Never Admit Defeat
Nor a Mistake

I once had a boss who said you should never admit a mistake because it makes you look weak. Whaaat? How can you learn if you don't recognize (and admit) failure? Seems to me that denying your mistakes is the weakness. I didn't work with him for long. I like the line in Joni's "Woodstock", But you know life is for learning. Mistakes, failures, defeats are part of the process, part of life. They should be embraced so that you grow and improve. I guess you can imagine what brought this to mind...our ole buddy, Trumpolini. But this week I really want to focus on my learning path in the garden...mistakes and improvements. I wrote a comment this week about the systemic system we've created with our greed for profit. I used my agricultural education as an example. I was taught fertilizer rates, herbicide use, animal feeding, depreciation and profit...not permaculture nor ecological farming. I was offered a lucrative job as a farm chemical rep upon graduation, but I took a low paying research position instead. It took years for me to learn to garden without chemicals, plowing, and constant weeding....production for pleasure not profit.

There are major consequences of our corporate food production system....at home and abroad.

...why we have so many hungry people on the planet when there is no need for that is that it is a deliberate decision that some human beings make in order to appropriate the resources of others, or, as in the case of one of the hot spots on the planet right now for hunger, which is Yemen, it was a deliberate strategy to disrupt the food system specifically to weaken the country in the pursuit of the war between proxies, Saudi Arabia and Iran. And so, it’s important to remember that hunger does not always happen because of natural disasters, which is a mental model that most of us fall back upon; it is often the result of things that we actually do to each other deliberately.
...
Why is it that some people are not able to produce in their own backyards, on their own land, enough to feed themselves? And the answer to that is that often it’s the folks interacting with the food system, that second category of people that I mentioned, that are the explanation. Those of us that enjoy cocoa, coffee, tea, the products of most of the tropical part of the world, are actually utilizing tropical land, are actually utilizing the resources of other people. In our mind, we believe in such theories as comparative advantage: We’re actually trading for these artifacts. But in fact what is happening is that most of the time we’re appropriating the resources of very vulnerable, economically desperate people that are not able to fight back against millionaires that are investing in land leases in order to produce industrial crops, such as jatropha for biofuels, or to produce the luxury crops of the Global North.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/10/ricardo_salvador_world_hunger (video or text)
Worth a quick read...

Jimmy has a solution to the hunger problem...EAT THE RICH! (6 min)

Millions of Americans are facing hunger as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic — and many of those are children. An estimated 17 million children could go without enough to eat this year, according to Feeding America, a leading national nonprofit food bank network.

Nearly 12% of Americans, or 25.7 million people, reported not having enough to eat over the past week, according to the latest Household Pulse Survey released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Dec. 2. Nearly 14 million households with children report they sometimes or often do not have enough to eat.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/11/millions-of-kids-are-going-hungry-and-it...

For the average American in World War II, the Victory Garden was a practical way to contribute to the war effort. Some 20 million Victory Gardens were planted (US population in 1940 was 132 million), and by 1943, these little plots produced 40 percent of all vegetables consumed in the US. It’s estimated that 9-10 million tons of vegetables were grown.
...
Victory Gardens sprang up on farms, in backyards, and on city rooftops. Even some windowboxes were converted from flowers to vegetables. Communal gardens were planted in parks and vacant lots and baseball fields. Sites for these gardens included San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the Portland Zoo in Oregon, and Boston’s Copley Square and Fenway Victory Gardens. The Fenway site is still an active Victory Garden today.

War plants often planted gardens on their properties for use in company cafeterias, and schoolyard gardens provided fresh vegetables for school lunches.
...
Neighborhood and community committees were formed with veteran gardeners guiding newcomers. These committees also helped with distribution of surplus food and sharing of equipment. Many garden tools were made of steel, which was in short supply, so sharing between families was encouraged.
...
People were encouraged to plant Victory Gardens to reduce the amount of processed foods needed. Newspapers and magazines published how-to articles, and gardens sprang up in backyards, vacant lots, big-city window-boxes, and even on community property. By the end of 1943, Victory Gardens supplied 40 percent of civilian needs for fruits and vegetables.

http://sonomamg.ucanr.edu/History/Victory_Gardens_in_World_War_II/
Perhaps there was a time when we had a competent country? Sadly, war was the reason we behaved in a sane manner.

I think my college education was pretty good. It isn't like everyone conspired to destroy the ecosystem, but that is what modern US farming has done. The growth of the agribiz industry swallowed the university. Who funds agricultural studies? Monsanto (now Bayer), Dow, the Potash institute, and the fertilizer institute among many others.

What kind of studies do you think they fund? Chemical trials mostly, and your results better show increased yields with their product if you want more money. It is the same reason we don't have better nutrition studies. Nobody will fund them. If people understood they could get off drugs and improve their health with diet instead of prescriptions and operations...OMG what would happen to our profit? Same reason regenerative farming isn't being pushed by TPTB.

So today let's look at best practices for the garden...the one in your yard and your internal garden of critters. There is NO one right way to garden or eat, but there are some bad approaches. Today I want to share my method, Please add your successful techniques in the comments.

I think of the garden as a time space continuum... How much to plant, when to plant, and of course what to plant. Let's start with what to plant. What vegetables and fruits do you like to eat? That is probably what you ought to plant. As to how much...well less is probably best. So this time of year we can grow some brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, collards, and so on). We can usually baby lettuce over winter with covers and get pretty good production. So we have about 5 or 6 of each of the brassicas filling a 3' x 25' bed, and a small lettuce patch 3'x 6'. We harvest and eat something daily out of that small amount. It is all the two of us can consume. We also have to work on all the stuff we processed last summer in the freezer. Really it does not take much space to grow lots of food. Timing is really dependent on your climate. Almost every state offers a free gardening calendar at its state extension office...here's the one for Alabama. In our climate we can produce vegetables most of the year changing what we grow with the seasons.

You don't have to live in the south to garden in the winter. Here's a NJ gardener that is still producing food in his garden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DctZRvvSBE8 (12 min)

I like using a no-dig approach to gardening. You might want to send a soil sample off (to your state land grant college) to test the nutrient content and pH of your site. Cover a future site or weedy garden plot with a heavy tarp or old carpet to kill the existing foliage but preserve the organic matter in the soil. Depending on the starting point it could take over a month to die.

Then I use the lasagna method. Remove the tarp or rug. You might need to lime at this point depending on the pH (and what you're planting). Cover the site with cardboard to suppress weeds, Place a few inches of manure or compost over your beds and mulch the site with straw. Some people use hay but it is too weedy here in the SE.

I learned to mulch garden from Ruth Stout (23 min).
https://www.gardensall.com/ruth-stout-no-till-gardening-without-work/
I've modified her approach to fit my situation and inclinations, but credit her with my mulched garden approach.

Here's a UK master gardener's approach which is similar to mine...but without the mulching. (28 min)

Charles is back Skyping with a gardener in California comparing how they create beds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW2aVZkjJa0 (28 min)

I use 3' beds that I can drive over. That makes it easy to spread manure and straw. The market gardeners I know use 30" beds. We have 10 25' beds in all. It is all the garden we want and need. We do have some perennials beds with berry bushes and fruit and nut trees mostly outside the garden. We grow for ourselves and friends, with no pressure for profit. To be a market gardener or farmers is a different ballgame. Suddenly it is a business.

Josh Sattin had an interesting position at Raleigh City Farm farming with a salary from a non-profit. He is moving back to his own farm next year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbIqVccZjCo (14 min)

There are market gardeners doing quite well like this young couple making pretty big money on 1.5 acres near Hickory, NC. Check out the production possible on a small area.

Farming kicks it up a notch because it usually involves animals. If I don't tend the garden one day...no biggie, but you have the tend animals every day.
This is a nice video visiting three different farms asking the question "How to quit your job and start farming." Featuring Joel Salatin of polyface farms, Paul Grieve of primal pastures, and David’s pasture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dp-5YAQ4VM (46 min)
A nice film if you have an interest in farming or how to raise healthy animals in a way that improves the environment.

There is a lot of similarity between our gut and the soil microbiome. (12 min)

In the garden compost and manure feeds the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy food, which in turn makes for healthy people. Unfortunately in the US we are not very healthy, Some 60% are diabetic or pre-diabetic, and some doctors estimate 80% are hyperinsulinemic and have leaky gut symdrome.

From my view, much of this ill health can be reversed with diet, eating habits, and lifestyle. The simple fix is to start by reducing how often we eat, often called intermittent fasting or time restricted eating. In the US we eat too much processed food. We need to eat whole foods.

Sugar is a big problem. We are addicted to it like cocaine or heroin (22 min with Dr Lustig). Breaking the sugar habit takes will power like breaking any addiction (5 min). The other elephant in the room is unhealthy seed oils that we were told were good for us. Canola is rape seed oil. Rape is a brassica and its seed looks like a turnip seed. How do you get oils out of it? With lots of chemical solvents. I use olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, butter, ghee, bacon grease, and lard. Usually I can find organic or grassfed versions in my local grocery.

Of course the primary health issue today is COVID. It is now overtaken heart disease as the number one cause of death in the US.

Yesterday, the US total death toll surpassed 300,000, or nearly one out of every one thousand people. There were another 3,019 deaths and a record 246,000 new cases. Approximately 125 people are dying every hour, or more than two every minute. At least 17,000 people have died in the past week alone. These figures are expected to rise sharply in the coming weeks. The current case count is only beginning to reflect the surge due to Thanksgiving travel toward the end of November, and the death rate lags two weeks behind.

The situation is made vastly more dangerous as patients overflow hospitals, and the health care system begins to break down, forcing doctors and nurses to make the horrific decisions about who will be treated and who will not. At least 200 hospitals in the US were at full capacity last week, and one-third of all hospitals in the country have more than 90 percent of their ICU beds occupied.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/12/pers-d12.html

I posted an essay this week featuring a doctor's plea to recommend the use of ivermectin as a preventative and treatment for COVID. A couple of NYT writers had an interesting take on the doctor's testimony which Chris discussed in his latest 27 min video below.

I don't have much in the way of breaking news this week. I did catch a couple of interesting pieces.

The first from Chris Hedges which ties in well with Chris' piece above. (7 min)

On his show last night (26 min),

Chris Hedges talks to journalist Diana Johnstone about the betrayal of the Left with its historical role as the champion of social justice and peace now replaced with the boutique activism of identify politics, political correctness and what has become known as humanitarian intervention, the justification of US and NATO adventurism and wars on the specious belief it would liberate the women of Afghanistan or the peoples of Iraq.

Chris Hedges article this week: The Collective Suicide of the Liberal Class

I caught an excellent lecture on US imperialism in South and Central America yesterday. He ties together lots of issues...

Ben Norton was invited to give this talk on US imperialism in Latin America, for the Workers’ Party of Ireland. He discusses the history from European settler colonialism, through the Monroe Doctrine, the first cold war, and the three great socialist revolutions, to the 21st-century resurgence of the left in the Pink Tide.

https://moderaterebels.com/history-us-imperialism-latin-america/ (1 hour)

Let's finish up today with a little laughter...I thought this was funny anyhow. 2 min

So take care of your internal garden and start planning for the vegetable garden. Have a good Sunday and a great week. See you in the comments below...