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Author: theMan
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What Water Becomes
Cattails, ferns, comfrey, there are so many wonderful plants shooting out of the ground. If it weren’t for the frequent spring rains, none of them would flourish.
I’ve recently learned about Dr. Elaine Ingham, a fascinating microbiologist. A quote of hers I like is: “If we as human beings are to continue to live on this planet we have to stop destroying her.” In this video, The Roots of your Profits, she describes the importance of root biology for growing healthy plants.
Most of the sugars plants create from absorbing sunlight through their leaves, they send down into their roots and into the soil to feed colonies of bacteria. The bacteria attract a variety of predators, and in the process of consuming the bacteria, they leave behind nutrients right at the plants roots, which the plants slurp up. It’s an ingenious method, but is easily destroyed when fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides are used. The video is an hour and a half long, but fascinating.
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Perfume from the Garden
Cooking, grinding coffee, washing dishes, all of these things are better with fresh lilac in the kitchen window. It won’t be long before the fragrance of peonies fills the kitchen too. The peony buds are full and on the verge of bursting open.
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Wild Cherry Blossoms
Wild cherry trees in bloom comfort my eyes each time I pedal home from an errand. There are wild cherries all through the woods. Somewhere in the mountains is a grove of cherry trees many hundreds of years old. A grove so beautiful when in bloom, that no one who has seen it as ever left the grove. As a result, to this day, no one knows where it is. If you stumble upon it one spring while hiking in the remote Cascades, you will never return either.
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Where’s Skunky This Afternoon?
Skunky’s mother is taking a rest in the grass. I see some of her chicks, but where is Skunky? As you can see, chicks like being next to their mother. They are relaxed and take the time to preen their tiny new wing feathers.
When the mother gets up from her nap, out pops Skunky and more chicks. They were napping under her. She’s wandered off with some of the chicks in tow, but these three are just comfortable enjoying the afternoon sun.
Now Skunky is up and on the move. At two weeks old, Skunky’s wing feathers are nearly complete. Skunky still has the stripe down its back, but its wing feathers are a dusting of white and gray, more owl than skunk.
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Out of the Garden Today – 2015/04/12
I don’t have the heart to cut these tulips. They are too beautiful to take inside, so they really aren’t “Out of the Garden” … they are still very much in the garden.
What did come out of the garden and into the house today were some over wintering kale and one of Cognac’s deep brown eggs. After growing produce for a number of years and watching the chickens hatch and raise a new generation each year, my understanding of what food is has changed. Ninety percent of the food on grocery shelves isn’t food. It’s some sort of edible (edible in the sense that it won’t kill you within hours of eating it) stuff that has been processed so much that it’s impossible to decipher from what plant or animal it came from. It’s not really food. It’s some sort of industrial product we’re told is food.
There’s no substitute for eating living things. Take the kale I picked above. We ate it within ten minutes of picking it out of the garden. The leaves were still respirating when we ate it. It’s the way most of nature eats. Even earthworms feast on living things: fungi, rotifers, nematodes, bacteria, and protozoans. They don’t first kill their food and then run it through industrial processes until it’s unrecognizable. They dig through the earth, sucking in living things and digesting them.
It’a fascinating working in the garden and seeing how alive the soil is. It’s teaming with life: earthworms, spiders, bugs of all sorts, and millions and billions of tiny creatures I can’t see. Good food is alive.