Harvest Home

Picture this (because I don't know where to find a camera with batteries charged up):

• onions and beets spread to dry on newsprint
• cardboard boxes brimming with carrots, potatoes, and squashes
• bags of dry beans, with the sides rolled down to let the beans dry a little more

This week I'll be storing things away a little better: tucking the onions into old nylons and hanging them on nails on the floor joists in the basement; cleaning up some of the carrots and beets and finding some room for them in the fridge, freezing some others, and maybe drying some for soups, too; and clearing some room in a not-too-cool spot for the squashes to sit with some air spaces between them. The dry beans are experiments. I have been growing Windsor broad (or fava) beans for several years, but never understood what they should look like when mature. Finally I read somewhere that they can be picked when the pods start to turn black, and realized that this was not a sign of disease! I let them dry on the vines, and today we gathered them. Also, as a sort of accidental experiment, we gathered the dry wax beans that we didn't get eaten as fresh beans in the summer. We eat a lot of kidney beans and some chickpeas, lentils, and pinto beans, but all of these are tricky to grow in our short summers, so I want to experiment with some other dry legumes. We'll see!

I am very tired, and very happy. I let myself be led away from the garden path for most of the summer and early fall, and when I heard the word "snow" in the forecast I feared I had left it too long, but the rain and snow held off and we got it all in.

Happy thanksgiving!

Real Gardening

There's a fine new reality-check blog post about gardening over at the Free Man's Garden. If you haven't met Eleutheros yet, oh, you should. Check out his advice on eating, too, at the Free Man's Table, and if you get to wondering how far removed he is from the dominant society, the archives of his original blog will tell you just How Many Miles from Babylon. A few hours at his place might shake you up. They might give you some real hope, too: not a vague hope for greater equity and unity and efficiency and all that, but a clear path to actually reverse your own share of the worrisome world trends. No more hand-wringing, friends; let's roll!

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Yes, I'll admit I'm a fan. And I'll admit that I've been spending too much money on garden gadgets and supplies. And as I ate my packaged breakfast cereal this morning, I thought about how I've backslid from eating mostly bulk-purchased whole foods. Right now, though, my focus is getting the garden in so we don't backslide too much in that endeavour. Next comes the renovation for a greenhouse area and passive solar heat - a step forward. "When the work's all done this fall," as they say, there will be time for more conscious cooking and eating.

One small triumph: today I am slow-cooking the last buttercup squash of our crop from last year. All I did with the squashes was to bring them into the porch, which gradually cooled through the fall to about 5-10 degrees C. All winter they decorated the steps in there, and most of them kept beautifully. And now we will be losing the porch to make way for our sunroom. I hope the new cold room that we tucked into the design will work as well.

ReLent: New Life Instead of Guilt

Upcoming: Ash Wednesday Worship, Feb. 21st, 7:30 p.m. at St. Andrew's United Church in Arcola.

From our church bulletin:

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent. Its roots lie in the ancient Jewish festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Atonement means "at-one-ment." If we are to be at one with God, with creation, with each other, we must face honestly who we are, make our confession, and open ourselves to the supportive power of God and our faith community in the Lenten struggle for new life. So Ash Wednesday is a day of honest confession and of commitment to the Lenten journey.

In the service on Sunday, Anita reminded us of a Mission and Service fundraiser our congregation did during Lent a couple of years ago. We had a calendar of the days of Lent, and for each day, we would make a contribution as specified on the calendar. One day might specify counting the number of light bulbs in your home, and paying so many cents per light bulb. Another day might ask how many pairs of shoes in your closet, and so on.

Anita wondered if we might try that fundraiser again, or if there were other ideas.

Here's mine.

Instead of feeling guilty about our stuff and our energy use and so on, why not find out what we can do about it, and what would do the most good? We'd save money at the same time, and then we could put some of that money towards the M&S fund.

I tried the Ecological Footprint calculator, mostly so that I would know what to tell others to expect, but I myself was surprised at the results. Here in the cold, sparsely populated northern prairies, we tend to think that a large part of our footprint comes from heating and travel - things that are difficult to change much (without moving south). Surprise: according to the quiz, a large part of my footprint comes from food. This was not entirely news to me, but the magnitude was a shock. Of my total footprint of 5.3 hectares, food contributed 3.5 hectares. Shelter came out at only 0.7 hectares, and travel at 0.3. Goods and services made up the remaining 0.8 hectares of my footprint.

On with garden planning! Next year, grass-fed beef, or venison, and maybe some chickens! And for a more immediate impact, how about porridge or cold cereal made from local grains, instead of breakfast cereal shipped in from Ontario?

This year, instead of a time of guilty brooding on the darkness of this world, Lent could be about learning a better way.

Yummy

Discovered by being in a hurry:
A scoop of baked butternut squash, drizzled with eggnog, tastes like pumpkin pie.