The wheel will turn

I'm planning the orchard. I've ordered birds (blue-egged quail, a greater breadth of breeding chanteclers and cayugas). All my seeds have arrived, mostly.

Preserving animals means worrying that no one will carry on after me, that my life's work will be lost because someone eats the pigs and doesn't keep breeding them or that there won't be enough genetic diversity to my geese and so the lines will die out (at least in north america).

Planting trees, though: that's weightless, and it's a rope into the future. I sit looking at my apple trees and wonder: who planted those? what types are they? what were they thinking when they placed them there? what did they do with the apples? I'm planting my apples on BUD118 and Antonovka, the trees could live a hundred or more years. I live in a place that is... not sheltered from climate change, though it is that, but resilient to it already. Someone will eat an apple that I plant, even if the moose eat most of the new growth when I am gone and the bears tear down most of the tree limbs. Or maybe by then we will be eating the bears.

So this year: I have all my animals, and I am planting trees.

The wheel will turn

I'm planning the orchard. I've ordered birds (blue-egged quail, a greater breadth of breeding chanteclers and cayugas). All my seeds have arrived, mostly.

Preserving animals means worrying that no one will carry on after me, that my life's work will be lost because someone eats the pigs and doesn't keep breeding them or that there won't be enough genetic diversity to my geese and so the lines will die out (at least in north america).

Planting trees, though: that's weightless, and it's a rope into the future. I sit looking at my apple trees and wonder: who planted those? what types are they? what were they thinking when they placed them there? what did they do with the apples? I'm planting my apples on BUD118 and Antonovka, the trees could live a hundred or more years. I live in a place that is... not sheltered from climate change, though it is that, but resilient to it already. Someone will eat an apple that I plant, even if the moose eat most of the new growth when I am gone and the bears tear down most of the tree limbs. Or maybe by then we will be eating the bears.

So this year: I have all my animals, and I am planting trees.