Reading Gene Logsdon

We are now safely past Thanksgiving, replete with the usual mashed rutabagas, a new and wonderful recipe for sweet potatoes, and a very tasty small turkey (one of our own, so yes, I'm bragging). Suddenly the weather has decided it's time to remind us what winter is all about, and the temps don't seem to want to get over 36 degrees today. And windy. No snow for us, though--just morning frosts to prove that there was some moisture in the air, diminishing as the days go by. There was supposed to have been a storm sloshing its way up from the south and meeting a cold front diving from the north, but the storm changed its mind and stayed down in Mexico before heading off toward Texas. So it's just cold.


I suppose I should be doing housework, or making bread, or making soaps, or doing something useful, but my favorite thing to do when it's too cold outside to make work seem like any kind of fun is to read. What I'm reading now is Gene Logsdon's Small-Scale Grain Raising. Sounds fascinating, no? Actually it is, because Gene is a good writer with a sense of humor which shines through like the sun burning off the early cold clouds. He really makes it seem important, and even fun, to get out there and plant some corn, milo, beans, peas, and wheat, even in small patches and rows. And then feed it to your turkeys/chickens/other livestock, as well as feeding yourself. Okay, we will wait until it stops being winter before we start planting, but I'm already designing a rotation scheme which will incorporate heavily fertilized (organically of course) corn or milo followed by a grain and clover, then vegetables, and finishing with iris for a couple of years before going back to corn/milo. This crop rotation would take 5 to 6 years, all the time building soil fertility better than my hit-or-miss methods. This could work! But oh, why didn't I understand this before I was quite so Old? I promise to report back on the results.
Here's a sample of Gene's writing (from the current second edition, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, for those of you who might want to look it up):
"Beans can be drilled carefully into finely worked seedbeds, no-tilled directly into mostly undisturbed soil following cotton or corn, broadcast by hand and disked roughly into the soil, even dropped on top of the ground from airplanes into standing wheat with no tillage at all. In all four situations the beans sprout and grow more or less successfully, although broadcasting them from airplanes is risky. The point is that if you make a mistake with soybeans or any dry bean, just say you did it on purpose."

Meanwhile, I had bad things happen with my computer last week, but I had a professional fix things for me (I'm a farmer, not a computer person). So far the only repercussions have been with this blog. I lost all the blogs I had been following, plus I seem to have lost my three deeply valued followers. Oh, no! Or perhaps everybody took issue with my last post, written in the pre-Thanksgiving dumps. Come back--it's safe now!