Not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself

I could copy out the entire book as one amazing quote, but here is just one of its beautifully-written lengthy passages that I can’t stop thinking about.  Very challenging stuff on so many levels.

From Ta-nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me:

I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what what they had sown, we would reap it right with them.  Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must ineviteably plunder much more.  This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.  

Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind.  But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent.  And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.  The Earth is not our creation.  It has no respect for us.  It has no use for us.  And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky.  Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind.  Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.  The two phenomena are known to each other.  It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age.  It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods.  And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.  

Three things: Hot sauce, garden refreshment, and slow fashion reading

I was given a bag of jalapenos a couple of days ago and I was so excited to use them to make  this yummy hot sauce… until cutting into the last peppers (with protective gloves and scissors) I discovered that they were tricksters.  Much too sweet for the job!  So I guess I am making an experimental batch of sweet pepper sauce now.

I really enjoyed this podcast recently on how to refresh your garden.  Even though my garden is probably more functional than ornamental, it still had some really helpful tips for me.  The bit at the end about optical illusions was especially interesting.

Slow Fashion October… it nearly passed me by… but this weekend I hope to catch up on a little reading about it for this year, starting with this post at Fringe Association.

Haiku-sday: Fourteen puddles

 

Puddle to puddle,

a stream flows between pot-holes

of sky in the lane.

Challenge 3: My soil is not what I hoped for

This sheep sorrel is prolific in our acidic soil, in spite of our regular harvesting.

What began as just a couple of wee sorrel clumps poking through the chuckies, quickly became a carpet when we pulled up the stones.  Listening to weeds can tell a gardener a lot about their soil… but did I listen to our happy sorrel?  Oh no.  What might I have heard if I paid more attention to the sorrel?  For one, that the soil at our place is rather acidic.

Good sense might have instructed me to get a soil analysis done before planting too many things.  However, eager to get things in the ground for the growing season (and to diminish the big muddy patch that was our entire property) I went planting things with willful ignorance.

While a few intentionally planted things thrived (tatties, kale, yarrow, borage, to name some), many plants did not do so well.  Raspberry canes yellowed before their time, blackcurrant leaves became tinged with purple, and my apple trees just managed to survive a few aphid attacks.

This is when I decided to get a soil test done.  I dug ten samples from around the garden, mixed them all together, took a 200g sample from that, and posted it with £30 off to the RHS.  They tested for texture, organic matter content, pH, available phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium.  Along with the analysis, they sent recommendations for soil amendments for growing different kinds of plants successfully.  They also noted what would happen in the absence of these amendments… indeed, yellowing rasps, purpling blackcurrant leaves, and attacks from pests were just some of their warnings!

In the challenge of a tight budget I talk about how parameters should be helpful in framing your project.  That stands true with soil too.  The ideal garden shouldn’t involve amending the soil for eternity in order for it to grow well.  Yes, it needs to be fed and watered and maintained, but in the end, we need work with what we’ve got by locating plants where they are best-suited to grow.  This benefits the individual plant itself, but it is also better for the garden as a whole.  As an aside, one of my favourite landscape designers who works with this principle is Pied Oudolf.

That all said, it is hard to know what the true equilibrium of my soil is, given it has been buried under gravel for about ten years.  Most organic gardeners will be able to get great results with generous piles of compost through each growing season, as well as other simple organic methods like cover crops and organic fertilisers+teas.  But my soil, I suspect, is so out-of-whack that it needs a little extra attention and some mineral additions… ideally a year ago.

What I really wish I had done, is tested my soil in the early days and then incorporated additions with the compost and topsoil.  But it is never too late.  This rainy month, I will apply dolomite lime in most areas to adjust the pH and raise the magnesium level.  Early in the spring and throughout the season, I will work in more compost and apply some Grochar (an organic alternative to the oft-recommended synthentic Growmore) and fertilising teas.  I hope that further down the track my garden will show me what it wants to grow well and the application of extra minerals will not be so neccessary.  My job is, and will be, about feeding the soil so it can keep feeding me.

For now, this concludes my Three Challenges series.  I had intended to write more on this particular issue going into more detail about, for example, cover crops, crop rotation, fertilising teas, and “no-dig” solutions, but I think I will leave it more generalised for now and wait until the season is appropriate for these other topics.

If you would like to read about the other two challenges I face in my garden, here are links:

Challenge 1: Part I  Challenge 1: Part II

Challenge 2: Part I  Challenge 2: Part II  Challenge 2: Part III

Also, here are some yummy recipes, two of which I have tried, with sorrel (beyond just brushing the soil off and popping them in my mouth, which is also worth trying).

Three things: Kids and their feet, emotions, and books

While I think that there are more benefits to going barefoot than just inside the classroom or for learning purposes, I really hope more UK schools will notice and act on this research.

I am constantly needing to return to these kinds of writings on kids+their emotions to remind myself it is ok, and good, in fact, to not “make things better” all the time.

And a beautiful poem.

Haiku-sday: Baby in Autumn

Wet wool and a fist

full of earth.  That cool autumn

smell on his blushed cheeks.

 

 

Sense of place

As he stepped out from the doctor’s house on the grey autumn morning after his unconventional arrival in St Piran, Joe could already feel a dissonance about the place.  There was it seemed to him, a discomforting misalignment in reality in this village–like a variation in gravity, or a change in the composition of atmospheric gases.  Perhaps the brief coma from which he had emerged had unsettled the balance centres in his brain.  Leaving the house felt like his first foray into an alien world.  How curious, Joe thought, that a location should possess a feel.  He had heard architects discussing a sense of place, as if there were some alchemy in the soil, or a confluence of ley-lines that could endow a site with mystical properties.  A sort of geographic feng-shui.  The idea had always struck Joe as unlikely, but something about this village seemed to confirm such beliefs.  It nestled so comfortably in the crook of the hill-side, the winding streets and granite walls echoing the natural contours of the rock cliffs beyond.  Indeed, it might be hard to imagine this bay without the village, as if these low walls and slate roofs were part of the local geology, features hewn out of the rock face by the sea and the wind.  

Not Forgetting The Whale, by John Ironmonger.

Three things: Elderberry syrup, soil support, and movement

Making this syrup for battling winter illnesses.  The elderberries in my area don’t seem to ripen at the same time, so instead of freezing them (which I have read can spoil the immune-boosting properties) until there’s enough, I am just making small batches, experimenting with spices as I go.

Soon I will be writing a bit more about soil health in my own garden, but for now, here is an article about how we can (and why we should) support the health of soil when we buy our food.

And I am looking forward to reading this book about the ecology of movement so so sooo much.  Here is a quote from the book that is recited in this conversation with the author, Katy Bowman:  We are currently living in a culture that separates what we define and label as nature. And we seem to be suffering the physical and mental effects of this separation. Yet, because we do not see ourselves as belonging to the animal kingdom, as needing clean water, and air, and food, and movement, just as all other wild animals do, our research begins by framing the symptoms of being in captivity as the problem. We see this in many other captive animals and I describe it in detail in Move Your DNA: cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal ailments, diabetes, anxiety, depression, and many other modern health problems that can be traced to our lack of movement and our lack of movement in nature. The research striving to heal us is informed by a worldview that sees us as essentially separated from the “natural” world; which one could argue, is our problem in the first place.

 

Haiku-sday: Winter comes

Slump of petals, a

wilted stem.  Above, wild geese

draw the season’s end.

Challenge 2: A tight budget (Part III)

Can you see the garden edge between the chuckies and the soil?  That’s a board from a pallet, lovingly cut and set in by my partner.  For us, the high quality comes from it doing its job (ie, dividing the stones from the soil) and it being an environmental option (ie, it is a reused item, and it will also bio-degrade over time).  It was low cost–actually free.  But the trade-off was that dismantling the pallet and getting the board in the ground made it a slower job than other options.

This continues the series I have been doing on the challenges of my garden.  This is the third part of the challenge of a tight budget.  You can read Part I here, and Part II here.

As I was writing the previous posts on this challenge, a model from the deep, dark days of architecture school came back to me.  It is taught in project management classes, and it has clarified some of the thoughts that I have had as I explain the “upsides” of a tight budget.  It is called the Cost-Quality-Time Model and it looks like this:

In all projects there are these three aspects (at the corners)–low-cost, high quality, and speed–that we desire for our creative projects.  See the black triangle in the middle?  That is the triangle of impossibility.  It is the perfect project coming together at the perfect price, at the perfect time.  Yep.  Impossible.  You get to choose only two from cost-quality-time and you must compromise on the third.

Most of us have been in (or, unfortunately, lived in) houses or flats that have been built very quickly with cheap labour, cheap materials, and cheap techniques.  These places are examples of projects for which the developers have chosen to compromise on quality.  An example of a compromise on cost is when you have guests coming to dinner and you want to impress them with a beautiful 5-course meal, but you have only 1/2 an hour to come up with something.  Instead of cooking, you nick down to the fancy restaurant down the road and buy a number of dishes from their menu, spending a pretty penny in the process.

When I originally learned this model, I understood it in a negative light–that whatever you do, you will have to compromise, and compromise sucks and is to be avoided in all cases.  Well, I have learned a few things about life since then, and to be sure, compromise cannot be avoided.  And it doesn’t always suck.

As the name of this blog may suggest, I have chosen to compromise on speed.  I really want a high quality garden, and due to my financial constraints right now it must be a low-cost project.  So according to this Cost-Quality-Time model, I am to compromise on speed.  You might be thinking, “wait–aren’t we just talking about a tight budget in this particular challenge?”  I would say to that financial constraints and speed (and quality) are so interconnected that it is almost impossible to think about one without the other two–with a small budget as a real constraint, and high quality as a primary desire, what I am left with is to compromise on speed.

To me, compromising on speed actually doesn’t feel like a compromise much of the time.  There are downsides, which I will mention so you don’t think I am completely deluded, but on the whole I think they are easy for me to get beyond when I think of the positives.  So, downsides: the garden is a low priority (both financially and time-wise) when other home maintenance things come up; it can be frustrating knowing and seeing what needs to be done, but having to wait for help or money; and sometimes having more time to work out problems means that the solution can end up being over-worked or over-designed.

However, I have chosen to grow slowly because, like Slow Food, Slow Build, Slow Cities, and other slow movements, I can see the inherent benefits and they outweigh the negatives.  Because it is a slow project, there is time to be creative and find the best quality solution, whether the problems sit on the back burner in my mind or are being worked out in the field.  Slow projects mean there is time to invite other people into the process.  Slow projects are often more mindful projects, where the maker has a connection to the materials and the process.  And finally, in being more mindful (for example, in reusing materials and employing people-power), the slow project is also often a more gentle and environmental choice.

When this model finally made its way out of the recesses of my mind, I felt some of the frustrations with my garden project easing.  It has been helpful to be able to understand why time is a compromise, whether or not I mind it much of the time.  It has also given me a clearer sense of the benefits of working within a narrow budget.

Can you think of how this model might have applied to any of your projects, gardening, knitting, cooking, or otherwise?