Compost bins

I am building a compost box (from non treated hardwoods) as our neighbor complained about the "pile" (which is all it is right now)...I found a design that screens in the sides and the top of the box - which I need to do as my neighbor is concerned about bugs (though I haven't noticed a problem).
What kind of "hardware cloth" or screening do you think is safe for compost for an organic garden? --Thank you so much, Ash

If you are talking about screening like that used on screen doors, that would not be strong enough to hold the compost. The only bugs that might be a problem for your neighbor would be flies and those only if you compost meat or fish. Meat and fish can also be an odor problem so if you have close neighbors, I suggest you not put these on the compost. We keep a plastic bag in the freezer where we put meat and fish scraps. These can be composted by burying them either in the compost if you have enough going or in the ground. These scraps may attract animals (raccoons, skunks and dogs) that will dig them up. An open top bin such as I use will be enough to protect against most animals but if you have a problem, just put on a top.

The purpose of the compost bin is to keep the area looking neat, keep animals out, and keep the sides of the pile vertical which improves air circulation. I use about an 8 foot length of half inch wire mesh held together to make a drum shaped circle with wire. You can see a picture of this at http://joshuas.biz go to “Farm” and at the bottom of that page you will find me turning compost. Before this I stapled the wire mesh onto wood frames which were screwed together to make a cube-shaped bin.

As far as materials that might not be OK to use, I can’t think of anything I’d worry about except treated wood.

How to Lose Weight

My wife has a double chin in our wedding pictures. She had gained weight in just the four months since I had asked her to marry me. She wasn’t really fat but if I hadn’t already decided that I wanted to live with her wrinkles or fat or whatever, I would have been having some second thoughts. The first couple of years of our marriage calories were in the forefront of her thinking. Weight Watchers seemed to work best for her during this period. She would frequently give me some Weight Watchers concoction like a milk shake saying, “Taste this. It’s really good.”
“Mmmmm. Yeah, that’s tasty,” I dutifully replied but shortly afterward I would notice an unpleasant taste in my mouth. To get rid of the taste, I would eat or drink something. I pointed that out to her but I don’t think that caused the change but change did come shortly thereafter.
Barbara started thinking about food and how to make it taste good. She focused on organic and natural food and culinary delights rather than calories. The calories she ate were complex rather than empty. We define empty calories as those found in refined foods like white flour and sugar. The concept is that our bodies need a variety of nutrients. I don’t know how many different nutrients humans need but plants need at least sixteen. Our theory is that if the body is not getting something it needs, it will send out a signal asking for more food until the deficient nutrient is ingested. Since our body is not specific in its request we just keep eating. Actually we have found that we sometimes crave something that we figure our body needs, but it is safer to just provide the body with complex food regularly.
Whole wheat has got more nutrients than white flour. Likewise for honey and maple syrup versus sugar. Fruits and vegetables are loaded with what in the garden we call micro nutrients.
Barbara and I were married in 1969. Today we are in partnership with our son in a restaurant. Josh is an excellent chef using the best ingredients he can find. He is a great fan of the organic vegetables I supply. Barbara never got any fatter than she was on our wedding day. She is a trim sixty year old and I’m a fairly trim seventy in spite of eating a lot of great food at the restaurant. Many of our customers will ask how we stay so trim with all that good food. The answer may be found in another frequently heard comment. “I never eat vegetables but I ate all the vegetables on my plate.” The secret behind Josh’s vegetables? They are fresh, organic, cooked to order, and cooked perfectly. When we eat them we don’t leave any emptiness.
If you want to know more about the restaurant, http://joshuas.biz

Is there a link between money and happiness?

A simple yes or no is problematic because defining happiness in general is probably impossible. As I read various studies on this illusive subject, illusive because it is subjective, I am interested in something I label profound happiness as opposed to something that comes and goes with wealth or the weather. Profound happiness is a state of being. That is not to say it doesn’t also have ups and downs but it is based on a concordance between how we are living our lives and how we believe we should be living.

Where I find support for my belief that happiness is not linked to money or anything material is in experiences like Joseph Campbell’s; who says his happiest time was during the Depression when he had no money, lived in a rooming house where the rent was forgiven and read borrowed books; and Eric Weiner’s experiences in The Geography of Bliss where he found his own happiness affected positively in Bhutan and Iceland and negatively in Moldova. It is time for another caveat. I don’t know what works for anyone else, what it is like inside anyone else. I write about what works for me, what I have learned about myself within this thing called life, because reading about and observing other people has proved helpful to me and I hope my thoughts might prove helpful to another.

I am convinced that what we need is air, water, food and shelter, not money. Those are indisputable for keeping our bodies alive. It can be debated whether or not our soul has needs. The existence of a soul is debatable but I’m going with duality here—body and soul. My soul needs companionship and something else. I’m not sure what—to be needed, work, a goal, a project, something meaningful to do? I am reminded of retired people who volunteered for me on a project and how grateful they were for the opportunity I gave them to volunteer. When I would thank them they would invariably say, “No, Thank YOU.” However I also know some retired people who do little more than read the paper every day. We are all different.

For me, yes, I keep trying to retire and now, in the winter, when the garden is put to bed, I don’t want to work any more than I have to at the restaurant. I want to kick back and read. But there is another thing gnawing at me, some need I feel to be doing more. I think about volunteering or, perhaps running for a town or state office. I keep talking myself out of it yet I feel that it would feel good to be involved in something larger than myself. I think this comes from my belief that I can make a difference, that my approach to people could move an entity in a positive direction. There would be meetings and things to figure out, problems to solve. I think I would feel needed.

I have known retired people who took up a musical instrument, who took up a new sport or started building models. I think any of these activities might fill the same void, might feed the soul. There are those who spend hours fiddling with their investments. This could be the same kind of thing though it seems different to me.

Where do I get off talking about profound happiness as if I had reached some vaunted plateau? Good question. I’m glad I asked it first. If you understand my philosophical base, you will realize that I am running my life on the assumption that I may be the only person involved in my life, all else, everyone else is an illusion, a hologram--characters and events through and around which I weave my life (or my life is woven). You, at this moment, are an important part of my life. I know, I know first I tell you you don’t exist and then I tell you you are an important part of my life. I hate the confusion but I’m unable to be clearer at this point. Perhaps I will be more articulate at some future time.

You are important to me because I love you and I want you to be happy. Telling you that I have something that you might not have is no way to make you happy. The best I can do now is to suggest that you smile at someone. Think about some specific person or situation in which you will have an opportunity to give off a big sincere smile—a “Hi, I’m sure glad to be sharing this space and time with you. I’m glad we are both alive here together.” Think about the situation now and maybe even make a note to yourself to help you remember. It can be a store clerk, a person coming toward you on the street, a neighbor, anyone. If you experience is anything like mine, most times you will get a smile back. If that smile doesn’t make you feel better, then give up any effort to understand my philosophy.

Scientific study reveals happiness is contagious.

When waxing philosophical it is a great treat to have a new scientific study verify my own anecdotal findings. A large study published in the British Medical Journal concludes: “People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.”

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec04_2/a2338

They say that happiness has three degrees of separation. In other words when you are happy your friends’ friends’ friends will benefit by becoming happier. If you have read the excerpts from my book at http://mortmather.com you have seen at least one example of how this works in improving your own life. If enough people get onto this, we will save the world perhaps even sooner than I think.

Don’t wait for someone else’s happiness to wash over you. Generate some happy waves of your own. Before the BMJ study that would have sounded trite but now it is scientifically proven effective.

Garden questions answered

If you have a question on growing vegetables organically, I’d be happy to answer it to the best of my ability. I’d appreciate it if you checked the columns I already have on line by clicking on the link to the right, Mort’s Organic Garden Columns. I’m also interested in answering philosophical questions and if you are interested in reading the rest of the book in its current draft, email me at mort @ mortmather.com I may rescind this offer come spring when I start getting busy in the garden again.

Thinking empathetically

My half acre of organic vegetables for the restaurant is keeping me away from the keyboard but it is also a great place to think. Perhaps I am credited with a “green thumb” because I think emphatically about plants in my garden.

If I were a plant, would I like to have heavy feet tramping on the soil right over my roots? Observing weeds I have come to the conclusion that Mother Nature does not like to see bare ground. She has developed weeds that have no problem being walked upon. Weeds reach bare ground through the air as seeds are blow about, on the ground as grasses like crab grass and ivies creep in and even underground as witch grass invades. With this observation I am able to counter with some seeds of my own like buckwheat that will cover the ground and shade out other weeds. I also take the hint and try to keep the ground covered with my own planting or a mulch like grass clippings or straw.

Empathetic thinking is really useful in just about all of life’s pursuits. When I was trying to raise millions of dollars to save Laudholm Farm I found it invaluable to try to understand as well as possible the minds of the people I was asking for money. When writing a grant proposal my final activity was to put it in the envelope and then go to another place in my office. I would sit down and think about the person who was going to receive my proposal and then I would open the envelope and pretend to be them.

Just imagine how easy life would be if we could read other people’s minds. Attempting to do that is really what empathetic thinking is. The more we practice it the better we get and the better we get the easier life becomes.

My Heaven

The notion of heaven and hell was created, I believe, to provide a carrot and a stick motivation for living a good life. I find Heaven, as most who believe in it have described it, totally unappealing so I thought up a description that does work for me. My Heaven is much like earth with all of the beauty but not what one might call perfect. There would still be nasty weather events. There would still be conservatives and liberals. There would still be a wide variety of beliefs that guided people differently. There would still be pain and suffering. However, there would not be polluted air or water and there would not be a great disparity between classes of people but these changes would have been realized because of the one simple difference between life on Earth and in Heaven. In Heaven everyone loves everyone.

Before my mother died she related an experience in which her mind took her to a place where all her friends were. She positively glowed when she thought of this place so I have invented my own place like that. I envision a party with a room full of my friends, all people who love me. At this party there is an Earth game in which any of us can strap ourselves in for an Earth experience. We are born, live our life and die. Meanwhile, back at the party, my friends can watch and they can enter the game to mess with me just to make the game more interesting.

When I’m in the garden chasing cucumber beetles I think of my friends messing with me. A group of them decided to be cucumber beetles and play hide and seek. It’s a fun thought that turns the job of beetle control into a game for me. Back at the party my friends might be marveling at my ability to take pleasure in the job.

It is with this attitude that I approach my feelings toward someone like President Bush. Hating him would hurt me. I know that. When I realized that he was raising my hackles, I tried to tune him out, unsuccessfully. When I thought about “the party on the other side” and that he is a friend who is just trying to mess with me my hatred was lifted.

My thought was of dieing and going back to the party. My friends cheer at the good game I just had. There is much hugging and high-fiving. Across the room is Dubya with a big grin. His right arm is raised and he is pointing his index finger at me. We high-five and hug. “Gotcha! Ol buddy,” he says. “Yeah, you sonofabitch, you got me.”

This image of a loving Dubya as a close friend brings a smile to my face. He presented me with some challenges. I have chosen happiness as my goal in life. He disrupted my happiness. If there were no challenges, life would be a pretty dull game.

Two worlds

The questions I explore here will be answered from the belief that love is the only thing that can truly save the world—both worlds. Two worlds, you ask? Yes.

The world we first think of is what we know of the world, the physical planet, space in the earth’s atmosphere, the political and belief oriented spheres we live in. In this world we may be thinking that it needs to be saved from environmental degradation, from terrorists, from economic collapse, from poverty or immigrants or killer bees. How can love save this world? The short answer is that it will take a long time, longer than anyone alive today will live to see but that shouldn’t be a reason to ignore the potential.

The second world is one that can be saved within your lifetime. It is the world that is very close to you. It is what you see and hear and feel and taste—the world of your senses. It is your world. There may not even be another world. You may be the only person in existence. You are certainly the only person experiencing your world. Even if you and I stood next to each other we would be in different worlds. Consider us standing side by side looking at a cylindrical oatmeal box a couple of feet away. We do not see the same thing.

If we stand side by side and look at something far away, say the moon, don’t we see the same thing then? In the context of the first example, yes, physically what we are looking at is the same but we are using different instruments. Our bodies are genetically different and they have been through different histories. We don’t even know for sure that what we are seeing is the same color as the other person sees through his or her eyes. Whatever it is you see, hear, taste, feel, smell and otherwise perceive it is your world, the world you live in every waking moment.

If you feel hatred for anyone, a relative or neighbor, the President or Osama bin Ladin, I invite you to check out for yourself just how that hatred makes you feel. Let’s say every time you hear President Bush on the radio or television it makes you angry. That can’t feel good. Why not improve your world by simply avoiding listening to him? Just tune out. Don’t listen to the news or anything else where you are likely to hear him. Never mind any arguments you might have that not listening to the President would not be a good idea. We are only talking about your world and you can make your world better by tuning in to your world and taking actions that will improve the way YOU feel. Nobody else. There may not even be anybody else. There is certainly nobody else living in your world.

There is a way to listen to the President (in this example) without getting angry. That is the love part and I’ll be exploring that further in the future.