(Read with apologies for my husky morning-voice)
This table in my living room is one small space I am using to dry seed for next year, and herbs for tea this winter. It holds houseplants during the cold months, and helps with harvest and preservation in warm months. From the little statue of Brigid, moving clockwise in a spiral (of course,) there is rudbeckia “campfire” seed; sambucus (elderberry) drying until I have enough to make a small batch of syrup; red clover blossoms drying for a heart, bone, skin, and hair healthy tea; Berkeley Green Tie Dye heirloom tomato seeds; thyme drying on the blue and white plate; zinnia, red drying for seeds because the hummingbirds and butterflies love red zinnia; a tiny first harvest of chamomile for a calming cup of tea; white cosmos drying for seed to help fill the white, yellow, and blue front garden; more red clover; and large flowered, yellow petaled, annual rudbeckia for seed.
The very small harvests of chamomile, red clover, and elderberry would, in the past, have seemed insignificant to me, and not even worth the time it takes to grow, harvest, and dry the plants. Being a child of empire and the way-of-living it teaches, I used to focus on bumper crops for anything I planted until I noticed that (with a few exceptions for cherry tomatoes, or zucchini, or green beans) the only things that regularly provide such crops are things that grow because they decided to (things like pokeweed, mugwort, acorns, and dandelions.) My garden, grown according to a unnatural, inorganic, non-regenerative, system of bare soil and constant weeding, seldom provided bounty. It couldn’t because I was starving it of life, trying to control what I am only a tiny part of, though I did not know it.
Now I am an adult, an elder; and I have seen that all the lessons of empire are destructive illusions. Now, I have changed my perspective and am patiently learning all that Mother Nature teaches in the lesson plans she presents. I am learning that healthy, living, self-regenerating, soils provide me with the food and nutrients I need. I am learning that chamomile does not want to be farmed; it wants to grow (and there is a huge difference.) I have learned that stinging nettle (which I drink in a tea every day) refuses to grow where I think she ought; so I am waiting for her to show me if, where, and how she would like to grow here in my gardens, and until then, I purchase organic, regeneratively grown, bags of dried stinging nettle from a seller I trust.
I am learning that my apple trees do not want to be pruned hard this year, so I am going to resist pruning for anything other than good air flow.
I am learning that I can harvest hazelnuts before they are quite ripe, then allow them to ripen and dry inside the house. At this time of the year I am paying close attention to them, and will collect them any day now, hopefully taking only enough for me this year, and leaving plenty for the chipmunks, squirrels and birds big enough to carry them off before they actually do carry them all off, as they did last year.
Yesterday, I planted five rosa rugosa seedlings into a nursery bed inside the vegetable garden. I started these plants from seed in April. They will spend the winter, and probably at least another full year in their nursery, before they will be big enough to replant in a permanent bed along the back fence. I have always loved these simple, open-hearted, fragrant “beach roses” so successful at seducing the bees and making large, beautiful, vitamin-C-filled, rose hips as food for the birds, and tea for those humans who have learned how to make it. I have a vision of a bed of these bushes blooming, and setting their fruit along that back fence near some of the hazelnut trees and young elderberries. I am learning the patience of the land, visioning with it instead of for it or upon it.
I have been working with and within the gardens differently these days, listening to them, learning from them, being a part of them, seeing them as alive, with their own consciousness, wisdom, dignity, and purpose within the immensity of creation. I am become a student, a friend, a safe-space for bees, butterflies, birds, and this one-legged katydid to land (my husband took the photo for me, as the katydid decided to hang around on my arm for awhile and I waited, and waited, and stood almost within the raspberries, until my husband and I could encourage this little sister or brother to hop off and into its own living once again.)
Courage my dears. May we Love no matter what the powers throw at us. May we learn the good lessons the land, the wind, the water, the seasons, and even these fires, long to help us remember and learn again. May it be so. Love one another.
