Old 99 Farm, week of Apr 22, 2019

Please take alook at the greens in our greenhouse: we got them through -28dC and hail and wind, now are prime for harvesting. Two bunches for price of one: red russian kale, Nero kale, rainbow chard, perpetual green chard, buttercrunch lettuce, Rouge d’hiver leaf lettuce, parsley, collards, something for every one.

Beef selection is tops and so is pork, you can buy individual cuts or 20lb packs or halves or quarters. I like the bacon this time compared to last; more smoke and salty flavour.

Pork is on special this week: 15% off market price. Ribs, shoulder roasts, butt and loin chops, smoked cuts.

There are tree saplings now diggable, quite large, about 8 ft tall: Locust, eastern chestnut.

Eggs are three doz for price of two, in other words, buy two doz and get the third free.

Compost for your garden, organic inputs from cow, chicken and pig manure, lots of straw and wood chips, innoculated with beneficial organisms, biochar and rock flours. $4/bushel (35L) or $60/cu yd (22 bushels).

Climate site of the week: Dark Mountain. Has been around for 10 years or so, very personal exploration of how we creatively react to the news and science of abrupt climate change, possibly stabilizing to a world we humans have never experienced before in all our history. Here are some quotes from a recent blog post on the global climate rebellion:

- [you will feel] the need for quiet spaces where bridges can be built between troubled insiders, an awakening grassroots and the ‘knowledge-carriers at the edges’; spaces of negotiation, away from the frontlines.

‘What you people call collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee.’

- part of Roger Hallam’s argument [for Extinction Rebellion] is that the rational, secular logic of mainstream Western activism, with its dependence on promises of progress, is the anomaly, while the stance for which he speaks has more in common with what has sustained grassroots movements in other times and places, and continues to do so.

…this is the first activism around climate change in the West…that has roots this deep, that draws on spiritual traditions. Roger speaks about ‘the dark night of the soul’, the need to move through the darkness rather than avoid it. This is a call to rebellion that is framed in the language and draws on the traditions of mysticism.

…the observation, backed up by research on social movements, that those whose willingness to act endures the longest are not the activists who are motivated by outcome, who need to be given hope and to believe in their chances of success, but the ones who are motivated by doing the right thing.