I’ve been chastised for not providing baby news. All is as it should be. As Georgia is one of the few places in the world where both home births and direct-entry midwives (the kind that don’t take their orders directly from an OB) are illegal, we are using the services of a wonderful midwife with a birthing center across the state line in South Carolina. We see her once a month, and everything and everyone is right on course. I’d show you a pretty picture of the young’un, but we don’t have one. Nor will we. It turns out that for the uninsured, ultrasounds are very expensive. At my wife’s last visit to her OB, we were quoted a figure in the several hundreds of dollars. So – no picture. If you’re wondering about the diagnostic abilities of ultrasounds, there are other ways to “see” everything the picture shows you. So, we haven’t lost out on any knowledge, other than the gender, which we don’t want to know. Speaking of gender, we’ve entered the realm of Baby Names. I think we’ve settled on a girl’s name (nope, not telling), but boy’s names are much harder. If we do have a boy, I would like to name him Bartleby, but my wife would prefer not to.

<a href="/legacy/weblog/cameraphone/archives/001643.html" title="Bone Bucket "><img src="/legacy/images/legacy/weblog/cameraphone/images/200403192034/_t.jpg" alt="Bone Bucket " width="120" height="146" class="pic" border="0" /></a>
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On this, the Ides of March, I’ll share with you the guilty pleasure of the movie Free Enterprise. I found it at a truck stop the other day for a mere $3, and the music video for “No Tears for Ceasar” – a medley of sorts from Bill Shatner’s musical version of Julius Ceasar -- was well worth the money. That’s the movie’s character “Bill Shatner”, played by William Shatner. That’s right… he plays a fictional version of himself. And it’s not too over the top, either. If your local truck stop (or video rental place) has a copy, don’t be frightened by the box. It’s rather quite enjoyable!

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So what have I been up to the last two weeks? I think this page sums it up quite nicely. Record keeping is key with gardening, and even more so when you’re trying to make a business out of it. What did you plant, when did you plant it, how much did you plant, when will it be ready to harvest, how much did you harvest… keeping up with these questions and answers makes each following year a little bit easier. Since I’m keeping this information for my own benefit anyway, I figured I might as well let the rest of the world peek in on it, too. So, this page will show in real-time specifically what’s happening on the farm.

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I’m certainly not trying to turn this into a weekly weblog, but it’s sort of happened that way of late. It’s been a busy week on the farm. All the seeds are in, but it’s been far too soggy t odo anything about it. We’ve had standing water most everywhere for a week or so. So I’ve used the time to get a few side projects done. I wrote a magazine article on our method of pasturing hens (due to be published later this Spring). I’ve got another web article due out this next week. Now that we’re in charge of the Locally Grown co-op, I’ve been slowly trying to get that back off the ground. There’s been problems, though, as the two biggest member farms aren’t farming this year and several of the others have sort of lost interest. Also, the annual Georgia Organics conference is this weekend, in Athens even, and I’m presenting three workshops. One as part of a panel on community-supported agriculture, one on the co-op, and one on our chickens. So, even though there’s no produce yet, I’ve still been busy selling. Hopefully I can get back on track with the farm’s photo of the day bit. I’ve taken quite a lot of photos, but they’ve all been of rain and mud, so I didn’t bother to use them.

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“Snackster.net is a powerful cookbook program that redefines how people will get their recipes. Snackster.net is the world’s best peer to peer recipe sharing program. Unlike other popular file sharing networks Snackster.net is dedicated to only cooking.” “The SWIPE Toolkit is a collection of web-based tools that sheds light on personal data collection and usage practices in the United States. The tools demonstrate the value of personal information on the open market and enable people to access information encoded on a driver’s license or stored in some of the many commercial data warehouses.” Li’l G’n’R is the first ever Guns ’n’ Roses kid’s tribute band. Be sure to check out the audition video. Build an excellent camping stove from one Pepsi and one Guinness can. Build your own “growing bag” hanging planters from 4-inch pvc pipes. (I’ve got a notion to do something like this for the farmers’ market…) Folks in the middle of Detroit are turning abandoned lots into mini-farms, complete with livestock. “Roughly a third of this 139-square-mile city consists of weed-choked lots and dilapidated buildings. Satellite images show an urban core giving way to an urban prairie. " You may have heard about American foie gras farms, where ducks and geese are kept in tiny cages and mechanized pipes force feed directly into their stomach to make their livers swell. An influential California lawmaker has introduced legislation that would outlaw the possession of foie gras produced this way (and the high-class restaurant industry, formidable in California, is up in arms over the idea). In Europe, American-style factory farms started to become the norm in their foie gras production, too, until the EU outlawed the practice (France and Hungary, the two leading producers of foie gras, have been given a waiver while they try to find alternatives). But, like most everything agricultural, it doesn’t have to be done like a factory. An English couple produce foie gras the traditional French way on a small farm in northern France, and (if you’re not adverse to the notion of killing animals for food), it doesn’t sound bad at all. Most people around here think we live in Cherokee country. We don’t, actually, as the Cherokee lived farther north. This was Creek country, at least until shortly after the US Revolution, when pressures from the Americans to the east, Spanish to the south, French to the west, and Cherokee to the north finally did them in. The remnants of this once vast confederation of related tribes are now in Oklahoma, having been forcibly moved there along with the other “civilized tribes” by Andrew Jackson. Here is the Library of Congress’ on-line map collection, 1500-2004.