Garden Medicine

  Fundamentally all life has the same requirements:  living things consume, respire, and produce waste.  One of the natural farming preparations I learned recently (see my post "Touching the Earth") is a health tonic that is added to other indigenous micro-organism recipes to strengthen the organisms and in turn strengthen the soil they live in.  Perhaps it isn't surprising that most of the ingredients are items we would use for our own health:  ginger, garlic, angelica, licorice.  Other possibilities include astragalus, burdock, curly dock, dandelion.  Their vital elements are extracted using brown sugar and alcohol.

The first step is to collect your ingredients:  you can find dried angelica root, licorice root, and astragalus root at any Chinese grocery.  There is usually an aisle devoted to dried medicinal herbs.  You may also find fresh burdock root for sale there.  Even better, dig its long tap root up out of your yard or field.  Burdock is a common weed in North America.  Learn to identify it, and know that you not only have a medicinal herb but also one tasty vegetable.  Learn more about the plant here  Burdock is one of my favorite things to add to stir-fries and homemade kimchees.



You first work with your dry ingredients, to rehydrate them.  Pack each one separately into jars one-third full, then cover each herb with a weak alcohol (10-15%) like rice wine.  Make two jars of angelica root.  Cover each jar with a porous cover like paper towel, cheese cloth, etc.  Let this sit for two days and the dried herbs will absorb the liquid and soften.

Now chop each of your fresh ingredients -- garlic, ginger, other ingredients like fresh turmeric, burdock root, or curly dock root -- and place them each in separate jars one-third full.  Now cover all your herbs -- the rehydrated ones and the fresh -- with brown sugar so the jar is two-thirds filled.  The brown sugar should liquify and melt into the crevices of the herbs.  This didn't happen for me my first time, so I used a wooden spoon to mix the sugar and herbs.  Now the herbs will ferment in the sugar for two weeks.

When this is done, it is time to fill the last third of the jar with a strong alcohol (25-35%) to extract the healthful properties from the fermented herbs.  The jar is covered with a non-porous lid this time (to keep the alcohol from evaporating).  Every day for the next two weeks, use a wooden spoon to stir the mixture so the herbs release as much as possible into the alcohol.  After two weeks, decant the liquids from all the herbs and mix the liquids together.  Store the liquid in an airtight container out of light. You can then add alcohol again to the herb mix up to 4 more times for further extraction.  The resulting liquid is a health tonic that is added in minute amounts to other preparations to stimulate the indigenous micro-organisms being cultivated. 

I would hazard (though definitely not recommending or prescribing) that this tonic would serve human health equally well and that a daily sip would probably do wonders.  Life is life, and we all consume together, respire together, and produce waste together.

Mosque Bomb Hits Close to Home

This post is a little off-topic, but important.  I hope you can take a moment or two to send out some emails.  Feel free to encourage others to do so too.  Thanks everyone.


The mosque where my partner Kazim's family has attended has been in the news recently because of the actions of its neighbor. He placed a sign on his front lawn reading "Bomb Makers Next Driveway"  Read about it here:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/10/136185720/new-york-man-posts-bomb-making-lawn-sign-to-protest-new-mosque

I am sure that you, as I was, are shocked but maybe not surprised by such hate speech. It's clear from the article that the neighbor's beef with the mosque actually has nothing to do with ideology or politics, but rather lighting and zoning. What is scary is that the air in our country is so filled with this discourse that this man can pluck it out of for his own purposes so easily, and frankly, stupidly. Are we beginning to see the development of a climate similar to 1930s Germany, where the irresponsible discourse of hate from politicians is causing such a cultural momentum that anyone can make claims about "them," those hated Others, whoever they may be?
I don't often do this, but I felt moved to write some short emails. Might I ask you to do the same as a small gesture towards cleaning the national air of such hateful speech?
1. First to Michael Heick himself. You can find him on Facebook. Search his name and you will find a Michael Heick who attended Williamsville North. That's him. Here's the note I sent to him:

Dear Mr. Heick,
  Though you may have legitimate zoning/building issues with your neighbor, the sign on your yard can only be construed as hateful, and frankly, ignorant. Do you really think your neighbors, or all Muslims everywhere, are bomb-makers? Come on now... Years from now do you think your family, children (if you have), and friends will be proud of this statement of yours? Regardless of whatever light or other issues you have with the building, is this really what you think of the people inside of the building? Consider for a moment how you would feel if your neighbor on the other side put up a sign that said "Pedophile next driveway." Not only factually untrue, but deeply hurtful... You have created a lot of hurt with a small sign. Let's hope none of those "bombmakers" gets hurt by any misguided violence unleashed by your petty sign. Then you would truly be guilty of a heinous thing.
Sincerely,
Marco Wilkinson




2. To the Amherst town supervisor, Barry Weinstein. You can find him at bweinstein@amherst.ny.us. Let him know that the rest of the world supports Amherst's commitment to religious freedom and encourage him to take a stand that more firmly proclaims Amherst is a place of tolerance and civility. Here's mine:


Dear Mr. Weinstein,
  First, I'd like to congratulate you and the town of Amherst for understanding, respecting, and celebrating two pillars of American culture: religious freedom and peaceful assembly. That communities of whatever faith can come together in houses of worship is a fundamental right, is something many towns and cities in the U.S. lately have been forgetting or willfully ignoring, especially when it comes to our Muslim sisters and brothers. So, thank you to Amherst for allowing the mosque to be built.
  Second, I am of course writing because of the news I am reading all the way out in Oberlin, OH. The notoriety your town has received from the actions of Michael Heick and his "Bomb Makers Next Driveway" sign is certainly not something you can be excited about. Your response as it was reported, "Inappropriate but not illegal," was tempered but also tepid. Please take a more vigorous stand. While there may be no legal recourse for removing the sign, certainly it is more than just "inappropriate." Use your bully pulpit to celebrate the diversity of your town, to decry these ignorant and hate-filled assertions by Mr. Heick. Iimagine if the sign was some anti-semitic slur in Germany in the early 1930s -- sometimes the poisonous discourse in this country around Islam feels similar.
  Again, thank you for your support of religious freedom. Please stand up more forcefully to celebrate it. You have many many MANY people in your community and around the country who will stand up and celebrate with you.


Sincerely,
Marco Seiryu Wilkinson
a Zen Buddhist farmer from Ohio

And now for a drag musical interlude...

The Kinsey Sicks' "BP is Creepy"



Inviting Indigenous Micro-Organisms to the Table: "The Lunchbox"

  This is a more practical follow-up to the previous post, "Touching the Earth," about a natural farming workshop I participated in a month ago.  So much of the processes we learned in the workshop were homely, comforting, domestic.  This work is truly the work of the kitchen, of cooking, of transformation. 

   Bernie Glassman, Zen teacher and founder of the Zen Peacemakers, wrote a book with Rick Fields on socially engaged Buddhism called Instructions to the Cook, based on the writing of the same name by 13th century Japanese Soto Zen founder Eihei Dogen.  In it Glassman reminds us repeatedly to "use all the ingredients of our life."  In the Zen Peacemaker version of the precepts which practitioners take when formally becoming Buddhists, the precept traditionally translated negatively as "not being stingy" is formulated positively as "using all the ingredients of my life."  How are these two renderings related, and what do they have to do with indigenous micro-organisms?

  What impressed me most about the natural farming workshop was its approach of connection and mutual support of all life forms for each other.  As a horticulturist I feel like much of my training privileged sterility.  The best soil was a sterile one for fear of the pests and diseases that might lurk within.  Most potting mixes use peat moss rather than soil as their base, not only because of its lightness but because of its antiseptic qualities.  At Stonecrop Gardens we actually used rich fertile soil dredged from the bottom of a pond as part of our mix, but first it passed through a soil cooker which baked the soil to the point that anything living in it was killed.  Especially when working with seedlings, "dampening off" (when fungus kills off seedlings by attacking their stems) can be an issue and my heart still leans in the direction of sterility for seedlings, but I do wonder if dampening off is really just a problem of an unbalanced ecosystem where one fungus can run rampant in a soil that is devoid of any other life.

  The whole natural farming approach is to invite life in all its forms into the practice of growing food rather than keeping it out.  The first step is to invite the indigenous micro-organisms (IMOs) already present in your life to dinner.  Brown rice is prepared and packed into a "lunchbox" for your microscopic guests.  This lunchbox can be an actual box of wood or it could be a straw basket, as long as it is porous.  I used a woven basket I bought at a Chinese grocery store that I think is meant for washing rice.  The rice should fill the container two-thirds full and then be covered with a porous material (kitchen towel, paper towel, etc) to allow movement of air. 

Now what is the "ingredient of my life" here?  Is it the brown rice?  My knowledge of this technique?  My intention?  Are the micro-organisms the ingredient?  Am I the ingredient of the micro-organisms' lives that is being used here?  Whose life?

  When the lunchbox has been prepared, you should bring your gift to your neighbors' house, that is, the compost pile.  Bury it in the compost pile in a sheltered site where it will not get rained on or otherwise soaked.  I have a three-bin composter with lids, so I placed the "lunchbox" in there and buried it.  A pile of leaves would also work.

The organisms already present in the compost pile, the very organisms that create the "black gold" that will eventually get laid into garden beds, will flock to the meal you have prepared for them.  Over the course of a week or two, depending on ambient temperature (you can add some fresh manure to the compost pile to help heat it up), the rice will be colonized by a rich array of fungi and bacteria.

When a good population of IMOs has been established, the rice will hold together as a solid mass.  The white fuzz is fungal hyphae that binds it all together.  Fungi, the living "internet" of the earth as Paul Stamets writes, form 40% of all the living material in healthy soils and have symbiotic relationships with over 90% of plants.  Ideally the hyphae are so vigorous they can end up filling the whole empty third of the container.   My first attempt at this didn't yield those results but still created a good population.  White should predominate, but there may also be other colors in your culture.  In this case there was a lot of green as well.   I'm not sure if there was too much, but I am trusting that the underlying concept of the rightness of life versus sterility means it is OK.  The fungal digestion of the rice releases a slightly sweet fermented fragrance that reminds me of miso. 

Notice the worms woven through the basket when I pulled the IMO rice culture out.  The fungus will feed other organisms like the worms that have sought this initial culture out already.  The worms in turn will enrich the soil with their castings and feed plants which will feed people.  What will we feed?  We too are part of the lunchbox, another ingredient of the life we all share together.

  The mass of rice impregnated with fungus and other organisms is known as IMO #1 and is the basis for creating further preparations that will enliven garden soil.  I'll write about IMO #2 soon.  In the meantime, why  not invite your own indigenous micro-organisms to dinner?