Aimee vs. the Weeds, round 118

The Bellingham Herald reports there have been four cases of human poisonings from the above plant this year. One fatality. The Herald reports that people mistake Hemlock for carrot or anise, and provides a detailed description to help people avoid making the mistake:

Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) was introduced to the U.S. from Europe as an ornamental plant. It has adapted to a wide range of climates and grows along roadsides and waterways, in pastures and playgrounds, in vacant lots and cracks in the pavement.

"This plant is very adaptable," Baldwin said.

Its stem is hollow, and the erect biennial is usually 4 to 6 feet tall.

The numerous flowers are white. Its leaves are lush, and look like a cross between Italian parsley and a fern. All parts of the plant are poisonous and affect the nervous system.

Initial symptoms could include a burning sensation in the mouth, nausea, confusion, and muscle paralysis.

Baldwin said the smooth and hairless stem with purple spots near the base are sure-fire indicators of poison hemlock.

It spreads by seed. When crushed, the plant has an unpleasant odor that has been describe as musky or smelling like mouse urine.

This smell is what makes me wonder how anyone could mistake it for carrot. Carrots smell good: Hemlock stinks like hell. Those of you with long memories will remember my years-long battle with this evil weed (Philosopher's Bane) . It's a battle I've been slowly losing, I'm afraid. Over the years, the Hemlock has been stealthily expanding it's range, while I have only been getting older and stiffer, which makes it much harder to stoop over and pull it's devilishly long taproot. Here's what I had to say about Hemlock back in 2008:

I really dislike this stuff. It's seriously poisonous, poisonous enough to pose a real hazard to animals and small children; it spreads like wildfire; it's hard, backaching work to try to pull it out by the roots, it stinks horribly and gives me hives, and if all that weren't enough, it grows in inaccessible places, like in the middle of thistle patches and along the fence line amidst the concrete rubble from the old barn. Every time I go wage a battle against the poison hemlock, I come back scratched, red, bumpy, itchy, and limping. I may eventually need to call in the cavalry: Roundup.

Well, I realize I have tied one hand behind my back here, but I have NOT called in the chemical cavalry, nor do I intend too. As far as I'm concerned, Monsanto is a far greater evil being than Hemlock is. Neither do I have the equipment (or the money to rent same) needed to disk the whole field, till, and plant new grass the way professionals do. No, it's just me, my aching back, and the pathetic old Murray lawnmower, which really deserves it's own label in this screed, considering the length and complexity of its ongoing saga.

In the last installment of the lawnmower saga, Homero fixed the machine for the umpteenth time and bought a new battery for it. That means it actually starts without having to drag a car battery and jumper cables out to wherever it was when it died last time. It means that I am actually capable of starting it myself and cutting the grass without asking my husband for his manly assistance.

Today I decided I would take the irascible machine out to the back pasture and try to mow as much Hemlock as I could. I would have to be extremely careful as there are still - despite several hours of really hard work with a crowbar - many large rocks imbedded in the ground and any one of them would kill the mower if I ran over it, not seeing it amongst the tall poisonous plants. Oh the many perils that exist in one small field! The idea, which is not exactly supported by experience, is that repeated mowing of the plants before they flower and go to seed will prevent them from spreading, at least.

Well, I managed to mow for a good thirty minutes, and I did mow down a large expanse of young hemlock plants. I felt pretty good. I felt pretty successful. I got ambitious and decided to go out to the other large patch of hemlock out by the fence. Now, this was dangerous because there is a steep drop-off right along the fenceline. The hemlock - along with stinging nettle and blackberry - grows down into this small ravine right up to the fence. Obviously, I was going to stay up on the plain and just get as much as I reasonably could get with the riding mower. The stuff down in the valley would have to be got with a weedeater.

Do you see where we are going here?

No no, not quite. I didn't drive right over the edge. But I did try to get too close and the mower started to slide sideways. I put on the brake, threw it in reverse, and tried to back up but I only backed up a half a foot or so before something stopped me. I thought that might be enough, so I put in the lowest forward gear and leaned my weight hard to the right and tried to go forward. No soap; the wheels spun and the machine started to tip sideways again.

After a couple more equally ineffective tries, I couldn't think of anything to do but kill the motor and hop off - right into a patch of stinging nettle, I might add - before the whole operation quite literally went south. Slightly scratched, with stinging ankles, and rather annoyed with myself, I stomped off to the shop to tell my husband I was going to need his manly assistance after all.

Just Who Do I think I Am, and What the Hell Do I Think I'm Doing?

Although it was a beautiful day here, weatherwise, it was a rather discouraging day for me personally. I'm not sure why - it was a fairly ordinary day. Some friends came by in the morning unexpectedly, and I had to scramble to find a meal to cook for them (Mexicans - if a family of Mexicans ever comes to visit you, know that you should provide a fairly substantial meal no matter what the time of day, and also that you will have to coax them to eat it. They will refuse, but just load up the plates and push. That's what's expected.).

I had about twenty minutes notice, so after I checked the fridge and ascertained there was basically nothing in it, I ran out to the chest freezer. There was also basically nothing in it. I'm down to three gallons of blueberries, three or four large beef roasts, one half-ham, and some dog bones. I picked the last package of small steaks - tenderloins, and cut them up frozen and fried them with jalapenos and garlic (I didn't have an onion in the house, can you imagine?) and served them with last night's reheated white rice and some canned refried beans. Pretty embarrassing.

I've been following a lot of "sustainability" blogs, and there are apparently a lot of people out there who take producing their own food a lot more seriously than I do. I have nothing but admiration for these people - I desire to emulate them. But surely I am not there yet. If my family had to depend on what I have been able to produce and preserve over the last year, we'd be in serious starvation mode right about now. Much less would I be able to entertain - as evidenced by today's adventure.

Of course, when I moved out of the city three years ago, starvation was the very last thing on my mind. I simply wanted to provide my young children with the opportunity to grow up with space to run and experience nature, the way I did. I wanted them to have the chance to interact with the plant and the animal kingdom in an immediate and emotional way, to ENJOY nature in the simplest, most visceral way - by playing in it. I wanted to recreate the best aspects of my own childhood while (hopefully) avoiding the worst. And in terms of that goal, I have been extremely successful. My kids have a grand old time digging for worms, catching frogs and snakes, gathering eggs, milking goats, picking flowers, and generally running wild.

But over a relatively short period of time, my goals changed. I became aware of crucial and short-term problems such as peak oil, climate change, and the disappearance of the honeybee. I started to worry, in a serious and sustained way, about how I was going to provide for the well-being of my progeny, to the second and third generation. The most common way parents try to do this is by paying for their children's college education, or maybe even giving them the funds for a down payment on a house. Thanks to my generous ancestors, my kid's college education is assured. I hope they will each take full advantage of that benefit. However, in the past few generations, Americans seem to have collectively decided that preparing our children for the future means preparing them to make money. I no longer believe that is a very practical goal. I have begun to wonder if money in the bank is going to be worth anything at all by the time my children are adults starting their own families.

I don't pretend to know what the world will be like in twenty or thirty years. But I will say I am not very optimistic. I believe there is a better than even chance that life is going to be very much more difficult - Americans will be poorer, with less access to healthcare and credit, and in general people will have to depend much more on localized economies - barter with their neighbors -and the sweat of their own brows. If that is the case, then the most important thing I can leave my children is fertile land and the knowhow to make it productive. When I think about what I can do to help my children be successful, I think about preparing them to be able to grow, store, and prepare their own food; to build and maintain their own systems of energy generation; to care for livestock and the fertility of the soil, and to doctor themselves and their children.

Well.... for the last three years, I've been working pretty hard to try and educate myself about all those subjects. I've made it my business to learn about small scale subsistence farming. I've laid out a plan for a self-sustaining homestead that includes food production, energy production, water security, and a full-scale library on a wide variety of topics, from beekeeping to home midwifery. I've laid in a supply of hand tools and a multi-year supply of seeds.

But while I have thoroughly enjoyed the planning and the reading, I would be a liar if I said that the practical results have been wholly satisfactory. Here is a small list of the things that are currently plaguing my homestead:

1) the chickens are not laying. They apparently don't like their home. Some of them seem to have diarrhea - most likely coccidia from living in a damp environment. They were happier and healthier when let to range freely, but we could never find the eggs and they would destroy our seedlings in the spring garden. Which is the better path? Don't know..... don't know. Everything I read says chickens are the easiest livestock on earth, which only makes me me feel like the biggest idiot on earth.

2) Pasture rotation - it turns out that a couple of ponies and four to six goats can strip five acres of land right down to the bone in three years. When we first came here, there were blackberry bushes galore - so many that I thought our goats would never be able to control them. Boy was I wrong. Now I wish the whole damn property was covered in blackberry bushes.

3) Noxious Weeds - there are some things the goats won't eat. Turns out these things are: various species of thistles, poison hemlock, creeping buttercup, milkweed, shotweed, and pretty much every noxious or invasive weed you've ever heard of. What this means is that year after year, my pastures have a tendency to become more and more thickly covered with poisonous and/or invasive/illegal weeds. Good plants die off as the goats eat them, and whatever is too evil to be eaten wins the evolutionary rat race and becomes dominant. I have spent a ridiculous amount of time pulling the deep taproot of poison hemlock out of the ground, and yet it is kicking my ass. Sooner or later I assume my entire property will be covered with venomous strangling vines and stinging nettle.

4) Mud. Hooves are the enemy of grass. I have seven or eight hoofed animals, and every one of them is doing it's level best to trample every bit of fertile soil I own into a quagmire. I have spent hundreds of dollars on hog fuel and injured my back trying to spread it over the most vulnerable areas, but nonetheless, greater and greater areas of my property are inexorably being converted into deep, sucking mud. The pig is especially destructive, rooting up turf and creating muddy wallows all over the main pasture. We have tried to confine him to his 12 x 20 foot pen, but he is an escape artist worthy of Houdini.

5) Parasites. Goats are particularly prone to worms, and without careful and aggressive management will become progressively overloaded with intestinal parasites. Resistance to common medications is a major problem. So far, my goats have not had serious parasite problems, but it's entirely likely that they will, and without access to high powered drugs, I don't know how I can continue to protect them.

6) Ignorance. I'm sure if I kept thinking about it, there are several things I could remunerate.

But I am a late-twentieth-century American and that means I am lazy, tired, overweight, and apathetic. God damn. I can't help but feel but that my best efforts are rather pathetic, judged by historical standards.

I know my brother will understand this - I swing between wildly opposed poles of feeling kind of absurdly proud of my accomlishments and feeling abjectly ashamed of how little I have managed to get done. It is actually very difficult to arrive at an objective judgement, and also probably irrelevant. How'd I do? I dunno, how many live grandchildren do you have?

Well, time marches on and I have to put my progeny to bed, because one thing I know for sure is that the little buggers need sleep if they are going to grow satisfactorily.

Some sage said that when in doubt, we should "do that duty that lies nearest." Right now I have to go feed my kids and put them to bed.

Philosopher's Bane

Today I visited the noxious weed board of our county with a sample of a particularly annoying weed that is rapidly proliferating on my land. It starts out very small and feathery, innocent-looking, with a sharp, half-familiar, not unpleasant smell. But pretty soon it is seven feet tall, growing in thick hedges, stinking to high heaven with a rank, foul odor, and giving me hives whenever I brush against it. The goats, naturally enough, won't touch the stuff, with the result that it is spreading. 

I walked into the office of the noxious weed board with a wand of it in my hand, and the lady who met me visibly blanched. "Ooh, put that in the trash. Here, wash your hands." Turns out I have poison hemlock flourishing all over my pasture. Yes, the same plant that killed Socrates. It's a potent nuerotoxin, and it looks just like wild carrot (though it doesn't smell like it. I can't imagine anyone taking a whiff and deciding to eat it for lunch.). Madame weed board said "you just go to sleep, and never wake up."

It probably poses no risks to my goats, since they don't eat it, and it probably poses little risk to my kids, since it's stinky and sticky, but it is crowding out grass and other good forage that my goats need. The only good thing I heard about it is that it only spreads by seed dispersal, not by rhizomes or cuttings falling on the ground or anything else, so if I hurry, I can lop all the flowering tops off before they go to seed and maybe put a dent in it this year.

I went directly from the weed board to the farm store and bought a machete.