Category: Sustainable living

What the critters so generously leave behind


Supper

If I had ever really understood how much effort (and defeat) is involved in defending a garden, an orchard, and some chickens against all the hungry mouths that want to eat everything, I might never have had the heart to start. The hungry mouths come from everywhere — out of the woods, down from the sky, and up from the ground. Hawks and raccoons want to eat your chickens. Snakes want to eat your eggs. Squirrels and raccoons will raid the orchard and carry off peaches, apples, and figs just before you were going to pick them. Raccoons and rabbits and voles raid the garden. And we haven’t even started to talk about insects and blights. The abbey, to be sure, is in a worst-case situation — up against the woods in some very fine animal habitat.

No one understands your grief, of course, better than your local agricultural agents. I’ve written in the past about how important it is to befriend them. One of the abbey’s friends is a horticulturist whose help and advice during the past eight years have been invaluable. He’s a very busy guy, and you can’t get him to dinner very often. But this evening he’s coming to dinner, so this afternoon I got my shears and a sack and went out to see what the critters had left me for a home-grown supper.

The squirrels took every last one of the peaches from one of the trees, the tree that bore first. They’ll be after the other trees soon enough. They’ve already stolen some green apples as well. I see the trees shaking and go up to the orchard to ask the squirrels what the heck they think they’re doing. They just glance at me and go on chewing. If I shake a stick at them they’ll run back into the woods with a peach in their mouths. Every now and then I see a chicken peck a squirrel, because the chickens like the fallen peaches. Good work, chickens.

OK, then. I can make chutney from green apples, and maybe I can even get away with putting some unripe peaches in it. A nice red onion would do nicely in the chutney. So far, the snakes seem not to have found a way into Ken’s new chicken house, so there are plenty of eggs. That means omelets with a filling including onions, green tomatoes, day lily buds, and basil. I’m covered up with squash. The squash will get roasted on the grill. There was enough late lettuce for small salads. The first two cucumbers of the season were ready to pick. And there will be a loaf of fresh-baked sourdough bread.

So it promises to be a decent supper for a horticulturist (or a hobbit), though it’s not the sort of supper that can happen every day.

Ken, by the way, is in Alaska, again in a summer job with the Park Service as a backcountry ranger deep in grizzly bear territory where he’s assigned a shotgun. Maybe the squirrels aren’t so bad after all.

When I bring stuff in from the garden, I like to wash it immediately in cold water, wrap it in a muslin towel, and put it in the refrigerator to chill. The lettuce is in a vase of cold water. I’ll pick the lettuce leaves off the stalk right before they go into the salad. When stuff is fresh, a little extra care will keep it that way.


Soon to be chutney

The perils of peaches

It’s year eight in the orchard, and this year I just might get my first bite of peach.

Last year, the entire peach crop was wiped out by a late frost. This year, the three peach trees are loaded. One of the trees is weeks ahead of the other two trees and has dozens of already-red peaches. But each morning I notice that someone is knocking them down. It could be a squirrel, or it could be a raccoon that climbs the tree during the night. The animals are very wasteful. They knock down several peaches, take a bite from some of them, and leave the rest lying on the ground for the ants.

I’ve not yet picked any of the peaches off the tree because they’re still hard and need more time to ripen. But I do retrieve the peaches that have been knocked down and take them to the kitchen, hoping that they’ll ripen decently and that they’ll be fit to eat.

If these four peaches ripen properly, there will be peaches and cream.

The importance of hugging trees

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, by Peter Wohlleben. Greystone Books, 2016, 272 pages.

This book got a lot of attention when it was published in German, in 2015, as Das geheime Leben der Bäume. Luckily we had to wait only a year for an English translation.

Though I believe that Wohlleben’s message about trees is well grounded in science and research, much of it also comes from his experience as a forester. It’s sometimes difficult to know just how metaphorical Wohlleben intends to be — for example, when he speaks of trees feeling pain, or of their experience or their character. But he is quite convincing: There is such a thing as tree behavior. If you observe tree behavior, then you must keep in mind that tree behavior is slow and requires years of observation, even if you do something brutal to a tree such as cut off a large limb or tear off some skin. In talking about the character of trees, he points out that individual trees (though the trees may be closely related genetically) may respond very differently to threats such as drought or an infestation of insects or fungus. It is as though individual trees make different judgments about when to start conserving water, or when to drop their leaves.

One of the most fascinating things that Wohlleben tells us about trees is the reach and power of their underground network, which involves not only the trees’ roots but also the mycelia of the many fungi that live underground in cooperation with the trees. This network can transmit messages about the forest environment (though slowly). And trees exchange water and nutrients with each other. Old trees “nurse” their offspring through their roots. Surviving trees sometimes keep the stumps of dead friends alive for many years. Sick trees get help from healthier neighbors. This altruism of trees makes sense, because all trees in a forest work together to preserve the forest environment — a canopy that catches 97 percent of the light, and where underneath the canopy everything is dark, moist, and friendly to fungi.

Wohlleben will leave you quite convinced that trees are sentient and intelligent in many ways, ways that are particular and appropriate to trees and their long lives (if left alone). Wohlleben also helps us understand how cruelly and stupidly we treat our trees and forests and the risks this poses to our ecosystems.

This book now takes its place among the works of other writers and thinkers who are leading us to what I believe is inevitable, assuming that we don’t destroy our planet. That is that all living things have natural rights, and that these rights must be protected by law.

This book is a must read.

Rain!


⬆︎ Baby apples

Drought is terrifying at any time of year. But drought in the spring, I think, is the worst. After a so-so start with the spring rains, a weekend front left behind 5.54 inches, and yesterday the sun came out. Now we can have some serious spring.

One of the things that is easy to see when you live in an undeveloped area with lots of wildlife is how drought means hunger for the wild things. During last year’s dry spring, for example, the deer wiped out the day lilies. They did it because they were hungry. The vole population is greater when there’s good rain. The moles flourish. Somebody — probably a raccoon but possibly a skunk — is making little divots all over the yard, orchard, and garden, taking advantage of the soft soil to dig for grubs.

Because there are many young trees at the abbey — including the orchard — good rain in the spring is important, because it’s in the spring that young trees do most of their growing. The surrounding woods also got a deep, deep watering, which will maximum the growth of the wild trees during the merry month of May. If good weather continues, the squirrels will have lots to eat this winter.

Ken’s garden is flourishing. Last night’s supper included mustard greens and roasted turnips. Cilantro pesto is on the menu for tonight. The onions are flourishing. The cabbages are forming heads. The basil and tomatoes are starting to jump.

The long-range forecast looks good. If the voles are happy, I’m happy.


⬆︎ The first fence roses


⬆︎ Spiderwort


⬆︎ Baby peaches, of which we have a great, great many


⬆︎ It seems that some red clover seed hitched its way in in a bag of grass seed. It’s a beautiful plant, so next year we should plant much more of it.


⬆︎ Wildflowers at the edge of the woods, the name of which I do not know

What’s growing at the abbey

⬆︎ Dogwood in the woods

⬆︎ Though we do see honeybees, these days bumblebees do much of the work of pollination.

⬆︎ Baby peaches

⬆︎ I always forget the name of this.

⬆︎ Baby chickens

⬆︎ It’s thrilling to see the woods coming alive. Looking down through the orchard toward the back of the house.

⬆︎ The wires that run along the top of the eight-foot fence needed replacing. For the top wire, we used copper wire and good insulators. The wire should serve as a reasonably good horizontal loop antenna for the low bands of amateur radio, including the 80-meter band. The loop is almost 400 feet long. That’s a long antenna.

An abbey literary update

Ken’s third book, This Land Is Our Land, has been in the final editing stages here at the abbey and is due at the publisher, Penguin Random House, next week. The book is scheduled for release in March 2018.

When the idea for this book was hatched last April, Ken was here at the abbey, traveling through on book tour for his second book. He had just published a piece in the New York Times, This Is Our Country. Let’s Walk It. After that piece was published, it was apparent that Ken had become the honorary owner of a “right to roam” movement in the United States and that a book on the subject was needed. Ken had no trouble at all selling his agent and his publisher on the idea, and in no time he had a contract to write the book.

A year ago, I would have assumed that this book would be a fairly bland and somewhat academic — but necessary — reference book for a new movement in need of a manifesto. But having read the manuscript twice during the past two weeks, I was reminded how Ken’s books always exceed my high expectations. It’s not just his superb research and the charm of his writing that make This Land Is Our Land such a good book. It’s also the way he surprises me, when I finally see the manuscript, with how deeply he delves and how high he flies, even though I was in on discussions about the book from the beginning. Though this book’s topic is seemingly narrow, Ken also has produced an incisive snapshot of contemporary American culture through the lens of our attitudes toward the land. And he has laid out a lion-hearted vision of a future America that is less insular and more benevolent.

If you’re not certain what a “right to roam” is, I’d suggest the New York Times link above. It’s not as radical a right as you might think. The people of England, Wales, Scotland, and Sweden have generous roaming rights, and even countries such as Lithuania and Latvia are far ahead of the United States with the right to roam.

This Land Is Our Land will be the fifth book to be born here at the abbey during the last four years. Ken’s other two books are Walden on Wheels (2013), and Trespassing Across America (2016). There also are my novels Fugue in Ursa Major (2014) and Oratorio in Ursa Major (2016). Symphony in Ursa Major is in progress and should be out next year.

Grinding your own flour

As I have gotten more and more experienced with sourdough bread, two factors have converged to pull me into breadmaking even deeper. Watch out. It could happen to you, too.

For one, the sourdough baker becomes so obsessed with the quality of the bread and takes such pride in each loaf that the amount of time and work involved is no longer an issue.

For two, it’s difficult to find stone-ground whole wheat flour these days. Partly, I suspect, this is because of the demonization of gluten (and therefore wheat) by so many “gluten free” people. Whole Foods now carries all sorts of exotic (and, in my opinion, useless) flours, and that’s crowding out good wheat flour. Organic wheat berries, however, are easy to buy in bulk, and they’re cheap.

My Champion juicer, fitted with Champion’s grinder attachment, makes a somewhat slow but entirely workable wheat grinder. The flour is excellent. Later this week I hope to have a portrait of my first home-ground loaf.

Update: The bread rose poorly and did not make a portrait-worthy loaf, probably because the weather was so cold. However, it was delicious.