200 Things: Spring

By Sharon Astyk. Reprinted with permission.

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Rethink your seed starting regimen. How will you do it without potting soil, grow lights and warming mats. Consider creating manure heated hotbeds, using your own compost, building a greenhouse, or coldframe, direct seeding early versions of transplanted crops, etc…

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Your local feed store has chicks right now - even suburbanites might consider ordering a few bantam hens and keeping them as exotic birds. Worth a shot, no? You can grow some feed in your garden for them, as well as enjoying the eggs.

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Order enough seeds for three years of gardening. If by next spring, we are all unable to get replacement seed, will you have produced everything you need? What if you can’t grow for a year because of some crisis? Order extras from places with cheap seed like Fedco Seeds, Pinetree Garden Seeds, and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.

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Yard sale season will begin soon in the warmer parts of the country, and auctions are picking up now in the North. Stocking up on things like shoes, extra coats, kids clothing in larger sizes, hand tools, garden equipment is simply prudent - and can save a lot of money.

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The real estate “season” will begin shortly, with families wanting to get settled in new homes during the summer, before the school year starts. If you are planning on buying or selling this year, now is the time to research the market, new locations, find that country property or the urban duplex with a big yard.

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Once pastures are flush, last year’s hay is usually a bargain, and many farmers clean out their barns. manure and old hay are great soil builders for anyone.

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Check out your local animal shelter and adopt a dog or cat for rodent control, protection and friendship during peak oil.

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As things green up, begin to identify and use local wild edibles. Eat your lawn’s dandelions, your daylily shoots, new nettles.

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Hunt for morels (learn what you are doing first!!) and wild onions. Get in the habit of seeing what food there is to be had everywhere you go.

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Set up rainbarrel or cistern systems and start harvesting your precipitation.

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Planning to only grow vegetables? Truly sustainable gardens include a lot of pretty flowers, which have value as medicinals, dye and fiber plants, seasoning herbs, and natural cleaners and pest repellants. Instead of giving up ornamentals altogether, grow a garden full of daylilies, lady’s mantle, dye hollyhocks and coreopsis, foxgloves, soapwart, bayberry, hip roses, bee balm and other useful beauties.

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Get a garden in somewhere around you - campaign to turn open space into a community garden, ask if you can use a friend’s backyard, get your company or church, synagogue, mosque or school to grow a garden for the poor. Every garden and experienced gardener we have is a potential hedge against the disaster.

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Join a CSA if you don’t garden, and get practice cooking and eating a local diet in season.

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Eggs and greens are at their best in spring - dehydrated greens and cooked eggshells, ground up together add calcium and a host of other nutrients to flour, and you won’t taste them. We’re not going to be able to afford to waste food in the future, so get out of the habit now.

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Make rhubarb, parsnip or dandelion wine for later consumption.

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Now that warmer weather is here, start walking for more of your daily Needs. Even a four or five mile walk is quite reasonable for most healthy people.

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Start a compost pile, or begin worm composting. Everyone can and should compost. Even apartment dwellers can keep worms or a compost bin and use the product as potting soil.

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Use spring holidays and feasts as a chance to bring up peak oil with friends and family. Freedom and rebirth are an excellent subjects to lead into the Long Emergency.

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Store the components of some traditional spring holiday foods, so that in hard times your family can maintain its traditions and celebrations.

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With the renewal of the building season, now is the time to scavenge free building materials, like cinder blocks, old windows and scrap wood - with permission, of course.

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Try and adapt to the spring weather early - get outside, turn down your heat or bank your fires, cut down on your fuel consumption as though you had no choice. Put on those sweaters one more time.

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Shepherds are flush with wool - now is the time to buy some fleece and start spinning! Drop spindles are easy to make and cheap to use. Check out www.learntospin.com

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Take a hard look back over the last winter - if you had had to survive on what you grew and stored last year, would you have made it? Early spring was famously the “starving time” when stores ran out and everyone was hungry. Remember, when you plan your food needs that not much produces early in spring, and in northern climates, A winter’s worth of food must last until May or June.

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Trade cuttings and divisions, seeds and seedlings with your neighbors. Learn what’s out there in your community, and sneak some useful plants into your neighbors’ garden.

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If you’ve got a nearby college, consider scavenging the dorm dumpsters. College students often leave astounding amounts of Stuff behind including excellent books, clothes, furniture, etc…

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Say a schecheyanu, a blessing, or a prayer. Or simply be grateful for a series of coincidences that permit us to be here, in this place, as the world and the seasons come to life again. Try to make sure that this year, this time, you will take more joy in what you have, and prepare a bit better to soften the blow that is about to fall.

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