Farming Follies

You would think that by now, some 10,000 years after agriculture began, that people would know all about how to grow food. In each region, everyone would know the right way, and the wrong way. But no. We have to learn and learn, adapt and revise and take it all with a sense of humor. After all, we have the supermarket when all else fails. Long may that last!

It’s 7 AM the day after the Solstice, and we’ve got to get the dry beans planted in the middle of the pumpkin field. We have delayed almost too long and they may not have time to mature. The pumpkins themselves are half in; the rest pending a new shipment of seed. That will complete a projected acre of Lady Godivas, grown for their succulent seeds. An acre of pumpkins?! Do you know how many heavy pumpkins that is? What are you going to do with all that? We are looking for a cash crop and Mark hit upon the idea of tasty, versatile pumpkin seeds. “Vermont-grown nuts,” I try, “ tasty, organic and local. Roasted and salted. Toss them into soups, pates, pasta, or in your mouth for just plain snacking…” When you’ve got a product that nobody knows, though, you’ve got to educate the people before they will buy them.. Hmm…Seems dubious. Mark is sanguine. Whew, stay tuned for this one!

The rest of things here look idyllic and often feel that way. Oh, but then there’s the onions….A wide row, a good hundred feet of onions three or four across, and they’re growing beautifully in the sun. I didn’t mulch them upon emergence, though, deeming our supply of mulch hay would have a higher, better use. Boy was I wrong! When my attention turned to getting the garden in with its seeds, seedlings and support structures (a whole debate of its own), the onion patch was overrun. Just finding the shoots growing among the sea of weeds was hard enough. Weeding that long row that seems to stretch off into the distance has taken me hours and hours and hours. I don’t look up as I weed. I pretend I am a peasant in India, and that this is all I do. I just keep my head down and gaze at the promising onions, the soil and the task, cultivating a sort of trance. Some of those weeds are friends that we have learned to eat, like lamb’s quarters—amazingly good. Dandelions and plantain, too. An old Swiss woman took us to her yard and showed us just how many things out there taste much better than we thought. It is a rather warm and secure feeling to know that tasty food exists out there for free should crops fail. But in my onion row, out they go. Next year I know that the highest and best use of mulch hay is without a doubt the onions.

Ah, but the main garden, now. Mowed grass between the rows is a dream come true. Our old garden just had trampled weeds. The multi-colored lettuce is a sea of various greens and the lovely red Merlot variety just gives it that fillip of contrast so pleasing to the eye. Mark’s tomatoes have passed their transplant crisis, now thriving….He started them in the greenhouse on January 23^rd, Brandywines and Mennonites and Peacevines. Put some out in the garden May 12^th—super early. He had laid down black plastic growing cloth to heat up the soil. When the soil was warm enough, he put in about 10 big tomato plants, carefully nurtured in dreams since January. He cut river ash boughs and bent them into hoops and covered them with that white agricultural cloth you see in the fields so the tomato plants had a snug home. A spate of sunny weather and no frost obviated the growing tunnel. But the tomatoes failed to thrive. They grew pale and shivered. Rain and a steady diet of highs in the 50’s came and they huddled against their poles. A spate of reasonable weather around May 21^st—or was it because it was the traditional Harvard tomato planting day?—got Mark out there putting in more of his best tomatoes and peppers from the greenhouse. (He took a big chance on frost not hitting us—it almost did, June 4^th, but landed in a field above us instead.) After Memorial Day we began to put in the rest of the plants, seeded in February and March, according to the typical Vermont planting schedule. So, three tomato planting times took place. Currently, the original settlers from early May are still smaller than the May 21^st batch, which strut their tall green lushness—one is already three feet tall-- and even sport a few little fruit. The later ones are the youngest and in their little 10-inch way, look very promising for September canning, which timing is deliberate and just right. So Mark put in a lot of effort from greenhouse to garden, and what shows up in addition but a host of thriving volunteer tomatoes!

We planted a first batch of potatoes in mid-May, when people around here do so, though we know they just invite the Colorado potato beetles. So that batch grows under the floating row cover, giving the field a rather professional look. The main storage potatoes—Yukon golds, some big flaky whites, some tiny creamy cowhorns, and one other—will go in in July. The bugs don’t come then. And that way we will dig them up out of the dirt, many emerging like big treasures, later in September when the root cellar starts to get cold and ready to receive them. We’re still eating last years’ potatoes and you would never know how old they are when they are on the plate. Sounds grim, tastes great.

First plantings of broccoli, beets and carrots failed, we put ‘em in again. Better now. Why fail? Who knows? We may know someday. Ditto cucumbers, but that was old seed.

It’s all about using the resources particular to this place: the greenhouse, the sun schedule, our living schedule, the soils and insects and weeds that we have right here. Why don’t people know all about growing food? Because of the infinite combination of the variables, the friends and foes and weather for each square foot of ground. Non-organic growers bludgeon the crops into compliance. We prefer to think we are composing a symphony.

Love, Josie

The Slow Living Summit

THE SLOW LIVING SUMMIT

In Brattleboro, Vermont, down Main Street each June people send their young cows in a genuinely cute event called the Strolling of the Heifers. Flower-bedecked Jerseys and newly-washed Herefords placidly “stroll” amidst balloons and jugglers and cheerful people. This year a preceding event in Brattleboro set the heifers in place in an emerging American economy—the kind we dream of and knew in part when we were little-- based on free enterprise, local initiatives, the protection of nature and social justice. The event was a cozy little economics conference called the Slow Living Summit. Mark and I knew it would be good.

I haven’t mentioned our interest in local economics. In my current view, political action is useless at this time when we don’t have access to mass media anymore. Locally, I am too new here to intrude my outsider’s perspective and besides, that path doesn’t call to me anymore. Strategically, it seems that our only avenue to positive change is to get out there and create the society, culture and economy we seek. The megacorporations are currently accountable to no-one, yet they control assets in the trillions and influence the lives of most of us on earth. They have no motivation for anything but profit for their shareholders, indeed, are only allowed by law to pursue that one goal. You all know the list of our economic ills, from the impoverishment of American initiative to the most serious consequence of all, climate change. Note also the enslavement of much of the American workforce to corporate giants whose shenanigans can bankrupt families due to what they claim to be “market cycles.” I think locally-based economies can pose a counterbalance to some of this. Grassroots businesses are accountable to the localities they are based in. They are part of a social web and therefore receive personal feedback from the people they affect. They are more likely to share the values of the people who surround them. Logically they have arisen in response to local needs and tend to address the basics of food, clothing and shelter. The decisions they make are more often influenced by the context they are in, whether they are about the products they stock or the need to protect the quality of life in the community. They understand the fabric of cooperation that makes up a neighborhood and they employ local people. They are local people. And this package adds up to values that help society

Vermont, as you and I know, has made real progress in the area of local economy, and so we went to get an overview from the heavy thinkers. In good Vermont style, they presented their work with a light touch and everyone basked in the optimism. Perhaps the essential question to be answered is, how can people make a living and stay true to their higher values?

I came away from this event cheered about the possibilities for social endeavor and I want to share some highlights. Before I do, though, I should tell you that Bill McKibben came in at the very end of all this fun, having participated in no part of the event. He mounted to the podium and delivered a truly horrifying speech about what is coming at us in terms of climate change. I practically fell off my chair with my sense of loss. The evil fairy had come and cursed the baby princess. What is the use of all of this positivity if we are to be crushed by, say, endless rains during our growing season?

Getting up off the metaphorical floor, I put it all back together. By God, perseverance is what we—people engaged in a social values-based approach-- are all about. We, including our counterparts around the world, all together creating the New Economy, are people who innovate, who create adaptive pathways. If anyone can, we can, and we are. Many of us at this point still have everything the world can offer us—you could see that in the robustness of the participants, the determined optimism and the abundant flow of ideas based in good practice and solid experience.

Presenters as diverse as the Vermont Secretary of Agriculture, and the founder of the Calvert Social Investment Fund and the owner of Pete and Gerry’s Eggs—a $24 million a year enterprise you may never have heard of—numerous financiers, and, of course, Stoneyfield Farms, set forth their business practices and their philosophies. You wouldn’t want me to include all, so here are tidbits.

Common Good Capitalism states that cooperation, not competition, is the prime force in evolution: When you examine anything from a systems perspective, you perceive the whole which the apparently competing parts make up. Think about it. Ecology began to teach us that a generation ago. The pervading spirit of cooperation that identifies the New Economy springs from this perspective. The multiple crises and the destruction of the resource base show us that cooperation is the last remaining way for society to improve. More and more entities, from companies to governments to protesters around the world, are embracing the idea that the common good trumps ruthless individual gain, though it’s rarely covered in the media. Some economists say we’ve got maybe 10% of the American economy, maybe even more; it’s hidden. An example is the new form of corporation, the Benefit Corporation, or B-corp, recently emerging in numerous states. It specifies in its charter that the common good will be the company’s top priority, and profit will be second.

Consider the Crew Fund. This uses the principles of network marketing to create funds for groups of people to administer for the benefit of their communities. You agree to automatically donate $11 a month to the Crew Fund. You recruit as many friends in your area as you can to do the same ($1 of their donation goes into your fund). They recruit their friends. Your group directs the expenditure of loans from your area’s fund. Solicit proposals for a daycare center, or a community garden, or whatever your fund can be applied to that helps the people in your town—things banks never fund and municipalities cannot. Eventually enough money accrues to execute the project. The success draws more people in. If you want, go to www.crewfund.org/terrymollner and check it out.

And how about Gross Domestic Happiness? The concept, invented by the king of Bhutan, jumps to the heart of any economy by measuring people’s well-being instead of economic production. That is, measuring what money is supposed to buy. In Brazil, the United Kingdom and Costa Rica, policy makers are applying these new measurements from the grassroots up. If you like, go to the TED lectures and look up Nic Marks’ talk. It’ll knock your socks off. America is in there, too. A questionnaire that you can take, that originated in Bhutan and is being applied around the world, is at www.glasnerprogress.org/GDH. (Caveat: as I write this, I have no Internet access, so I can’t check on what is at these sites yet.)

Building community is key to raising consciousness and understanding. This means, in your neighborhoods, know your neighbors. From your companies, knit together your customers. Address real needs, not manufactured ones. Learn what your community, however you define it, needs and help it to come about. Practice social justice.

Will such changes be enough? Will they be in time? (One presenter advised us to “walk on two legs,” meaning keep one leg in political movement while the other walks your economic and social aims.) Maybe none of this will save us, though in conjunction with other prongs of the New Economy, such as innovations in more traditional financing, the economic initiatives will be more effective. We’ll probably redefine salvation! We have to begin somewhere, and we have made a good beginning. And what a way to live, what a meaningful bundle of values for the local economies we are developing. Never think that life does not have meaning, if your boat is sailing these tides.

Love, Josie