The New Agrarian

On Monday I sheet-composted a rocky and shallow part of the garden, laid down newspapers to kill the weeds and spread old bedding from the duck pen on top. There is something deeply satisfying about heaping shit onto last week’s (now last year’s) news. A new dictator in North Korea? Shit on him. Elizabeth Dole endorses Mitt Romney? Shit on them both. Unemployment, debt, foreclosures, indefinite detentions? Pile it on! It’s old news. Most days the newspaper isn’t good for much, but it makes good drop cloths and weed barriers, and if politicians’ faces can crumble into next spring’s carrots, then they’re good for something too. Twenty-eleven is old news now as well, a year that seemed for me to brim over with crap, but amazingly fertile crap, as it all is, or ought to be. Old truths and new ideas spring from disillusionment. A finished book grows from the compost of a lost job. Bury last year deep, sheet compost the old bastard and baptize the new with mud. And a happy new year to us all.

Laugh at the vultures, who think you would steal
Their refuse. Love them anyway, and be grateful
For their meal. Say their grace.

Trade your house for a turtle, then set it free
In the woods, to find its way to water.
Rejoice in your hope.

Fall on your knees to see the wild flower
That grows in the ditch, its head erect
Among the paper cups and sandwich wrappers.

Then rise up. Go forth. Sing your song
As if you would make it so.
Work as if it mattered.

I posted this last week on my eponymous site, but it probably works better here. Enjoy.

(Cross-posted from Walbert’s Compendium.)

A former “food industry insider” named Bruce Bradley has started a blog to tell the world about all the terrible things the food industry does. In his most recent post, he lists some of the disgusting things that industry passes off as natural products. “Unfortunately,” he writes, “big food companies have cast a spell over most regulators that allows them to manipulate us with advertising, make deceptive claims, and mislead us with ingredient labels.”

I appreciate the effort to speak truth to powerless, but here’s the problem: Three of the five things he lists have been commonly used for centuries or, in some cases, millennia. Not only are they, in fact, natural; they’re traditional and originally handmade. Read on

I typically don’t blog in photographs because I am not really much of a photographer, but the Eno River made it easy today. The air and the water were absolutely still, the sky deep cloudless blue, and the low angle of the afternoon sun coaxed a glow from the trees and the river that I can’t find words to describe. I can see why Monet spent a lifetime trying to paint light and reflections on water — and why he was never satisfied.