Winter Solstice

On the Winter Solstice I dug up Jerusalem Artichokes, carrots and leeks from the garden. We added our garden potatoes, butternut squash and garlic to create a delicious stew for our solstice celebration. It was gratifying, on the darkest day of the year, to harvest and cook food we grew ourselves!

There were several things I thought about as I was digging up the root vegetables:

1/ These are not nice pretty veggies when you first see them! They are dirty and messy when you dig them up and it takes some cleaning and peeling to have an attractive meal. This always gives me a different perspective on food than I get when I buy the same thing in the grocery story where everything is clean and neat. I become aware of how much work goes into putting food on the shelves in the store.

2/ I wondered what it would be like to HAVE to harvest our food all winter. What would it be like if we had to be more self sufficient? It took a long time to dig up the vegetables, and clean, peel, and cook them. How would our lives be different if we had to do this kind of work every day in order to eat? Of course, we would be a lot more efficient and I wouldn't be out in the garden in my pajamas, but it would still be a much different way of life than we have now.

We had a lovely root vegetable stew by candle light and appreciated our delicious food as well as the warmth and light we were blessed with.

Forest Garden Design Class

August 16, 2010

You might ask, "What is a forest garden?" Below is a quote from the book, "Edible Forest Gardens" by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier:

"An edible forest garden is a perennial polyculture of multipurpose plants.

Most plants regrow every year: perennials.

Many species grow together: a polyculture.

Each plant contributes to the success of the whole by fulfilling many purposes: multipurpose.

In other words, a forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food production."

I just finished a week long intensive Forest Garden Design course with Dave Jacke and it was truly a life changing experience! We spent a week analyzing a piece of land and then developing a detailed design for a forest garden for that site. We worked together in groups on the site and had the opportunity to learn from Dave's expertise and experience as well as that of the members of the class. We had a diverse group that consisted of people from many walks of life including professors, an architect, a psychologist, attorneys, artists, teachers, farmers, and students or recent graduates of programs in ecology and sustainability. Several people have built or are in the process of building strawbale or cob houses, and many of us are in varying stages of developing our own forest gardens. All of us are acutely aware of the issues we are all facing related to fossil fuels, food, and resources. We were very appreciative of the community we developed throughout the week, and Dave and his teaching team led us through many experiences that brought home the connections between people and the landscape/plants/gardens we live with. I think we all came to a deep realization that the scope of what we are trying to do is much broader than putting plants together to create an edible forest - although that in itself is a fascinating endeavor. Dave talked with us about cultivating a new paradigm, and I think we all became more aware than ever that we are involved in that process in some way that is exciting and mysterious.

Saul and I consulted with Dave this morning for several hours and hope to work closely with him to design a forest garden in our back yard. I hardly have the words to describe all the things we have to think about after our discussion with him! More on that in later posts!

"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings." Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution, (quote used by Dave in one of his talks)

Color

As an artist I am fascinated with the color of freshly grown food. The eggplant in this picture is from one of the local organic farms, and the rest of the squash and zucchini is from our garden. The purple color of the eggplant is so vivid - I almost hated to eat it! All the colors together create a lovely palette.

I made some cheesecake with local blackberries the other day, and the blackberry sauce was a fuchsia/magenta color! Wow - it was a visual pleasure to eat! Local, organic food not only tastes good and is nutritious, but it LOOKS good as well!

The Downside

Last night we went for a bike ride and we talked about the downside of this low energy comsumption lifestyle we are trying to carve out. It was sort of depressing, so I decided to take a picture of all the food I harvested today (beans, zucchini, cucumber, rhubarb and butternut squash - and, not pictured - a lovely yellow squash) as a reminder that we ARE making progress, however slow. Two years ago we didn't even really know what the plants or the seeds looked like for each of these vegetables and now we have a nice harvest.

We had to get our wood burning stove repaired to the tune of several hundred dollars, which stimulated the discussion that we are not really saving all that much money by using wood as a source of heat even though our utility bills are very low. Our level billing for Vectren is about $10/month. We had to pay for the wood burning stove (which we purchased new), have it installed and now it needed a repair because it was cracked. Once we got the stove we had no idea how to get wood (!), so we bought wood for awhile until we learned how to salvage it from Craig's List and other local sources. When we started salvaging it, we usually had to cut and split it, but we didn't know how to do that either and neither of us is too handy with a chainsaw, so we hired people to cut the wood. A very nice person here in town loaned us his wood splitter and Saul spent a lot of time last summer splitting the wood - so we didn't have to pay for that part of the process, but it was a LOT of labor.

Regarding the garden - we have learned a lot, but it has been very dry lately,so I have had to water quite a bit to keep the plants alive. Our water bill was high last summer and it probably will be this summer, too. We will eventually have a lot more rain barrels installed, but in the mean time I'm wondering how much money I should spend on water to produce a squash or two! I'm a little disappointed in our harvest so far, but I think it's because we planted all these perennials like raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries and it takes a few years to get them established. The rhubarb is REALLY growing, but you aren't supposed to harvest it the first year, so I just pick a few stalks here and there that are looking droopy. The asparagus didn't come up this year except for a few stragglers, so I don't know what that means, and the apple trees have some kind of weird thing going on with their leaves which could be a disease. All these issues...

In our discussion last night we realized that we are in the middle of a mega learning curve. We knew we would have one, and part of the reason we are doing this now is to learn from our mistakes when we have the luxury to make mistakes. If we don't produce a good harvest right now we can always go to the grocery store or the farmer's market, so we know we will have food on the table. If the time comes when it is necessary to produce much more of our own food we will have a much better sense of how to do it.

Perhaps the time will also come when we have saved enough on our heating bill to pay for the wood burning stove, the wood, and the back breaking effort to cut and split the wood. In the meantime, we will keep plugging away at trying to live a more simple life, consume fewer fossil fuels, eat nutritious food, and make a smaller footprint - despite the downsides and mistakes.

Rain Barrel

We installed our first rain barrel a few weeks ago and we watered with it for the first time this week. We bought it used from someone here in town and she had all the hardware to go with it. Then we had to figure out how to attach it to our downspout. We thought it was going to be really complicated because we had to cut into the downspout, but it was remarkably easy! We thought we were doing pretty well for a couple of suburban intellectuals!

It is a good feeling to water the garden knowing that you are using rain water you have collected yourself. This summer has presented us with days of practically torrential rain and then long, hot, dry periods during which the plants really start to wither. Before we installed the rain barrel I watched the rain run out of the downspouts basically going to waste because it was only watering the grass. Green grass makes for a nice lawn, but you have to keep mowing it and you can't eat it!! I kept thinking about how nice it would be to collect all that rain for the garden, and now we have started doing that! We are planning to attach several more barrels to this one and also to utilize our other downspouts in the same way. There are larger rainwater catchment systems that are possibilities in the future, but we've started with one rain barrel and that's an accomplishment for us!

End of July - Pictures of the Garden

Harvesting

We harvested a lot of green beans this week and it's so nice to be eating from the garden. We realize that we have a long way to go before we could actually survive on the food we are growing ourselves, but it is still nice to eat food that we've planted and harvested with our own hands. We want to learn how to preserve the food, too, through canning, drying, fermenting, and pickling - but one step at a time. We eventually want to have both a greenhouse and a root cellar, also. Big plans!

I try to get to the farmer's market on Saturday mornings so I can supplement what we aren't growing ourselves with food grown by local farmers. That way we are still eating a lot of locally grown food. I am finding that I sometimes overestimate what we can eat, so now we have a LOT of fresh food in the fridge. Today I made some vegan cheesecake with blackberries because I had to use up the blackberries I got at the market before they spoiled. The eggplant at the farmer's market was so many beautiful colors of purple - I wanted to buy all of it so I could paint a picture of it! Instead I just bought the ones that were the prettiest color! They are so much more beautiful than the ones you buy in the store. Next time I'm going to take my camera!

Yesterday I found 4 cucumbers in the garden and I was so excited. It's amazing the things that excite you...

Gardeners Potluck

In the Yellow Springs area we have a gardeners potluck that meets monthly and we have a chance to see various gardens and organic farms, and swap ideas. I've just started attending and wanted to share some of the things I saw at the last meeting.

Our friends Jenny Haack and Rob Content moved here a few years and ago and bought a small (approximately 6 acres) farm property just outside Yellow Springs. Jenny has been trained in permaculture so they started a garden that utilized the garden spaces that were already on the property. Then they worked with Andrew Maneri, a local organic farmer, to develop part of the property as a working CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm.

Rob and Jenny have been through many twists and turns in their experience with this project and I think that is as important to their story as the food and the farm are. Rob has to work long distance in Washington D.C. in order to pay the bills, so Jenny does most of the work on the farm right now with Rob helping when he can. They wanted Andrew and his wife to be able to live on the farm with them, so they built a yert with a lot of help with people in the community. However, the zoning laws make it difficult for someone to live in the yert year around, so it can't be a permanent residence. Of course they didn't know that until the yert was built, so - what a learning process! This year, because of so many changes in their lives Jenny hasn't done a lot with the garden, but she hosted our potluck a few weeks ago and she is hosting a permaculture workshop in a few weeks (which I'm planning to attend!).

I think it's important to note that we may set out on a path that we think is very important and that we are committed to - eating local food, starting a garden, living a more energy efficient lifestyle - but there are sometimes obstacles, illnesses, job losses, aging and other problems along the way that make the path different from what we thought it would be. It seems important to take note of those things because they are really a part of the path and not something separate from it. I think we have to embrace those things along the way. The yert is a beautiful structure that can be used in many ways and Jenny's gardens are productive with berries, apples, and many edible perennials even if they aren't pristine annual vegetable beds right now.

There is a woman who is keeping bees on the farm, so we had a chance to get up close to the bees. It's amazing to watch them. We buy honey in 50 lb. buckets from a local farm just outside Yellow Springs and apparently their bees aren't producing very much honey this year. I just picked up a 63 lb. bucket this morning at the farmer's market this morning,so that should last for awhile, although it's amazing how quickly we go through it.

We also had a chance to see the "no-till" style of farming that Andrew practices. He puts in beds the same way we do by laying out newspaper or cardboard and piling manure on top of it. Then he plants his vegetables, but doesn't till all around them, so you will see in the photo that there is squash growing in the midst of a lot of clover in the field. He farms this way because it doesn't disturb the ecosystem as much, it preserves the soil and the root structures of the native plants, and the native plants are good companions for his annual vegetables. At least the way I understand it!

One of the things that has come out of this gardener's network is a series of community gardens in which various parks throughout the village are being used for gardening. People can sign up for a plot and share the garden space with others in their neighborhood. One of the community gardens is right across the street from us so we see many people working throughout the week in their gardens. Also our neighbors on both sides have gardens so we talk to them mostly when we are all in the backyard weeding, watering, harvesting, and mulching. I think there is a huge network of people everywhere who are starting to tune into food production and who are learning all over again how to grow, harvest and preserve food. Tomorrow we are going to meet at the home of an older couple who move to Yellow Springs recently and built an energy efficient house with solar and geothermal. It should be an interesting gathering!

Community Garden across the street

Summer Solstice 2010

Today is the Summer Solstice and we have just about finished most of our planting, at least for the time being! It is difficult to get it all in when I am working, but I finished teaching for the year the first week of June, so we have been very busy trying to get all the annual vegetables planted - beans, squash, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes, and herbs. We planted a huge bed of cilantro because Saul loves it, so we'll see how that goes!

This is only our second year and it is so exciting to see all the perennials that we planted last year coming up and spreading. The raspberries are multiplying rapidly as are the strawberries. The blackberries have grown quite a bit and we are seeing berries on them. The asparagus isn't doing very well - don't know quite what to do about that yet. Lots of potatoes came up from the bed last year and the safflowers and nasturtiums are happily coming in again as well. The Jerusalem artichokes are huge - we have a sort of forest of them!



This year we planted a LOT of rhubarb because it's actually a very pretty plant and it is a perennial. It seems to be very happy and it thriving.






In our front flower bed we have some of the rhubarb, edible flowers, blueberries, sweet potatoes, and potatoes mixed in with both perennial as well as annual flowers. It makes for an attractive and edible landscape!


Today is sort of stormy and rainy - my favorite time to work in the garden. It is hard to believe it is the longest day of the year in which we have the most hours of sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer has officially begun!

At Home in the Muddy Water

Winter Harvest

May we exist like a lotus, At home in the muddy water. Thus we bow to life as it is.

Yesterday I harvested some carrots and then made a delicious Moroccan Carrot Salad with some fresh spelt bread for dinner. I was delighted with the sweetness of the carrots and even more delighted that they were so crisp in the middle of January! It is nice to know that some food can be left in the ground and harvested during the winter months. I have often wondered what we would do (will do?) if food couldn't be transported from warmer climates. Saul and I and Mollie want to learn more about canning and drying food, but it's good to know that we can have fresh food in the winter as well.

I am always struck by the amount of dirt that is involved with harvesting vegetables! In the Buddhist book discussion group I belong to at the Yellow Springs Dharma Center we are reading a book called "At Home in the Muddy Water" by Ezra Bayda. The above quote is recited at Zen meditation retreats after each meal. As I was pulling carrots out of the mud yesterday I thought about this quote. When I harvest food that has a lot of mud and dirt on it I become much more aware of all the labor that goes into bringing our food to the grocery store. It has to be planted, harvested, packaged, and transported. When I harvest and clean our food I realize what must be entailed in the cleaning and sorting of food on a mass scale. When we meet our food in the grocery store it is so neat and tidy, the vegetables are similar in size, the roots and tops are trimmed off, there are no bugs...

I think the connection to mud and dirt from which our food comes is actually a great loss to our collective psyche. I like the quote about being at home in the muddy water and I think it also applies to being at home in the dirt and mud that is part of growing food. The quote says that when we are at home in the muddy water we "bow to life as it is." We want life to be clean, neat, and sanitized, but that really isn't how life is at all. "Life as it is" is full of surprises, complications, ups and downs, and unexpected twists and turns. It is messy and dirty and full of bugs! Being more closely connected to real things in life - growing food, fire, animals, weather, the natural world - helps us also to accept life's more harsh realities (loss, grief, pain, suffering) with more grace. When we experience the cycles of life and the muddy water on a regular basis in the natural world, they don't come as such a surprise when we have to face them in our own lives.

We are also disconnected from the value of good soil when we never really see it. When it is all washed away for us by the time we get to the grocery store it is easier for us to build shopping malls and housing developments on essential farmland because we don't have a connection to the value of the soil. It is easier to spray pesticides on our lawns when our yard is just an aesthetic showcase and not a spot of land that is teeming with life.

The lotus is a beautiful flower that blooms upward and draws life from the sun, but its roots also extend into the muddy water where it also draws sustenance. We also draw sustenance from both the sunlight and the "muddy water", in reality and on a metaphorical level. Our dirty, muddy carrots made a delicious, crisp, fresh winter salad, but it took a bit of extra work to get them to the dinner table: bundling up, getting the shovel out of the shed, digging up the carrots on a cold day, bringing the muddy basket into the house, washing the carrots, and taking the compost bucket full of carrot tops outside. The work itself, however, had an intrinsic pleasure that was inextricably connected to the mud and dirt.

Snow Day

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.
Henry David Thoreau

It snowed today and the school where I work was closed, so I had a day of quiet contemplation by the fire. It is so cozy to watch the snow fall and listen to the fire crackling. Mollie and I took a walk through the neighborhood in the quietly falling snow and greeted our neighbors who were shoveling their driveways. We stopped to watch some robins quarrel in one of our neighbor's trees. I went out to get wood for the stove and then shoveled our driveway. After that I took some photos of the yard because it is so beautiful when it is covered with snow. The creek in the back isn't frozen, but it does have a thick layer of ice on the top, and the gardens are nestled under piles of leaves and now snow. Later I took the compost bucket out to the compost pile. All these small tasks - gathering wood, taking the compost bucket out, shoveling the driveway - are such nice ways to make contact with nature. They force us outside because they are tasks that involve us with life outside the house. I love the connection between our daily life in the house and the life that surrounds us in nature.

Of course all of these encounters with nature occur between and amidst checking our e-mails, getting our electric garage door opener fixed, watching Jane Austin's "Emma" on DVD, and answering our cell phone and our home phone (sometimes at the same time!). Modern family life, even when attended to with conscious awareness, is bound to include all the technological means of communication and functioning that are available to us. After all, we wouldn't be writing this blog if we didn't have some of these things at our fingertips! However, I think making the attempt to connect with nature is important as we connect with the world through our computers. Hearing the water flowing in the creek and the wind blowing snow across the field behind the house is a direct experience that can't be had in cyberspace. This hearing also includes seeing the snow fall softly and silently to the ground; it includes feeling the cold bite of freezing wind on my face; and it includes the fresh feeling of breathing in the winter air. As we chat, blog, skype, twitter, download, upload, and e-mail we can also cultivate activities that take us to the life that meets us outside.

To be admitted to nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded but excludes himself. You only have to push aside the curtain.

Henry David Thoreau

Happy New Year 2010!

New Year's Day 2010

I went out and explored the yard today. It is amazing that there is so much life outside even though everything looks dead and barren at this time of year. We have many perennials that will come up next spring, but it's hard to believe that they will live through the winter.

It is easy to understand why people who lived an agrarian lifestyle celebrated the Winter Solstice - the shortest day of the year which falls around December 21st. We usually try to mark that day by taking a walk in the Glen, cooking a meal of root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets, parsnips), and lighting candles around the house. This year all the vegetables we cooked for our meal were from our own garden!


One of the reasons we like to pay attention to the Winter Solstice is because it is really where most of our ancient Christmas traditions come from. In fact, most religions have some kind of celebration of light around this time of year, so it seems important to give it a little attention. At the Winter Solstice we know we will begin to see more light each day and can look forward to Spring. I painted the picture below to commemorate the day.



The garden beds are covered with a lot of leaves and when I took photos of them they all looked the same! I've included a few pictures so you can see what they look like. These pictures aren't very interesting except by comparison, so I am putting pictures of the beds in full bloom also.







We went for our regular 2 mile walk as a family and then Saul and I put more wood at the back of the house for easy access when we are ready for it inside. It was cold out, but we have to spend these times outdoors in order to keep up with the wood. It is good for us to make that connection with the outdoors, even though sometimes we would rather just stay warm inside. We have used more wood so far than this year than we expected to, so we are still figuring out how to calculate how much we need for each year.


Saul's Winter Break