Monday, January 18, 2010

Post Oil Solutions

Post Oil Solutions

About a year ago, I signed up to be on the Post Oil Solutions mailing list, little knowing how vital the contact would be. As its name suggests, it’s a group dedicated to helping people come up with viable solutions to the challenges of trying to create thriving communities that are not oil dependent. In southern Vermont, there is an added challenge facing us. The Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant is due to be relicensed in 2012. If people are really serious about shutting this old, and in my view, dangerous, plant down—and many are-- we are going to have to come up with alternative sources of energy.

One piece of this puzzle that POS focuses on is local eating. The logic is that it is wasteful and dangerous to not have local sources for our food. What makes POS so brilliant is they start with where people really are. The winter calendar of workshops features garden planning sessions for beginning and intermediate gardeners, seed starting, cold frame building, and one that I’m sorry to say I already missed, “Eating from your garden 12 months a year”. Not rocket science, but if you’re new to country living, or have just been too busy with your life to even contemplate chickens, then these workshops could save you years of trial and error. Not bad for $20.

How do people normally learn this stuff? If you’re brought up on or near a farm, you learn it from your family or neighbors. Newcomers are usually stuck with the trial by fire method that has generated so much amusing literature. Here, at last, another way.

Last year I went to the chicken, goat and sheep workshops. Filled with earnest, note-scribbling neophytes like myself, the workshops were inspiring. Held at Fairwinds Farm on the edge of Brattleboro, each workshop contained a element on fencing—portable electric for chickens and sheep, something a little more robust for goats. Fencing is where I need more info, and I plan to get to yet another workshop in New Hampshire on same, early this spring. Meanwhile though, we got to taste fresh goat’s milk, which because of the farm’s good hygiene, has none of the off-putting goatstink I associate with that animal. It also helps to keep the odorous bucks away from the does. That, I’m told, is a large part of the problem. The milk was delicious and, what’s more, it tasted real, like there were actual nutrients in it.

The question is, do I want to milk goats? Twice a day, regardless of my own wee druthers? Well, actually, no, not right now. Attractive as Tasha Tudor’s life was in theory, I’d like to be able to go to Boston once in awhile, or New York, or even New Mexico. And if I’m an unlikely goatherd, you should see my adored but even more disinclined men folk.

But—gardens I can do. And bees, too. Maybe even chickens and sheep, although I can picture every hawk, raccoon, fox and coyote in the neighborhood tying napkins around their necks in anticipation. I just need to get to the electric fence workshop.

My parents published a joke book called Real Vermonters Don’t Milk Goats. The cover featured a cartoon of a preppy guy with a sweater tied over his shoulders, grinningly regarding the viewer as he yanked away on the teat of some poor little nanny goat. The jokes lampooned the pretentions of flatlanders coming here to live The Vermont Life, or what they perceived it to be.

Those concerns seem rather quaint now. Times change.

1 comment:

  1. lovely writing as always, Steph. I just told Wendy this morning I want us to take our veg garden more seriously this summer. The key issue for me is time.

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