#i grew up in a family that composted (garden/plant people) and went to a college that was big on composting

[mildmayfoxe]

i feel like i dont see people talking enough about composting. like we had the big push to get rid of plastic straws but where's the big push for composting. hell they even give out compostable straws now a lot of places. but wheres the COMPOSTING!! there should be compost bins on every corner. there should be free composting provided by every city. how can you expect me to watch an ad where people are scraping food waste into the trash when they could be composting. you guys are throwing away your food?? in the TRASH??? why aren't we on this

[revlyncox]

Trees (2021)

A talk abut growth, hope, and paying attention to history

Revised and expanded for the Washington Ethical Society by Lyn Cox

February 7, 2021

In this place halfway between the beginning of winter and the beginning of spring, we draw on imagination and memory, caution and optimism, hope for the future and learning from the past. Many of these things are contained in stories.

I don’t know if the story happened exactly this way, but I believe it’s true. A sage, a wise person, was walking along the road and saw someone planting a carob tree. The sage asks, "How long will it take for this tree to bear fruit?" "Seventy years," replies the gardener. The sage then asks: "Are you so healthy a person that you expect to live that length of time and eat its fruit?" The gardener answers: "I found a fruitful world, because my ancestors planted it for me. Likewise I am planting for my children." I will tell you where this story is from because I want to give credit, but I also want to notice that this story has a universality to it, a truth that the beginnings of things we set in motion can have an impact long past the horizons of our own lives. This story is from the Talmud, a collection of rabbinic conversations on ethics and customs. (Talmud Ta'anit 23a)

We drink from wells we did not dig and eat from trees we did not plant (Deut. 6:11). Our physical, intellectual, and religious lives depend on those who have gone before. Following their example will lead us to plant literal and figurative trees for the world of the future.

I believe caring for ourselves AND others will help us sustain a shared life of meaning and compassion for a long time.

My first semester studying for my M.Div. degree in California, I worked at one college in the south bay area, and went to school in the east bay area. I enjoyed the fragrance of eucalyptus trees around both campuses. The dry leaves rustled in the breeze, leaves rubbing together like the wings of singing crickets. Some people were distracted by the sound and allergic to the smell, but I liked them. The eucalyptus trees were tall and graceful. One might imagine that they had always been there. There’s a story about those trees. I don’t know if it happened exactly this way.

The American West in the late 1800’s was heavily influenced by dreams of getting rich quick. Non-native eucalyptus trees were brought from Australia because they grew quickly. It was imagined that the lumber and oil would become quickly replaceable commodities for those who farmed them. They were promoted as ornamental trees for rich landowners new to the area and not used to treeless landscapes. Eucalyptus trees were all over California by the 1900’s, and were tested for use as railroad ties. They didn’t work out. Eucalyptus from Australian virgin forests, seasoned and treated properly, behaves differently than eucalyptus grown from seeds in California, hastily treated, and set down in the Nevada sand. Some of the railroad ties were so cracked they couldn’t hold spikes. Some decayed within four years.

The trees themselves grew like weeds. They did what non-native species are famous for doing: thriving in the new environment, edging out diverse native plants that provide food and habitat, with consequences for the entire food chain. An attempt at a quick profit turned out to have unintended consequences. Recently, there has been more discussion in that region about restoring native trees, but it’s complicated. To say that it will take time to mitigate the damage of an invasive species is an understatement. Then again, compare that to the 2,000-year growth of some living redwood trees. May we learn patience and commitment from slow-growing trees.

We strive to be among those people who have the hope and imagination it takes to envision a world of justice and compassion, a world of liberation and self-determination, a world of peace where people sit calmly in the shade of slow-growing trees. In our neck of the woods, we might imagine a world where every person lives in safety and abundance, with access to the shade of a Witch Hazel, Hackberry, or Redbud tree; the three logically native trees our Earth Ethics Action Team recently arranged to have planted on the WES property. In folk music and wisdom tales, slow-growing trees symbolize enough time for a generation to grow without being uprooted by hunger or violence.

The California eucalyptus story reminds us that some of the environmental mistakes we humans have made were decisions made by a few but using the resources and the risk pool of many. Another time, we can unpack the harm that white American westward expansion had on indigenous land rights and communities, and on the horrors of labor exploitation involved in the transcontinental railroad, and on the energy and resources that were available for white colonization but not reparations for formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. Understanding the wrong choices that have been made in the past may help us turn toward making better choices as a society going forward. We can play an active role in the governments, corporations, and organizations to which we belong and who act on our behalf. Let us embody these relationships for repair and renewal.

Contrast the rushed, climate-disrupting story of the eucalyptus trees with the story of George Washington Carver. I had to catch up on some of his story this week, when my kids noticed discrepancies between what was said about Dr. Carver in the elementary school reader on our bookshelf and what they had read elsewhere. Some of us learned in school that the most important contribution Dr. Carver made as a scientist was discovering and promoting new uses for peanuts, but this version of his story is grossly oversimplified and obscures the way his research and activism supported Black self-determination as well as environmental repair.

After he graduated from the Iowa State Agricultural College in 1896, Dr. Carver accepted a position at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Riding on the train to his new home, he noticed immediately that growing nothing but cotton was causing soil erosion and depletion. He had scientific solutions to that. What took longer was figuring out how to empower Black farmers -- especially those who were being exploited as sharecroppers -- to feed their families, improve their chances for subsequent years, and still make enough money to try to get out of debt. Smithsonian Magazine quotes biographer Mark Hersey about the way Dr. Carver understood the problem:

“What Carver comes to see,” Hersey says, was that “altering [black sharecroppers’] interactions with the natural world could undermine the very pillars of Jim Crow.” Hersey argues that black Southerners viewed their lives under Jim Crow through an environmental lens. “If we want to understand their day to day lives, it’s not separate drinking fountains, it’s ‘How do I make a living on this soil, under these circumstances, where I’m not protected’“ by the institutions that are supposed to protect its citizens? Carver encouraged farmers to look to the land for what they needed, rather than going into debt buying fertilizer (and paint, and soap, and other necessities—and food). Instead of buying the fertilizer that “scientific agriculture” told them to buy, farmers should compost. In lieu of buying paint, they should make it themselves from clay and soybeans.

So ends the excerpt. Dr. Carver understood way before what we think of as the modern environmental justice movement that liberation and conservation are entwined projects. The decisions we make for our families, for our communities, and for the planet all go together, and they all benefit from remembering interdependence and the long years of generations to come. Honoring the very beginnings of things, continuing to work on hopes that are barely tangible, believing in the distant future, allows us to live into Beloved Community. White Supremacy depends on the hurry-up-and-profit mindset that brought cracked eucalyptus logs to the Nevada desert. Beloved Community invites us to consider what may come from a seed.

Strong trees grow slowly. Strong communities learn and grow and make connections to other communities little by little over decades. Healing takes time. Repair takes time. And for all of these, we can’t always tell that it is happening. In most cases, we don’t see the seed unfolding under the soil. Our senses are not adjusted to notice the growth of trees right in front of us. Sometimes resilience is about knowing in your heart that change is possible, even when the evidence is not yet obvious.

The nearly imperceptible beginnings of change are also a theme in the earth-honoring holiday of Imbolc. The Celtic calendar where this holiday comes from is rooted in the seasons of light and dark of the northern hemisphere and the agricultural cycles of western Europe. At approximately the same time of year in the British Isles and here in the mid-Atlantic, the middle of winter means that we can start to perceive the time of sunrise and sunset edging toward spring, just a little more daylight each day.

February into March is the time of year when lambs start to be born, vulnerable and full of promise for the coming spring. It’s still cold outside! One theory for where the word Imbolc comes from is that it’s related to the word for sheep milk. The lambs need a lot of help to stay warm and to survive. Yet their arrival shows the persistence of life. Sometimes resilience is about remembering that life is possible.

This is also the time of year when people who grow vegetables in climates like ours make a plan for the next six months, gathering seeds, starting a few indoors, and figuring out how to make the most of the soil and sun that will be available later. Making plans at this in-between time of year takes courage.

For earth-honoring folks in Celtic traditions, the goddess Bridget (and, in her later form, St. Bridget of Kildare) is associated with this early February holiday. In the legends, Bridget protects access to clean, healing water. She is also a figure of light and flame. When you put fire and water together, you can make entirely new things out of what you had before. You can forge iron, cook food, sculpt clay and fire it into ceramics. Maybe this transformative potential is why Bridget is also associated with childbirth, poetry, healing, song, and art.

There is one thing that newborn lambs, vegetable seeds, soup ingredients, raw iron, and future poetry all have in common: They don’t look at the beginning the way they are going to look at the end. You have to have some hope and imagination to believe in the transformation that is coming. You have to keep doing what you are doing, when the evidence for success has not yet appeared. We need to hold on through the long term, through step-by-step processes, through the discomfort of growth and change. And so another thing we learn at Bridget’s holiday is the need for commitment.  

If we’re paying attention to a legendary figure of generosity, art, and transformation, it’s a good idea to listen to the voices of poets who figured out how to sustain themselves and their families and communities through difficult times. During Black History Month, we are reminded of many examples of poets and artists who showed and inspired perseverance as they provided hope and imagination about a better world that was not yet fully manifest.

Back in October, on Vote Love Day, we heard about the story of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. She was born in Maryland in 1825 to free parents, was educated at her uncle’s school, and had published a book of poetry by the age of twenty. She became a full-time lecturer and writer, and she was an activist for abolition and for economic self-determination in the Black community. One verse of her 1895 poem, “Songs for the People,” [more on that poem here] reads:

Our world, so worn and weary,

  Needs music, pure and strong,

To hush the jangle and discords

  Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.

Harper was well aware of the injustice, economic inequality, and violence that still plagued the cities and towns where she toured. She didn’t fail to address any part of that system in her other writing. Yet she still saw a place for music and art. For Harper, poetry was not a distraction from building the Beloved Community, but one of the technologies that can help bring it into being. Out of intangible words and ideas are woven a network of visions that lift up possibilities for liberation.

Good things grow from beginnings that are not yet obvious. The forces that will become spring are already at work under the snow in the middle of winter.  

On the Jewish calendar, we’ve recently passed the holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the new year of trees. This is a minor holiday. It’s been around for hundreds of years, yet more people seem to be noticing it as we learn to connect spirituality with care for the earth. Sometimes people in Jewish homes and communities gather to eat different kinds of fruit and nuts, to give thanks for ways of growing, and recommit to stewardship of the planet. In regions where it makes sense, Tu B’Shevat is a time to plant trees.

Clearly, looking out the window today, it is not the right time to plant a tree where we live. Nevertheless, in our gratitude for trees, we are reminded of the growth and the fruition of work that exist because of what has come before. The forces that create and uphold life and our ancestors who cooperated with them knew that growth and resilience don’t always look that way from the outside. They knew that growth can start with something tough or plain. They knew the importance of allowing time and of giving thanks.

We drink from wells we did not dig and eat from trees we did not plant. As a community, part of our task is to muster the hope and imagination it takes to consider growth and resilience over time. We think long-term. We honor beginnings of change, even when they are hidden or barely perceptible. Let us be mindful of the impact of our choices, now and in the generations to come.

May it be so.

[organiclifestylemagazine]

Interview With Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms

Joel Salatin is an American farmer and author. He owns Polyface Farms, which is known for its small scale unconventional farming methods. Months ago I heard Joel on a Joe Rogan podcast and was immediately blown away. It’s not very often that we hear people discuss the gut microbiome on one of the most popular podcasts in the country.

Here’s that podcast. I highly recommend listening to it if you have the time.

Along with discussing the gut microbiome, Joel talked about his farm, Polyface Farms. Polyface Farms is located in Virginia, and they do things a little differently than most. The land that is now Polyface farms was purchased by Joel’s parents in 1961. They’re all about regenerative farming through sustainable practices, like pasture-raised meat, carbon sequestration, and working in a seasonal cycle.

In short, it’s a dream come true for someone like myself who is all about organic eco-friendly agriculture, so naturally, I had to ask Joel a couple of questions.

The older generation is a big fan of talking about life when they were young. My grandfather loves to talk about the fact that he was raised on cow’s milk, and he turned out “just fine.” The difference, of course, is that the milk he was raised on was unpasteurized small scale cows milk. What encouraged you to get into small scale sustainable farming? Does it relate back to how you were raised or did you have some sort of revelation in life? Feel free to comment on how things have changed if you have any thoughts on that.

My paternal grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine when it came out in the late 1940s.  He always wanted to farm but never did.  He had a very large garden, though, and sold extra produce to neighbors and corner grocers.  My dad received his no-chemical indoctrination, then, from Grandpa, so I’m the third generation in the compost tradition.  My Dad was a financial wizard and did accounting work all his life.  After flying Navy bombers in WWII, he went to Indiana University on the GI bill and then headed off to Venezuela, South America as a bilingual accountant with Texas Oil Company.  His long-range goal was a farm in a developing country and Venezuela seemed as good as any.  After about 7 years he’d saved up enough to buy 1,000 acres in the highlands of Venezuela and began farming.  The goal was dairy and broilers. My older brother and I were born during that time, and things looked bright.  But then came a junta and the ouster of Peres Jimenez and animosity toward anything American; we fled the back door as the machine guns came in the front door; lost everything and after exhausting all attempts at protection, (we) came back to the U.S. Easter Sunday 1961, landing in Philadelphia. Mom grew up in Ohio and Texas and all their family was in Ohio and Indiana, but Dad’s heart was still in Venezuela and he hoped after the political turmoil settled to be able to return to our farm.  

With that in mind, he wanted to be within a day’s drive of Washington D.C. so he could get to the Venezuelan Embassy quickly and easily to do paperwork and return. That never happened, but it’s why we ended up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.  When I hit 41, I remember thinking: “If I lost it all, would I start over?” That’s what Dad and Mom did in 1961. I was 4.  Dad did his accounting work, and Mom was a high school health and physical ed teacher; that off-farm income paid the mortgage and within 10 years the land was paid off.  Dad combined his ecology with his economic understanding to create some broad principles: animals move; mobile infrastructure; direct marketing; carbon-driven fertility.  I had my first flock of laying hens when I was 10 years old and then added a garden.  By 14 years old, I was our main salesman at the local Curb Market, a Depression-era hold-over that foreshadowed today’s farmers’ markets.  With only 3 vendors, it struggled but after a couple of years, we had a growing and steady clientele for our pastured meats, poultry, eggs, produce, and dairy products (yogurt, butter, cottage cheese). We closed it down when I went off to college and the other two elderly matrons at the market quite as well so by the time I came home, that market and all of its wonderful grandfathered food safety exemptions were gone forever.

I’ve always said we were about 20 years ahead of our time.  Operating that market during my teen years of early 1970s as the nascent back-to-the-land hippie movement germinated was not easy, but the lessons were invaluable when I returned to the farm and started building a clientele on my own in 1980, long before modern farmers’ markets. Teresa and I married in 1980, remodeled the attic of the farmhouse, and lived there for 7 years until Mom and Dad moved out from downstairs to a mobile home parked outside the yard.  My Mom’s mother had lived there for 10 years and passed away, making that spot available.  As an investigative reporter at the local daily newspaper, I realized every business was desperate for people who would show up on time, put in a full days’ work without whining, and actually creatively think through better ways of doing things all made me highly employable.  Living on $300 a month, driving a $50 car, growing all of our own, cutting our own firewood for winter warmth, not having a TV—all these things enabled us even without a high salary to squirrel away half the paycheck.  Within a couple of years we had saved enough to live on for a year.  I walked out of that office Sept. 24, 1982, with a one-year cash nest egg and the jeering of every person I knew”  “He’s throwing his life away.”  “All that talent and he’s going to waste it on a farm.” “Don’t you know you can’t make any money farming?”

We succeeded. 

While we were watching the podcast you did with Joe Rogan, my dad and I had several “Wow!” moments listening to you. One of us would be in the kitchen, and we would run into the living room where the podcast was playing, and share a look of absolute awe. “This guy is talking about the stuff that we talk about! And he’s on Joe Rogan!” We don’t know many people who talk about gut health the way we do. How did you learn about the importance of the body’s microbiome? Is there a correlation between your knowledge of the microbiome and how you run your farm? 

Perhaps the most profound truth in life is that everything we see floats in an ocean of invisible beings.  With electronic microscopes, we can now see many of these things, but because we can’t see them with the naked eye, they are not in our momentary conscience.  It’s hard to forget the microbes floating in the air, on our skin, in our eyes, nostrils, and intestines.  Our farm’s wellness philosophy stems from Antoine Béchamp, the French contemporary and nemesis of Louis Pasteur.  While Pasteur promoted the germ theory and busied himself destroying and sterilizing, Beauchamp advanced the terrain theory and encouraged people to think about basic immunity.  Rather than sterilization, he encouraged sanitation.  He encouraged folks to get more sleep, drink more and better water (much of the water at that time was putrid) and eat better food.  Along came Sir Albert Howard half a century later adding the soil dimension to this basic wellness premise.

In general, we believe nature’s default position is fundamentally wellness and if it’s not well, we humans probably did something to mess it up.  That’s a far cry from assuming wellness is like catching lightning in a bottle, and some sort of sickness fairy hovers over the planet dropping viral stardust willy nilly.  Sickness and disease, whether in humans, plants, or animals are not the problem in and of themselves; they simply manifest weaknesses developed in the unseen world.  Every sickness or disease we’ve ever had on our farm was our fault.  We may have selected the wrong seedstock, crowded things, created incubators for pathogens.  You can stress things a lot of different ways.  But our assumption when confronted with non-wellness is not to assume we missed a vaccine or a pharmaceutical, but rather to ask “what did we do to break down the immunological function of this plant or animal?”  That leads to far more profound truth than assuming we didn’t select the right connection from the chemistry lab.

The fact that today people actually talk about the microbiome in polite company is a fantastic societal breakthrough. Hopefully, it will continue.

The current “pandemic” resulted in a total collapse of our food chain at big grocery stores. While things have since calmed down and straightened out, many people are now aware of just how weak our food supply chain is. The obvious solution- buy small- scale, buy local. The obvious problem- buying meat the right way, (small scale and local) is expensive. Here where I am in Detroit we’ve got a great meat guy, but a couple of weeks ago I found myself at the Dekalb farmers market in Atlanta. I spent $9 for one pound of organic, grass-fed ground beef. What are your thoughts for people who are concerned about the costs of shopping ethically? On a broader scale, do you have any solutions to this? 

Price; it’s one of the biggest and most common questions.  So let’s tackle it on several fronts.

1.  Whenever someone says they can’t afford our food, I grab them by the arm and say “take me to your house.” Guess what I find there? Take-out, coffee, alcohol, sometimes tobacco, Netflix, People magazine, iPhones, flat-screen TV, tickets to Disney, lottery tickets—you get the drift. Very seldom does “I can’t afford it” carry any weight. We buy what we want, and that includes many folks below the poverty line.  

2.  Buy unprocessed. That $9 ground beef is still less than a fast food meal of equal nutritional value. Domestic culinary skills are the foundation of integrity food systems, and never have we had more techno-gadgetry to make our kitchens efficient. The average American spends fewer than 15 minutes a day in their kitchen. Nearly 80 percent of Americans have no clue at 4 p.m. what’s for dinner. In fact, the new catchphrase for millennials is “what’s dinner?” not “what’s for dinner?” So cooking from scratch is the number one way to reduce costs. Right now you can buy a whole Polyface pastured broiler, world-class, for less a pound than boneless skinless breast Tyson chicken at Wal-Mart. The most expensive heirloom Peruvian blue potato at New York City green markets is less per pound than Lay’s potato chips across the street. It’s about the processing.

3.  Buy bulk. Get a freeze and buy half a beef or 20 chickens at a time.  Buy a bushel of green beans and can them.  We buy 10 bushels of apples every fall and spend two days making applesauce; it’s cheaper than watery junk at the supermarket and is real food.  That’s not a waste of time; it’s kitchen camaraderie.  On our farm, we give big price breaks for volume purchasing because it’s simply more efficient to handle a $500 transaction than 25 $20 transactions.  This means, of course, that you must have a savings plan.  Half of all Americans can’t put their hands on $400 in cash.  That’s not an expensive food problem; that’s an endemic and profound failure to plan

Q: Here at OLM we’re a big fan of systems. We also have 10,000 square foot urban farm right in our back yard and are getting chickens very soon. Developing a farm feels a bit like an optimal opportunity to create the “perfect” system. I’m curious as to how the farm is systemized to be self-sustainable. I’m wondering if the farm is carbon neutral or carbon negative? Do you let your chickens work on your compost pile? Do you monitor cow grazing for optimum carbon sequestration? What advice do you have for the many people including us, who have just started growing our food after the current crisis?

Perhaps the starting point is to think of integration rather than segregation.  How many different species of things can you hook together for symbiosis?  So we follow the cows with the laying hens in Eggmobiles to scratch through the cow dung, spread out the manure as fertilizer, and eat the fly larvae out of the cowpats (this mimics the way birds always follow herbivores in nature).  We build compost with pigs (we call them pig aerators).  We have chickens underneath rabbit cages, generating $10,000 a year in a space the size of a 2-car garage and making the most superb compost in the world.  We see trees as carbon sinks to integrate with open land; industrial commercial chippers enable us to chip crooked, diseased, and dying trees for compost carbon.  The kitchen and gardening scraps go to the chickens.  Hoop houses for rabbits, pigs, and chickens in the winter double up as vegetable production in the spring, summer, and fall, creating pathogen dead-ends for the plants and animals growing there at different times of the year.  Integration is everything.

In half a century, we’ve moved our soil organic matter from 1 percent to 8.2 percent.  I don’t know if we’re overall carbon-neutral, but we’ve done this without buying an ounce of chemical fertilizer and using 800 percent less depreciable infrastructure per gross income dollar than the average U.S. farm.  That creates resilience.  Over the years we’ve installed 8 miles of waterlines from permaculture style high ponds that catch surface run-off and gravity feed to the farmland below.  And the rocks and gullies now grow vegetation where none grew before.  This is not pride; it’s a humble acknowledgment of a Creator’s benevolent and abundant design; it’s our responsibility to caress this magnificent womb.

Interview With Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms was originally published on Organic Lifestyle Magazine

[recordofmyreverie]

WWOOFer for a Day (March 2017)

WWOOF stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms. While I was on the cruise in Mexico, I had been researching options for traveling and working abroad and thought that I’d start first across the country. I’d always been interested in learning how I could live a life more independently with a low-cost of living, so I wanted to know how some people lived almost completely off-the-grid and self-sufficiently. 

I bought a membership to WWOOF’s database and explored my options with organic farms nearby. That’s when I found Milk and Honey Farm, an organic homestead run in Yadkinville by Eric, Melissa, and their five kids, Nora, Paul, Hattie, Christina, and 10-month-old Rebecca. 

Their farm was about a 2-hour drive away with rush-hour traffic on the morning drive. I had been emailing Eric and Melissa back and forth for about 3 weeks before coming up. I drove up to their homestead and farm on March 28th to see what it was all about. 

Through the winding roads and lush green hills of Yadkinville, I found their house located at the bottom of a hill on 40-Acres of land. The GPS could only take me so far, and then the rest of the way I followed their directions in the email that they’d sent to me. The farm was like I’d traveled more than just distance, but also time. 

I drove up the gravel drive-way to be greeted by a sleeping old dog named Red at the entrance, and the ducks scattered to make room for me to park my car. The sky was a bit overcast, but the weather was mild and breezy the whole day. Eventually the sea of clouds dissipated into cottontail rabbits by mid-afternoon. Perfect weather for a perfect afternoon on the farm. 

I got out of my car, and saw the children all standing there in curiosity at who could be visiting them that day. They’d met people from all over the world: New York City, France, Germany, and even the Philippines to list a few. I’m sure it was always exciting for them to see who was coming up to the farm next since they didn’t really have any neighbors close by, and it was a great way for them to learn about other cultures. The homestead was pretty isolated, but had no real need to be nearby anything when everything they’d ever need was right there. And they had each other.

Melissa invited me to come inside of their house which was build in the 1930s. It still had the original charm of the past, with a seemingly all-wooden interior. In the kitchen, there was a stove, an oven, a sink, a refrigerator, another refrigerator on the porch, then three more refrigerators in the outdoor pantry, but no microwave. She was cooking lunch in pressure-cookers on the stove that I’d never even heard of before. On the countertop there were about a dozen jars filled with milk. She was in the process of making and canning yogurt, and was going to move onto making butter and buttermilk too. Their two cows were both lactating, so there was currently a surplus of dairy options for their family that they had to figure out ways to make use of.

She asked me if I’d ever used a pressure cooker before. 

“Nope.”

She asked me if I’d ever made butter, yogurt, or buttermilk.

“Nope.”

She asked me if I’d ever made flour, cornstarch, grits, or anything completely from scratch or if I’d ever worked on a farm at all before. 

“Nope. It’s all new to me. Have you ever taught somebody about your way of living from scratch?” I said.

She said that it was pretty common that nobody knew where their food come or how it was made, but that her farm wasn’t the standard either since so much food that we eat comes from large manufacturing plants with added chemicals. But she showed me how food should be consumed naturally. 

She took me outside to show me around the farm. They grew apples, figs, persimmons, pears, blueberries, pecans (unsuccessfully), black tea, barley, wheat, ocra, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, radishes, grapes, peas, and they even had their own bees to make honey and brew mead. They had chickens to lay eggs for them, and to sit on eggs that were from other poultry; one hen sat on a duck’s eggs and was the new mother to three ducklings. They also had geese, African Ginnies, goats, and cows. 

Everyone in the family had a job every day except the baby. Even the four-year-old was responsible, smart, and caring enough and to carry and entertain the 10-month-old child. I was so impressed by the maturity and kind nature of these kids. They were all very humble, grateful, hard-working, and knowledgable. They were definitely brought up by great parents who taught them well, and they were also accepting and nice to strangers. 

I didn’t see a television anywhere in the house. There was no time for that. For entertainment, the kids read books, road their bicycles, chased the ducks, played with each other, wrote in their journals, or watched the live birth of their two-week-old calf, Gusty. 

I didn’t do much work on the farm since I was only staying for a day. They gave me easy tasks like re-planting onions from the seeds that sprouted and mulching the blueberry bushes.  Most of the day was spent just informing me about how things worked and how their family lived every day. 

After planting onions, we went inside for lunch and washed our hands with the handmade soaps in the kitchen which were made from lye and milk. Their family didn’t eat meat very often, and usually saved the butchering of farm animals for the winter months. Often they would rely on a diet of grains, dairy, and vegetables. We all sat around the dining room table and Eric delivered Grace. He even thanked God for my visit and prayed for me to have safe travels in the future!

We had sweet potatoes, steamed kale, beans of two different varieties, homemade grits, and salad. Melissa also made a delicious hibiscus tea and gave me a taste of her persimmon puree which she was going to later turn into pudding. We talked about past WWOOFers, their travels, and mine, and then we quickly cleaned up the table and saved our food scraps for the worms in the compost bin in the garden. With no wrappers or really anything covered in plastic, I couldn’t even find a garbage can in their household because everything was put to good use and never wasted. 

We went back to working on our individual projects, and then before I left I was given a tour of the farm of the parts I hadn’t seen yet. We finished making butter, and then Melissa told me the story of how she’d met Eric in college. She only knew about living on a farm and had never lived in the suburbs or the city until she went to NC State for Agricultural Studies. She said that college would have been a total waste for her if she didn’t meet Eric because she learned more about farming by actually doing, and learned more about the biology of plants in college rather than anything practical. Eric had lived in the city and the suburbs before, but he didn’t want to be stuck behind a desk the rest of his life and preferred life on a farm. He studied agriculture, and then studied abroad in Switzerland where he picked up beekeeping. He later WWOOFed on a farm in New Zealand, and learned that was what he wanted to do the rest of his life, only now he hosts his own WWOOFers in the summer. 

It was such a humbling and eye-opening experience being on their farm for just a day and I enjoyed spending time with their family so much. WWOOFing is definitely something that I’m going to do in the future, but first I’ve got my eyes set on living in Alaska this summer. There will be time again to work on a farm in the future, but I’d rather it be abroad for the full experience. I just hope that I can find a family that is as wonderful as theirs.

[peppurthehotone]

Last week I wrote this whole thing about wedding stories n’ such titled, “When the Fairy Tale Runs Dry“. Well, I’ve got another tale for you…

In September, I went to my college-roommate’s wedding. You know how these particularly special weddings go; they’re always a reunion of sorts where a lot of beer is consumed and hugs are hugged and drunken tears are shed over college memories relived and then suddenly it’s over. This wedding was no different, but it was sooo much more.

Photo by Lisa Stearns

I think Denise and I met the very first day we moved into the “Y” at Marquette University in Milwaukee, when we were eighteen years old. The “Y”, short for YMCA, had just been acquired by MU. It was a mid-sized building with a gym on the ground level and had several floors of apartments that I guess had been used for slightly transient people (?). I don’t know. I just know that it was the only dorm on campus with single rooms and I desperately wanted my own room. I know you guys know me to be super outgoing and friendly and stuff, but I’m actually afraid of people, especially strangers; especially certain stranger types from Wisconsin. (I’m from Wisconsin, so I know of which I speak. #RedState).

Trivia: We were the last MU class to be called Warriors before we became the Golden Eagles.

My stepmom is from Mississippi and was a part of this incredible program where Viterbo University sponsored or “sent for” or somehow got students from the South to come up North to be teachers. My stepmom was a pioneer to this program. It was the late 1960s or so. My stepmom told me about how when she arrived at the dorm to move in, her white roommate saw her and the girl moved out. Like immediately. I didn’t want that to happen to me ’cause I don’t like surprises; so I really wanted my own room.

Luckily, even though Denise and I didn’t actually become roommates until we moved off campus Junior year, she was nothing like that girl from Viterbo. Instead, Denise is this lovely, no-nonsense, blond, Irish Catholic from Massachusetts with rosy cheeks and an inviting smile. She has the biggest, most generous heart and funniest giggle-laugh. She’s anti-floss n’ fluff and shuns people and things who are. She also has this slightly wicked accent she always tried to cover up because its Boston-ness stuck out against our Wisconsin nasal. Wicked accent or not, she’s pretty awesome.

“D” and I just might be twin soul mates because it turns out our parents were both based at the Great Falls, Montana Air Force Base, possibly at the same freakin’ time! I was actually born in Great Falls, so, we were destined to be friends just like I’m destined to be Great.

Denise and I have this very cool ying-yang thing going on, and not for the visually obvious reasons. I’m chatty with strangers (“Heeeyyy everybody!”); Denise isn’t (“There she goes again.”). Denise is a crusader, a warrior; I’m not. She will boldly go where no woman has gone before; I wait back for the report and then go ahead on and follow. I’m taller, Denise isn’t. One year for Halloween, we stuck six cut-out feet on her and we made a sign that said, “All my life, I wanted to be six feet tall, and now I am.” And then at the Halloween party we went to, some idiot tore off one of the feet and she was back to 5’3.

Speaking of parties, this is one place where I would lead. Every night that we’d go out, she’d say, “Peppur, we’re not out all night. I have to study.” I’d say, “Okay!” and then we’d get home at 3 am. Because with a party, I am The Warrior . AND I know what Denise needs: Excitement! I’d do recon, locate the keg, spin my chatty, smiley, magic sword and within minutes, we’d be beer-laden and all was right with the world. Comrades would come from fraternities far and wide and we, Peppur and Denise, would hold court! Social shenanigans would ensue, and as any collegiate attendee knows, this work cannot be done in a matter of mere hours. Dawn must arise, Real Chili must be eaten and occasionally, (naked*) beer slides along a beer-drenched floor at a bar that has since closed, must be slid to prove our valor.

Real Chili in action.  Photo courtesy of “Wisconsin L” on Yelp.

We were all for one and one for all. Even if I was leading, Denise was watching from behind to make sure we didn’t get into any shit. To protect us. To shield us. Like that one time this fucker of a guy asked me my name, and when I said “Peppur!” and he said, “That’s too black. I’m going to call you something else.” Denise was right there to tell him to shut up and stabbed him in the neck with her words because all I managed was to stand there, sword clanking to the floor, fallen.

We were pals like that.

And, we didn’t just drink together, people. She’d listen to me when I’d come home from track meets and cry because I got second place instead of first. We’d go to the library and close it down together because getting a “B” in anything was not an option for either of us. On the weekends, she would come home with me to Kenosha and we’d have dinner with my parents and my brothers and do laundry and watch movies on the VCR. We really were pals, like that.

Later, after we got older and Denise had her own dental practice in St Charles, Illinois, she’d have my dad come down for his cleanings and stuff and she would never let him pay. She’d tell me, “That man let me do laundry at his house! His money is no good here.”

Fast forward to today. Denise moved back home to Massachusetts. Her marriage had ended and she simply wanted to be home. She bought her parent’s house from her mom, the one she grew up in, and was ready to make a new, quiet life for herself as a single woman living in a small town on the Cape.

In the Spring of 2017, way beyond those years when we’d go to my home to do laundry,  I finally, for the first time, made it to the warmth of hers. D’s mom and sister stopped by so we could hug and I could cry at the loveliness of it all; it felt so good to be at home.

Over coffee, after her mom and sister had left, D and I stared out her kitchen window.  A quietness fell over us. The kind that happens between friends. The kind that’s filled with shared memories and thoughts on mute. In that quietness, I knew we were both sort of exhaling. We’d both been through some things over the past year, the type of things that leave you retreated from what you believed to be true only to be placed front and center in a newness to be absorbed and welcomed. Alone. Like warriors. After a few moments, she pointed out her kitchen window and showed me where she’d wanted to plant a garden. “I want to be sustainable,” she’d said. Then she took me outside. While her dog ran about, playing hide and seek with the woods that surrounded her huge corner property, we walked the backyard with its expanse of grass and majestic pine trees and she showed me where she wanted to have chickens and goats. “For the kids I want to adopt,” she’d said. And as we stood back, standing where the garden would be, she told me how she wanted to add a wrap-around porch and bring some additional charm to this beautiful, quaint home that was built in 1890. “For my two rocking chairs,” she’d said.

The next day, we drove near the water. D and I walked along the water’s edge. It was past the tourist season on the Cape; the air was cool and we watched the calm waters before us just sort of exist. She told me how she would take her boat out there and get clams and mussels and how she used to fish with her dad. He’d passed away several years before and she shared these memories with me. There. Where’d they’d happened.

On our last night together, we drove the forty-five minutes out and spent the night in Boston. We were two post-collegiate girls out on the town. In our forties. We were actually a little sad, and not because staying out until 3 am and doing beer slides was no longer like, feasible, but because I was headed back home to Prague the next day, and who knew when we’d see each other again. We decided to soothe our sorrows at an Irish bar.

And that’s where this wedding story begins, guys. Because, THAT NIGHT, at THAT Irish bar, we met Denise’s new husband-to-be.

Denise and I were holding court; just the two of us, really. But I like to think Irish-wannabes had come from far and wide to be audience to our shenanigans that were now rousing “Remember When” stories we were rehashing to each other between sips of Jack. One tall gentleman, with a beard of slight scruff and eyes of bright blue happened upon us. I lifted my magic sword and said, “What say you, man? Join us!”

And join us, he did.

How they fell in love, and all that stuff, is their wedding story. To be told by them. But what I CAN tell you is that Jay of Slight Scruff is mean with a power tool, and with a cast-iron skillet, and with fixin’ boats, and makin’ compost; he’s a dad and he can strum a few tunes on the guitar. Denise loves that kind of stuff.

Together, they built their own version of Chip & Joanna’s Magnolia Farms known quaintly as Harborside. Handyman Jay built a chicken coop and a goat barn and three garden beds and you guessed it, a wrap-around porch. This past April, Matt and I (#WeLiveInLA) went for a visit and we got in on the fun farmy stuff too! We harvested eggs from the chickens, pet the goats and sent baby dust to one of which that had just been mated (or, schtupped). I planted some raspberries in the garden and Matt, tooling about with a wheelbarrow wearing city slicker hard-soled shoes, helped Jay plant some barley (for homemade beer, of course) and sunflowers. Over homemade whiskey, we toasted to their newly-announced engagement and they spoke of wanting a simple wedding in the back yard, Harborside.

All was right with the world.

And then, right after Jay finished building the wrap-around porch, a bit of tragedy-not-tragedy-but-tragedy happened. The house caught on fire. Every bit of the 1890’s house, that housed her family for over twenty-five years, was licked by flame or singed by smoke. Destroyed.

Most people would crumble and just like, die. But not my friend, Denise. Yes, she bawled and had her own moments of buckling as she and Jay and her family took assessment of so many things lost in the fire. But like I said, she’s a warrior. She stuck to the fact that no one did die, including her dog who had been trapped in the home alone when the fire broke out. Guys, AT THE WEDDING, via friends of friends, she found out that a stranger driving by had seen the flames and the dog inside, stopped and let the dog out!

The wedding went on. In the backyard, as planned. The burnt out house was open for browsing and marveling; a backdrop to it all. But really, it was a reminder to what’s actually important in life: Rebuilding.

Matt. Thinking this photo was not a good idea.

  Our college girlfriends came together from our corners of the world, to uphold, be witnesses to, and be there for our dear friend. Ready to continue the story and build more memories.

Pep, Denise, Lisa and Jenny (Julie is there in spirit from CO and Annie is there in spirit from heaven.)

Right before she went on, D called me aside. She pulled me into the trailer and she said, “I want you in here with me and my mom and Jay’s girls while I get ready.” I followed the leader. I helped tie the pink satin ribbon she wanted around her waist to match those of the two young girls, to whom she would be a new stepmom. I watched as her mom put on her sparkly necklace which I think was the something borrowed and blue. I watched as Denise applied her own lipstick; a lovely muted, sheer and rosy plum from NARS. Simple, pretty and sophisticated, just like her (and maybe the something new). And that was it. Nothing else was needed. My friend was going boldly into a new life. One I knew she’d dreamed of and waited for even though we’d never really spent those umpteen girly hours talking about such things. Watching her, I knew that all she really wanted was love, respect, a place to peacefully and happily grow those things…and a few chickens and goats.

As I was about to leave, she said, “Hold on, Pep!” She handed me a bouquet of sunflowers that matched hers, “I want you to be in my wedding.” You know how I told you I don’t like surprises? Well, this one was okay.

Yes, I was crying.

Under an awning made from the burnt bathroom doors re-purposed and repainted with love, Jay and Denise gave their vows and got married. And, yes, when the officiant said that part about “Through good times and bad…” everyone knew that the bad had already passed and it was time to let the good times roll. Simply.

More about this later.

      *Note: The ‘Lanche was known for Naked Beer Slides. People would throw their beer on the floor. Boys n Girls would strip, run and slide. Although I wanted to have the courage to do this, I never did. Neither did Denise. #GoMarquette.

When Warriors Lead. Last week I wrote this whole thing about wedding stories n' such titled, "When the Fairy Tale Runs Dry…