Free Food

Every spring I am rewarded for my laziness. While many gardeners and farmers clean up their gardens before the first frost, I become my usual slothful self and decide that I would rather spend what little energy I have left freezing and canning my garden's bounty and skip clean up all together.

It pays off in the spring.

But you have to be patient and pay attention.

All too often in the early spring, I would be in such a hurry to get the garden clean and tilled and ready to plant that I would miss all the food just waiting for me.  I would plow it under before it even showed itself.

Every fall, that lettuce that you didn't take the time to uproot....it goes to seed.
Those cucumbers that you neglected after you had enough pickles made and stored....they went to seed.
That spinach that bolted and became too bitter to eat....it went to seed
That somewhat rotten onion that you didn't want - it sprouted again and is now beautiful
The garlic that you didn't pull....it's back and bigger than last year.
The parsnip you forgot to dig up - they are sweeter than ever now and ready to eat.
And so is that carrot!

And not only that, but Mother Nature is the best almanac for when to plant things you will ever find.  In general, when seeds are naturally sprouting outside in the cold spring, it means those seeds can handle it, so if you want to start neat and tidy rows of food, you probably can - even though the almanac and the seed packets may say otherwise.

There are all kinds of wives tales about "what is the best time to plant _____?"  For corn it is when oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear.  I don't know how many people have actually even seen a squirrel's ear?  I tend to just wait for the random forgotten ear of corn to suddenly sprout into action.  Even after a long, sub-zero winter, it will happen.

This is, of course, provided you use seeds that haven't been genetically modified to only sprout once.  Heirloom quality seeds or organic seeds cost more, but they will more than pay you back in their ability to produce fantastic quality foods with minimal work (or in this case, no work), year after year .







So, while other enterprising gardeners are busy cleaning, tilling and planting, I am busy harvesting the fresh spinach and lettuce from the garden - the first crop of greens so long awaited in the many months of cold.

 What we don't immediately harvest and eat, I transplant into more recognizable and organized rows.  The transplanting slows it down a bit and extends the season for a few more weeks.

So many times while gardening I have marveled at man's belief that we know what we are doing and are "in charge" of growing food.  While it is true that we are the caretakers of the produce, Mother Nature already has the system down and knows the perfect timing and temperature for it all.

In The Company Of Solitude

“Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.”

~Paul Tillich

I grew up as a farm girl.  Not so much in the sense that we raised a lot of animals and it really wasn't a "working" farm by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely in the country without the sound of a busy street nearby or street lights to light up the night.  I remember several times growing up when I would have friends over for the night and they would find themselves  freaked out by the lack of noise in the middle of a dark Minnesota night. 

Then I moved to the city to go to school and lived their for five years before being able to escape once again to a very tiny country farmhouse in the absolute middle of no where.  Unfortunately, I was entirely too busy finishing school to really enjoy that stay.  After school was finished, it was back to living in town as we started to raise our kids and pay off school loans.  A total of nine years of living in the thick of things - street lights, 24 hour stores a few blocks away, sirens going off, neighbors coming home late, dogs barking at all hours.....you sort of take it all in and block it all out at the same time. 

Finally, the move here.  Almost a mile to our nearest neighbor, no streetlights, no cars going by, no sirens, only quiet.  At night, only stars for as far as the imagination cares to fly out into the universe.  I very distinctly remember a moment a few days after moving out here when I stood on the front stoop holding our baby daughter in my arms and watching my two older children, then ages 5 and 3 run down the hill at breakneck pace, their short stubby legs going as fast as they could. I looked down at the baby in my arms for only a second and suddenly my two older children had disappeared from sight.  I felt my heart stop in that moment of sheer, pure panic that can only come to a mother whose children are suddenly no where to be found. All the typical thoughts of kidnapping, attacks by wild dogs, and falling in old wells raced through my brain.  It, thankfully, was only a moment before I realized that the only reason I couldn't find them was because the short apple tree had called to them to climb her leafy, apple heavy branches and they were just up in the first crook of the tree, happily hidden beneath all her leaves.  It was at that moment that I realized I had become "city-fied" and had become like one of my freaked out friends that felt both terribly exposed and totally alone all at the same time.  

Living on a farm takes a little getting used to, but thankfully, nature is a very patient teacher.

Instead of the street lights to light your way, nature shows you a magnificent sky on a clear winter night that takes your breath away.  You realize that, if you had to you could also navigate by the stars as so many other people have had to do for thousands of years because Polaris is always where it should be.  Suddenly the constellations and the stories behind them become worth knowing as they provide a sort of comfort while outside at night.  The moon's large smiling face becomes a dear friend's that you enjoy seeing every 28 days and time measures out from full moon to full moon when your very blood seems to rise more with the tide of it.  In the summer the fireflies light up the early evening and make the world appear as a shimmering diamond, and generally are used as a sign to the kids that it is time to head in for the night....right after they have caught (and released) a few of them.

Instead of the convenience stores and sirens you have your garden and your farm dog.  At first these seem woefully inadequate to the task at hand, but then after working in the garden all day you are really too tired to notice the dog keeping the masked bandit raccoons away.

Instead of sirens and noisy neighbors,  there is the chirping of industrious birds whose whole conversation lets you know the moment spring arrives because of the cacophony outside the window.  The frogs chime in at night with their low "bur -up, burr-up"  which roughly translates to "this mud is fine!"  The crickets keep track of time and the temperature as the summer heats up.  All these sounds are infinitely more agreeable than those of crowded humanity....unless, of course, one of the aforementioned crickets finds his way into your bedroom in the middle of the night.

Instead of many houses, there is only the one - yours.  This house is old, it has its secrets and protects its past well, but that doesn't mean that it isn't open to the warmth and life of a new family.  There are, after all, always more secrets to protect- like the time capsule that we put together with our story and our current information and tucked it away in a wall that we built. I have always had a thing for old houses.  They seem so wise somehow, they have seen so much and stood storms that have driven lesser houses into the ground, but they are alive and take some getting used to.  The floor boards that creek and squeak as you walk across them and always seem so much louder in the middle of the night , the door hinges that haven't seen any grease in decades and let you know just who is coming and going whether it is an angry teenager or a seven pound cat.  There is often a shifting of the entire frame of the house when the wind is strong enough, or when the pressure drops suddenly just before a big storm.  The basement breathes with its rock wall lungs.....cool, moist air breathed in during the summer and warm, dry air exhaled during the winter, and in between her many rock spaces she houses any number of very small neighbors that I have come to not only respect, but admire in many ways as they are extremely efficient in keeping many other creepy crawlies away.

The longer I have been here, the more I revel in the quiet and the solitude.  I would rather spend a day communing with the bees in my garden then most people I know.  I have come to count the animals and insects around me as my nearest neighbors and suddenly my world is very full indeed of beings to talk with when the need arises, and the best part is that they don't immediately consider me an idiot for expressing my views, whatever they may be.

I believe that, for many people, it is more of a comfort to live in town and have a network of humanity close at hand, but it often masks how much we really do rely on nature and the world around us to survive.  There really isn't any less nature in town - there are still all the same microbes in the soil, the same insects in the air, and many of the same animals that scurry around the neighborhoods at night, but it is easier to put that out of the mind in a town or city.  My daughter has often admitted to being afraid of the dark - more precisely - afraid of going outside after dark - which, for most kids is understandable.  The dark, for me, has become such a part of what I know that even the shadowy shapes that I see moving along beside me now are nothing much to be feared....especially when they answer to the name of Vincent, Tink and Frank - a few of the farm's cats.  And as to the occasional raccoon and possum that happen to stumble onto the same path- as I have explained to my daughter- they are as much afraid of us as we are of them.


Nature speaks quietly but if we allow ourselves to hear it, to work with it, and to understand that we are also a part of it....suddenly we are no longer alone in our solitude, but surrounded by friends that are all entwined in the wonder and travail of the earth.

The Darkest Day

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_102.html

We are quickly approaching that time of year again.  And, no, I don't mean the time of year that involves elves in red suits, flying reindeer, nativity scenes, bell ringers or carols.  I mean the time of year when the terra firma that we stand on every single day is angled as far away from the sun (or toward it if you are below the equator) as it will be for the entire year.  The day is as dark as it will be for this year's race around the sun. 

Every day, whether we think of it or not, we are cruising through space at a fairly consistent pace of roughly 67,062 miles per hour, not to mention that the Earth itself is rotating at the same time at roughly 1100 miles per hour (this, of course, depends upon your particular latitude, but for middle America, it is roughly 1100 miles per hour).  Taking those two speeds and revolutions into consideration suddenly makes even the wildest rides at the amusement park seem like child's play.

Now, add in the fact that it has all been going on for approximately 4.5 billion years without significant change or alterations and I find myself standing outside at night looking at the stars with  my mouth agape in complete amazement.  The concept of time is completely lost on humans.  We have no grasp of what billions of years means.  One year?.... yeah, that's understandable.  Ten years?....well, most of us can look back that far and, ironically most of the time we say something like, "Wow! Where did all that time go?"  or "If only I knew then what I know now."  Fifty years? ....We see marriages that have lasted that long and, if you are like me, you say "I wonder how they did it?"  A hundred years?.....This is about the level that humans can reasonably be expected to comprehend on a personal level.  Beyond this point, it becomes antiquity, mystery, mythical.  We may know stories and have a few artifacts, but we really have absolutely no physical idea of how life was several hundreds of years ago much less 4 billion.  I would even hazard to say that the average person, if tossed back in time a few hundred years, would not have the first clue about how to survive using only their wits and the tools afforded them by the Earth itself.  The learning curve in the wild is pretty ruthless.

We, as humans, have lost touch with the Earth.  Oh, we use it daily - we drag coal and oil out of its depths and we haul the fish from its sea and crowd cows, chickens and pigs into insanely small spaces and force the Earth to grow crops that we then rob for our own uses.  We get the Earth to do our bidding and then we all happily go home to our houses, warmed during these cold, dark months with all the oil and coal, turn on our televisions to yet another ridiculous reality show, eat our overly processed, artificially raised food, and then go to bed so we can do it all again the next day. 

Pretty depressing, isn't it?  Sorry about that.  And, to be fair, there are more and more people doing what they can to help the cause, but many days it seems woefully ineffective.

I battle with this "woefully ineffective" thing myself.....all the time.  Sometimes I chalk it up to seasonal effective disorder, but mainly it is just do to the world in general.  Regardless of my mental state, I try to remember that this change in the seasons is a good thing.  Winter is a time for reflection and hibernation which seems to eventually eliminate the depression and readies a person for spring.  I find I can read and digest more books in the winter months than any other time of year. 

One especially good one that I have been working my way through is Folks, This Ain't Normal  by Joel Salatin.  If anyone thinks that I am hard core about living on a farm sustainably, Joel puts me to shame.  I honestly wish I could convince everyone to read this book because he not only understands and talks about farming sustainably, but he does it and proves that it can work on a larger scale.  Much of his emphasis is on treating the earth with respect and being creative in how we solve problems such as energy, food production, water conservation and housing.  There are a few New Year's resolutions that are forming based on this book alone. 

Another book that I am reading is The Joys of Beekeeping by Richard Taylor.  I have been reading a few bee books, but upon opening this one and reading, "The thrill and fascination that filled me then as I watched large swarms stream into hives has never weakened....It follows exactly the pattern established millions of years ago...We see only a small part of the surface of things.  The rest will be forever hidden from us, to be appreciated for its felt but unfathomed presence."  In short, he had me at 'hello'.

I realize that my choice of writers has a lot to do with the level of connectedness that they feel - not just to the subject that they are talking about, but to the earth as a whole.  Emma Restall Orr wrote:  "Perceiving the world as a web of connectedness helps us to overcome the feelings of separation that hold us back and cloud our vision. This connection with all life increases our sense of responsibility for every move, every attitude, allowing us to see clearly that each soul does indeed make a difference to the whole.”  

Those "feelings of separation" are one of the problems with today's society. People no longer feel connected.....to anything.  Ironically, despite e-mail and twitter and facebook, we are all much more disconnected from each other and from nature.  It really isn't natural to sit in front of a computer screen all day and remotely learn about things happening somewhere else when our world - the only one that we will be able to actually touch and physically interact with - lives outside of our house.  

People live for connection with the world around them - eye contact, hugs, relationships.  Without it we are only so much protoplasm walking around without aim or purpose.  It costs nothing to pay attention to other living beings that share this Earth as well- animals, trees, insects - and often these connections prove to be sometimes deeper and more profound than our human ones.  So, as the earth rounds the corner yet again and makes its way back into the hours of daylight, my hope for everyone this year is this.... May you find a connection with some part of the earth around you - be it a roof top garden somewhere in the city, a farmer at a local market, a stray cat that adopts you, the bees in an apiary, the moon coursing through the night sky, or your neighbor next door.  Make this year count because you just never know......maybe the Mayans were right.

When it Snows and Blows

Every once in a while Mother Nature likes to remind us that she really does have the upper hand. A drought here, a flood there, the occasional mud slide or earth quake. Sometimes she gets really serious and throws together a hurricane or two, or sends a tsunami on shore to keep us on our toes. I just heard the other day that all of Yellowstone park is sitting on top of a "super volcano" that is due to erupt anytime between this second and about 100 years from now, but they really have no way to know Mother Nature's schedule for sure.

We humans are starting to get slightly better are forecasting weather - at least that weather that will effect us in the next 24 hours or so, but we remain woefully ignorant and argumentative about what effect we may be playing on the weather. Are we getting warmer as a planet or is it just a cycle of sun spots? Are the polar ice caps just undergoing a natural ebb and tide, or are the Polar Bears just going to have to develop flippers due to all the pollution that we have thrown into our environment.