Monarchs In The Air and In Our Living Room

Monarch Butterflies have followed me most of my life, as it turns out. I was born in Monterey, California when we owned a house in Pacific Grove...the Winter destination for the Monarchs West of the Rocky Mountains. Here on the East coast, the butterflies have a different flight pattern.

This egg I watched being delivered on a milkweed plant by a gorgeous female Monarch Butterfly, out in our Virginia yard on the 18th. I cut the stem and about half the plant and brought it inside to watch the unbelievably swift process from egg to wing. The egg hatched out today, less than 72 hours after it was attached to the underside of the leaf. The newly-hatched caterpillar has already eaten a tiny hole in the leaf, and the the big 1 1/2" caterpillar that I collected off of a milkweed on the 19th, split its caterpillar persona and became a chrysalis over the last 24 hours. Whew...so incredibly fast !

Spring !

Yea, Spring ! Just when all outdoor plant life looks really, really dead and gone, trees start to flower and bud out, Spring bulbs begin to nose out of the Earth...and suddenly.... Winter is over. Not that we had a hard Winter. Just the lack of green, growing plant-life brings me down after awhile. Houseplants help for sure, and the Dwarf Banana tree ( now a small grove ! )that shares our bedroom for six months out of the year has a definite living, breathing presence of its own. But watching the return of the mighty Hostas and Bleeding Hearts always seems incredible...so delicate looking, yet there they were, frozen root clumps for a good part of the year. Actually, frozen and defrosted several times over.
Yesterday I sowed some seeds out in the Fenced Garden, in a bed I prepared several months ago with some veganic plant food from Garden's Alive, some kelp meal and compost from our own heap. I sowed Red Cloud Beets, Short 'n Sweet Carrots, and Osaka Purple Mustard Greens. Garlic is coming up where J planted some out last October....or was it early November ? The weeds will be starting their race any day...some have already begun, but not in earnest yet.
Yellow Goatsbeard seeds got planted in a flat of seed-starting mix. I harvested the seeds from a crazy-looking seedhead down the road. I think S helped me collect the seeds. We'll see how they do...I kept the seeds in a closely closed baggie in a laundryroom cabinet all Winter.

New Leaf Vegan Society

I'm playing in Photoshop more....and trying to learn XHTML and CSS at the same time. Boy do I feel dumb a good part of the time...so many news angles to learn...!

I am looking forward to spiffing up our site and getting more information out to people about the truth of industrial-scale animal agriculture, and how easy and delicious and better for everyone involved, a vegan diet is.

Pirate Sam Dammit

Sam will be 12 years old this May. He's still got the energy and humor of a kitten. His left may need to be removed soon, and just for fun I fitted him up with a patch on Photoshop.

2008 Begins in the Heap

Ah, it's been a busy couple of months...I havent posted anything in months, and now that Winter is setting in I'm ready to garden again !
But the gardens need serious cleaning up, and I need to wait for Spring to come back around.
I did start a new compost heap today, seemed like the perfect way to start the New Year. We'd been tossing all of our veggie scraps, coffee and tea leavings in a loose pile of straw and leaves, waiting for there to be enough to build a big enough pile to contain the heat that the microbes give off while living their lives. Too small a mound and the warmth dissipates too soon, leaving the colony subject to freezing. Make it big enough and the heap will live on and work all through the winter and reward you with nice compost and worms aplenty in the Spring. I love our compost heap :)

I've been reading a lot lately about food. The history of American food production ( Kitchen Literacy by Ann Viselis), world food issues ( Feeding People is Easy by Colin Tudge ), Feeding your family on strictly local viands ( Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by B Kingsolver ), and of course all the food related issues in the news ( that I can find time to read ! ). Several new vegan cookbooks have come out, including The Joy Of Vegan baking by Colleen Patrick Goudreau and Veganomicon by Isa Chandra...both very inspiring cooks and human beings.
And who knew that global warming was caused in large part by our shamefully wasteful and cruel methods of animal containment, torture and consumption of their body parts and excretions? Including transporting said body parts, "by-products" and other food stuffs around the globe. I guess we should have seen it coming. The reports have been out for several years now, and still it barely gets attention. "Try to eat less meat", is about the strongest message you'll hear on the subject. Sigh.
I remain hopeful though.

Because I don't know how else to stay sane.

Going and staying vegan has been incredibly easy, rewarding and fascinating. The hardest part is busting old habits and myths, and keeping an open mind. For instance: I just yesterday got around to making almond milk from scratch. I could not believe how easy it was. I've been vegan for over a year and still felt like milk ( rice, almond or soy milk you can buy in stores ) had to come from some factory and packaged in a carton. Like some magic made it "milk" behind factory doors. Jeez ! So you soak raw almonds in water for some hours, grind it up, strain it, and there is : nut milk ! The almond milk was very white ( even using unblanched nuts ) and barely tasted of almonds...perfect to splash on cereal or make into a chocolate pudding ( this afternoon's delish experiment ). So everyday I learn something new and wonderful that has been out there for years and years. And there's the hope : that others will catch on and look around, and realize that going vegan is so worthwhile, on so many levels.

Hamish Passes

Our Americana hen, Hamish, died today. She was 7 years old on June June 19th. We've lost several others in the last month, but her passing seems like the end of a family era. She laid gorgeous big bluish-greenish eggs....was still laying up until about a month ago, when they all stopped laying. J buried her in the Fenced Garden saying that the garden was as much hers as ours. She spent many happy hours in there with the others, scratching for bugs and bits. Hard to believes she's gone....so robust and smart we figured she'd be the last hen standing out of their flock.

The hens started out as something our daughter wanted to do in her senior year in high school...actually she wanted to rescue a bunch of chicks that were hatched at school ,( in one of those misguided class projects ), but I said, "no"...let's order some from a hatchery ( ugh...that was before I became vegan ! ), and before we knew it, there we were, in love with the little peeps that arrived via the post office, in a cardboard box. I think we always gave them good care...lots of room to run about and explore, good food, fresh water, and we even built a nice hen house which has become a focal point of our yard.
When our daughter went off to college, the hens needed me to take care of them and I loved the rhythm they brought to my day. The girls would be crowding the door to be the first out to start the day's bug hunt. Just before dusk they would amble back in to the house and arrange themselves on the roost, fussing about who would sleep where. Some of the smaller ones worked their bodies up under the wings of the two big Cochins, some would roost apart from the others, all murmuring ancient chicken songs to themselves and each other. Rain they hated. Falling snow was intriguing, but accumulated snow was a problem. One year snow drifted 3 feet deep in the hen yard. I shoveled high-walled alleys so they could get outside and stretch their legs and watched them parade single-file down the blue corridors.
Only three hens left. Who will I bake giant pans cornbread for in the bleak dark days of Winter ?

Mom's Birthday Butterflies

This chrysalis all but opened on my Mom's 79th Birthday, she LOVES butterflies.... especially Monarchs, so I'm calling it her's ! It did open and fly away the next day. Next year I'd like to get some pictures of one as it's emerging from the gold speckled cellophane envelope. I'm still seeing lots of Monarchs, and still reading Four Wings and a Prayer. It's getting a little tedious and disappointing to keep reading how petty some of the early researchers were about sharing their information with other researchers, both citizen and degree-ed scientists. More writing about the natural history and migration of the insect would be welcome. But I guess this way I'm getting the whole picture on how the information that we do have came about...so I'll quit gripping !