ThinkLady

Voluptuous veggie

Meet last spring’s Early Wonder beets – a voluptuous veggie – sweet, crunchy, beautiful, delicious. Plotting the fall/winter/spring garden now and silly me – admit to being giddy with anticipation.

Technorati Tags: gardening,seasons,local food,beets

Growing compassion

"Compassion literally means to feel with, to suffer with. Everyone is capable of compassion, and yet everyone tends to avoid it because it's uncomfortable. And the avoidance produces psychic numbing -- resistance to experiencing our pain for the world and other beings." -- Joanna Macy

Easter weekend gave all of us a lot -- time to contemplate, time with friends and family, a riot of spring with gorgeous hues of green, soft pinks, jazzy Redbud trees, yellows and whites exploding at every turn, and every bird imaginable orchestrating a song of new life that rivals that of the "The Hallelujah Chorus."

With the riot of spring as my soundtrack, strangely enough while digging into my garden this weekend, my thoughts turned to compassion. After the deep sleep of winter, spring is Nature's compassion for us in every way, both practical and spiritual -- from giving us more direct sun to warm the soil and grow the crops we need to survive, to turning the inward gray of winter into the outward buzz of glorious green we revel in. Nature's compassion infuses us with a bit of giddiness as we turn our faces to the sun, and in turn we humans seem to soften a bit in the passionate first blush of spring.

This softening moves me beyond self-imposed rigidity and into the heart of diversity, to setting aside long-held grudges and opinions, to deconstructing walls of rationalization, to listening beyond words to emotions lying underneath -- my own emotions and those of others. Usually I find fear of "something" underlies our most deeply held anger and prejudices, so this is never an easy task, even in the optimistic light of spring, yet the season beckons us to loosen the binds of fear, to embrace hope, to find balance between the two, letting both inform our world without controlling it.

Just as my garden involves hard sweaty work, so to does this unbinding of the heart and softening of the soul. It is made more difficult if I am blaming and labeling the other (whoever the other may be) which is course a most human thing to do. But so often while blaming I am also ignoring my own complicity in the matter at hand, or rationalizing my behavior to the point finding a solution becomes more challenging. And all the blaming only leads to more division, less compassion, more fear and loathing of ourselves and others. This doesn't mean we abrogate our values; it does mean we don't become so entrenched in them we can no longer see multiple sides to an issue.

I've found certain underlying principles and values make my garden stronger -- diversity of plant life, appropriate scale, nurturing soil, sighting to suit each plant's need for sun. But I've also found that these principles, values and ideas for gardening are constantly evolving. Each year I learn a little more. Each year I try something new or different, adjust, recalibrate, try again. If I close my mind to other ideas for my garden, then it may not cease to grow but it will certainly stagnate. Remaining open to what I can learn from others -- from beginners to seasoned master gardeners - means gardening becomes a journey in potential, an unending growing adventure.

So too growing compassion involves remaining open to the Universe and evolving our ideas about how we move, live and be. It means we advocate for correcting injustices with great humility and some degree of open-mindedness, working for solutions, and setting aside our own egos and need for attention in service to a greater cause.  

When we can do this, we blossom from the inside. Like the Grinch whose heart grew two sizes, we can feel our own hearts expanding like flowers opening to pollination by potential, to possibility, to something much greater than individual self. By doing so we stand a greater chance of breaking down long-held barriers, myths and assumptions about each other. By doing so we learn what is possible and what must wait for another day. By doing so we find clarity and inner serenity.

Growing compassion, whether lending a hand or listening to the least among us, helping the suffering, holding a hand in times of depression or fear or sorrow, doing these things when no one is watching, when it is anonymous, unseen by by peers, seen by only by an expanding Universe, may be the hardest thing in the world to do, and yet, in grace-filled serendipity, it's the most important work we'll ever do. 

How a small winter garden is saving us about $236

Officially spring is a mere three days away yet the weather folks are saying winter may yet have another another blast at us on Saturday. While we're all so weary of cold and gray, maybe this winter is Mother Nature's way of reminding us that even on our best days human beings really are not in charge.

Having no control over the weather, rather than grumbling about it, which I often do, I'm trying to focus instead on the blessings of winter -- and one of those is winter greens. A couple of years ago I learned of a book, "Four Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long," by Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch that dramatically altered my perspective on gardening and winter.

Coleman and Damrosch are small farmers in Harborside, Maine, where they own and operate Four Season Farm, which produces vegetables year round. It's become a nationally recognized model of small-scale, sustainable agriculture. They produce crops, even in winter, in customized unheated, or in some cases minimally heated, movable, plastic greenhouses. Coleman's techniques are easily implemented and scalable to the smallest backyard or even patio gardener.

To grow winter crops, the concept is embodied in a few key points:

• Select cold weather crops. Coleman provides a long list. We started with a couple of small plots a couple of years ago and focus on winter greens such as lettuce, kale, chard, arugula.
• Plant them in the late summer or early fall when the ground is still warm and insulate the soil via cold frames and deep mulch. We find deep straw and leaf mulch work very well.
• Cold frames can be easily constructed with minimal cost a variety of ways -- using straw bales, or with planters or raised beds you may already have in place -- just remember the goal is to provide insulation for the soil to keep it from freezing.
• Then cover the cold frames with heavy plastic or old storm doors or windows. We've used both methods -- they work!
  

Coleman writes about shoveling aside three feet of snow in Maine to harvest salad greens from a cold frame. Although we didn't have three feet of snow here in Oklahoma, we did have a lot more snow and ice this winter, and yet our greens grew all winter long. Growth does slow to snail's pace in the winter so it's best to have robust growth going by winter's onset or you won't have much to harvest during deep winter. Once the weather begins to warm a bit though -- in Oklahoma that's around mid- February, early March -- the growth takes off again. We're cutting our greens now every few days and eating salads that wow the taste buds.

This year we spent about $4 on seeds for our winter greens cold frame and we used cut-and-come again varieties, meaning we can harvest from the plant again and again, and they are all totally organic. Everything else -- wooden stakes to elevate the plastic, leaf mulch, straw and straw bales and so on -- we already had on hand. Due to space and time constraints, we do supplement our harvests with greens from the farmers market, Oklahoma Food Cooperative and in deep winter, the grocery store, but in the future we hope to increase the amount of winter produce we grow ourselves, which in turn increases our household food security and resiliency. We may eventually be able totally eliminate grocery store greens since under our current food system, most travel from very long distances and are hence not only nutritionally inferior but dependent on fossil fuels for shipping.

A five-ounce container of organic salad greens at the grocery store can cost anywhere from $4 to $6 depending on the store and season -- enough for maybe two salads in our family. I've lost track of the number of salads we've harvested and eaten from our winter garden, but before it bolts (probably sometime in May or June) I'm estimating we'll have consumed at least 40+ salads at a cost of only about $4. If we'd purchased the greens from the grocery store, we'd have spent about $240. So our little winter garden plot is saving us about $236, and the taste of fresh cut salad greens in the middle of winter -- ladies and gents -- that's just priceless. A table to illustrate all this is below. Any other insights to share on winter gardening?

	Garden	Store bought
Initial investment	about $4 for seeds	about $6 per five ounces (organic)
Est # of salads for family of four	40+	2
Total cost of 40 salads	$4	$240
Estimated savings	$236
Household food security	Increases	Nope!
Taste	Priceless	Bleh!

Note: After I posted this entry, I was contacted by Nathan Lau in Malaysia. He and his wife Annie are self-described foodies and write the popular blog, "House of Annie." From their blog, "Annie is mistress of the kitchen while Nate is the master of the grill and smoker. We cook the homestyle Asian and Hawaiian foods of our younger days while also exploring the wider worlds of Western foods." They also place a strong emphasis on home-grown foods and offer a "Grow Your Own" roundup each month. They invited me to submit my post for possible inclusion in their April roundup, which I did. You can read more about this great opportunity here and enter a post in the roundup as well if you're blogging about raising, eating and using home-grown foods in recipes, etc.