Archive for December 2010

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New prints available

A few more of my paintings have been put on Imagekind as prints. These ones are all birds. After looking at them I have realized that I need to do some chickens. We have so many beautiful chickens here that they just deserve to be painted! This one, Eyes to the World was inspired by an owl that lives the Raptor Centre at Mountsberg, in Campbellville. School trips to Mountsberg were regular when I was a child and I loved the Great Horned owl they had. I can't remember his name, but I do think he had been shot by a hunter. He could no longer live in the wild. The rehabilitators at Mountsberg fixed him up and he became an educational bird.

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Winter fun

Winter seems to be incredibly dividing. Some people hate it, others love it. Personally I have been on both sides of the fence on this one. When I was little I hated winter. I didn't ski, snowboard (it wasn't invented then) snowshoe, or much else. I like to hibernate, or come as close to it as possible, and wait for spring. I was like this until we moved into this house and got a dog. The first winter here Beauty needed at least two hours of walking per day. this generally meant I also got two 2 hour walks a day as well. I can't say I was thrilled at first, but over that first winter I learned to really love it. What I realized quickly that it enabled me to see what Beauty smells the rest of the year. If you look closely while out going for a walk you can "read" the outside world. Footprints in the snow let you see the critters that were there before you and discover their stories.

• where they went
• where they came from
• how fast they were going
• if they were alone or with others
• did they eat something
• what they ate

the information can be quite extensive if you know how to read it. In many ways it is like learning a different language. What I love about winter is I can now find these things out. Beauty can smell this all year, but the snow is the medium I need to help me. I am still learning the art and science. Luckily anything involving animals has been a main focus all of my life so I love to learn it. It really is the kind of thing that you have to actually do, reading isn't quite the same. Recently I went on a tracking workshop at RARE in Cambridge with Alexis Burnett. Alexis runs Earth Tracks, a wilderness school based in Grey County. He has been doing this type of work for many years and is very good at it. He has tracked many animals including cougars and bears in BC.

"Holy $#it! The secret behind creating truly sustainable food."

Thank you intertubes for this excellent read. Gene Lodgson is a prolific author and farmer. He was recently interviewed for his new book, "Holy Shit! The secret behind creating truly sustainable food." Read the full article here. My favourite bit: "Makenna Goodman: What makes manure such an incredible fertilizer? Gene Lodgson: First I want to be clear that by manure I mean not only the feces and urine itself, but the bedding or absorbent material mixed with it. The bedding, most commonly straw with animal manure or sawdust in human dry toilets, is nearly as important as the excrement since it reduces odor, soaks up the urine and adds bulk to the feces so that the material is easier to handle and preserves the plant nutrients better until the material is applied to farmland or garden. Manure so defined can supply all the nutrients including trace elements that plants need to grow healthfully in most soils and situations, plus adding organic matter to become humus in the soil. It accomplishes soil enrichment safely. No commercial chemical fertilizer adds organic matter to the soil like manure does. For the farm that has its own livestock and chickens, manure is free for the loading and hauling. As purchased fertilizers become more and more pricey, this benefit alone makes manure incredibly valuable. It can keep a farm truly sustainable and a farmer less susceptible to outside forces seeking to take his money and his land away from him. MG: Has our culture always been fearful of using manure as a soil enhancement or is this something more recent? GL: Europeans settling America brought with them a respect for the value of manure and the management practices necessary to enhance that value. (In Switzerland, even in more recent times, farmers carefully aged their barn manure, along with their own manure, in big compost piles out in front of their barns where everyone could see it. The bigger and more neatly square or rectangular were the stacks, the richer and more successful the farmer was thought to be, sort of the way, in our culture, we leave the Porsche parked conspicuously in the driveway.) But in America, early farmers were under the delusion that the soil here was infinitely rich and did not need any kind of fertilizer. When that became obviously and painfully wrong, efforts were made to return to the careful stewardship of manure practiced in Europe and Asia. But at almost the same time, purchased chemical fertilizers became commonly available. Given the choice, and lacking the modern machines that make manure handling much easier, few farmers, beset with all kinds of tedious labor, opted for labor-intensive manure management. A leading farm magazine just a few decades ago ran an article declaring that manure was not worth the hauling. Some years later, the magazine contritely printed a retraction. Only in an urban society removed completely from rural life did an irrational fear of barn manure develop. This kind of fear was and is part of our society’s paranoia about dirt and germs. In the countryside, the fear was about avoiding the labor of handling manure, and then, when the number of livestock on a farm started increasing dramatically without any advancement in good manure management, a fear of odor and flies."