I’m going to skip the obligatory “sorry I haven’t posted since 2016” preamble, and just say that it’s been a long five years. Things happen, things change, people get closer, people get further apart, and we become more aware of the things we care about and the things we don’t. So let’s just move on to the part where I catch you all up on life here at the Warren homestead. Assuming, of course, that anyone is still checking this blog from time to time.
The pandemic has been.. interesting. It’s been stressful, Kristi being a teacher and all, but we’ve both been well. We resolved at the start of 2020 to get our collective health together, and the COVID crisis was just additional motivation for that. We got our diets on track, threw out all the junk food, started walking and biking regularly. The idea generally was that we may not be able to outrun the virus forever (though as of October 2021, we have), but we can buy time and fight like hell to stay out of an ICU. We’ve both lost significant weight and are the fittest I think either of us has ever been.
We both got vaccinated as absolutely soon as we humanly could. The minute we got the emails saying we were now eligible, in March 2021, we were making appointments and getting it done (Moderna for Kristi, Pfizer for me).
Much to Kristi’s dismay, during the March-April 2020 lockdowns, I started referring to our home property as “the Hab”. This is a reference to one of my favorite books, Andy Weir’s The Martian, a novel about an astronaut who gets stranded on Mars and must somehow survive for years on a dead world with only the supplies brought for a 30-day mission.
I love the book because at heart it’s a story about intentionality. You get up, you face the problems, you get to work with what you have. I think it’s an invaluable lesson for living in the world that we’re navigating today.
In many ways, more than COVID itself, the supply chain mess for us has been a bigger overall headache. The virus itself has been a matter of “the protocol”: mainly masks, hand sanitizer, and not being stupid about social gathering. But source and supply has been a more pressing challenge. We’ve learned what we can buy on demand, what we need to buy months at a time, what we grab whenever it’s available, and what we can do without (which turns out to be a lot). And, of course, what we can make ourselves.
Prior to COVID, we were already planning to start a small garden in 2020. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t produce much, but Garden 1.0 was a start. We put in tomatoes (which barely produced anything), zucchini (modest yield until they got murdered by white flies), and Armenian cucumbers (did well late season and were surprisingly good). The lockdowns and supply chain clusterfuck meant a lot of available time to do things like yard work. Garden 1.0 wasn’t a spectacular success foodwise, but it did provide an education.
Garden 2.0 did much, much better. Tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumber again, and this time we tried green peppers (which turned out to be mislabeled at the nursery, and were actually Poblano peppers). Moved the whole operation to a better sun position, expanded the plot size, and did a much better job amending the soil and uniform watering. We ended up with a ton of cherry tomatoes, a pretty solid zucchini harvest – once I finally figured out some tricks to fertilizing and pruning – and a decent batch of Poblanos. The cucumbers were disappointing, but oh well.
So now Garden 2.5 is underway. All the summer stuff has been pulled up and thrown into the compost tumbler (oh, yeah, we got a compost tumbler) and I’ve been reworking the soil. With all the mulch from the zucchini and tomatoes over the summer, we’ve got a lot of rich black stuff out there and I’m happy with it. So I’ve been out there most mornings lately with a pickaxe and shovel, busting tree roots and getting the plot ready for a fall planting.
For Garden 2.5, we’re going to give carrots a shot, as well as onions, broccoli and kale. Maybe spinach or lettuce. I’d be pretty happy with that – I’ve been spending a lot of time lately watching YouTube videos and reading, and think we can probably get away with all of that.
And – to keep with the Martian theme – I’m giving container potato planting a shot. Because the sooner we mess up, the sooner we can start getting things right, and from what I hear it’s hard to mess up potatoes too badly.
Of course, the flip side to the gardening challenge is the food preservation challenge. After last year’s white fly wipeout, I wanted to hedge our bets this year, and so planted extra zucchini plants in separate locations. Most of the summer we got little to nothing out of them, and we just struggled to keep the plants alive in the battle with flies. But then we figured out some new things, made a few changes, and suddenly everything was producing and we had more zucchini than we could eat. Tomatoes, too.
So we bought a dehydrator, and just started cranking things out. Now we have a fairly large supply of dried tomatoes, zucchini, Poblanos, cucumbers, bananas, and even spinach laid in for the winter months. I’m looking forward to adding carrot, onion, and kale to the Hab’s food stock as well.
That’s the Hab report for October 2021, mostly. We’re doing okay. Kristi’s teaching life is challenging, to say the least, but I’ll leave that to her if she wants to write about it. Much like with the global supply chain and healthcare service delivery systems, COVID has done extensive damage to the educational system that will probably take many years to repair, and our nation’s educators are fighting like hell to put out the fires.
I could go on for another 10,000 words, but I’m not going to. Daylight’s burning. I hope wherever you are, you’ve managed to find ways to adapt and maybe even thrive in these ongoing pandemic circumstances. Just keep planting potatoes, my friends. Just keep planting.