Homestead mailing list

["Don Bowen" <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

I have spent the last month or so (really from the first of January) helping 
out on an organic vegetable farm in the Central Coast of California near 
Hollister.  I did a little tractor work but mostly worked on tractors.  You 
can look on my I was out of email contact most of the time so had little time 
to join in the discussion but I learned a lot.  While there I spent time 
reading some of the magazines he gets and that was an education, mostly about 
what is not reported on the celebrity obsessed news.  

Do you think that by buying organic food you are avoiding GMOs?  Think again, 
genetic drift and the inability to keep GMO and non GMO separated combined 
with no testing have allowed significant GMOs into your diet even if you grow 
most of your own.  

All farmers are suffering from very high fuel prices.  I filled one tractor 
with over $150 worth of Diesel fuel.  Delivery trucks to go to the several 
bay area farmers markets are consuming several hundred dollars a week while 
delivery to the farm is costing more every day.

Not having a computer and the Internet to distract me allowed me to finish 
several books on my very long list, unfortunately the list grew as fast as it 
shrank.

The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H.W. 
Brands was a very good book on the growth of California after the gold 
discovery of 1848.  Several first person accounts livened up the book.

Building Green: A complete How-To of Alternative Building Methods by Clarke 
Snell & Tim Calahan was a much better description of various building methods 
than his earlier book.  He built a small guest cottage using cob, cordwood, 
strawbale, and stick frame with a living roof. 

World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler was a piece of modern apoplectic 
fiction.  What happens when the oil runs out?  His vision of the future is a 
little darker than mine but he presents it in a very readable fashion.

Peak Everything" Waking up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg is 
another of his Peak Oil books.  In it he tries to show that we are in a cheap 
oil derived economy and culture that the reduction of oil is also a reduction 
of many things including social progress and innovation.

I also added a couple of books to the list.  One in particular is Glacial 
Lake Missoula and its Humongus Floods by David Alt.  I will get to it next 
after I complete Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow by J.K. Rowling.  There 
was a recent comment on the list about 70,000 years of glacial coverage in 
the upper Midwest.  I have not replied because the Lake Missoula book is 
about a lake formed several times when glaciers dammed the Clark Fork in 
Northern Idaho.  This book should tell me about the extent and time of 
glacial activity.
>From don.bowen AT earthlink.net  Sun Mar 30 18:10:57 2008
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I believe that as a condition for him to run his wife asked him to stop
smoking.  I do not know if he has kept to his promise.

As for speeding, I drove 400 Interstate miles yesterday and speeds often
over 80 and was continually being passed.  I tend to drive fast except when
I am towing.  My trailer is still in Hollister so I came back much faster.