People always tell me I'm so weird. Whatever. They're the weird ones not me.
I want the world to be a better place. I want to do whatever I can to make that buzzing dissonance in my brain go away. How can I live a life where every action I take necessitates deforestation, strip-mined mountain tops, burning oil fields and war? Where every object bears within in it the pain of one thousand exploited workers, in a supply chain stretching back through hundreds of years of colonialism and genocide?
So I do whatever I can. I don't know why this stuff bothers me so much. Other people are cool with it. As a kid my parents always made sure I didn't waste any food on my plate. I think a lot of parents do that though. And not everyone ends up like me.
My individual actions won't change anything that matters. You can't fight back against the world just one consumer decision at a time. It will take wide-scale reform or, I don't know, maybe we have to wait for this whole system to bite the dust before anything changes.
Until then at least I can make the pressure in my head go away a little bit. Each day can be one less day that I am the last link in the invisible chain stretching back to the destruction of old-growth forest, destroyed watersheds, lost birds looking for a place to roost, a starving coyote with ribs visible through its fur looking for trees where a possum might live. Linking back to fourteen-hour workdays, back pain, carcinogenic dust, burning lungs, stolen dreams. Linking back to hope that the future might be better, hope for good health to support your kids through graduation, hope for a late night shift time that lets you see them for fifteen minutes before school.
So I don't fly. I keep repairing my old car instead of buying a new one. I wear the same clothes for years and make them last. I don't eat anything off a factory farm. I eat organic and I eat local.
OK fine, I know those are the mainstream ones that everyone thinks are good. I wash my clothes about once a month. And I don't use soap, which destroys your skin microbiome. I don't use deodorant either. My friends say I smell fine. So it's working. And I only do holistic body workouts, I don't wear shoes unless I'm leaving my property, and eat standing up or lying down only. Sitting collapses your abdominal range and strains your spine. Obviously I sleep on my back too. Even babies know about that.
Sometimes I try to share what I'm excited about with other people. At my old apartment building I set up live compost with worms in the alley next to the trash. Organic matter decays more than one hundred times faster in a live compost biome than in landfill where it might sit there for years with no moisture and bacteria to break it down. I told my neighbors, and put up an informational flyer. The bin lasted a week and then disappeared. I set up one more and the same thing happened. You have to accept people the way they are, not the way you want them to be.
Today I'm replacing the wheels on the mobile hutch where my guinea pigs live. Originally I used lawn mower wheels. That was OK at first, but now a year later the hutches are a lot heavier from an extra fifty guinea pigs plus all the extra straw and grass for their winter bedding. All the weight makes the small lawn mower wheels dig into the grass and get stuck. I'm putting on bigger wheel barrow wheels. That should handle the terrain better.
I've been living upstate for a couple years now. I got tired of paying rent in the city. Tired of just doing everything they tell you. They set up the whole city to be illegal to make a real garden on the roof, illegal to have bees to pollinate it, illegal to have chickens that can remove pests and provide nitrogen fertilizer. What a scam.
So I saved up as much as I could. I was working for a company that installs solar panels on office rooftops. Carrying the heavy solar panels was the best part. It's a good workout. They tried to promote me to an office job designing installation parameters and I said hell no. There's no amount you can pay me to kill myself by sitting down all day.
It took a while to find the right property upstate. Ideally I would be able to find a good place without going north of Montgomery County. That's where the climate changes from USDA zone 5a and 5b to 4a and 3b. That really limits the crops you can grow without a greenhouse.
I saw a couple perfect listings, but hadn't saved up enough of a down payment yet. Even with just three to five percent down, I didn't have enough yet. Those places sold pretty quickly. Of course they did.
Eventually I found a weird listing when I was doing some manual searches by county name. The seller made a typo in the zip code so it wasn't showing up on the map view. I must have been one of the only people to find it.
I called to schedule a visit right away, and made sure to bring a loan authorization form from my bank so that I'd be ready to move quickly and not miss out on this.
The house was awesome. The backyard had a slope on the back half that would take a bit of landscaping to control moisture flow for plantings. But I could tell right away from how overgrown it all was that eventually it was perfect for a beautiful full-cycle multi-season harvest.
The house is in western Cayuga County, which is actually zone 7a! Perfect. The house was built in 1955. They knew how to make good ones back then. And for these upstate houses, it's good to be post-war since they weren't cutting any corners on materials like during the Great Depression. This one was built by a regular guy trying to make a great house for his family. Well, a regular rich guy anyway. I looked up the history at the County Register Office, and the guy who built this house owned a couple thousand acres of farmland around here at the time.
They accepted my first offer. One week and two inspections later I put $11k down and signed my name about fifteen times. And the place was mine.
I quit my job. Bank didn't expect that when they were pricing my mortgage but fuck 'em. I was gonna do whatever it took to make the house payments and keep this place.
Moving out of the city was amazing. A new start. Fresh air. I can do anything I want up here.
The only hard part was Emma. We'd broken up a few months earlier when she took a year off from work to travel. We still love each other I think. She just had some other stuff to do, and I was struggling to survive in the city anyway myself. I wish we'd had more time to figure things out between us without life getting in the way. Now she's been back in the city for more than a year, working in compliance for an international manufacturing company. We still message every day, and I send her pictures of all the stuff I'm working on. Emma is pretty excited to try some guinea pig next time she visits. I don't know if we'll ever get back together. If we don't that's OK. I miss her either way.
I moved up here alone at first, and was lucky enough to find a couple roommates through the holistic community. Ben works remote jobs doing web development, and Will is a chef at a fancy restaurant up here. I'd been watching Will's fermentation tutorials for years and was pretty psyched to live together.
The total house price was $110k. After my $11k down payment, inspection fee, loan origination fee, transfer tax, attorney fees, flood certification and title insurance, that meant I took out a $105k loan. Thirty-year term at 3.25% interest. $435 monthly payments on the mortgage. Ben pays $400 for the big room upstairs, and Will pays $200 for the small room downstairs next to mine.
So, basically I started off hating landlords, and now I'm a landlord. Not sure what else I should have done. It just happened. Emma loves to give me shit for that and she's not wrong.
It's not easy though. $5,220 per year in mortgage, and I get $7,200 a year in rent. That's $1,980 extra per year. Or $165 per month.
They say homeowners should expect to spend 1% of the property price in maintenance each year. That would be nice. This old house is really falling apart. It needs like $5-10k in maintenance a year. So that's 5-10% of what I paid for the place. Arguably I got a really good deal and at a true price the maintenance is more like 5% of the property value. Still a lot.
I do most of the work myself. I learn a lot from YouTube. I replaced all the vertical drainage pipes in the house last month. I met this cool guy Derrick at Home Depot last year. We were both looking at the straight-line laser-level nail guns. Anyway, Derrick works on a lot of tear-down jobs up here, and he let me know when they were taking down a thirty-year-old house in Genesee County that still had all the pipes in great condition. I drove a couple hours over there and picked them up for free. Derrick rules.
After doing all the work myself on the drainage replacement, I only spent $120 on brackets and pipe connectors. So then I had $45 left for the month. Car insurance is $31 per month. $14 left. The three of us split electricity, gas, water and internet, which comes to about $40 each per month. Negative $26.
That's a pretty good month.
So I do some random jobs at a neighbor's farm. I know a lot about permaculture irrigation, so I was helping them lay out some natural drainage with berms and a few swales for retaining moisture. Usually I can make a couple hundred on that. Will brings home food from the restaurant like half the time, that helps a lot too.
The goal of moving up here was to make it on our own anyway. The money stuff just put the pressure on a little faster than I expected. Staying solvent has been pretty difficult, but I don't want to pretend like woe is me. I mean, in thirty years Will and Ben will have paid out thousands in rent and I'll own an asset worth a ton of money. I hope so at least.
I moved up in late spring, and managed to hurry up and get the first planting down in the garden. I got some bush beans, squash and cabbage going right away. Those are some of the best summer crops for survival gardening.
I had done some pH and mineral checks on soil samples before buying the house. The backyard soil health was OK. Not great, but not bad either. It would have been risky to plant heavy crops right away without building up the soil microdiversity and agricultural ecosystem, so I had to get working on improving those right away.
The basic elements of permaculture and regenerative ecology are water health, soil health, flora diversity, and fauna diversity.
Water health is the easiest. Just have to plan it out based on elevation and topography, and maybe construct some simple drainage and berms to help retain moisture in swales. That's where the water-intensive crops will grow.
Soil health isn't too hard either. It takes time, so you just have to be patient. The most fundamental thing is to reduce soil exposure. Plants protect the soil. Always have something growing, something enriching the soil and shading it so the sun doesn't just blast it away. And never till the soil. Old-school farmers love turning the soil over and breaking it up. All my neighbors do it. They have to do that when they plant the same crops over and over, and let the top layer of soil get sucked dry. First of all, tilling is intentionally destroying the structural integrity of the soil, which reduces the soil's ability to retain moisture and resist erosion. And you'll never get really good vertical biome diversity in the soil if you keep mixing it up.
Flora diversity is hard to plan out. It depends a ton on the precise details of your local ecosystem, so it's unlikely you'll find people online who have already mapped out the exact steps you'll need. And of course flora diversity is what's going to break your back day in and day out when you're harvesting and putting down seeds. Succession crops is the main plan. New plantings every twenty days to forty days or so, making sure to harvest and sow the new seeds on the same day to reduce soil exposure.
Fauna diversity is the one most people get lazy about. They try to put out some water sources for wild birds, and hope wild bees help with pollination. And that's great. But if you're serious, you need some grazing fauna to remove bugs and weeds from your crops, distribute manure, and aerate the soil. Common fauna for permaculture ecosystems are cows, goats, geese, chickens, rabbits and more. Plus when you create perfect balance in your ecosystem, the fauna will be a food source just like the flora.
Finding the best fauna for my property was hard. I wanted to do permaculture right and fauna are critical to creating a complete biome. First I needed something that can thrive in my zone 7a habitat. That's most of them. The big restriction though is that compared to most permaculture farms, my backyard is tiny. I have a bit over half an acre of growing space. That's plenty for a home garden, and pretty much enough for subsistence farming. But not nearly enough to graze cattle or anything.
I also wanted something I could handle on my own. Bigger animals like cows and goats are a ton of work. They need a lot of food, they need a lot of cleanup, they get sick easily, and the breeding is very labor intensive. If I'm mostly running this place on my own and pretty low on funds, I need animals that can eat whatever is lying around, are happy to live in close quarters, reproduce frequently with low infant mortality, and are just generally resilient creatures.
I did a bit more research online. Guinea pigs were the perfect fit.
Guinea pigs can thrive on a diet of just grass, weeds, and kitchen scraps like vegetable stems. They are social animals, so you can fit ten or twenty in a small cage with no fighting or attrition. Female guinea pigs birth up to five litters a year, with an average litter size of three. As social animals, they nest together and keep each other warm even when their entire enclosure is buried in snow. And the infants are pretty hearty and born with fur, for a low infant mortality rate.
In Peru, they call guinea pig cuy and it has been part of the cuisine back to 5000 BCE. After looking up a few recipe videos on YouTube I couldn't wait to try some.
The first step was building the mobile hutch. It needed to have wire floor 1.5 inches off the ground, so that grass and weeds can stick up through it. Any lower than that, and the guinea pigs would eat the entire grass root along with the grass blades, and it would take weeks to grow again. If they eat only the blade itself then that can grow back in just a few days. I added some slots on the wood frames to hold corrugated roof and siding for insulation during winter. And I used some lawn mower wheels to move it throughout the yard so they don't overgraze any one section. The lawn mower wheels were great when the cage was empty but we all know how that worked out.
The next step was getting my first guinea pigs. I really wanted the larger varieties that are common in Peru, but those are difficult to source up here. That's OK, just the average guinea pig you get at a pet store is great too and a lot tougher than people would guess. I started out with four. You should always have two guinea pigs minimum so they can keep each other company. They really are social animals and their health will suffer alone. I went with two males and two females to start out the population and give a bit more biodiversity. I knew all this from reading online. At the pet store I asked them to pick out the healthiest, strongest ones they had and carried them out in a cardboard box. Took about five minutes.
After that, well, that was kind of it. I ran a stack of old newspapers through the table saw a couple times and had plenty of bedding for them. I added a little dry grass and hay to give them stuff to chew at night, and we were in business.
Two and a half months later we had the first litter. Four strong little pups. They tottered around and just did their thing. All I had to do was watch.
The first winter was tough. The snow came earlier than expected, and I didn't have the right diameter pipe ready to build a good snorkel. Like I said, they'll be fine all huddled up when the snow falls thick and covers up the whole hutch, but you need to give them the right bedding, and make sure there's a snorkel poking up above snow level so they can get fresh air in there. I moved them into the garage for a few days, and made sure to feed them a lot of the loose hay that I'd get out of my neighbor's barn.
Then spring came again and I had a happy crew of about twenty guinea pigs running around the hutch, pulling up weeds and chewing blades of grass all day long. Once there were more than ten or so I had to start moving the hutch every three hours once they'd eaten all the long growth in that patch. It was awesome.
Like I said, up to five litters per year at about three each all averages out to two guinea pigs creating one new one each month. I figured I'd keep an adult population between eight and ten, which would produce about four per month, and then I'd get to eat one pretty much every week. Guinea pigs are mature at one year old, and that's about the best time to eat them. So totaled up that would be about ten mature adults for breeding, and about fifty juveniles still growing. Perfect amount for balancing the rest of my permaculture system.
That summer I had an adult population of eleven with a fresh litter of four pups. I watched some Peruvian cuisine videos on YouTube, grabbed out one of the older males, and I was ready.
The first step is having the prep space ready. Chopping block, offal bucket, and a bowl for the clean meat itself. A quick slit to the throat, hold the legs and let it drain into the bucket. Then peel off the skin, open it up and throw the intestines in the offal bucket, and that's all. Ready for the refrigerator section. The YouTube tutorials were very clear and easy to follow, and it worked out in real life just like they showed. I got a couple tips from Will too, he used to trap rabbits in Vermont and skin them and stuff himself.
You can cook guinea pig any way you like. My go-to is pepian de cuy, a Peruvian stew. Potato, garlic, cumin, and peanut. Awesome.
At the end you can chew the tendons, which is really good for orthodontic health. You know ancient humans and Neanderthals had very straight teeth? It's from all the chewing they did, the pressure kept the teeth lined up naturally. Soft food is what lets our teeth move around so much and cause problems like needing wisdom teeth removed.
The first person I told about the first meal was Derrick. He was like oh nice my cousin does that too. Derrick rules. Too cool.
The next person I told was my old coworker Dylan who'd hit me up over email to see what's going on. Dylan got it immediately and said the guinea pigs were a great idea, and they must be one of the best food sources for ecological restoration.
Emma thought it was genius too of course.
Ben's parents and sister visited one weekend and even they were impressed. His mom emailed me later to get advice and learn how to start a herd of her own.
I was like, whoa. I mean, yeah, I agree the guinea pigs are cool. Super local food, low resource cost, low maintenance, good nutrients. It just makes sense. I realized this acceptance is what I'd always wanted. I'd always wanted people to think my life made sense. To not make a big deal out of it. To say that's great, and want to try it too.
No one thinks it's weird. I don't worry about what other people will think. I just do what I think is right. And yet, now I realize I did expect some reaction. For them to reject me again. I was so used to that feeling. That's who I was. I almost miss it.
So yeah, it's one of the best things I've ever done. I love these little guys. We don't name the guinea pigs. That would be objectifying. They have their own names for each other maybe, I don't know. I do check on their health every day.
I pick up each one, sometimes two or three at a time. If the weather's warm I'll lie down on the grass and let them walk up and down my arms and chest. I need to make sure they aren't sick or injured or anything. They'll put their pink noses one milimeter away from my fingertips or at the inside of my elbow, and sniff in and out quickly while standing still, completely absorbed in the smell. Then they'll lie down and relax on my chest or stomach where my body heat is warmest.
When I hold one cradled in my arms and marvel at the strength and beauty of life, I wonder if this is how my parents felt when I was a baby in their arms. Guinea pigs are wonderful, curious little creatures. If they didn't eat grass and weeds, if they didn't spread manure to fertilize the plants and complete the nitrogen cycle, that would be OK. It would be worth it just to spend time together like this and look into each other's eyes. I look into the depth of the pupils that take up the entire eye socket, and wonder what's going on in there, back where that optic nerve echoes to the neurons and brain stem and something deeper flickering beyond even that.
I still eat them. It's the right thing to do.