Life-Bombs

This 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.

Ground

    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.
 
    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.

Seed

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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 "Farmer in Chief," 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.

   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?

Seedling

    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 Stonecrop Gardens, where myself and the other interns spent many early spring hours in the potting shed at this work.

    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.

    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.

    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, Matteucia struthiopteris, 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.

A Year in Pictures: 2010

Spring

Preparing a bed for planting peas.

Judy Laushmann, Ben Knowles, Mandy Fracchione, and Kazim Ali pull weeds and harvest dandelion roots for roasted dandelion tea at the same time.

Domenico Ruggierio of Oberlin College's Multicultural Resource Center uses a broadfork to aerate soil without disturbing its profile.

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.

Springtime greenhouse:  lettuces, scallions, Chinese cabbage.

Royal Oakleaf Lettuce.

Touring Old Haunts During a Spring Trip Away from the Farm

Stonecrop Gardens, Cold Spring, NY:  A plant-lover's paradise, and where I spent a year training as a horticulturist.

Stonecrop's Gunnera tinctoria.  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.

Stonecrop:  A straw Gertrude Jekyll overlooks the vegetable garden.

Stonecrop:  the Flower Garden.

Stonecrop:  the Gravel Garden.

Stonecrop:  The Wisteria Pavilion.

Stonecrop:  The Horticulture Library.

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.

Hops climbing up the Bonnefont Arcade.

Trie Cloister.

The Village Zendo, New York City:  My home temple where I have practiced Zen for 11 years.

Summer

Garlic, garlic everywhere.  Summer interns Ben Agsten, Emma Cunniff, Gabe Baldasare, Patrick Gilfeather, Assistant Grower Freed, Ian Burns, and WIlly Wickham.

Garlic:  bunching and hanging.  For the next week the strawbale building was redolent with the pungency of curing garlic, somewhat yeasty like baking bread.

Oberlin Farmers' Market Stand:  Me and Freed manning the stand.

Fall

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.

Day of Service:  Weeding a greenhouse to get it ready for fall planting.

Day of Service:  Education Coordinator/Operations Manager Evelyn Bryant and a volunteer planting lettuce.

Day of Service:  Weeding turnips and lettuce mix.

 Day of Service:  the last big project of the day was replacing the plastic on this greenhouse.

It was a team effort.

Thank OC first-years for all your help.  Welcome to Oberlin!

November Markets at the Farm

We still had lots of produce to offer.

A happy customer with her edible holiday wreath.

Harvesting the Future: Seed Saving

George Jones Farm interns Danny Cowan, Rachel Cotterman, and Emma Cunniff saving celery seeds.

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.

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. 

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. 

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 Stonecrop Gardens, 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. 

Why save seeds? 

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.

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. 

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. 

In this way, seed saving truly is harvesting the future.

Saving All Sentient Beings

“The best way,” Brian said, “is to just squash them between your thumb and your index finger.” I grimaced, he grinned. “Or you can throw them into your bucket of soapy water. I’ll burn them on the bonfire later.” This was twelve years ago when I first apprenticed at a farm, Flickerville Mountain Farm and Groundhog Ranch (a joke about their perennial crop of one pest in particular), started by former Washington Post reporters Cass Peterson and Ward Sinclair, and in 1998 run by Cass and Brian Cramer in the wake of Ward’s passing. Brian and I were standing in the middle of several rows of potatoes holding fluorescent yellow and blue kiddies’ sand pails filled with soapy water, incongruous tools for our grim task: killing Colorado potato beetle larvae. One by one the larvae filled my pail and those of the other apprentices, quarts and quarts of wriggling life, anaesthetized and drowned in the soapy water. Although one of the high school students we worked with, a local kid in this most rural part of Pennsylvania, left the field that day expressionless and unfazed with his hands covered in orange goo.

Twelve years later, as the Farm Manager of the George Jones Farm in Oberlin, OH, I walk through our fields and smile at the treasure trove of Stellaria (aka the chickweed that most people try in vain to eradicate from their gardens) I’ve just spotted. Late May and warm, but the recent rains have meant a resurgence of fresh growth on this cool season wild green. It’s bright green leaves and tiny white flowers (it’s in the carnation family) are mild and fresh.

Next to this unexpected find is the large patch of crowded Lamb’s Quarters growing in a dense colony of varying shades of blue, silver, and gray. Ooh, and there’s a patch with dusty rose coloring similar to the special variety (Chenopodium giganteum) I just got seed for from a recent visit to Stonecrop Gardens, where I had lived and worked while training as a horticulturist in the Hudson Valley. Caroline and Michael kindly allowed me to dig up a few plants of a very special Lamb’s Quarter whose new leaves are a fiery magenta and then mellow out to a peaceful silvery aqua. In Spring, Stonecrop’s English-style flower garden erupts with bulbs followed by spring perennials and these stunning little magenta and aqua plants pepper the blank spaces of the beds. Soon enough they’ll be pulled to make room for summer plantings, leaving only one or two to self-seed next year’ crop, but in the meantime this little “weed” shares its beauty. My own interest in it is that Lamb’s Quarters, a relative of spinach in the goosefoot family, is also an excellent and nutritious edible wild green. Packed with vitamins, the leaves can be steamed or sautéed like spinach, or the tender tops can be eaten raw in salads. For the past two weeks or so, we’ve been harvesting these tender tops at the farm and adding them to our salad mix. Now, with this little magenta and aqua gift from Stonecrop Gardens, the salad mixes at George Jones Farm will shine.

I think I’ve missed my chance at picking the deliciously sour wild sorrel leaves of Spring but maybe they’ll be back in the Fall when the weather cools. However there’s always purslane to hunt for in the heat of summer. Each season brings forth a new wild addition to our palettes. Stellaria, Lamb’s Quarters, Sorrel, Dandelion, Dock, Purslane: weeds gardeners spend so much time trying to remove from their lives, which all the while might satisfy our hunger and nourish us.

Most of the rye and vetch cover cropping we sowed last Fall has already been mowed down just before flowering. It is mass death on the one hand (I send a thought to the literally tens of thousands of lives I’ve just killed just at their fullest potential), but their “corpses” will add valuable biomass and nitrogen to the soil as the churned tops and the invisible but massive root systems below decompose and build topsoil on this land that had been mined mercilessly with corn and soy of its riches for decades. This is a patient work of life through death, a participation in the process (which I will join in too. So will you.) that started with lichens growing directly on primeval rock eons ago and in dying provided life to mosses which in turn in dying gave life to small plants which in turn in dying gave rise to forests, all growing from an ever-increasing placenta of soil (see Wes Jackson’s preface in New Roots for Agriculture for a compelling discussion of how all agriculture as we know it degrades this “placenta” of topsoil).

But here is a patch that got missed, and in the late evening twilight, as I am (im)patiently waiting for the chickens in our chicken tractor to finally decide it’s time to roost so I can close the coops, I wander up to this beautiful and subtle island of blues, violets, and silvers in a sea of freshly turned earth. The rye is just coming into flower, its long stately bearded heads swaying in the breeze. These will make an excellent accompaniment to the creamy yellow and aqua blue of the spikes of overwintered collard flowers I will pick for bouquets to sell at market. Yes there are lupines and valerian flowers and later we will have zinnias and marigolds. But there will also be rye (and other grasses), dock seed heads, chive and sage blossoms, collard flowers and seed pods, cress seed stalks, and many many other unbidden gifts from the fields.

I’ve just taken a small break from the farm and gotten away to New York for a few days before returning for the summer. I went back primarily to spend time at my home temple, the Village Zendo, with my teacher Roshi Enkyo O’Hara, and my sangha. My time there began with a wonderful workshop led by Roshi on the Four Bodhisattva Vows that are chanted each evening in Zen temples around the world. At the Village Zendo they are translated as:

Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.

Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.

The Dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them.

The

Four impossible tasks that Zen students commit themselves to each day.

The workshop looked at various English translations of these vows and at the original Chinese characters, to try and tease out for ourselves just what these vows mean. For me, as a farmer who daily engages in cultivating life that in turn enlivens the people in my small community while also simultaneously engaging in daily killing (whether its Colorado potato beetles, countless rye and vetch plants, or beheading broccoli or ripping carrots from the earth), the first vow has always been a lesson in partiality and accommodation, a lesson in acceptance of failure. There is no way to “save” all beings. The fact of my own life and all the actions that support its continued existence mean the death of other beings. I have come to think of this vow as one that forces me into an understanding and acceptance of my interconnectedness, that as I am intimately connected to all beings, so by “saving” my own life and taking care of others I save all beings. But still there is still this dark side of beetles drowning in buckets and rye falling beneath the scythe.

The Chinese original of this vow and the workshop’s discussion of it, however, revealed other dimensions of it for me. The original of “sentient beings” is more literally “all birth” or “all that which has been born;” “numberless” is “without boundary;” and “save” is “to take over to the other shore.” So, one might say: “All that is born (i.e., subject to birth and death, or that I perceive as being born and dying), I vow to transform.” What is this transformation? Hui Neng, the sixth patriarch of the Zen tradition, expressed this vow as “The beings in my own mind are infinite, I vow to liberate them.” Who are these beings “in my own mind?” Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Soto Zen tradition in Japan, writing about the Buddhist precept, “Do not kill,” said “Promoting life is not killing.” The other day at the Farmers’ Market a woman came to buy a head of romaine lettuce for a housebound friend of hers. “I need one that absolutely doesn’t have any slugs on it. My friend can’t handle slugs,” she said. We looked for a nice head and poked about among the leaves, inspecting for slugs. No slugs but the leaves did have holes here and there, and yes in the evenings when I close the greenhouses where these lettuces have grown I have seen the odd slug slowly strolling along the edge of a leaf. Watching slugs do their own walking meditation is immediately calming. I tell the woman at the market that she should tell her friend not to be too unforgiving of slugs. After all, they have to eat too, and in opting for the head of lettuce with a hole here or a hole there, she has in fact shared a meal with another being. We all get hungry.

Of course we have also lain down slug bait and when I’ve seen slugs I usually pick them off and throw them far away. So who are these “beings in my own mind” and how do I not kill by “promoting life?” What arose from me at this workshop was that in absolute reality nothing is born and nothing dies, there is just a great circulation of energy, but in my mind I give birth to countless beings. Here is valuable food, here is a pest. Here is the plant that I will coddle, here is the weed I will uproot. Here is the person I get along with, here is the person who is difficult. In reality none of them exist, but I spend my whole life constructing them out of thin air, worrying about the survival of some on the one hand and killing others over and over again on the other hand.

I think that fulfilling this first of the Bodhisattva Vows is at its core accomplished through loving observation. To look about oneself carefully and with an open mind and heart means seeing bouquets in collard blossoms and rye, food in chickweed and cattails and lamb’s quarters, partners and teachers in the people who drive us crazy. “Saving” is “transforming.” Slugs and potato beetles still need to be removed, but hopefully they’ve enjoyed the meals they’ve managed to have, just as the chickens will surely enjoy the slugs and the beetles, and I will surely enjoy the eggs they offer up each morning.

Buddha Way

is unattainable, I vow to attain it.