The Importance of Stars

Bortle Dark-Sky Scale lists my home as a number four on the scale (1 being the darkest, 9 being the least dark). I personally think that it is a number three, especially after reading the descriptions of each number, and determining that the closest reporting observatory is actually quite far away. However the area that I currently live in rates a seven. (Check your sky here. Use this chart here to determine rating based on color.)

When I moved here, to Virginia, the stars hardly crossed my mind for the first few months while I adjusted to a new place, living in the city, new routines, and applied myself to finding a job. But then they began to call to me.

At home, in New York, I look to the sky for comfort. I enjoy stargazing on a blanket in the yard. (Though now that all the trees are grown up, the middle of the driveway is the best place for stargazing.) One night in Virginia I went outside to do a little looking-up. Imagine my surprise at only seeing one or two tiny points of light sparkling back at me! A phrase entered my mind then that I had only heard once, but never forgot and never truly understood until that moment: light pollution.

How strange the orange glow on the horizon, as if the edges of the sky were on fire! The moon shone brightly to my right and those two stars burned through the indigo backdrop. I was mesmerized. I had no idea that people couldn't see the sky as I had always seen it: clear with the stars shining benevolently down. I couldn't believe that I wouldn't be able to go outside and find the Big and Little Dippers, and the North Star.

Source: Astropix.com via Pinterest

This is a picture of the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Polaris - the North Star.
One of my routines upon returning to New York for visits and the like has been to walk outside on that first cool, clear night and look up. It's like a balm on my soul: to be outside, gazing at the stars, contemplating the vastness of Creation and the very small space in it that I occupy. The very small space that occupies everyone I have ever known and affected in some way. The stars are very good that way. Allowing for such large thoughts.

I encourage and urge you to go outside and look up. If you are lucky you will see constellations. If you don't see many stars at all, then I hope that somehow, sometime in your life you will see them as I have and that you will allow yourself to truly see how very small you are in comparison.

Homesteading Binder Additions

I thought that Mondays could serve as the round-up of whatever I have added to my Homesteading Binder this past week.
So, without further ado:

This list of 22 lessons in running a successful farmers market stand. It sounds promising, though I haven't full read through it as I only added it to my binder this morning.

I also printed information on cultivating and transplanting wild blackberries, because my uncle has tons of blackberries every summer, but I have none. I thought to transplant a few. However, the link seems broken. Here's the link anyway, just in case it's back up soon.

A list of cold-temperate perennial plants that grow in my zone. I got the list from here. Just click your area and it will take you to the correct list.

That's it! Three new additions this week.

On Cloning

Cloning our public milk and meat puts more power straight into the hands of major monopolic conglomerations. They are the ones that can afford the complicated equipment and personnel to engineer and place these clones into their surrogate mothers. They also have the money needed to enlist or build and employ veterinary facilities for their often sickly cloned infant animals.

That leaves family farms again unable to meet the demand of the public for good, cheap meat. That's a lot of why we are in this mess we are in, because we didn't want to wait for the animals to grow to slaughter weight naturally. The demand for so much meat isn't sustainable naturally - they way God intended it to be - and so we allow other people to pump our food full of unnatural feed and antibiotics to force it to grow to slaughter weight (1200 pounds for a steer) in just 14 months. Allowed to reach this weight naturally, it would take years.


Why clone at all? It is infinitely more expensive to raise a cloned animal (from impregnation to birth to slaughter), and so it's been suggested that the companies would then use the more valuable animal for breeding purposes instead of slaughtering it for the market. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.

Cloned animals are more sickly than (I hate to call them "regular" or "normal" animals) their traditional counterparts and if not for highly specialized veterinary care, most would die long before they were even born. These high rates of miscarriages put strain and stress on surrogate mothers. Babies, if born alive, can be malformed and are certainly in more jeopardy health-wise than normal babies.

The FDA continually ignores public outcry that cloned meat and milk at least be labeled so consumers who wish to can avoid it.

Those who do resist are often labeled negatively and laughed at and patted on the head as if a small child who asked a dumb question. We are reassured with easy language and pat answers that everything is okay, that everything is safe. But we are told that so often - that something is okay and safe - that we are becoming suspicious. We know better.

Their arguments are that the same outcries went up over pasteurizing milk, and over artificial insemination and look where we are on those issues now. That we are obviously better off and cloning will follow the same path.

Those of us awake to the real food of yore know what is wrong with these things. We know they are not of God. We refuse to be coddled and reassured with falsities and we resist, albeit peacefully. We bring (most of) our food from the ground with hard work and prayer. We are trying to break through with earnest pleas for intelligence in regards to that most basic of needs: healthy food.

Sources:
http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/campaign/cloned-animals/
http://www.livescience.com/2182-cloned-milk-meat-beef.html
Photos: William Warby.

Homemade Chicken Broth

Have you made chicken broth from scratch yet? If not, why not give it a try? It's easy and simple and so much better for you than the store stuff because you know exactly what's in it (and you control salt content)!

Basic Chicken Broth

Ingredients:
1 WHOLE rosted chicken, picked mostly clean of meat.
VEGETABLES to taste.
(I used: 5 stalks of CELERY,
1 large chopped ONION,
1 sliced green PEPPER
4 smashed cloves of GARLIC,
SALT & PEPPER.)
These are what I had on hand, you could add CARROTS, THYME, ROSEMARY, PARSELY, BAY LEAF, SAGE, and anything else you can think of. It's really hard to ruin.
WATER to cover.

Place chicken carcass into a large pot. Add vegetables. Add enough water to entirely cover the chicken. Set over burner, turn the fire to low and do not cover.

Leave it alone for at least 1 1/2 hours, but you can skim as needed.

Strain broth using a colander or mesh strainer.

Pick any remaining meat from the chicken and put into a separate container to use later.

Store in glass jars in the fridge.

Easy, right!? Absolutely simple, and it makes the house smell divine! After a night in the fridge, remove the congealed fat from the top. If you make a mistake and add too much spice, add a little more water. If you add too much water, mix in a little more spice. It'll turn out, I promise.

Now, this can be canned and stored just like the store stuff, but you need to do it with a pressure canner. A regular water-bath canner does not reach a high enough temperature to kill botulism, a rare but deadly bacterium that produces nerve toxin. I didn't actually can this batch, because I don't have a pressure canner, but I liked how it looked in the jars anyway.

I used a fair bit the day after this batch was made in a chicken topped with biscuit dish I was trying out. Yum!

Ye Olde Microwave

I could live without a microwave. Sure, it'd be a little inconvenient at first, but then it would force me to be more proactive about planning dinners and eating healthy food. I have never really trusted them anyway. I guess it sort of niggled at the back of my mind without ever truly coming to the surface.

However as I am awakening into real food, I am facing things that I never thought of before. Never considered. Always taken as good and true and right because that's what we are told; that these things are normal.

I will be going cold turkey on microwaves, especially after reading this article on the subject that is well researched and full of examples. I didn't know that microwaving certain foods in certain materials can cause carcinogens to form in otherwise healthy food! What? That's utterly insane. Why use something that will give you cancer?! Just... wow.

How disappointing that we are told this is safe.

How frustrating that this information is so unknown, and that people are so unwilling to hear it.

I had a microwave that mom gave me for Christmas one year. I am happy to say that it has been gone for months now to someone else (though knowing what I know now, I'm feeling guilty for giving her that thing). Though I live with people who do use theirs on occasion, I am personally giving it up for good.

- From the (now non-microwaving) Sweetgrass Cookery.