Entry 6: Cold Weather, Warm Hearts

Snowflakes fall gently from the sky as I help a second-year Food Studies student-employee at the organic garden label the perennials planted in the Permaculture section.  Lamium, adjuga, thyme, oregano, Mother’s wart, wild geranium, stinging nettle, sorrel—some familiar, but most I have never even heard of before.  It doesn’t take long for me to associate their names with the distinct colors and shapes of their leaves.  Identifying local flora and fauna is one of many lost arts in our high-tech society.  Low-tech knowledge like being able to name plants is an underappreciated and underutilized skill in a culture that praises any advances that further remove humans from the drudgery of needing to have such skills.

But here I am in the frigid air, the temperature hovering right around freezing in the middle of the afternoon, and there is no classroom I’d rather be in at the present moment.  Practical, useful, applied, fun—call it what you like—learning through hands-on tasks in the outdoors is a method of passing along knowledge that is largely lost in most curriculums at any level of study.  This sort of knowledge does not require a PhD of the teacher, or even a complete high school education—if you know something, you can pass it along to whoever is willing to listen.  It is knowledge that can be used to produce tangible and sometimes immediate results.

Plant something and watch it grow.  Pull up weeds and marvel at the instant results of your efforts—your actions directly and unquestionably create a more favorable environment for food-producing plants by simply yanking some tap roots out of the ground.

Permaculture is more of a philosophy than it is a plan for designing or planting, although the design of garden plots is important as well.  One of the many tenants of Permaculture is to share the surplus harvest.  Weeks ago, when I was busy harvesting peppers before the frost, I ended up pulling more off the plants than anyone knew what to do with.  I froze about ten quart bags for myself and my partner, and other students took peppers home by the dozens as well.  Still, more peppers that I and my peers, busy graduate students, simply didn’t have the time to prepare or process.

I filled a cloth grocery bag with peppers of all varieties, shapes, and sizes.  Picked fresh a mere 48 hours prior, I drove them over to the folks at Jubilee Kitchen.  The fruits of my labor were kindly received by the volunteer staff managing the facility that day.  In the kitchen, I overheard one of the cooks near the walk-in cooler say, “I’m coming to look for something I know we don’t have…carrots.”

And I was learning all the while, more and more, as I drove away, about what it means to grow food.  In the comfort of my car, I glanced to my right and noticed the row of empty raised beds outside the kitchen, empty aside from all the overgrown weeds.  

Share the surplus.

I guess someone had wanted to share more with the soup kitchen at some point before—some materials and soil, seeds for a season and probably some labor too.  But this project was now abandoned.  I guess growing fresh produce doesn’t have the same appeal as salvaging nearly expired baked goods from the Giant Eagle.  But what if the volunteers hadn’t abandoned the plots?  Would the cook I eavesdropped on have had carrots for whatever dish he was wishing to prepare?

As Wendell Berry often writes, a farmer’s job is never dull or boring, but filled with surprise, excitement, and new opportunities for discovery each and every day.  Home from the farm on the frosty day, I notice the lamium planted outside of my apartment building.  The pretty sea-green leaves with dark green jagged outlines not only make for a nice ground cover, but apparently, could make a highly nutritious salad too.  I resist the temptation to harvest my landlord’s ground cover and return my thoughts to the raised beds at the soup kitchen.