Winter Green Farm

My article “Farmers Go Wild” about conservation-based agriculture is in the Winter 2012 issue of YES! Magazine. You can read it here.

It begins:

“Frogs are an indicator species,” Jack Gray explains, leaning over a small, muddy pond to look for tadpoles.

Here on the 170-acre Winter Green Farm, 20 miles west of Eugene, Ore., Gray has raised cattle and grown vegetables and berries for 30 years.

It’s a sunny April day, but water pools in the pastures, evidence of the rains this part of Oregon is known for.

Gray is in his mid-50s and agile from decades of working outside. He built this pond to provide habitat for native amphibians, because bass in another pond were eating the red-legged frogs and Western pond turtles.

Cows graze in a field behind him; wind whispers through a stand of cattails, and two mallards lift off. Gray points out the calls of killdeer, flycatchers, and blackbirds. Up the hill a flock of sheep chomp on long grass. “They’re part of a controlled grazing to try to control reed canary grass, which is an invasive species,” Gray explains. “It tends to smother areas. It makes deserts almost.”

Gray, his wife, Mary Jo, and two other families co-own Winter Green Farm. They are committed to something Jo Ann Baumgartner, director of the Wild Farm Alliance, calls “farming with the wild.”

Winter Green Farm

Winter Green Farm

A2R Farm

A2R Farm

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Photo Credit: Taro Taylor

Tuesday, June 21 is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun will bathe the Arctic Circle in 24 hours of daylight, and ancient monuments around the world will align with the sun. Historically Europeans celebrated the summer solstice by gathering plants and holding bonfires and festivals. Native American plains tribes held sun dances.

The first day of summer is a great time to start new family traditions. Seasonal celebrations are a fun way to connect with nature and they can be as easy or elaborate as you want them to be. Here are a few ideas:

1.  Take a trip to the library a few days before your celebration and pick out books about summer. Some of my family’s favorite summer picture-books are: Before the Storm by Jan Yolen, Summertime Waltz by Nina Payne, Canoe Days by Gary Paulsen,  Sun Dance Water Dance by Jonathan London, Summer is Summer by Phillis and David Gershator, and Under Alaska’s Midnight Sun by Deb Venasse. For adult reading, check out these lists of 2011 summer must-reads compiled by NPR, Newsweek, and Oprah.

2.  Place a bouquet of roses, lilies, or daisies in your family members’ bedrooms while they sleep, so they wake to fresh summer flowers.

3.  Find a special place outside to watch the sunrise and sunset. You can find out what time the sun will rise and set where you live here.

4.  Eat breakfast outside.

5.  Trace each other’s shadows throughout the day to note the sun’s long trip across the sky.

6.  Take a camping trip. Light a fire at night to celebrate the warmth of the sun. Sleep outside. Wake with the sun.

7.  Go on a nature hike. Bring along guidebooks to help you identify birds, butterflies, mushrooms, or wildflowers.

8.  Make flower chains or a summer solstice wreath.

9.  Display summer decorations: seashells, flowers, sand dollars, or whatever symbolizes summer in your family.

10.  Gather or plant Saint John’s Wort. Traditionally Europeans harvested the plant’s cheerful yellow flowers on the first day of summer, dried them, and made them into a tea on the first day of winter. The tea supposedly brought the summer sunniness into the dark winter days. If you don’t have any Saint John’s Wort in your garden, consider planting it. It is  an incredibly useful herb, and it thrives in poor soil with little attention. Find out more about it here.

11.  Visit a U-pick farm to harvest strawberries, snap peas, or whatever is in season where you live. Find a “pick your own” farm near you here.

12.  Make a summer feast. Eat exclusively from your garden or the farmer’s market to celebrate the bounties of summer in your area.

13.  Host a “locavore” potluck.

14.  Turn off all the indoor lights, light candles, and eat dinner outside.

15.  Play outside games, watercolor, or decorate the sidewalks with chalk until the sun sets.

16.  Read aloud from The Summer Solstice by Ellen Jackson.

17.  Read aloud, watch, or put on your own rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. For kids, check out the book A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Kids by Lois Burdett or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Kids: 3 melodramatic plays for 3 group sizes by Brendan P. Kelso.

Need more inspiration? Check out these resources:

• Celebrating Midsummer – School of the Seasons
• Celebrating the Solstice: Fiery Fetes of Summer – Huffington Post
• Summer Solstice 2010 Pictures – National Geographic
• Stonehedge Summer Solstice 2010 – YouTube (1 min. 49 sec. video)

When I was a kid, every May 1, I accompanied a friend’s family in their festivities. We made homemade baskets, filled them with flowers, hung them on neighbors doorknobs, and ran away. Since it wasn’t my family’s tradition, I never understood why or what we were celebrating.

It turns out that May Day was traditionally a pagan holiday practiced throughout Europe in honor of the end of the dormant winter months. Festivities varied from country to country, but dancing around a Maypole with ribbons or streamers has been a common activity in modern times.

May Day is a simple, fun, and earth-friendly way to celebrate the beginning of spring and share some of your blooms, plants, seeds, or handicrafts with your neighbors. Want some inspiration for homemade baskets? Check out these resources:

• 10 May Day Baskets Made of Recycled Materials - Mother Earth News
• Celebrating May Day! – Mother Nature Network
• The Recycling Bin: May Day Baskets - The Goods
• Celebrating May Day With Crafts – About.com
• Happy May Day – Kleas

It’s spring, which means some people are stocking up on Round Up and Weed-B-Gon to prepare themselves for battle against my favorite flower – the humble dandelion. If you’re not as big a fan as I am of these yellow-headed “weeds”, which grow in lawns and sunny open spaces throughout the world, I know of a great way to get rid of them. Eat them.

Every part of the dandelion is edible – leaves, roots, and flowers. And they are nutritional power-houses. They’re rich in beta-carotene, fiber, potassium, iron, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, B vitamins, and protein.

Over the years, dandelions have been used as cures for countless conditions including:

• kidney stones
• acne
• high blood pressure
• obesity
• diarrhea
• high cholesterol
• anemia
• cancer
• diabetes
• stomach pain
• hepatitis

“There is probably no existing condition that would not benefit from regularly consuming dandelions,” Joyce A Wardwell writes in The Herbal Home Remedy Book.

She also says that dandelion is “one herb to allow yourself the full range of freedom to explore,” because it has “no known cautionary drug interactions, cumulative toxic effects, or contraindications for use.”

So why not harvest the dandelions in your yard this spring? And I’m sure your neighbors wouldn’t mind if you uprooted some of theirs too. (But you probably want to avoid harvesting near streets or from lawns where herbicides or fertilizers are used.)

The leaves

Dandelion leaves have more beta-carotene than carrots and more iron and calcium than spinach. The best time to harvest them is early spring, before the flowers appear, because that’s when they’re the least bitter.

How can you eat dandelion leaves?

• Toss them in salads
• Steam them
• Saute them with garlic, onions, and olive oil
• Infuse them with boiling water to make a tea
• Dry them to use for tea

The flowers

Dandelion flowers are a rich source of the nutrient lecithin. The best time to harvest them is mid-spring, when they’re usually the most abundant. If you cut off the green base, the flowers aren’t bitter.

How can you eat dandelion flowers?

• Toss them in salad
• Steam them with other vegetables
• Make wine
• Make fritters
• Make Dandelion Flower Cookies

The roots

Dandelion roots are full of vitamins and minerals. They are also in rich in a substance called inulin, which may help diabetics to regulate blood sugar. Dandelion roots are often used to treat liver disorders. They’re also a safe natural diuretic, because they’re rich in potassium. The best time to harvest dandelion roots is early spring and late fall.

How can you eat dandelion roots?

• Boil them for 20 minutes to make a tea
• Chop, dry, and roast them to make a tasty coffee substitute.
• Add them to soup stock or miso
• Steam them with other vegetables

As most gardeners know, dandelions are virile (some say pernicious) plants. Why not treat them as allies, rather than enemies, this spring?

Interested in reading more about herbs or home remedies? Check out these posts:

• Do-It-Yourself Health Care
• Simplify Your Medicine Cabinet
• Simplify Your Personal Care
• Simple Herbal Tonics
• Herbs Made Easy

Do you eat dandelions? Do you have a favorite dandelion recipe?

Not only am I finally back to blogging … but it’s finally feeling like spring here! I always forget how uplifting good weather can be until these first few warm spring days are upon us.

“The sun’s coming down,” my son squeals, as he opens the front door. “Let’s go to a little walk.” Then he races to get his new bike. Oh yes, we’re taking many walks each day around here. Flowers are blooming, trees are budding, birds are singing.

Thanks so much for your patience during my March sabbatical. As always seems to happen when I decide to take time off from one thing, a deluge of unexpected happenings crowded in to take its place. It was a blur of a month, with a not-so-fun (but minor) illness for my son, out-of-town guests, and an article assignment.

I must say, it’s nice to be back to the old routines. Of course, now with the long days and rain breaks, we don’t have much excuse not to be out in the garden, do we?

I hope you’re enjoying some spring weather wherever you are.

Women picking worms off of plants, ca. 1910-1915. Photo courtesy of The Library of Congress.

“Eating is an agricultural act.” – Wendell Berry

As you fly over the Midwest, you can look down on the seemingly endless patchwork of plots that make up much of our country. From the air, it’s striking how organized, clean, and antiseptic the nation’s farms look – almost more like factories than farmlands.

Humans have been farming for 10,000 years, but few of us have to think much about agriculture these days. Ninety percent of colonial Americans made their living in agriculture. Today less than two percent of us are farmers. Thus many people don’t think much about how farming has changed in the last 200 years.

For most of human history, farmers had no choice but to care for the health of the soil and ecosystems to some extent. Compost, manure, conservative tilling practices, crop rotation, beneficiary insects, and other natural allies were farmers’ only ways of ensuring healthy crops. But in the last century, petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides enabled farmers to buy fertility in bottles.

Today many consumers are concerned about the dangers of fertilizers and pesticides to human health. But one factor is often ignored: they and the “sterile” farming methods they’ve engendered have been disastrous to wildlife and ecosystems.

Today agriculture is the single biggest cause of habitat loss and endangered species. In the last century farmers across the nation have ripped out vegetation, cut down forests, eradicated insects, shot and killed predators, and filled in wetlands and streams. Wilderness is something increasingly contained in designated areas, not something tolerated on the farms and ranches that make up 40 percent of our nation.

Does it have to be this way? Can we protect the health of ecosystems and grow enough food to feed the world? Can we combine the unpredictable, fertile disorder of the wilderness with our craving for predictable, high-yield agriculture? Can farms be wilder?

I’ve been grappling with these questions for an article assignment over the last month, and in the process learning much about conservation and agriculture. I’ve gotten to talk to many interesting people on the subject and have been pouring over the writings of Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, and other thinkers, who’ve challenged notions of wild and tame.

I’ll share more about my article after it’s published. In the meantime, I thought you may like to know how you can support farmers who are protecting ecosystems, wildlife, and natural areas. A handful of eco-labels help consumers purchase food grown on farms that protect biodiversity. Some people call these labels “beyond organic”. If you don’t see them at your grocery store, consider asking the owner or manager to stock food certified by these organizations.

The Food Alliance

The Food Alliance launched its certification program in 1998 to designate producers and processors dedicated to social and environmental responsibility. To gain certification, farmers and ranchers must:

• Conserve soil and water resources
• Protect biodiversity and wildlife habitat
• Provide safe and fair working conditions
• Practice integrated pest management to minimize pesticide use and toxicity
• Continually improve practices

To find Food Alliance Certified farms, ranches, processors, and distributors in your area, click here.

Salmon Safe

Salmon Safe certifies vineyards, ranches, and farms on the West Coast that are protecting endangered wild salmon and steelhead habitat. They require growers to:

• Restore and protect waterways and wetlands
• Prevent stream bank erosion and control sediment
• Minimize the use of pesticides and contaminants
• Keep livestock out of waterways

You can find out about some of the farms Salmon Safe has certified here and find a Salmon Safe wine here.

Demeter Biodynamic

Rudolf Steiner developed the concept of Biodynamic agriculture in 1924 in Germany, envisioning the farm as “a self-contained and self-sustaining organism”. In 1928 Demeter was formed in Europe to codify Steiner’s farming principles. Demeter requires farms and ranches to:

• Avoid chemical pesticides and fertilizers
• Utilize compost and cover crops
• Set aside a minimum of 10% of total acreage for biodiversity

You can find a list of some Biodynamic farms here.

There are also a handful of excellent eco-labels that designate non-U.S. growers protecting wildlife and natural areas, including Bird Friendly, Fair Trade, and Rainforest Alliance.

You can find out more about all of these eco-labels and look up any that you see in the grocery store to make sure you can trust their claims at Consumer Reports’ greenerchoices.org.

The Christian Science Monitor published my essay “Learning to Listen Again” in their January 31 issue. (It was inspired by a post I wrote here last June.)

My world has gotten a lot louder lately. My 2-year-old son, Ezra, just discovered noise.

“Airplane, airplane, airplane.” He gestures toward the sky until I repeat, “Airplane.”

“Car!” He interrupts the story I’m reading and spins toward the window as a Volvo station wagon rolls by. “Phone, phone, phone,” he says as we walk through the grocery store and hear cellphones chirping.

Usually I’m blocking out these sounds. I suppose it’s a survival mechanism that helps me live in a world full of obnoxious, cacophonous noises, because now that Ezra’s pointing them out to me, I’m longing for silence.

I’m not the only one. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, travels the world recording natural soundscapes, and he’s been spreading some alarming news: Natural silence is going extinct.

“In the last 30 years, I’ve found it nearly impossible in the United States to experience 15 minutes or longer where there’s not some kind of noise disruption in the background,” Mr. Hempton explained in a recent radio interview.

A couple weeks after Ezra starts identifying sounds, my sister announces she’s coming for a visit and wants to go for a hike. “As long as it’s somewhere quiet,” I reply.

We choose McDowell Creek Falls, which is an hour from my house in Eugene, Ore. We turn off I-5 and head down a country road. The farmhouses thin; the road narrows; Douglas firs, Western hemlocks, and moss-covered big leaf maples crowd in. A stream babbles on our right. I can almost taste the silence.

When Hempton talks about natural silence, he’s not talking about the absence of all sound, just of man-made sound. Natural silence can be surprisingly loud, as anyone who’s been to the Oregon coast, visited a rain forest, or heard an elk bugling on a crisp fall morning can attest.

My sister parks the car and I strap my son onto my back. Then we cross a bridge and wind up a hill. My sister stops to snap photos of salmon berries and snails, and I close my eyes. I can hear a waterfall, birds, and an animal scampering through the undergrowth.

“Big truck!” Ezra squeals, as a logging truck rumbles down a nearby road.

Back in Eugene I surf through real estate websites from the tiny Colorado mountain town where I grew up. When I moved to the city for college, I told someone where I was from, and she re­plied, “Oh yes, I go there to listen to the silence.” When I temporarily moved back a few years later, I appreciated what she meant. The evenings were notably quiet in my neighborhood. Most of the houses were dark by 9, few cars passed, and it was more than a mile to the closest highway, which wasn’t exactly teeming with traffic most nights.

I start planning a visit with just one thing on the itinerary: sitting outside in the evenings and staring at the stars – just me and the crickets, hoot owls, and the occasional barking dog. I call my parents to announce we’re coming and to lament that I’m thinking of wearing earplugs from now on.

“I thought you left because it was quiet,” my mom says.

“What are you talking about?” I flash back to the last summer I spent in my hometown before leaving for my freshman year at the University of Denver. I longed to crowd onto the trolley and ride up the Sixteenth Street Mall, weave through packed city sidewalks, and shout along to rock concerts at Red Rocks.

“Remember, you used to complain about how dull it is here, how everyone goes to bed at 9, how…” I interrupt my mom, almost letting it slip that sometimes I go to bed at 9 now. Instead, I change the subject and wander around the house closing windows; outside, a diesel truck is idling and a weed wacker is hacking and whining.

Gordon Hempton teaches wilderness listening at Olympic National Park, and he writes that some students have a difficult time hearing silence for the first time and that many sounds aren’t audible until people have been out on the trail for two or three days. He writes about an elderly woman who took one of his classes. She thought she was losing her hearing and hoping to amplify what little she had left. But in the class, she realized that the problem wasn’t that she’d lost her hearing. What she’d lost was her ability to listen. I think Ezra is teaching me the same thing.

“Leaves,” he says as we walk through our neighborhood. He points up. Far above our heads, the birch leaves are dancing in the breeze, and their gentle rattle drowns out the sound of a passing car. I turn my face up and remember to listen.

Credit: Anssi Koskinen

December 21 is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. Locales above the Arctic Circle, including parts of Canada, Alaska, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Greenland, and the very northern tip of Iceland will experience 24 hours of total darkness. You can find out when the sun will rise and set where you live here.

Winter was a long, dark, and difficult time for many of our forebears. The solstice provided an opportunity for people to celebrate the return of more daylight.

How did ancient people celebrate?

• Gift-giving

The ancient Romans exchanged candles and other gifts during Saturnalia, their week-long solstice celebration.

• Role-switching

In Persia, the king changed places with one of his subjects on the winter solstice, and the subject was crowned during an elaborate street party.

In Rome, masters and servants switched roles; senators wore simple, rather than elaborate togas; men sometimes dressed as women; fights and grudges were forgotten; and other everyday conventions were put aside.

• Candle-lighting

In England and Scandinavia, people lit a Yule log, or oak branch, which was often replaced by a large candle that burned throughout the day.

• Bonfires

Japanese Shinto farmers lit fires on the mountain sides to welcome back the sun.

• Mistletoe and Evergreen Trees

The British Celts put mistletoe on their altars. And the Germans and Romans decorated their houses with evergreen trees, wreaths, and garlands as a symbol of life and renewed fertility.

• Sun Festivals

The Hopi celebrated the return of the sun with ceremonies. Priests dressed in animal skins with feathers in their head-dresses to look like the rays of the sun.

Why celebrate the first day of winter?

The holiday season is busy enough for most of us. Why add anything else to the to-do list?

Celebrating the first day of each season has many benefits. It offers the perfect opportunity to:

• Note the cyclical changes in the soil, sky, trees, plants, and wildlife.
• Reflect on the lessons each time of year imparts. Winter, for example, reminds us of the importance of quiet, rest, and dormancy.
• Learn about different celebrations around the world.
• Celebrate! And seasonal celebrations are affordable, nature-based, and as easy or elaborate as you want them to be.
• Be grateful for the gifts of food, family, and friendship.

The key to celebrating the first day of winter, when most of us are busy planning other celebrations, is to keep it simple, and choose traditions that give you time to relax and reflect.

Some ideas:

• Establish a table-top, shelf, or mantel to display a seasonal tableau. On the first day of winter, replace the fall decorations with evergreen boughs, pine cones, candles, mistletoe, or whatever symbolizes fall in your family.

• Collect books about the seasons at yard sales, used-book stores, and thrift shops year-round. Choose a special basket or shelf for them, and change them out on the first day of each season. Or take a trip to the library a few days before your celebration. Some of my family’s favorite winter picture-books are: Stella, Queen of the Snow by Mary-Louise Gay; The Big Snow by Berta Hader; The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats; A Kitten Tale by Eric Rohmann; Snow by Cynthia Rylant; Winter is the Warmest Season by Lauren Stringer; and Owl Moon by Jane Yolen.

• Read aloud from The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson.

• Go for a nature walk or go cross-country skiing, and enjoy the brisk air and winter scenery.

• Watch the sun rise and set.

• Make a seasonal feast, with foods like beets, winter squash, potatoes, onions, kale, cabbage, or parsnips.

• Eat by candlelight.

• Blow out the candles and turn off the lights after dinner, sit together quietly, and experience and reflect on darkness.

• Share one thing you’ve lost and one thing you’ve gained over the past year.

• Bring an evergreen bough inside and make it into a wishing tree. Secure the bough in a bucket with rocks. Cut leaves out of green construction paper. Have each person write down a wish for the coming year on each leaf. Hang the leaves on the tree using a hole punch and yarn or ribbon.

• Sit around the fire or cuddle under blankets and tell stories about your best and worst holiday memories.

Resources:

• The Winter Solstice by John Matthews
• The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays by Anthony Aveni
• Celebrate the Solstice by Richard Heinberg
• Ceremonies of the Seasons by Jennifer Cole
• The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson

(Updated version of post from December 14, 2009.)

How do you celebrate the change in the seasons?

Credit: Ed Yourdon

My son didn’t want to leave the park. He tugged on my hand, pulling me toward the swings. “Let’s stay here.”

The wind was starting to blow, rain spattering our faces. “Come on. I’m hungry,” my husband called. He was already halfway down the sidewalk, dragging my son’s scooter behind him.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed something in the sky.

“Look at the birds,” I called.

The three of us turned and stared up as hundreds of starlings swarmed across the gray sky. They moved into a black mass, and then spread out, shifting together and apart, like dancers in a ballet. After a few minutes they landed all at once on a nearby oak tree, settling into its decaying leaves and gnarled branches, almost camouflaged, except for their cacophonous birdsong.

My husband cut across a field toward the tree. My son and I followed, the swings forgotten. We stood together, speechless, as we watched the starlings swarm into the sky and land, again and again.

It reminded me of other wild moments I’ve witnessed. Years ago, at Yellowstone, my husband and I trekked along a hillside at dawn, listening to an elk bugling. Then we glimpsed him on an opposite hillside, his muscular body and massive antlers silhouetted against the pale sky.

Another time, on a sweltering July day in Colorado, we lugged gear up a steep, rocky trail to an off-the-beaten-path campsite my husband had discovered as a kid. We made multiple trips from our car to the site. Then, just as we slumped into our lawn chairs, a brown bear lumbered into our campsite.

More recently, we sat on a jutting rock next to the Pacific watching waves roll in and glimpsed a whale a few miles from shore.

Watching the starlings was a similar experience – unexpected and wild. Except this time, we were just a few blocks from our home.

I’ve always loved going to nature – driving up mountain roads, finding wildness in alpine snowdrifts and aspen groves, atop fourteen-thousand-foot mountains, amidst old-growth stands, and on wind-swept beaches. These days, we do less of that. We ride our bikes and walk almost everywhere we go, and we usually spend our days off exploring the ten square miles of urban land where we’ve lived for almost a decade.

I miss driving into the wilderness, but I’m discovering that wildness is not something we need to drive to find. It’s all around us. Starlings swarm. Squirrels scavenge for acorns. Deer munch on our neighbors’ arborvitae. Wild turkeys wander the hills above our house. Ducks swoop through our neighborhood.

These creatures are our neighbors, so perhaps the moments when they surprise us and render us speechless are even more wild than the ones we traveled miles to see, binoculars in hand.

It reminds me of something I heard the nature writer David Gessner say in an interview. He travels around the world, experiencing nature, but some of his most wild moments have been at home.

I was with my dad when he died and heard his breathing slow. I was with my daughter when she was born, and these are wild moments too. For me, the key to wildness is its integration with our so-called normal lives.

(To watch this video, you must click over to YouTube. It’s worth it.)

Have you experienced any wild moments close to home? I’d love to hear about it.

Outside, the leaves are turning yellow, orange, and red. This weekend we hibernated while the wind blew and rain hammered down. I’ve always loved this season – the beginning of classes, the stillness in the afternoons, the smell of the air, baked apples, crunchy leaves underfoot, wood smoke curling into the sky.

But lately fall also brings big changes to our little household. We transition from summer, where my husband is home full-time, into fall, where he is gone a lot, and it is never quite graceful for us. I have less time to write and more work to do around the house, which always surprises me even though I know it’s coming.

It’s ironic that this season, which is all about balance, with its equal days and nights, always feels a bit wobbly in our household. But perhaps that’s how it is for many of us, with many kids going back to school and starting activities.

It’s my birthday next week, and in honor of finding balance, I’m going to take a week off from blogging and leave this space quiet. I hope you enjoy your week.

Happy Halloween!