Earthing: Gets you to the right place with the wrong reason

Now and then when one is researching minimalist shoe products, you come across the concept of earthing.

Earthing is bunk.

I do highly recommend proper grounding for all electrical appliances.  Low powered appliances are grounded through the neutral line, high powered appliances have an additional grounding plug.  A simple outlet tester should tell you if your house wiring is behaving correctly.  Stray voltage is no joke.

Another possible source of stray voltage is static.  This is almost impossible to avoid in indoor heated environments.  Even the best "earthing" shoes will do nothing because most indoor flooring is an insulative material.  The stray voltage you pick up with static is way less than stray voltage you can get from bad wiring and isn't a huge concern unless you're playing with a Van de Graaff generator.

From Wikipedia

Even if you were worried about proper "grounding" the earth isn't all that conductive, proper electrical grounding requires rods be sunk into the ground.  Electrical fences generally use three six foot rods for proper grounding.  Home systems are grounded with one eight foot rod.  Just touching the earth is not likely to do the trick.

That isn't to say that you won't experience an improvement in health if you try earthing.  Barefoot and minimalist shoes may help some people with gait issues through reducing constriction of the foot and leveraging the nerves in the foot that are muted through cushioned shoes to improve gait with biofeedback.  Sleeping on a hard surface with no pillow may have postural benefits for relieving back tension and even sinus issues.  Spending time outside increases your exercise level, sun exposure and Vitamin D production.  Soil also contains beneficial bacteria that you can alternatively pick up through gardening.  If earthing got you there and it's helped you, good for you, but it's probably not the actual earth contact doing the trick.

So if earthing helps you, but you're miserable in winter, get some good wool socks (insulative) and thin leather moccasins (water resistant), build yourself a platform bed with minimalist padding, take some Vitamin D supplements, get some exercise, bring in some plants potted in local soil, and enjoy being warm in winter.

(Amusingly this hits just about all of my non-diet blog labels.  Even endocrine, since Vitamin D is as much a hormone as a vitamin.  Earthing does touch on a lot of real benefits even though the reasoning is all wrong.)

Tick Bite

This has not been my season.  Thursday morning I harvested beets from the garden, Friday morning I found a tick on my backside.  The doc isn't in on Friday so I went to the immediate care place she recommended and got the precautionary antibiotics.  Keeping an eye on the bite mark as best as I can look at my own backside.

This is my second tick bite.  I got my first a couple years ago when crawling through the woods in November.  That time around I'd been dressed to the hilt, it was cold so I had on three layers of pants, a couple pairs of socks, and the bugger still found a gap in my armor and crawled up me.  He was also found the next morning after the most likely exposure.  I think the best advice is to shower after being outside rather than waiting until morning, and throw your outside clothes in the wash.  Ticks often crawl around on you and your clothes a while before they bite and at that stage they are easy to be rid of.  I've never gotten a tick bite while wearing shorts, which is what the conventional wisdom says you must not do.

Eddy Ridge Grassland Updates

If any of you were following the farm-y posts, I have a whole new website for Eddy Ridge Grassland.

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Running Ragged

Nothing good to report this month.  I'm running ragged around the edges.  Working full time, summer time farm chores, trying to get the house ready for my sister's visit next month...  the truck needs work, the hyper-reactive dog I can't take near a vet needs spaying, I've got some digestive issues I'd like to see a doctor about if I liked seeing doctors at all.

...and I ate a doughnut yesterday.

So much for my plan to catch up on this week by getting to bed early and getting up early.  I left my phone/alarm downstairs with hubby while he worked out details with my sister and it didn't get brought up and plugged in.  I slept for 9 hours like the old days.

Not good.

I had that annoying thing happen with my left knee again.  I wish I knew what it was, feels like old scar tissue snapping or something.  Knee feels great after I get over the twinge.

I am able to get all the physical work done that I have time for.  I get winded and take a half hour break, but I'm functional when I march out to the barn again.  That much is a major improvement over the old days.  I just don't know if I can hold it together emotionally and get my priorities straight.  Sometimes I just can't stop myself from sinking into Facebook, Hulu, or stupid phone games to escape for a bit.  Tonight I'm working until 8:30 PM to catch up on hours because I had priority issues earlier in the week.

Doings on the Farm...

This blog was supposed to be about the farm...  ...but I think the other health topics are a worthwhile diversion.

Today was a big day for the farm.  We had our first lamb!  She is not to be part of our long term breeding program, but I expect she'll produce her share of market lambs while our purebred flock is growing large enough to fill our farm.  (Although I better pick her up and double-check gender again before I make too many plans for her future.)

We also got the tractor working again yesterday, and this weekend so far I've planted an herb garden, two rows of onions, and four rows of fodder beets (sheep feed).  The potatoes are going in soon too.  Two days working in the hot sun, and so far no sunburn (although I did get a little dehydrated yesterday, and I threw on long sleeves as a precaution near the end of today because I was feeling a touch warm.)

Book Recomendation: Keeping a Family Cow

Keeping a Family Cow: The Complete Guide for Home-Scale, Holistic Dairy Producers

This is a great read for anyone, even if you live in an apartment in a big city, you will find out a lot of interesting things about the history of the dairy industry, food safety, and raising a healthy family.  You'll find recipes for various milk products you can make in your kitchen at home.  Not all the claims are substantiated, but there is a lot of research referenced and a fairly impressive bibliography in the back.  This is not the blind dogma I see in some other pro raw milk propaganda.

For the cow-curious, the book further details a lot about how to care for a cow on as little as one acre with just a family garage for a barn, and details many other benefits of having a family cow besides fresh milk and homemade milk products for the family table.  (High quality feed for chickens and pigs from waste milk, beef, and garden fertilizer...)

I still think large raw milk dairies and bottling plants are stupid.  One mistake with one cow can contaminate the whole batch.  Much better to work with a single cow.  Even with a single cow, mastitis usually only affects one quarter at a time, and is easily detected.  The affected quarter could be milked separately and fed to chickens.  Fecal contamination is harder to detect, but the book outlines a strict protocol for barn cleanliness, cow cleanliness, and preventing the cow from kicking and getting her feet near the milk.  I'm satisfied that fresh milk from my own cow could potentially be cleaner than any of the vegetative foods I eagerly pluck raw and devour right in the garden.

I'm cow-curious, but don't see how having a dairy animal is compatible with my current schedule...  Speaking of, time to go, I'm late bringing the sheep in for the night.

Shearing Day

First of all, if you're a shepherd who does his/her own shearing, I recommend the book Shearing Day, although I'm going to disagree in a bit on the diet recommendations within it.  The tips on how to prepare the shears and how to hold the sheep were very helpful.

The biggest health related note about shearing, is that this is an endurance exercise.  Champion shearers can finish a sheep in a couple minutes, and they maintain that pace for eight hours.  A sheep can weigh up to 300 lbs, and although most of the time the majority of their weight is on the floor, you have to move that weight around in a precise manner through six positions to keep the sheep calm enough to remain passive while you get to every inch of it's body.  (And that's after you've managed to catch a sheep and move it to the shearing floor.)  That is a lot of work.

I'm no Champion shearer.  I'm not even sure I've really understood position 1 yet, and I couldn't tell you how to transition to position 2.  Last night we spent some time in position 1, got some belly wool clipped and hoof trimming done.  By this time I was exhausted and called it a night.  But the sheep was also exhausted, and decided not to try very hard to get up.  I took advantage of her passive nature and sat down beside her to clean off her head and shoulder in a completely inefficient pattern.  Eventually I decided I was really really done, and rolled the sheep onto her feet to help her up.

Afterward, I was sore.  There is lots of bending over from the waist going on during shearing, and the legs knew it.  I was severely handicapped at bending over, climbing stairs, or even rising from a chair.  I could walk or stand fairly comfortably.  I went to bed and fell asleep with my glasses on and book out while the lovely heated mattress pad soothed my tired body.

In the fibromyalgia days, overdoing it to the point of muscle exhaustion would have been followed by a night of cramps, a half day of walking with crutches while I stretched out those cramps, and a week or two of recovery through drugged sleep.  Now?  I'm a little sore, but I'm recovered enough to consider doing it again tonight.

Here's a couple of my girls before and after shearing:

A bit about diet.  Yes, I was starving when I came in.  I had exceeded my aerobic capacity while shearing.  The diet recommendations in the book reflect standard recommendations for other endurance sports, eating a high complex carbohydrate diet every two hours, with lots of water to lubricate that carbohydrate digestion.  I see no reason why I can't train my body otherwise, like a ketogenic endurance runner would.  I think on future shearing sessions I'm going to bring my heart rate monitor and see if I can set a slower pace that my metabolism can better keep up with.  If I can't keep my heart rate down, then perhaps I should shorten the sessions.

Pain Killers - Haying

We all know them and love them, those little pills that make the pain go away and let us go back to our normal lives.  I'll leave discussions of the side effects and long term damage to the more informed, but how about the primary, advertised effect?  What is pain, why do we have it?  It is a signal from your body that something is wrong.  If we take pain killers in order to ignore this signal from our body, then we at the least are not fixing what is wrong, and at worse are injuring ourselves.

Now the experts claim that pain killers promote healing, which I might believe is true given equal actions of the patient on pain meds and off of them, but pain medication affects behavior, and behavior affects healing.

For years I was on daily pain medication.  I took them like vitamins morning and night.  But they never made the source of the pain go away, so I kept needing them, and I kept shrugging off minor injuries until I'd aggravated them for a couple weeks and escalated the severity.  Only when I addressed the source of the pain did I get true relief.  It took some experimentation and ignoring the advice of my doctor, but I got to the bottom of it and got off the pain meds (and off doctor visits).

Given that experience of ignoring pain on a daily basis until I'd hurt myself, I'm very careful now about how I use pain medication.  If I'm in pain, I give myself permission to take it easy and rest, if it's so bad that I have to take pain medication, I command myself to rest until the meds wear off, since my body's communication to my brain about my limits is muted while under the influence.

Last Sunday must have been a blue moon because I took pain meds.  Saturday was our first hay day.  On hay day, a fellow comes and harvests our hay.  He keeps a share for his labor and fuel, and gives us a share.  The hay wagons are his, and have to be emptied as soon as possible so he can use them on the next field he's doing today.  A small square hay bale weighs about 40-45 lbs, and a hay wagon holds about 100 of them.  That's 4000+ lbs of hay that has to be moved by hand.  We have a hay conveyor, but there's 20 feet from the hay wagon to the bottom of the conveyor, then the bale has to be lifted four feet in the air to get slammed firmly down on the conveyor spikes, then up top they have to be pulled off the conveyor before they cause a jam or get sucked onto the underside of the machine, and stacked up in the mow.  We had a good deal of help, but it was still a lot of work for each person.  I probably personally handled about half the bales, so 50 reps of lifting 40 lbs, and some of those had to be carried a short distance, not just lifted.

Needless to say, I was a sore puppy.  I made it through Saturday night, but Sunday morning the DOMS set in and I caved enough to go for the pill bottle.  I then rested completely.  Not even computer time, just napping and reading.  Monday morning I was still feeling like my arms were massively overworked.  Tuesday the arms were better, but I noticed the leg that had been doing the pushing during the turn-and-slam-hay-on-conveyor move was still not real happy about full extension.  Wednesday I did some back stretches when getting up, but was mostly fine.  Thursday I noted I was back to waking up before my alarm clock and felt fine.  I really don't think I would have recovered so quickly if I'd taken more than the one dose of pain killers.  I know in the past that a setback like that would have required a week of painkillers until I could get to the next weekend and take the maximum dose of muscle relaxant (always makes me sleep in so I don't do it on work days)  in order to get a good rest and  finally heal up.

I did experience foot cramping when I tried to do something else after haying.  But my hip and my calf that always used to trouble me were silent.  I hope to eventually strengthen my feet so they don't cramp any more, but I'll take a few hours of foot cramping over weeks of perpetual hip pain any day...

Outside Perspective & My First Tractor

Improvement is often slow, so it's nice to have an outside perspective of my progress.  Last week my in-laws  came to visit, and we spent a couple days doing touristy things.  The subject of my health came up, and my father in law noted that I did seem to be much better and inquired further.  I expressed disappointment that I still had to sit down at both museums when my feet were tired, and he noted that it wasn't just me, everybody had to sit down...  So I guess that confirms that I've come up to couch potato level of fitness, although I'm still a ways off from farm girl fitness.

Speaking of farm girl fitness...  I bought a two wheeled tractor while on vacation.  Behold, the BCS 732 with electric start:

And yes, that is a tractor.  It pulls things, and has attachments that do different farm jobs.  I do have to walk with it, so I do get some exercise while using it.

I got the sickle bar mower attachment, but I'm not giving up on scything.  Scything is a way better exercise and it doesn't wake up the neighborhood when I want to mow early in the morning.  On the other hand, I can't keep up with the garden paths by scythe alone and this lets me get it done more quickly.

The sickle bar may be an unfamiliar mower type to you, it's primarily used in harvesting hay, but it can clear a garden path pretty well, maintain a pasture, and even take out small saplings.

Above mentioned father in law came along with me to the tractor store, and gave me credit for not being afraid to tackle the machine.  I've never run a powered lawn mower before, and I bought a big complicated one.  I brought the manuals along on a long drive to one of our touristy stops, and the next day I brought out my cliffs notes and fired her up on the first try.  Next challenge will be finding the right oil to change after the first four hours of run time.  She's got three or four different oil pans, and I've never done engine maintenance before either...

Thinning

Most of my seedlings are up, some are getting too tall for humidity domes already.  It's time for one of the slightly sad duties of gardening: thinning.  Uncertain of how good my older seeds were, and confident seed was much cheaper than space under plant lights, I planted more than one seed per cell in my pots.  In some very poorly germinating seed this turned out to be very prudent, as even with the extra seed only a few cells are showing any sprouts, but then others have 2-3 plants in every cell, and one of my sources of broccoli seed was incredibly fertile and the pot is overflowing with sprouts.  Right now both sprouts in the cell are cute little promises of future mature plants, but if I let them continue they will crowd each other out and not do so well in the garden, so out come the scissors, and I have to choose one to keep, and one to be thinned.

*clip*  A sprout falls to the floor.  It's promise gone.  But yet I've given more promise to it's brother that is left behind to thrive.

Sometimes I have to do thinning in my life too.  Just this week I unsubscribed from one of my gardening e-mail lists. It was educational, but it took too much time to filter for useful info, and that took time away from more targeted reading and actually getting away from the computer and using what I'd learned.

Week 1

Wait, week 1?  Hasn't this blog been running for 2.5 years?  Well, yes, but note the very first words of my first post: "Well, I had planned to start this blog some time from now, when the really big experiment begins..."

Well, it has begun.

This week I planted a couple trays of seeds.  This alone is not all that unusual, I did this for many years while living in the city, but this year I have 17 acres to manage.

Obviously my two trays are not going to go very far in the grand scheme of things, they are just the start of my personal garden.  In the future I hope to have a greenhouse against the south wall of the house, but for now I'm just going to be content with my trays.  The majority of the land will be put to small livestock or hay and sold to support the farm.

I'd like to start chickens soon so I'll have them ready to eat before my June company comes, but I'm putting that on hold until the credit card has been paid off, and at the rate that repair bills are piling up in this old house, who knows how long that will take.  I may have to settle for showing off live chickens to my company...

So what does this have to do with health?  Long before I found my way into the paleo type diet, I theorized that
A) Almost all processed food is bad for me.
B) I'd get a lot more exercise if I gardened more.
C) I seem to be healthier when I eat more meat.
The farm is going to encourage me to eat mostly fresh foods or minimally processed foods, get some exercise producing them, and also provide as much meat as I need.

This is a really huge experiment for me, it is not an ordinary hobby that I can give up easily on, I've moved to another county, and purchased land with an old home in need of lots of repairs.  There is a lot at stake here in me being successful at this.  I have a bit of the sense of the founding fathers when they said "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."