January 25. In the week I was away this place made its yearly transformation to chorus frog paradise. Last week: dry partly frozen ground, frogs quiet and hiding. Ten inches of rain later and I could hear the chorus from several hundred yards down the road as I returned Monday evening. The low corner of land I walked along last week lies under enough water to allow the dog a good swim. A feeling of celebration fills the evening air along with the sound (to hear it, and read more about the chorus frogs, click HERE). The cloud cover broke the spell of cold, too, bringing on a growth spurt in the winter hoop house greens, while the rain released all the scents that make up this fecund spring-in-winter season – astringent oak leaf compost, citrusy fir needles, the promise of mushrooms.

The Organic Seed Growers Conference was a completely over-stimulating mix of equal parts inspiration and practical learning, with hundreds of seed people who traveled through weather the Seattle forecasters dubbed “Snowmaggedon” to converge in Port Townsend, Washington. I met seed growers from Idaho, North Carolina, and Ireland (as well as many from the Pacific Northwest), organic plant breeders from Wisconsin and New York along with many from Washington and Oregon, community organic activists from Los Angeles, Iowa, Hawaii, and South Korea. Lin stayed behind nursing a cold but managed to attend electronically via live-broadcast webinars of many workshops (also attended by hundreds more people all over the world).

Now we’re spending the winter evenings reading out loud from our notes and planning our 2012 gardens. I’ll be speaking about the conference next week at the Laytonville Garden Club (Feb.1^st at 1p.m.), and you’ll hear more too as we proceed with early spring plantings. I’m only beginning to digest what I learned, but I can say it was just as transformative for me as the big storm was for the chorus frogs.

Big Picture summary of the moment: The situation is dire (96% of food crop varieties extinct, a similar percentage of the world’s seed controlled by Monsanto) – and the opportunity for creative effective action is immense, and fun, and available to everyone. In partnership with plants, we can grow it back.

Occupy our food supply!

If you’d like an email note when a new post appears, click here to let me know.

Laughing Frog Farm’s new re-organized Seed Pages are up, with new varieties added from last summer’s growing season. In the heirloom tomato realm, check out smoky Cherokee Chocolate, the prolific apricot-sized-and-colored Jaune Flamme, and the low-acid Lillian’s Yellow. We’ve got the reddest lettuce, and a recipe for positively addictive kale chips. Thank you Sharon Jokela for elegant web design and a shopping cart feature that works.

We’re about to go from our seedy gardens to seedy heaven – the Organic Seed Growers Conference sponsored by Organic Seed Alliance, this year in Port Townsend on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. A long day’s bus tour of organic seed production farms, followed by two days packed with workshops on every topic from basic seed production to breeding for positive microbial interactions. Plus speakers, a trade show, the seed swap of seed swaps, and even a dance with music by the Pheromones.

This year’s theme is Strengthening Community Seed Systems, and I’m looking forward to learning ways to organize more seed growers in this little pocket of paradise. Everyone knows rural Mendocino County is full of gardeners. So many scattered patches of cultivated land, ideally suited to saving seed without concerns over isolation distances. Some gardener can take on saving and improving Painted Mountain corn, say, and provide seeds for others, and in the same season be able to trade with growers of other varieties and have sweet corn to eat. Or something like that. I hope to hear how different communities are approaching this issue. And I’m sure we’ll come home with a few (dozen) amazing varieties to try out this year. 

 January 6. Polly O’Possum moved into the garden in late fall to glean apples. Every evening, there she’d be, nosing around under the trees. Chaco the dog started by barking and trying to chase, but opossums don’t exactly sprint away, and soon he switched to making friends, always his true agenda with any creature other than bear (run away), raccoon (give the appearance of being willing to fight viciously forever), or mouse (swallow it).

Even in the beginning Polly understood that Chaco was no real threat and never resorted to the defense of “playing possum”, an involuntary loss of consciousness like fainting that includes lips drawn back in a frozen snarl, foam around the mouth, and for a final touch, the release of an extraordinarily rank fluid from the anus. Polly just shares a nose-sniffing moment with the dog and goes back to foraging.

Now that the fallen apples are cleaned up, the opossum has shifted from her normally nocturnal schedule in order to eat chicken feed. At night the feeders are locked up along with the chickens (still accessible to mice, but that’s another story). We often find Polly chowing down at midday, or sometimes catching a nap in the rice hull bedding. (Opossums eat chicken eggs, but ours are safe in tall barrels she can’t reach.) She doesn’t “shoo”, and a push with the broom on her behind only makes her dig in, bracing her feet against the floor (all four feet have opposable thumbs, making this a surprisingly effective maneuver).

 I’ve taken to just picking her up and carrying her out the back door. From there it’s a long opossum trek back to the chicken feed – she won’t show up inside again until the next day. Meanwhile she’s combing through the garden for over-wintering insect larvae and filling our opossum niche with her gentleness. For an animal its size, opossums have very short lifespans, only 2-4 years, which makes me appreciate her odd presence even more.  

  If you’d like an email note when a new post appears, click here to let me know.    

 December 30. The living skin of the planet in our little bioregion is happy today as the rains return. We’re at half the usual, which makes people and frogs nervous. The frogs have been all but silent, and just this morning as the mist turned to soft rain a few more spoke up hopefully. The cloud cover is just like my down quilt, holding in our warmth so nights are suddenly 40 degrees instead of 20. So much easier to stay warm.

I pass through the chicken yard a zillion times a day, as it lies between my house and most of the gardens. By their eager attention to my passage the hens remind me to bring along my kitchen scraps going one direction and vegetable treats from the hoophouses when I come back the other way. Often in the late afternoon I pause for a chicken yard break. It’s the most peaceful time there – hens have finished laying for the day with all its accompanying drama (“You’re on MY laying spot!” “No that’s mine!” “OMG I just laid a big one”). Lots of gentle contented talk, feather preening, digging here and there for a last snack before bed. And hey the camera was in my pocket when I sat down in one chair and put the bunch of carrots I’d just pulled in the other.

When I divided the harvest with the chooks, they were sure they’d gotten the best part of the deal with the carrot greens.

If you’d like an email note when a new post appears, click here to let me know.

 

 December 16. One measure of the special nature of this corner of the world is that at least half the time I mention Usnea, people  know what it is. I think of late fall and early winter as the season of Usnea, so I’m noticing and appreciating it now.

Worldwide, there are 600 species of Usnea. Our Pacific Northwest species is sometimes called Old Man’s Beard for its wispy dangling habit. It looks a lot like Spanish Moss, that constant companion of southern oaks (which is not actually a moss but a bromeliad). Usnea is not a moss either, but a lichen. And lichens, I love to remember, are formed of symbiotic relationships between fungi and algae, two very different life forms that come together to create a third totally distinct being.

Usnea anchors its pale green filaments to tree bark, here especially the twigs of deciduous oaks. When the trees are in leaf the Usnea remains unnoticed. When the Black Oaks drop their leaves, the trees are revealed not as skeletons of bare branches but as fully clothed Usnea scaffolds, pale fuzzy branches highlighted against the darker firs growing among them. Here’s a picture of the transformation in progress. 

Usnea is both an indicator and maintainer of air quality, declining in vigor as it traps pollutants. It has strong antibiotic and antifungal properties, making it ideal for dressing wounds. Not that I’ve ever used it in that capacity, but good to know. As an internal medicinal it’s even more useful, especially through the winter months, as its antibiotic properties focus especially on upper respiratory infections. As a winter cold preventative it functions as an immune system tonic. The sudden appearance of whole trees of Usnea reminds me to make a batch of tincture (the convenient way to take it, though a tea works also). Winter storms prune dead twigs and branches from the oaks, and these provide plenty of Usnea for medicine, with some left over to use as kindling, and plenty to leave for the deer to eat.

If you’d like an email note when a new post appears, click here to let me know.

 November 24. I’m germination testing the laughing frog seeds of past years, using the method my favorite garden scientist, Carol Deppe, outlines in The Resilent Gardener. Layers of sopping wet paper towels, seeds placed in rows at one end, the whole rolled up and placed in a zip-loc plastic bag. I’m using a heat mat to keep them in the low 70s, a temperature range my house does not attain in winter. Specks of Hopi tobacco, tiny round mustards, the pale disks of pepper seeds and sorghum like shiny chips of obsidian. Every morning I unroll the paper towels to check on their progress (and give them some oxygen). As soon as the seeds swell I wring out the toweling and keep it just damp.

It’s entirely fun, like a junior high science fair project without the angst of competition or judging. I look forward to each day’s viewing and thrill to the miracle of the plant’s emergence root first from the husk of the seed.

Two-year-old Osaka Purple mustard seeds were the quickest, with 100% sprouted in the first 24 hours. It’s been a week now, and most varieties are finished. Excellent results for all but a few. Trombetta squash lags with only four vigorous sprouts out of 20 seeds, though others are still swelling as if they may yet germinate. Nothing at all from the stinging nettle, and I’m wondering if my methods are to blame rather than the seeds themselves. Do they require some condition I’m not providing? In the hoop houses the nettles reseed on their own, coming up by the thousands every fall when the summer crops are cleared away. More information needed, and further experiment.

The Laughing Frog seed pages will soon be reorganized to include the germination results. Trombetta and maybe nettles will be discontinued, and new varieties from this year added. Awe-inspiring fun, those seeds.

If you’d like an email note when a new post appears, click here to let me know.

 

November 12. A few days ago I had a chance to meditate for hours on the subject of my conflicted relationship with our petroleum-centered way of life – while driving a tractor for the first time. Neighbor Martha (of Harvest Moon Farms lavender) offered to show me how to operate her Kubota, and she chugged it over to the giant pile of finished compost on Lin’s driveway. A 30-second lesson and I was on my own, using the tractor’s front scoop to carry three wheelbarrow-loads at a time out to the far hoop house. At first I was horrified at the diesel smell and the engine roar, but once I added hearing-protector muffs to my outfit I began to enjoy maneuvering the thing. A few hours later I’d moved more compost than I could ever have managed in a week via shovel and wheelbarrow.

Now that I’m in my sixtieth year – and it’s been forty years since I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis – I find I need to be more careful about overdoing physical labor. An hour of any one repetitive action – shoveling, raking, weeding – and that’s it. More, and the pain that follows is not the good ache of tired muscles but something more lingering that feels like damage. So I was thrilled to reach the end of the afternoon pain-free and with ten cubic yards of beautiful compost delivered to various garden spots, ready to spread on raised beds.

That’s more compost than we can create here in a year from the farm’s own materials. It was made fifty miles away, using gasoline-powered tools – chipper and backhoe – and transported here in a diesel dumptruck. I think about that as I drive the tractor, about how we’re using industrial-scale petroleum inputs to create the infrastructure – raised beds, greenhouses, deer-fenced areas – for what we intend ultimately to be a people-powered food-producing locally sustainable garden enterprise. Much of the forty cubic yards of compost purchased this year goes to filling new raised beds. Meanwhile we’re making more of our own compost each year, and banking that whenever we stop adding new planting areas we’ll be able to maintain fertility with cover crops and our own compost. The end of oil-dependent inputs is in sight. Whether we’ll be able to maintain all this just with our own diminishing physical capacities is another story. I’m hoping to attract a few young gardeners before long.

No photo of me and the tractor – you’ll have to imagine it.

If you’d like an email note when a new post appears, click here to let me know.