raw

[Warning: This post is not for the squeamish!]

So my latest venture into the world of the non-traditional (that is actually most traditional!) is something called raw feeding. I was somewhat primed for this by the last book I read (Omnivore's Dilemma) and its talk of species-appropriate diets (although it was referring to cows & chickens!). I had read or maybe just heard about the concept prior to that but between Shadow's almost incessant licking lately and the aforementioned book, I thought I'd do some investigation. Turns out to be quite a....robust topic of conversation online with several camps (of course) as to the *real* proper diet for dogs, ranging from the "food science" of kibble to the "prey model" (basically, feeding dogs diets similar to those of their closest wild relative, the gray wolf. Thankfully this does NOT involve having the dog actually kill the prey.)

The realization that Shadow's previous diet was the most processed food in my house, with an ingredient list to match (Chicken By-Product Meal (natural source of Chondroitin Sulfate and Glucosamine), Corn Meal, Ground Whole Grain Sorghum, Ground Whole Grain Barley, Chicken, Natural Chicken Flavor, Dried Beet Pulp (sugar removed), Chicken Fat (preserved with mixed Tocopherols, a source of Vitamin E), Fish Meal, Dried Egg Product, Brewers Dried Yeast, Potassium Chloride, Calcium Carbonate, Salt, Vitamins [Vitamin E Supplement, Beta-Carotene, Ascorbic Acid, Vitamin A Acetate, Calcium Pantothenate, Biotin, Vitamin B12 Supplement, Thiamine Mononitrate (source of Vitamin B1), Niacin, Riboflavin Supplement (source of Vitamin B2), Inositol, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (source of Vitamin B6), Vitamin D3 Supplement, Folic Acid], Sodium Hexametaphosphate, Fructooligosaccharides, Fish Oil (preserved with mixed Tocopherols, a source of Vitamin E), Choline Chloride, Flax Meal, Minerals [Ferrous Sulfate, Zinc Oxide, Manganese Sulfate, Copper Sulfate, Manganous Oxide, Potassium Iodide, Cobalt Carbonate], Dried Chicken Cartilage (natural source of Chondroitin Sulfate and Glucosamine), DL-Methionine, Marigold, L-Carnitine, Rosemary Extract), helped solidify my decision. So I've started her off on whole chickens (by feeding the whole bird, you ensure the right dietary mix of meat, bone & organ meat) and plan to start working in fish 1x/wk and other meats. Thankfully Costco sells organic chickens for about $1/lb so it doesn't make that big of an impact on my diet...or my conscience...although eventually I'd like to get a deep freeze to be able to get more "ethical" meat by buying in bulk.

Here's a clip of her chowing down. I was pleasantly surprised to find that she confines herself to the towel and is for the most part, very clean about it. It's only been about a week but already I've noticed that her teeth are sparkling, she no longer has "doggie" breath, AND she's stopped licking herself (which makes me feel horrible since in all likelihood she's been allergic to something in the kibble all along).

For more on raw feeding, there are a couple of websites that seem to be most prominent:
http://rawfed.com/myths/index.html
http://www.rawlearning.com/
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/rawfeeding/

ethical eating

A friend of mine jokes every time we go to a place like Chipotle where they advertise that their meat was raised humanely: "Yeah, right up until they kill it." I've been thinking about this concept quite a bit lately as I've been reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. In it he goes through 4 different food paths: (1) the predominant highly-processed & circuitous path that most food travels nowadays from the corn field to our stomachs, (2) commercialized organic, as represented by Whole Foods, etc, (3) local & more true-to-the-original-intent organic and finally (4) hunted/gathered.

Can't say there were any shocking revelations (having been friends with Audrey for well over a year now!), but it was difficult to get through the first section and its detailed descriptions of the unnatural living conditions (torture, really) that CAFO animals are put through. What is most infuriating is how industrialized agriculture has made food like this seem "normal" while cows & chickens raised in pastures are suddenly "organic" and have to be sought out with great difficulty & expense. I do wish that I had the resources (and personal...fortitude) to undertake creating something similar to the "grass farm" that Pollan describes up on the land in PA. Would be so ideal had I the wherewithal, both monetarily & mentally.

Just received this email from a friend from watermark and though I don't have time to really interact with it now I wanted to get it up here because it struck such a chord with me, not so much because it answered all (or even any) of my questions but just because of the tone of acceptance and understanding it contained. So here it is:

You know I hate it when religion becomes a burden to a person's faith. I have always considered not having been raised in a fundamentalist home a blessing, especially the more I understand the damage caused by toxic faith.[...]I do understand your crisis of faith. I have had people suggest that the best thing to do when facing such a dilemma is to take a vacation from church. Try not to feel judged, because I know your history in the C&MA and the long ties to the traditions of your family and denomination will probably dog you.

I don't think you're alone in your struggles either. I think the revolution taking place is a reflection of people with similar struggles and thoughts. Jesus was a Jew, He wasn't protestant or catholic and I have had those thoughts for years, since seminary in 1980. I at one point considered returning to catholicism. Let me just say, I love Jesus but hate what we have made of Him and the church. I don't have doubts about Him but for me my crisis was and is how can I reconcile the simple message of Jesus with the screwed up denominational rantings of fundamentalism and evangelicalism.

I have two people in my house church who won't call themselves Christians. I can't go that far, but I do understand their struggles. I asked one of them "would you follow Jesus if he walked in here now" and he said yes! So I advised him to just say I am a follower of Jesus and try to live by His teachings.

Look for Him everywhere and you will find Him.(green for earth day)

weeds?

This is an ode of sorts to weeds. They're pretty amazing when you think about it. They grow under the harshest of conditions, when the more elite & sophisticated plants turn up their noses, and they can have some of the most beautiful flowers around. I can vouch for the fact that the butterflies & bees that visit my yard certainly think so!

Over the last year or so, I've filled my backyard with all kinds of "butterfly attractant" flowers and yet, on any given morning, the plant they never fail to visit is the bidens alba, commonly known as "Beggar's-tick" (nice name, eh?) which currently proliferates in my backyard. Toby Hemenway in Gaia's Garden talks about how weeds are better than pretty much anything at deriving nutrition from the soil & air around them. It makes me wonder if the bugs can tell that...and if the nectar is somehow better from these plants? It would make sense since it would give them a definite advantage for propagation.

In any case, I'm keeping these real butterfly attractants around.

planting frenzy

As a result of yesterday's visit to Jene's Tropical Fruit, I went a little mad with the planting. I seem to be maxed out on the backyard; managed to fit in 2 blackberry bushes & some replacements really to the crop circles (feverfew & new jalapeño plant) but the oak roots are just too pervasive on the west side of the yard. (I think the only thing I can possibly add over there are bromeliads & other shallow-rooted things.) So, I have officially begun work on the front yard!

I planted:

2 blueberry bushes (one even has blueberries already on it!), a mulberry (yummy memories of childhood here) & a starfruit tree

digital vs. analog

After numerous attempts, I have finally achieved what I once thought to be an impossible task: reading a Thomas Pynchon novel. Admittedly, his shortest and "most accessible", yet I still feel some pride at actually getting through it - and more than that, enjoying it. At first I tried reading it in small chunks, letting the page-long sentences wash over me without trying to figure out what was going on. Excruciating method that I do not recommend. Finally, this weekend I decided to read it for real, going back to the beginning, reading aloud the interminable sentences until I began at last to get into the rhythm of his writing. Once that happened, the book flowed along more easily and I began to catch glimpses of the elusive idea.

[Here's a sample of the long, involved sentences:

Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust — and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath of the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes — it made him sick to look, but he had to look. (Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 4-5)

Yes. That was all one sentence.]

I still cannot say that I got it. The entire experience was similar to what I imagine an acid trip to be like: nothing I can quite pinpoint but an overall, overwhelming sense of seeing an idea much larger than myself. The crux was a passage in which Oedipa (the protagonist) is trying to figure out whether the entire series of events were fabrication (an elaborate hoax or hallucination) or fact. She is certain that one or the other must be true since that is the matrix of life: ones or zeroes, life or death, paranoia or reality. And yet, since this is never resolved, one is left with the third possibility of something that is neither one nor the other — She had heard all about the excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided...

gardening quandary

I noticed yesterday morning that one of my pentas was looking unusually bedraggled in spots. Haven't had rain in a couple of weeks so I thought that might be the problem...but the other pentas in the yard all looked fine. Upon closer inspection, I found TWO huge caterpillars happily munching away. They are pretty funky-looking with 2 huge black spots which are, I think, to scare birds into thinking they are much larger than they are, and then a series of circles down their back.The coolest part of their camouflage is that they can look like a dead leaf hanging from the plant. So now the quandary. A good butterfly garden has good host plants for them to lay their eggs...and will have caterpillars. My reading on the subject suggests planting in large quantities for this very reason and just assume that you will lose some to bugs & caterpillars. Eventually a balance will be achieved as natural predators invade, etc. It's so hard to do though when I have a plant that I feel so personally invested in though!

For the moment I'm going to let them be since the plant seems to be fine except for those 2 areas. Plus, it seems to have survived this before since I can remember it looking this way in other years.

In other gardening news, I'm checking out a place this afternoon that I found online and that just happens to be over in St. Pete! (Jene's Tropical Fruit) It looks like they have both the perennial peanut there AND blueberry bushes! I am very excited :)

rain gardening

For the past few weekends, I've been working on putting in a little rain garden near the downspout. That area constantly floods when I have rain, particularly if it rains for an extended period of time - or heavily - and it never fails to flood the back porch as well. Briefly tried a rain barrel there but the location is not ideal - neither in terms of convenience or for the obstructed view!

The idea behind the rain garden is to dig out a depression and then fill it with plants and other elements that allow the excess water to soak into the ground, rather than simply eroding away the topsoil. They can be as elaborate or simple as you want to make them. (I just read about a cool system they have at the Permaculture Institute of Northern California that uses greywater in a similar way, eventually ending in a pond, complete with ducks & koi. )

Step 1:
Dug out the area for the rain garden. Not as extensive as I would've liked due to the inevitable roots in my way! For the most part, I filled the area with ferns & other plants transplanted from another corner of the yard but I did pick up some lilies to include.

lillies purchased from a local garden fairtransplanted ferns

Step 2:
Sheet mulched the surrounding area to build up the soil and allow me to plant ground cover. This should further define the rain garden area and also prevent dirt from filling the area back up. The added mulch in the rain garden itself should help hold in water for the water-loving plants - plus it makes it less apparent that it is actually about a foot deeper than the rest.

so far the transplants seem to be holding up!

Step 3:
The first rain since the garden has been installed! Seems to be working. Water has collected into the depressions and NO flooding on the porch, despite almost continuous rain since last night. Hooray! Now I just need the area to fill in with greenery and hopefully it will be a beautiful addition to the garden.

Anyone reading this (thankfully, an unlikely scenario) will begin to wonder at the frequency with which spiders are mentioned in this blog...but I had another encounter with one that has made me think...and gave me a tiny insight into the concept of grace.

I was washing up and (luckily for the spider) before I began to run the water, I noticed a small spider down in the basin. I switched to the other side, all the while keeping an eye on her to see what she would do next. During the course of rinsing of dishes, etc, the poor thing tried repeatedly to climb up the wall of the sink and kept falling down. The thoughts of her slowly starving to death or worse, being inadvertently killed when I next washed dishes, were too unsettling so I determined to "rescue" her. I tried the first thing at hand - a fork - which she did *not* like and scurried away from, even when presented with the handled end.

After several other implements were tried and rejected by said spider, I finally hit upon the drain stopper and that met with her approval. I airlifted her to the counter and watched with satisfaction as she scurried off to the corner, probably never to venture out to the world of the sink again. It made me think of my biggest roadblock to believing in God - that I cannot fathom an infinite being of a vast universe concerning itself with such a small and inconsequential planet such as Earth, much less one of the billions of beings that inhabit it. Obviously, I am much more closely connected to the spider in terms of scale than this being would be to me but still, it made me think that perhaps such a thing could be possible.