Winter Prayer

I ask for the strength I will need to endure until spring

and the wisdom I require to learn from the dark 

and cold the lessons they will teach.

May I receive them without flinching

Jenna over at Cold Antler Farm shared this last winter, or possibly the year before.  I copied it down and made a note to myself to use it as the basis for a winter time blog post.  Its a good prayer for me right now.  We are having issues with all of the 'modern' infrastructures of the house: a leaking generator, a broken inverter, failing batteries, and now more plumbing issues on top of the ones that have had us hauling water in blue jugs the last year and more.  Its almost enough to make me want to rip out the plumbing (itself probably as arduous a job as fixing it), set up a grey water system, install the compost toilet, sell the hot water heater and water softener and the whole generator set up and invest the sales monies in a wood cookstove and a bajillion Alladin lamps.  I want to curl up in a ball of tears and ask why.  Instead, I count our blessings.  I'm grateful for woodheat and candlelight.  I'm grateful that the leaky generator still runs, and that the mountain man has its manual on order.  I'm grateful the batteries have not yet given up the ghost.  I'm grateful that I get to learn about plumbing.  I'm grateful that the prospect of a housejack makes me sigh, but does not scare me.  I practice gratitude because that's the only way to hold my determinism.  We will have running hot and cold water and a working electrical system before snow flies next fall.

I ask for the strength I will need to endure until spring

and the wisdom I require to learn from the dark 

and cold the lessons they will teach.

May I receive them without flinching

Hi again

Hello. I miss writing here. So I'm back. I think. We'll see. It seems sometimes (a lot of the times) (nearly always) that I have better intentions and more projects than I can live up to or finish. And sometimes this space feels like another one of them. But at the same time, this is a useful space for me to catalog and share those intentions I do live up to and those projects I do complete.  Not to mention thought tangles about life and beauty which seem to want more than just a journal entry no one else will ever see. Why do thoughts seem more valid when shared?  

Which I realize really gives this space a lop sided perspective on my life; it elides the rough patches, ignores the sink of dirty dishes or the fact that the summer garden is overgrown and that just outside the perfectly composed frame is the mess of life. But there you have it. We all curate ourselves on the internet, do we not? 

So, here goes. An experiment perhaps? That takes the pressure of a resolution away. A return to this space and an experiment in using it however best suits me. Even if that means entries that are nothing but pictures of pies. Like this one. 

Blueberry rhubarb. My new favorite combo. And with rhubarb hopefully surviving it's first winter in the garden and blueberry lowlands just down the road, one that's sure to return for many years to come. 

Cabbages!

Three giant harvest baskets full! With frosts coming regularly at night, I took a head lamp and a cleaver to the garden last night to finally harvest my cabbages. I recently finished a course of antibiotics, so the first place some of these beauties  are going is into the crock. Lacto-fermented Saurkraut, here I come. The second place they're going is into a giant bowl of a raw cabbage salad (with some hot peppers and oil and almonds). The micro biome isn't only inhabited by critters that are acid tolerant (cultivated in bulk via lacto-fermentation), but by others as well. My dad is a biology prof and we have long discussions on many subjects, the upshot of a recent one being that probably the microbes inhabiting veggies growing in the garden are a) super important and b) distinguish loca-votes from different places and c) probably a large part of the benefit of raw vs cooked veggies (cooked veggies have different benefits). In thinking about this, and about the way that eating local veggies and local (wild!) meats grounds me and connects me to this place I live, I think about the root chakra. About the way muladhara is nurtured by eating root crops -parsnip, potato, carrot, etc - and about how a good grounding practice for travelers is to eat local food. There's a power in place, y'all. And if the beings a place can live increasingly intimately, that's all to the best. So I'll be eating a few days worth of raw cabbage salad to ground me and to nurture my gut. Today I've got tabbouleh made with the last of the frostbit parsley and a homegrown tomato from a friend.  

The rest of this giant pile of cabbage, and the other large mound from the CSA (not pictured) will go into the freezer, to ground me and nourish me and mine this winter. 

In the garden...

The pie bed! Strawberries and rhubarb. And daisies.

Cabbages and squash,
saved from the rampant overgrowth of weeds. 

I'm harvesting freezer bags full of kale for winter time, and giant bowls full of salad greens.  We thinned the cabbage with a giant saute, and the rest of them are forming beautiful heads.  The squash are flowering, but at this point in the summer, its an even toss up if we'll see squash or hard frosts first. Some year I'll figure out the whole seed starting time table...

"I" becomes "we" : recognizing our symbiosis with the microbiome in our gut

"Viewed from this perspective, the foods in the markets appear in a new light, and I began to see how you might begin to shop and cook with the microbiome in mind, the better to feed the fermentation in our guts. The less a food is processed, the more of it that gets safely through the gastrointestinal tract and into the eager clutches of the microbiota. Al dente pasta, for example, feeds the bugs better than soft pasta does; steel-cut oats better than rolled; raw or lightly cooked vegetables offer the bugs more to chomp on than overcooked, etc. This is at once a very old and a very new way of thinking about food: it suggests that all calories are not created equal and that the structure of a food and how it is prepared may matter as much as its nutrient composition.

It is a striking idea that one of the keys to good health may turn out to involve managing our internal fermentation. Having recently learned to manage several external fermentations — of bread and kimchi and beer — I know a little about the vagaries of that process. You depend on the microbes, and you do your best to align their interests with yours, mainly by feeding them the kinds of things they like to eat — good “substrate.” But absolute control of the process is too much to hope for. It’s a lot more like gardening than governing.

The successful gardener has always known you don’t need to master the science of the soil, which is yet another hotbed of microbial fermentation, in order to nourish and nurture it. You just need to know what it likes to eat — basically, organic matter — and how, in a general way, to align your interests with the interests of the microbes and the plants. The gardener also discovers that, when pathogens or pests appear, chemical interventions “work,” that is, solve the immediate problem, but at a cost to the long-term health of the soil and the whole garden. The drive for absolute control leads to unanticipated forms of disorder.

This, it seems to me, is pretty much where we stand today with respect to our microbiomes — our teeming, quasi-wilderness. We don’t know a lot, but we probably know enough to begin taking better care of it. We have a pretty good idea of what it likes to eat, and what strong chemicals do to it. We know all we need to know, in other words, to begin, with modesty, to tend the unruly garden within." - Michael Pollan

Read the whole article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Seeds!

, 

I started seeds WAY late this year.  For various reasons, I wasn't sure that I'd have the time to dig in new garden beds this spring, and then...  well.  Then I knew I would.  But by then, the optimal seed starting time had passed.  And I might have procrastinated another week.... waited until I was REALLY itching to garden.  And so on Tuesday, I started seeds!

Cabbage seeds.  Parsley seeds.  Calendula seeds.  Summer squash seeds.  Zuccini seeds.

Less a planned composition than the happenstance of left overs combined with gifts from a friend.

I've others I will direct-seed in the ground...  into those beds I still need to make.... Parsnips, peas, green beans (because why not?  I have a bazillion of them!)

And another friend has promised many many eggplant starts from her own over abundance, and tomatoes to join the basil on the upstairs porch.

Making Dirt : Compost

I'm starting at the ground, literally, with this homesteading endeavor.  Making dirt.  Compost is the lifeblood of a garden.  That and manure, which I will be picking up a load of today, and one year soon I'll have the livestock to produce it ourselves.  

I remember, growing up in a Civil War era farmhouse in Maine with a giant garden out back, we had an equally giant compost pile out back, and in the later years we were there (the ones I remember most clearly) I don't believe we ever bought soil amendments.  And now, when I'm looking at a quarter inch of soil over a hillside of glacial silt and clay...  I long for that giant fertile pile of rich dark loam.  But this is how it starts: one step at a time, one pail of scraps, one armful of leaves.  Directing the decomposition...

The current compost heap...  I hope to be able to harvest a good deal of dirt out of it before the end of the summer.  My way of making dirt is a bit of an improvisation.  I pay very little (if any) attention to the proper balance of green and brown composting material.  Instead, I empty the pail of collected kitchen scraps, occasionally throw on some dried leaves or a bucket of sawdust, add congealed chicken's blood when I have it after a slaughter (cross my fingers no wild predators stalk the compost for chicken's blood) ...  and call it good.  It all eventually decomposes.

But since I was making a new pile, I figured I might as well be a little conscientious about it:

I laid down cardboard and newspaper to help block the grass and fireweed and rosebushes from simply growing through it.  I plan, very soon, to make a container for it, log cabin-style, of stacked fallen trees, so the pile can more easily grow up than out. 

And I bedded it down with a wheelbarrow of leaves from the forest driveway, before I ever tossed the first pail of kitchen scraps.  One day it will be dirt :)