Slugdge: Garden-themed Metal

So this is very fitting for the farm: a metal album full of puns and references to slugs and their slimy gastropod allies. With song titles like Dark Side of the Shroom, Lettuce Pray, Salters of Madness, Slugdge may sound like a joke, but these songs absolutely rip. An infectious mix of death, sludge and doom. Maybe I'm the only one who gets excited over these sorts of things, but Slugdge is going to be on heavy rotation while I go about my business in the garden from now on. No garden pests, no mercy.

"Dedicated to he who harvests the cosmos, Mollusca the Greatfather."

First Week Update

So what's been going on here at Uma Rapiti in my first week? Well, a lot of mulching really. The main goal has been to get the garden beds covered and in order in anticipation of spring planting for the seedlings we've started in the greenhouse. So chop and drop is the name of the game at the moment, turning all those pesky weeds into green mulches. I need to replenish my stock of cardboard for sheetmulching purposes, such has been the demand. Simple things like cardboard and newspaper become highly valued commodities within a permaculture system. I've also sown broadbeans and peas as cover crops for their nitrogen-fixing contributions, plus as a bed full of garlic. I've been making lots of trips into the surrounding karaka forest to collect sack-loads of tasty leaf litter as well. It's pretty sweet to be able to listen to birdsong from tui, kereru, etc. while doing my job. I just hope none of the karaka seeds decide to take root in the garden beds. I also headed down to the beach with my trusty wheelbarrow for a load of seaweed to grace the uppermost asparagus bed. Other jobs have been things like digging out gigantic flaxes and attacking it with an axe to divide it into three pieces before I could even move the behemoth, let alone replant it. A new tamarillo has gone in as well as more olives. I'm awaiting the arrival of about ten new banana trees to fill out the subtropical garden. Oh and I also restarted to the worm bin that had gone to wrack and ruin previously, so fingers crossed that the new worms are happy and healthy in their remodeled home.

In terms of produce that was growing when I arrived here, it's been mainly leafy green like silverbeet, brassicas like broccoli and cauliflower, a bunch of chili peppers, a few radishes, lettuce, leeks, some young potatoes, and there's a stash of kumara and an assortment of squashes in storage. The chooks are laying many eggs, but still getting a few feeds out of them. Oh and the brined olives from last years harvest are ready and so I've been cracking into those and they're delicious.

The upper garden all dressed up in leaf litter.

Lower garden bed

Seaweed-laden asparagus bed

One flax divided up

Filling the void left by that gigantic flax, becoming a pathway to the forest sleepout

The Hardcore Farmer

   Up until this point The Hardcore Ecologist has been a miscellaneous mix of addled-brain theories, tirades, metal videos and random poetry. All surely of varying levels of quality, coherence and interest to my micro-audience. Now however it is about to enter into a new phase: permaculture farming. Today I moved onto a small lifestyle farm on Waiheke Island for the next four months of winter and into spring while also finishing my BSc. Environmental Science by correspondence. I'm going whole-hog hippie farmer in order to back up all the eco-smacktalk that I've been pushing here. It will  no doubt be a challenging, often lonely experience as the sole permanent resident, but one of great growth and beauty as I learn what it means to work with the land in an ecological manner. I'm sure to wrestle with all the pests, shit, rain, failed experiments, and overwhelming level of responsibility that I've never before held over so many forms of life. Whatever happens, I'll get into the habit of documenting my trials and travails here in hopes that it can be of some value to anyone else.

A Few New Tasty Metal Jams to Spread on Your Toast

You have to keep the demon inside pacified, right?

Since that day you dug it up,
my peridot heart, prising it from
basaltic womb where land
and sea collide,
its sharp green flicker has been
fading.

A dull orange shell crusting around
where you you once wiped the still-
warm earth from its angular faces.
Now it wastes away, too fragile
for human keeping, it crumbles
back into the natal dirt.

I always knew this would happen
ever since I saw its mineral gleam
tied with a ribbon around your laughing throat.
You wore it so well,
Your eyes reflected its dancing glimmer,
And I was enchanted anew.

But the light always fades,
the crystal always cracks
And I lose you, like all the others.

This heart of mine, forged
in the stomach of this earth
under fire and weight married into form,
it erodes so quickly at
the surface.

Reminding me that at the core
I am nothing
but a rotting gemstone,
and that permanence
is just an illusion.

Eat for Sustainability

This is just a reminder that the world's ocean environments are in perhaps even greater peril than our terrestrial ones. Bottom trawling, overharvesting, imbalanced foodwebs, acidification, etc. are all driving widespread ecosystem collapses. Simply because they're less visible to us land-lubbers and we can't immediately see the effects, it doesn't mean that things are alright. Play your part by making sustainable seafood choices and demand change from an egregiously exploitative industry.

I Just Want to be Robinson Jeffers

These stone-heavy limbs weigh me down;
Keep me tied to the earth
If only I could shed their mineral casings
Sheet by sheet unloading
Until my crystalline innards stand exposed
To the circling condors above
In the deep sapphire California sky
Come dine on the rubies and garnets
Of my opened chest
Spread my jewelled offering aloft
Drifting across dry western winds

I could rest easy then, knowing myself
Freed from brittle form
Safe inside those Great Decomposers
Agents of Shiva
Closing the perpetual circle
To be cast again into form.