This winter Bug Hill Fruit and Flower Farm will participate in our first winter "farmer's markets" in Ashfield, Northampton and Greenfield, Mass: winter fares
However, Winter Fares began this season with a first: instead of the usual school fund raising catalogues featuring trinkets imported from China or wrapping paper that nobody really wants, the local school and local business people decided to create a local foods & crafts catalogue. If this model spreads to other communities and other schools throughout the country, look out Wal-Mart! In our small town of Ashfield, sales totaled $20,000 - dollars that went to local craftspeople and farmers and dollars that stayed in the community! $6,000 of those dollars went directly to the school, more money than it had ever raised in previous catalogues of imported goods.
Be a local hero in your community and start promoting local farms and crafts in your next school fund raising catalogue!
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Learning from forest ecosystems
Getting Beyond Other
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.
-Jelaluddin Rumi 1207-1273
Just a decade ago, a forest ecosystem study showed that a species of mycorrhiza* thought to be in mutualistic symbiosis with a specific species of fir, had a “relationship” with another forest species (birch). Scientists injected isotopes (tracers injected with a dye) into the firs. The tracers traveled from the fir trees down through their roots until they appeared in a web-like underground linked system with the firs’ associated mycorrhiza. This did not surprise the scientists: many species, including orchids have mutualistic relationships with different species of mychorizzia. The surprise for the scientists was that the firs’ mychorizzia appeared in neighboring stands of birch, but only those birches that were struggling. It is as if the firs had sent out their co-evolved mycorrhiza to assist the birches that were undergoing environmental stress.
This brings up the intriguing idea, central in many strains of Buddhist thought, that everything in the natural world is cognizant. This is not to say that all things are conscious, as we understand human beings to be conscious, but each species and every individual within those species, even down to the simplest of life forms, are cognizant: they are aware of their environment, and respond to it in a way informed by that awareness.
But this word awareness, too, might not be adequate to convey what is meant here. Awareness comes and goes: if we find we are aware of something in our environment, chances are that sometime in the past we were or sometime in the future will be not aware of that object, and this assumes already that we are separate from it. What if we, for the sake of argument, eliminated the concept environment? What if we considered that the notion of an environment that is outside or separate from ourselves is false?
Some semi-nomadic tribes in the Americas had no words in their languages for environment. Perhaps there is another way to conceive of our relation to the natural world: perhaps we needn’t see ourselves as essentially different and separate from our surroundings. If a species of fungus can “recognize” and go to the aid of something in an entirely different taxonomic rank, the notion of what is “other,” between different human individuals becomes suspect.
Other. What if there is no other? There is, at least momentarily, times when this seems true: In nature I can sometimes feel the world is whole and one. Once I removed a portion of duff from the forest floor and discovered the cobwebby tracings of mycorrhiza like some vast network linking an entire forest. And sometimes with women on retreat, with women in one room on a winter day telling stories, there is wholeness. Last month, I attended my third women’s retreat in Ashfield, and while most of the women are from our church, there is no requirement that they be so. Many of us recognize but do not know one another deeply, while others share long-lasting deep relationships with one another. It doesn’t seem to matter. Over the course of the weekend, we become like strands of mycorrhiza, reaching out and connecting, especially to those who are under stress. Our story threads, like mycelia, become entangled until we are woven whole. Or as one woman said, “it’s as if this room is full of hundreds of women” because in telling our stories we became our mothers and our mothers’ mothers. And when we reach across and meet, we are whole, we are healed.
I write looking out my kitchen window across my neighbor’s hayfield to woods’ edge. In the foreground, a line of battered trees testifies; seven old sugar maples, limbs bent at wrong angles like broken arms. Their fingers, which were raised to the sky, now brush across snowdrifts. It comforts me to imagine that less shattered trees at woods’ edge, those spruce, pine and hemlock that better weathered the ice storm, will be sending out roots with their underground threads of fuzzy white mycorrhizas beneath snow and stubble to the troubled maples, whose root masses, after the ice storm of 2008, now must exceed the size of their reduced canopies.
Somewhere in the middle of the field, invisible to me, they meet.
*mycorrhiza: a mutualistic symbiosis between plant and fungus, localized in a root or root-like structure, in which energy moves primarily from plant to fungus and inorganic resources move from fungus to plant" (Michael F. Allen, The Ecology of Mycorrhizae, Cambridge University Press, 1991).
For good information on “the source of all that is good” see: http://www.mykoweb.com/articles/Mycorrhizas_1.html
# # # #
-Kate Kerivan
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.
-Jelaluddin Rumi 1207-1273
Just a decade ago, a forest ecosystem study showed that a species of mycorrhiza* thought to be in mutualistic symbiosis with a specific species of fir, had a “relationship” with another forest species (birch). Scientists injected isotopes (tracers injected with a dye) into the firs. The tracers traveled from the fir trees down through their roots until they appeared in a web-like underground linked system with the firs’ associated mycorrhiza. This did not surprise the scientists: many species, including orchids have mutualistic relationships with different species of mychorizzia. The surprise for the scientists was that the firs’ mychorizzia appeared in neighboring stands of birch, but only those birches that were struggling. It is as if the firs had sent out their co-evolved mycorrhiza to assist the birches that were undergoing environmental stress.
This brings up the intriguing idea, central in many strains of Buddhist thought, that everything in the natural world is cognizant. This is not to say that all things are conscious, as we understand human beings to be conscious, but each species and every individual within those species, even down to the simplest of life forms, are cognizant: they are aware of their environment, and respond to it in a way informed by that awareness.
But this word awareness, too, might not be adequate to convey what is meant here. Awareness comes and goes: if we find we are aware of something in our environment, chances are that sometime in the past we were or sometime in the future will be not aware of that object, and this assumes already that we are separate from it. What if we, for the sake of argument, eliminated the concept environment? What if we considered that the notion of an environment that is outside or separate from ourselves is false?
Some semi-nomadic tribes in the Americas had no words in their languages for environment. Perhaps there is another way to conceive of our relation to the natural world: perhaps we needn’t see ourselves as essentially different and separate from our surroundings. If a species of fungus can “recognize” and go to the aid of something in an entirely different taxonomic rank, the notion of what is “other,” between different human individuals becomes suspect.
Other. What if there is no other? There is, at least momentarily, times when this seems true: In nature I can sometimes feel the world is whole and one. Once I removed a portion of duff from the forest floor and discovered the cobwebby tracings of mycorrhiza like some vast network linking an entire forest. And sometimes with women on retreat, with women in one room on a winter day telling stories, there is wholeness. Last month, I attended my third women’s retreat in Ashfield, and while most of the women are from our church, there is no requirement that they be so. Many of us recognize but do not know one another deeply, while others share long-lasting deep relationships with one another. It doesn’t seem to matter. Over the course of the weekend, we become like strands of mycorrhiza, reaching out and connecting, especially to those who are under stress. Our story threads, like mycelia, become entangled until we are woven whole. Or as one woman said, “it’s as if this room is full of hundreds of women” because in telling our stories we became our mothers and our mothers’ mothers. And when we reach across and meet, we are whole, we are healed.
I write looking out my kitchen window across my neighbor’s hayfield to woods’ edge. In the foreground, a line of battered trees testifies; seven old sugar maples, limbs bent at wrong angles like broken arms. Their fingers, which were raised to the sky, now brush across snowdrifts. It comforts me to imagine that less shattered trees at woods’ edge, those spruce, pine and hemlock that better weathered the ice storm, will be sending out roots with their underground threads of fuzzy white mycorrhizas beneath snow and stubble to the troubled maples, whose root masses, after the ice storm of 2008, now must exceed the size of their reduced canopies.
Somewhere in the middle of the field, invisible to me, they meet.
*mycorrhiza: a mutualistic symbiosis between plant and fungus, localized in a root or root-like structure, in which energy moves primarily from plant to fungus and inorganic resources move from fungus to plant" (Michael F. Allen, The Ecology of Mycorrhizae, Cambridge University Press, 1991).
For good information on “the source of all that is good” see: http://www.mykoweb.com/articles/Mycorrhizas_1.html
# # # #
-Kate Kerivan
mildew, slugs & retribution in the strawberry patch
Learning from the Garden
"You don't have a slug excess, you've got a duck deficit!"
Bill Mollison Permaculture expert
It started with the strawberries. I’d planted 25 of 4 different varieties last year, including a heritage variety, Raritan, which I can no longer get from my supplier. This spring, they leafed out and bloomed beautifully and I expected a bumper crop of beautiful berries to eat and sell at the farmer’s market after a warm and dry April. All gardeners know that assumptions about future crops are foolish and doomed to disappointment, and this was no exception. May and June were record months for rain and low temperatures, and I didn’t discover that slugs were ravaging the ripening berries, covered with netting to protect them from the birds, until it was too late to save most of the crop.
I’ve loved and been fascinated by insects since childhood, had bug collections, and took entomology courses in college, but slugs and snails are not insects, they are gastropods, a class of animals second only to insects in number of known species. This is where I get ashamed to write what happened in the strawberry patch on a drippingly moist June evening when I discovered the damage and hand picked about 200 slugs: I took the bucket of slugs floating in soapy water to the middle of my dirt road and dumped it. Next I took out a box of kosher salt and watched while slugs shrank like the wicked witch of the west into tiny pools of slime. I could almost hear them scream, “I’m shrinkiiinng!” I considered waiting until cars ran what was left of them over but that seemed a little extreme.
Then I remembered doing the same thing to garden snails as a very young child on our front steps in California and the horrid fascination I had in watching something so other, so alien, retract, sizzle and die by my hand and with my mother’s salt shaker. I’m confessing to both acts (but the first is more interesting, and I think it has to do with a curious child’s first sense of power) not because I regret killing them in either instance but the way in which I did it as an adult and how it has affected me. It was the satisfaction of revenge and of not quite viewing slugs as living organisms deserving if not compassion, at least understanding of what they are.
I decided to learn more about gastropods. They are hermaphrodites, that is, each individual is both male and female and they can “choose” which individual is male or female with each mating, using their slime trails to help find the next mate (which also makes them susceptible to predators, like birds, frogs, snakes, toads, box turtles and people who follow the same trails.) Slugs have a long and complex evolutionary history of the same body type (shell-less “foot”) evolving separately from shell bearing ancestors at separate times. In other words, that shell-less body design has worked so well that various families are not even closely related to one another in spite of similar body forms. And like so many of our ecological problems, most crop damaging species of slugs and snails are introduced from other countries while our native species play an important and mostly positive role in forest ecology. So I learned that our own species was responsible for my strawberry woes because we introduced them (however inadvertently).
I want to keep learning to do things consciously, even when it involves killing. After all, we do kill to live daily. Now why aren’t my geese and chickens helping? Maybe next year I should have ducks.
#
Kate Kerivan
August 23, 2009
"You don't have a slug excess, you've got a duck deficit!"
Bill Mollison Permaculture expert
It started with the strawberries. I’d planted 25 of 4 different varieties last year, including a heritage variety, Raritan, which I can no longer get from my supplier. This spring, they leafed out and bloomed beautifully and I expected a bumper crop of beautiful berries to eat and sell at the farmer’s market after a warm and dry April. All gardeners know that assumptions about future crops are foolish and doomed to disappointment, and this was no exception. May and June were record months for rain and low temperatures, and I didn’t discover that slugs were ravaging the ripening berries, covered with netting to protect them from the birds, until it was too late to save most of the crop.
I’ve loved and been fascinated by insects since childhood, had bug collections, and took entomology courses in college, but slugs and snails are not insects, they are gastropods, a class of animals second only to insects in number of known species. This is where I get ashamed to write what happened in the strawberry patch on a drippingly moist June evening when I discovered the damage and hand picked about 200 slugs: I took the bucket of slugs floating in soapy water to the middle of my dirt road and dumped it. Next I took out a box of kosher salt and watched while slugs shrank like the wicked witch of the west into tiny pools of slime. I could almost hear them scream, “I’m shrinkiiinng!” I considered waiting until cars ran what was left of them over but that seemed a little extreme.
Then I remembered doing the same thing to garden snails as a very young child on our front steps in California and the horrid fascination I had in watching something so other, so alien, retract, sizzle and die by my hand and with my mother’s salt shaker. I’m confessing to both acts (but the first is more interesting, and I think it has to do with a curious child’s first sense of power) not because I regret killing them in either instance but the way in which I did it as an adult and how it has affected me. It was the satisfaction of revenge and of not quite viewing slugs as living organisms deserving if not compassion, at least understanding of what they are.
I decided to learn more about gastropods. They are hermaphrodites, that is, each individual is both male and female and they can “choose” which individual is male or female with each mating, using their slime trails to help find the next mate (which also makes them susceptible to predators, like birds, frogs, snakes, toads, box turtles and people who follow the same trails.) Slugs have a long and complex evolutionary history of the same body type (shell-less “foot”) evolving separately from shell bearing ancestors at separate times. In other words, that shell-less body design has worked so well that various families are not even closely related to one another in spite of similar body forms. And like so many of our ecological problems, most crop damaging species of slugs and snails are introduced from other countries while our native species play an important and mostly positive role in forest ecology. So I learned that our own species was responsible for my strawberry woes because we introduced them (however inadvertently).
I want to keep learning to do things consciously, even when it involves killing. After all, we do kill to live daily. Now why aren’t my geese and chickens helping? Maybe next year I should have ducks.
#
Kate Kerivan
August 23, 2009
Why Garden?
It is not nice to garden anywhere.
-Henry Mitchell
Mitchell, who died in 1993, was my favorite garden writer. In The Essential Earthman, he wrote that there are no green thumbs or black thumbs, only gardeners and non-gardeners, and that defiance is what makes gardeners. Ruin, a perpetual theme of gardening (think ice storm, drought, hail and flood) doesn’t stop a gardener from thinking that where there once was a garden it can be again or if there never was, there can be.
But why do we (or some of us) garden as if our lives or our very souls depended on it? Some say that it is a biological imperative – it is in our species’ genes and we are only a few thousand years removed from those first humans who stopped wandering, took a cutting, a root or a seed, poked a stick in the ground and planted it. My dibble (I have two: a wooden and a stainless steel one) is just our recent version of a stick. Others say we are just trying to re-create those first four square, walled, Edenesque gardens of the desert, or that gardening is a compulsion to create some order in our messy, often incomprehensible world.
But I garden for the pure pleasure of grubbing around in the dirt. If I could stack all the pieces of sod that I have dug up to make gardens wherever I have lived in the last 35 years, (23 of them in the same garden) I could probably green roof an entire city. Whether I am digging, planting or weeding, gardening is almost the only time when I am truly present in exactly what I am doing. I am not thinking about what I should have said or done, I am not thinking about what I didn’t do or say, and I am not planning beyond the next patch of weeds. What I am doing is listening smelling, and watching: the changing light, the hum of insects, the way tall grass catches a breeze and dances, the feel of moist loam between my fingertips, the sweet, accidental crunch of a black fly. The danger is when I stop, and staring into the garden, start imagining what it would look like, or what else I could grow if I just…
# # #
Kate Kerivan
June 09
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