The Life and Times of the Plume
I Love Your Soul
Heirloom, organic popping corn — not genetically modified. I grew it in healthy, rich, alive soil instead of soil that has been mono cropped to death. I grew it with manure and compost instead of synthetic fertilizer and chemicals. I’ll let it dry on the cob and in late fall we will manually remove the kernels from the cobs with the friction of our hands and then on winter nights when we feel like a positively sinful treat, we will pop it in cast iron on the
I’ve been busy turning soil, sun, and water into gold — the ultimate alchemy.
Something I try to do every morning before I do anything else, before I make breakfast or a cup of tea, before I feed the dogs and all the other mouths and beaks, before I check on the horses, before I collect eggs…is step into the large garden here and see what needs harvesting, what needs water, what needs deadheading, what needs fussing over. It’s a literally beautiful way to begin the day — outside where life is apparent and thrumming and aesthetically pleasing to the eye. There is texture, color, weirdness, abundance. It’s good for my soul.
This morning, as I picked a passel of zinnias and enjoyed their different sizes, colors, and details, I thought about how important it is to foster an appreciation for beauty in ourselves and others, to develop an aesthetic, a taste for the sublime. It’s probably what bothers me most as I look at our education systems in North America — the gaping, yawning abyss that exists where art and music classes used to reside. I worry about focusing on teaching kids reading, writing, and arithmetic, racing China to produce tech-savvy children who can build the computers of the future. What about beauty? What about looking at a painting and crying and not being able to express why but just knowing that an invisible string has been tied tight between the artist’s paintbrush and the beats of your own heart. What about looking out at a pristine landscape and understanding how important it is to keep that beauty as it is? When we know about beauty and value it, when we have a developed aesthetic, we want to conserve beauty, we want to grow beauty, we want to design beautiful buildings that reflect nature, we want to grow beautiful gardens that feed our bodies and nurture our souls. When we have been taught about what is beautiful, we care about beauty. I’m over art that is solely about politics, about making statements about how ugly and
I was not prepared for how piglets enter the world. I thought they would be flopsy, mopsy little things with soft bodies, closed eyes, and weak legs. I thought they would be like most other infants, dependent and helpless. It’s simply not true. When piglets are born they seem less like frail baby animals and more like tiny pigs. They are strangely dependent on their mother for milk yet somehow, they’re utterly precocious. They hit the ground trotting, marvelous, chunky things covered in velvet and clever spots. They drink their milk. They are endlessly hungry. They oink. They squeak. When I reach out to touch them they startle and leap off the ground, all four tiny pink hooves in the air. It’s hilarious. What is most surprising of all is that their tiny bodies are rock hard with muscles, thickly coiled
We harvested our garlic over the weekend. One variety was ready and the other three varieties we grow could have stayed in the ground for another week but Robbie suspected he was going to start rolling* since the McCall base has pretty much emptied out to spike bases in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. Sure enough, he was given a division position on a Utah fire on Monday and I’m not sure when he’ll make it home again so it’s really great to have this crop harvested and curing on the racks in our big workshop building. It’s our biggest and best harvest yet! We had great success this year which is probably a sign of our seed adapting to our soil and the overall health of the soil here. This will be our fourth year carrying our own garlic seed over into the next season and it just keeps getting better, richer, more complex in flavor.
This garlic crop was grown under contract for a fermented garlic company in Sun Valley as well as for our own consumption (we eat SO MUCH garlic), and seed stock but we do hope to be able to offer you garlic for sale in an online farm store next summer. We continue to expand and develop our garlic plot here and as our knowledge grows so does the quality of our harvest. Stay tuned! We hope to make your garlic dreams come true!
And since I know some of you will ask about her, the new kitten is Roxanne, as in, “you don’t have to put on the red light“. Our friends found her mostly dead in a puddle of water on the side of a road in McCall. They brought her back from the brink of death, gentled her, but didn’t want to own a cat so we brought her to the farm. She loves it here and is a pesky little savage. Mew mew!
*Rolling, in fire lexicon, refers to a