thought for those of us working in community forestry. Although Leopold states that "planting a pine is an act of creation" (86), he also argues against a mere "zeal for roadside beauty" (193) that doesn't take into account the history of the land or the balance of its historic species. He warns that changes made in the service of improvement can also bring wounds:

Each substitution of a tame plant or animal for a wild one, or an artificial waterway for a natural one, is accompanied by a readjustment in the circulating system of the land. We do not understand or foresee these readjustments; we are unconscious of them unless the end effect is bad...we are so busy with new tinkerings to think of end effects (197).

The power of A Sand County Almanac is that it helps us see in so many ways that the land is an organism, a circulating system, of which we are but a part. If and when we tinker, we must exercise ultimate care. But the beauty of this book is that it does so not by merely exercising our minds, but by helping us see, hear, feel, and experience the land organism as it moves and breathes—by working a wonderful experiment in what Leopold calls "that dark laboratory we call the soul." (89)"

Note: All page references are for the paperback edition.