Fish in a barrel

So Cliff and I are hatching plans. When he came to work in the garden, we got to talking about crazy schemes to deal with high food prices.

EXCURSUS: Back in the day (about 20 years ago), I was convinced things would get bad in this country, and it would be necessary to learn to survive. So I went on a crash course of gardening, hunting, and fishing. The latter two are not the best ways to survive—useful here and there, but not long-term. I also was interested in alternative forms of energy and food production. One that really pumped me up was growing fish, either in a pond or tanks. I think you could make a killing raising trout and selling them.

Back to me and Cliff. So this idea that we should really be learning about raising fish is going somewhere. Cliff comes back to the garden with a 55-gallon metal drum. He can get them from work and he cleans them with steam from the steam plant at UK, where he works. And get this, this is how easy it is:

Get a metal drum. Cover it with a glass top. Put in a pump that aerates the water. Grow catfish. Like 40 in a barrel. Drain out 5 gallons a day from the bottom to get rid of waste. Add water back. The waste is largely nitrogen, so use it to water your garden plants!!! Oh, and catfish love worms. So grow worms—feed them your table scraps (Joe Dongell, the guy who married me and Jessie, is the worm guru in these parts!). So you raise worms that make compost for the garden and feed your catfish, and the waste water feeds your garden. And a 25-ounce catfish yields 1 lb. of meat. My guess is the worm bins and fish barrel take up 15 sq. feet tops. Everyone has room for this in their backyard.

Can you imagine the savings to the families that need it? I mean, what if we taught people to garden and raise catfish? They could put high quality protein on the table for next to nothing.

If you have followed the news about high prices and the apocalyptic mindset it puts some folks in, you’ll notice that the “survival” mentality usually moves out to the hills and sets up an isolated base. They are out of the way to avoid people, the hordes that they see rampaging thru cities when the defecation hits the rotary oscillator. The sensibility is very much surviving for self. There will come a time for that, I suspect. But there is a chance that we can teach people here in town to grow a little bit here and there, to offset the high costs, to go to almost no cost, because God just makes things grow!!!! I wonder if we could begin that process whereby we get back to one of the most powerful evangelistic witnesses the church has ever had: the pagan Pliny wrote of the 2nd century Christians, “there are no poor people among them… if someone is hungry, the rest will fast until there is enough to eat…” And perhaps we could teach people how to garden rather than just giving them some tomatoes.

I think about Cliff a lot, how he is kind of the point of the direction of the Rock. We’re trying to make a push into the community, to be the church in and for the community. Generally, churches have not known what to do with neighborhoods like ours, ones that are on the downhill slide. We abandon them, or our worshippers come from outside the neighborhood. There’s nothing wrong with people coming from outside, but if it means that we don’t worship with people from the neighborhood (i.e., we can’t just provide social services for them; they should be the bulk of our worship—can we welcome them back in their own neighborhood?), we have a problem. I have said repeatedly that the people who know best what the community needs are the ones who live here. And in Cliff’s case, as we talk about the impact of high gas and food prices, he knows the impact in personal, daily ways. And when we talk about possible solutions, he is right there with the equipment and the willingness. We just may figure this thing out.

All that was a few days ago. We just had our awesome dinner in the garden, and Cliff and I spent some more time talking, and I think we are just going to go for it in his yard. He’ll be the pilot program. He wants to raise some serious fish. Man, this is getting out of hand. Me, Jessie, and our neighbor Tom are going to get some beehives. It hit me. I have a card I pass out with the vegetables that says, “taste and see that the Lord is good,” from Psalm 34. I started thinking how cool it would be to pass out some natural honey, in little jars with a little bit of honeycomb in it. “The law of the Lord is perfect, the ordinances of the Lord are sure… they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the comb” from Psalm 19. Cliff said that if we could start multiplying fishes it would be like “passing out love.” I about fell over. He gets it better than I do!