Starting Seeds

Began the late winter ritual tonight, with one small laborer.  I was management.

Straight Lines

It was seventy degrees today, and I spent the morning laying out the planting beds at the Cedar Ridge Farm - eight large beds, either 20 x 30 or 40 x 30, bisected by 10 foot wide paths.  The work itself was tremendously satisfying - straight lines of string, hard whacks on wooden stakes, the creak and crack of a winter soft body protesting against the work.

But what I desperately needed, and this day gave me, was a day outside, alone.  After a week when everyone wanted a piece of me - work, kid, house - there was just nothing of me left, and I needed some silence and wind and dirt to put myself back together again.

I wasn't completely alone.  I brought Otis, more for his own spring fever than for company for me.  I glanced up once from my measuring and pounding and saw him romping, flinging my discarded bright blue sweater in the air and leaping after it, full of bliss.  I think I'll always remember the sight - brown soil and light straw, gray sky, brown and black dog, and a blue sweater like a banner in the wind.

My joy today was more sedate than Otis', but inside I was leaping, too.

Thaw

Fifty degrees on Valentine's day, a gift to all the worms and birds and squirrils and people from mother nature, a big fat kiss to wake up all sleeping beings and prepare us for the big spring day ahead. I'm ready.

Seed Order

Here is the 2011 seed order list:

Broccoli "Early Purple Sprouting"
Cucumber "Solly Beiler"
Cucumber "Marketmore"
Huckleberry "Chichiquelite"
Ground Cherry
Kale "Blue Curled Scotch"
Leek "Giant Musselburgh"
Pea "Lincoln"
Winter Squash "Red Kuri"
Wormwood
Cosmos "Sensation Mix"
Dahlia "Unwing Mix"
Nasturtium "Moonlight"
Nicotania "Fragrant Delight"
Yarrow "Parkers Variety"
Sunflower "Tarahumara White Seeded"

Why wormwood, do you ask?  Homemade absinthe, of course.  I joke.  Mostly.

Eating meat from the garden

Wendell Berry famously wrote that "eating is an agricultural act."  Once you begin to think of food as the product of agriculture, of farms and gardens (rather than supermarkets or makers of boxes of cereal or macaroni or whatnot) you are forced to think about the kind of farm your food came from, and the kind of life your food lived before it became food.  Or at least I've found that to be true for me.

Yesterday I cooked a meal for friends, and we sat down together at a big table, gave thanks for the food and the goodness of eating together, and ate bowls of home made beef stew.  But for me the eating (although not the sitting down together) came with remorse.  The beef was from the supermarket, and for a couple of years now I have eaten meat primarily from local farms that raise their animals humanely on pasture, rather than on grain and confined in feedlots.  I've been thinking a lot about why I've been doing that, and how it fits in with my garden obsession.

If eating is an agricultural act, and if the kind of agriculture I want to "eat" is one that looks something like a healthy garden - one that cares for the health and well being of all life within its fence posts - I am required to leave out the feedlot beef and warehoused chickens.  I can imagine a garden with animals (in fact I want one, with hens) but I can imagine no healthy garden that can abide confining a suffering animal.  And so to eat one of those poor beasts I must eat outside the garden, which is something I am trying to do less and less of.

In one of my favorite novels a struggling priest asks his mentor how to know if prayer is successful.  The mentor tells him that prayer works if you can act less like a shit head afterward.  My effort to eat meat from animals that have not unnecessarily suffered is a bit like that - I realize I still act like a shit head when it comes to food a lot, since I do still eat meat in restaurants and take my kid to Five Guys for burgers on occasion, but if thinking of humane meat as meat from animals that have lived a garden life rather than a feedlot life helps me eat less like a shit head...than I can judge it a success.

White on White

A heavy snow fell yesterday.  Perfect for sledding, for coating fence rails just so, for catching on a small boy's tongue.  It made a lovely backdrop for my white amaryllis, just coming into full bloom.  I love the snow for its beauty and for the lovely weight of silence it imposes - and also for enforcing a sort of neighborliness, where people shovel each other's walks and push each other's cars from drifts.  I have neighbors I only talk to after it snows. 

But the snow also took down the wire delivering Internet to the house, shattered my car's back window, and tore limbs from all of the neighborhood magnolias.  And by this morning the pure sheet of white that was my back porch is pocked with yellow holes where Otis the Tenderfooted prematurely relieved himself, too wimpy to go down to the yard.

I am realizing that I am drawn to gardening largely because beauty and fruitfulness are entwined with ugliness and death.  All my attempts to reconcile the beauty and goodness of life with the suffering and evil that goes along with it have failed to deliver a satisfying answer.  But in the garden, where the drama of life and death and decay is repeated in an annual lesson with beings that can commit no sin, I begin to learn the lessons religion might teach me, if it could, if I would let it.  A magnolia may be torn open in January, its newly bare trunk gashed and ugly against the snow, but come spring it will set buds and bloom on its remaining limbs, and send up new shoots to replace the ones it lost.  I am afraid to see what lesson that might have for me - perhaps that one can endure unimaginable pain and yet live and bloom - because it would require me to acknowledge the unbearable possibility of loss.

Political Seeds

It is time to order the seeds.  I usually love looking through the catalogs, marking every single page with yellow stickies and highlighter, fantasizing about all I will grow.  I mark much more than I order, I order much more than I plant, and I plant much more than I eat - year after year, the same old story.  This year, though, I am relying more on my CSA for vegetables and am going to focus on growing the things Gorman Farm won't supply in any quantity - asparagus, peas, fruit.  Sadly, I can order the seeds I need for my scaled-back veggie patch in a few minutes.  Scaling back is practical, but it sure isn't as much fun.

But there is another reason I'm feeling less enthusiastic about looking through seed catalogs.  Buying seed has become a political act, and I feel both resentful and stymied.  Recently Monsanto (the company that brought us Roundup-ready crops) bought a seed company called Seminis.  Seminis provides 40% of the country's seed, and if you buy from any of the mainstream seed companies - Johnny's, Stokes, Burpee - you have a good chance of buying Seminis seed.  Now, just because Monsanto owns Seminis doesn't mean all those seed varieties we've bought from Burpee for years are suddenly evil.  But it does mean some portion of the revenue from that seed now goes to Monsanto, and that sticks in my craw. 

My solution?  I'll probably buy from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.  Their catalog is the one on top of the pile in the basket in the photo at top.  The company is owned and run by a couple of wacky back-to-the-landers in Missouri who enjoy dressing up in period clothing and re-enacting pioneer days, which I find somewhat endearing.  I am aware that by buying from Baker Creek I am also engaging in a political act - but it is one I can live with.  Power to the seeds.