Sacred Gardening

Of Oil: Harvest Time

July 24th, 2010

We have counted our blessings in our country garden now. Even though animals pretty much cleaned out my cukes and tomatoes (that’s an OLD picture), the jalapeños and sweet Italian peppers came in a bonanza. The pumpkins might make it, but if not, I’ve learned a good amount about how to fence to prevent digging animals. We’re getting some butter beans and squash, and the rain barrels have been topped off by thunderstorms. Now it’s time to supplement our pantry with locally grown produce while the prices are cheap. Just ask at any farmer’s market for a box of “canners” and you may get 25 pounds of good tomatoes for less and 50 cents per pound. Act quickly and try the recipe for sauce I’ll include in this post.

In our city garden, I’ve actually harvested slicing tomatoes for the first time in a few years. It took some ingenuity and expense to surround the containers with hardware cloth and put a little chicken wire on top, but so far the squirrels are not eating the tomatoes: we are. We’ll repeat that process on a larger scale next year, and although one ground hog died on a fiendishly hot day in one of my live traps, and two raccoons (likely rabid) and one fox (definitely rabid) had to be shot in the country, I’ve let the animals win this year until I put in better fencing. They need the food, in any case, in the ongoing drought.

Rain barrels have been our garden-savers this year. We have about 170 gallons of capacity in town, so we can be lavish enough to water ornamentals as well as food. Our basil and parsley have been welcome companions on our table, especially for Lebanese dishes like tabouli and the weekly pesto night.

All of these simply pleasures locally, despite the sickly heat and dry soil, come against the denouement in the Gulf as BP claims to have the situation at the Deep Water Horizon under control. Let’s hope so, and even more importantly, let’s hope the public has a longer memory for this disaster than it did for Katrina or Prince William Sound.

While we cannot individually stop the flow of oil, we can, as individuals and families, learn from our gardens and lean on them, too. My advice in this post focuses on talking stock of where we live as the time of oil depletion approaches and making stock, in the form of a lowly tomato sauce, to get us through the dark half of the year.

A Vision of Transformation: A trip to the Short Pump area (I get there about once per year) showed me both the foolishness of our past practices and an odd hope. In a time when cars will be nigh impossible to operate, the “Towne Center” of such shopping malls may actually become just that. The sidewalks are already there, and multi-lane roads beg to become bikeways. As a locus for local production, the old commercial buildings will host workshops for making things, stages for cultural events, a farmer’s market, and a range of businesses selling with a post-oil economy will need: crafted metal, simple tools, salvaged electronics, locally crafted furniture. People will walk there or use whatever public transit emerges with the end of cheap oil. It need not look shabby, like some half-wrecked Roman forum of the 6th Century. The artisans among us will have to bring forth new beauty and the craftsmen will build upon the bones of our 20th Century civilization.

Enough of the land remains unpaved around this particular suburban nexus to revert to farmland and feed a village-in-the-making. Will live theater come to the old cinema complex? Will live music be performed where piped-in music now plays? I think it will in some places, after a terrible time when the American Dream of Hyper-consumption gives way to a local and sustainable reality.

What happens at your suburb, city neighborhood, or small town will be up to you and those you know. Get to know them now. And give thanks to the Goddess who spun the galaxies and, to me, left the rest in our hands, by using your hands joyfully to put away some of the harvest. Feed some neighbors, and they’ll be more likely to remember your name and be there to help if you ever need it (and we all will).

The recipe that follows uses many ingredients you can grow yourself or find from a local grower without too much difficulty. Making your own sauce and canning it, something our grandparents took for granted, can become a subversive and spiritually rewarding act.

Burdock’s Tomato Sauce

10 pounds tomatoes, cut into eighths
1 large onion, chopped medium to small
10 sweet Italian peppers or 2 bell peppers, chopped small
1 tsp dry hot pepper (optional)
1/2 cup dry basil (whole leaves stripped from stems)
1 tsp oregano (whole leaves stripped from stems)
1/4 cup honey (dark honey like buckwheat or sourwood are superb)
1 tbsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
6 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped (or more, you nuts!)
1 tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp allspice

Add tomatoes to heavy saucepan. Press down with potato masher to make juice. Grind basil and oregano in a spice grinder or in batches between your palms and add to tomatoes. Add other ingredients, stir, and bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer, stir occasionally, and cook 2-3 hours (or more, depending on your stove) until sauce is thick and not watery.

Serve as-is over pasta or with sauteed okra, sausage, beef (cubed or ground) or cubed lamb, depending on your intentions. This sauce works great with Middle-Eastern dishes (use lamb), over pasta or gnocchi, or over rice.

Add meat (optional), pintos and kidney beans, plus chili powder (1 tbsp per gallon of saurce), plus a square of unsweetened baker’s chocolate, to make delicious chili.

Canning Advice (and Philosophy):

The sauce can be canned; I put away at least a gallon every summer to get us through the winter. I add more salt to each pint or quart (usually 1 tsp canning or kosher salt per quart).

I use a pressure cooker because of the peppers and onions. In fact, except for tomatoes and a few high-acid or pickled foods, I use the pressure cooker for everything, though I’m going to dry some figs this year as a first step in learning how to dehydrate fruit.

While a good canning pressure cooker seems expensive, ours has paid for itself after three years. Don’t use your cooking pot; it lacks the crucial pressure gauge.

A warning on canning: it is not an art. It is a science. Bacteria do not care one iota about your sacred or secular intentions.

Check your canner’s instructions or the USDA’s publications found at U Georgia’s site on preserving food . When using books, follow modern recipes online or in excellent books such as Susann Geiskopf-Hadler’s Putting it up with Honey (about all sorts of canning, not just with honey). Do not go by granny’s recipe or a 1950 cookbook. We know more today about the pathogens in fresh food, and the experts have changed processing times for both the boiling-water and pressure-cooker methods.

Canning like an artiste may result in a lingering and painful illness, if not death.

That fear may be why so many folks look at me as if something were growing from my head when I say “I’m doing my canning now.” They wonder why we don’t spend hundreds on a chest freezer or just go to the store. One power failure ends the bounty of a freezer, and I can only imagine the expense of buying so much sauce, pickles, and veggies in winter. Besides, they’d not bring the pleasure or flavor of what we grew ourselves.

And, damn it, I make a statement, with every pint or quart jar, about my choices in a crazy society based on debt-driven consumption.

My pantry is my hope in a better future, as well as an insurance policy in case the lights flicker and go out for a while.

Tags: change, energy
Posted in How2, food, societal transformation | No Comments »

Of Oil: Glory Days, Chaos, Community

July 18th, 2010

It’s hard to realize that we live in a time of decline. I don’t mean the temporary decline in our employment levels. I mean the decline of a nation that still considers itself the greatest power ever to stride the earth. I mean the end of American primacy.

We’ll recall the Deepwater Horizon spill as a punctuation mark in an ongoing story that, in my mind, began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy but included events as disparate was the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the 2000 election, the oil embargos of the 1970s, the resignation of Richard Nixon, Woodstock and other monuments to the 60s Counterculture, the backward thinking of a resurgent New Right, the rise of anti-scientific thinking at home and apocalyptic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Our victories in this era were signal and I hope they will endure: the women’s, civil rights, and environmental movements.

But the punctuation mark that sticks with me most over the years is the Apollo 17 moon landing.

Why that mission? Its commander, Gene Cernan, has said as much on several occasions, but it marked the end of America as explorer. It saddened me as a kid, and it still does. I was 12 then, but I felt that the glory days were over. We’ve never gone out so far with human beings again, and I doubt we will in the sort of civilization we now have. While the moon landings may have spent too much money on what could have been done cheaply with robots, they provided me and many others with a sense of wonder, a look above events on a very troubled horizon, one that has only become more troubled since 1972.

What we live through now may not be the long-predicted “Decline of the West,” but it may be “the rise of the rest” as America’s and many European economies come to terms with living far beyond our means, at both the governmental and personal levels. It’s going to be hard to claw our way back to Kennedy-era prosperity without cheap and easily extracted oil, and if you’ve been following my and others’ writing about oil depletion, you know that those days, like tail-fins or moon landings, are relics of our national glory days.

When oil drilling begins in the Gulf again–and it will–the anti-environmental Right will forget the killed animals, lost jobs in fishing, the soiled coasts. It will be “drill here, drill now, pay less” again, even though those who place those stickers on their bumpers take it on faith that enough oil can be gotten if only we forget about Mother Earth. It’s doubly ironic that they won’t make any leap of faith to see the realities of climate change, even though that is backed by good science and the evidence of our senses. Scientists are to be trusted only when they confirm what we already believe.

I predict we’ll see a time of chaos, even worse leadership than we have seen, and shattered hopes until those in denial about the glory days fade from view–the Right is old, after all–or change their hearts.

That time will call upon us to build communities like never before. No one who is unconnected to others will have the spiritual resources, let alone the financial and material ones, to weather the rapid decline of our society into something that looks more like the 1890s, or if we are lucky, 1930s, technologically. I figure we’ll have survivals of high technology such as local electrical grids, locally made fuels, and, I hope, Internet connectivity to remind of that another world exists over the next range of hills.

Now that Deep Water Horizon is capped, one hopes forever, it’s time to take stock of our pantries and our circles of friends. My spouse has been, in her quiet way, preparing our “hurricane pantry” for a longer time without trips to the grocery store. We work with a few very skilled and talented friends to prepare retirement land in the country, and we hope to find community there, and in our walkable and sensibly designed urban area, when a long motor trip will be a luxury to be done once a month.

Food is all around us now at the time of first harvests, so in my next post I’ll dedicate a more upbeat column to harvesting and storing food without refrigeration. That’s a skill each of us should have.

Tags: change, energy
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Of Oil: What I Learned from a Ginkgo Tree

July 4th, 2010

As the disaster drags on in the Gulf, complicated by the start of the hurricane season, it’s easy to grow despondent. Our species can act so stupidly, and on Independence Day I don’t feel independent. In America we’ve chained ourselves to a way of life utterly dependent upon the passenger car. And while I really enjoy cars and driving, I don’t enjoy the more quotidian uses of the vehicles for most Americans: commuting and running errands. In fact, those activities, to me, take the fun out of being behind a steering wheel.

The nation won’t give up its motorcars easily or painlessly. Imagine your own life without access to a car; many of us live far enough from shopping, schools, and our places of worship to quickly elevate vague concern to active alarm. Then imagine the US Southeast without readily available air conditioning, from a series of brownouts or an aging electrical grid.

Our entire civilization is one oil crisis away from something I cannot predict, though many writers I admire have given this a try. The best treatment of such a world–and by far not a bleak one–is James Howard Kunstler’s fine novel World Made by Hand. The folks in his fictional Union Grove, NY make do. They get by. They’ve learned something we soft Americans have forgotten.

In my last post, I noted a few simple things we all can do as we prepare for what I believe will be a time of privation and uncertainty. I don’t know that my advice implies a philosophical stance, and while I might turn to Marcus Aurelius or the Taoists for the fine expressions of Stoicism, I need only look out the window. That’s where I see a Ginkgo tree.

In the spring, the city planted a Ginkgo biloba across the street from us. The home owners are new to gardening and lack proper tools for tending their yard in very dry weather. I volunteered to do a deep-watering treatment with a watering probe, something that saved a few saplings of mine over the years. The neighbors knew they were going to lose their shade tree, so they were happy to have my help. Now the little tree should live–one hopes, in this awful heat–to adulthood in a city with a climate markedly warmer from today’s.

Facing climate change and the looming end of cheap oil, I stare at the little tree. If you don’t know about the Ginkgo, do some research. It’s a living fossil, as shown in the photo a plant common in the Eocene Era, a period of time stretching from 56 to 34 million years ago. That era ended with massive extinctions caused by impacts of meteorites, one of them in the Chesapeake Bay.

And the Ginkgo survived it. In fact, it’s a tree ideal for the disturbed soils, dirty air, and baked conditions of cities. It has no other living relatives on Darwin’s Tree of Life. It comes down the eons to us intact.

Whenever I see the fanlike leaves, identical to those leaves browsed by the first mammals on our planet, I take a very deep breath. I’m in the company of Deep Time, the sort denied by the fearful and overly literal of our time. Yes, the Earth is many many times older than the 6,000 or 10,000 years they claim. And the Earth will be here after 2012 and the Apocalypse of those who misread the meaning of the Mayan calendar.

For these reasons, the Ginkgo gently mocks us. It will be here if we bake the world and our civilization vanishes. What if we hairless apes could be so persistent? What if we could adapt to changing conditions and live down the eons gracefully?

That’s our challenge as the oil gushes from the ocean floor and the temperatures soar. I don’t know what our specific “Ginkgo Strategy” should be, but in the end, the tree reminds me that survival is not only possible but inevitable for those who can adapt.

Tags: change, energy
Posted in ecopaganism, trees | Comments Off

Of Oil, Part 1

June 21st, 2010

When I set out to write my month’s post, the news from the Gulf of Mexico was bad. Now as I prepare to post this entry, the news has turned catastrophic. None of us can predict, with accuracy, how our hearths will fare as the crude far beneath the surface of the sea continues to gush. All sorts of nightmare scenarios play out, as ridiculous to me at the 2012 “prophecy” of the Maya. I won’t darken your day here with them. But as I look at the Scarab Beetle I keep on my writing desk, I recall the ancient Egyptian idea that the Scarab represents: good coming from evil.

The topic is so huge that I’m going to cover my thoughts on the matter over several posts. This one will focus on oil of all sorts and what it means to us and how we can begin to change our lives to use it wisely.

Oil is precious as fuel, as food, and as lubricant. Oil has always been dear to humans, be it our recently discovered and addictive petroleum, the clean-burning oil of whales that once lit our homes, or, since the dawn of history, oils derived from plants and other animals. Lard and lye make soap, after all. Though modern soaps are very different, chemically, one irony of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is that Dawn dish detergent is used to clean beaches and oil-coated animals.

To spill oil has long been considered a special form of waste. While the same could be said for the clumsy villager who spilled water coming from the community’s wells, probably only the loss of seed for next year’s planting could compare to the spilling of oil. Where my ancestors came from, not just anyone could press olives into oil, and thus the loss of this substance was a sacred violation of the hearth. One needed oil to live.

There’s little this writer, or our spiritual community, can do to stop the spill except send our energies and financial support to the humans, animals, and plants whose lives are being ruined by this disaster. If I believed in spellwork, I’d be doing so now. But even for a Deist like me, who does not believe that any God or Goddess will step in save us, there are things to do to prepare for a time when the oil stops gushing, both from the deep waters of the Gulf and from the global supply of oil. Permanent depletion of the global supply and untold economic disruption are at hand, at least within the next decade. How will each of us fare?

In retirement I plan to farm in a sustainable manner, so obviously I’ve made my plans to do what I can to help sustain a future population. Even if that never pans out as I hope it will, I think much of urban Richmond where I live will remain vibrant as it gets harder to use private cars to move about to work and shop. We are blessed with living in a walkable and bike-able community. Yet even those who can or won’t leave currently unsustainable suburban areas can do something positive.

Re-learn old skills: And while we rebuilt community that is not made through the Internet but on the sidewalks and across our fences, this is the time to learn to save seeds and propagate them, to learn “hobbies” appropriate to life after the Age of Oil ends, to study animal husbandry, to figure out who to save and reuse instead of discarding. It’s time to figure out about other oils for cooking, for lighting if the electrical grid begins to fail us as it does in developing nations, to make fuels for the few vehicles we’ll own, tending them as carefully as Cubans do their 1950s Chevrolets.

Simplify: The recent moneyless yard-sale at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church inspired me to think of how we could substitute barter and non-monetary systems of exchange for our debt-based economy. Can you trade your time cleaning, cooking, gardening, or making things for food or for another skill? Now’s the time to start considering that.

Be Loud: The voices driving the debate today are the paid consultants, the nay-saying radio hosts, the shills for the worst possible corporate citizens. They have the money and power, for now. But the end of cheap oil will hurt them more than it will hurt those who have become the creators of sustainable culture. I’m a Nietzschean at heart, and my will to power is quite strong. When America’s powerful and greedy slip and fall, we must step forward to press our most able lawmakers for justice, to use whatever media we can muster, to pressure corporate boards with our power as shareholders.

Be Silent: Choose your battles. The powerful can make changes, so they are the ones to confront and, yes, cajole. We will, however, never win over the most strident and ignorant of those who oppose the transition we are making. I try to remain silent near them.

Often they are victims of economic injustice they champion and have been convinced by demagogues to act against their own interests. Yet circumstances will move some of their hearts to see that problems such as oil depletion and global warming are real, not inventions of some socialist cabal. Some will never change, but these self-styled “rugged individuals” will not last long into an age when labor in the open air, moving on one’s two feet, and forming communities in the flesh rather than online will be the order of the day.

When all is done, and the changes that are coming have passed, or lives will be richer. Getting there will be difficult, and oil will be spilled metaphorically and literally, until we once again honor our hearths.

Tags: change, energy
Posted in How2, societal transformation | Comments Off

A Big Tree Falls: Three Principles of Taoism

June 2nd, 2010

I was really touched by a recent service at First Unitarian Universalist here in Richmond. Our Taoist group led it, and the three principles of Taoism resonated deeply with this Deist and Eco-Pagan: Compassion, Patience, and Simplicity.

Every day since the service, I’ve been checking passages in the Tao Te Ching, a work I have taught in an academic setting many times. It reads differently now that I’m considering it from a spiritual point of view.

My other daily bit of inner work is to recall the three principles. It amazes me that one is always harder to recall than the others, and it often corresponds to what seems missing in my day. I’m neither a patient nor particularly compassionate person: Nietzsche is more my philosophical ancestor than is Lao Tzu. And yet…simplicity has been the goal of my Sacred Gardening practice since it began. The non-striving of a gardener who works with nature, rather than against it to force his will on the Good Earth corresponds to Taoist ideas of non-striving. The wise gardener shapes and does not hack.

In fact, Nature likes to hack back at such hubris. She’s doing so to our species daily. Is this a form of racial karma?

I had a chance to practice the three virtues recently, when I had to clear up a huge pine, nearly 3 feet in diameter, blocking one of our farm roads after a heavy snow pulled it out of the ground.

First, there was non-action, the returning to the uncarved block. I studied the fallen giant for a long time, walking under it as soon as the nest of vines and branches beneath the main trunk had been cleared to permit my passage. Silently, I observed the balance point and where the limbs held great weight. To cut the wrong one could lead to, at best, a stuck chainsaw. At worst, a limb would rebound with the force of a catapult’s arm and slay me.

And yet this tree had to be cut. I could not reach the rear of our farm, including the path to our pond, on the tractor or in my truck. The woods to either side are thick with green briar and more: copperheads and poison ivy. It’s nothing to wade into such a thicket and return with half a dozen ticks on your body.

Finally, as I realized that my saw was not big enough, but I recalled the Cook of Ting, mentioned by Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu. The cook could carve a side of beef with an old knife, and he never dulled its blade. He knew where to cut because he applied a type of compassionate thinking: where on the animal did the joints move? With fluid strokes, how could he avoid striking bone? How could his cutting hand become part of the work?

My version was to think like the pine: soon I took ever larger wedges from the bottom and top, until only perhaps 8 inches of solid wood held what I thought to be the balance point. Each move was done with respect for this great tree, so different from the Loblobby Pines planted for a quick harvest by the timer companies nearby.

Unlike the Cook of Ting, I planned an escape route in case the many-ton trunk rolled toward me when the top half came free. Even the bottom half, now only a long beam as thick as a frigate’s mast, could twist toward me under the enormous forces released when the tree parted.

I then made my final cut. With a loud but not catastrophic “POP” the two halves of the tree separated, perfectly balanced. The top half, many tons of it, wiggled in my hand when I gently nudged it. I felt no pride, but I did feel gratitude and compassion toward this once-living thing. Then I began to make chopping blocks and a couple of seats, each so heavy that it took the backhoe to move them later. At that moment, however, the tree seemed a toy, and the forest got very quiet indeed.

By not contending, but by patiently accepting and shaping, I had good fortune.

Compassion, simplicity, and patience. Why are they so hard to recall?

Bright Blessings as the days grow hot and close; tempers will flare at things beyond our control or perhaps our will to admit as problems.

You’ll need all three virtues.

Tags: woodwork
Posted in How2, trees | Comments Off

Beauty Has Its Price

May 5th, 2010

I would never have chosen to plant a Magnolia Grandiflora so near my house. Southern Magnolias are magnificent trees, when I see them on someone else’s property. And besides, I’m not fond of the hokey reverence for the Old South, where one thinks of belles in hoop skirts and dashing gentlemen mixing juleps, not people bought and sold like livestock.

But I also cannot bear to cut down Blanche DuBois, as I have come to call this tree. She’s a messy beauty, never picking up after herself, clogging downspouts, and casting a shadow over everything so dense as to exclude other lesser plants.

Thus Blanche is a Southern Belle with issues, like her namesake. When the illusion of control for gardeners is most complete, in early Spring, she begins shedding leaves. And shedding leaves. And shedding leaves.

By early June, Blanche is done with her little pity-party and she explodes into blossom. Then we are back to enjoying her for another nine months.

My paganism keeps me from firing up the chainsaw, so here are a few tips if you too have to deal with your own Drama Queen of a tree, some advice:

Rake up the leaves weekly and mow them when you cut grass. The leathery leaves are very slow to decompose otherwise. When chopped, however, they make a decent mulch.
Lift up her skirt! Blanche was not that modest, despite her pretensions. Just don’t be a Stanley Kowalski about it. Approach the Magnolia gently and remove the lowest limbs that droop down so you get some light under the tree. I tend to make this a mulch island using the chopped leaves.
Enjoy the other nine months, because Magnolia blossoms floated in a bowl of water are lovely and fragrant, and the sprays of green are handsome in deep winter. I cut a few and bring them inside in the dark half of the year.
Learn what Magnolia Grandiflora teaches us about how some trees develop; she looks like a deciduous tree yet sheds like a pine. Her behavior, all about herself and not about we tidy humans, puts us in our place because it shows us how temporary the order of a garden can be.

Mix a julep and go enjoy her company this summer. Burdock’s Julep Recipe (per drunkard):

1/4 cup simple syrup, chilled
2 oz Bourbon, chilled
2 big sprigs of mint, bruised by rubbing in your palms

Combine syrup and whiskey in a glass and mix. Add mint springs to Julep cup and add crushed ice. Pour syrup-Bourbon mixture over ice and mint, stir, and enjoy.

Hint: I don’t use my single-barrels for this. I employ a common Bourbon that Stanley would belt down during poker night.

Tags: nativeplants, woodwork
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A Lesson From the Irises

April 19th, 2010

It’s high spring now, in our city and country gardens. That means a good deal of work before the South’s climate takes matters out of our hands to show who is really in charge: weeds and humidity.

For now, and given the blessedly cool temperatures, we can make a bit of headway in the flower beds and lay out the area for our vegetables. The difficulty can be, even for a gardener with a spiritual practice, that the work gets in the way of the practice. That’s why I was so pleased when my wife pointed out the purple irises we’d moved to our farm, and my sister sent me a photograph of my mother’s bearded irises, blooming with abandon in the near-perfect weather.

We don’t often notice such beauty until it goes missing, and with irises that means a week or a little more before the show ends.

There’s a lesson in that for us all; the beauty that the Goddess casts upon the good earth, like our own youth and strength passes. They pass more slowly than a blossom, but they pass nonetheless. I remain thankful that I have so many gardening seasons behind me and, I hope, many more to come.

My mother puttered in her iris beds until her last few years, when illness kept for from tending them. After she passed into whatever lies beyond the Veil between the worlds, I divided the corms and planted them with my sister. We sent some to a sibling in California and we put some in both city and country. Now the corms need dividing again, meaning that great-grandchildren who never knew mom will have a share of the beauty that moved her and moved within her.

I cannot end without the planting tip she passed on to me. Never bury the corms when you plant them. They should be slightly visible on the ground. Once they take, don’t over water them or they’ll rot. You’ll then enjoy these deer-resistant plants (no small thing at our farm) every season.

Tags: transcience
Posted in How2, ancestors | Comments Off

Awakening the Garden

March 13th, 2010

It’s time.

Our late frost-free date coincides with tax day, but I cannot wait until mid-April. Now it is time to start seeds in the greenhouse, to thank the earth for what she has given, to awaken the garden.

Usually, my seeds go in by Valentine’s Day. Just keep in mind that in 2009-2010, the Mid-Atlantic actually had a seasonably cold winter. It was not freakish; this range of temperatures has been our historical average, though El Niño meant that we got more moisture and thus more snow.

It was a blessing, since we did not get the up-and-down bounces that shock our beehives into activity too early, so the foragers leave and burn energy when nothing is in bloom, and the queen begins to lay eggs to make young mouths that cannot be fed.

So yes, I’m thankful for the winter. I’m more thankful for spring, the way our ancestors must have felt–and the bees still feel–when the cold relaxed and the time of want was behind them.

Working with wonders the ancients could not have imagined, I use a combination of spiritual and technological methods to get the garden ready for the harvest. First, I mulch any fallen leaves that I did not grind up in autumn, and then I turn them back into the flower beds carefully, so I don’t break the stalks of the daffodils that are coming up now.

Then I walk the bounds of the garden with my staff, tapping each tree and saying words such as “awaken and join the dance of the summer!” or “Old oak, we need your shade come July! Join us here and awaken.”

There are many words one could use, but I’ve heard this salutation of the trees called “vital” by some who walk an earth-centered path. I rather like it.

My other jobs involve fixing tools, changing oil, sharpening blades, and doing wood-work with fences, edging, and twigs. I mend whatever supports and untreated fencing I can, and the rest goes to kindling or woodchips. A new heavy-duy chipper meant for our farm (but living in town for a few weeks) lets me chip what I want to compost for mulch next year (note: new wood chips steal nitrogen until they cure). With my pole-saw I cut and craft wattling from shoots of Crape Myrtle, to slow down the four-footed theives.

It’s not, however, time to turn the soil; the sudden warmth tempts us, but digging when the soil is too wet makes a clay pot that will bind roots and stunt a plant. Planting when it is too early may blast a seedling. So for now, keep the plants in the greenhouse!

When I am done with these simple chores, from the center of the garden, near our sundial, I give thanks to each element and tap my staff to salute the garden again.

My your growing season be plentiful with harvest and with joy. See you at Herbs Galore in Maymont, in late April, when it will be time to dig and plant in profusion.

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The Greek Pantheon: Online!

March 4th, 2010

No, Zeus does not have a blog. And Hera does not Tweet about Zeus’ latest trysts with mortal women.

But as I wanted to check the differences between Kairos and Chronos, this site came up: Theoi Greek Mythology Anthology.

It’s a wonderfully prepared and written source. I particularly like the entries on the primevals, the old gods who made the cosmos.

The image above is Chronos / Aion, holding the wheel of the Zodiac in his hand.

Late-winter blessings, all! Soon I’ll write about the first signs of spring I’m seeing in our gardens.

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The Small Voice of Spring

February 15th, 2010

The stove is whispering to me. The cold rain alternates between a patter and a slanting hiss on the remaining snow, but I do not listen to it. Once, before the world began to warm steadily, that landscape of melting snow–even in Richmond–marked the turning from deep to late winter.

Today, I listen to the rain no more than I listen to those who say “you see, the scientists invented global warming.” No, I don’t listen, because one season is not a climate and we forget that not long ago, every Virginia winter could be this biting. In a few years, even those doubters will listen, but for now, I’ll enjoy a winter that is as familiar as a childhood memory of snow. I like how it slowed us, how it told us “the world is not about you.”

So I listen to the stove. The porch is cold, and I can see my breath as I carefully clean out the fire box, sending ashes into the tray and retaining the good embers. Then I crumple a few sheets of newspaper on top. With care, and thanks for my ability to make fire, I take up the hatchet and split a few bits of kindling until they are as thin as pencils. These go on top of the paper, and to get the chimney to draw I put in a flaming wand of paper with one hand, then light the fuel.

The result is dramatic, as always, but my fire-hand is armored with a thick stove-glove. As the fuel catches I close the door, and the crackling is like laughter. “Let me be a moment,” the stove says, as I wait, watching the rain wax stronger and steadier into a full shower. Soon all the kindling is blazing well, and I begin to build up the fire gently, choosing mindfully each piece. In half an hour, the chill from the porch subsides, and I pull up a rocker and a copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune near the stove. Over the adventures of Paul Muad’Dib the stove reminds me of its purpose: fire as preserver and, if one is foolish, destroyer.

South is not my element, but I respect the sun’s power. In the long run, cold will be the fate of all things, but long before that, and long after humanity has passed form this world, Mother Earth, even Mars, will vanish into the surface of a bloating red star that once made our gardens grow. Such thinking about Deep Time, however, is personally no more troubling that Herbert’s evil Baron and how Paul and the other characters become pawns in a galactic game.

The stove settles down to a rhythmic chugging, a lovely old freight-train noise. The pipes on the chimney ping a little, as they expand from the heat. All too soon, I’m pulling back the rocker from my closeness to the fire. Like the wheel of the year in miniature, the stove waxes strong, and I’m drawn from both my book and the rainfall.

Spring will come and after it, summer in her fulness. Then, the fire will ebb and only embers remain. But between now and then, there’s work to do. The other day, I noted the calls of the birds had changed.

They know what is coming. Do we stop long enough from our scurrying and worrying to notice?

Tags: Imbolc, woodwork
Posted in Wheel of the Year | Comments Off