Our poor neglected blog was beginning to be taken over by spambots, so I thought I better give a real update. Hopefully those spammers won’t be back, but please do not be fooled; we would never promote “Health Management Services!!! CLICK HERE!!!”, nor would we use that much exclamation.
So, what’ve we been up to over at Golden Ears?
Well our amazing basement renovation is coming together quite nicely. Before long we’ll be sitting around a rocket stove in our subterranean library!
When the conditions are right, we’re playing a lot of hockey out on the river. The ice is beautiful and it sure beats paying to skate around in an arena.
Despite the snowscape, we’re already getting the bike shop geared up for it’s exciting re-incarnation.
Other projects on the go (or upcoming) include wine making, wool spinning, and bee keeping.
It’s about that time to order seeds and start planning for spring. On that note, we’re beginning to get wwoofer requests for the spring already, so now is the time to email us if you’ve been thinking of spending some time with us this summer.
Hope 2011 is treating you all very well.
-kelsey
Stay warm friends!
Hey friends and lurkers,
Hope you are having a great winter!
We’re doing pretty well. The basement is coming along nicely; the hardwood floor is almost ready for a dance party (or a quiet reading session?). Paul has the loom all repaired and ready for use. We were very graciously given a sweet mini-van by a gentleman Tristan met while hitchhiking. Not too bad huh?
So spring is here without a doubt, everything is greening up if it is not already green.
We have been busy spring cleaning, including refinishing our house floor.
What have we got done, what are we doing still.
Well just today we relocated the last of approximately 500 asparagus plants. last thursday we hosted a group of 60 students, parent and staff of the Beatty school of the arts, a high point of the week for us and the attendees, one can read the testimony of one parent, Heather, below.
It’s the long weekend now and still a little chilly. I’m starting to think that the good meteorologist at enviroment canada has taken her/his vacation time. The predictions for the last few days have have been terrible. Last thursday we had a wind storm that was the strongest in years. My tree house(where i sleep) was doing a jig. All this rain is keeping everything green. The river is also making a late rise. On a normal year the river usually peaks in the first 2 weeks of may. This year it will come up short in terms of a high water mark but even to see it rise a few feet is heartening after such a terrible non-winter. Summer is coming non the less. Our pigs arrived Monday, yeah pigs.
point form list of spring accomplishments
-Asparagus saved, 500 plants relocated
-60 new fruit trees planted
-studio built(just waiting for the floor to dry)
-sauna improvements(river rock floor, cedar on the walls of the change room, shower stall tiled
-new(old) three point on the front of the small tractor(thanks Al)
-new filters for drip irrigation(thanks Al)
-new blades on our lilingston spider cultivator
-beginning to purchase 10 acres of adjoining land
-garden heaps turned into garden beds
So we have just experienced our first 2-3 days of weed killing weather.
we massacred weeds manualy, mechanicaly and with flame.
Manualy it is amazing what 20 poeple with hoes can do to cultivated corn 2 mornings and all of our early corn is done. Today i assembled a flame weeder for the front of our deere tractor and with the cultivater following up on the back we should have cut the amount of broad leaf weeds down considerably.
I guess some explanations are in order. We have to kinds of weeds broad leafs, and grasses.
Broad leafs include pig weed, lambs quarter, and the allways plentyfull canola. This group of weeds are the most immediately dangerous to what we grow, they can shade out, or choke out, and obscure the plants we grow as well as depleting the surrounding soil of the same nutrients our crops need.
Grasses while not an immediate threat can become established and be hard to remove. The worst id cuch or quak grass which spreads by ryzhomes that can pentrate just about everything including potatoes, carrots and rubarb roots.
The best way to remove these is a care hand and hoe.
Last thursday i began the process of replacing our aging stirrup hoe fleet with 4 new hoes.
-tristan
So new hoes were picked up at the post office today. They work great. Also in the mail today was a big thick envelope of the experiences of the students of Beatty School of the arts, haven’t had a chance to read more than a couple. I will excerpt some in the next posting.
3 of our wwoofers of are off to their next farming experience, 4 more have arrived in the last week.
Last we had our first on farm mini concert, a success the band: Morlove, and all of us had a great time, the house was beautifully decorated.
Ah the Strawberries, they are just around the corner. This wet couple of weeks has been excellent for limiting lygus bug activity. If the cool temperatures continue for another couple of days we won’t even have to break out the bug sucker. Are bug sucker is a large hydraulically driven squirrel fan. It operates by disturbing the plants causing the lygus bugs to fly up where they are sucked then chopped by the fan into oblivion.
-tristan
According to Jacob Grimm of Brothers Grimm, Easter has long been a holiday of spring, rejuvenation that the Christians then perverted with tales of the son of God turning into a zombie.
“Ostara, Eástre seems therefore to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted by the resurrection-day of the christian’s God. Bonfires were lighted at Easter and according to popular belief of long standing, the moment the sun rises on Easter Sunday morning, he gives three joyful leaps, he dances for joy [...]. Water drawn on the Easter morning is, like that at Christmas, holy and healing [...]; here also heathen notions seems to have grafted themselves on great christian festivals. Maidens clothed in white, who at Easter, at the season of returning spring, show themselves in clefts of the rock and on mountains, are suggestive of the ancient goddess [...].”
Source: Wikipedia
Rebecca Kneen of Crannog Ales and Left Fields has really sparked my flame of ceremonies and rituals. Upon her recommendation, almost everyone on the farm has read The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk. I suggest anyone interested in spirituality of any kind and “end of the world” scenarios read the book.
So on this easter, perhaps we could integrate back a bit of tradition. I say to you:
- Women wear white, suggest of the ancient goddess!
- Build a bonfire and give three joyful leaps!
- Draw and drink the healing water of this day!
Really, all I need is an excuse to feast.
-illona
I must post this incredible section of Monsanto’s description in Wikipedia. It’s absolutely mind-boggling how one company could have possibly created so many detrimental products that take about 20-40 years to discover as being absolutely toxic to life.
“Monsanto was founded in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, by John Francis Queeny, a 30-year veteran of the pharmaceutical industry. He funded the start-up with his own money and capital from a soft drink distributor, and gave the company his wife’s maiden name. His father in law was Emmanuel Mendes de Monsanto a wealthy sugar factor active in Vieques, Puerto Rico and based in St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies. The company’s first product was the artificial sweetener saccharin, which it sold to the Coca-Cola Company. It also introduced caffeine and vanillin to Coca-Cola, and became one of that company’s main suppliers.[citation needed]
In 1919, Monsanto established its presence in Europe by entering into a partnership with Graesser’s Chemical Works at Cefn Mawr near Ruabon, Wales to produce vanillin, salicylic acid, aspirin and later rubber.
In its third decade, the 1920s, Monsanto expanded into basic industrial chemicals like sulfuric acid, and the decade ended with Queeny’s son Edgar Monsanto Queeny taking over the company in 1928.
The 1940s saw Monsanto become a leading manufacturer of plastics, including polystyrene, and synthetic fibers. Since then, it has remained one of the top 10 US chemical companies. Other major products have included the herbicides 2,4,5-T, DDT, and Agent Orange used primarily during the Vietnam War as a defoliant agent (later proven to be highly carcinogenic to any who come into contact with the solution), the artificial sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet), bovine somatotropin (bovine growth hormone (BST)), and PCBs[3]. Also in this decade, Monsanto operated the Dayton Project, and later Mound Laboratories in Miamisburg, Ohio, for the Manhattan Project, the development of the first nuclear weapons and, after 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission.
Monsanto began manufacturing DDT in 1944, along with some 15 other companies.[4] The use of DDT in the U.S. was banned by Congress in 1972, due in large part to efforts by environmentalists, who persisted in the challenge put forth by Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring in 1962, which sought to inform the public of the side effects associated with the insecticide, which had been much-welcomed in the fight against malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. As the decade ended, Monsanto acquired American Viscose from England’s Courtauld family in 1949.
In 1954, Monsanto partnered with German chemical giant Bayer to form Mobay and market polyurethanes in the US.
In 1968, Monsanto became the first organization to mass-produce visible LEDs, using gallium arsenide phosphide to produce red LEDs suitable for indicators.[5]
In the 1960s and 1970s, Monsanto became one of 10-36 producers of Agent Orange for US Military operations in Vietnam[6][7]
In 1980, Monsanto established the Edgar Monsanto Queeny safety award[citation needed] in honor of its former CEO (1928–1960), to encourage accident prevention.
Monsanto scientists became the first to genetically modify a plant cell in 1982. Five years later, Monsanto conducted the first field tests of genetically engineered crops.
Through a process of mergers and spin-offs between 1997 and 2002, Monsanto made a transition from chemical giant to biotech giant. Part of this process involved the 1999 sale by Monsanto of their phenylalanine facilities to Great Lakes Chemical Corporation (GLC) for $125 million. In 2000, GLC sued Monsanto because of a $71 million dollar shortfall in expected sales.
In 2001, retired Monsanto chemist William S. Knowles was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on catalytic asymmetric hydrogenation, which was carried out at Monsanto beginning in the 1960s until his 1986 retirement.
Throughout 2004 and 2005, Monsanto filed lawsuits against many farmers in Canada and the U.S. on the grounds of patent infringement, specifically the farmers’ sale of seed containing Monsanto’s patented genes. In some cases, farmers claimed the seed was unknowingly sown by wind carrying the seeds from neighboring crops, a claim rejected in Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser.[8] These instances began in the mid to late 1990s, with one of the most significant cases being decided in Monsanto’s favor by the Canadian Supreme Court. By a 5-4 vote in late May 2004, that court ruled that “by cultivating a plant containing the patented gene and composed of the patented cells without license, the appellants (canola farmer Percy Schmeiser) deprived the respondents of the full enjoyment of the patent.” With this ruling, the Canadian courts followed the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision on patent issues involving plants and genes.
As of February 2005, Monsanto has patent claims on breeding techniques for pigs which would grant them ownership of any pigs born of such techniques and their related herds. Greenpeace claims Monsanto is trying to claim ownership on ordinary breeding techniques.[9] Monsanto claims that the patent is a defensive measure to track animals from its system. They furthermore claim their patented method uses a specialized insemination device that requires less sperm than is typically needed.[10]
In 2006, the Public Patent Foundation filed requests with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to revoke four patents that Monsanto has used in patent lawsuits against farmers. In the first round of reexamination, claims in all four patents were rejected by the Patent Office in four separate rulings dating from February through July 2007.[11] Monsanto has since filed responses in the reexaminations.
In October 2008, the company’s Canadian division, Monsanto Canada Inc., was named one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers by Mediacorp Canada Inc., and was featured in Maclean’s newsmagazine. Later that month, Monsanto Canada Inc. was also named one of Manitoba’s Top Employers, which was announced by the Winnipeg Free Press newspaper.[12]
In January, 2010, Monsanto was named company of the year by Forbes.”
-illona
Wednesday i was a parent helper at my sons trip to the Farm. When I first drove up in my new car i thought it might be a long day. I saw a group of granolas and wondered where the day would take us. Boy was i in for a surprise……
I was immediatly impressed at the way Tristan spoke to everyone as equal and not like kids and city moms, but as people he was genuinly interested in teaching a little of what is precious to him and his community.
Before i was a wife and mother and employee i was a young woman that traveled and believed in individuality and making a difference in my world. I was unique and open minded and loved and appreciated all the simple things that i take for granted everyday. I think that listening to the men and women i met there i realized how closed up i have become.
While i could see that this place was making a real impact on many of the children visiting and learning about different lifestyles and farming without a corporate influence, I think that the biggest impact was on myself.
Sometimes it only takes a simple field trip or a brief conversation to really make a deep lasting impression on someone. I have to thank all the wonderfull men and women who took time out of there day in order to teach young people what they value and cherish. I hope that the things i saw and the feeling that i got from your community lifestyle will have a positive reawakening effect on me and how i teach my children to look at the world and what they can achieve.
A special thank you to illona for the walk through her medicine garden and the beautiful food she and others prepared for us.
Thank you
Heather
The recycling council of B.C. has set up a contest for the best movie trailer about getting people off their addiction to disposable cups. Neskie and illona put together a video. Wish them luck!
(illona’s update: we placed 4th, i think? …. i guess that’s why indie media stays indie. 
)
Ta7ks Re Cups (that means “NO CUPS” in Secwepemctsin) from Neskie Manuel on Vimeo.
Imagine a world where everything you’ve ever needed could just be found instead of bought. Well, congratulations because you’re living in it now. See the link below and enlighten yourself!
I Love Trash – Watch it for free!