We interrupt this update for the following Timely Reminder: today, May 5th, is Give STL Day, when your online donation has a triple chance of being amplified if you give between 12 and 12:20 pm Central time. Check out this page for details!
And now back to our regularly scheduled update…
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Did ya get your corn in? Climatic conditions being what they are here in the heartland, I’m going to be asking this question a lot in the coming days. Makes me seem more farmerly.
This is Ben, over here at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, and for better or worse, we’re in the height of spring. Though it is pretty easy to expound on the beauty and hope inherent in the season, what with our garden beds bursting with mustard and radish, the pastures greening up nicely, the constant song of birds, the flittering showers of maple samaras, ad nauseum, I cannot help but notice that for every treasure to be found here on these rolling prairie hills, small tragedies are concealed deeper down in the shadows.
There are the dead baby birds catapulted from their nests by spring winds, pink and ant covered in the brush; frost-killed leaves on young mulberry shoots misfortunate enough to have sprouted in cooler microclimates; orphaned deer mice, unable to feed themselves, starving beneath grassy tussocks. Sure, the spring is abundant with life, but the natural world has its sobering checks and balances too.
So I’m not an expert on much, which is fine. It’s been said that an expert is someone who can blow the bit out of a mule’s mouth from the other side. I’m not sure by whom. But one way of gaining expertise is to continually make new and different mistakes in a narrow field of inquiry. That is what I’ve been doing for many consecutive years with my corn planting.
I’ve tried tight plantings, spacious plantings, rows, blocks, three sisters variations, planting my corn in furrows, and putting the corn in holes. I’ve put the corn two inches deep in a hole, one inch deep, and a half inch deep. I’ve sprouted it before planting, and frantically scratched it in with a hoe during a thunderstorm. I don’t have any expert advice for you about corn, I just like talking about it. That’s all.
Spring is the time for tonics. As I attempt to shake the final vestiges of another winter from my gradually aging bones, I find myself compelled to devour fistfuls of violet, peppergrass and chickweed. Then there’s the tonics I feel less compelled to take, though I suspect they’re healthy. Dock, henbit, and ground ivy, the bitterer the better. Makes the blood rise like sap in a tree, the old timers say. But spring tonics aren’t merely for us humans.
I send my child to the fields and draws daily to harvest chickweed, clover, dandelion, comfrey and nettle as greenchop for our precocious baby chicks. Start ‘em out early on greens and they’ll know what to do when they get to pasture, I say. But I’m no expert.
Just a coupla few days back our goat Alice birthed two kids. The first milk they nurse on contains a rich, oily cocktail of nutrients called colostrum, to get them up and running. While the babies nurse, momma eats the afterbirth, betraying her ruminant status, a sort of postpartum tonic. People sometimes consume colostrum, for the tonic effects, but curious as I am about it, I wouldn’t dare deprive the little ones.
Speaking of oily and nutrient dense, I recently performed routine maintenance on our village’s main greywater system. I sort of hold the belief that if I submerge myself deeply enough in it, I’m bound to receive some type of immune system benefits. Again, I’m no expert, not on health, or greywater, really. I liken it to those folks who eat tiny leaf fragments from freshly emerging poison ivy to reduce their allergic reaction the plant. Me, I don’t buy it, and being currently uninsured, have no desire to make any mistakes in that narrow field of inquiry. I’m an equal opportunity skeptic: I don’t put much stock in Western medicine, Eastern medicine, homeopathy, or even chiropractors. I do like my tetanus shots, though. And I think Tylenol is a sham.
But back to that first bit, about the simultaneous miracles and tragedies of spring. We’ve been grieving the loss of a few ducks at our homestead this week. Two in particular, Bernadette and Francois, our prized momma ducks, who have reliably raised large clutches all on their own for as long as we’ve been in the duck business, were nabbed one recent night.
Reading the kill, which again, I am no expert on, coyotes seems to have been the culprit. Now, we don’t lose much livestock ordinarily, and when we do, it’s usually a wayward adolescent bird who was bound for the butcher block anyway. We sort of write it off as taxation to the land we’re on, an unintentional offering for some other poor starve-gutted critter that deserves a chance at making it here too.
But these ducks were special, and I feel quite taken aback by this unfortunate episode, despite the fact that I myself am perhaps the biggest predator of ducks in Northeast Missouri, being as though we raise them primarily for meat. This being said, I see much hope in our landscape.
After a couple years of artificial chick brooding, which is inefficient, unnatural, and fraught with mortality, we are letting our broody hens do the work, with amazing results. Natural chick brooding is highly effective, less work, cheaper, and I believe leads to healthier, more precocious chicks.
Also, my daughter is successfully raising an orphaned field mouse to good health, keeping it fed and warm (mice love chickweed too), tapping into her own innate nurturing instincts. The day is nigh when the little mouse will probably dash away, wild and free, so that one day it might nest in our root cellar and steal our precious organic grain. Oh well. I tend to think that all the important work that needs done on our planet is going to have setbacks.
One look at our current state of environmental affairs can sometimes feel like an utter tragedy. And it is. But our common path to a sustainable future is paved with a lot of small signs of hope, not unlike our own paths here at Dancing Rabbit. We all gotta cut our way through some brambles and poison ivy now and then, but it only gives me more appreciation for the hard-to-see things, like the minute inchworms, baby squirrels, and the flowering forest floor in early May.
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Been wanting to check out Dancing Rabbit live and in person? Now’s your chance! There are still a few slots left in the second session of our visitor program, happening June 1- 22, 2015!
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And if you planned to join in on the Give STL Day fun, but were so captivated by Ben’s column that it slipped your mind, here’s the link to the event again! Thanks for your support!
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Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community and nonprofit outside Rutledge, in northeast Missouri, focused on demonstrating sustainable living possibilities. Find out more about us by visiting our website, reading our blog, or emailing us.