We at Circle Acres are committed scavengers. Group dumpster runs are part of the fabric of our collective. These runs provide needed goods for the farm as well as plenty of food for shared meals.

Scavenging also includes gleaning scrap lumber from neighboring demolition projects, concrete pieces (urbanite), old greenhouse plastic, bamboo, hay twine, nails, and irrigation drip tape. Combine all those elements and you get a really decent and basic greenhouse.

The process started with a bamboo harvest – this ingredient was necessary for putting together the top framing as well as the side ribs.

The ends of the greenhouse were built with downed cedar trees that we pulled out of the woods as well as scrap lumber from a demolition up the road from us.  There were also a few pieces from a recent gutting of a few rooms in our house.

The plastic came from an organic farm near the NC coast as did the drip tape that was used to staple through and hold the plastic to the framing.

Photo from Danielle

Total cost for this greenhouse (not including labor of course) is somewhere between $5 and $15 depending on who you ask.  I think the staples were at least $4 for the box, but calculating how many nails were purchased versus how many were scavenged is difficult.

Regardless, the greenhouse is ready for seed flats and a jump-start on the season.  Anyone interested in our CSA?

I don’t like mowing a yard, especially when the yard is on a farm.  It irritates me to push a noisy piece of machinery over a piece of land that yields no food for me or the others living here.  The roaming rooster and guineas glean a little here and there, but there really are not impressed with the selection at this particular salad bar.  A yard is great for a picnic, but I would prefer a pasture for a picnic any day.

I am vowing that this coming year the mowing will be minimized.  Going in are perennial beds, hugelkultur mounds, insectory plants by the hundreds and a kitchen garden for fun.  The front yard outside of mine and Kristin’s door is the first to fall.  Step one is to kill the grass or otherwise remove it. Well, actually step one is to figure out where the beds will go and do some measuring and flagging.

A few years ago I attended a workshop at the annual CFSA conference presented by Susana from Salamander Springs Farm. The workshop was all about building no-till beds on top of grass.  I finally found the notes in one of the piles of notebooks that I have only recently brought together into one pile.  The notes spell out a no-till “Layer Cake” garden bed recipe:

Step one – “The Plate” consists of large sheets of cardboard laid over existing pasture or lawn.

Step two – “The Cake” consists of several inches of manure or compost.

Step three – “The Frosting” consists of mulch such as leaves, old hay, shredded paper and straw.

Step four – “The Baking” consists of letting it all settle and rot for three to four months.

Step five – “The Eating” consists of pulling the mulch back to put in plants and replenishing the mulch as the plants grow.

For our cardboard needs we almost always head to Siler City.  The dollar stores’ Dumpsters are usually a nice jackpot for all sizes of box, not necessarily a requirement to fit most mulching needs.  For larger jobs we would hit furniture and appliance stores.  The boxes are bigger and thicker providing more grass and weed killing power.  For uniformity of boxes, the local ABC Liquor store would be perfect.  Most folks hit them up for packing boxes.  For wax boxes, hit the grocery… Since this particular project was just a piece of a front yard, the dollar store cardboard works well.  The only problem is the tape.  There is a lot of tape to remove and dispose of.

While peeling off tape, you get to see where all the crap products come from and come through.  Most of the importers seem to be in New York City of New Jersey.  The origins are India, China, Korea, Vietnam.  None of the boxes were made from recycled material (no notices on the boxes), so I will probably be mulching with cardboard descended directly from trees, most likely trees from Canada.  That is a long way to go in order to get into my front yard.  The boxes also have loads of staples, fabric tape and heavy duty packing tape holding everything together.

The value of the boxes and its associated connectors is probably higher than the value of the stuff inside the box. I know the value of what I am about to grow on and through those boxes is higher than the box plus the stuff inside.  And then some – mostly because so much comes from the cardboard.  Earthworms tunnel under and through it; pill bugs, beetles and earwigs make their home in the crevices between the layers; fungal mycelia run like branching rivers throughout the whole bit.  All of this activity leads to the decomposition of the still useful organic matter and carbon that is nestled within the cardboard.

What would have taken years to happen with the use of a new log, the loggers, grinders, pulpers, pressers, importers and exporters have made into a readily available haven for all sorts of micro and macro interactions. But the folks at the end of the box-chain would have just thrown it away or possibly recycled it into more cardboard that would eventually be thrown away (nothing against recycling cardboard) whereas we at Circle Acres have really recycled the box and returned it to its rightful place – rotting on the ground and being digested by those who can do such a thing.

The only drawback to this system is that it takes a really long time to build.  For one person, by hand, estimate at least two hours to go twenty five feet.  Then of course there is the “baking” part, but after three or four months the area should be grass and weed free.  It will also be a nutritious place to start off new Spring plants for Summer harvest.

In my line of life you have to embrace some level of hypocrisy.  Anarchism is an imperfect ideology, especially in day to day application.  In regards to food, we build momentum against industrial agriculture, monoculture, neocolonialism, global food distribution systems and chain grocery stores while building regional food systems, community gardens, CSAs, and cooking for Food Not Bombs.  I work on the latter all while relying heavily on the waste streams of the former.

The whole dichotomy came into focus (again) as I was hauling ten pounds of bananas out of the dumpster, taking in a nice and cozy 2600 mile diet subsidy.  We are building a farm with a focus on self sufficiency.  Since that goal is way off, we rely very heavily on the waste stream.

I have written about dumpster diving in the past, but the level of food and resource rescuing we do now is pretty unprecedented.  The chickens eat it (bananas and melons are their favorite), the goat eats it (cabbage trimmings are always available) and we all certainly do our part to go through as much of the food as we can.  The pigs are coming soon; they will eat whatever we other critters cannot get through.  Clothing, shelving, buckets, cardboard, wire, dishes, and a billion other things get converted into feeders, mulch and everyday farm equipment.

Artichokes, red peppers, starfruit, melons, red bananas, eggplant, avocado, asparagus – a sampling of the seasons from around the world, all held up by petroleum and horrible working conditions – picked, packed, shipped and then thrown away while still edible.  It is basically a punch in the face of all the work done … The wasteful practices are illustrated over an over again by the sight of good food going to the landfill.  But we intervene, daily, breaking the waste chain, feeding ourselves and others while the world dies around us.

Yesterday – in ten seconds in the grocery store dumpster – I pulled out an entire case of tomato sauce.  Twelve jars with an expiration date sometime in 2011, undamaged and unopened, thrown away simply because it was delivered to the wrong store.  So it gets thrown away.  Not donated, not given to employees, not sampled out.  If a punk wasn’t there to rescue it, it would be on its way to the landfill at this moment, the jars broken on the sides of the trash truck and contents stuck on the gears and plates and pieces of a wasteful world.

But if that waste stream stopped suddenly (like we want it to), our current food paradigm would change radically.  We are not yet growing enough to feed ourselves.  Entire subcultures are built on the availability of trashed food, websites and blogs are devoted to one thing only -

Every year in the US nearly 100 billion pounds of edible food are sent to landfills by retailers, restaurants, and consumers. It’s also estimated that only about 4 billion pounds of food would be necessary to eliminate hunger in America.

Don’t get me wrong, a huge pot of dumpster veggie soup is delicious, but with Trashy Gourmet I hope to show that dumpsters offer an endless array of options for your culinary delight. So start diving, get cooking, and stuff your face while you help save the world! Eating against capitalism tastes so good.

Can we eat our way out of capitalism?  Can we reconcile our goals with our current actions?  Pass me an avocado and we’ll talk about it later…

Where I grew up, it was hard to go nine days in Winter without some sort of snow fall event.  Here in North Carolina, nine years is about the average wait for an significant snow.  In New York, days off from school because of the weather were very rare, but those days were always met with enthusiasm.  A snow day meant sledding on the Thruway bridge or banging around on snowmobiles or just walking around in the woods.  Days off from work because of snow were even rarer, and those days were usually met with early beer and earlier bed.

With the beauty of the snow in NC comes the problem of clearing it from the roads and the ridiculous frenzy and panic of the local population.  Just the threat of snow is enough to close all schools and most businesses.  Bread and milk flies off the store shelves, people forget how to drive and banks close their doors.  It took me three days to make a deposit at the local bank branch; even the day of the deposit had a delayed opening.

Snow plows are in very short supply around here, and it can take a day just to clear a major highway.  We live on a side road off another side road off yet another side road and then down a dirt road, which basically means that we never see the snow plow anywhere near our home.

It is nothing like New York where the plows come fast and often, their sounds destroying the quiet of night.  I wrote about the plows in Quitter #5.  Here is a taste -

Oh, How Long December…
During a snow storm, the plows mostly come at night.  In the sturdy, hoary months of childhood in Western New York, I would lay awake listening as the distant scraping of the plow brushed its steel blades over the roughly poured asphalt.  In the dry winter air, the low hum could be heard for miles, the flashing orange roof lights of the plow radiating off the lumbering snowflakes, themselves moving unpredictably towards any available surface, wrestling the wind’s vacillating directions.

First the plow would pass to the south of our house, down the thin Barville Road, then up North Byron Road and finally across our unmarked, no-shoulder road.  As the sound grew closer I would pull my face up to the window, watching the coming lights reflect off every available inch of ground, the thick cover of flurries yielding very little until the massive vehicle was right in front of my eyes.  A wave of snow and rock passed over the giant chisel, driven by a mass of grinding metal and boiling oil, echoing brutal noises off the aluminum siding of the house.  The sound and lights would fade as the driver made way through the expansive grid of rurality, on and on towards the gawking of other children unable to sleep.

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In Chatham County we are blessed with the ability to grow food all year round.  With this blessing comes the curse of trying to fool the natural cycles either through the creative use of energy (wood stove in the greenhouse) or by the less intensive means of row covers and low tunnels.

Yesterday’s snow meant that the folks at Piedmont Biofarm had to battle the flakes in order to keep their crops alive.  I found farmer Doug Jones busy in the storm sweeping off his row covers with a push broom.

Even he had to admit that it was a losing battle.  A day later, he and a few of his interns finished the work, clearing the snow and ice by hand.

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Yesterday ended up being a half day of work for myself and Kristin.  The first snow at the farm was an event for me even though snow and cold and ice is basically in my blood.  I haven’t studied an icicle in years.  The icicle is an indication of poor roofing and a lack of insulation, but let’s leave all that for the adults to think about…

One thing you don’t usually see is a Magnolia grandiflora full of snow.  The evergreen leaves stand out during the brown of our short Winter, but they really stand out against the cold white of an even shorter and rarer snow fall.

And what would the short work day be without a little snow fight action?

We threw snowballs at each other and at 80 (our doggie).  But she was busy with work most of the afternoon, and could barely be bothered to play along.

Her “work” mostly consists of chasing mice in the back field and running around like a crazy person.

This work keeps her occupied and healthy, alert and slim.  It is almost a script – the mice run; she follows their scent, bouncing from grass clump to tree stump, digging up rocks and fallen branches all day long.  The mice run some more.  Repeat.

80 doesn’t really come off as a killer.  Now I’m starting to think that I should be cheering her on.  After all, with a depleted mouse population, we may be able to lower the tick infestation in the Spring.  Mouse blood is the gateway drug for young ticks.  Damn delinquents…

After she caught the mouse (the first one I ever saw her catch), I basically took it away from her.  Later on in the evening I thought that it probably would be best if she had been allowed to eat her catch.  We live in the middle of nowhere, so these field mice are not eating poison.  Kind of a waste of protein.

From now on at Circle Acres, the number one rule for all of us is “You eat what you kill.”