2010 Diary week 9

Our weekly diary

Our response to the chaos in the world has been to adopt Abraham Lincoln’s words, “The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.” In the diary section we are recording our progress, successes, failures and lessons learned.

My wake-up call

Certain books assisted me to identify my wake-up call following my cancer. The Five Gifts of Illness helped me to look upon my cancer as a gift; The Perils of Indifference made me realize that I needed to overcome the defect of indifference in my character; From Age-ing to Sage-ing made me realize that I could do something positive with my remaining years; and 50 Secrets of the World’s Longest Living People told me that I could undo the damage done to my body and could enjoy a good quality of life into old age. This week I review Be Fit! Or Be Damned!

Our Next Frontier: A Personal Guide to Tomorrow’s Lifestyle; The Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener; and Five Acres and Independence: A Handbook for Small Farm Management led me to greater self-reliance through gardening.

The garden

This has been fruit and nut tree planting week because of two books. Forest Farming –‘Civilised man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints’; ‘When the plough invades the hills and mountains it destroys the land’; ‘Crop yielding trees offer the best medium for extending agriculture to hills, steep places, rocky places, and to lands where rainfall is deficient’; ‘Agriculture in mountainous, rocky, or dry regions is a disaster, but trees are salvation’. The second book is Forest Gardening – ‘A forest garden, a form of agroforestry or permaculture that occupies up to seven stories, can provide fruit, nuts, root and perennial vegetables and herbs with minimal effort’; ‘Forest gardens support sustainably some of the highest population densities on earth’; ‘Trees conserve the environment, control groundwater, provide shade, and are a source of timber, fuel, fibres, fodder and food’.

On our daily walk following recent heavy rain we saw neighbors’ fields where good top soil had been washed away because of poor agricultural practices.

Book reviews

Over the next five weeks I will be reviewing the five books on gardening/farming mentioned above.