Silence, prawns and barley

Jun 7
Tent caterpillar

Tent caterpillar with 3 predatory tachinid fly larvae attached.

I have been off-line for a while. In this space should have been some amusing tidbits from the Writers Union AGM which I unfortunately missed in its entirety due to what I am calling Italian influenza, since I received it from someone who brought it back with her from Rome.

I have passed the time of my recovery (and then some) picking tent caterpillars off my roses, blueberries and rhubarb. Not nearly enough of them have the tachinid fly larvae attached, but those that do seem to have two or three, which is hopeful, as the tachinids are helpful against caterpillars of many kinds, so I’m letting those afflicted eat their fill before they get the last headache of their lives.. and will be planting lots of tachinid-friendly plants like dill, parsley and Queen Anne’s Lace.

Meanwhile, BBC has been broadcasting Strands on its Book of the Week (sigh.. I remember when CBC used to have such offerings) by poet Jean Sprackland. In the second installment, she discusses the effects of anti-depressants on prawns. The excess fluoxetine excreted by Prozac users ends up in the ocean. It affects prawns by causing them to throw caution to the winds and swim towards the light… whereupon they become easy pickings for predators. This chemical also affects reproduction in mussels and has been found in fish near Montreal. Who knows, after that, how the fluoxetine travels through the food chain.

Add this to what we already know – the effects on fish of excreted birth control pill hormones, the drugs that we’re obliged to ingest through drinking water and produce grown in fields fertilized with sewage sludge – and to all we don’t yet know about the effects on other organisms.

In this anthropocentric world, we have invented a reality in which curing human ailments trumps any effect on other living beings. There are no legal checks on pharmaceutical companies to prove their products will not harm other species, or even humans who find them in their drinking water or vegetables down the line. Surely it’s long past time big  pharma should be required to prove its products will not harm the rest of our ecosystem?

I have become a barley bore while plodding away these past few weeks on an article that will appear in a future issue of Small Farm Canada. I had a lot of great information I couldn’t include so here are some of my overflow facts that prove barley is the best thing ever:

  • Our oldest grain, barley has been cultivated for around 10,000 years: it was found in Egyptian tombs and has a long and varied history, as a grain, a flour and a beer starter among others.
  • It’s the grain highest in beta glucan, a soluble fibre which slows digestion of glucose, making it helpful for diabetics, and is getting attention for potential in fighting obesity and heart disease.
  • In Nepal and Tibet tsampa (sampa) is a staple:  toasted barley flour that is mixed with yak butter to make a nutritious (B vitamins, minerals and of course that all important beta glucan) bread or cake called pa. (A disheartening news item in the Nepali Times reports that tsampa is losing ground to instant noodles which are nutritionally bankrupt. The result of course is an increasingly malnourished population.)
  • In parts of India, the beverage sattu is made of roasted barley, wheat/rice/chickpea flour, jaggery (raw sugar) and water. It’s quenching, nutritious and a long established fast food for travellers.
  • In the British Isles, barley water is an old traditional drink whose benefits are said to include: clearing the complexion, preventing wrinkles, soothing the digestion, cleansing the kidneys, curing cystitis, treating atherosclerosis and preventing gallstones.
  • In Italy, roasted barley is brewed as a coffee substitute: caffe orzo (not to be confused with the pasta)
  • Roasted barley tea is called mugicha (麦茶?) in Japanese, dàmàichá (大麦茶) or màichá (麦茶 or 麥茶) in Mandarin Chinese, and boricha (보리차) in Korean.
  • Barley has been studied for use in bioremediation:
    • Bioremediation of coal bed methane product water
    • Bioremediation of CCA-treated wood (using malted barley as a nutrient source for the metal-tolerant bacterium Bacillus licheniformis)
    • Barley is a metallothionein (as are wheat, peas and soy): in animals they have been shown to bind copper, cadmium, zinc and silver and to detoxify normally lethal concentrations of cadmium and copper in yeast
    • Barley is salt-tolerant and has been used to extract sodium chloride to reclaim sea water-flooded fields (it’s being studied as a way to remediate the tsunami-damaged farmland in Japan)
    • Barley is thought to be an aluminum hyperaccumulator.
    • Barley straw is a traditional treatment to prevent blue-green algae in ponds.

 

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Skagit River Poetry Festival

May 19

It’s been a brilliant couple of days in La Conner WA, and the weather likewise. Cool blue skies over a flock of talent at this biennial event. Tonight’s readings by Nikki Giovanni, Bob Hicok and Marie Howe were dazzling.

After admonishing one and all to be sure to record and archive readings such as these,  Giovanni explained to us mostly white folks what the agonies of hair care were for black women of her age, raised on flat ironed hair and a chronic fear of the moisture or heat that could bring the nappiness back. She had to explain to us what a “kitchen” was, so we could hear her poem The Wrong Kitchen.

Hicok ranged from proprietary leanings on his birth-decade, the Sixties, to the tender agonies of a mother with Alzheimer’s, a topic he’s worked before. His Speaking American was a delightful opener. We’d heard his name already in an afternoon discussion on humour in poetry, invoked by Tony Hoagland when he’d been asked whose poetry and sense of humour resonated (our own Lorna Crozier – brilliant in all the sessions I caught – cited Alden Nowlan and Susan Musgrave).

Howe finished the evening off with a painfully funny reading, including poems about her mother and her daughter, a new sequence about Mary Magdalene’s seven devils, and a poem she said she’d like to retitle After the Divorce.

The best session of this friendly little festival had to be the marathon reading this afternoon at which every invited poet (and there were 31 of them) read a single poem. The earth-shakers for me included Elizabeth Austen’s Untitled; Ellen Bass’s Gate C22, Jericho Brown’s Heart Condition, Karen Finneyfrock’s What Lot’s Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn’t a Pillar of Salt) (possibly my favourite poem of the weekend); and Tony Hoagland’s The Social Life of Water.

Those of you who’ve heard me rant about festivals that cram poets into cattle-car readings rather than letting them roam the stage in twos and threes like prose writers may find my delight in this reading surprising. But here it was a sampler, an opportunity for a fully-packed autditorium to hear all the poets – not just those who the tight scheduling of a two-day festival would allow. And to hear poets of such calibre reading one fine poem after another was a pure pleasure.

So, one more day in La Conner, with its smart shops and casual oceanfront air. And its amazing oyster tacos from the Swinomish seafood kiosk, Legends Salmon Bar, which were so delicious in their frybread wrappers I had to have them for lunch two days in a row.

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Earth Medicine

May 10

View from Alderlea FarmhouseI’d heard bits and pieces about biodynamics over the years and finally had an opportunity to hear Dennis Klocek speak about elements of it last weekend. It’s not an easy thing to wrap your head around, or define succinctly – though one of my favourite thumbnail definitions of what it is was “organics with knobs on.” Which is amusing though not illuminating, and after a full day plus evening lecture by one of the teachers from the Rudolf Steiner

College I feel a bit closer to understanding some of Steiner‘s ideas about biodynamic agriculture. But don’t feel much more able to capture it in a few words. Nor could Steiner, for good reason, and this perhaps this excerpt from his Agriculture Course Lecture 1 gives you a sense of the span of his thinking:

Why is it that people think they can talk of a thing from theoretic points of view, when they do not understand it? The reason is, that even within their several domains they are no longer able to go back to the real foundations. They look at a beetroot as a beetroot. No doubt it has this or that appearance; it can be cut more or less easily, it has such and such a colour, such and such constituents. All these things can no doubt be said. Yet therewithal you are still far from understanding the beetroot. Above all, you do not yet understand the living-together of the beetroot with the soil, with the field, the season of the year in which it ripens, and so forth….

To take [the beetroot growing in the earth] just for what it is within its narrow limits, is nonsense if in reality its growth depends on countless conditions, not even only of the Earth as a whole, but of the cosmic environment. The men of to-day say and do many things in life and practice as though they were dealing only with narrow, limited objects, not with effects and influences from the whole Universe.

This addresses what I think is the main problem with, well, everything that matters in the world today, which is the human insistence on seeing the biosphere as a jigsaw puzzle of independent objects that can be damaged, altered or removed without any effect on the rest. Our legislators cannot seem to grasp the fundamental interconnectedness of life on this planet, and until that is accepted, I think we are all doomed. Fortunately, we all have the opportunity to educate ourselves, and share that knowledge, and hope to restore some sanity to the world around us.

Dennis Klocek at Alderlea Farm 

Dennis Klocek

Klocek has been involved in biodynamics for decades, and besides being author of a revered text on weather patterns is billed as the Program Director of Consciousness Studies at the college. He began by giving us the beginnings of an answer to that “what is the difference between organics and biodynamics” question. It is everything to do with the philosophical underpinnings:

Steiner recognized the principle of evolution of consciousness. The destiny of the earth is congruent with the evolution of human consciousness: and in fact the two are interwoven. The vast majority of people today are divorced from the reality of the spirituality of the earth (it’s been described as “mother” in the past, in more naturalistic cultures) and instead see the earth as a resource to be used.

He went on to discuss the evolution of consciousness in more detail. We are here, he argued, to learn about limitations. While the past, we depended upon others (“tribal consciousness”), today we have evolved to cope with our human limitations using technology. And technology arises from human imagination, which allows us to convert things of nature into things that nature can’t make (medicines, machines, devices): unlike a rock or a bird, we are able to make manifest what exists in our imagination.

But morality has to keep pace with technical capacity: if that doesn’t happen, we can only assess morality after the fact and end up with regulations. We’ve certainly overdone it with Western thinking, and risk being regulated out of existence by our own technology (just think of the legal wrangles over being “allowed” to produce food: chicken bylaws, meat regulations, land use policies). Simulated culture will be all that’s available to us, he warned, unless we find a way to re-establish our connection with nature (“Gluten-free pizza with dairy free cheese,” he mused: “Why even bother?”)

He went on to talk about the uses of imagination, patterns, the mineral cross, the drop picture method, antenna theory, the philosophy and science behind biodynamic preparations and planting charts that use the the star moon (lunar cycles in conjunction with planetary aspects that cause tidal and atmospheric changes) and which are perhaps most simply followed by buying a copy of Stella Natura and doing what it says.

So. A thought-provoking day was had by all and I’ll need to spend some more time mulling over my notes and looking at a bit more Steiner before I rush out to stir up the preparations. One of my earlier encounters with biodynamics was our memorable sojourn to Crete in 2007, where agronomist Kostas Bouyouris had explained some of his background in it. He said he’d been skeptical about the theory and had tested it out enough to convince himself that it worked, and applied it without attempting to explain it in full to local farmers, letting them see for themselves. But there was enough poetry in the talk to intrigue me, and I can enjoy that for starters. As I did the excellent food grown (biodynamically!) on the farm and provided during the day by Katie Ehrlich and her team from the Alderlea Farm Cafe. It’s definitely worth a taste if you’re passing…

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Wendell Berry: “It All Turns on Affection”

Apr 25

By now all thoughtful people have begun to feel our eligibility to be instructed by ecological disaster and mortal need. But we endangered ourselves first of all by dismissing affection as an honourable and necessary motive.

Our decision in the middle of the last century to reduce the farm population, eliminating the allegedly inefficient small farmers was enabled by the discounting of affection. As a result, we now have barely enough farmers to keep the land in production with the help of increasingly expensive industrial technology and at an increasingly ecological and social cost.

Wendell Berry is known to many of us in many ways, whether as farmer, poet, novelist, essayist or land activist. I recommend taking the time to listen to his no-holds-barred Jefferson Lecture, in which he urges us to restore affection – for our land, neighbours and community – in order to attend to matters crucial for human survival.

The lecture is a powerful and compassionate analysis of our times. Such words as these struck me:

Now the two great aims of the industrialism, the replacement of people with technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy, seem close to fulfillment. At the same time, the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny.

Corporate industrialism itself has exposed the falsehood that it ever was inevitable or that it ever has given precedence to the common good. It has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighbourhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to sustain the health and wealth of nature.

And these:

The losses and damages characteristic of our present economy certainly cannot be stopped, let alone restored, by liberal or conservative tweakings of corporate industrialism, against which the ancient imperatives of good care, home-making and frugality can have no standing.

The possibility of authentic correction comes I think from two already evident causes.The first is scarcity, and other serious problems arising from industrial abuses of the land community.

A positive cause still little noticed by high officials and the media is the by now well-established effort to build or rebuild local economies, starting with economies of food. This effort to connect cities with their surrounding rural landscapes rests exactly upon the recognition of human limits and the necessity of human scale. Its purpose to the extent possible is to bring producers and consumers, causes and effects, back within the bounds of neighbourhood, which is to say the effective reach of imagination, sympathy, affection and all else, including enough food, that neighbourhood implies.

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Earth Day: gruesome gorse and wild food

Apr 23

It was a busy Earth Day weekend. Saturday I spent grubbing around in the undergrowth of Gorge Park where a community cleanup was underway, in an attempt to control the spread of gorse as well as other invasives familiar to me from my own garden: English ivy, Spurge Laurel (a toxic black-berried invasive, what I’ve heard called daphnea but is really Daphne laureola), Ivy rootsand holly. The Himalayan blackberries were everywhere too but I think we would have needed two or three pairs of the leather gloves they issued the gorse-gatherers to tackle those. Even the ivy had grown to such staggering strength we had to take an axe to some of it to slow its spread. I considered that we were doing invasive species interruption rather than elimination as the problem of escaped garden plants is pretty much out of control. Still, there’s an ongoing series of cleanup parties planned for the Gorge Tillicum parks to try to get a grip on some of it.

Gorge Park cleanup - gorseOne of the Saanich Parks staff who accompanied us glumly observed at one clearing that he’d been there when they had a gorse removal task ten years ago. But, he said, there’s been no funding since then and it wasn’t a priority. Our mission of the day was to try to keep the spread to a minimum by removing flowering plants before they could set seed, and removing what we could without disturbing the soil too much. We were instructed to pull the smallest gorse seedlings and then tamp the earth back down to slow the replacement through buried seed. LarPulling gorse rootger plants have strong taproots and as they mature the roots branch outward and new plants sprout from those. So we were told to cut below the first root nodule, or to flag the plant for someone to pull later. The largest plants will be strategically poisoned: there is a pesticide ban in Saanich but it is sometimes the only route available to parks workers trying to contain well-established invasives.

Nanaimo Wild Food Fest-Cowichan Pasta Nettle fettucineYesterday’s treat was a trip to the third annual Wild Food Festival in Nanaimo. A gorgeous day for it and a good throng already queued up by 11:30, half an hour after it opened. I was able to control my consumer urges by sagely bringing only a little cash, but I managed some fine sampling for the half dozen food tickets I did purchase.

Later I watched a cooking demo with Francois deJong, from Francois deJong - Nanaimo FoodshareNanaimo Foodshare, who was whipping up a generous batch of Nettle Polenta with Blackberry Hazelnut Brown Butter, with a side salad of kale and miner’s lettuce. He had brought along a bag of gleaned local hazelnuts which grow wild and cultivated in the area, and another of stinging nettles, which were the most popular food ingredient at the fair. There was nettle soup, nettle in wild food smoothies, nettle gyoza, nettle pasta and nettle ice cream.

It’s Gougere with wild leaves and salmonberry blossomsa good food with many health benefits, but I think we need to move on and learn to eat a few other things too. So I was happy to see raw blackberry cheesecake; a lovely gougere filled with wild greens and local cheese and apples; and a wild greens salad (chickweed, miner’s lettuce, sorrel and dead nettle) among the offerings. I came away with a bag of delicious Immuni-tea (made from rose hips, wild ginger, peppermint, catnip, elderflower and yarrow) and a few more ideas about turning my weeds into feeds.

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