I've continued to buy useful tools. I feel rather shameless about it now, as they are useful, enduring things- many of which, I expect, will come in handy during the magnificently great(er) depression that I feel brewing just around the corner. I'll list some of them for you:

• a (blemished) country living grain mill,
  
• food grade buckets with gamma seal lids,
  
• a nightstar flashlight,
  
• a petzl tikka headlamp,
  
• a hori hori,
  
• a rain barrel,
  
• whetstones,
  
• a global sun oven,
  
• canning jars,
  
• a REI sub kilo long down sleeping bag (and thermarest pad),
  
• a minimalist bivy sack,
  
• a granfors bruks small forest axe,
  
• a 32 oz thermos (for passive cooking),
  
• a compost fork,
  
• a push reel mower (my parents actually bought that for me, since they're the one's that want the grass cut and all)
• encyclopedia of country living (I know, I'm in the city, but did you see the green space around me?!)
• 4 replacement Berkey black filter elements (which supposedly covers my filtration needs until january of '10)

And so the wishlist evolves.

I've also been buying garden materials. I've already listed some tools above, but even more interesting are the living things. I've been scouring books and the internet for good local fruit tree and shrub nurseries and have had little luck. Right now, my best bet looks to be Stark Brothers, which is probably about an hour away by car. The next best selection in the midwest that I've found is in Michigan- Southmeadow. I'd love to find one with a really good selection in or just outside St. Louis city. I'll keep looking. In the mean time, I've gotten a little impatient and have already gotten some fruit bushes and vines from Lowe's. Specifically, a blackberry bush, blueberry bush, red raspberry, black raspberry, green grape, concord grape, and strawberries. So far I've held off on getting any trees from them. I'm also planning to grow some annual veggies and perennial herbs. In fact, I've just joined that community garden that's on the corner of my block, Fox Park Farm, and have a 5 by 16 foot raised bed to plant with whatever I want. I've picked up a lot of free seeds from Gateway Greening. Rotating seedstarting trays in my bedroom windows has now become a daily ritual. I can't wait to plant them out (april 15th is the area's last average frost date, but I don't know if I'll wait that long). Tomatos, sweet peppers, carrots, onions, spinach, broccoli, chard, beets, cabbage,collards, arugula, artichokes, peas, cucumbers, borage, corn, sunflowers, squash, melons . . . I won't have room for it all! Not in that one bed at least.

I've mail-ordered 2 pounds of red wriggler worms to unleash upon the garden and compost piles, as I'm planning to do no-till gardening. And with a combination of square foot gardening, companion interplanting, and mulching, I'm hoping to do no-weedpulling gardening. After studying up what I can find, my companion groupings, or guilds (to use a permaculture term for annual veggies), are

1. tomato, pepper, carrot, basil, onion, borage
2. cabbage, beets, spinach, chard, broccoli, onion (?- I've gotten mixed reports on whether to plant cabbage and alliums together), borage
3. corn, sunflower, squash, melon, peas, cucumber, borage (borage is everything's and everyone's best friend)

I'm still mapping out my perennial herb and fruit garden. Not knowing what trees I'm going to get is partially holding that process up. I want to get two apples, and then an almond tree. And then peaches and plums and pears. And hazels and chestnuts and (black) walnuts. As long as I'm dreaming of a forest, I might as well add some paw paws, tart cherries, apricots, and nectarines. If there's a temperate fruit tree out there, it's on my wish list.

Also, I've recently joined a local food co-op, so now I can order bulk organic food and pick it up a couple blocks away instead of driving out to the county. They also supply local "clean" meat (uncertified but organic-ish, grass-fed) for cheap. I pay cost+15%, and then just work a 4 hour shift each month. It's a pretty sweet deal. My primary impetus to join was to find a cost effective way to buy a 50 pound bag of wheat berries, for grinding flour. I didn't want to do it over the internet because the shipping charges were nearly doubling the price. But now that I'm in, I'm excited about more fully utilizing this resource.


In the fermentation department, I'm experimenting with making ginger beer. I've started a batch of dandelion mead that'll be ready to drink by the end of the summer. And I just got the raw materials today to try to make my first batch of saurkraut (practice running for harvest time later in the year) and to pickle cucumbers. Once I get the hang of it, I'd like to move on to making kim chee. I'm staying away from the soy ferments for now, though. While I'm in love with yeast at this point, and I'm warming up to fungi, the idea of eating mold still freaks me out.


One final bit of random news before I end this nonsense. My computer is over four years old now and is kind of slowly dying. But I'm trying to breath new life into it by stripping down my uses of it (namely, no longer using it as my stationary ipod - putting that music on cds). And I'm playing around with linux puppy. Now, I thought that I needed an external modem to be able to get on the internet, but it turns out that after a bit of setup, my wireless works fine! So this post is being written while running puppy. And it's running veeerry quickly. If running your entire OS on your RAM sounds appealing to you, I suggest you give it a looksee.