first church of dirt

communion of saints

important announcement: weekly Sunday services begin January 1, 2012.

the sauna kiuas isn't quite finished yet, but it's functional. so we'll have potluck and hot sauna Sunday afternoons/evenings. e-mail for directions if you need them, or to coordinate potlucking.

you may have noticed that January 1 is New Year's Day and are perhaps thinking, "that's not such a good day to start a thing like this." but here's something to consider: sauna is a great way to sweat out the Old Year's intemperance for to start off the New Year right. don't feel bad if you need to skip, though; the increase to your likelihood of damnation will be minimal.

see you soon.

shirking hard

friends and faithful: I very much regret my unexplained absence from this here electronical church bulletin. rest assured that good things have been happening at the first church of dirt and that I will try to write about them all in time, probably during the slower seasons of the year. until then, have fun with your bobbing apples and mushroom hunting and wine mulling and whatever else it is you dirty folks like to do this time of year.

leisure

all sorts of projects are going on around here. we'll get around to putting out some church bulletins with more detail eventually, but an incomplete list will have to do for now:

mushroom cultivation
new toilet
big piles of woodchips
four swarms and one ten-hour hive cutout
fishing
mobile chicken shelter
baby animals
water filter work
probably some other things

so there you go. we're still doing good dirty work, just failing to publish anything about it. apologies.

colonialism

since 2006, there have been numerous articles written about the impending doom of the European honeybee. colony collapse disorder entered the common lexicon. the odds that the average non-beekeeping liberal urbanite had heard of Varroa destructor increased dramatically. at some point, journalism took a backseat to sensationalism. Albert Einstein has since been routinely invoked. that one-third of the world's food relies on honey bees has been repeated severally.

well. the first church of dirt is quite fond of honey. and happy honeybees. and there's no serious quarrel with Albert Einstein. we would not condemn the world to get by on but two-thirds of its food.

but some things are fishy. the first reference to Einstein speaking about the importance of honeybees showed up in 1994, for example. the one-third of food claim has fairly obscure origins, but the original source referenced insect-pollinated crops, not honeybee-pollinated crops.

that said, honeybees and beekeepers are most certainly having troubles. some are, anyway. the biggest losses have been occurring for migratory beekeepers. these are folks who transport beehives into big almond orchards, or big blueberry farms, or big cranberry bogs, or big pumpkin fields, &c for pollination. there are a couple of reasons these places need to import pollinators.

first is that there's typically just one species of plant growing. in an almond orchard, that's going to be almond trees. all others have been removed to prevent competition with the almonds. that's either been done with chemicals, or with tractor cultivation, or with hands and hand tools, but it isn't terribly important which. so there are only almond trees around to flower. so there's only nectar and pollen around as long as the almonds are flowering. so honeybee colonies that stayed put in this hypothetical almond orchard would have no flowers to forage for most of the year. they would die.

the other reason pollinators are imported is that insecticides are typically a big part of large-scale fruit orchards. even organic orchards sometimes use plant-derived insecticides such as neem oil. if honeybees were around while insecticides were applied, they would die. so beehives are brought to the orchard only during almond flowering.

those two practices also eradicate any wild pollinators that could otherwise take care of business. these include bumble bees, mason bees, syrphids, wasps, and several more. turns out that many of these species are much better at pollinating than honeybees are, but aren't so easily transportable. they also require a variety of plants around to complete the various parts of their life cycles.

syrphids mating in midair. nice. from wikipedia.

the point of all this rambling is that some of the beekeepers who are having the most trouble with colony collapse disorder are the migratory beekeepers servicing the bad habits of industrial agriculture. this church does not have much sympathy for those beekeepers. this church does not actually have any sympathy for those beekeepers.

many beekeepers also use a variety of potent chemicals to keep a variety of honeybee parasites and diseases in check. they feed honeybees syrup made from refined sugar to maximize the honey harvest. they disturb and manipulate their colonies such that the bees' resilience is greatly reduced. bad habits, all of them. the honeybees so abused deserve our sympathy. the beekeepers who lose their colonies because of their foolishness do not deserve our sympathy.

there are, however, a growing number of folks keeping bees in much more thoughtful ways. all the ins and outs are far beyond the scope of this church's humble blog, but go ahead and look into it. biobees.com is a great place to start.

we at the first church of dirt and pikkumaatila would rather like to join the ranks of wise and responsible beekeepers. to that end, I took a trip to town about a month ago to build some Warré hives with a pal. apart from cutting the end of my thumb off with a table saw, everything went pretty well.

1/8" smaller. the best gore is obscured by gauze that I couldn't take off.

fortunately, the lovely folks at the shop we were using had themselves a sawstop, so the width of the blade was all I lost. Deston's selfless sacrifice of his beloved old t-shirt to save some of my blood was much appreciated, as was Barny's quick transportation to the emergency room.

it wasn't until I finished assembling the hives two weeks later that I realized I hadn't cut myself on the last cut of the project; I did it cutting one more piece than we needed. oh well. nothing some honey and comfrey dressings couldn't fix.

one hive stayed at adx, two went to Alsea with Barny, one's a watershed north with Deston, and one is sitting in wait for a swarm at pikkumaatila.

I tried to at least approximate most of Cornell's recommendations. now we'll wait and hope.

if you're in the area and want to learn about beekeeping, Jacqueline Freeman in Venersborg runs a great bee class periodically. and I think that's just about enough for now.

coming up: Sunday is Vappu. and Mayday. drink sima and dismantle capitalism accordingly.

canon

there are a handful of folks the first church of dirt is particularly fond of. by way of silly metaphor, let's say that the first church of dirt has a crush on Ivan Illich. that he's been dead for eight years makes it unlikely that the church will suffer any sort of crushing rejection and start playing Morrissey during services.

dashing, right? from wikipedia

this crush does create some mild conflict, as hero worship is sort of antithetical to our creed. that's not such a problem, though, as we also prefer not to truck in dogma.

presently, Illich's Gender is mildly blowing my mind probably once every ten pages on average. and the pages are short. despite being the first book I've read with more footnote than body, it's been a blast. very much recommended.

not being the most articulate cleric, I fear an attempt at summary would be more confusing than enlightening. instead, I'll give you the chapter headings and subheadings:

I. SEXISM AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

II. ECONOMIC SEX
The Reported Economy
The Unreported Economy
Shadow Work
The Feminization of Poverty

III. VERNACULAR GENDER
Ambiguous Complementarity
Socio-Biological Sexism
Social-Science Sexism

IV. VERNACULAR CULTURE
Gender and Tools
Gender Rent, Trade, and Crafts
Gender and Kinship
Gender and Wedlock

V. GENDER DOMAINS AND VERNACULAR MILIEU
Space/Time and Gender
Gender and the Home
Gender and the Grasp of Reality
Gender and Speech

VI. GENDER THROUGH TIME
Gender and Transgression
The Rise of the Heterosexual
The Iconography of Sex

VII. FROM BROKEN GENDER TO ECONOMIC SEX

actually, after looking over that, the book sounds exceptionally dull. it isn't. the main idea, as far as I can tell, is the profound difference between the modern idea of the sexes (male and female) and what Illich calls "vernacular gender".

the book isn't exactly... accessible. I find myself reading the same paragraph over several times to get a handle on it. even then, there are plenty of passages that escape me. there's a certain density of ideas that demands close reading, at least for me.

because of that, the standard issue misogynist who gives Gender a skim might read it as justification for all manner of patriarchal bad behavior. I'm quite certain that Illich's aim was almost the opposite: to explore the detrimental changes in culture that have led to our current situation where gender equality is widely given lip service while quality of life for most everybody declines.

at 179 pages, many of which are two-thirds footnote, Gender is a short book. as such, some important ideas get only a brief treatment. I would really have been interested to read more in "The Rise of the Heterosexual" chapter on, in Illich's words, both transvesty and the transsexual.

I'm also very curious about the idea of rough music, various methods of social control used by communities to keep folks in line. one example given from northern France:

Should a man beat his wife, he too will get rough music. He will be covered with mud and pushed around the village in a wheelbarrow, accompanied by teasing doggerel and the clang of pots and pans. Should he let himself be beaten by his wife, he will be singled out again, tied backward on an ass with the animal's tail in his hands.

the lengthy footnotes do include plenty of other literature to read that may well satisfy my curiosity, and in several languages. I'm most immediately interested in reading the several articles and books cited concerning traditional and historical methods of contraception, as the previous post about reproduction feels very incomplete. and also because I'm a prevert.

also, happy equinox. I think I'm a day late, but I hope you all did something equinoxy. I am, however, right on time for my dear mother's birthday. she's something like 173 years old today.

didn't have many current photos to choose from (I'm looking at you, h-balm), but she's the taller one.

hyvää syntymäpäivää, äitini.

balls not bombs

over the last several days, I've been assembling a substantial supply of seed balls here at the flavor country campus. these are not to be confused with the seed bombs of guerrilla gardeners. the construction and purpose are roughly the same, but our church's rhetoric is a lot less ridiculous.

(fresh balls, not yet dried. the seeds are white clover.)

I enthusiastically approve of the typical guerrilla gardener's activities, but find framing those activities as a form of warfare to be distasteful. if their gardens were being used to feed actual guerrillas, the name would be appropriate. or if they were used to grow material for weapons. or poison. none of those, to the best of my knowledge, are the case.

the choice to conflate regenerative actions (gardening derelict land) that involve little or no risk with destructive action (engaging in guerrilla warfare) that involves very real risk may have something to do with the somewhat juvenile tendency among a certain demographic to exalt guerrillas, or at least an abstract idealized version of guerrillas. Motorcycle Diaries is a good book, folks, but that story got a lot messier before it ended.

but never you mind all of that. back to the balls ("clay dumplings" is also acceptable nomenclature). finding a recipe for seed balls on these here internets is relatively easy. the instructions vary a little bit between sources and can be much more complicated if so desired, but the basic proportions I've been using here at church are five parts clay to three parts compost. some folks add sand. some folks add paper for strength. I don't do either.

the clay I've been using came from our illustrious friend, Deston, not too far north of us. ask him about the meth dozer. most instructions I've seen suggest powdered pottery clay. that sounds like something I would have had to buy, though, and the tithes haven't exactly been pouring in lately. I suggest using your shovel instead of your pocket book.

for the compost portion, I've been using screened worm castings from our worm bin. it's got the shells of old melon seeds, and plenty of bits of egg shell in it. and a few worm egg cases. and worms. the minerals from the egg shells will be good for the garden. the worms and their eggs are unfortunate casualties.

so, I mix up the clay and castings and as many seeds as seems appropriate. then add enough leachate from the worm bin to stick all of it together. most folks use water, which I'm sure works fine. I use the worm tea mostly because we've got a steady supply of it and not a lot of use for it until the main growing/baptism season. it will provide a little something extra for the seedlings, too. then I roll it into balls, giving my hands the distinctive mark of the seed baller.

we've been tossing some into the garden right away, and putting the rest in front of a fan to dry.

once the balls are dried, the seeds should remain viable for about as long as they would have in dry storage.

you might wonder why we use seed balls at all. well, our approach here at the first church of dirt differs substantially from the typical monastic garden. toil doesn't have any inherent value here, so if we can grow food, medicine, and fiber and be lazy, that's super. remember: sloth is a virtue. combined with some free cardboard and heavy mulch to kill the turf, seed balls allow us to plant a veggie garden without turning any dirt over or digging any holes or really bending over much at all. bending over isn't quite a sin, but the first church of dirt recommends avoiding it when possible. it's hard on the back, which can ruin nap time.

in addition to being a lot easier, forgoing turning the dirt also has the advantages of leaving soil structure and complex biology intact. as is frequently the case, the lazier option is the better option.

now, I've never actually planted a veggie garden entirely with seed balls, and I don't know anyone who has. the more orthodox use of seed balls is for spreading wildflowers on vacant land or bank landscaping (those poor bankers won't know what hit them). so our attempt to establish a garden with seed balls could be a complete failure. I prefer failure over working harder.

How long will you lie there, you sluggard?
When will you get up from sleep?
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest—
and ripe fruits will come to you like a tasty snack
and shandy like a cold drink.

Proverbs 6:9-11, edited for content

flock

following the previous uncharacteristically serious post, I think it's time for a sort of intermission before we get back to anything of substance.

so, in that spirit, the first church of dirt presents two photographs of worms for your edification.

(click for larger view)

please enjoy. and be edified.

production

down at the Pikkumaatila, there's a bantam Silkie hen patiently sitting on ten fertile Buckeye eggs we ordered from some folks in Ohio earlier in the week. sounds like a fairly typical barnyard sort of scenario, and it is. but it's also turned my thoughts toward issues of reproduction and technology, as have recent conversations with another little chicken (not to mention the placenta in our freezer).

first, though, the chickens. this is how we found two gals a couple evenings back:

that larger Ameraucana hen, Foggy, has a bad foot and doesn't roost with the others. instead, she sits with the broody little black Silkie, who also makes a handy security blanket. so we tossed Foggy out, dusted the Silkie with diatomaceous earth to do in any critters living on her, and put the eggs in the nest, all while gimpy Foggy looked on.

set the Silkie back on top, and Foggy crowded in shortly afterward.

you can see that, being a bantam, she's not really big enough to cover all ten eggs at once. maybe Foggy's company will help there. we'll see.

Silkies have a reputation for frequently going broody (and having blue skin and flesh). rather than fight that tendency, it makes sense for us to coöperate with this hen to expand the flock instead of using one of the several alternatives using various technologies.

now, a lot of folks keeping chickens are interested in maximum egg production, and breeders have been happy to accommodate that preference. but it comes at the expense of mothering instincts—which decrease egg production when hens go broody—and the longevity of hens, who are quickly exhausted by laying many eggs quickly and need to be frequently replaced if production is to be maintained (see Deston's story for an example of a hen not pushed to produce).

consequently, both the poultry industry and folks with small backyard flocks typically rely on artificial incubators and brooders to hatch chicks then keep them warm while they grow. whether chicks are ordered from a hatchery or purchased at the local farm and feed store, chances are very slim that they were incubated by an actual chicken.

wikipedia

rather than allowing a chicken to express it's instincts and do us a favor in the process, complicated contraptions to do the job are rigged up that consume substantial resources in their design, construction, and operation. this makes sense only if concentration of production and the perverted industrial version of efficiency are the goal. the first church of dirt does not share that goal.

picking a fight with industrial incubators most likely won't excite many of the congregation, though, so let's move on to some possibly more controversial territory, hmm?

more examples of this dichotomy between technological solutions for problems created by previous technological solutions on the one hand and functioning biological systems on the other hand are easy to find. on the topic of reproduction, I'm reminded of stories I've read about the vast sums of money that middle- and upper-class women and men (together and separately) spend on medical procedures to improve their odds of bearing children or siring them, respectively. from a certain point of view, this is a perfectly reasonable example of folks controlling their own bodies and fertility. from another point of view, it is an offensively selfish act considering the large number of children in foster care or otherwise under state control or in need of adoption. as far as this church is concerned, though they aren't without merit, neither of those two opposing views address a couple of more important issues.

most obvious among those issues is the question of why people have trouble with fertility to begin with. the answer, in most cases, isn't really mysterious at all: industrial civilization. myriad modern sources of intense stress. ubiquitous pollutants: PCBs, POPs, endocrine disruptors, a huge variety of pharmaceuticals, agricultural biocides and fertilizers, and on and on and on. a culture that drives humans further and further from meaningful knowledge of our bodies and interactions with the natural world.

these problems are now spread around the world, if not exactly uniformly. the products, services, institutions, and habits that generate them are more predictably distributed; these benefits are enjoyed almost exclusively by the wealthy. and only the wealthy are able to insulate themselves from damage: in relatively less polluted and stressful surroundings, and with expensive industrial medical care including—can you guess?—reproductive technologies.

copyright: Roger Abdelmassih, I think.

so the industrial/technological/incubator-and-brooder solution in this instance is any number of costly medical procedures and pharmaceuticals for those who can afford them. the broody hen solution is to not poison ourselves or allow others to poison us in the first place. whenever possible, the first church of dirt encourages you to choose the broody hen, even though (and because) it might be the dirtier option.

there is also the issue of reproductive technologies for same-sex couples and transgendered folks. for now, I'm going to acknowledge those issues, but leave them for another discussion.

and then there is technological contraception. if disapproving of reproductive technologies ruffled a few chicken feathers, I'm sure that talking about contraception is going to be rather more inflammatory, particularly coming from someone with a Y chromosome. this screed has gone on more than long enough, though, so I will continue with that can of worms a little later.

but back to the chooks: the first chicky day this year, an intermittent first church of dirt high holiday, will be Wednesday, March 23 (or thereabouts). that's 20 days of sub-hen incubation for our ten aspiring baby Buckeyes. looks like we'll miss the vernal equinox—also observed by this church—but not by much.

merkabah

As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made of a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went. The rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around.

The Book of Ezekiel

rims full of eyes all around do sound pretty awesome, but they might not be so easy to come by. that doesn't mean we can't each have our very own thrown-chariots. I recommend ditching the four-wheeled hallucination model in favor of two wheels and a frame. what I'm really getting at is that bicycles are super rad. and also automobiles are mostly really stupid.

(shaundeller.com)

Ivan Illich calculated that the average U.S. automobile travels barely faster than humans walk, if all the time that is devoted to pay for its purchase and operation are taken into account. the pertinent figures may have changed slightly since Ivan Illich wrote about them, but still: automobile transport strikes this church as a rather terrible idea. we will spare you the sermon about the evils of pavement and petroleum pollution. for now, anyway.

but let's talk about bicycles. let's lavish praise on bicycles. the ubiquitous wikipedia puts a sample bicycle's efficiency at roughly equivalent to 670 miles per gallon. that means bicycling is way easier than even walking.

bicycles built or retrofitted for the purpose are very handy for hauling cargo. bicycles take up far less room than automobiles, both in use and when parked. bicycles, weighing very little, do not require the extremely durable and expensive paths that automobiles do.

it should also not be ignored that frequent bicycling has the potential to give one a hot ass. a seriously hot ass. the first church of dirt is in favor of maximizing the number of seriously hot asses in your community and in the world. we're no Augustine of Hippo, folks (patron saint of sore eyes, by the way), so lust away after any bicycle-toned corpora you might encounter.

in the paraphrased words of Farrokh Bulsara, get on your merkabah and ride.

pyro's progress

moving forward slowly. lifted some heavy metal up.

mechanical advantage!

cobbed the junction between fire bricks and 8-inch pipe.

the gift of life

I was given a very special present this weekend.

that is, obviously, a human placenta frozen in a garbage bag.

an old friend whelped a nice little human baby this year. she and her husband planned to bury the placenta in their yard and plant a tree on top of it. trouble is, they'll likely move away before long.

so they gave the placenta to the first church of dirt. we'll decide together what to grow on top of it. whatever we decide on, I hope the kid grows up to like it.

I'm not familiar with the specific makeup of placenta. I expect it's similar to other organs, though, with a substantial amount of minerals involved. that bodes well for whatever tree this placenta ends up feeding. I can't imagine it will be the very best fertilizer in the world, but that isn't really the point.

my friends and I aren't trying to re-create any particular placenta tradition (of which there are many), but what we're doing probably most closely resembles a Hawai'ian ritual. I don't know exactly what significance the parents are attaching to their gift, but I'm very pleased by it. their child will grow up knowing about this and knowing that this one tree has special significance to her. I expect that it will have a positive influence on her connection to dirt.

though my friends are very much part of a Christian tradition that doesn't exactly celebrate connection to ecology, I believe this is a nod to what this church is all about. and that means an awful lot to me.

if you've gotten yourself knocked up recently or plan to in the future, the first church of dirt asks you to please consider treating your placenta in a similar manner. no need to freeze it, just pick out a plant with some significance to you ahead of time and have it on hand when the day comes. I'll make sure to post an update when we choose a plant for this placenta.

and if you're curious what a fresh placenta looks like, here you go:

(from wikipedia)

addendum

the first church of dirt has just discovered that Portland's (that's Oregon) Urban Farm Store will very shortly begin accepting EBT.

that's good news. I don't know a whole lot about the folks at Urban Farm Store yet, except that they've been friendly to me during the limited interactions we've had.

and for those who think government food benefits should only be used to buy shitty grocery store processed garbage: well, you're morons.

addendum to addendum:
just got an e-mail from the owner of Urban Farm Store. turns out that they did not qualify for SNAP. shoot. the eligibility requirements seem a bit onerous for a small business. I guess that's that for the time being, though.

pyro's progress

the pay wasn't very good, so there's been a slowdown on the project. onward still.

that's the next course of fire brick, with three errant bricks left where they don't belong. and another course of clay brick. the heat riser was placed for layout only as it still needs to be insulated.

the heat exchanger. a four-foot length of 16" diameter, .255" thick steel pipe. it is heavy. the protective bitumen coating was removed with a wire brush wheel.

pyro's progress

one more level of clay bricks and fire bricks with perlite and clay in between. this will be the floor of the burn unit.

next level. same as the first layer of bricks in the mock-up.

pyro's progress

perlite and clay slip insulate from the concrete slab.

pyro's progress

salvaged clay bricks and clay sand mortar.

pyro's progress

wood goes in here:

then burns through here:

and that big chunk of pipe draws the exhaust upward, bringing more air into the feed and aspirating the whole thing.

that's about it for the guts.

pyro's progress

fire bricks. they're leftovers from the old Asarco smelter in America's Vancouver.

pyro's progress

in case it isn't immediately clear, that's a 48" length of 8" diameter steel pipe.

real life

I want to talk about spirituality. specifically, I want to talk about how annoying spirituality is to me.

I'm happy to notice that folks seem more critical of organized religion lately. wholesale abandonment of religion isn't what I'm after, but I do believe that honest examination of one's religious beliefs and practices is a good idea. this is just my vague impression, but it appears to me that such examination is becoming more common.

however, it also seems that the people I hear criticize "religion" have no problem with "spirituality". I won't pretend to know what being spiritual means for most people. for one of the folks who is close to me and spiritual—but not religious—it means a whole lot of manifesting and optimism and general serenity. note that "manifest" in this context does not mean, as the wiktionary tells us it should:

To show plainly; to make to appear distinctly, — usually to the mind; to put beyond question or doubt; to display; to exhibit.

rather, it refers to something much more magical. I'll use it in context:

Jim broke his leg? why does he always manifest such pain for himself?

not every spiritual person is that goofy. fine. my biggest objection is not the goofiness, obnoxious as it is. it's that most spirituality does not, to me, seem to value reality.

(www.xfamily.org)

that is one of my major gripes with religion, too. weird, since spirituality and religion are alleged to be so very different.

as far as I can tell, the difference between spirituality and religion is the difference between inventing one's own wacky bullshit and adhering to wacky bullshit with an established pedigree. maybe those spiritual folks deserve credit for being creative and non-conformist. consider that credit given.

I would like to acknowledge that there are plenty of folks who I admire and respect who adhere (or adhered) to a variety of religions. very few of them could be considered in the mainstream of those religions. likewise, there are plenty of spiritual folks who I like. their spirituality is either vague enough that it has no real impact on their life, or it's a spirituality that grounds them in reality rather than removes them from it.

I'm probably repeating myself. the first church of dirt is concerned with reality. dirty reality. speculating about invisible possibilities is just fine with this church, so long as it doesn't take precedence over dirt. after all, if you're dead because you poisoned your dirt, it seems likely that you'll have trouble manifesting anything else.

~~~
church bulletin:
punkin season will very shortly be over. Sunday services will then commence. they will consist of eating delicious food with pleasant people, and maybe eating some food that was intended to be delicious but didn't quite end up that way. location will alternate between Flavor Country, and Pikkumaatila, and maybe some other places, but mostly those two.