 Dear Friends and Family,
When we are very young, our parents and our teachers teach us to share. Increasingly, modern social sciences tell us that humans are, by and large, naturally inclined to be cooperative and collaborative, so the nudges given to us as preschoolers have fertile ground to work with. Our parents and teachers also encourage us to be independent and take initiatives. I took this to heart. My parents tell me that one of my very first utterances as a two-year old was “sef do!” — I want to do it myself. No tales exist of any precocious sharing capacity, so perhaps this story is a case of “never too old to learn”. This farming project is mine, I mean, I am the one who is doing it. But it is also going to take place in the house and in the yard that I share with Mark, and his income is going to pay for the running costs – for a few years at least. So maybe I was feeling a bit defensive.  Living room in a clean-up jumble Dear Friends and Family
One thing about making a big change in your life is that there is still all this old stuff. While I’d like to spend most of my time on my terrific new forest garden project, things get in the way. There are house projects that I promised myself (and Mark, my spouse) to finish. There is winding down my previous consulting business. There are the usual household tasks, friends and kids to see, exercise to be had, and the violin to practice. When I was planning the coming months out, it all fell neatly into place: November and December for painting the house, January for planning the garden, February for ordering plants …. hm. In reality, things jumble up together; new tasks and plans come up; and everything takes longer than I thought it would.  Me and the Gigantic leaf pile Dear Friends and Family, Many people groan when it comes to raking leaves in the Fall, but I don’t get it. I wait for a beautiful, sunny day after all the leaves have fallen. Then I go out with my rake, and enjoy being outside, the rhythmic swoosh-swoosh of the rake, and the crunchy rustle of the leaves. We like leaves so much, we typically collect the leaves from two or three neighbors in addition to the ones from our own trees! Today, I was alone, but there have been years when a group of neighbors ended up working together to do multiple yards. Once, when our girls were younger, it turned into a spontaneous garden party with kids jumping in leaves and hot chocolate at the end! Leaves have all kinds of benefits ...  Village Roots Permaculture Class Dear Friends and Family,
I have been dabbling in growing food for many years. Our yard, which is about 1/3 of an acre, has been gradually converted into a motley collection of fruit and vegetables. There’s the ramps, fiddleheads, and mushrooms back in the “woods”; the bees under the flowering cherry; the strawberries, currants, apples, sour cherries, raspberries, blackberries, and grapes. From May to October, we can go out on most days and munch on some fruit or green. It’s fun and rewarding, but I know that our production is just a fraction of what it could be. Reading lots of books and experimenting have not turned me into a master gardener – I felt I needed to go back to class.  Dear Friends and Family, As I said, one of the exciting aspects of this new endeavor is that there are so many people who are trying to figure out how to grow food in a healthy, equitable, restorative way. Yesterday, I went to a Meetup hosted by the Boston Food Forest Coalition to work with some fellow farm folks at an Audubon sanctuary in Mattapan (two weeks ago, I attended another BFFC Meetup in Dorchester to plant a food forest on an urban waste plot with about 50 other volunteers and had a lot of fun). The BFFC is a very active organization that works with neighborhoods and neighbors to plant food forests all around Boston. At the Meetup, I met: Michael, the older Audubon groundsman full of knowledge and energy; Betty just back from Barbados; Mesquita a student from UMass; Gail who has a small apple orchard in Vermont; Alex from Germany, consultant to FIFA and organizer of the pro-soccer league in India; Ginny, a young autistic woman, eloquent and proud of her identity; and Orion, the director of the BFFC, who, as I found out, was a former international development expert (sound like a familiar story?…). I mention all of these folks because the sheer diversity of people interested in growing food in new ways is something to celebrate. Our tasks were to put mouse protection around the fruit trees (Alex and Gail in the photo) and mulch the blueberries and raspberries with wood chips (Orion below).  Dear Friends and Family,
We all eat. In fact, producing food is humanity’s largest endeavor. Every year, we produce almost ten trillion pounds of food — vegetables, fruits grains, meat, fish, mushrooms, eggs… It swamps other huge industries like cars and trucks, of which we produce a mere 400 billion pounds per year. According to Toensmeier in The Carbon Farming Solution, about half of the greenhouse gases we produce come from growing, processing, and transporting food. But there is a flipside: in the wonderful book, Drawdown, we find that changing what we eat, how we grow food and plants can help to restore the planet. Really: we humans can be part of the solution!  Dear Friends and Family, Today was my first day back in the garden after a long hiatus recovering from various surgeries and going on a 7-week long walk through Spain and France along the old pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostella. I started by day back with my first-ever official garden walk-through. This is when you take a little walk in your garden, looking at what needs some attention, noting what is doing well and what is new. Edible Forest Gardens (Jacke and Toensmeier) recommend doing this in their book. It was a lot of fun, and it’s true that you notice a lot of things that need to be done! The list was too long, but I wanted to start by making sure the new paw-paw seedlings and the blueberries are protected from the rabbits that always eat the ends off the new branches during winter. The paw-paws got little chicken wire cages, and the blueberries got wrapped in burlap. While I was there, I also cleaned the blueberry and asparagus beds, taking out the Creeping Charlie (Glechoma hederacea) and other plants that had grown there. But Creeping Charlie turns out to be compatible with blueberries and asparagus and to accumulate phosphate and potassium, so I put the pulled plants back on the beds as mulch. Then I added comfrey leaves for additional nutrients. The blueberries got a thick bed of pine needles, and the asparagus got a thick bed of leaves with some pine on top. Yummy! Leaves tend to form a rather impermeable layer, but a post from Snakeroot Farm said the asparagus spears will push through it and they will like the leaves. I also carried a little plastic table around with all my tools and materials. This is quite a handy invention; I will make a photo next time and post it!
Hooray for being back in the garden! Tot gauw, Babette |