BACK TO COMPOSTING...

THE TREES HAVE TAKEN SERIOUSLY that this is the Fall. In turn, they have dropped their leaves and this means it is serious composting time for me.

After a few days, this task is well in hand; the composting processt starts with things looking like this; it doesn't do to wait for all the leaves to fall as this makes too much work for the mower. First, I set up the mower to mulch. Unless I am collecting cuttings, this is the normal setup. The mower chews up whatever it goes over and returns the cuttings to the ground. One has to mince up the leaves to speed up the action of bacteria already on the material. Leaves left uncut take forever to reduce to compost. After a run of the mower, the leaves look like this.

Composting leaves works best by including grass clippings as each has different balance of nutrients and one is looking for a proper balance of all nutrients in the final compost. In Summer I compost the lawn clippings from time to time but generally leave them in the lawn which grows up around them and returns them to the soil. As Autumn draws near, I collect lawn clippings in one of the bins at the end of the yard. Within hours the bacteria are at work and you can feel the heat of the reaction if you place your hand into the pile. The heap settles quickly and must be turned over to aerate it and prevent anaerobic bacteria taking over.

The next step is to set up the mower to collect the cuttings. When mincing up the leaves, I have the mower set high. With the basket attached, I set the mower lower so that it will also cut and pick up grass cuttings along with the macerated leaves.

Here is the good old Toro mower ready cut and vacuum. In the background, in the middle bin, you can see compost mainly from last year but also from the 2008 spring collection. On the left is some compost that has been working for several weeks (since coming back from Paris). In the right hand bin are cuttings done just the other day.

Here is a close up of the recent cuttings. If you look carefully you will see blades of grass mixed in with the chopped up leaves. All this is a bit dry (the bacteria love moisture) so I spray in several gallons of water for each six inch layer of cuttings.

This really gets things going and the heap becomes very warm by the next day. After a day or so the heat of the reaction dries out the mixture and I turn over the pile, adding water by layer as before.

After this, it is just a matter of turning over the heap occasionally to keep it aerated occasionally adding some water to preserve a moist environment for my bacteria friends. This only takes an hour or so and is good exercise. A garden fork is just fine for this task. I have just discovered that one can compost leaves inside black plastic rubbish bags. Rolling the bag about would make mixing and aerating the compost somewhat easier. If I have a surplus of leaves, more than my bins can hold, I will give this a shot. What does it all look like when the process is complete? Lovely compost like in the final picture. New York state is short on worms so I will look to introducing worm culture to the middle pile.

Now, doesn't it look just lovely! It smells wonderfully fresh and earthy and plants just love to grow in it. The pieces you can see break up easily in the hand into friable, rich dark potting material. During the Winter, the pile remains warm despite a constant covering of snow and, last Spring, I was not surprised to discover evidence of a couple of mouse nests. Bacteria were the first life on earth and constitute the largest biomass by far. The soil is full of them. In fact, they make earth into soil. We too are mostly bacteria and they generally treat us very well. It is nice to have them working for me in the garden and the compost they produce is better than potting mixture and petroleum based fertilizers.

ON ELECTION EVE

A BIG DAY FOR AMERICA...

A longtime friend wrote me: 'Robert, are you voting Nov 4th? Are you voting for the right person?'

Yes, I am and, Yes I think I am. If you live in the US, there is a strong feeling abroad that this Election Day will be one for the history books. It is my first opportunity to vote for a presidential election since my naturalization. Just figuring out how to use a voting machine will be quite a challenge (in Australia, we use pencil and paper, which could be quicker and certainly less expensive and, in the state where I last voted, Washington, it was all postal voting).

It could well be a day for the records in terms of the numbers of registered voters voting.

So we will vote and wait to see the outcome.

We have been enjoying wonderful autumn weather: sunny days and frosty mornings. How good it was to 'fall back in the Fall' last Sunday to rejoin standard time. Begun during wartime, long ago, Daylight Saving persists despite economic analyses suggesting that is does not save energy and costs more that remaining on standard time. At least the sun now gets up at a more convenient time.

The fine weather has extended the suitability of bike riding. Corning has some really beautiful countryside and, from where I live, I am quickly into rural scenery and quiet roads that often run alongside the rivers jn the valleys. Climbing out of the valleys can be quite a grunt, I do admit.

At the end of my last ride, I was lying on my back on the rear deck looking up at the blue, cloudless sky and the autumn leaves and suddenly thought, 'Photos". Jumping up I got myself inside and returned with my camera. So, here is what I had been looking at:


Once you get going with a camera, it can be amazing how that changes how you look at familiar scenes. Suddenly, instead of leaves to be mulched, lawn to be mowed, fallen branches to be picked up...there were scenes to be photographed!

The local squirrels seem to love this weather also. Of course, they are busy finding and burying seeds for their winter larders. Nonetheless, they find time to frolic about together in the sun. They love the breezes which seem to get them quite excited. Have you ever looked at a squirrel's tail lit from behind by the evening rays of sunlight. Their fur is amazingly fine and their tails are electric with small tremors. Almost as in the Spring, they run about, chasing each other up and around the trunks of the trees...squirrel aerobatics!

This pic eventuated as my favorite for the day. Luckily for me, the three trees in the yard take in turns to shed their leaves. This tree is the last and it may be several more days before all its leaves havel fallen. The streets are lined with heaps of leaves at the front of all the houses...except for our place where, at the rear, compost grows higher with each mowing.

Have you ever wondered where the squirrels go during Winter? Chipmunks pop in and out of their holes while woodchucks retire to the burrows to hibernate and to have their litters. One thing squirrels do is to construct nests made of leaves in the forks of three branches. This tree has such a nest, about two thirds of the way to the top. Also, while woodchucks sleep the squirrels may decide to squat in the woodchuck holes. The woodchuck are generous chaps and do not seem to mind the occasional guest.

We have had two days when fine snow fell, quietly materializing all around then melting as soon as the flakes found the ground. This sent me into the shed to recover my skis with the aim of getting my winter gear in order. Also, the promise of snow had me swapping out my snow tires. I am keeping my fingers crossed as such behavior has been know to send snow away. After election day, I plan to drive north to check out cross country ski areas between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks Park.

Happy Election Day if you live in the US and, if in Canada or Australia, enjoy the spectacle.

GLOOM AND DOOM III

I HAVE JUST READ AN INTERESTING BOOK: written by one of those climatologist types, Wallace Broeker, 'Fixing Climate; what past climate changes reveal'.

It is really amazing what these scientific chaps can do with a mile of so of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, submerged tree stumps, and lakeside stratifications to gain knowledge about past climate, reaching back tens of thousands of years. I recommend this book for your 'must read' list.

One compelling piece of information: each day the earth's inhabitants emit 80 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. You will perhaps agree that this is a lot of CO2! A great deal of this is recycled via natural processes but much remains leading to an increase in the 'green house' gas content of the atmosphere. Broeker puts the case that it is urgently important to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, given that there is little we can do, in the short term, about slowing the emission rate. Despite this, he is overall pessimistic about the chances of humans doing anything constructive in the next thirty years. We will become accustomed to a hotter climate along with some nasty stormy weather where it will cost the insurance companies and the governments lots of money.

This will probably make life difficult for Californians who are now in their third year of drought. The real problem for Californians is that their state has come to being during a rare period of wet climate that has continued since the great gold rush, judged by recent studies of climate change over the last several thousand years in the region. I hope this is not true but if it is so, they may be about to slide into a period of extremely dry climate lasting a hundred years or so, typical of past periods of greatly pr0nlonged dry climate. It won't help the rest of us much since theirs is the eight largest economy in the world and a very large slice of the US economy; not to mention that they grow a lot of what the rest of us enjoy eating. Watch how climate develops there and if you notice continued drought and happen to live there, plan to move somewhere else where it rains more reliably, such as Oregon or Washington states. This will not help those of you who live in Australia which looks as it will have to endure prolonged droughts as climate shifts.

I confess to being surprised at how the current recession has developed. I thought it would arise as oil became scarce and more costly. Given that oil contributes to so much of what we use and even eat, it just seemed inevitable that, as supplies dried up, so the global economy would stall. Instead it has turned out that, due to the efforts of some clever financial wizards in manipulating and disguising debt, what has dried up is credit. As available money has suddenly diminished to just about naught, the global economies have stalled and toppled. Consequently, we are not using so much oil and the price is dropping. If it falls far enough we will probably recommence our profligate ways, get back into our SUVs, and resume our former fatal course to ruin. Hopefully, this recession will provide an opportunity to learn better ways. Darn...just when those oil rich nations were becoming embarrassed, due to the falling price of oil, and were in trouble with their attempts to strong arm us with oil-diplomacy.

The slowed global economy will not stop us burning lots of coal to keep our poorly designed and built homes (from the climate perspective) warm/cool, depending on the season, our TVs on standby, our computers humming, and the like. So the CO2 will just keep on piling up in the air above us.

So, if you hear of someway of getting CO2 out of the air at about 90 millions tons of it per day, please send the 2009 President or Prime Minister (depending on where you live) a note so that she or he too will have a clue about what to do. Well, send a note anyway...maybe, when enough or us do so, it will be a wake-up call loud enough, a tsunami like roar demanding urgent attention.

AS GLOOM AND DOOM (G&D) CONTINUE...

G&D LOOK LIKE BEING ALL AROUND US for some while to come...so how about a little more of Paris? This post is about food...

A funny thing happened the last evening we were in Paris. After spending a pleasant late afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens, we walked back to our hotel to shower and dress up a little for the next big event: dinner at the corner bistro. Uma was determined to have the steak with pepper sauce I had sampled a day or so earlier. I settled on the breast of chicken. An interesting feature of the menu is that it had little footnotes about areas from which the meats originate; four areas not too far from Paris. Now...this is not an expensive restaurant, just your ordinary local cafe-bar bistro. Well, you say, 'What is funny about that?' OK, I am getting to that... but I bet it would be hard to find such footnotes on the menus of the cafes where you and I ordinarily eat.

The funny thing was the taste of the chicken. It tasted quite a bit like the 'chook' I used to eat back in days before supermarkets. Explanation needed here...the term 'chook' is Australian vernacular for fowl. As a boy, my family ran chooks in the back yard as quite a few folk still do if the local regulations permit. The chooks forage all about and do a great job of keeping local insect populations low. They also gobble up kitchen scraps and grain you spread about in the evenings. In the morning, you go and collect the eggs. When they ceased laying or happened to have become to be a supernumerary rooster, they were killed off and became a feature of Sunday lunch. For a special occasion, if you didn't run chooks or wanted to preserve your layers, you could buy one at the local butcher shop who might also have a rabbit or two for sale as well as the usual range of meats.

The curious thing is: the chicken you buy in the supermarket tastes nothing like those free ranging chooks. I was eating some last night, come to think of it, and it is hard to say just what it tastes like; certainly not like good old fashioned 'chook'.

I confess it was a bit of a shock to rediscover what chicken used to taste like...kind of 'wild'. Now I think of it, the french fries tasted a little strange too; they had a distinct 'potato' flavor! The French of course, above all else, are 'foodies'. They really value the taste of good food.

How about this? In 2006, when I stayed with a French family in Aix-en-Provence, we would start getting dinner ready about 6:30 in the evening and continue through the preparation and eating until almost nine o'clock, talking all the while and working our way through at least four modest courses. We never got to watch TV! Thinking this a little strange, I asked the other students at the language school about their experience. Oddly enough, they reported the same pattern.

I have referred several times to the views of Michael Pollan. He has a great piece in NY Times (October 9: The Food Issue...Farmer in Chief) in the form of a letter to the next President. Maybe, what with the cost of transporting goods, the rising cost of food, and a new emphasis on buying locally, we may one day be once more eating chicken that tastes like 'chook'. Maybe the old fashioned butcher shop will return, along with a local bakery where you can eat bread that tastes like, well...BREAD!

Happy eating!

A LITTLE LIGHT RELIEF?

AMIDST ALL THIS GLOOM AND DOOM, how about some frivolity…

The other week, Uma and I went off to Paris (France) for four days. Of course, we wish it could have been longer but what with the demands of running a business and the exchange rate, four days looked enough for us to get to do all the things we wanted to do.

Paris is a wonderful place to visit, both old and new and full of wonderful history. It was Uma’s first visit it (she wanted to visit The Louvre and to see the Mona Lisa above all else) and the third time for me (twice in 1985) not counting a brief transit on my way to Aix-en-Provence in 2006. We had perfect autumn weather, the sun shining every day and hardly a cloud in the sky. Our hotel, the Holiday Inn pres St. Germain, was in the Left Bank area and just a minute or so from the Metro, served a sumptuous breakfast each day giving us a good start for all the walking ahead (part of a great deal I discovered on the Virtual Tourist website).

Don’t believe those stories you hear about the French being rude or disinterested; it maybe that this perception is more a function one’s own personality. In any event, we found, with perhaps one exception, everyone friendly and helpful. And we got it all done: the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, Notre Dame Cathedral, Musee Carnavalet, and the Eiffel Tower (at night all lit up). We walked a lot, drank coffee and ate patisseries in sidewalk cafes, rode around and around on the Metro, ate at cheap bistros, sunned ourselves in the Luxembourg Gardens, and happily observed the relaxed life of Parisiennes.

One highlight was taking a guided walk around the Mouffetard area, based on the life of Ernest Hemingway in the years he was first in Paris (1921-26).

At left is the location of his apartment, his second after coming to Paris.This is the Latin Quarter (so named because of the concentration of scholars and schools where, in the early days, all spoke Latin). In this area you find rue Mouffetard, a narrow sloping street filled with vendors of all kinds of good, including food and wine.

The sights, sounds, and smells are wonderful. It is filled with tourists many of whom may have been unaware of the connection with Hemingway. On the right, you see some of them, typically eating outside a bistro in this street. No matter, Paris is fascinating from any standpoint.

Our guide was fantastic, animated and knowledgeable.This tour got me all worked up about Hemingway’s life and writing.

So, now I am back, I am reading as much of his work as I can lay my eyes upon. As I read 'A Moveable Feast', I could see the young EH walking the streets from his apartment (the first was just down the road from our hotel and the second was near the most interesting Gothic church, St Etienne du Mont) so he would have walked quite often by the building that was briefly our base , on his way to the Luxembourg Gardens or to Gertrude Stein's apartment nearby.

IN THE HEART OF THE FIRE

HOW MANY TIMES have you said, "Now if I could just write (say) something as well as that"?

How about Bob Herbert's 'When Madmen Reign' (NY Times Op Ed, September 29), his opening shot?

'I’m not holding my breath, but I would like to see the self-proclaimed conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealots step up and take responsibility for wrecking the American economy and bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

Even now, with the house on fire, the most extreme among them won’t pick up the fire hoses and try to put it out.'

So here we all are, at the center of a conflagration akin to a forest fire set off by a group of picnickers who wanted a 'barbie' in the woods at the height of the fire season. We are surely past the moment of finger pointing about who was responsible or who held up rolling out the hose. The politicians are in the crossfire between the immensely powerful lobbyists who aim to protect 'Wall Street' (say, have you any idea of how powerful lobbyists are?) and the sudden anger of millions of citizens who have flooded Washington in a deluge of emails, many expressing rage at the possibility of rewarding the incendiaries.

'We get the politicians we deserve', as I previously quoted. 'Can we be all that deserving?', one might quip. Thomas Friedman, in his latest book (Hot, Flat, and Crowded) traces the origins of the cumulative messes, of which the latest credit crisis is just one, in which we find ourselves. Is there a way out? The power of one activity has been strikingly evidenced this week...the power of email. This power had previously been evident in influencing policy even in China. But how should such power be used? Maybe to reassure the 'pollies' that it really is OK to roll out the hoses and start quenching the fire? There can be no perfect solution to this kind of mess. Maybe to pressure the current candidates to start saying something clear and productive about some of the other alligators swimming around us? Like the energy crisis, decay of infrastructure, the excessive political polarization of government, and the inefficiency of excessive urbanization are examples surely?

If the 'Bailout' package is the best we can do, then let's do it. It may not be, of course. Some 200 economists have expressed their collective doubt about this. 'Wall Street' will eventually bounce back and maybe doing so as I write. The freezing up of credit appears to be the central issue. How are other countries responding to this, perhaps by increasing the money supply as the main intervention. Is there a case to hasten slowly on a massive 'bailout'. Putting so much economic power into the hands of one man who won't be around for much longer, with no political redress, seems too lacking in caution. Not even in wartime have we gone to such extremes.

Remember the joke about the three greatest lies (The check is in the mail; I will respect you in the morning; and Trust me, I'm a doctor)? What are we to make of 'Trust me, as an ex-mogul, I can rescue us from this mess'?

Maybe we should hang on a little longer or find a means to graduate and review the course of this proposed intervention, certainly for government to retain adequate control. But not too long...the dog days of government are just ahead, where the trade winds cease to blow. I would like, before November 4, to see how the candidates really propose to step into action. Our emails to them should insist they become plain about what they plan to do about "change".

HERE COMES FALL

THE TREES AROUND THE HOUSE are beginning to drop their leaves, prompting me to turn over the compost and create space for new material. Hard indeed it is to believe that all the material from last year now occupies just one (of three) piles and looks like very rich soil indeed.
Also, here in the USA, we have less than 60 days to endure before the Presidential election. As a relative newcomer to this land, it is still amazing how much considerations from certain religious attitudes intrude into the political process. Also puzzling , not related to anything I have written so far, is the level of 'socialism' (whatever that may be) that is present in this intensely 'capitalist' country. Way, way back, President Nixon, concerned about the high price of food, instituted a change in farming support that enabled farmers to profit from corn no matter what price they might get for it. Now we have so much corn that it appears, in myriad forms and derivations, in almost all the foods we eat, not to mention being turned into ethanol so we can fuel our cars as fossil fuels diminish; we even feed it to other animals before we eat them. As well, there are tax benefits granted to many industries; it seems that the oil industry is a considerable beneficiary from government largess. And just this week, the federal government has had to move to bail out 'The Frannies' whose debt level is higher than the economies of many nations. So great it seems that their impending collapse was capable of stopping credit worldwide! Now we taxpayers will have to take over this debt burden.
To add insult to injury, it even seems possible that the Frannie masters who have run to ruin these two conglomerates may even be permitted,while shareholders loose all, to walk away with multimillion dollar golden handshakes. Socialism for the rich and powerful is OK but not, it seems, for the poor and needy.
Well then, back to religion and politics; those two unmentionables in polite conversations in the local (pub). Just now, one party is doing all it can to retain or increase support from the 'religious right' and hopes that the selection of their VP candidate will assist in achieving that goal.
I wonder about the terms 'right' and 'left'. In language, 'right' usually means 'correct' and 'left' suggests something to worry about. For example, in Latin, 'dexter' is the word for 'right'; from which we get 'dexterous'. On the other hand (forgive the pun), 'sinister' is the word for 'left' reminding us that this side is not altogether 'correct'; bad things, often unexpected, can come from the left side. In French, the word for that side is 'gauche', carried over into English, this is not an epithet one likes to have applied to one self!
Perhaps I am being gauche! There may be a case that a strong component of 'rightism' answers to the need for certainty, for simple strong action. We humans differ considerably in our tolerance for complexity and uncertainty. One does not find much fundamentalism out there in the left zone. Risking a fall into excessive simplicity, I surmise there may be a connection to 'capitalism'. Before Charles Darwin made us part of Nature (vs. 'apart' from Nature); we had a convenient, simple view of ourselves in the world, the world and everything in it was made for us, as we were made for God. For many this meant that we could do anything we liked with Earth's bounty, its myriad creatures and material resources, so long as it led to our aggrandizement and greater glory. As wealth became concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer there came about a dehumanization of the common person. Just as kings and princes could formerly send with impunity ordinary folk into war, the emerging owners of industrial might could send laborers to the mills and the mines.
Those were hard and cruel days, we will say...the days of child labor and of slavery, of harsh conditions in fearfully grimy cities; all gone now, of course, or so we think.
Even so, I suspect the tension between the powerful and the poor, buffered somewhat by a substantial and educated middle class, lies just beneath the political process. In the meantime, what will our resolution of this tension portend for the rest of nature? Now that we, having arrived at our present place in the world,are so collectively powerful and able to alter life on Earth.
Never mind 'global warming', just get down the price of gas! Forget the polar bear, the Arctic fox, and the Alaskan wolf; there are probably too many of them. Reclaim more prairie for cropping. For that matter, clear away the Amazonian rain forest so that we can grow more sugar cane to produce ethanol for our cars. Never mind that it supplies a lot of the oxygen we burn in our blast furnaces and cars and nicely tucks away a good deal of the carbon dioxide we produce. And hey, forget all those species that disappear with the trees, they are of no use to us anyway.
Gauchely yours 'til next time...
Roberto