Gardening

I haven't written much about gardening, especially for the proportion of my energy and time it has filled during the last year. I am going to take a stab at describing my intro efforts at understanding the natural world in a garden plot. This isn't the most eloquent description, but it's hard to summarize 10 months' worth of investment articulately. So, gardening - the harnessing of plant ecology to drive evolution in a more controlled and delicious direction; the melding of eating and the outdoors!

When I arrived at the camp, I was handed the position of garden, compost bin, and animal center czar (caretaker). I considered myself fairly proficient, because I had spent the two prior months working on a vegetable farm. Kelley, the previous Naturalist, gave me a tour of the garden, naming the plants as we passed them. I frantically wrote down their names. I tried to get a history of the garden plots. And then I was left in charge of the veggie, herb, and flower garden!

In the fall, I harvested the last of the vegetables, collected seeds from the basil, sage, daylilies, and echinacea flowers, and maintained the plots. I strung up the tomatillos and tomatoes with twine and gathered posts. I covered the crops to protect them from nighttime frost and extend their production. Sometimes I forgot to cover them. I dreamed. I used some of the crops for my cooking, shared the crops with other staff members and a couple of times, with the kitchen for student meals. I planted a few late-season crops - kale, arugula, cilantro, carrots, and radishes, especially. I made a map of the garden. With help, I made signs to identify the different plants in the garden. I made an interpretive sign for the compost bins.

By the spring, I was ready to get started. I looked up recipes for potting soil and ordered free seeds from Seeds of Change (for educational purposes they give away older saved seeds in unpredictable assorted boxes). I brainstormed, with the help of new Naturalist Lara, what and where we wanted to put the plants in the garden. We planted some seeds in the flats, by a big sunny window in the animal center. We planted some seeds outside when the ground defrosted. We weeded and cut back overgrowth. We added lime and compost to the garden beds. We dug up two new gardens - behind my house, and a Three Sisters demonstration garden at the base of the dining hall. I made an interpretive sign for the garden.

These are just lists of things - and for all of the things that Lara and I accomplished, we forgot to do things, and were late planting seeds, and didn't water all of the plants enough. I put a lot of love, time, and energy into those gardens. When I left the camp in June, the plants were doing well (at least the ones that had germinated and not been dug up by moles or eaten by insects/slugs). I don't think of all of that effort as pointless - I learned a lot from diving in and screwing up. I came back in the fall to see friends, and to see the garden. Lara showed me photos of all of our plants that had grown. The hardest part of a garden is letting it go at the end of the year - letting the plants die.

These photos feel like photos of newborn babies to me:







































I have become, against all odds, a plant person. Looking back, I realize that this was inevitable. I love animals, and am becoming more infatuated with fungus by the day (bacteria and viruses, you will have to wait for another period of my life). But there has always been something so immediate, so tangible about interactions with plants - they define places more than any of the other living things that occupy the world. A landscape is made up of plants that cloak the geological figures. Before I could identify plants, I spent time knowing them intimately. Each place I have lived has its foliage and accompanying scents that draw me to it. Here in Durham, the mimosa trees are in bloom. While an invasive species, their blossoms are beautiful and fragrant. Their scent has followed me gently as I've biked in Durham.

These photos are my documentation of the production of a raised bed garden in my old backyard:

Ze Magick of Communitee

I recently had an epiphany - one of those epiphanies that is actually a realization of something that I should have, perhaps, known long ago (like that "genre" is pronounced "jjjohn-ray" or even "jjjjohn-ruh", or that linkin' logs are actually Lincoln logs after the log-cabin-prez). This epiphany has to do with community.

I was talking to my friend Sarah about our respective experiences this summer, explaining how amazing it was to run into and meet people, who were all intertwined in some way. Going contra-dancing here, and seeing 3 people I knew from different settings. Or running into other people who went to my college, and know my friends or professors. It keeps happening to me. Running into people at the farmer's market, concerts, bike co-op... Last summer, there was so much of this coincidence, that I began to attribute it to something other than random luck. I gave it the title of fate & magic, I believe? More appropriate, I think, is community. That's what community is, after all, isn't it -- a group of people who are intertwined, involved, and invested in each other, somehow?

Anyways, I am revelling in this magic-community I am once more a part of. Maybe community is the less mysterious cousin to trail magic (the unseen forces that bring you what you need while you are hiking, or traveling). It's a pretty amazing force field and I am truly enjoying the homing process.

Photo Journal: Goodbye Voyage

This is my ode to these fabulous mountains that have incubated my soul, taught me so much, and introduced me to some kickass friends this year. I spent two days, two nights of revelry before leaving in a friend's vehicle to begin the drive to my summer home: Durham.

I cooked some daylily buds with my foraging friend, Ann, then said goodbye to my old bicicleta, the famed P.Diddy (formerly known as Puffy the Huffy) giving it a new chain and new life as a communal bike (leaving threatening directions on the mandatory love and respect that should be given to P.Diddy). I then took my backpack and tarped a couple miles from my house, falling asleep to the flickering blue fairies (a lingering firefly).






























The next day, I hiked a new trail for me: to Falls Creek Falls and down into Jones Gap from a new approach, swooping past the the River Falls lodge where I no longer can contra dance, and up past Rainbow Falls to say goodbye to the waterfall, and up to the house to collect my new-to-me bicycle (as will be fondly remembered by my loyal hiking blog readers as the one I used to bike from Falls Lake to Stone Mountain in 2008). I biked down (mostly down) to Brevard, and through town to Pisgah Forest, a total of 23 miles. Along the way, I had my first flat bike tube! Of course, I wasn't carrying my spare tube with me, but as luck had it, I broke down practically in front of Pierce's house - a Cleveland of Cleveland Cliffs fame - and he is a wiz bike mechanic. In town, I got ice cream at Dolly's for the last time (for now) and migrated into the forest to stealth-camp with my tarp by the Davidson River.