october eighth

Kara's Arts and Agriculture collective/class is coming later today, and much of what I've been up to has been about preparing for their arrival.

We're going to be doing a lot of dirty, exciting things, foreseen and unforeseen. Aside from participating in the Oktober All Saints Festival at the Church of the Little Green Man (more on that later), we'll be laying down sheet mulch in the greenhouse (which we're gonna be treating like any cold-frame this Fall and Winter) to build up the soil there, and potentially sheet mulch another bed or two in the garden if we have the capacity to do so. We'll also be laying down seeds (however belatedly) for a Fall and Winter harvest. We'll be harvesting, preparing, and enjoying what the garden's providing us these days, and I have a mind for people to do a collective weed walk in the garden, discussing the volunteer plants we recognize and which ones are edible or medicinal. Perhaps some folks will want to take it a step further and include some of these volunteer plants in our food this weekend, or begin to make medicine with them.

I've gone through the seeds we still have at Denniston (and there are a lot - I'm very excited about next Spring's seeding), setting aside those that we'll be planting this weekend. We're gonna map out the lay of the greenhouse/cold-frame together before setting to work.

I've been spending time in the garden, cleaning up here and there and getting to know the plants a little more. I feel very lucky to suddenly have so much basil in my life, and in such variety too. 

And I'm glad to see that many of the weeds I can recognize in the garden are edible and medicinal. Most of what I recognize is plantain, clover, and dandelion. 

I've applied a freshly-chewed pumice of plantain to a skin sore before, and the soothing and healing effect it had was pretty remarkable. And plantain is in copious supply. It's also been used for coughs, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, and toothaches. 

From the Peterson Field Guide to Central/Eastern Medicinal Plants and Herbs, I learned that red clover, which we have sprouting up here and there throughout the garden but all throughout the yard as well, has been used to treat, among other things, "asthma, bronchitis, spadmodic coughs; externally, a wash has been used as a folk cancer remedy, including the famous Homsey treatment, and for athlete's foot, sores, burns, and ulcers. Flowers formerly smoked in anti-asthma cigarettes." 

And, though perhaps more known as something to toss into salads, dandelion also has medicinal qualities. Its leaves and flowers are rich in vitamins A and C, its leaves have been used as a folk laxative, and its roots have been used, fresh and dried, to treat problems of the bladder, kidney, gallbladder, and liver, and "as a tonic for weak or impaired digestion, constipation."

On the northeast corner of the garden, outside of the fencing, are a variety of mint plants that seem to be very comfortable. I've already used some fresh mint leaves in a tea to soothe some stomachaches and alleviate a slightly sore throat. Something we might try and work out this weekend is whether or not to plant more mint on the southern side of the garden fence. That's the meadowside of the garden, where plenty of mice have been making their home, going for raids in the compost pile (I accidentally killed on while shoveling the compost with Kara the other day - about four or five of them soon came writhing out of the ground and ran away). Apparently mice don't take too well to mint plants, and they have provided effective non-toxic, edible barriers against mice for other people's gardens. 

There's also quite a bit of thyme growing between the deck surrounding the pool and the pond, over where people hang their laundry to dry, and that has medicinal properties too, though I didn't learn that until this week's research. It's used for the treatment of viral and bacterial upper respiratory infections, and staves off cough and bronchitis.

On Wednesday I went over to Josh's to gather some horse manure for the weekend's mulching. The folks who lived on the land he's on some fifteen years or so ago had horses, and left behind an ample field of the stuff for us to enjoy. When he took me out back to find it, however, I had a hard time at first figuring out where to look. Gesturing broadly to the lush, diverse near-to-meadowland before us and telling me to go for it, I didn't really know what to say or do. He then led me over to a nearly waist-deep pit and, jumping in, started hacking away at the edges with his shovel, drawing the rich, dark soil out from beneath the riotous green happening above. I recovered from my momentary confusion and began to do the same, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of the stuff we were digging. 

There's been some skepticism voiced about just how useful this stuff is, but my suspicion is that it'll do plenty more good than harm for our sheet-mulching and the building up of our own soil, whether it could still be considered manure manure or not. 

While we dug in silence, carrying buckets of it over to the bowl of tarp set up in the Subaru some ten, fifteen feet away, my thoughts turned to soil as the symbol and the literal embodiment of transformation that it is. It was one of those moments of seeming clarity, where I felt I could discern, however hazily, the continuities between "life" and "death" that were at play in the soil before me, and that together composed the soil itself. To my eyes there were merely fleeting snatches of this play, the more humanly-visible spiders and worms and sowbugs scattering everywhere as I disrupted their living and dying places, but I knew there was a lot more going on than I could ever hope to see. 

For much of my life I've regarded soil as an inert, static substance, more of an empty vessel or perhaps, in the language and spirit of the prevailing industrial, mechanistic paradigm, a factory through which creatures and materials and elements come and go. Though clearly the potential cradle of abundant communities of life, it has often seemed to me to be another place where living and dying happens. It's only in recent times that I've come to understand soil as, wholly and entirely, the chaotic and dense composition of these processes. The soil is somehow an embodiment of, somehow the riotous and anarchic unfolding of living-and-dying itself. Sometimes, when I understand and experience soil in this way, I have this moment where I can feel the dichotomous demarcations between life and death that I often uphold straining to fall apart and fall away. 

Very recently a young friend of mine died, and before his body was committed to the soil that inspired him (he was a grower of things, an activist and organizer whose work centered around food justice and sustainability), there was an open casket wake. It was very hard to accept the fact of his body, in the coffin, at the end of the room before me. Among the things that passed through me was the impossible feeling that his body didn't look at all like him. I couldn't bridge my memory of him with the body before me. 

Offered all around me were the familiar, muttered affirmations that he had gone to a better place. Personally, I've felt a spectrum of things when it comes to all this talk of soul and whether or not life as we think we know it can be said to have a beginning or an end, and I've come to no stalwart or fundamentalist positions about any of this, save to assert the fact of my own ultimate ignorance. In more recent times I've tried to not conquer, in thought or speech, what I deem to be the ineffable, radical mystery of this place that we're unfolding in, and I don't think I'd find much comfort or solace in doing so.

As I sat with my friend's body there was a particular word that kept coming to me :: dispersal. It was clear to me that whatever forces had animated his eyes, his lips and his hands, were no longer present, or at least not present in the way that they'd been. And the unseeable communities of bacteria that once blossomed and composed the life of his stomach, where were they? Had they gone dormant, left? Would they now turn to feed on the matter of his body, from within? Or had they died out entirely, and wouldn't they have left something of themselves behind? I'm sure the most nuanced and detailed explanations and mappings abound out there, but I guess I am less interested in what those mappings have to say. During the time of his funeral and his wake, and some two or three weeks later as I shoveled fifteen year old horse shit into buckets with Josh, it felt enough to know that somehow there was transformation, that somehow there was dispersal, however inadequate or shortsighted any particular mappings of that transformation and dispersal may be. 

These aren't always easy perspectives to sit with, and sometimes I can hardly bear the fear that such mysterious company sets to flare within me, but for now at least, I feel committed to stoking my courage, and committed to not try and banish my fears, but to listen for what these fears of mine have to teach me.

I'm looking forward to our weekend with the Collective, and will be writing about what we get into shortly.