Signs of Seasons Passing, Winter Edition

Hello Gardeners.

Wasn’t it something to wake up Monday morning to temperatures in the upper 40s? And the forecast is for almost 60° by the end of the week. Maple sap will soon be running in earnest, and the streams that have been more ice than water this year will start flowing loud and high. But what really lets me know that winter is starting to turn—ever so slightly—to spring is…dead skunks.

I saw my first road-killed skunk this past weekend, and another this morning. Poor things, although not true hibernators, they remain dormant most of the winter except when the males stir themselves from warm dens about this time of year to mate. They’ll range quite a bit in search of females, who often den in groups.

Granted, I’m often guilty of anthropomorphizing, but when I see those little bundles of black and white fur along the roadside, I can’t help but think of them as groggy and cold, hungry at a time of year when their natural diet of grubs and roots is locked in frozen ground beneath the snow, but forced by instinct to wander in search of a mate. I’m sure a few more become a meal for their one true predator, the great horned owl, as well, which the owls must look forward to after such a cold winter when many of their prey would be inclined to stay to their dens.

It’s a sad notation for me to make in my journal each year, when I spot the first one, but sad or not, it is still a sign of the passing seasons that I like to note, as much as when I first notice snow fleas in the snow around the base of trees where the sun warms the bark or when the first turkey vulture appears floating in the skies above our valley.

So. Winter’s on the wane. And we’re all rejoicing, right? Well, sort of. I’d be happier if I had more done. I still need to prune the fruit trees, start my onion seeds, and get my garden calendar made up. At least my seeds are (mostly) ordered.

But I have to be honest, although I listed those three to-do items like they’re a regular part of my gardening year, I’ve had fruit trees in the ground for going on 4 years without ever pruning them after the first “prune before you plant.” I have at least 3 years’ worth of really interesting onion seeds that I’ve never managed to get started in a timely fashion (so I end up buying sets or someone else’s starts). And although I first read about the idea of a garden calendar a couple years ago, if I get one done this year, it’ll be my first.

sigh.

My great idea this year is to write about these 3 chores as I do them. Nothing like a waiting audience to give one a little push! And you all have my permission to ask me about them if you don’t hear about them…soon.

How about you? Anyone else marking time by watching the natural world? Or getting your mid-winter chores started? I’d love to hear about it!

Julie

Sustainable Me

Hello Gardeners!

I’m back after attending last week’s PASA Conference at the Penn Stater Hotel. More specifically, it was the 20th Annual Farming For the Future Conference held by the Millheim-headquartered Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture.

For those of you who have never been to it, I can highly recommend the experience. I started as a volunteer at the registration desk, not even attending any workshops for the first few years, and I was amazed at how pumped with healthy enthusiasm I could get just being around these people. And they serve the best food! Much of it is donated by farmer-members, and all of it is prepared by chefs who work to bring local ingredients into their menus all year round.

After a few years, I started to get more interested in local, healthy eating (I stopped being a vegetarian around that time, deciding that I would rather eat meat I knew had been locally raised on grass the way they should be and humanely slaughtered than buy Archers Daniels Midland mass-produced soy products). I started attending a workshop or two. Then a pre-conference all-day program. And now, the Conference is the highlight of my winter and a time I can be assured I will learn something new and be inspired for the coming year. (If cost is a problem, they have a great system of volunteer hours for attendance.)

This year, I attended two workshops on holistic orchard health and one each on permaculture design, forage radishes, and silvopasturing. And, no, I didn’t know what the latter 2 even were before last weekend.

That is the beauty of the Conference: the workshops often have multiple layers of information, offering something that can be equally useful to farmers who have hundreds of acres or to market gardeners farming a few dozen or even to someone like me, who wondered how best to use the small woodlot on my 5-acre lot if I wanted goats to have access to it as well as to the “meadow” I have. That’s silvoculture; a fancy word for something that’s been done around the world for ages: an intentional growing of trees and shrubs with crops and forage. And I learned how to thin my trees to let in enough sunlight to grow forage under them, as well as what to plant under the trees and why it will be more nutritious for livestock than the same stuff grown in the heat of the sun. The right nut- or fruit-bearing trees in the mix, I learned, will reduce the amount of feed I need to grow or buy, and the shade in summer and windbreak in winter those trees provide will keep the animals more comfortable and healthier.

We hear the word “sustainable” a lot these days, including in that completely nonsensical pairing with “growth,” about which archdruid John Michael Greer says:

…there’s no meaningful sense of the adjective “sustainable” that can cohabit with any meaningful sense of the noun “growth.” In a system – any system, anywhere – growth is always unsustainable. Some systems have internal limits that cut in at a certain point and stop growth before it becomes pathological, while some rely on external limits, but the limits are always there, and those who think there are no limits to a given pattern of growth are deluding themselves.

PASA, though, is nudging farmers, gardeners, chefs, consumers, everyone a little closer to true sustainability. And I, for one, want to know how to get there from here. How to get from where I am as a cog in the machine that is the industrial age to a place where my existence causes as little harm to the planet I live on as possible while I happily and healthily work and play with my friends and neighbors. You all, in other words.

Julie