Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

Yesterday I harvested the last of the peppers from the plants we grew in our neighbor’s greenhouse.   The use of our neighbor’s greenhouse was a wonderful gift.   She had to go South for work over the summer, and her greenhouse was going to go unused; she offered it to us.   However, the gift really was not just about the peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers we grew, it was also a fabulous opportunity to observe how her greenhouse was constructed, what worked well and what did not, and to begin planning the greenhouse we want to build next year.                                                                       The Last Peppe...

Life has been busy and full this summer.   Between working on the various projects that go along with life in our Bioshelter Home, the subsistence fishing and gathering that go along with life in Alaska, and various family activities, we have been busy.   As a result, this blog has fallen on the back burner for some time.   Today, however, I feel moved to write. One of the great joys this summer has been experimenting with growing things in a greenhouse.   Our neighbor took a job in Oregon and had to vacate her house, at least temporarily. She knew that we wanted a greenhouse eventually, but did not have the time to build one, yet.   She therefore suggested that we use her greenhouse this year.   What a gift! Our friends might have said that it was predictable that one of the problems Cindee and I ran into with this amazing opportunity was a desire to try EVERYTHING in the greenhouse at once.   Indeed, we decided to try three different ty...

In Alaska the three-day Memorial Day weekend is traditionally planting time.  By the end of May the soil has thawed and those plants that thrive in the ground can be planted.  We have been right on time this year, I suppose.  Last weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and we got most of our planting done, and I am thrilled.  It feels almost like the first harvest, though we have only just planted.  It’s just that it took a lot to get this year’s planting in, and we did it! In fact, we have been working hard for a long time to prepare for this month’s planting.  Last June a number of our friends and acquaintances helped organize the Alaska Food Challenge .  The idea was to participate as little as possible in the inefficiencies that go along with getting most food in Alaska.  Participants in the Alaska Food Challenge pledged either to avoid all food that is not produced in Alaska (only a few were quite that hard core), or to take specific meas...

When it comes to raising one’s own food there are certain times of the year that require more time and effort than others.   This is especially true in Alaska, because our winters are so long, and winter restricts so much outdoor activity.   So, springtime and early summer are busy times at our bioshelter home—and May is extra-busy. One of our goals in the bioshelter has been to try-out strategies to become more self-sufficient and less a part of the consumer culture.   Recently, this has meant focusing on how to produce more of our food, either through hunting and fishing or through small-scale gardening.   Now is the gardening season, so we are at it. The big task this week has been filling the garden boxes on our garage roof-deck.   This has been a bigger project than some might think, since it began last year with the harvesting of our own cottonwood trees, then continued by eventually finding a friend to mill the trees into lumber, then ...

Yesterday really felt strange to me.   On the one hand it was a great afternoon to be outside.   The snow is gone, the ground is drying out, and the mosquitoes are not biting…much.   I found myself reveling in the work of cutting out some dead wood and making room for the new growth we are planning this year.   I almost never get to do brush-work when there is no snow and no mosquitoes.   What a day! On the other hand, I was doing this work with my Smith-and-Wesson .44 magnum handgun hanging on my hip.   You see, the day before yesterday our neighbor was attacked by an 800 lb grizzly bear .   The bears are particularly hungry this time of year, given that they haven’t had much to eat in six months, and that the salmon won’t be in our river for another six weeks.   The bear chased our neighbor down, clawed him up a bit and the, mercifully, left him alone.   As I enjoyed being outside preparing ground for permaculture-style ga...

It is April 6, Good Friday 2012, and it is snowing outside. I am watering the small pepper and tomato plants that have just managed to peek their newborn heads up out of the soil. It seems incongruous—somehow not right—to nurture new life on the day we commemorate the sacrifice and death of the Savior. And it is really snowing outside. It is just plain counterintuitive to put effort into raising up new life on a day of loss—such suffering, pain and death. It is also counterintuitive to plant and water in a snowstorm. I know, of co urse, that life follows a cycle of seasons. There are seasons of building up a new idea and out of a growing sense of visions and conviction; seasons for watching as all the potential moves toward great fruitfulness—and doing the weeding and pruning necessary for even greater fruitfulness; seasons for harvesting and celebrating the plenty; and seasons for watching the old plants wither and fade away. I hate the season of death. Maybe ...

I promised to write a blog out of my understanding that the biblical witness desc ribes human beings as the youngest members in the Creation Family Tree. This is one way of understanding both our relationship with God’s creation and our responsibility to it. In earlier blog posts I already described why I think that is so ( here and here ). I suggested that it truly is appropriate to treat Genesis 1:1-2:4 (the six days of creation, plus the Sabbath) as a genealogy. Further, I pointed out that the Bible calls on the younger members of the family to honor and respect the older generations of the family. What my colleagues have asked me to do now is to spell out some examples of why I think we are failing in our task to honor and respect the older generations. As I have thought about it, I realize that I can’t cover it in one blog entry. How do we engage in caring for nature-as-our-elders in a way that will truly make a difference today? There are over seven billion pe...