The Harvest Begins Buds are starting to show on the trees and spring is exploding at us here on the ranch.  Its still cold at night, and we may not yet be done with the freezing weather, but the change from the winter garden to the spring garden has begun in earnest.  Over the next several weeks we will be focusing on harvesting each bed, preserving the harvest, and planting the new season of plants. This week we started with a bed of beets.  The harvest was actually pretty disappointing.   We took out only three pounds of  beets from a bed with about 40 linear feet of planting.  We did can an additional 4 pints of greens, but the return was still quite small.  The problem appears to have been root knot nematodes, as many of the full beet tops revealed stringing under-roots knotted and bulby from their action. We are starting to treat the bed by planting french marigolds (nematodes can’t live in their roots)  and then we will also solarize the bed once it warms up a bit. Cat in the Wild I know that my obsession with my wild cats is probably a bit annoying to non-cat lovers, but when they look like this I simply can’t resist it.  Our two cats were raised to be outdoor cats, and I find observing their behavior to be absolutely fascinating.   It always makes me wonder what humans might be like without all the domestication.  These cats run up the hill to greet me, climb trees, burrow into piles of fallen branches tracking unknown animals in the brambles.  What would we do as humans in the wild.  How are our bodies meant to move in the wild?  How would our senses alter? There is a whole movement developing these days to look at this idea.  Natural Movement Fitness encourages and trains people to reclaim their nature.  They have a lot of fascinating ideas, and I really enjoy reading their newsletters.  Check them out. Planting Begins We started the spring season off by planting potatoes.  We will be trying to do a pair of potato towers this year, adding mulch, compost, and soil as the potatoes grow so that the spuds rise up a vertical tower.  The desired result is that we can get more potatoes out of the harvest with less space.  We shall see in a few months.  Fingers...

The Closet I am only two weeks over schedule, but finally the closet is complete and I have been able to move my stuff back in.  We have not yet put the doors on, as we are having them specially ordered to fit the space.  They will be double swinging doors so the whole closet can be opened and accessed at once. The process of building the closet was pretty challenging for me.  This was my first construction project, and I learned to use the mitar saw, and how to do a wood glue and screw combination, but the real learning came from the challenge to have confidence, to trust myself and my instincts, as the plans I created for the closet collided with reality. It is an interesting and powerful skill to have the confidence, perception, and flexibility to allow the plan to change when it needs to.  We often set paths for ourselves, declare some far off destination, and set off on our journey.  But the journey is never exactly what we anticipate. If we continue to drive forward on our intended path, and not work with the realities that present themselves to us, we encounter frustration and even failure.  If we can have the presence and the flexibility to change our plans, however, that can lead to great insight and inspiration. I had a teacher, Daniel Stien, who taught this lesson as a part of a creating new work class.  He would talk about pushing really hard against a locked door trying to find a way out of a room.  We can pound and beat on the door, but it will remain locked.  As long as we are rigid with ourselves, we never relax and step back and get perspective and see the hallway just beside it. So, I set a plan for this closet, but the realities of three dimensional space differ from the fantastical images in my head (and on the paper).  It took some struggle for me to shift from trying to force my plan into the space to improvising with what the space actually presented me with.  In the end, I think that I ended with a final product that is much better than my...

Spooky Action Ranch Report: Week Eight 2015. This week we head to the state capital for lobby day, can a bit of spinach, watch our baby turnips grow, and get down to business in the closet.

We discovered the identity of some new weedy volunteers in the garden and attended a townhall meeting on the future of water in the hill county.

Spooky Action Ranch 2015 Week Six, we focus on winter pruning.