View From a New Vrindaban Ridge

“Pious acts are prescribed in the supplementary Vedas (smrtis), which specifically mention digging tanks and wells for the water supply of the people in general. To plant trees on the public roads, to construct public temples and places of worship of God, to establish places of charity where the poor destitutes can be provided with foodstuff, and similar activities are called purta.”

SB 2.8.21

There is an organic input supplier up near Canton, OH called Ohio Earth Food.  As I have never been able to find a local supplier for rock phosphate, that is where I get it from.  It is about 2 and 1/2 hours away.

There is a Mennonite guy from Ohio who bought some land next to us who comes down here to go hunting.  He lives just a few miles from Ohio Earth Food. He has offered in the past if I ever wanted anything from there to call him and he would bring it down so I called him.

He isn’t coming here until the end of April but said he was coming to Cadiz, OH to another property he owned so last Saturday I met him there. It was only a 50 minute drive so it made getting supplies more doable. I called in an order Friday which he picked up and met him at his Cadiz place at 9 AM Saturday.

I  got rock phosphate for myself as well as several other New Vrindaban gardeners. I also got Maxicrop, a liquid seaweed which I am a big fan of for easing transplant shock and foliar feeding, some Rotenone/Pyrethrum to use for flea beetles for a potato planting I am going to do with Devananda, and some organic herbicide.

I know that organic herbicide sounds weird, but anytime there is a deer fence, it is a big hassle keeping the weeds down under it. It is hard to use a weedeater because hitting the wire really goes through the string. Thus I want to play with this and see if it is effective.

They had a couple of kinds and I picked one rather arbitrarily called Burnout. The ingredients list is as follows:

Citric acid 30%
Clove oil 18%
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate 9%
Mineral oil, lecithin, water 43%

We will see how it works but it sounds all like stuff that will break down. This isn’t a selective herbicide, it supposedly will fry any broad leaf or grassy weeds.

Anyway, after I loaded the stuff from his truck into our van, we talked for a while, mostly about trees. He had planted some Chinese chestnuts on his property as food for deer but they hadn’t done that well because of deer damage.

I shared some tree wisdom tidbits I had picked up in discussions.

“One generation plants a tree, the next sits in it’s shade.” Chinese proverb.

There was a tree that took 50 years to come into fruiting. The people said that was too long but the king said we should plant it immediately. (Story via Soma.)

My neighbor shared the following with me. Someone bought a new property and wanted to plant some trees on it to improve its value. He sought advice from a nurseryman and asked when was the best time to plant trees. The nurseryman replied, “Twenty years ago.”

First, let me be clear that I lack both  the will and  the technical expertise to ever do this, so this is simply an exercise of the imagination.

This past Sunday Vidya, Devananda and myself drove up to Beaver, Pennsylvania to check out the Maple Syrup Festival. We were scouting it as a place for Vidya to sell her crafted gourds. Devananada was checking out their maple syrup operation.

Devananda tapped about 40 trees in New Vrindaban this spring and made 3 gallons of maple syrup. He is thinking of expanding his operation so it was an information gathering mission for him.

The nice thing was that he is not one to waste his time, so he brought his guitar along to practice during the journey so we had live inflight music. Such an opulence.

We thought it might be a good festival to sell at because the attendance was reported to be 30,000.  That may be true but it turned out most of them weren’t coming to the festival for the crafts.

What they were coming for was pancakes. We learned this standing in line for the shuttle bus taking us from the parking lot to the festival area itself.  I was talking to the couple in front of us in line andthey were there for the pancakes.  We also noted that people returning on the shuttle bus weren’t carrying very many bags, which indicated they weren’t buying a lot of crafts.

When we got to the festival there was a huge line, with at least a thousand people standing in it waiting for pancakes. The pavilion they were being served in sat 500 and  was packed.

We walked around the festival and talked to some vendors to get the scoop. We also saw a steam engine running a grain mill with a belt drive that was making buckwheat flour and some ladies in period costume making lace using bobbins.

After more than an hour as we were leaving, we saw the couple I had talked to while waiting for the shuttle bus still in the line, about half way through it which naturally made me think those must be some good pancakes.  Hence the idea for a Youtube video.

First would be to do an establishing shot of the long line, then a devotee would get into the end of the line.  He would be chanting and we would  see him finishing a round and sliding down his first counter bead. Then a cut and we would see him again in the line but with lots of people behind him. Still chanting we would see him slide down the 16th counter bead, indicating he had chanted all his rounds, meaning 1 1/2 to 2 hours had elapsed.

Then he would start reading the Bhagavad Gita at the beginning. Another long shot showing more progress in the line but still not at the head of it. A cut back to the book showing most of the pages will have been read.  He pulls out kartalas and through cuts it is indicated he does bhajan for a long time.

He finally gets to the head of the line but before he buys a ticket for the pancakes he asks, “Do they have eggs in them?”

“Abandon all varieties of religion and just surrender unto Me. I shall deliver you from all sinful reactions. Do not fear.”

Bhagavad Gita 18.66

Reflection: “Christianity is precisely a liberation from every rigid legal and religious system. This is asserted with such categorical force by St. Paul that we cease to be Christians the moment our religion becomes slavery to “the Law” rather than a free personal adherence by loving faith to the risen and living Christ:  “Do you seek justification by the Law…you are fallen from grace…In fact, in Christ Jesus neither circumcision or its absence is of any avail. What counts is faith that expresses itself in love” (Gal. 5:4, 6).”

Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration, p. 147.

Reading from the Bible:” God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

I John 4: 16 [NRSV]

The 1st day of April is also known as April Fool’s Day, when it is traditional to play tricks on family and friends. Vidya is always into it.

We have some daffodils coming up by the Carpathian walnut tree next to the driveway.  She took some silk flowers and stuck them in the daffodil foliage. She then called several of her friends the day before who she knows are into flower arrangements and told them that she had all these nice flowers that had came out and there was a frost warning so they needed to be picked.  Then she stuck a metal frog in amongst them that said April Fools on it.

They looked very real and she got several people with it both the ones she called and a couple who stopped by incidentally.

I was tricked by Janardhan.  I am planting 15 nut trees, including chinese chestnuts, heartnuts, chinquapins,  hardy almonds,  hardy pecans, a hazelnut, and a filbert.  I can do the actual planting but lack the stamina to do the heavy lifting.  I can do some, but not fast enough to take advantage of when soil conditions are right so Janardhan has been helping me.

He  digs the holes and carries buckets of compost and water to them so when I plant everything is there. It is on a hillside and I only have limited  trips up and down in a given day.  He has those young inexhaustible legs.We were getting the water from a spring catch above the area I am planting the trees in so multiple trips were involved.

Once I get a tree planted, paying attention to fanning the roots out in all directions and respecting the different levels that the roots grow at, they need to be watered as even though I tamp the dirt as I back fill it, the water will carry soil particles and fill any voids that remain. Air pockets kill roots. You have to do the watering in even if it is raining, because rain isn’t enough.

I was soaking trees in water by the spring so the roots didn’t dry out  and would have Janardhan bring then down one at a time when I was ready to start on another hole.

As he was bringing me the last one for the day,  he handed me a twig with no roots that I knew wasn’t a tree for planting. I immediately got irritated and started to chaste him for wasting my time by bringing the wrong thing when the right one was so obvious in the bucket.  He started laughing and pulled the real tree from behind his back.

He totally got me, even when I was completely aware it was April Fool’s Day and should have been on my guard.   Very funny, Janardhan.

FYI, we also got all the berries planted except the lingonberries and the plum berry which are coming from a different grower.  Vidya did virtually all the actual putting into the ground of the berries so we got them in before it rained and made the ground too wet.

We got 8 trees planted and I have 7 more chilling out in the root cellar to plant when soil conditions get right again.

In the meantime I need to get 5′ x 5′ chicken wire cages up around the 8 already planted to protect them from deer and mulch them.  Plus finish up the garden fence around the berries and get them mulched.

Then I hope to have some energy to help Soma help Hari Bhakta planted the 40 nut trees, 150 asparagus , and a couple of dozen or so gooseberries and goji berries that Hari Bhakta bought to plant on temple property in memory of his wife. They are both jazzed up so the enthusiasm is contagious.

Anyone else wanting to help can contact any of us and we can plug you in.  Planting 40 treees is a lot of work. Come help plant for Krishna.

Closet gardeners in the suburbs, throw off the chains of your lawn!

Planting the seeds of a revolution

by Ellen Goodman

There are now 1,100 square feet on the South Lawn of the White House being transformed into a kitchen garden. You have to admit that this gives new meaning to the idea of a “shovel-ready project.”

I tip my hat to the first lady, because my rookie season in the green league opened when my daughter was Sasha Obama’s age. It began with a lust for real tomatoes and a horror that she would grow up thinking cucumbers came full-grown, cellophane-wrapped and adorned with stickers.

I soon discovered that having a garden is like having a pet. (Obamas, beware!) You start out dreaming about puppies and you end up wielding a pooper scooper. You start out planning for snap peas and you end up pulling weeds. You also get hooked.

The image of Michelle Obama surrounded by fifth-graders digging into the White House dirt gave heart to locavores everywhere. The idea of an edible landscape was fertilized by left coast chef Alice Waters and food guru Michael Pollan. But it was Roger Doiron, a modest Zone 6 gardener — my kind of guy — and head of Kitchen Gardeners International, who began a lettuce-roots campaign last year to “Eat the View” at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Now spring has sprung and we have the first mom getting her hands dirty in the attempt to get kids to eat their vegetables.

But there is something else about the incredible edible project that also makes me do a fist bump. The Obamas aren’t just eating the view, they are eating the lawn.

What Michelle and the kids and the crew did the other day was to drive a shovel right into the heart of that American icon: the lawn. They took the most pampered lawn in America, dumped it in a wheelbarrow and carted it away. Is it possible that along with local, organic food, the First Garden can promote the thoroughly subversive idea that this symbol has seen its day?

I am not the only one who looks at lawns as a populist enemy. The low grassy surface has its roots in the English aristocracy, among folks who had so much food and land they didn’t have to farm it, they only had to display it.

Today lawns cover 40 million acres in America, making them the nation’s largest agricultural sector. They consume 270 billion gallons of water a week, or enough for 81 million acres of organic vegetables. They suck up $40 billion a year on seed, sod and chemicals, leading one historian to compare them to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”

We mow the lawn; we fertilize it; we pesticize it; we water it, for the absurd purpose of keeping this useless patch in a deliberate state of arrested development.

“It’s actually devouring resources and polluting and happening in the most visible parts of our community — the vacant land between the house and the street,” said Fritz Haeg, creator of the Edible Estates project whose goal is to begin replacing the domestic front lawn with what he calls “full frontal gardening.”

This might be a fertile time for change. During the housing bubble, people thought of their homes as an ATM or a transient way station. If we settle into a view of home as a place we nurture ourselves, we may have a grass-roots anti-grass movement.

I don’t want to get carried away. The last White House occupants to eat the lawn were Woodrow Wilson’s sheep. As a gardener, I begin every new term with high hopes and end up with tomato hornworms.

Moreover, the White House garden is likely to produce a bumper crop of metaphors. I can imagine the first Fox News report on the cost of each leaf of spinach. I can imagine when Miriam’s Soup Kitchen begs the Obamas to stop sending over zucchini. Or the first time one of their cultivated bees stings a foreign leader.

Hare Krishna!

Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

Srila Prabhupada used to say that keeping cows is the way to solve our economic problems: “according to Vedic economics, one is considered to be a rich man by the strength of his store of grains and cows. With only these two things, cows and grain, humanity can solve its eating problem. Human society needs only sufficient grain and sufficient cows to solve its economic problems” (SB 3.2.29) yet in almost every project for cow protection in ISKCON we see the request for donations.

It seems then that cow protection creates an economic burden that is put on our shoulders. It seems that people who see it, and devotees as well, will have such an impression and instead of seeing the whole thing the way Srila Prabhupada saw it i.e. as the solution, we will see it as burden and maybe decline to take to it. Could anyone comment on this, why is it so?

your servant

Gopala Acarya das

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From Hare Krsna dd:

Here is my assessment of the matter.

By way of analogy, let’s think about air.  Air is such a wonderful substance. Krsna even says, “Of purifiers, I am the Wind.”  It is the natural arrangement of the Lord that everyone should have as much healthy air to breathe as they want.

However, imagine some futuristic situation in which a landlord finds a way to create an apartment which has no air.  He rents out the space, and in addition to the regular expense, the tenant also has to pay for an oxygen machine to provide for the air he breathes.  The charges are very burdensome and difficult to maintain, but due to a housing shortage, the tenant has no other choice.

The Lord made a wonderful arrangement, but man altered it to become something onerous and burdensome.

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Krsna has made the arrangement that cows and bulls can provide us milk and grains, by which we can live very easily.  However, this arrangement fits into a larger program called varnasrama.

The brahmanas provide spiritual guidance and practical training for society; the ksatriyas protect the people in general; and *under the protection of the ksatriyas* the vaisyas protect the cows and produce food; the sudras provide service to help everyone else.

As described by Srila Prabhupada, it is the duty of the ksatriyas to make sure everyone obtains the training they need for their varna (ksatriyas make sure that brahmanas are maintained for this purpose), and the ksatriya also distributed land so that the vaisyas can protect cows and produce food for society.

However, in a modern capitalist society, the vaisyas are not protected by the ksatriya.  The ksatriya does not provide free land as intended by Krsna.  Quite the opposite, the land is obtained by gamblers and speculators, who sell it at a high price.

Thus, the farmer starts out with a gigantic debt.  Even if he is fortunate enough to already have some land, speculation causes the value to increase so it is taxed at a high rate.  In Maine, we find many farmers living along the coast can no longer afford to pay taxes on their land, because speculators have pushed the taxes so high.  They lose their farms because of these speculators — and the government does not protect them.

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In addition, Srila Prabhupada states that farming should be first to maintain the family, and then if there is any excess, it can be traded.  He gave instructions on this in Mauritius, for example.  However, under the capitalist mode, production is first of all for the market.  All farmers produce more and more, driving the commodity prices down.  The more they produce, the less their product is worth per unit.  Thus they become poorer and poorer.

And, of course, in the current society, there is no rule against cow slaughter. Thus, it is very easy to see that in a competitive market, the farmer who kills his cows can sell milk for less that the farmer who maintains his old cows and oxen.

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One example was given of a devotee who kept one cow and one ox and was doing very nicely.  That is nice for the time being, but the first question that comes into the mind of anyone who has studied the social dynamics of cow protection is “What happens when the cow needs to have a calf to have more milk?”  Only 15 years into the program do we find out how sustainable it actually is.

In the current social context, selling the calf to someone else generally means there is a 95 percent chance that the calf will eventually be slaughtered — which is why our best cow protection programs around the world struggle to avoid selling or giving away any of their animals.

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So, why doesn’t cow protection provide us the abundance that has been described?  Indeed that was the Lord’s original arrangement, but because we are forced to practice cow protection within the context of a perverted social and economic context,  the natural order has been turned topsy turvy,  just as in the crazy example of the landlord who invented an apartment where the tenant would have to pay for his oxygen.

However,  Krsna is watching the cow protectors and their supporters, and although the present struggle is very difficult, the spiritual success of the program is guaranteed.  And even though we don’t have any ksatriyas to protect our farmers, a supportive community of devotees can at least partially make up for that lack so that the cows can be protected, even if they don’t provide a great opulence.

Hope this helps answer your question.

your servant,

Hare Krsna dasi