Sustainable living – Page 20

The garden kicks in

The abbey is far from self-sufficient in food, a fact made clear by expenditures at Whole Foods. But each year when the garden kicks in, there begins a time, lasting for several months, in which the abbey is pretty much self-sufficient in produce. Eggs too are an important part of the equation. Eggs from the abbey’s expert hens provide up to 20 percent of our protein year-round.

So the season is beginning in which suppers at the abbey largely consist of food grown here. Yesterday’s supper (above) was omelette, a salad of lettuce and broccoli with homemade garlic-Roquefort dressing, turnip and mustard greens, and a side-dish medley of seared turnips, baby bok choi, and some leftovers. All the produce except the garlic came from the garden — garden to table in about an hour.

On the next trip to Whole Foods, I’ll buy very little produce — a significant savings. Instead, Ken will slave in the garden.

Lettuce, cabbage, and brussels sprouts

A young cabbage

Some of the finest broccoli this year I’ve ever seen

Above, a young tomato. For those not familiar with the Carolina foothills, the soil here is mostly red. Over the past five years, the garden has had literally tons of compost and other organic materials added. Building the soil and feeding the worms is a years-long process, and the process is now well along here. I’ve never seen such rapid growth in the garden. No doubt the insect pests will get worse as the weather gets hotter, but so far the garden has been almost bug free.

Young corn

We have walls and walls of heirloom roses on the garden fence and elsewhere.

A rose on the garden fence

Old-fashioned shrubs

A neighbor has given us some shoots from her old-fashioned shrubs. I’m pretty sure this is English dogwood, also known as “mock orange,” or Philadelphus coronarius. If that indeed is what it is, it’s a native of Southern Europe. A hundred years ago, it was very popular, and it can sometimes be found around old homesteads. It has gone out of fashion. Time for a revival.

We’ve got lettuce

We are so rich with lettuce right now that we donated some of it to the Stokes Future Farmers’ Market.

The garden is looking great. Photos soon…

Kitty and Ronda, who help hold the farmers’ market together

A good drink was had by all

There had been barely half an inch of rain in the last month. Yesterday, it rained — 1.56 inches. This morning you can almost feel the exuberance of the green things. The honeysuckle and the roses are just getting started. We’ve been eating lettuce for a week, and now we’re covered up with lettuce. The first broccoli probably will be harvested today, and mustard greens tomorrow. Soon there will be cabbage and onions.

It’s that farmer’s market time of year

The farmer’s market nearest to the abbey is in Danbury, and today it opened for the season. It’s operated by a group called Stokes Future, several members of which are friends of the abbey. So far, there’s not much fresh produce available other than lettuce and onions. But you can buy honey from bees that are only a few miles away, or a book written at the abbey.

How to find a dark sky

The dark blue areas are reasonably dark skies. One of the darkest areas on the East Coast is in West Virginia. Note that almost the entire state of North Carolina has ruined skies, with the exception of the Dismal Swamp in the northeast corner of the state.

One of the cruelest, most magic-killing forms of our alienation from nature is our inability to see the stars. Light pollution, of course, is the cause of it. Cities, suburbs, rural areas, fracking areas — all these places are brightly lit, all night. Massive quantities of fossil fuel are expended to drive off the darkness. This is insane, but it is only one of the many forms of insanity that we’re no longer even aware of anymore, because that’s Just the Way Things Are.

Would you like to see how far you’d have to travel to see a dark sky? Here’s a link to instructions on how to get a light-pollution overlay for Google Earth. First you download a light-pollution map (it’s a TIFF image) from a site in Italy. Then follow the instructions in the link to load the overlay into Google Earth and position the overlay correctly.

I am in northwestern North Carolina, north of Greensboro and Winston-Salem. Note that the nearest dark sky, for me, is in southern Virginia, between Hillsville and Floyd. I am quite familiar with that area. It’s isolated, is sparsely settled, and is reachable on tiny, winding roads.

In my novel, Fugue in Ursa Major, the young protagonist is a stargazer. The novel begins with Jake driving southwest from Charlottesville to go stargazing, to the blue area west of Grayson, Virginia.

The new publication date for the novel, by the way, is May 30. I’m still waiting for one of the first readers to finish. He’s an academic and won’t have time to read the draft until the end of the academic year, which is — tomorrow! His feedback on the novel is very important to me, so I’m holding up the release of the book for a few more weeks.

Wild ramps, and ramp pesto

I have heard of ramps for many years, but not until today did I finally taste them. Ramps are members of the onion-garlic-leek family, and they grow wild all over the Appalachians. A friend gave them to me on a recent trip to Asheville. Ramps appear in April, I believe, and then they fade.

I made the tops of the ramps into pesto. Though the bulbs (which look like little onions) are as edible as the tops, I saved the bulbs to plant in the branch bottom where the May apples grow. There is a good chance that the ramps will naturalize here in the Stokes County foothills.

The tops have a mild oniony taste, much like leeks, but more tender. They made a delicious pesto.

Coping with screwy weather

A brief warm spell about three weeks ago gave us hope that we might be able to make an early start with the garden. It was not to be. A cold spell followed, and two nights with hard frost. Only the lettuce germinated decently. Even the broccoli and cauliflower, which we started from plants, had minor damage from the frost.

We decided to re-till the area where the seeds didn’t germinate and try again in a week or so when the weather is warmer. Ken took advantage of the downtime in the garden to apply some of the organic soil amendments that had been delivered late, including dried kelp, cottonseed meal, blood meal, bone meal, and lime.

The two new chickens have been transferred out of the bird cage in the house to the chicken coop. They were getting too big and too rowdy to remain indoors.

An apple blossom damaged by frost

No Fracking in Stokes: our new video

As regular readers know, I’ve been involved for the last two years with No Fracking in Stokes, a grassroots group fighting fracking in Stokes County and in North Carolina.

Our group has released a new video, filmed here in Stokes County (except for the shots of actual fracking in the Marcellus shale area of Pennsylvania). The actor is a retired schoolteacher, and the farm where this was shot is just a few miles from the abbey.

That’s the abbey’s garden in one of the photos near the end of the video, and the chicken perched in the Jeep window is an abbey chicken, Fiona.

The original music is by Rex McGee, a Stokes County musician.