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

Firewood

Firewood
We put a Vermont Castings woodburning stove in our house in 2007. I think the guy who installed it thought we were a little nutty because when he explained a few things to us it was apparent that we had no idea how to build a fire. We kept giving him blank looks and I think he left hoping we wouldn't burn down our house.

Last year it was such a big deal for us to build a fire and it took the better part of an afternoon to really get it going and start heating up the house. We have gotten a lot faster at it and we really enjoy the heat that comes from the stove. It is so much more comforting and relaxing than the kind of heat from our gas furnace. We think we have discovered that the reason the heat is so much better is because it heats everything - the bricks, the walls, our bodies - instead of just heating the air like the forced air heat from the gas furnace. There is something delicious and wonderful about connecting with the primitive nature of real fire that is truly warming when it is cold and dreary outside. It is difficult for us to pry ourselves away from the fire in the winter and I often fall asleep reading by it in the evening.


Cozy fire in our Vermont Castings stove

Some people who are concerned about sustainability have chosen not to use wood for heat because they are concerned about pollution. The argument goes that if everyone had a woodburning stove in the winter the air could become very smoky and, although trees are a renewable resource, we might use up too many of our forests. This is a fair argument and one we thought seriously about as well. However, in the end, we have chosen to use wood over gas, coal, and oil because we feel that it is a local, renewable resource, and because it puts us in direct contact with our consumption. We have to work (and we will explain just how MUCH we have to work) to heat our home by gathering wood and building the fire. This give us a direct connection with the source of our heat and with our footprint on the earth.


So, to get back to our process... the first step was to choose the stove we wanted and get it installed in our house. We also looked at pellet stoves because they are a little easier to deal with, but they use electricity to feed the pellets into the stove and our goal is to get "off the grid" as much as we can. Also, you have to purchase the pellets from someone, and we wanted to develop more independence as consumers. We chose the Vermont Castings stove and had it installed, and then set about learning how to build a fire.


But, oh - how could I forget...THE FIREWOOD!




Where do you get firewood when you are college educated teachers - intellectual subanites? We hadn't a clue! We bought some wood from the place we bought our wood stove from and we also bought some wood from a local farmer. But it started to bother us to have to pay so much for wood, so we started foraging for wood and looking for free wood offers on Craig's List. Then last year we had a huge storm caused by a hurricane in the Gulf Coast and trees were down all over the place around here. People were chopping up trees and leaving them by the curb as yard waste, so Saul took the pick-up and collected wood like a fiend. He gathered about a 2-3 year's supply of wood at least! I think collecting the wood tapped into his hunting and gathering instinct!


OK, so we had the stove, we had a bunch of wood, but we then had to CUT and SPLIT it. Oh my, what to do? We both have a healthy fear of chain saws, so we hired someone to cut it into lengths that would fit into the stove. Then we tried a number of electric wood splitters, but they weren't really powerful enough to split some of the large stumps we had. Finally, through some community networking that happens when you live in a small town, Saul found out about a gas wood splitter that someone was willing to loan us free of charge. It was a large one - 27 tons of pressure! We borrowed the wood splitter and Saul went to work...for almost the entire summer of 2009! What a job! It was a very physical job for a college professor and it was a lot of hard work, but Saul persevered and we are very well set for firewood for at least a few years.


Saul's summer vacation

The last step in the process was to organize and STACK all the firewood, which was also new to us. We had no idea there were so many things you have to do in order to build a cozy fire in your newly purchased woodburning stove! Before we could stack the wood we had to have some place to stack it, so that was a decision-making process. We learned that it's probably not a great idea to stack it against the house because of termites (which we had already done and we are using that wood up this winter), so we had to have some kind of structure to put the wood on. The first time we stacked it most of the stack fell down, which was very disconcerting, but we finally got our log stackers (which we ordered off the internet and assembled) and we got the all the wood stacked. Whew!





Sooooo....just to reiterate the things we did:
1. Picked out the stove at the store (took some doing).
2. Had the stove installed (took some doing).
3. FOUND firewood (had to learn where).
4. Hired someone to CUT the wood (the easy part).
5. Borrowed a lot splitter and SPLIT the wood (oh man!).
6. Ordered and assembled log stackers and STACKED the wood (backbreaking).
7. Learned how to build a fire and BURN the wood (took some doing).
8. Enjoyed our fire (haven't burned down the house yet).
9. Felt like pioneers from "Little House on the Prairie" (little energy efficient house in Yellow Springs)
10. Wrote this blog post (brag, brag).


Voila! Stacked wood!

The Manure Pile

Building the Soil - or in other words...
The Huge Pile of Horse Crap in our Front Yard

We really are very fortunate that we live in a neighborhood where not one person has complained about the fact that we have about 3 tons of horse poop on our front lawn!

This came about because we found a farmer on Craig's List who owns 20 or so horses and wanted to get rid of some manure. He sold it for $75 a truckload - and I do mean a TRUCK load. A huge truck, not a pick-up truck. He was willing to deliver it, which we were ecstatic about because we had filled up our own pick-up with manure several times and that job - pardon my slang - really totally sucked! The farmer who delivered the manure is an older man and he didn't make it to our house for a long time, so when he finally called to say he was ready to come with his truck load of poop we were ready. He arrived with this huge truck and we realized that if he drove the truck to the back of our lawn it would probably sink into the soil and make big ruts - and he might actually get stuck. Sooooo...we decided to have him dump the manure in the front yard. We didn't really want to think about what that was going to look like - we were just excited to get started gardening.

After he dumped the first load he offered to bring ANOTHER load, and we thought we might as well strike while the iron was hot. He was such a sweet guy, and he kept telling us that he didn't feel very well and might not live much longer. That did it for us and we ended up with 3 loads of manure that day. He ended up only charging us $50 for the whole pile!! I imagine he had a lot of manure he wanted to get off his hands that day that was maybe clogging up his barn and we were willing takers. I suppose you might wonder about us a little - taking 3 tons of sh_t and paying $50 for it. But I'll tell you that the manure is black gold when you want to start a good organic garden. One friend has actually told us that she has "manure envy" because we have so much manure now!!

It helps to know that we can start another garden bed whenever we want to because we have so much good rich composted manure. We are wealthy in horse crap and are the envy of the neighborhood! Who would think!

It is interesting what one finds valuable in life, and to take note of how that can change...


Piling manure on a new bed

Lawn to Edible Garden: creating the beds for planting

Creating the garden beds for planting

In order to transform our lawn into an edible landscape, we have to create garden beds where we have had grass. The hard way to do that is to dig up the grass by hand with a shovel or to use a rototiller. There is an easier way, however, using inexpensive and easily accessible materials: cardboard, old carpet, wood chips, and horse manure.

Our first step in creating garden beds is to go on a scavenger hunt around the village in search of large sheets of cardboard and old carpet. We bought a used pick-up truck for hauling firewood and gathering materials, so it is easy for us to drive around town with the pick-up scouting for our FREE materials that people have put at the curb. We usually do this on trash night and it's actually a fun routine that we often do as a family.


Once in awhile we hit the motherlode of cardboard and we really feel happy when that happens. I know that weird things make us happy, but when you can envision a large garden bed coming together easily because of your big pile of cardboard it's really quite satisfying! We pile it all into the truck and drive home, ready to work. The back of our house looked messy when we first started gathering these materials - in fact it was a little hillbilly-ish and a bit embarrassing, but we pressed on...





When we find carpet it is, of course, carpet that people are throwing out. Once when our neighbor saw us in her driveway piling her old, dirty carpet into our pick-up, she came out with a concerned look on her face and told us that we probably didn't want her carpet because it was full of cat pee! We explained what we were using it for - and that the cat pee was not a problem - and, although she was still a bit puzzled, she let us take the carpet. Now she stops often as she is walking her dog to see how our garden is coming along.


In addition to gathering carpet and cardboard, we also have to accumulate horse manure and wood chips - which is another story in itself and deserves to be told at a later time. Suffice it to say that we have huge piles of manure and wood chips in our FRONT yard and we are fortunate to live in a garden conscious neighborhood!


In order to create a bed for planting, we put the cardboard down where we want to develop the bed in order to kill the grass. We cut the carpet into strips the width of the pathways we want to have because we don't want weeds to grow on our pathways and the carpet will not only kill the grass, but it probably won't disintegrate for another 300,000 years or so. It's nice that we can use it for something useful since carpet full of cat pee isn't a sought after commodity.


Once we put the cardboard down and create pathways with the carpet, we pile manure on top of the cardboard and spread it out. Then we put wood chips on the pathways and - voila - we have a new garden bed!





Sometimes we begin planting right away, and sometimes we prepare the bed in the fall, pile leaves or straw over it so it can compost over the winter, and then plant that bed in the spring. Last summer I created a bed and planted zucchini in it the same day. We have such an abundance of manure that I can pile it on 6-8 inches deep. (I know how that sounds...6 inches deep in sh_t, but you know, we do what we gotta do - and it's all good!) I made hills about 15 inches high to plant the zucchini in so it had room for its roots. The zucchini was very happy and provided us with an abundance of tasty food into the fall.


I like the idea that we are recycling materials - carpet, cardboard, wood chips from fallen trees and yard scraps, and horse manure. It is simple and we can do it ourselves without spending a lot of money. We drive around our small village and talk to our neighbors to collect our materials rather than driving to Lowe's or Home Depot and spending money on materials that come from who-knows-where. The manure we use comes from a local horse farm and is not wrapped in plastic; the wood chips come from the local tree guy who has just used his chipper to chop up the neighbor's tree; the cardboard and carpet come from recycling bins all over the village. By using these materials we have developed relationships with a whole network of people that we would otherwise not know. The change in our lifestyle is not only about gardening, but also about relating to our friends and neighbors, using local materials, and doing our own labor. It is quietly radical on so many levels...

Changes in Lifestyle #2: Lawn to Edible Garden

Lawn to Edible Garden

When we got pretty well settled into our new home, we decided we wanted to mow less grass and create a yard that was filled with edible food. It makes more sense to us to have a yard that produces food than to have grass that uses resources to be watered and mowed, but that doesn't serve a useful purpose. We used some of the principles of Permaculture and then jumped in to try our hand at growing some of our own food.

The word Permaculture comes from both "permanent culture" and "permanent agriculture" and is "a set of techniques and principles for designing sustainable human settlements" (Toby Hemenway, Gaia's Garden). We are total novices at practicing permaculture, but what we want to do is develop a yard that is not only beneficial to us, but to the plants, animals, insects - and other humans that we live with. For us that means not using pesticides and sprays, creating interconnections between the plants, animal, and insects in our living space, and using recycled and natural materials to develop the garden. It seems logical to us to create an edible landscape that is both beautiful and useful.


We started by planting fruit and nut trees, as well as berry bushes and perennial vegetables that would become a permanent part of the structure of our garden. We planted apple, paw paw, and chestnut trees, as well as blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, serviceberries, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb, and some perennial flowers and herbs. This gave us the beginnings of a structure for what some people call an edible forest garden. The picture below left is an apple tree (protected by deer fencing) with beans and summer squash growing next to it. We expanded a flower bed that was already developed as a foundational structure to plant the apple trees around as well as to plant vegetables in.




Once we had the trees and bushes planted we went about developing beds to plant our annual vegetables and herbs. We planted butternut, acorn, and summer squash, zucchini, potatoes, parsnips, carrots, beets, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, beans, peas, basil, lettuce, garlic, and a variety of edible flowers. The edible flowers above were a delicious and beautiful way to add color to the bed in front of our house. We planted nasturtiums, Maximillian sunflowers, calendula, safflowers, hyacinth runner beans, scarlet runner beans, hollyhocks, bee balm, marigolds, violets, Sweet William, and flax.


We learned a lot during the last growing season and we had a lot of great food to eat straight out of our garden. It was wonderful to go gather a salad or to create a meal with fresh zucchini or summer squash. I loved picking basil and making fresh pesto, or simply putting a lot of basil in my salads. Sometimes I just foraged through the garden munching on sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes. It was satisfying to know that the work we put into our yard had a purpose, and that we could eat the fruits of our labor.

That was all great, but we have a LOT more to learn. We had to water quite a bit and our water bill was enormous! We need to learn more about collecting water with rain barrels and about mulching to hold the moisture from the morning dew in the ground. We planted some things that we aren't familiar with and that didn't grow very well like lovage, fava beans, and salvia (I don't even know what that is!) , so we will probably stick with more conventional vegetables that grow well in Ohio until we get better at what we are doing. There was a tomato blight, so our tomatoes were orange and the plants got really brown, and our corn was full of worms. I thought I could leave the sweet potatoes in the ground and harvest them this winter, so I was really disappointed when I harvested them a few days ago for our Winter Solstice meal and they were brown and weird. I was happy, however, to find that the parsnips had grown throughout the fall and were very tasty! I know that Jerusalem Artichokes are a staple of permaculture gardens because they are a prolific perennial plant, but we haven't really warmed up to eating them. I have a bag of them in the refrigerator that I harvested on the Winter Solstice, but I haven't been terribly motivated to cook them along side all of our tasty holiday food. We had a beautiful garden, but we also have a huge learning curve. We want to give ourselves a lot of time to learn so that, in the event that it becomes necessary for more of us to grown our own food, we have some wiggle room to make a lot of mistakes.


We will post more information about how we set up our garden beds, getting the raw materials like manure, wood chips, and old carpet (yes, that's right - carpet!), but I am still struggling to figure out how to upload photos on this blog and put them where I want them with the text, so...another learning curve!