Two articles caught my eye tonight, and I think they have some ideas in common. The first is about the possible demise of the world's honeybees. I've written about it before and it is one of those things that simply scares the living daylights out of me, until I start thinking about food production on a smaller, more human, scale. Read it here, and feel free to let me know what you think in the comments. When I read about "beekeepers" who load millions of bees into semis and drive them across the country, well, that's hardly food production on a human scale, and it is really about the corporatization of our food supply. Furthermore, it seems as if the California almond growers, as well as the big-time "beekeepers", are less concerned with finding answers to the long-term questions than they are with maximizing their profits in the short-term, the future be damned.
The other article is about small family gardens in Lesotho, as one small scale solution to the food crisis (which, by the way, I believe is largely manufactured and highly profitable for that small percentage of the Earth's citizens who always profit off the misery of the many.) Anyway, reading it was a balm for my soul tonight.
I was delighted over the weekend to find a small patch of ground in my postage stamp of a yard where tomatoes can grow. After work today I went to our Tuesday Farmers' Market and bought 4 tomato plants, 3 of them heirloom varieties, which will be going in soon. There is little as empowering as growing your own food. (Warning to Mr. Ether: This year it's tomatoes. Next year, chickens! Can backyard sheep be far behind? I hear there is a growing market for sheeps' milk cheese ...)
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Suzy! I have been threatening chickens for a few years now. My biggest problem is having someone to look after them when we go away.
Perhaps next year we can work a little deal.......
Oh Suzy- this terrified me, the bees.
Your post deserves more of a comment than I can leave right now, but I wanted to acknowledge. Time is such an issue of late.
As for chickens - I say yes! And then the sheep. Milk, cheese - sweaters?
Today I noticed my first bloom of a flower on one of my tomato plants!
Small is beautiful, small and local and filled with love.
I have heard bee's are dying out and they are having a hard time with honey now.
Jess, are chickens legal in the #1 most livable city in the country, or would you have to go underground?
My understanding about the honeybees is that colony collapse is affecting the big big honey producers the most. I read an article over the weekend in Organic Valley's free magazine about small scale beekeepers not experiencing the same problems, and I think Jim Hightower has written something to the same effect.
Hi Luminiferous,
I'm visitng the Internet after about two weeks away. I scrolled down on your blog and found so many posts that I am eager to read.
The honeybee crisis is just chilling, sort of like the canary that dies in the mineshaft. I don't know very much about it.
But I do know that you can have a chicken in your yard in Madison. Your councilperson is trying to raise the number to 4!
Actually, Crayons, we can have up to 4 chickens and two years ago an ordinance was passed that also allowed one to have a chicken coop. (Can you believe that they allowed chickens, but disallowed chicken coops? How Madison is that?)3 households on my block have chickens. There is one over my back fence that is quite talkative every morning and late afternoon. I have also noticed an upsurge in red fox sightings over in my neck of the woods -- really.
I think I checked on this a few years ago and it's okay. My old CSA farmer grew up in Baraboo and had one of those huge backyard lots. He raised goats in town when he was a kid!
I want the chickens so they'll eat the Japanese Beetle slugs that are all over the yard. Yuck. Plus the fertilizer.
But we occasionally get coyotes because we are close to the Pheasant Branch creek, so that's been my biggest concern.
Sheep's milk cheese. Mmmmmmm.
What about chicken milk cheese?
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