tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74669033906783730232024-03-05T03:32:21.810-05:00EarthStoreHouseOccasional thoughts of a Zen Buddhist farmer on regenerative agriculture, permaculture, and Zen practice.Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-3466735034910032952012-06-25T23:28:00.002-04:002012-06-26T09:48:47.399-04:00This Instant Harvest<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Five minutes of harvesting from the yard. What's in it?<br />
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Top (l to r): red onion, basil, bee balm flowers, daylily bud, sage</div>
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Middle (l to r): salad burnet, bronze fennel leaf, calendula petals, wood sorrel, spinach, borage flower, kale</div>
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Bottom (l to r): royal oakleaf lettuce, 'Bright Lights' swiss chard</div>
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Earlier today I also harvested fava beans. Here they are whole and shelled. After peeling away the thick seed skins I also added these beautiful emerald fresh beans into the salad.</div>
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More and more I find myself understanding that my aim in gardening is not to grow plants but to grow systems. With minimal effort, this salad appears -- a colorful play of greens wild and domesticated, flowers and herbs that return year after year, a brocade of the stitches that gather this particular space into a place.<br />
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For me this is what the EarthStoreHouse is, this mutual arising that feeds me, that is me.</div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-25397066964036076282012-06-03T07:34:00.000-04:002012-06-03T23:00:43.943-04:00The Great Tangle<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The garden looks messy, overcrowded, chaotic. Weeds are running rampant. What is planted is growing too thickly. The gardener has clearly run away. Time is in a tumult with spring, summer, and fall all entangled one with another.<br />
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And isn't this just like nature. In this bed are kales and cabbages that overwintered from last fall, grown now into teetering top-heavy treasuries of seed almost ready to spill. Even now there are still delicious greens to be harvested from these plants long past the calendar's judgment of usefulness. (And there are still bright yellow flowers to pluck for garlanding salads!) <br />
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Quietly tucked into the ground underneath and alternating with these behemoths are tomato seedlings. As their roots settle in and reach out to knit into the soil, the leaves are lightly shaded by the sifting dapple of the kale seedpods blowing about overhead. In a week I'll be harvesting all that seed and then chopping those kale trunks down to the ground (leaving roots to compost in place and feed the tomatoes), exposing my now-settled seedlings to the light they'll need to rocket up in turn.<br />
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In front of the kale are fava beans all in a row, maybe the only hint of human hand here. Now eighteen inches high, in early April they were curled up in hard, giant seeds in a paper packet, and in their place was a luxuriant bed of red nettles, downy soft green topped with a magenta crown. Hardly an unpaying tenant to be evicted to gentrify the neighborhood, these greens deserved respect. Everything is at home where it is. Before planting my beans I did not "weed" the nettles, but rather "foraged" these wild edibles. Or did I "harvest" them just as I would any planned crop? In this crazy tangle of a bed, even terms lose their boundaries. They were carefully cut back to keep the greens clean, and these were blanched and frozen for winter, when they will be mixed every once in a while with other greens or into soups.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My haul of nettles back in April.</td></tr>
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And at the front of the bed is spinach sown thickly. Little by little, the patch is thinned for eating, and little by little these little ones remaining grow bigger and bigger. Here there is some weeding to do, but if the weather's right (hot, sunny, and dry), the weeds can be laid out as a mulch right in place. Make sure roots and leaves are all aligned in each handful, then lay the first bunch down. Carefully lay the next one so its roots are on top of the first bunch's leaves, and continue. The roots of each bunch will be temporarily prevented access to the ground's moisture by the preceding bunch's leaves and on a hot, sunny day will be crispy before sunset.<br />
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But mostly I just eat the weeds. First there were the red nettles, then chickweed, and now lamb's quarters is rocketing up. These days when it's time to make dinner, I just walk out with a big steel bowl and pluck either tender top twelve inches of the larger plants or the whole smaller plants. As I go I tug out the roots and let them die out in place to give more breathing space for the spinach, fava, and tomatoes. In five minutes or less I easily have enough for a meal. At a certain point they will likely get out of control. Then I'll do a massive weed-forage-harvest and blanch them to store for the winter. Frozen lamb's quarters cooked up is even better than frozen spinach. It has a silky texture and a richer flavor that makes great saag paneer or other Indian curry dishes.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Another bed with lamb's quarters stitched through a dense brocade of onions, fava, kale, lettuce, burdock, and more.</td></tr>
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But then what? Just as the lamb's quarters is hitting its stride, purslane seedlings are sprouting. They will be a juicy crunchy summertime green and when there's too much, they can be pickled. They in their turn will tangle through this food web.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Carrot seedlings rising up to meet falling bok choy seeds</td></tr>
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And just like the purslane sprouting at the feet of the lamb's quarters and the tomato seedling settling in under the tutelage of the kale, I'm thinking about what to plant among the spinaches and the favas. Maybe in a few weeks I will direct-sow some basil seeds for a second summer crop, or perhaps spot in a few late plantings of peppers or eggplants. Later in the summer as the tomatoes are really appearing in August or even as late as early September, maybe I'll try sowing turnips so that as summer crumbles under cooling weather, fall will already be rising up to meet in one great tangle.</div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-57410352890802778062012-03-27T00:16:00.003-04:002012-03-27T00:17:14.143-04:00A Bonanza of Greens<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Summer in March seems to have finally ended and left us back in a breezy Ohio Spring again...<br />
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<span style="color: #274e13;">...but not before those warm days spurred an amazing bonanza of greens in the garden! </span><br />
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Share in the bounty! </div>
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Stop by </div>
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EarthStoreHouse Project @ 270 East College Street, Oberlin, OH</div>
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to pick up some fresh local greens grown sustainably without chemicals or fertilizers. </div>
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Come by the front porch on </div>
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3/27, Tuesday 3-5pm </div>
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3/28, Wednesday 1-6pm </div>
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3/29, Thursday 1-6 pm</div>
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This Spicy Greens Mix is perfect <br />
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<li>for shredding up and adding as a vitamin-packed flavorful addition to salads</li>
<li>for steaming or stir-frying (great with sesame oil!)</li>
<li>for juicing to kickstart your day!</li>
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What's in it?<br />
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Tat Soi </div>
Turnip greens<br />
Bok Choy greens<br />
Chinese Cabbage<br />
Hemerocallis leaves -- an earthy slightly spicy flavor<br />
Garlic Mustard leaves -- super garlicky flavor<br />
Baby Kale leaves (winterbor, redbor, lacinato)<br />
Baby Savoy Cabbage leaves<br />
Brassica florets -- like mini-mini broccolis!<br />
Brassica flowers -- rich yellow blooms for a bright garnish<br />
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All that for only $8/lb!</div>
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What's been going on at EarthStoreHouse lately?<br />
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<li>A group of OC Environmental Studies students is coming out weekly to learn sustainable gardening skills.</li>
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<li>Marco is supervising a private reading in gardening to facilitate the inception of an OC-student-led community gardening project in Kentucky.</li>
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<li>Every Friday this Spring OC students are gathering for the Exco course, "Zen/Gardening," an exploration of how Zen meditation and gardening can inform and enrich each other.</li>
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<li>Marco continues teaching in the Sustainable Agriculture program at LCCC. He is teahcing "Plant Propagation" right now and will teach a course on Wild Edibles in the early summer. Want to join in on the fun? For more details go to: <a href="http://www.lorainccc.edu/NR/rdonlyres/CD7C32A9-A316-4027-8A3A-14B0B01E65AB/13033/SAGRCoursedescriptionsanddetails.pdf">http://www.lorainccc.edu/NR/rdonlyres/CD7C32A9-A316-4027-8A3A-14B0B01E65AB/13033/SAGRCoursedescriptionsanddetails.pdf</a></li>
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<li>Marco is offering a series of two-hour gardening workshops through LCJVS under the course codes ESHP and RP. To learn more and register, go to: <a href="http://payments.lcjvs.com/adult-career-center/index.shtml?tp=8&tp2=1&all=1">http://payments.lcjvs.com/adult-career-center/index.shtml?tp=8&tp2=1&all=1</a></li>
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</div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-77460310637211723972011-11-19T23:58:00.001-05:002011-11-19T23:58:54.569-05:00What is WIld: Interlude“Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise” by W.S. Merwin<br />
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When it is not yet day<br />
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I am walking on centuries of dead chestnut leaves<br />
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In a place without grief<br />
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Though the oriole<br />
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Out of another life warns me<br />
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That I am awake<br />
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In the dark while the rain fell<br />
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The gold chanterelles pushed through a sleep that was not mine<br />
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Waking me<br />
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So that I came up the mountain to find them<br />
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Where they appear it seems I have been before<br />
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I recognize their haunts as though remembering<br />
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Another life<br />
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Where else am I walking even now<br />
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Looking for me<br />
<br />Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-62592564580363363472011-09-21T13:49:00.000-04:002011-09-21T14:37:15.079-04:00Forest Skulls, Porous Worlds<br />
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Amid the leaf litter bronzed by the slanting afternoon September light, a gleaming skull round and clean catches my eye. First one, then another further off the trail, and another smaller one like a child’s, and there is a white knob like a hip joint unsocketed and emerging from the ground. <br />
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“Botanizers are the worst out here. You’ve got to unscrew those green eyes from their sockets and put them away. No more flowers or leaf shapes. You’ve got to screw in your brown eyes and look for shades of brown and red, violet and orange, caps and shelves and spheres” advises my rotund forest guide as we soft-step through the leaf litter scrutinizing every shadow, every tree stump and rotting log, every clump of leaves tilted up as if by some tiny earthquake. We are searching for mushrooms.<br />
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Years later, having trained myself to look with my “brown eyes” at that other world sitting contiguous with ours – alien yet making contact at every point – I see from a hundred yards away what I have been looking for. Cradling the largest of these “skulls,” my hands reach under the smooth taut curve of it and with a light lift it pops away from the ground, as if snapping the delicate vertebrae of a neck. Where it emerged from the ground there are only leaves and twigs, no sign of its origin, no sign of the rest of the skeleton. <br />
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Calvo: bald. To be bald is to be one step closer to one’s skull. Gleaming taut skin across the hard bone. Most of my uncles are bald, as was my mother’s father. Dead: the baldest one can be when even skin and blood are shed away and only unyielding bone remains. <br />
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Across some hundred square feet, Calvatea gigantea, the “Giant Skull,” has burst from the ground, making its annual fruiting bodies, a fecund field of gleaming white skulls. As the recent colder weather brings down a few yellow leaves from the trees with every breeze, this magnificent fungus ripens its crop of spores, trillions inside each mushroom. As it matures, the pristine white marshmallowy interior becomes grainy and a sickly yellowish-green until with a silent snap the “skull” breaks from the invisible gigantic body underground and rolls away – downhill, tossed with the wind – cracking open with each bump and spilling its trillions of progeny to the breeze. <br />
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It is no wonder that the ancient Greeks thought mushrooms were created by lightning strikes, noting that the strange “plants” (actually fungi are more closely related to animals like you and me than to plants) would appear after summer nights of lightning-streaked rainstorms. The speed of their growth is prodigious, so quick and unyielding that where there was nothing yesterday today there might be a five-pound mass like the Calvatea I found this past weekend. Some fungi sprout their fruiting bodies so relentlessly that twigs, grass, anything already present in the vicinity is simply surrounded, engulfed by a form unable to countenance interference. <br />
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Fungi comprise 40% of all the life in the soil, and mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with some 90% of all plants on the planet. Actually it turns out that most plants are quite ill-equipped to absorb the nutrients necessary for life on their own. Fungi on the other hand, with powerful enzymes that can break down intractable substances like the lignin which makes wood woody (not to mention the Destroying Angel, which each year eats a hapless mycophile from the inside-out by liquefying her or his liver with its enzymes – “There are old mushroom hunters, and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.”), are excellent nutrient absorbers. While plants catch sunlight and bounce it through the narrow green-glowing canyons of chloroplasts in leaves high in the air, fungi tunnel underground melting away this illusion of a solid world into wisps and fragments. Fungi send molecules across vast waxy white networks of mycelia to plants and plants reciprocate with sugars sent down stems and trunks to roots which fungal hyphae clasp and even penetrate. Together, these “phytobionts” and “mycobionts” form one system. Can we even think anymore about one kingdom and another? As in politics so in biology, borders are imaginary lines drawn for convenience only, and almost always they do violence to the true nature of life which is porous and connective.<br />
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Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-33252874416110209042011-09-07T23:06:00.001-04:002011-09-09T20:50:15.756-04:00All of Time in a Bottle<br />
I began teaching a Soil Management and Conservation course in <a href="http://www.lorainccc.edu/Academic+Divisions/Science+and+Math/Sustainable+Agriculture.htm">Lorain County Community College’s new Sustainable Agriculture program </a>two weeks ago. (This is its first semester. Come join us in creating a vibrant forum for learning and applying sustainable agriculture principles to the NE Ohio region.) Roughly speaking, the class is divided into three units: What is Soil?; How Does Soil Work?; How Do We Work with Soil? These first few sessions have given me a chance to revisit just how amazing the scale of time on the planet is. As Wes Jackson put it in the opening of <em>New Roots for Agriculture</em>, the world has been around for a long time and it's only gotten interesting in the most recent sixth of that time, that is, 750,000,000 years ago! <br />
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Every week we get out of the classroom and do a hands-on lab. In these early weeks we are very simply trying to understand what soil actually is. When you pick up a handful of dirt, what is it you hold? Air; water; minerals; literally billions of beings eating, breathing, excreting, and breeding; the shreds and wisps of the innumerable beings that have come before, metamorphosed into that mysterious and all-powerful thing called humus; the kaleidoscoping whirlwind of electrical charges passing like gifts from one point to another. <br />
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How disorienting and reorienting it is to know that the principal elements of soil – and hence of us as well – are produced not in the furnace of our own sun, but were forged in suns far different and far away, that our own origin originates in the end of another place in another time. <br />
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Today, we did two simple tests to gauge the texture of soil. (Try them out yourself. <a href="http://cmg.colostate.edu/gardennotes/214.pdf">Here are the instructions.</a>) Texture is a measurement and description of the relative percentages of the three kinds of inorganic particles in soil – sand, silt, and clay. Sand in our everyday lives is one of those very things that signifies the small, the inconsequential, the overlooked. Sand in-between your toes after a trip to the beach. What portion of a moment is one grain of sand passing through the throat of an hourglass? “Innumerable as the sands of the Ganges.” Yet when we enter the world of soil, sand looms large as boulders, big as houses. Silt is middling, and clay is the smallest particle. If “O” is a grain of sand, then clay is the period at the end of this sentence. <br />
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Here in northern Ohio we are a people of clay. <br />
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Bacteria and fungi eat rock, lick by enzymatic lick. They unlock electrons and tiny molecules of silicon and magnesium and aluminum float away from “parent rock” into microbial gullets and out into the great whirling energetic ferris wheel that is life, rising up perhaps some millennia later into the sky to seed a cloud and then down again after an eon or two to the bottom of the sea. But nothing eats rock like a glacier, and here in northern Ohio, one of these great white land-leviathans crept further and further, pulverizing under the sheer scraping weight of its belly a quantity of rock in a relatively short period of time that bacteria and fungi could never have hoped to digest. It was these minute particles left behind that became the fertile matrix for a resurgence of plants, animals, and soil in the wake of the glaciers’ retreat. <br />
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We also talked about soil horizons, the characteristic profile that soil forms as it is created. Typically, as one scrolls down such a profile one goes through decomposing organic matter to topsoil rich in biological activity and then to subsoil rich in minerals and poor in humus and eventually down to bedrock, solid and immutable (or are there some patient intrepid microbes down there? Lick. Lick.) However, here in northern Ohio, where once this was the bottom of a glacier and then after that the bottom of a lake, dig and dig and dig and you are likely to only encounter the frustratingly dense and sticky clay that every gardener around here wrestles with.<br />
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In 2008 I had the luck to travel to Patagonia, making my way down down down to El Chalten near Tierra del Fuego. I camped and hiked through an amazing landscape of alpine plant hummocks like living boulders clinging to near-bare rock; brilliant mosaics of lichens and barren fields of scree; and forests comprised of one and only one tree --Nothofagus, the southern beech – tall and stately in sheltered areas, scrubby and contorted in open places. Finally I climbed up and onto the serene alien beauty of a glacier. Light refracted into varying shades of turquoise through its undulating twenty-, fifty-, hundred-foot walls. The group I was with balanced our way up ridges with crampons on our feet and gloves on our hands lest we shred them on the knife-sharp crystals of ice.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">For a sense of scale, the face of the glacier was well over 100 feet high.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Me climbing up the side of one of the "ripples" on the surface of the glacier in the picture above.</td></tr>
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The glacier lay in a trough of its own making between imposing blackish-greyish-red cliffs and one could see along the seam between glacier and mountain where boulders had been knocked off the side and embedded in the icy flow. More subtle and more fascinating was the dust, blown or washed off the mountains, that coated the glacier to varying degrees. The “dust” ranged in size from pin-point to quarter-sized. Being blackish-greyish-red, each speck absorbed the heat of the sun and, like innumerable little heaters, melted the surrounding ice. The smaller pieces pock-marked the surface. The larger stones and boulders “carved” their way deep into the glacier, tunneling down into the blue deep heart of it. Ultimately all this “sweating” results in a glacial lake that bleeds out into a rushing glacial stream. Strange world, where black stones burrow like moles through white ice and emerge into a blue lake that pours out into a milky white river. The milky whiteness of these rivers (note the color of the glacial lake in the picture above) is from all the mineral particles they carry, reflecting light back out of its currents. Like all flowing waters carrying minerals from mountaintop to ocean bottom, these shining rivers carry suspended in them specks of the mountain their parent glacier is bringing down bit by bit.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;">If you look closely a the dark gray "rock" to the right of the center light-gray boulder you'll notice it is actually ice covered in dust.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;">Everything but the immense bluish rock forming the horizon is actually rubble crusted over the glacier. </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; text-align: center;">The strange tunnels formed by heated rocks and flowing water on the glacier's surface.</td></tr>
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Once upon a time, this too was a glacial place. (I was sad to learn recently that <em>A Place on the Glacial Till</em> by Thomas Fairchild Sherman is out of print. Those of you from Oberlin, Lorain County, or northern Ohio, should go to your library or find a copy online. It is an invaluable place-book, lovingly cataloguing all the horizons of this particular bit of land.) As our own glacier ebbed away, how much dust sweated and burrowed its way down off its flanks, slipping off the great white body into the lake that once was over all of this land? Sherman writes that in most spots around here one would have to dig twenty to fifty feet through clay to hit bedrock, and under the Cuyahoga it would be 500 feet! Over millennia, it was minute clay particle by minute clay particle, drifting through the chilled milky waters and settling at the bottom 500 feet down, that shaped this land. As you grapple with the clenching heavy mud of it all in your own garden or farm field, imagine that you are at the bottom of a bone-shivering cold body of water and looking up you see nothing but a sky of shimmering white, the winking patient tumbling of innumerable bits of mountains making their way across eons to lay at your feet.</div>
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I demonstrated one of the soil texture tests for my students and then asked them to replicate it at home. First soil is dried and then pulverized. As I rubbed the dirt between my fingers and palms, I said, “What other processes that we’ve talked about does this remind you of?” At one end of Wes Jackson’s great line of time, I am a glacier, grinding to dust the massive and unbroken expanse of bedrock. At the other end, though, I am also a tiller passing through a field, taking all the complexity imbued in healthy soil by the powers of time, physics, chemistry, and biology over millennia and reducing it to a uniform and simple dust. I placed the pulverized soil into a bottle and then poured water into it. After shaking the mixture thoroughly, the goal of this test is to measure the percentages of different size soil particles – sand, silt, clay – as they fall out of suspension. On the one hand, we have the shimmering descent of mountains through a glacial lake. On the other is a freshly tilled field after a heavy rainfall, muddy puddles and ponds pooling here and there. Within a minute, the heavy sand particles have settled out into a sludge at the bottom. A few hours later the silt particles will rest as well. Clay -- the clay of our fields that resists our shovels and follows us into the house to the annoyance of our non-gardening partners – is so fine that it may take days before it fully settles out of the water. </div>
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“Now,” I asked the students as we watch the chocolatey water swirl and the larger particles settle, “when this test is finally done and there is a layer of fine clay on top, how well will plants grow in this newly configured soil?” Clay is clay, the same as what terracotta pots are made of. Imagine how well a plant’s roots would penetrate such a thing. When our glacier receded back to Canada and the glacial lake drained away and the sun finally graced the mucky sticky clay of the lake bottom, it took millennia for plants and animals to churn up that uniformity and impregnate it -- life by life -- with their own corpses broken down cell by cell, electrical bond by electrical bond, into that mysterious and all-powerful humus. Ask any gardener around here about making the mistake of working their soil when it is too wet, and they will readily shake their heads and groan. “Concrete” is what they’ll mutter, usually followed by a curse. When the puddles and pools dry up in the tilled fields all around us, little by little the work of millennia has been undone. Little by little microbes and fungi and earthworms will resume their endless churning complexifying work, but it will take other millennia more before the soil returns to what it was yesterday, and will we even be here to see that return?</div>
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Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-12753446761316633612011-05-16T13:53:00.002-04:002011-05-16T23:24:23.999-04:00Garden 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 <a href="http://earthstorehouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/touching-earth.html">"Touching the Earth")</a> 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.<br />
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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 <a href="http://www.pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Arctium lappa">here</a> Burdock is one of my favorite things to add to stir-fries and homemade kimchees.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZjesY-mWqHFF5Eb-QBnRe6QdN_VwhqiwG1Xr0Na0FpKyUtraoy7MnycsosrIFwaHlyVAmyHIvxz_IHWhqA2skrwR83nGu72iARG3zSS4MX54U4ztnjK3B8qTwsoWSHS0Jc368U6yJU84/s1600/20110423+085.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZjesY-mWqHFF5Eb-QBnRe6QdN_VwhqiwG1Xr0Na0FpKyUtraoy7MnycsosrIFwaHlyVAmyHIvxz_IHWhqA2skrwR83nGu72iARG3zSS4MX54U4ztnjK3B8qTwsoWSHS0Jc368U6yJU84/s320/20110423+085.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">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. </div><br />
I would hazard (<em>though definitely not recommending or prescribing</em>) 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 <em>together</em>, respire <em>together</em>, and produce waste <em>together.</em>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-38338368009410787182011-05-11T08:45:00.003-04:002011-09-07T23:33:52.568-04:00Mosque Bomb Hits Close to Home<span style="color: #f1c232; font-size: x-small;">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.</span><br />
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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:<br />
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<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/10/136185720/new-york-man-posts-bomb-making-lawn-sign-to-protest-new-mosque">http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/10/136185720/new-york-man-posts-bomb-making-lawn-sign-to-protest-new-mosque</a><br />
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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? <br />
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?<br />
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:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #274e13;">Dear Mr. Heick,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #274e13;"> 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.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #274e13;">Sincerely,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #274e13;">Marco Wilkinson</span><br />
<span style="color: #3d85c6;"><br /></span><br />
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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:<br />
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<span style="background-color: #bf9000; color: #274e13;">Dear Mr. Weinstein,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #bf9000; color: #274e13;"> 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.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #bf9000; color: #274e13;"> 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. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: #bf9000; color: #274e13;"> 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.</span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><br /><span style="background-color: #bf9000;"></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: #bf9000; color: #274e13;">Sincerely,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #bf9000; color: #274e13;">Marco Seiryu Wilkinson</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #bf9000; color: #274e13;">a Zen Buddhist farmer from Ohio</span>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-24987087778037041682011-05-07T12:02:00.000-04:002011-05-07T12:02:49.616-04:00And now for a drag musical interlude...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/7C90DVNVORw?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div align="center">The Kinsey Sicks' "BP is Creepy"</div><div align="center"></div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-72351587313975107442011-05-04T23:41:00.002-04:002011-05-05T08:12:21.584-04:00Inviting Indigenous Micro-Organisms to the Table: "The Lunchbox" This is a more practical follow-up to the previous post, <a href="http://earthstorehouse.blogspot.com/2011/04/touching-earth.html">"Touching the Earth,"</a> 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. <br />
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Bernie Glassman, Zen teacher and founder of the <a href="http://www.zenpeacemakers.org/">Zen Peacemakers</a>, wrote a book with Rick Fields on socially engaged Buddhism called <em>Instructions to the Cook, </em>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?<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhr9tt3V-suaiqgEbFyD0NcfELjNuVnwzwrNvkuZgSZQqPm_GkqUjUox2iAfoiXOBSmNR6hOIsB0Vn5kJmFUew-LiNh_zDdw4DakdHanDz1LgwVLbjBmsSS3thxx-Y08BqXpADkJ9M9OI/s1600/20110423+030.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhr9tt3V-suaiqgEbFyD0NcfELjNuVnwzwrNvkuZgSZQqPm_GkqUjUox2iAfoiXOBSmNR6hOIsB0Vn5kJmFUew-LiNh_zDdw4DakdHanDz1LgwVLbjBmsSS3thxx-Y08BqXpADkJ9M9OI/s200/20110423+030.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>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?<br />
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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.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc6ZEL9oQCbX36ErlFEiAlla_fACnXRK9COYFMjwBfIT2Lqt9w9c97T1SsuWUgWkkn54Gl23tS8NXUKoONPsBNiAB9zhSfHaGy_-uhjzP4h6kH1Bnmfo-BEWrBzXXl90JttsmQrtG6wyA/s1600/20110423+129.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc6ZEL9oQCbX36ErlFEiAlla_fACnXRK9COYFMjwBfIT2Lqt9w9c97T1SsuWUgWkkn54Gl23tS8NXUKoONPsBNiAB9zhSfHaGy_-uhjzP4h6kH1Bnmfo-BEWrBzXXl90JttsmQrtG6wyA/s200/20110423+129.jpg" width="200" /></a><img border="0" height="132" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggzv7w8y_RbUPM8SenZtshCRF1f0lworpuzOxtH6u3TUUUq6K28nKpZ6TOdFGO_SvlRhRp1nYvrY5Vwsibn6Pcn8Nh0Z6bBNHofWegsG-MoVH9crewWsGzhlP2EfN4fYIY4RrBjtE7TYA/s200/20110423+136.jpg" width="200" /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzB6E0Io3veTOxZzCLVyvbN41SGzDDbxcw3wADXzqJUjSsqznnUF0IdLocfxIevzc9EMW2jfFR54WkSHRYzg25ggPUcpmD3jhhttZP3DpiftPIETFC6rrPbf37X6iyqckupBDbDVheJeE/s1600/20110423+137.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzB6E0Io3veTOxZzCLVyvbN41SGzDDbxcw3wADXzqJUjSsqznnUF0IdLocfxIevzc9EMW2jfFR54WkSHRYzg25ggPUcpmD3jhhttZP3DpiftPIETFC6rrPbf37X6iyqckupBDbDVheJeE/s200/20110423+137.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyUaSoXS2kjcEd2czUZIcsAvK6r9FHrXojxXaa0boLLKwTJKiWgbTQWFE0fVw4MgqV7D9k7AO4ulfWYk1EY6kqfsiICBPjbiR2lR-pYs8IDEdUsdsZlxEV_J-hO84r-2cUZXMVrxDQVkM/s1600/20110423+138.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyUaSoXS2kjcEd2czUZIcsAvK6r9FHrXojxXaa0boLLKwTJKiWgbTQWFE0fVw4MgqV7D9k7AO4ulfWYk1EY6kqfsiICBPjbiR2lR-pYs8IDEdUsdsZlxEV_J-hO84r-2cUZXMVrxDQVkM/s640/20110423+138.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> 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?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-51054436269191482542011-04-27T14:52:00.004-04:002011-04-30T15:54:34.181-04:00"I am doing the best I can"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> In the past week Oberlin has been lucky to be visited by Gary Paul Nabhan and Bill McKibben, two amazing thinkers and activists dedicated in their own ways to confronting the realities of climate change. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> I feel so lucky to have met such a kind, thoughtful, energetic man as Gary Nabhan. As both someone involved in sustainable agriculture and writing, he and my partner Kazim Ali (a poet) and I sat around and could seamlessly shift from fruit tree grafting and soil development to Agha Shahid Ali. He is for me truly a model of what an agri/cultural worker can be. Gary's work as a pollination biologist, ethnobotanist, and writer centers on preserving local foodways around the country and the world, particularly in the Southwest. He spoke at several events, describing how 16,000 regionally-specific American apple varieties in the nineteenth century have now been reduced to only 11 varieties available in supermarkets today and how climate change is creating not just shifts that will cause crops to shift geographically but sudden and dramatic weather events that could extinguish species altogether and disrupt the cultural food pathways connected to them. His latest book is <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1603582509?ie=UTF8&tag=garnab-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1603582509">Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail</a></em>. You can learn more about his work and writing at <a href="http://garynabhan.com/">his website</a> and at <a href="http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/details/raft/">Renewing America's Food Traditions</a> (RAFT), a program he helped start that promotes local foods and food cultures. Ohioans: check out the <a href="http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/ark_product_detail/buckeye_chicken/">Buckeye Chicken</a>, bred right here in Ohio, and consider raising some of your own to keep one of our own local food breeds alive.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> A week later Bill McKibben gave a stunningly bleak picture of what awaits us in this brave new world created by climate change that was at once rousing, activating, and hopeful. In his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eaarth-Making-Life-Tough-Planet/dp/0312541198/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303921029&sr=1-1"><em>Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet</em></a><em>, </em>McKibben argues that climate change is not coming but is already here, that the rhetoric of having to make societal changes for our grandchildren's sakes is woefully inadequate and misses the timeliness of what is happening <em>right now. </em>In fact, he writes, we are now living on a planet that is fundamentally different from the one on which human culture first developed. Hence the uncanny new name for this planet: Eaarth. This means not only having to make fundamental shifts in global energy use, but also facing up to having to rethink how we can survive and thrive on this new planet -- that there needs to be a new human culture for this new world.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> At his lecture, he spoke of events in two parts of the world in 2010, after he had finished writing this new book: 19 countries broke high temperature records; a string of 100+ degree days in Moscow where 100 degrees had never been recorded; major decreases in grain production in Russia; 129 degree days in Pakistan; 25% of Pakistan underwater during flooding. He made an interesting case for the need for both global and local action on climate change. While local action is fundamental, it will be useless if global changes aren't made because effects will always be global. As he said (and I can attest to from my experience of an incredibly hot summer last year in Oberlin), "It doesn't matter how good a farmer you are, you're not going to be growing food" if extreme weather makes it impossible. His <a href="http://www.350.org/">350.org global activism movement</a> is dedicated to creating the change necessary to bring atmospheric carbon levels down to 350 parts per million (ppm), the maximum level that James Hansen, a leading climatologist, believes human civilization can survive in. Where are we now? 391 ppm. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> Where will we be by 2100, even if all the government pledges made at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change conference are kept? </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">725 ppm.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> At the end of sesshins, weeklong intensive Zen meditation retreats, participants are exhorted to practice diligently "as if extinguishing a fire on our heads... Like fish living in a little water, what sort of peace and tranquility can there be?" These two startling images, one of searing pain and immediacy and the other one brimming with pathos and the doom of the inevitable, have always been striking to me. But now I have to admit that I feel them more keenly. Last summer a long string of 95+ degree days and no rain made farming difficult and yields less than abundant. It seems chillingly appropriate that Gary Nabhan's and Bill McKibben's visits should be bracketed by unusually harsh and destructive weather this Spring. We had a hail storm descend out of nowhere on Oberlin just a few hours before Gary arrived, with pea-size hail turning the streets white and clattering on the roofs. They also battered the cool-crop seedlings I had been hardening off outside.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguvp1_oE_MeZsg-qxXRiHFXn5L-BkfjbeDN_vkgFATH-nVxNSVOo4Dfy5yqNsCseXxXuPd-Yz3vzL82bvGOSXFg83IqQDhfeHrwfl4NJqb_gC7P9E4zdgFI2ObadeV3-JxeY737qTPVgQ/s1600/20110423+063.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguvp1_oE_MeZsg-qxXRiHFXn5L-BkfjbeDN_vkgFATH-nVxNSVOo4Dfy5yqNsCseXxXuPd-Yz3vzL82bvGOSXFg83IqQDhfeHrwfl4NJqb_gC7P9E4zdgFI2ObadeV3-JxeY737qTPVgQ/s200/20110423+063.jpg" width="132" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRZlOZitokk7rpcKywm7RBI0HXoJEuUJYu5T8Q-fPUg203dzjXNr0b8VZtQtdCEvTN6wd5SeZP_30OpJt8ZadYBulY9zAWKFEBAaWuhWmS87B2KBETYozdedewA0MfOkiGCfe8R7AZ-w4/s1600/20110423+062.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRZlOZitokk7rpcKywm7RBI0HXoJEuUJYu5T8Q-fPUg203dzjXNr0b8VZtQtdCEvTN6wd5SeZP_30OpJt8ZadYBulY9zAWKFEBAaWuhWmS87B2KBETYozdedewA0MfOkiGCfe8R7AZ-w4/s200/20110423+062.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The hailstorm only lasted about 3 minutes but it came down heavy.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdQHIblWdwp5htpQVbKkQXFxdwiPKAhn6822XRdEwT8Ax8qHDBCq6cSC38bJnBBKqPzC5ZHnLA8BLKKPHdNMlVlEIOWzdCVC_M9IIlO86h0Feu8-8AZxbr9s-BlTjf4lLr9_wyzJ2Fu5s/s1600/20110423+065.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdQHIblWdwp5htpQVbKkQXFxdwiPKAhn6822XRdEwT8Ax8qHDBCq6cSC38bJnBBKqPzC5ZHnLA8BLKKPHdNMlVlEIOWzdCVC_M9IIlO86h0Feu8-8AZxbr9s-BlTjf4lLr9_wyzJ2Fu5s/s320/20110423+065.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div align="left" class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Just a few hours later, there is barely any evidence of the storm, except for battered radish and pea seedlings.</div><div align="left" class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> Bill McKibben's lecture was greeted by torrential rains, only yet another in a series of downpours this Spring that have been filled eerily with lightning given the time of year. Earlier this year my backyard (about 3/4 acre) was flooded worse than I have seen before: </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGwMMvRQ1d_MrC0f9Cx33hrLbdMJWMrgunc9l3EthOpPzcUrpGGMZZJEZB9JeusFYOlYAIfqH41hAKB1FjIlMo2pxHkf4CCUhMGEnysv2l9X_-prdpvLMoxM9kpooKcSVz4Hg0myEfxV0/s1600/20110423+084.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGwMMvRQ1d_MrC0f9Cx33hrLbdMJWMrgunc9l3EthOpPzcUrpGGMZZJEZB9JeusFYOlYAIfqH41hAKB1FjIlMo2pxHkf4CCUhMGEnysv2l9X_-prdpvLMoxM9kpooKcSVz4Hg0myEfxV0/s320/20110423+084.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I thought this would be a once-a-season event, but by the time Bill McKibben was done speaking about the increasing incidence of disruptive weather, this is what my back yard looked like:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-udLG00wHut-am1UqsTio9lTRAxnVAlbWTA_Pu952jEBfBTxwgcq5jC0VyoFIIQOvf4UQ3Jczew6v7dAQQ0G179wnLEqrKxwUkmlw1FpuFj61Ix1Up4E2kuIWqng5Z3aX_jH8CJdo6iA/s1600/20110423+142.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-udLG00wHut-am1UqsTio9lTRAxnVAlbWTA_Pu952jEBfBTxwgcq5jC0VyoFIIQOvf4UQ3Jczew6v7dAQQ0G179wnLEqrKxwUkmlw1FpuFj61Ix1Up4E2kuIWqng5Z3aX_jH8CJdo6iA/s320/20110423+142.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><br />
And this is how deep it was:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpSrf9SFgXngx4ieKSKKYEfz2zSkNld2QDHyJAVMmS1wcAf9H_2yMQ1_lI2fZzZo3YTojzsUfHOZMo0MTSG18r19Iz7X0IqHgNBDNcs-eid_qhfwJptejGK5p9ZC9iiZkHed3uYGa2EU4/s1600/20110423+124.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpSrf9SFgXngx4ieKSKKYEfz2zSkNld2QDHyJAVMmS1wcAf9H_2yMQ1_lI2fZzZo3YTojzsUfHOZMo0MTSG18r19Iz7X0IqHgNBDNcs-eid_qhfwJptejGK5p9ZC9iiZkHed3uYGa2EU4/s200/20110423+124.jpg" width="200" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSriK1M4FYYuhKty5_ws5v_QxGRvAg2icFRyg3FwsW6MFygClP5yNiMCEW8IfGfxHqE5RriSWScEoAGNTv57BJKiFYbogPil4mWrobeeZJqdnw2uPaKOg37bhEccOu3rE9EKyBV5fjbEo/s1600/20110423+125.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSriK1M4FYYuhKty5_ws5v_QxGRvAg2icFRyg3FwsW6MFygClP5yNiMCEW8IfGfxHqE5RriSWScEoAGNTv57BJKiFYbogPil4mWrobeeZJqdnw2uPaKOg37bhEccOu3rE9EKyBV5fjbEo/s200/20110423+125.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvAjMEiDBCtJf0LQYf7KKeDk8L8-d4AnD66JyPGehfCV90_W3l6fZXocz-gOrGGc7b8h9onSXlUzkC2spTf3W5a-67idf5Wz-uaGhymACkId7ZhPr_xS8f6pnk4K_7-Gwo6PPs8bM-jnU/s1600/20110423+130.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvAjMEiDBCtJf0LQYf7KKeDk8L8-d4AnD66JyPGehfCV90_W3l6fZXocz-gOrGGc7b8h9onSXlUzkC2spTf3W5a-67idf5Wz-uaGhymACkId7ZhPr_xS8f6pnk4K_7-Gwo6PPs8bM-jnU/s200/20110423+130.jpg" width="132" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiuOVI2PbXYnquMPu3enEsZZpa2IToDz7gnRQluslMhPxQ8xTRhtYWP-RS9U6WwqOkRipyWoD0P_BDkwK6P2iHJU3O5Lf5kxet0WpCHy6-qOVHYv8h7RbetTYJ5hVIDcnklSKotQvMKeU/s1600/20110423+131.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiuOVI2PbXYnquMPu3enEsZZpa2IToDz7gnRQluslMhPxQ8xTRhtYWP-RS9U6WwqOkRipyWoD0P_BDkwK6P2iHJU3O5Lf5kxet0WpCHy6-qOVHYv8h7RbetTYJ5hVIDcnklSKotQvMKeU/s200/20110423+131.jpg" width="132" /></a></div><div align="left" class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Fava beans, radishes, and peas are not underwater vegetables, unless they've been flooded.</div><div align="left" class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> All the work I've put into building beds and sowing seeds "on time" means nothing if weather systems change. On Eaarth maybe the time for planting radishes and peas and fava beans is different than the planet I grew up on. Maybe these cool weather crops no longer have a place in a landscape where extreme spring weather doesn't offer the appropriate window of mild weather before the summer heat arrives. This is frightening. What sort of peace or tranquility can there be? </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> While my goal this year is to grow lots of vegetables in our yard and model a kind of micro-farm space within the suburban space of my small town, I luckily have the resources to feed myself from the supermarket. But what of the farmers in Pakistan, where 25% of the whole country was flooded? As I write this another strong storm is passing through and threatening more rain just as the lake in my backyard is slowly receding into the saturated ground. What happens if another storm comes? And another? McKibben pointed out the harsh injustice of climate change: that those who have contributed least to its causes will suffer most from its effects. And so I cast my thoughts to my Pakistani and Bangladeshi farmer brothers and sisters. And knowing the distress I feel from my relatively comfortable vantage point, I have to wonder what the future holds for all of us.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> I recently watched the documentary, <a href="http://www.hulu.com/watch/191666/dirt-the-movie"><em>Dirt!</em></a><em> </em>and was heartened to hear the story recounted below by Wangari Maathai, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work planting 20 million trees throughout Africa. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/IGMW6YWjMxw?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">For me the little hummingbird's spirit is like the Zen power of <em>joriki</em>, translated as "self-power." She accomplishes what she does because of her will and self-reliance. Maathai's hummingbird is a lot like the Buddha's parrot. There is a series of Buddhist stories called the Jataka tales about the many previous lives of the Buddha in which his virtues of compassion and wisdom are revealed. One of them is about a parrot whose spirit of endurance is like the hummingbird's. Which bird is the Buddha in this story: the parrot or the eagle?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://0.gvt0.com/vi/uPnY9_l8AEw/0.jpg" height="266" width="320"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uPnY9_l8AEw&fs=1&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uPnY9_l8AEw&fs=1&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Is this a story about <em>tariki, </em>"other power," an approach of petition to a higher power (here in the form of the golden eagle)? The being who would later become the Buddha, "the awakening one," was the little soot-covered parrot, not the resplendent god-like eagle. The added dimension that I see in the parrot's story compared to the hummingbird's is that one's self-reliant energy gets things accomplished precisely because this "self" isn't contained in just one tiny body but ripples out through small actions that beget other actions. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"> What can I do about climate change and the very real new world we are all living in <em>together right now? </em>"I am doing the best I can." Thank you for doing the best you can too.</div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-56841443632600932242011-04-23T22:41:00.001-04:002011-04-24T22:07:42.855-04:00Seedlings!<div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">Spring is here and it's time to plant cool crops. </div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">I have been busy nursing seeds into seedlings since February and have a wide variety of plants for sale.</div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG01hTta0jbIKde2S-xZgtnoB6CxkYkFWV9b7py49W96ygTqzgrogPNJM5WWEDFDSwrFg2G0uM3vILd0mf4ERLIDONvcHpB59fN3xK9EKFLXYKFR9pUWNuMG6IZocA9pwTgzg0t8nWAcM/s1600/20110423+066.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG01hTta0jbIKde2S-xZgtnoB6CxkYkFWV9b7py49W96ygTqzgrogPNJM5WWEDFDSwrFg2G0uM3vILd0mf4ERLIDONvcHpB59fN3xK9EKFLXYKFR9pUWNuMG6IZocA9pwTgzg0t8nWAcM/s200/20110423+066.jpg" width="132" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2zHUROE9DyXEpD-e5X-X-fZYj-hLxh65yq1NV-k0pRANSraQrAj_aPmyqglMoZS9Utlu3zzmDPHpsnoXgZHwbj2-RgQCdZe4Hc9ryOZx3eQ60BCXr0WQo6hmZJ8Qe4MEku23IIJ4NaRc/s1600/20110423+082.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2zHUROE9DyXEpD-e5X-X-fZYj-hLxh65yq1NV-k0pRANSraQrAj_aPmyqglMoZS9Utlu3zzmDPHpsnoXgZHwbj2-RgQCdZe4Hc9ryOZx3eQ60BCXr0WQo6hmZJ8Qe4MEku23IIJ4NaRc/s200/20110423+082.jpg" width="132" /></a></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">Seeds busy growing under lights.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Ux2T5hDdMl8MvUOz4aux9MbPKYjIXtwMmQsAk0Eo2PuPAmjeEf7IdYq0o5mF37Z_P3Q_A8Au1AnMjK9KMKIf5zsJTDgmoTKBOAjnVNc9MAqDcs1ALnqtiyuamw0hKuqSdqdzG8yVwrs/s1600/20110423+074.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9Ux2T5hDdMl8MvUOz4aux9MbPKYjIXtwMmQsAk0Eo2PuPAmjeEf7IdYq0o5mF37Z_P3Q_A8Au1AnMjK9KMKIf5zsJTDgmoTKBOAjnVNc9MAqDcs1ALnqtiyuamw0hKuqSdqdzG8yVwrs/s320/20110423+074.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">A wide array of transplanted seedlings.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="132" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAETKzUJxHGHMwh1QNT2RcG8D7LojeCodj8EJ_fE26qOz-PPVb6_PO0CdDSfO6kM_fWB1Kf1SjPeJw0LRA_LIwKJtYnvJJ7eXlQuoNm4IdeFkTC3pq8InNP50drPKozTlJk1nU2C01_oU/s200/20110423+087.jpg" width="200" /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo84Flpy9ZExaiJ4l6iKsruN6MUkc9M_Uu6xW2odTIdZfDh7QF1hAanVRHEaLQn3LgLEbJis02XDD5lWQeIMy4DPoIXGSKK9jS6QgFpgLr-xnSGLEdsBDvLsH3NZGVaXIzyO4oQ52iiCU/s1600/20110423+088.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo84Flpy9ZExaiJ4l6iKsruN6MUkc9M_Uu6xW2odTIdZfDh7QF1hAanVRHEaLQn3LgLEbJis02XDD5lWQeIMy4DPoIXGSKK9jS6QgFpgLr-xnSGLEdsBDvLsH3NZGVaXIzyO4oQ52iiCU/s200/20110423+088.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">Winterbor Kale</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwm6s2aR4rCj-qNiUrBLlRZJ_QBo04HWn0wfe45XjFnVQsEIdQ4U5zZQadYWm9UXA5i718sfIRirztxaqf6Th2tn7hHmEJtA48I2dM9odOiusX-H_KAE8Ycopv7_FA3p2szUW5XiLPVqg/s1600/20110423+091.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwm6s2aR4rCj-qNiUrBLlRZJ_QBo04HWn0wfe45XjFnVQsEIdQ4U5zZQadYWm9UXA5i718sfIRirztxaqf6Th2tn7hHmEJtA48I2dM9odOiusX-H_KAE8Ycopv7_FA3p2szUW5XiLPVqg/s200/20110423+091.jpg" width="132" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPcN1M97BjkB6f2t-0wp1Xr5ChYWXxrljhIEacXtygxkn7_cJDBn8GHEHqhbgyLr-LhS0P6em8XLG-qcz_xpI_2RyeVRGC9DdY_0_o8X0lD3dWTR_yoTlMKKefNl2rw1spyKHWlUgDTwg/s1600/20110423+097.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPcN1M97BjkB6f2t-0wp1Xr5ChYWXxrljhIEacXtygxkn7_cJDBn8GHEHqhbgyLr-LhS0P6em8XLG-qcz_xpI_2RyeVRGC9DdY_0_o8X0lD3dWTR_yoTlMKKefNl2rw1spyKHWlUgDTwg/s200/20110423+097.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div align="left" class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong>Redbor Kale Red Russian Kale</strong></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4SoFBIIdwrzmIfAsI98MlvaqwVoqQES-izGZP9raAug3-CJSb2mQEAc-l4hrd_X0LdDYqdIEq8p3cuvK5czu7ppeeXCT5dv1J1AgaHMoY3xpfl-9K8DjhQgPqKJG95SI_6RUlMPgjGfs/s1600/20110423+099.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="132" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4SoFBIIdwrzmIfAsI98MlvaqwVoqQES-izGZP9raAug3-CJSb2mQEAc-l4hrd_X0LdDYqdIEq8p3cuvK5czu7ppeeXCT5dv1J1AgaHMoY3xpfl-9K8DjhQgPqKJG95SI_6RUlMPgjGfs/s200/20110423+099.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong>Calendula:</strong> not just a pretty flower. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Also known as "poor man's saffron" for its ability to dye foods saffron-gold.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4SoFBIIdwrzmIfAsI98MlvaqwVoqQES-izGZP9raAug3-CJSb2mQEAc-l4hrd_X0LdDYqdIEq8p3cuvK5czu7ppeeXCT5dv1J1AgaHMoY3xpfl-9K8DjhQgPqKJG95SI_6RUlMPgjGfs/s1600/20110423+099.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><img border="0" height="132" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtHP1qRcLgzKN7b3JlWrVuMIPe_eBv-1H9z6elb34y5tfkYLNKM0LyPgGtCgAsXRAUKGD572Ua5VGg8gX021MEf8MGBn3jDKWC-N6M64xwIfKHPCiMc_bfOtwnezlaC6dmE4kRi1sLwtQ/s200/20110423+093.jpg" width="200" /> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong>Poppies</strong>: </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Enjoy the tissuey red flowers and then harvest the seeds from the cool seedpods for good eats.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7HTqz9YtnTQEdrliCtUyfxgFJNqSkZAssEjVpDbGKCMC0dOTEqfSHW-bNZ5sT6KSF9Pr0Z6ohs6pzfRfZvWPrMTVKaJ6Bo0m1HMbPFkaL5NCY4mVdlyaXCgKzTshrYh8bqcKLONcp3Mw/s1600/20110423+094.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7HTqz9YtnTQEdrliCtUyfxgFJNqSkZAssEjVpDbGKCMC0dOTEqfSHW-bNZ5sT6KSF9Pr0Z6ohs6pzfRfZvWPrMTVKaJ6Bo0m1HMbPFkaL5NCY4mVdlyaXCgKzTshrYh8bqcKLONcp3Mw/s200/20110423+094.jpg" width="132" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhkMLIRS4Yz3Nhb0H27-0poVbIDxWJYOuaJ2JGwwNudk2nIrPpQ7QyIjUo2vzNaLUDfbPCytYgiJad72MbI2JQkbe4SOiqPXxgTZgWqgsEG_rrka0WOcfMc8hXP67B-hzxcYAiFr7jbNk/s1600/20110423+096.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhkMLIRS4Yz3Nhb0H27-0poVbIDxWJYOuaJ2JGwwNudk2nIrPpQ7QyIjUo2vzNaLUDfbPCytYgiJad72MbI2JQkbe4SOiqPXxgTZgWqgsEG_rrka0WOcfMc8hXP67B-hzxcYAiFr7jbNk/s200/20110423+096.jpg" width="132" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong>Broccoli:</strong> </div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">Limba, Diplomat, and Romanesco. </div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;">Romanesco is actually a greenish cauliflower that will amaze you with the fractal spirals of its head.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNmfuxc5uHePNtTlPoHsFkdtdrPS7BQHH7J0ppsq3qHztBUnSCQwC4UJzS5T5GFe7XBcZxcWPiHFb0_-ZWYeMt07kX98yyZrzVx9IjhbXvhLoNQ8U2nsqKbL4Hg-pt3N9HyjtmfIReslI/s1600/20110423+102.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNmfuxc5uHePNtTlPoHsFkdtdrPS7BQHH7J0ppsq3qHztBUnSCQwC4UJzS5T5GFe7XBcZxcWPiHFb0_-ZWYeMt07kX98yyZrzVx9IjhbXvhLoNQ8U2nsqKbL4Hg-pt3N9HyjtmfIReslI/s200/20110423+102.jpg" width="132" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong>Fun Jen Chinese Cabbage</strong>: </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">An elegant upright vase-shaped Chinese cabbage with stout white ribs and chartreuse leaves. I also have more tradional Napa-style Chinese cabbages.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">A happy individual plant could easily weigh in at 4-5 lbs!</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiBHW-_OLpmBNsXYfQmpArhgmLayNb1S7Qhxow1LdGWwgiXqI3HHO91I-w0bGARoYARxYL8UmxCgRU4LUaVBFi5l5FMB9h-Ajd20oN2vv4CQr8pIM6wE7qk7OWactADyY7YDjOsmNcJOY/s1600/20110423+105.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiBHW-_OLpmBNsXYfQmpArhgmLayNb1S7Qhxow1LdGWwgiXqI3HHO91I-w0bGARoYARxYL8UmxCgRU4LUaVBFi5l5FMB9h-Ajd20oN2vv4CQr8pIM6wE7qk7OWactADyY7YDjOsmNcJOY/s200/20110423+105.jpg" width="132" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong>Gigante d'Italia Flat-Leaf Parsley:</strong> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">A burst of flavor from plants that will keep putting out fresh foliage all year long.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkXWrDVsMa-AY1pf_3K08mZM2pbQgS9KU56_-7_96NxH9VdxN7Yj035dbzubR2Kg9jjk5-dHGHOIpLpZW3zWDIr4j0SNo1CY0ldvEw2AxN2e8Z-982O_GWly5a7mFMWA8w7_zuLy8JguY/s1600/20110423+108.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkXWrDVsMa-AY1pf_3K08mZM2pbQgS9KU56_-7_96NxH9VdxN7Yj035dbzubR2Kg9jjk5-dHGHOIpLpZW3zWDIr4j0SNo1CY0ldvEw2AxN2e8Z-982O_GWly5a7mFMWA8w7_zuLy8JguY/s200/20110423+108.jpg" width="132" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong>Cornflowers/Bachelor Buttons</strong>: </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">The clearest cheeriest of blue meadow flowers borne on silvery stems.</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimq6RVq5ONJbdXD8CL4pFy87LEr5fucLQnmZI7-zVcThaEri0wVDVX4zDIdJ5CUyDBl9HnkOZX3kHP8o_SQ7kEcVewraMzrMviU-pX-DtzcF0FDZEUNnto5ImbKIvhfp0lKYYDrYQW-H4/s1600/20110423+107.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" i8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimq6RVq5ONJbdXD8CL4pFy87LEr5fucLQnmZI7-zVcThaEri0wVDVX4zDIdJ5CUyDBl9HnkOZX3kHP8o_SQ7kEcVewraMzrMviU-pX-DtzcF0FDZEUNnto5ImbKIvhfp0lKYYDrYQW-H4/s320/20110423+107.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><strong>Tomatoes!</strong></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">A wide variety of heirloom tomatoes, Sungold cherry tomatoes, and husk cherries are on the way, as well as basil, peppers, and eggplants.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-86219281786798348052011-04-13T23:26:00.006-04:002011-04-23T21:18:29.226-04:00Touching the Earth This past weekend I attended a transformative workshop in Natural Farming and Indigenous Microorganisms by a fellow former George Jones Farm Manager and good friend Aaron Englander that was at once revelatory and confirming. It was full of surprises but also completely common-sense and an extension of my own learning experience in relation to the land.<br />
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In the coming days and weeks I plan on experimenting with the recipes taught at the workshop, and will likely follow up with some more practical posts on this topic of IMOs. If you have the chance to learn more about these IMO-oriented farming techniques, I would heartily recommend it. Aaron Englander is based out of New England. If you'd like more information on future workshops he may be teaching, you can contact him at aaron.englander@gmail.com.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="color: #38761d; font-size: large;">"I Alone Am the Honored One:" I All One Am Honored</span></strong></div><br />
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Aaron's first foundational point was that all living things are one system. All life -- bacteria, fungi, plants, animals -- share eating, respiration, and waste as fundamental processes and accomplish these processes through each other. Thus what is healthful for one type of life is also fundamentally healthful for all others, and through this commonality life forms one system.<br />
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In Buddhist tradition the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, is said to have been born and to have immediately taken seven steps leaving blooming lotuses in each footfall, and then raised one hand up to the heavens and another down to the earth, saying "I alone am the Honored One." Who is this "I alone?" I think the answer is in this point about the commonality of all living things.<br />
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In 2002 I was training as a horticulturist at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and found myself amazed by a worm-bin outreach project in the Education department. I got to know Mary Appelhoff's (the patron saint of worms) crazy sense of humor through her seminal <em>Worms Eat My Garbage</em>. At the same time in my Soil Management course I learned the term "edaphon," meaning the soil as a totality of all the living organisms in it. Right at the beginning of my own training in plant ways, the ground beneath my feet was revealed to be a whole universe unto itself, or better yet a whole universe that is this universe, a coextension of all life. There are bacteria who pass their whole lives high in the atmosphere whirling in the winds and clouds (see <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/when-life-goes-cloudy/?scp=1&sq=clouds%20judson&st=cse">Olivia Judson's fascinating piece in the New York Times</a>) and there are tube worms on the ocean floor and there we are in between. My own farming intuition long before I read anything by Masanobu Fukuoka or Wes Jackson or ever heard of permaculture was to be mindful of soil as more than substrate. <br />
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During that same year of horticulture training I remember all too well mowing the lawn of the BBG's Rose Garden and having a baby rabbit run out from a bed right in front of my mower, probably startled by the noise of the engine. The blades scalped its head in half cutting right through the skull, the bright pink contents spilling out. Years later I was trained on a tractor by brush-hogging a fallow field in late summer. Like a giant lawn mower the tractor wound its way through the shoulder-high grasses while I watched grasshoppers and other insects, groundhogs and cats scurry out of the way at the last second and I remembered the rabbit I killed all those years before. I saw the ones who escaped the tractor that day, but how many didn't?<br />
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And so when I work with the soil and when I have taught students about working the soil, I remember that poor rabbit and I remember the grasshoppers who flew out of the dry grass and the groundhog's sleek fur undulating away. As with a lawn mower and a brush-hog, so with a tiller. I tell my students to think of the soil as New York City, to consider all the energy flows and work that gets done in the concentrated space of a city block: the streets and hallways and elevators, the work spaces and the living spaces, the plumbing and the architecture. Now imagine Godzilla (or better yet these days, a tsunami or a nuclear disaster) coming along and flattening a stretch of that city. It will likely get rebuilt by the survivors left on the margins, but its economy will be severely compromised and it will take a long long time to return to its former vibrancy. Now imagine Godzilla making an annual visit and demolishing that same site over and over. This is tilling. Like the relentless scalping lawn-mower blade seared in my memory or the whirring blades of the brush-hog, the tiller passes through and destroys whole systems of life in a moment. <br />
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Instead we use a broadfork to accomplish a less interventionist aerating and loosening of the soil. "Small and slow solutions" is one of <a href="http://permacultureprinciples.com/principles.php">David Holmgren's twelve permaculture principles</a>, and the broadfork can represent a de-escalation of violence against the hidden (to our eyes) communities of the "edaphon." This is an economic decision, a recognition that it is in humans' own interest to minimize the damage to the soil's own economy so that it might continue to meet our needs. But in light of the recognition of the commonality of all life's needs and the unity of this system, might it not also be a moral decision? I share kinship with the slain rabbit, with the escaping grasshoppers and groundhogs, with the grasses falling under the blade. We all breathe. We all breathe together. Who is this "I" and how is it "honored?"<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="color: #38761d; font-size: large;">Touching the Earth</span></strong></div><br />
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In 2002 using worms to create compost was revolutionary to me. It was a recognition of a connection to something so unconsidered and alien as an eyeless limbless worm in the ground. That same year I learned about fungal mycorrhizae and their symbiotic existence with over 90% of plants, extending plants' nutrient uptake through an "internet" of hyphae as Paul Stamets puts it in <em>Mycelium Running</em>. It brought home the fiction of separateness, that living <em>things</em> are really always living <em>communities</em> of mutual support.<br />
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Like embracing worms and vermiculture as a workforce and a technology as partners in the act of composting, and like embracing mycorrhizae as a fact of the lifeways of plants and their production, and like embracing the broadfork over the tiller as a way of protecting the life of the soil, this workshop simply pushed the envelope of consideration a little further. In <em>Worms Eat My Garbage</em>, Mary Appelhoff has a delightful cartoon of a board meeting of soil decomposers. Her book and the vermiculture movement it spawned focused on the worms at the table. This workshop simply reminded us all that all the invisible members at the table should also be kept in consideration, cultivated, and embraced as partners in life. Ultimately, all that the Natural Farming workshop pointed to was to stay awake to <em>all </em>facets of the edaphon, to not forget any element in the system of breathing life.<br />
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Like raising worms in a bin in a basement or a cupboard, the workshop taught a series of recipes for cultivating the microorganisms indigenous to one's area. It's important to note the "indigenous" aspect of this, that we are already thoroughly and intimately enmeshed in a weave of life right here and now. It doesn't need to be brought from anywhere else: it's already here. The EarthStoreHouse this blog is named for is right here, the door always open. Using simple ingredients like grain and sugar and alcohol to coax and cultivate collections of these indigenous microorganisms (IMOs), we get to know the life already present in our lives and amplify it into a mixture ultimately used to "seed" life back into the soil, the ground of our lives. (Last year at the Jones Farm my goal with our aerated compost tea program was just this, to "sow life" into the fields. In a larger way it was also my mission at the farm and continues in my present education work not just to grow vegetables, but to grow farmers, to not just sow crop seeds but culture seeds as well.) It is no surprise that at each step in the amplification process, the flourishing bacteria, molds, and fungus smelled sweet and appetizing. Whiffs of miso, scents of baking bread, the sweet spiciness of curing meats. In so many ways we've come to forget that it is the eating of our microscopic kin that allows us to eat.<br />
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Through all the processes for cultivating IMOs, contact with the ground is considered important. Not only does it allow for proper breathing of the mixtures (as opposed to some non-porous surface), but more fundamentally it maintains the connection of these IMOs to their home. When the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, on the eve of his enlightenment, he dropped one hand and touched it to the ground, asking the earth to bear witness to his awakening. Revelatory as the concept of the "edaphon" was to me, it also has its limitations. It implies that the edaphon is a world apart from our own, a universe underground. In light of the workshop, the Buddha's touching of the earth reminds me that I am not separate from the edaphon. There is not one world above ground and another below but one "alone" to be honored. We honor it when we know that we not only touch the ground but that the converse is also true, that the earth touches us.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="color: #38761d; font-size: large;">Groundwork: Stepping As The Earth</span></strong></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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During the workshop we talked about a number of "groundworks" that could enhance the IMOs' abilities to help other organisms flourish. The recipes, ranging from creating a "lunchbox" of cooked rice to invite the IMOs to take up residence to mixing IMO cultures into wheat bran to fermenting weeds in brown sugar, all aimed to greet the IMOs already present and exponentially multiply their beneficial presence. On the one hand this can be seen as purely utilitarian, as yet another technology of humans to further their own ends -- in this case eating -- through the greater yields that can come from a vibrant soil. Yet on the other hand, I would return to this image of the EarthStoreHouse that has been so potent for me in my own farming practice, and see in it the collapsing of above and below ground, our world and the soil world, into the impossibly intricate interconnected system of giving and receiving, of invitation and acceptance.<br />
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We place our bundle of rice in the compost pile and invite the life <em>that is already here supporting us</em> to take up residence so we might nurture it. Whether we do so or not, this life is there and functioning. The fields hum with their vibrancy underfoot, the duff of the woodland churns with them already. And we too hum and churn in the system whether we know it or not. This Natural Farming approach simply offers us the chance to make a conscious awake choice to join in the "groundwork" that is always underway. In a previous post, <a href="http://earthstorehouse.blogspot.com/2011/03/who-is-this-farmer.html">"Who is this farmer?,"</a> this is the point I was trying to make but could not quite articulate. Whether I farm here or there, whether I farm or not at all, "farming" has gone on, is going on, and will always be going on. Who is this farmer? Who is this "I alone am the Honored One?" <br />
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One of my favorite galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art houses a number of large Buddhist statues. On one side of the room are the stern and self-contained arhats, or lohans, disciples of the Buddha who sit steadfast in meditation. On the other side are richly adorned and quietly smiling bodhisattvas, some of whom (like the one pictured above from the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City) are stepping out of meditation and back into the world. This stepping into the earth is stepping into the Honored One farmer's muck boots, stepping into the groundwork of bacteria, fungi, and molds, of worms and moles, of bent backs and dirty hands. Not merely stepping on the earth or even into the earth but stepping <em>as </em>the earth. <br />
<div align="center"></div><div align="center"></div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-32553401748842952422011-04-01T16:41:00.001-04:002011-04-04T11:52:44.378-04:00Unsealing and Sealing I couldn't wait, but probably should have.<br />
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Armies of seedlings have overwhelmed my shelves of grow lights indoors. Cabbage, chinese cabbage, kale, claendula, broccoli, parsley, lettuce, cauliflower. Busting out of seed trays jostling under the fluorescent tubes, or pricked out and standing in orderly ranks of 72 or 128.<br />
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And each day the sun grows stronger. Driving down the road I have to crack the windows to let some air lest I roast. That delicious bracing air that is beginning to smell of damp soil and life. These bracing early spring days reach the 30s and 40s, and the breezy air flows around you with that same quality of melting ice: a cooling fire, a liquid burning cold.<br />
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With more seeds and seedlings on the way, I decided to brave an experiment a few days ago. Admittedly it was slapdash, thrown together at the end of the day, but I figured it was time to think about a cold frame. Mine was a cute homely little thing, cobbled together with old bricks stacked together and a recently scrounged sheet of plexiglass. Was I crazy to hazard some pampered indoor plants in my little contraption on a night forecast to dip to 20? Yes. Probably even the best cold frame wouldn't have mattered against the frigid air.<br />
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A cold frame is meant to acclimatize seedlings and plants pampered indoors to the harshness of the outdoors. Unmediated sunlight, winds, and above all colder temperatures can all stress tender plants. The cold frame is an enclosed space with a transparent lid that can be opened or closed to varying degrees to gradually expose plants to the environment so they literally develop a "thcker skin."<br />
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The key to the cold frame is forming a good seal when closed for the evening. This is where my own quick build failed. The gaps between the bricks allowed air into the chamber, effectively mullifying any protection, so that the morning after I built it I found frost not only on the grass outside but on the inside of the plexiglass lid. 20 degree lows are probably too low for any cold frame to protect delicate indoor plants, but I could improve it greatly by making sure that when the lid is closed the entire environment is sealed. This could be accomplished with more serious construction or could be done by even simply piling soil or leaves up around the sides of the brick walls so as to form a seal or at least a mediating baffle to slow heat and air transfer. I could also pack any empty space in the frame with styrofoam packing material I have lying around for insulation. Another improvement would be to burrow down into the ground so the cold frame's floor is below ground-level (as long as it won't flood when it rains). In China, greenhouses are constructed as just such giant buried cold frames. Their floors are six feet below ground level and I'm told even tomatoes grow right through the winter.<br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;"> In some ways the cold frame's opposite is the Wardian case. This is a transparent enclosed case that is kept sealed rather than gradually opened. In the early-19th century, Londoners fell victim to a craze for ferns. Ferns of all kinds were hunted from glens and woods in the countryside (some to near extinction) for the sake of urban fashion, to be potted and shown off in Victorian parlors. (To learn more about this, extravagant parlor displays, and the milieu which led to the birth of the modern houseplant, check out Tovah Martin's very interesting book <em>Once Upon a Windowsill.</em>) Unfortunately, this was London of the early Industrial Revolution, choked and benighted by coal smoke, and many ferns promptly crumbled and died.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"> Nathaniel Ward, a London doctor, was a fern collector and amateur naturalist. He one day collected a moth in a glass jar within which he placed some soil and plants. Though the moth eventually died, Ward noticed that the plants flourished, apparently saved from the "bad air" of London by the sealed nature of the jar. Soon the fern enthusiasts saved their prizes in "Wardian cases" dressed up as elaborate Victorian mini-glasshouses. These cases became little temples of green life in the sooty urban expanse.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: left;"> The Wardian case not only preserved precious ferns but revolutionized the transportation of plants from one part of the world to another. Since the late 18th century with the world-crossing botanizing expeditions of Joseph Banks on Captain Cook's voyages (the inspiration for Star Trek. Captain Cook = Captain Kirk!), Britain's growing navally-based empire saw the value of moving valuable newly dicovered food crops from one colny to another (Captain Bligh's ill-fated voyage, source of "Mutiny on the Bounty," was meant to ship breadfruit trees from Tahiti to Jamaica for a cheap food source for Caribbean slaves). The stressful months-long sea voyages filled with storms and salt water were nearly always disastrous for plants that were usually potted into barrels, exposed to harsh sea air and winds, and then sometimes even watered by ill-informed shiphands with salt water from the sea when fresh water was a scarce resource. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"> The advent of the Wardian case changed this by enclosing well-packed plants into large glass cases. The tight seal kept the harsh sea environment out and humidity from plant respiration and soil in. It also was instrumental in the mass smuggling of Chinese tea plants from China to British-controlled India over the Himalayas, effectively breaking the Chinese hold on Britain's tea addiction. Plants could now move across the vast expanses of the Inidan and Pacific oceans back to the metropole of London and the imperial center of plant expeditions, the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"> The modern descendant of the Wardian case is the terrarium, where plants nestled in a bit of soil in a glass bowl are sealed away. Water is cycled and recycled in the closed environment where tiny ferns, mosses, and club-mosses flourish.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-42391717337645464922011-03-20T22:56:00.000-04:002011-11-21T00:19:24.935-05:00Field Dance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/AxRT60-kw78?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-20540537819676089762011-03-18T14:19:00.005-04:002011-11-21T00:18:33.615-05:00Life-BombsThis spring four Oberlin College Environmental Studies students will be working with me on my garden and learning farming skills and sustainable agriculture concepts along the way. Last week they came for our first session to begin at the beginning: seeds.<br />
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-size: large;"><strong>Ground</strong></span></div>
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As limpid late winter sunlight streamed into my dining room, we dampened seed-sowing mix and tamped it into seed trays. We talked about the peat bogs that had been mined to bring us this most amenable medium. Peat moss is the accumulated work of thousands of years of dilligent living by sphagnum moss. Leaves composed of a single layer of cells unfurl continuously upward while older ones die off below but continue to serve by wicking water up to those green blades above. Where do living and dying meet in this intimate mini-world? Over years, decades, centuries of living, the moss' dying remains create an environment so acidic as to prevent any organisms from entering to engage in the normal business of decay. Ultimately, deep bogs coated in shimmering green are formed. In World War I when bandages ran short, it was the silent work of centuries by moss that came to the rescue, with fluffy antiseptic peat moss used to stanch wounds. One death warding off another. In ancient Ireland, a peat bog was the final resting place for a sacrificial victim whose luck it was to find this antiseptic home. One death preserving another. This is where your potting soil comes from. One death nurturing new life.<br />
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Peat bogs are however, like oil, a finite resource and the work of millenia is being consumed too quickly. Coir, or the hairy husk of coconuts that are a normally trashed byproduct of the coconut industry, has also recently come into use as an alternative to peat moss. While the recycling aspect of coir as potting mix is laudable, is replacing one endangered resource with another non-local resource the best option? In many English gardening books, seed-starting mediums are usually described as "composts," designated in their fineness by numbers. While this may simply refer to peat moss mixes, it points back in gardening history to the original solution of sifting compost. Compost would be "riddled" through screens of varying gauges for a determined fineness. Though I admit I am using commercial peat-moss-based mix this year for my seedlings, perhaps investing some time in sifting some of my own compost for future seedlings is the most local sustainable way of beginning the season. <br />
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<span style="color: #f1c232; font-size: large;"><strong>Seed</strong></span></div>
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Our trays formed, we sat down with seeds: brassicas and lettuce, zinnias and pansies. As we made shallow furrows (no more than twice deep as the size of the seed) in our trays, I explained that seeds are life-bombs and water is the fuse. In dicot seeds, a tiny proto root and leaves are nestled inside of two larger cotyledons or food storage organs and all of this is surrounded by a seed coat. As soon as water penetrates the seed coat, enzymatic processes surge and the cotyledons swell, rupturing the seed coat as the root burrows into the soil. A tiny cluster of stem cells (called meristematic cells) at the tip of the root divide rapidly forming a root cap like a drill tip on the outer surface and vascular cells in the interior that lengthen and push with tremendous force capable of rupturing stone. Just behind this tip the root forms cells on its outer surface that extend in ultra-fine filaments or hairs into the soil to absorb water. The fine fuzz on the soil surface as seeds burst upward are individual cells sipping moisture. As the root burrows down, the cotyledons unfold like hands revealing the tiniest of leaves within and another packet of meristematic cells that will produce all above-ground parts of the plant. Like rocket boosters taking a satellite into orbit, the cotyledons are the only source of energy for the dramatic growth of seedlings until the leaves unfurl like solar panels to begin photosynthesizing. <br />
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To call seeds bombs, roots drills, and leaves solar panels is not too metaphoric. The power of seeds' explosive growth in their early stages of germination can alter the landscape, however minute that terrain might be. Some seeds are more powerful than others, and an old gardener's trick takes advantage of this by planting radishes and parsnip seeds together. Radishes are among the quickest harvests, and an especially satisfying first gardening experiment for young children who need instant gratification. From seeding to crunchy spicy treat, radishes take about a month. Parsnips on the other hand are incredibly slow, both in germination and in ultimate harvest. By planting parsnip seeds alongside radishes, the gardener takes advantage of the radishes' explosive growth to break open the soil so that the comparatively more gentle parsnip can easily reach the sunlight.<br />
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Plants with tap roots are particularly useful as natural drills in the dense clay soils that we have here around Oberlin. Their main root burrows deep in the ground, not only bringing up deep soil nutrients to the surface through their leaves, but fracturing and aerating the soil. Some gardeners plant daikon radishes in their fields and then deliberately leave them there unharvested to rot through the winter. Each root is like a garden fork and fertilizer in one, breaking up the soil and then decomposing into rich humus by spring.<br />
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Finally, leaves truly are solar panels in their ability to convert the energy of the sun into chemical energies stored in sugars and starches. They power all life on the planet. As Michael Pollan wrote in his important letter to then-President-Elect Obama entitled <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=farmer%20in%20chief&st=cse">"Farmer in Chief,"</a> we can solve many of our national problems by coming to terms with the reality of our "solar economy." Life truly does revolve around the sun and it is leaves that harness its power. <br />
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I am writing about seeds as bombs, roots as drills, and leaves as solar panels, but this is merely reverse-engineering language and by extension the world. We would do better to discuss bombs as seeds, drills as roots, and solar panels as leaves. How would our thinking and our actions shift if we set these plant parts as the ground for our human language?<br />
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<span style="color: #38761d; font-size: large;"><strong>Seedling</strong></span></div>
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Having sowed our seeds, the students and I looked at some trays I had seeded two weeks before: kale and calendula. Cotyledons were unfurled and the first leaves were developing. We "pricked out" the seedlings, that is, transplanted them from their cramped seed trays into more commodious flats, 72 plants to a flat. This is my favorite plant propagation task. There is a meditative quality to the delicacy of the maneuvers that I first learned to appreciate during my training days at <a href="http://www.stonecrop.org/">Stonecrop Gardens</a>, where myself and the other interns spent many early spring hours in the potting shed at this work. <br />
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When pricking out, one should always remember that roots and root hairs are incredibly delicate and that while there are usually two cotyledons and more than one leaf, there is only ever one stem on a seedling, so one should never grab a seedling by its stem lest it get crushed. Chopstick in one hand nudging roots apart from each other, and the fingers of the other hand delicately holding a cotyledon, we teased apart our seedlings. After making a hole in the mix for the new seedling, it is best to submerge it as deeply as possible in the cell, up to but never above the level of the cotyledons. Burying the stem might seem counter-intuitive, but it helps to anchor the new plant. After gently nudging soil mix over the roots it's on to the next seedling. When a whole flat is planted up, it's time to bottom-soak it. Bottom-soaking is preferable to watering from above because it is more gentle and the water acts as a million tiny hands reaching up through each soil particle to remove air gaps and to ensure that the delicate roots come into contact with the soil mix.<br />
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As we worked our way through our kale and calendula seedlings, we talked about environmental studies and I asked the students, "What do you need for a local food economy?" Renewable energy, infrastructure, compost, transportation. "What else?" I asked. After lots of good ideas, I shared my own: people who know how to grow food. Going from seed to seedling to plant to harvest is hardly a simple process and it is a knowledge-set that can only truly be acquired through experience. If we are going to create the web of relationships required to live locally, many more of us will have to be involved in food-growing. These four students began taking their first steps toward the knowledge and experience of how to do that. <br />
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For me the ideal would be that everyone grow at least some of their food. Even if only growing a small pot of lettuce greens on a windowsill in Brooklyn or the Upper West Side (or an edible fern like Ostrich Fern, <em>Matteucia struthiopteris</em>, for those in shadier apartments?), the act of eating a leaf or a fruit or a frond of something you have grown and lived with begins the road to the solar economy. These plants in the backyard or on the windowsill are our own solar power plants, or better yet we should flip that metaphor around and begin seeing solar power plants as leaf mirror gardens in the desert.Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-40036023635520341992011-03-13T15:25:00.001-04:002011-11-21T00:16:41.671-05:00Who is this farmer?<div style="text-align: center;">
<em>No bad fortune, no good fortune, no loss, no gain;</em></div>
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<em>Never seek such things in eternal serenity.</em></div>
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<em>For years the dusty mirror has gone uncleaned,</em></div>
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<em>Now let us polish it completely, once and for all.</em></div>
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<em>...</em></div>
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<em>Always working alone, always walking alone,</em></div>
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<em>The enlightened one walks the free way of Nirvana</em></div>
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<em>With melody that is old and clear in spirit</em></div>
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<em>And naturally elegant in style,</em></div>
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<em>But with body that is tough and bony,</em></div>
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<em>Passing unnoticed in the world.</em></div>
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--<a href="http://villagezendo.org/2010/11/study-text-winter-2010/">Zhengdaoge</a></div>
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It was difficult <br />
to walk away from the George Jones Farm, a place to which I can honestly say I completely gave myself.<br />
to take a chance and step off the hundred-foot pole and onto that farm, and then step off that same pole again off that farm.<br />
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It's been even more difficult <br />
to let go of good fortune, and bad fortune.<br />
to let go of losing the security of an unreasonable proposition.<br />
to let go of some fancy of gaining liberation from others.<br />
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This year I decided to move on from the George Jones Farm, with a lot of sadness for a dream not fully realized, but with some renewed sense that that dream lies not in one field or another, in one network of relations or another. What and where is this farming practice? What and where does this work take place?<br />
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This year I will be concentrating on developing the acre of land our house lives on to grow vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, berries, and more, while working with students and others, sharing what I know and how I think about this work of growing with the world. It will be an experiment in techniques and in approach.<br />
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Growing and eating and dying and growing and eating...<br />
Who does this? <br />
Preparing fields or small garden beds, sowing five hundred feet of peas or twenty around the fence encircling an apple tree. <br />
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These fingers knitting the soil gently over this seed or that seedling are themselves knitted together by sunlight and the searching mouths of worms in darkness and ever-hungry bees buried deep in flowers and other fingers before them. Who is the farmer here?<br />
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In these last days of winter there is the bursting seed coat and the pale tenacity of roots pushing down and cotyledons pushing up. There is growth and there is caring for that growth and there is eating. <br />
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There is a farmer "passing unnoticed in the world" hoeing her rows and watering his children. In spring her hands curl in green tendrils "naturally elegant in style." In autumn winds, he sways and creaks with a "body that is tough and bony."<br />
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It was difficult to leave (or be left by?) my old job, but really the same farmer is still farming, all the time "always working alone." My fingers knit into his and knit the soil in turn.Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-27520701843592622792011-02-08T10:09:00.003-05:002011-11-21T00:15:26.522-05:00...There Is Nothing At All<div style="text-align: center;">
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<em>“When the Dharma Body awakens completely,</em><em></em></div>
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<em>There is nothing at all.</em><em><br /></em></div>
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<em>The source of our self-nature</em><em><br /></em></div>
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<em>Is the Buddha of innocent truth.</em><em><br /></em></div>
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<em>Mental and physical reactions come and go</em><em><br /></em></div>
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<em>Like clouds in the empty sky;</em><em><br /></em></div>
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<em>Greed, hatred, and ignorance appear and disappear</em><em><br /></em></div>
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<em>Like bubbles on the surface of the sea.”</em></div>
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(from Zhengdaoge/Shodoka)</div>
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“When the Dharma Body awakens completely/ There is nothing at all…”</div>
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Mycorrhizae, root hairs, ants, voles.</div>
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Birds, acorns, barberry fruits, and seeds in a matrix of excrement.</div>
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Winds used to carry North American pine pollen hundreds of miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, dumbfounding European sailors in clouds of gold.</div>
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Canopy leaves catch dust in the hot breeze, rains catch dust in vertical rivers, bark catches dust floods in channels, moss catches innumerable unkown Nile silts in luxuriant green deltas at the foot of the oak in the backyard.</div>
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Who is in control?</div>
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<em>To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.</em></div>
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Looking out, there are birds and roots, dust and leaves and moss.</div>
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Looking around, what is there? Kaleidoscope center, still point among the shifting colors. Amazement.</div>
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The sailors lift their eyes from their tasks to see the backs of their hands, the rigging, and the sails, the sky and the clouds covered in gold. Their mouths hang open and their eyes widen, lost.</div>
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<br /></div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-7871684510588081212011-02-07T10:31:00.003-05:002011-11-21T00:14:03.883-05:00The Leisurely One<em><span style="color: #bf9000;">Pardon the hiatus but I was in Uruguay with my partner Kazim visiting family in January.</span></em> <br />
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Two times a year my sangha, <a href="http://www.villagezendo.org/">The Village Zendo</a>, engages in Ango practice. Hearkening back to the original rainy season retreats of the early Buddhist sangha, ango (meaning "peaceful dwelling") is a period of intensified daily practice. We are currently in an Ango period, and the study text for this period is a long poem by the Chinese Zen master, Yongjia Xuanjue, called the <em><a href="http://villagezendo.org/2010/11/study-text-winter-2010/">Zhengdaoge</a></em> (Shodoka in Japanese). I have decided to read it stanza by stanza with an ear towards what it says about my farming practice, and will occasionally make posts on thoughts that arise<br />
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"There is the leisurely one,<br />
Walking the Tao, beyond philosophy,</div>
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Not avoiding fantasy, not seeking truth.</div>
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The real nature of ignorance is the Buddha-nature itself;</div>
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The empty delusory body is the very body of the Dharma."</div>
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“There is the leisurely one…” What might it mean to farm leisurely? Hardly “gentleman farming,” rather a kind of poor man’s farming. <br />
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Chuangzi: So removed from civilization were they that they forgot how to speak. <br />
Mumon: His speech is rough, his writing illegible. <br />
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To farm leisurely might mean farming <br />
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as if your life depended on it, <br />
as if farming was your life, <br />
as if life was nothing but farming. <br />
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As if:<br />
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In June Kazim and I pick deep red-purple serviceberries from the trees in Tappan Square in the pallid violet of twilight.<br />
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In the evening I pad out the back door and through the high grass to pick orange day-lily blossoms one day short of bursting open into a great steel bowl. Then I string them with needle and thread and hang them to dry for winter soups and stir-fries. <br />
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Hurrying ahead of the wave of frost, we work though the evening until even headlights aren’t enough, picking tomatoes and peppers, hanging the immature cayennes upside down so that they continue to ripen to red.<br />
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Cattails in spring, lamb’s quarters in summer, mushrooms in autumn.<br />
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Hang acorns in an onion bag in a toilet tank and with each flush slowly leach the tannins. Every week hang mint to dry for winter tea.<br />
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Save seeds at every opportunity. Seeds in pants pockets, shirt pockets, stuffed in backpack pouches. What were these again? <br />
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Read and dream and forget. Hatch plans.<br />
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Spend evenings chopping, washing, mixing, pickling.Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-55062683905893986322010-12-13T12:29:00.004-05:002011-11-21T00:12:37.379-05:00A Year in Pictures: 2010<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<strong><span style="font-size: large;">Spring</span></strong></div>
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Preparing a bed for planting peas.</div>
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Judy Laushmann, Ben Knowles, Mandy Fracchione, and Kazim Ali pull weeds and harvest dandelion roots for roasted dandelion tea at the same time.</div>
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Domenico Ruggierio of Oberlin College's Multicultural Resource Center uses a broadfork to aerate soil without disturbing its profile.</div>
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The Hawken School and Cleveland Oberlin College Alumni showed up in force to prepare the fields and plant leeks! Thanks to Matt Young of Hawken School and Kira McGirr of Cleveland OC Alums for organizing this, and thanks to all the parents, students, and alums who came out.</div>
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Springtime greenhouse: lettuces, scallions, Chinese cabbage.</div>
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Royal Oakleaf Lettuce.</div>
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">Touring Old Haunts During a Spring Trip Away from the Farm</span></strong></div>
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Stonecrop Gardens, Cold Spring, NY: A plant-lover's paradise, and where I spent a year training as a horticulturist.</div>
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Stonecrop's <em>Gunnera tinctoria</em>. The Chilean Rhubarb is the largest herbaceous plant on Earth. The tallest leaf in this picture is about 7ft tall and still growing! Though hardy to Zone 8, gardening wizardry keeps this plant alive in Stonecrop's Zone 4 weather.</div>
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Stonecrop: A straw Gertrude Jekyll overlooks the vegetable garden.</div>
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Stonecrop: the Flower Garden.</div>
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Stonecrop: the Gravel Garden.</div>
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Stonecrop: The Wisteria Pavilion.</div>
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Stonecrop: The Horticulture Library.</div>
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The Cloisters, New York, NY: A refuge of calm in the busy city, The Cloisters is a branch museum of The Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to Medieval art and culture. It is so named for the series of open courtyards that house period-style gardens. I was a horticulturist here for three years.</div>
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Hops climbing up the Bonnefont Arcade.</div>
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Trie Cloister.</div>
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The Village Zendo, New York City: My home temple where I have practiced Zen for 11 years.</div>
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">Summer</span></strong></div>
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Garlic, garlic everywhere. Summer interns Ben Agsten, Emma Cunniff, Gabe Baldasare, Patrick Gilfeather, Assistant Grower Freed, Ian Burns, and WIlly Wickham.</div>
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Garlic: bunching and hanging. For the next week the strawbale building was redolent with the pungency of curing garlic, somewhat yeasty like baking bread.</div>
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Oberlin Farmers' Market Stand: Me and Freed manning the stand.</div>
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<strong><span style="font-size: large;">Fall</span></strong></div>
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Oberlin College Annual Day of Service: Every year the George Jones Farm hosts new first-years who come out for a day of volunteer service as part of their orientation.</div>
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Day of Service: Weeding a greenhouse to get it ready for fall planting.</div>
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Day of Service: Education Coordinator/Operations Manager Evelyn Bryant and a volunteer planting lettuce.</div>
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Day of Service: Weeding turnips and lettuce mix.</div>
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Day of Service: the last big project of the day was replacing the plastic on this greenhouse.</div>
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It was a team effort.</div>
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Thank OC first-years for all your help. Welcome to Oberlin!</div>
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November Markets at the Farm</div>
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We still had lots of produce to offer.</div>
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A happy customer with her edible holiday wreath.</div>
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<br /></div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-58930394567029366162010-12-12T23:45:00.000-05:002011-11-21T00:09:11.218-05:00Harvesting the Future: Seed Saving<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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George Jones Farm interns Danny Cowan, Rachel Cotterman, and Emma Cunniff saving celery seeds.</div>
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The growing season is finally done. The fields are covered in snow and the last cuts of salad mix have been harvested from the greenhouses. Temperatures are hovering in the 20s during the day and snow is a daily occurrence. But one more harvest remains: seeds.</div>
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Over the course of the year, I made sure to leave some of our crops alone. Collards overwintered from last year rose up into billowing towers of creamy yellow blossoms followed by slender aqua blue seed pods. Intensely flavored soup stock celery provided a nice early spring crop before stretching up to the sky and bolting into a profusion of delicate and very fragrant umbels that gave way to the tiniest of seeds. Both collard and celery flowers made for great seasonal additions to our salad mixes (dill and parsley flowers also offered bright accents), but I always made sure to leave some alone. </div>
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As spring turned into summer the collard's glaucous seed pods weighed heavy and the stalks bent low, the pods shifting from blue to gold as they dried. As summer turned to fall, the celery's green seeds turned deep brown and dry. This is the time to harvest the future. In the mad scrabble of harvest season to get every ripening tomato before it splits and every head of lettuce before it bolts, take some time out on a dry day to cut back these dry seed heads, put them in a paper bag, label them and stow them away in a dry, dark place. </div>
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Now in these cold days, those crumpled paper bags can come out of hiding and slowly but surely seeds can be separated from chaff and sealed in paper envelopes and carefully labeled for next spring. When I trained as a horticulturist at <a href="http://www.stonecrop.org/">Stonecrop Gardens</a>, I spent all of January 2004 cleaning and saving seeds. What a wonderful time to spend in the potting shed hunched over bins of an incredibly diverse array of seeds. Shimmying the pans, tossing them to winnow chaff, using strainers of varying gauges. Campanula seeds like shining dust and shimmering silver Ricinus seeds like sinister coffee beans. </div>
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Why save seeds? </div>
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Firstly, from those training days, poring for hour after hour over seeds and dried inflorescences was for me the best way to develop an intimate and intuitive understanding of plant families. Each family of related plants has its special way of conveying itself through time from one generation to another. Apiaceae (celery, parsley, fennel, e.g.) seeds for example have a ridged coating and a bend in them that makes them unmistakable, whether large like angelica or lovage seed or miniscule like celery seed. This may seem an abstract reason, but most of us have grown up so removed from intimacy with nature that this kind of learning develops a powerful intuition later in the field later. I may not know what wild mustard is but as soon as I see those yellow flowers and then later those narrow silique seedpods waving in the wind, I know exactly what those seeds are going to taste like. Playing with seeds inside in winter can offer one avenue for becoming conversant with the world around us through the rest of the year. And the best way is to hold them in your hands, sift them from the chaff, roll them between thiumb and forefinger, hour after hour.</div>
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Beyond this, there is utility. Seeds make plants. The next growing season is only too close and those seed packets can add up to big bucks once your greedy eyes have perused the stack of bewitching catalogs that show up in your mailbox. Saving seeds from your own plants is a way of trimming costs and making next year's garden truly "local" from the very start. </div>
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Back to the abstract, for me the most exciting reason to save seed is participating in a years-long, decades-long, centuries-long process of developing bioregion-specific -- even site-specific -- vegetables. When I grow a patch of collards and one plant grows noticeably bigger leaves or fends off cabbage worms particularly well or makes it through summer droughts better than others, and I save seed from that plant I am joining a line of farmers stretching back to the beginning of agriculture. And when I save collard seeds consistently year after year, the resulting plants will become ever better at growing in just this set of circumstances that Oberlin, Ohio presents. They will truly be of this particular place. </div>
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In this way, seed saving truly is harvesting the future.</div>
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<br /></div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-83300030397958489982010-12-05T23:18:00.002-05:002011-11-21T00:07:25.495-05:00Farm Art 2: Crafts and Natural Building<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<strong>Crafts</strong></div>
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Garlic Braid with cayenne peppers.</div>
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Wreath made of mugwort (<em>Artemisia vulgaris), </em>ironweed (<em>Vernonia sp.), </em>and cayenne peppers.</div>
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This braid and wreath as well as many other crafted itmes, herbal teas, and more will be available at the Alternative Gift Fair. The fair is a great chance to fulfill your holiday shopping obligations with a good conscience by purchasing unique items from local non-profits, including the George Jones Farm. It runs from Dec 13-17, 11:30-3:30 in the Bent Corridor of the Oberlin College Science Center on West Lorain Street. On Dec 18 it will run from 1-4pm at the Oberlin Public Library on South Main Street. I hope you'll come out and supprot the farm and other great organizations. </div>
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<strong>Natural Building</strong></div>
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Sprucing up the strawbale building at the farm with a fresh earthen finish. Nanette Yanuzzi (in the blue sweatshirt), an Oberlin College Art professor, and Anna Wolfson (in the red vest), OC alum and head of Wolfson Earthen Finishes (see my Sources and Tributaries sidebar for a link), lead students in plastering the walls with a rich ochre mixture of clay and sand.</div>
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Adding deeper shades of orange and red along the bottom of the wall.</div>
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<strong><em>Thank you Anna, Nanette, and everyone who came out to brighten up the walls of the strawbale building!</em></strong></div>
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My first exposure to permaculture came while traveling in Patagonia in 2008. I volunteered for a week at CIDEP (Centro de Investigacion, Desarollo, y Ensenanza de Permacultura) and was blown away by the beautiful organic architecture that was possible with mud and straw and sand, not to mention the very special community that forms when a group of strangers step into a mud pit and work the clay and the straw and water and sand together with their feet by dancing. This is a very special place I feel very lucky to have discovered. My brief time there definitely caused a paradigm shift in the way I think about my work with/in nature and it will be a very long time before I truly see how much that week affected my life. You'll find a link to their website in the Sources and Tributaries sidebar.</div>
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At the entrance, only another mile of hiking to go...</div>
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The main building: front</div>
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The main building: back</div>
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Community at play</div>
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The result of a day of adobe dancing</div>
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A harvest of adobe bricks</div>
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Dry composting toilet: front</div>
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Dry composting toilet: back. The chimney faces towards the sun and is painted balck so that it heats up and creates a draft which whisks away any smells. This bathroom was truly lovely to spend time in!</div>
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Shower room wall. Note the bottles embedded in the wall. They not only allow light in but their necks become towel hangers.</div>
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The kitchen. Check out the use of the bottles embedded in the far wall.</div>
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Brisa! CIDEP's resident sprite.</div>
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So imagine my surprise when I meet Eric at CIDEP, an expat American, who says when I mentioned that I had just moved to Oberlin, "Oh yeah, I helped build a strawbale house on a farm up there." Turns out to be the strawbale building in the pictures above where I now work as the farm manager. While at CIDEP I also met Eva, a wonderful woman from Portland, OR whose eyes gleamed with passion when it came to plastering and earthen finishes. </div>
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Now nearly three years later, imagine my surprise when I meet Anna, who has come from Chicago to do the ochre earthen finish on the building's walls and it turns out she knows both Eric and Eva quite well. It's a small world indeed and I feel very happy to have found myself linked in to this permaculture network of folks inspired to work dynamically with and in natural systems.Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-269094033852396362010-11-29T14:50:00.005-05:002011-11-21T00:04:46.261-05:00Growing Beyond The Euclidean World; or, In Defense of the Unruly GardenI have a planter in my kitchen with a sad Colocasia that goes through periods of voluptuous growth and pitiful bare survival. Mostly I must admit that this is because of my neglect. And this I suspect has something to do with the fact that it lives in what is supposed to be a sleek, immaculate white glazed ceramic pot. Without being too dramatic, this pot has come to seem to me the epitome of modernism, a reaching for and confidence in a pure and totalizing universe of fundamental principles. It is the obverse of Malevich's Suprematist Black Square.<br />
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There is a violence in its demand for perfection (not surprisingly it came from Walmart), even as it makes room for the plant in its center. Like LeCorbusier's Esprit Nouveau pavilion with that tree growing through it, it is stunning visually but completely in denial about the nature of nature, acting more like a cage than a residence. Do the falling leaves stain the pure white of the structure? Do the roots buckle the foundation? What happens when a storm brings a limb or the whole tree down on the building? I imagine that when decisions have to be made, it is the building and not the tree (which was there first) that come first.<br />
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It is also a failure, and why I think I have subconsciously given the living being that resides in it short shrift. Every time I water the plant soil splashes up along the interior edges and cakes on in clumps when it dries. Dust and soil inevitably dull the pure shine of its white exterior. What is supposed to gleam with a "clean" look only appears dirty , dingy, and diminished, and this simply because of the forces at work around the living being inside it that the planter purportedly exists in service of. </div>
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And so, I find that I conveniently forget to water the plant. It's like I've developed a blind spot for it. I've come to hate the planter, but really I wonder if the planter, its denial of the messiness of life, and the resulting dinginess of it have somehow caused me to hate the plant instead. In any case the poor colocasia is stumbling along. (How much of this applies to people and architecture too I wonder?) The only hope will be if I move that plant to a new pot and/or radically rethink how forms interconnect with each other. (Again, what about people?)</div>
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In a sense what it lacks is what my terracotta pots have: porosity. Salts from the water I pour into them crust on the lip of the pots. Blooms of white and sometimes a little green algae cover their sides. pots chip and texture forms at the breaks. Pots crack but still hold together. The "cooked earth" of the clay pot is not alien to but close cousin to the "raw earth" inside it. Water and air flow up, down, and through the pot as well as the earth as well as the plant. Here is one system, flowing with life. Here is a wabi-sabi admittal of change and impermanence. Here is time.</div>
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All of this is really just preamble and window into my increasing conviction that gardening is most fully accomplished when done without edges. Or, put another way, I think I am done with raised beds built in neat rectangles with wood planks.<br />
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Particularly in permaculture design, there is often an emphasis on the virtue of edges, but these are not the edges I'm speaking of. Those edges are perhaps better called margins and they are really anti-edges. They are the indeterminate spaces where different regions with different functions meet and merge. In fact it is the inability to delineate a clear "edge" in these margins that makes them so fruitful and profitable. The edge I mean is the edge of the straightedge, the line, the fence, the definition, the name, the "thing," ultimately the "I."<br />
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In the greenhouses at the George Jones Farm where I work we have a series of constructed beds, made mostly from slabwood, designed in a series of rectangles. They are great, but they are also the bane of my life. The wood holds the soil in place but it also catches my feet as I try to crouch. The wood creates order, but it also makes the edge of soil that it holds unusable as a growing space. Instead of a rectangle of verticle right angles, imagine a wall-less trapezoid whose sloping edges are another surface for planting on. The wood tells me this is a planting space and this is a path for walking on. Curious how weeds haven't heard this. The seam between path and wood is where every undesirable plant finds a home, particularly the thistle covered in spines whose only weakness is a lack of spines right at its base, which in the world of raised beds is (in)conveniently right where my trowel or hands can't reach. </div>
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Ultmately what the the tidy world of the rectangular raised bed and the gleaming glazed white pot have in common is a denial of reality and the omnipresence of life. Here is the bed of lettuce, there is the path for walking. Here inside is the soil and there outside is the gleaming surface of the planter. Here is value, there is emptiness. Here is life, there is not. Is the world of form whose fruit is Malevich and Le Corbusier and my Walmart planter ultimately predicated on: here is chaos, there is order, and form is the wall between? </div>
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But there are the thistles bursting from the edges, refusing to abide by these conjurations of lines and forms. And so in a world of borders (whether flower borders or national borders), what can any transgressor be but illegal, worthy of extermination? This is the logic created by a worldview of rectangles and circles, of lines and linear time. </div>
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What is lost is the radical notion that life inhabits every space according to causes and conditions and that in each instance there is (for lack of a better word) a "purpose" for what exists. In other words, I would argue that the problem lies in privileging space over function.</div>
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Why do thistles emerge precisely where my trowel cannot reach? They thrive in poor soils and the compacted pathway is a perfect place for them. Rather than curse them for being somewhere I don't want to be, I should be asking, "What are you doing there?" Really, "what" are you doing?</div>
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A central tenet of permaculture thinking is that "the problem is the solution." From a spatial persepctive, why are thistles the bane of my weed-pulling life? They have brittle taproots that reach deep into the soil and are impossible to completely remove, leaving behind pieces that will inevitable resprout. But from a functional perspective, what thistles accomplish is the release of deeply buried micro-nutrients to the surface where other plants can use them. Their deep roots also help to aerate the soil, making it easier for other plants to grow in their wake. </div>
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Throw some cardboard over those thistles to smother them. All those nutrients will be released just below the surface and as the thistle roots rot, other plants' roots can move in. A few slits in the cardboard and I can plant tomatoes, basil, pretty much anything in there. If I can respect the function of life that arises and work with it, possibilities arise endlessly.</div>
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For me this approach has been a revelation, evaporating all those rectangles and lines and borders, not only spatially, but conceptually and temporally too. When there is a line, there is a bed and a path. When there is a definition, there is a crop and a weed. When there is a season, a garden bed holds first one crop, then another.</div>
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In all three cases I have found myself freed from unnecessary restrictions in this past year of farming:</div>
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In the farm's Learning Garden, weeds have been a horrible problem in the stone-dust paths. However, chamomile seeds from plants in the beds in 2009 sprouted everywhere in the paths this year. The same has been happening this fall, with errant arugula seeds sprouting into gorgeous plants in the paths. Next year, I hope to plant lots and lots of thyme cuttings throughout the paths. Why should the "path" be a dead zone? It never can be, so why not see it as a specialized growing space with great drainage and lots of heat?</div>
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I've written a lot already on this blog about re-thinking what exactly is food and widening the scope of our culinary repertoire. Chickweed, amaranth, lamb's quarters, purslane, and cattails have figured prominently this year at the farm as examples of this idea. In another vein, we have a part of our field that is overrun with <em>Artemisia vulgaris, </em>mugwort, and we had artichokes which produced only foliage and no flowers (and hence "artichokes") this year. By freeing them from the labels "weed" and "crop," I was able to convert both into holiday wreaths (check out my last post, "Farm Art" for pictures).</div>
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Time: </div>
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For me this has been the most interesting experiment in shifting paradigms. Early in the spring, a row of last year's kale plants stood like ghostly sticks poking out of the ground right where I planned on sowing peas. Rather than remove them I left them as preliminary in-ground staking for the peas. To my surprise, mst of the kale began to sprout from the base, having survived the winter. So, while waiting for peas we harvested lots of baby kale leaves from the plants until they exhausted themselves just in time to let the peas take over. </div>
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In the fall, we repeated this same "stacking" by planting Brassica seedlings in between tomato plants in the greenhouses several weeks before the end of the tomato harvest. The seedlings had time to set roots while being slightly shaded by the tomatoes. When it came time to remove the tomato vines, we cut them at the base rather than remove them entirely, so as not to disturb the brassicas' roots and to leave the tomato roots to decompose in place and enrich the soil. If crops are rotated, this kind of practice shouldn't cause any problems. </div>
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We also sowed kale seeds in along with our mesclun mix in the greenhouses this fall. The mesclun will be sheared back a few times and in the meantime the kale has been growing steadily. When the lettuces are done, the kale will be ready to harvest. With this kind of interplanting, space is not occupied by one crop at a time in a linear fashion, but rather is occupied in a series of overlaps that recognize life is everywhere and all the time.</div>
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Next year I plan on interplanting giant sunflowers every six feet in a bed with some other crop. In 2011 they will offer up a crop of cut flowers and in 2012 I will experiment with using their mammoth stalks as tomato stakes and bean poles.</div>
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Can all this look messy and unruly? By this point I hope you too will be convinced that this is the wrong question to ask, that it is based in a Euclidean world that life does not know. We live in -- we are a component of -- an unknowably complex world of pattern and function that is dynamic. Let's farm that way!</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjInVwctVqVrEkDfOm33yTBoRy_n9aDxo8Gjwm1zexaYN__cEYkJ2dlYW6TEoR2BwJUAFWGHs3RXZXlwgJ65mcdsTtPnGlzUJnpWylx3kD1ChNCn3BXRK8L33bDZZZOZ7F3kfy36GZej7E/s1600/pakistan_art_03.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545075576594339634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjInVwctVqVrEkDfOm33yTBoRy_n9aDxo8Gjwm1zexaYN__cEYkJ2dlYW6TEoR2BwJUAFWGHs3RXZXlwgJ65mcdsTtPnGlzUJnpWylx3kD1ChNCn3BXRK8L33bDZZZOZ7F3kfy36GZej7E/s320/pakistan_art_03.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 273px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-65654401290088549632010-11-26T09:48:00.007-05:002011-11-20T23:58:56.300-05:00Farm Art: Mugwort, Garlic, Cayenne Peppers, Artichoke Leaves<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTrmIth7zKjrirIH3jeUJ78e3Ze20DzJiTm2j_FnUI-66OUeOBHWz6APGD1Li300dYUfOBfJSq96rDowYTd1WO94yTqxLdxTk5q_FKwRDrLWn7xIguUkY8xEDNutLnz8bCaLRJ3YbyTaI/s1600/1119101614a.jpeg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5544259601095406754" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTrmIth7zKjrirIH3jeUJ78e3Ze20DzJiTm2j_FnUI-66OUeOBHWz6APGD1Li300dYUfOBfJSq96rDowYTd1WO94yTqxLdxTk5q_FKwRDrLWn7xIguUkY8xEDNutLnz8bCaLRJ3YbyTaI/s320/1119101614a.jpeg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 231px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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</div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7466903390678373023.post-60899241227412202102010-11-22T16:28:00.020-05:002011-11-20T23:56:57.508-05:00The Sky is Falling<div align="left">
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<span style="font-size: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 0px;"></span><span style="font-size: 0px;"></span></span>The earth is pivoting towards winter and an autumn shift in the world's water is taking place.<br />
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In the summer sweat almost steams off our bodies in the fields, heat mirages shimmer off the asphalt, and above the treeline in the distance there is a bluish haze of forest breath licking its way up into the deeper blue of the sky. As the world heads towards the Summer Solstice, everything ascends: peas climb, foxgloves rocket up, sunflowers grow almost visibly. By summer, a world of water has filled the sky and coalesced into massive towers of cloud. Like a flywheel whose momentum slips past the force that set it in motion, thunderstorms erupt and downpours within a day steam back up into a muggy saturated atmosphere only to break again and again like waves against the surface of the earth.<br />
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But for the past month the wheel is slowing; the summer sky is falling to the ground. The nights have chilled and in the mornings frost brocades have adorned the ground. By 10 am they're gone with the sun, but each morning they have been appearing and remaining with more insistence. Today there was a long drenching rain, and though there was some thunder it was limpid and resigned compared to its summer cousins. If summer is the high time of cumulus, autumn is a descending time of seeds scattering to earth and leaves falling, and winter is the low time of morning frosts and snow drifts.<br />
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In a zendo a suspended wooden block is struck with a gnarled branch and it rings out over the course of several minutes in a series of quickening hits. This is the han, used for calling practitioners to meditation and in the evening struck again as the Evening Gatha is chanted:<br />
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Let me respectfully remind you.<br />
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Life and death are of supreme importance.<br />
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Time swiftly passes and opportunity is lost.<br />
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Each of should strive to awaken.<br />
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Awaken! Do not squander your life.<br />
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The han's strikes are like the cycle of water rising in summer and falling in winter. There is rising and falling energy, and the striking of a balance along the course of change. The han has three rounds that read like a ledger or an abacus. In the first a lengthy round of 15 strikes lies on one side of a crescendo and one lonely hit lies on the other. In the second, 8 strikes are paired with two hits. In the final round, three short strikes balance on one side of the crescenedo with three short strikes on the other.<br />
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Everything ultimately quiets into balance. The activity of this life seems long at first but it, like the summer world of water in the sky, ultimately rests in equilibrium and in the ground. The water cycle pivots and while working in the fields at the farm, I find myself seeing in the collapse of all the elaborate structures of summer life (in June fireflies filled the night air, now crickets hug the ground with song) an analogue of the pivot in the rest of the world right now.<br />
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What is "permaculture?" It combines two concepts: permanence and culture. On the one side is stability, on the other activity. How can we create a realm of activity that can sustain itself indefinitely. Not in some determined, dead way but dynamically, creatively. Like the han's progression from imbalance to balance, I find myself hopeful that the economic turmoil we are lving through is really a slowing down into balance, into a permaculture.<br />
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How else to understand pears from Argentina in January but as a version of summer thunderclouds? The pear rises up in an airplane from the foothills of the Andes and comes down again to earth in New York City or Oberlin, Ohio into a supermarket. The amount of energy needed for that trip is like a discharge of lightning in the summer sky. But can we live in an eternal summer?<br />
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I come home from the farm where I work listening to NPR and there is always this curious contradictory tension or unease in a lot of financial reporting. The United States and the rest of the world finds itself in such precarious straits because people have been living beyond their means and not saving -- living from paycheck to paycheck. We are like little heat mirages on a summer road, evaporating away in a shimmer of consumerism. And yet in the next breath the radio reporter discusses the recalcitrance of the economy, unable to return to its former glory because no one -- not individuals, banks, or corporations -- is spending. No monumental thunderclouds of activity fill the sky because water (read "money" or even better, "wealth") everywhere is hugging close to the ground, near to home.<br />
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Economists everywhere decry this situation but could this be the beginning of true local economies? Rather than a summer world of extravagance, are we heading into autumn and winter? And why would that be so bad after all? Like an excited atom's electrons falling back to their ground state, or like the han in a zendo reminding everyone to wake up to "this" life -- of this human body in this moment in this place -- and live in balance, my hope is that the world is not collapsing but rather settling into billions of nooks and crannies like frost in kernels of soil. There is great work to be done there, each being at work in their own little sphere of activity.<br />
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The farm this year has been poor indeed, a model of what is happening in the rest of the world. We've struggled to make ends meet. But as I've written elsewhere, I've devoted a lot of time to harvesting wild foods and expanding the repertoire of what my small community thinks food is. We've dried herbs and dehydrated vegetables as a way of extending the harvest. An open eye allows artichoke leaves and mugwort stems to be transformed into beautiful holiday wreaths laced with cayenne peppers and garlic.<br />
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Hunger is a powerful motivator for living a full life and waking up to all that is around you. Summer can often be a time of drowsiness, but the bite of winter sharpens the senses.<br />
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<br /></div>Marco Seiryu Wilkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17807803631578678257noreply@blogger.com2