Second Spring

 

Hot on the heels (or is that, coldly nipping at the heels?) of First Spring, comes the mayhem of Second Spring. Clear days approaching warm followed by snow that plays mayhem with morning commutes only to disappear by lunch. At the greenstead, this time requires constant motion combined with a focus on the long term, instantaneous reaction paired with faith in the long slow progression of earth in her orbit. 

This year, Second Spring was Nettle Spring, early March madness devoted to snapping tender tips as nettles push up from the leaves. Already, these plants are stretching, gathering up urticaceousness sufficient to keep the tender-skinned at bay through summer. Only about a week  separates the hidden in humus from the lanky "Howdy, you're a might late ain't ya?" wave of the stinging nettle, but this year I managed to gather a couple big grocery bags full and freeze them for later. To get more this year, I'll need to head up, following Nettle Spring into the lagging hills.

But here at the greenstead, Second Spring gives the snowdrops a rest while the daffodils begin opening. Grass grows rank, berries black and blue loose leaves from huddled buds. The wild greens get a head start on the planted ones; some say this is weeds getting the upper hand, but I see it as first course of the long garden feast.

But there is planting to be done in Second Spring, especially successive sowings of spinach, broadcasts of poppies, rills of radishes, pokings of peaseeds, and all the other cold spring crops. Sow early, sow often. If round one succumbs, the next will fill in, but if it succeeds, I get to eat early. I plant too soon because it just may pay off, books and master gardening 'wisdom' be damned. 

 There's still time in the prequinox to make some last minute moves: take those blueberries languishing under the hazelnut and put them where they stand a chance. Gather up that rhubarb from the not-quite-right spot before its leaves turn from pale crinkly February scrotums to stalks aroused by full-on Spring.

A little weeding this early (whether it yield a meal or not) is a good bet. Dandelions plucked easily with small roots in moist soil will never be this cooperative again. Grasses can even be manageable. It's time to decide where you want to let blackberries roam, and where you will do battle. A minute of Second Spring becomes an hour of Summer. 

In truth, Second Spring is already over. Most of the perennials are already putting on growth. Firework bursts of flax have exploded everywhere, valerian and lupines remind me they are not dead yet, emerging from the grave. It'll be too late to plant early things soon (or will it? I push the boundaries in both directions, because you never know when we'll get one of those everlasting springs), and there are still those clean-up jobs lingering from First Spring procrastination. I observe with a mixture of anticipation and franticism that the soil is warming, that dry days arrive more often,...and I rush.

But not so much that I cannot pause to soak in sun that actually has some warmth. Not so frenetic that there is not time to listen to the varied thrushes with the mellow substrate to a growing list of songbird virtuosos inhabiting the Indian Creek watershed. With each new Spring, new levels of beauty and bliss, the kiss of the sun awakening passions from chlorophyllic cells to the sparrows nesting in the birdhouse by the door.

Cutouts, Or the Sunken Raised Bed

 

In that interim between freezing and foliating, I tend to engage in a campaign of expanding cultivated area. Out comes the flat-bladed spade, and back go the grassy margins. Beds expand, the ground still wet and soft enough to dig and shake soil from grass-roots, dandelions readily separated from matrix. Then, I rake the dirt into a raised bed, which usually rises no higher than the surrounding grass, the persistent mockingly unproductive remnant. There are no wooden or masonry edges, just a low ziggurat slouching in a cutout of the lawn.

The bed is soil mixed up bottom to top so any remaining weeds lay dispersed and unrooted, easy to pluck out later. Seeds in, weeds out, so goes the next few days. The weeding continues: pluckings of non-productive obviocracy, cullings of non-crops, ferreting out of sneakerweeds. The seeds sprout and flourish. 

Sandy soil makes this easy. No clay-clung weed-root balls propagating. Easy extraction. 

My hope is that unimpeded root-foods will grow large here, that cultivars will flourish into the weed-freed spaces. We'll see...Even the weeds that may emerge are better eating than the pathetic lawn that preceded them...

Occupy Our Food Supply - Herbs First

Beginning the cure.

I admit it, I'm more of a slowcial media person than a twitterbug, and so it is that I'm only finding out late on the day itself that February 27th is Occupy Our Food Supply day, when we stand up to Monsanto, Cargill, ADM and the very few others who control most of the seed and crops. And, I guess I should mention, the vast market in chemicals that most food growers use.

So what can one blogger do? Coincidentally, I planted 8 more blueberry bushes today, but it'll be a while before production outstrips the capacity for the kids to eat them before they make it into pies, much less the freezer. I could write about problems with the food system, but plenty of people have done that. I might even conjure up a pipeline of dreams about living off the agribusiness grid, about a self-feeding urban greenstead, but who am I kidding, I still use stores.

Or I could just talk about the one part of my life in which I exercise food autonomy: herbs. People with space might've gone for a staple-ish staff of life, some storable starch on the potato to quinoa continuum. Canning mavens may've favored veggies or fruit sufficient to put up a year's supply. And of course, there are the chicken yarders, beginning and ending with the egg. 


But me, I likes me some spice, some flavoring. And, I am kinda lazy. So at this point, all the self-sufficiency I can point to is on the herban front. I buy no garlic, no oregano, no thyme, no mint, no chives. It's a small success, but I grow enough of these to eat all I want (and I want a lot, profligate herber that I am).


There are some things that would be hard to grow here in Olympia--tropical exotica, and some years even a decent chile--but for those this town is lucky enough to have Buck's spice shop, where you can get just about anything you can think of, from local alder-smoked salt to finely tuned curries, not to mention some fine conversation. They do mail order, but I'm lucky enough to be able to walk in, sniff around til I find what I want, and buy however much or little my taste-buds desire. If you read my blogs, you know I'm no shiller or plugger, but in this case it makes sense to send readers to this finest of spice ladies. 

Are the agri-giants are quaking in their boots, knowing that I grow my own herbs and buy spices from a freedom-fooder? Probably not, but my autonomy is mine, not a foil to their hegemony. Small a step as it is, growing my own herbs is a move away from McCormick monotony and corporate subjectitude. I'm  getting closer to doing the same with growing tomatoes (weather permitting, I should get there this year), and will keep buying as much as I can of everything else from local farmers. Maybe I'll even get off my ass and start making my own salt this year, something that hasn't happened in the years since I stopped working in Kona. 


Life will continue to taste good, and the big boys will get an iota less. I may not be an important voice, Pollanating the culture, making corporations Shiva, but I do what I can, and for me, that begins with aiming my money where it benefits farmers most, and starting on the road to self-sufficiency with some tasty flavors. 





  

First Spring

Spring in the northwest defies the simple "April showers bring May flowers" logic I grew up with back east. Since arriving here four years ago, I've been presented with several theories about how it works: Spring comes late some years, Spring takes it's own sweet time reaching fullness, there is no Spring between Rain and Summer. According to my yard and the plants and critters of the maritime northwest, however, the truth is that there are many Springs.

A foot of snow and ice may have distracted us, but First Spring began not so long after the Winter Solstice, as the earth revolves toward longer days, and some things begin to awaken. But if you looked closely at those branches downed by the storm, you could see swelling alder buds, catkins, and other signs of growth. By mid-February, even in my procrastinating yard (which seems to do everything a week or so after the rest of Olympia), shoots are emerging from the ground, blueberry buds are swelling, and the grass is growing again. Even garlic in the pantry is heeding the call, going soft and sending out roots and shoots.

It will take months for this precursory promise to become full flower, but it's enough to keep me going. More than that, to get me going. Emergence begets urgency. Dormancy is slipping away, so it's time to transplant those things I intend to move, plant new fruit I want to establish, and cut those scions if I am wont to graft. Seeds need sorting, new beds must be dug, bushes and trees cry out for pruning so they can grow in the right direction, and so on. Garden gear stashed or abandoned in the Fall has to be checked and fixed (or culled), and Winter's windfall is not totally sorted, stacked, and otherwise re-deployed. The list grows longer as time flows faster.

First Spring is the farmer's breakfast, imbibed early while the rest of the world sleeps, warming the belly and fueling the body for work that must be done. While the rest of the world awaits the more obvious Spring, replete with flowers and sunshine, here at the greenstead those first shoots and sprouts say it's time to wake up from that long Winter's nap. Subtle snowdrop blooms and blushing budswells reinvigorate me with beauty--latency before blatancy--and serve as quiet reminders before fully unfurled foliage says it's too late to be ahead of the game.

Some people are already busy starting seeds under lights and on heating pads. Maybe I am too cheap to buy the gear or the watts (in more pious moments, I'd say I'm loathe to consume too much), and it definitely could be that I procrastinate (or, sayeth the self-righteous me: not hubristic enough to force nature to my timetable). In the end, I know that come April I can support local growers by buying their starts at the Farmers Market: I get a good healthy selection without having had to buy seeds months ago, and they get some income before crops are ready.


Another thing that has been on people's minds over the past few months has been planning. I've never been that disciplined, and since the garden skeleton (trees and bushes, the woody parts that don't move so readily) is articulated already, I don't do that much planning. While others studied and fretted, I ate and carved. At some point soon, I'll think about how I want to flesh out the gardens as I plant spinach and radishes, but for the most part the foodscape is formed by habit and whim. Shoots of garlic, daffodils, and tulips, as well as the hoop house full of embiggening lettuce and spinach seem to suggest that I did some planning last Fall, but I don't recall. The seasons, and in particular this year's version of how they will play out, have their own plan, and I am mostly just along for the ride.


Which brings me back to where I started: First Spring. Spring begets Summer begets Fall is way too simplistic, and not so helpful. The first year I was here, I saw signs of Spring and immediately started planting. The result? I had some beans that sprouted and remained in suspended animation as tiny seedlings for a few months, while the rest just rotted in the ground. Things like that need to wait til Warm Soil Spring, which is after Nettle Spring and Burgeoning Spring. OK, I am just making up those names on the fly, but the point is that the seasons hold more complexity than how our calendar is drawn and quartered. Look at the "moons" identified by farmers, or those named in Lushootseed and the other native languages of our region, and you'll see that for most of our history, humans had a more refined appreciation of what happened to their world as it swung round the sun.

Severe Windfall

 

The weather has cleared, but the debris has not, which means that it is time to apply Clearing Theory. The storm that dumped over a foot of snow and ice pulled down billions of branches, and people are still clearing and cleaning; yesterday I saw a convoy of pick-ups and trailers filled with alder and others, headed for the city's overflow pile. Back at Mojourner Truth, I wrote about the normal windfall of alder, and how I'm one of those back to the earth freaks who welcomes the organic rain of catkins, cones, and twigs.

But the aftermath of an ice storm is a different thing. Not the normal seasonal droppings. More like the difference between the farmer whose flock drops fertile pellets and the farmer who awakes to find the pasture strewn with the torn remains of a chupacabra frenzy. My usual compulsive conservation of biomass broke down, and a couple of small loads went to the city's chipper.

Not all of the severed limbs went away, though. Surgical machete work first freed the biggest pieces, which will cook salmon and whatever else need grilling this summer. (Just a week before the storm, I'd been fretting about where the wood would come from...careful what you ask for.) I waded into the carnage, blade a-swinging, but with a mission in mind. 

I'll ramble on about Clearing Theory at length, but later. Right now, suffice it to say that what looks like a guy skittering and pausing, whacking branches and tossing them this way and that follows a plan. It's pretty basic, and boils down to a few basic decisions based on branch diameter and length. Anything as big as my older daughter's wrist is firewood, and all the smaller stuff gets chopped off and sorted into bean or hops poles (if it's long enough), kindling (between wrist and finger caliber, and with at least a foot of straight wood), and the twigs of less-than-finger diameter that will break down fairly quickly. Along the way, I stack the gnarlier mid-sized pieces for removal.

It sounds like a lot of work, but with a sharp machete, it goes quickly. I don't even bother moving the small stuff, stomping it where it falls to kick off the decomposition process. All the other piles are stacked--more or less--branches parallel. That makes the stuff I plan to haul off easier to pick up (after hacking off a few more itty-bitty ends), and lays out the bigger stuff so that a few chainsaw swipes will reduce it to the size I want. Before long, the crazy tangle is reduced to a pile of mini-logs, a stack of bean-poles, and a pick-up bed full of branches. The ground takes on a grey haze of twigs that in the coming week or so will be stomped into the dirt or tossed under the alders where the native blackberries will clamber and blanket them.

Traditional Clearing Theorists still hold that this is an anti-entropic enterprise, a transformation of chaos into order. The post-modern contingent points out that the integrity of any one branch is violated, and that the "order" is no better than Belgian colonialism. I can see sense in the first part of this argument, but the latter part is ridiculously cantilevered. Yes, the branches are cut up, and parts of them are a couple of miles away. But I'm just hastening the natural process of returning cellulose to the earth, and snagging some firewood in the process. Nobody gets rich, nobody gets abused, and there is no Kurtz lurking in the dark reaches of the far back yard.

Winter Storm Cookery

A pot o beans

I admit it, this is one of those contrived blogposts, and you know, I think we've all learned something here. 

But there really was a big winter storm here in Olympia last week. I blathered in truly blogallistic style elsewhere, but here, I want to real it back in. Like, how to feed the 'stead after icy branches bring down the electric grid. There are those in the secret backroom of the Chamber of Commerce who scream for the pre-emptive beheading of all those trees who would terrorize Americans by attacking the consumerist infrastructure, but wiser heads prevail. Meanwhile, I just adapt.

Fortunately, I have a primitive fireplace. No wood stove, not even an insert; there was a grate once, but I threw it out. Just the flueless firebox (within a magnificent heatilator, to be sure). Wood goes in, heat flows out(and not all of it up the chimney). 

And when the wires go down and the stove strikes in sympathy (or sometimes, when I just feel like it), I cook in that there fireplace. 

Step one: burn through a half dozen logs, heat up the big chunk of heat-sucking concrete underneath, and get a nice batch of coals going. Put a couple of bricks in one side of the fireplace, to support the grill later on; I start herding logs to the left, and coals to the right, where they can give me nice steady heat. Flames are good for cooking marshmellows or quick sterilization of the sausage that the dog licked, but that's about it.

When there's a solid layer of ember reaching nearly up to the top of the bricks, put on the grill. Not that you have to grill anything. This time, I heated up soup one time, and beans another, in a heavy aluminum pot. As long as you are willing to stir it often enough, half the pan can sit on the brick while the rest is over the fire. That way, there's space to grill something, because you know you want to, and anyway, the electricity's out, so you may as well use some of that stuff in your no-longer-freezer. 

Foil is your friend as well. Packets of just about anything can be heated or cooked in foil, then tucked into whatever space you have left, off the grill and even in the coals or ash. I'm not much into skewery, but if you are tight on space or cooking stuff on sticks is your thing, there's the whole yakitori/kebab world of food waiting to be held over the fire.

Whatever techniques the fireplace chef brings to bear, vigilance is a must. A bed of coals is not uniformly hot, so pots must be stirred and packets or grillables rotated and flipped to avoid ending up with a half-charred half-raw abomination. And because the fire is more a distraction than a source of light, a good flashlight is key to keeping watch, because trying to eye golden brown perfection in a hot sooty cave is not as easy as you imagine.

On the invisible handle is an even more invisible hand-print.

Then there's the issue of injury. It's effing hot in there. Making espresso in one of those little Italian rigs last week, I grabbed the plastic handle which, as I predicted, would not conduct heat from the metal pot, but which, as I was stupid enough to forget, can still get hot when it's sitting near a fire. The burn was not too bad, but it took most of the day for me to finally be rid of the melted plastic stuck to my palm. Oven mitts help, but you still have to move quickly lest they burst into flame. So yeah, hot, flamey,...be careful.

Otherwise, it's just a matter of managing several flows. The flow of air through the fire side, keeping flames licking wood and birthing coals. The flow of coals from fire side to cook side, replenishing those that burn out (half-cooked meals suck). The flow of which food first, of flipping, of stirring. The flow of kindling to blaze to embers to slumber.

It was less than 48 hours without power, but we ate hot food, and we ate not badly, considering my limited talent. Basics like black beans, potatoes, and canned soup, but also impromptu pie (spiced apples wrapped in pie crust and grilled on foil). Grilled brats and skewered veggie sausage. And of course, marshmellows. 

There Used to be an 'Awa Patch Here

Auwe

This is where I gardened for years. Before this glaring repair of the big wall that holds up Iolani Avenue wiped it out. In fact, that darker part behind the Mini, you see that? That's the old new wall, that went up years after I first started building terraces and composting, and in a minute I'll tell you something about what's on it.

But in the meantime, imagine it back in the 90's, gardens where there is now an impervious apron, and at the end of that, a big old mango, recently rejuvenated by some nut climbing around with a big Swedish chainsaw. The same guy planted a hala tree that grew fast and huge, but that's gone now, along with the bananas and cane clumps, ti-leaf. Kalo and `uala in the sun, mulched by maia, ko, and ki.

On two terraces heading up from the mango, more than a dozen `awa plants went from cuttings in pots to being old enough to go to first grade if their roots weren't so deep and happy in the Puowaina cinder, so well moist cheap city water. 'Awa is kava is yanqona is Piper methysticum, a relative of black pepper whose roots are pounded and mixed with water to make a drink that relaxes without dulling the senses. It has practical and ritual uses: for relaxing muscles tired from digging and stacking stone, for sharing over stories with the Tongan and Fijian guys at the garden, and once for presentation of an entire plant to an elder anthropologist being honored by the Rotuman community. 

I go on, because the 'awa patch was something I was proud of. In soil that had begun as parched and lifeless cinder, compost and a soaker hose gave it a black and worm-rich foothold on terraces that would have fit right in at many of the archaeological sites I'd worked in. Having a garden with `awa and all its Polynesian companions in the middle of Honolulu was satisfying, it felt like a place of refuge (if not a real pu`uhonua) from the concrete jungle. Growing the plants for years--not only resisting the urge for an early harvest, but somehow managing not to get ripped off--was an accomplishment, and yielded some fine quality root, not to mention cuttings that became many more plants. 

The 'awa was just part of the garden, though. Eventually, I had maybe a thousand square feet of space, lush with descendants of the plants Polynesians thought enough of to transport across the Pacific in canoes. It was a lab, testing varieties (60+ going at any given time), experimenting with planting schemes and horticultural techniques gleaned from the many published and archival accounts of traditional gardening in the islands. It was, as I said, an island of peace and green in the midst of a large hot city, a place I took my daughter to play while I worked, and to share meals of mangoes, bananas, and cook-out chicken. It was, by the time I'd gardened there for a decade and had to leave, a place that had transformed from barren to brimming with life.

When I started, in 1991, the big wall had partially collapsed. It had been built decades earlier from the local stone, part of Puowaina (aka Punchbowl), which was beautiful and interesting, but also pretty weak and crumbly, not suited to holding up a heavily used road. The community garden there was officially closed, but an old local Chinese woman still slipped in and tended her plot, inviting me to do the same. So I took rubble from the big wall and made terraces in the hilly northwest corner. 

After a couple of years, the city fixed the collapsed part of the wall, replacing the cut Puowaina rock with massive boulders. It happened while I was away doing fieldwork somewhere, and they did a little damage, but I rebuilt and replanted. The garden officially re-opened, and I struck a deal with the city that I would keep my large, irregular plot, and they could carved it up when I left. In the meantime, I enjoyed a run as the 'president' of the garden, having the occasional meeting in which we'd all share food and maybe resolve one of the inevitable minor disputes and agree that we were autonomous from the city, all of whose other community gardens were sad little grids, none of the terraced hills or Chinese havens or Korean restaurant feeders or Tongan subsistence plots that made our place special. We broke the rules against big plots, against bananas and trees, against fires, and so on, and were very happy.

Last time I visited was at least 4 or 5 years ago, and of course it didn't seem the same. The `awa was gone, replaced by spindly cassava, one of the terraces pulled down in the process. One of my old banana clumps clung to life, having eaten all the compost and not been fed again. It was sad, but still better than when I'd first peered over the wall.

I don't know exactly when they fixed the wall again. The satellite view claims to be from 2011, and the concrete looks fresh. The devastation is clear. Gone is the mango; only a common mango, but it had been the anchor for the terraces, the shade for young plants and the girl I trained to recognize and track down the thunk of a ripe one dropping the mulch. Gone is the hala, whose roots were a playground, whose leaves grew long and clear and would have been excellent for weaving. Gone are the terraces: the lower garden, the plant nursery, the cookout and play area, the highest one (above which was 'natural' ground with native plants). Gone is the topsoil that took years to grow. 

What remains? Maybe a bit of terrace, perhaps the stone adze I found and built into the first terrace, and probably some artifact dropped by me or my kid. Some tenacious root or shoot, I hope, propagating itself as an act of defiance against the machines and concrete. One thing I am pretty sure is still there is on the old new wall. I carved some petroglyphs into it, something I'd never have done on a natural boulder, where spirits may still live and take offense, but which seemed alright adornment for roadkill rock. There was a giant lizard head, it's forked tongue licking it's eye the way they do. Also, an owl, a recognition of the animal associated with that place. Maybe some other stuff, too. Someday I'll check. If I live long enough, I'll come back when I am 80 and the petroglyphs are old enough to be recorded as historic.

In the meantime, I hope the process of renewal starts again. That somebody will peer over the wall and again feel the surprise and joy of finding a garden in the city. Maybe there's enough rubble for them to build some new terraces. Maybe as they dig, the new gardeners will find that trowel I lost, or a toy my daughter stashed in the hala roots, or a buried organic layer still willing to grow something. Maybe somebody will find a way to make that concrete slab below the wall produce something. 

I hope so.