Mini-Farming

The emphasis on this blog will now shift from South America to mini-farming, which was among the major purposes in the land purchase made six years ago. The property is now nearly fully equipped to become largely self-sufficient in plant food production.

The system employed here is biointensive agriculture, which is defined in the Wikipedia entry as:

"The biointensive method is an organic agricultural system which focuses on maximum yields from the minimum area of land, while simultaneously improving the soil. The goal of the method is long term sustainability on a closed system basis. It has also been used successfully on small scale commercial farms."

The system (best to read the full entry) equates to raised bed growing of vegetable and grain crops, the extensive use of compost, companion planting and crop rotation, the use of open-pollinated seeds and production of compost crops, among other factors. The reader is advised to read and study carefully
John Jeavons, How to Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine ISBN 1-58008-233-5, among other respources. Spanish-speakers can download free an extensive amount of material at
http://www.growbiointensive.org/publications_main.html. 

I have a ten square meter plot of oats growing right now (it's late winter here) and am planting carrots, turnips and more lettuce next week. I have fava beans growing alongside, plus chard and lettuce. More beds will be dug next week and the greenhouse (photo soon) will be completed for planting as well.

I am also happy to report that following the two-week stay of the first Wwoof volunteer, an American couple have committed to come for as long as six months! I greatly look forward to working with these enterprising young people who are moving in the right direction with respect to the new paradigm necessary to live a wholesome and spiritual life in the stage of society into which we have entered.

Back in the Saddle!

I have received enough expressions of interest in relocation to South America that I am reactivating this blog and introducing a new one, the latter to be "job-specific." It is called Safe Haven: South America Rural Relocation and can be accessed at www.sa-rural-relocation.blogspot.com/.

Since I last posted half a year ago, the situation in the northern hemisphere seems to have worsened significantly for many folks, who would now like to seek greener pastures. I am willing and able to help them for an extremely reasonable, flexible fee. If I were able to do it free, I would, but unfortunately I cannot, given that I have an income well below the US federally determined poverty level for one person; I live well, however, and would like to see others follow this example, given my belief that the greed-based paradigm of finance capitalism is entering its death throes and major social disruption will be caused as it either croaks or transforms itself into something even worse: legally imposed collectivism.

All inquiries welcome, honest and frontal answers given: if your circumstances make considering a relocation to South America imprudent in my opinion, I will tell you so and charge nothing for doing so, will not in fact accept you as a client. It's a major undertaking, and few than one might wish are financially and emotionally equipped to do it.

I did it, have no regrets, and continue to expand my nascent agricultural activities. Here is my latest undertaking in photo form, a geodesic dome greenhouse, ten meters in diameter, one of the largest if not the largest in Argentina. Those with an interest in this method of construction and/or style of greenhouse may contact me for information and an estimate should they wish one constructed on their property.

As mentioned earlier, I have a second house on this property and unless I have a rent-paying tenant before our winter is out (Sept.), I am willing to entertain a mixed barter/low rent arrangement with possible apprentices. We are doing interesting things with open-pollinated heirloom seeds of varieties of vegetables that heretofore haven't had much market acceptation here, as well as with amaranto and quinoa, two sources of plant protein that will have increasing importance, particularly now that the mono-cultivation of soy is beginning to show it dreadfully destructive effects om soil fertility.

Let's hear from you so we can develop some momentum!

Going Forward Back-o-the-Mountains

Mister Potato Head waves bye-bye to those who choose to stay behind in the Old Paradigm, signs "so-long-it's-been-good-to-know-ya'" to those like a couple cited in a comment on The Oil Drum who declared that "they didn't wish to be the "sort of people" who stored potatoes," and when the commenter pointed out to them that "they'd actually be wise to have a bit of food stored in their home for unforeseen circumstances and offered to pay for it myself," "his wife simply said "we'd rather die" and that ended that discussion."

It would, wouldn't it?

Discovery channel has come up with a show for those who would rather live: it's called The Colony, "where real people from a wide variety of backgrounds and skills will be challenged to rebuild their own civilization in a devastated world."

The Catacombs is looking to build a New Paradigm from a civilization not yet devastated but already endangered in a world that needs changing if it is to provide a decent life for our progeny yet unborn.

The Catacombs intends to be a community-driven Paradigm Change site, not a hunker-down, rugged individualist survival bolthole, and it is the creation of similar communities this site hopes to promote.

We are looking forward, not Looking Backward, to the "resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia" that was Edward Bellamy's fever dream looking forward to the year 2000. Bellamy would have felt right at home at a Bilderberg conference, or sharing a glass with Gramsci, perhaps. A conclave here at The Catacombs would favor G.K. Chesterton over Bellamy and be more confortable sharing a locally brewed beer with Wilhelm Ropke.

Preparations for August 1st's Valley-wide "Great Seed Swap" continue apace. Down here, we're the sort of people who store spuds, seeds and what-have-you, the sort of people who jerry-rig repair materials when store-bought isn't possible, the sort of people who believe with William Faulkner what he stated in Stockholm in December of 1950 when awarded the Nobel Prize for literature: "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

We wouldn't "rather die" than store potatoes. We will endure, we will prevail long past the time when the foolish, infantile and narcissistic suburbanites have died and their way of life become extinct. It is they who look backward: we look ahead; we are going forward.

Independence Day

Yesterday, July 4th, was "Independence Day" in the United States of America, where "independence," like so much else in the post-modern era, is relative.

Independence Day for me is Sept. 24th, the day I moved into my just-completed straw bale house on my own property, not a penny owed on any of it. Three months and a bit from now, I'll celebrate my fourth anniversary in this home, although two years ago, the wife who entered it with me preferred to return permanently to apartment living in Sevilla, Spain, after repeated false starts with respect to living in another country. The rural, self-sufficient life made for a nice fantasy, but the reality was something else again. In retrospect, I suspect she had been humoring me, not believing that I was serious. I was and am. I was saddened by her departure, but not about to commit financial and psychological suicide, trading this for a sardine tin in a noisy city in a country that I was sure was soon to experience exactly what it is experiencing now, and worse to come.

Living alone in a 2700 sq. ft. house on three acres is not easy at 62, but when I reflect upon what my life would likely be in any northern hemisphere country, without wholly owned property not subject to confiscatory taxation, without my own trees and gardens producing food, without all the free range eggs and chickens, the pig I fatten and have butchered right here, the fresh milk straight from the cow, the homemade cheeses, the crystalline air, the gurgle of the arroyo, the birds, the peace and quiet... without any of this, well, it wouldn't be a harder life: it wouldn't be any sort of a life at all, not for me.

Independence.

The local people here are very poor by northern standards, but they have free health care (often they grow old waiting for the doctor, but...) and for the most part are content with their extremely simple lives; the young, however, are tempted by the allure (false, of course, but that takes time to learn) of bright lights, big city, at least for a while. Very, very few have full-time jobs, but neither do they have mortgages or pay rent in most cases. The have no debt. NO DEBT!! They are FREE!

More and more previously docile folk are beginning to chafe at the growing restriction upon even the mildest sorts of freedom once available in the north. One sees more and more rebellion talk, "throw-the-bums-out" talk with respect to governments, advice offered as to how to become independent once more. Here's one that I found particularly relevant to what I'd like to accomplish down here in the Catacombs: Fifty Things to Do NOW! Many of them have been advocated here and elsewhere, but it's encouraging that more and more systematization is being applied to the freedom and independence issue.

The new "Cap-and-Trade" Law is an abomination, pure and simple, and if it passes, it could be the straw that breaks the back of the up-to-now ruminant population that has been willing to swallow the "Patriot" Act, all the thievery entailed in the bailout programs, but this... As I joked in a separate post with respect to a different topic: "In my twenty years on the force I thought I'd seen everything, but this...this...". Will those in the northern hemisphere take back their rights and their countries? The jury is still out, but one fears it may have been "got to."

Hard copy those Fifty Things and begin putting them into practice if independence means more to you than a barbecue; firecrackers have been illegal up there for so long now, that...

And remember, here at The Catacombs, you've got a friend; in fact, more and more every day.

Confluence

The synchronicities simply don't stop and this post gives me great pleasure to write.

Here we are at the confluence, something I have hoped for from the moment I began this web site.

You see to the right a photo of La Confluencia, both the place in Patagonia where two rivers meet and a self-sufficient community: http://www.laconfluencia.com/ This community is now part of the "Catacombs Confederation," which is to say Southern Cone Paradigm Changers working together to create a sustainable future for our posterity and a largely self-sufficient present for ourselves and those who wish to join us.

La Confluencia is near the Patagonian town El Bolsón, as is the nearly self-sufficient Traditional Catholic monastery the Seminario Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, whose hardworking monks are held in high esteem by hippie-esque "New Agers" and grizzled laborers alike.

The "padres" and seminarians at the monastery are friends; I visited them in March. The folks at La Confluencia recently contacted me because we have both built bale structures, and we quickly recognized that synergies exist that we should not allow to be ignored. We are now looking forward to a tripartite get-together with the monks to initiate cooperative ventures that will hopefully create a ripple effect in the larger community.

The folks at La Confluencia practice bio-intensive agriculture. I'd heard of it, but never known any one who practiced it until I encountered an acquaintance at the nearby Saturday morning farmers market and after chatting a good while, he agreed to come to The Catacombs in the second week of July to do a demonstration. When I returned home, there was the email from La Confluencia!

The universe appears to be trying to tell me something, and I'm all ears.

There may be a message here for you as well, because things are coming together rather nicely here in Catacomb country.