Rootstalk

A few weeks ago, I went to the first annual Rootstalk festival outside of Salem, OR. My friend, John, and I spent the weekend camping, going to classes, listening (and dancing) to bands, meeting awesome people, and generally having an amazing, mind-blowing time.

As soon as I found out about the existence of Rootstalk, I knew that I had to go. It was like someone had decided to make a festival just for me. With classes on herbalism, organic and sustainable living, wildcrafting, and more, I couldn't stay away. It was the right decision; the weekend was one of the best I've ever had. I still haven't fully processed my experiences (which isn't that surprising given that I was bombarded with bad news as soon as I got back). When it was over, I didn't want to come home. Normally when I see the Seattle skyline after being gone for a while, I feel euphoric. This time, I felt my stomach sinking. I was coming back to reality after being in a utopia.

I'm not entirely sure how to put my experience into words. Normally, words don't fail me, but in this case, I've barely been able to talk about it at all. I could talk about what classes we went to and which vendors I bought things from, but that was such a small fragment. It was more about the synergy (I hate that word, but in this case it fits) of the people, their combined knowledge and wisdom, the environment, and the activities we participated in.

What sticks out most in my mind is the overall feeling that some humans have given up a lot of things that we would probably be better off having in our lives. We have given it up in order to have the convenience of modern, city life, but I'm far from convinced that the tradeoff is worth it.

One of the presenters, Daniel Vitalis, said that he thinks that humans need fire - not just to cook our food and keep us warm. I can't help but agree that sitting in front of a real fire, whether I'm roasting marshmallows on a camping trip, having a bonfire on the beach, or sitting in front of a cozy fireplace, makes me feel good, like I'm getting something vital that I've been lacking. He aslo brought up that in modern western culture, we have developed the notion that we are somehow separate from the ecosystem. The fact is that we are part of the whole, and we can't escape that for good or ill. I'm not entirely sure what to do with that concept, but it rings true. Mostly, I want to spend more time in nature (I say as I'm sitting in my living room in my apartment in a major city) so that I can experience and hopefully understand what it is that I think it's so critical that we protect and live with in harmony.

The sense of community that pervaded the festival was amazing. Everyone was friendly and had a smile to share. There was no awkwardness about starting up a conversation with a stranger. We were all kindred spirits, and it was fabulous. The free tea pavilion was a great place to feel the camaraderie of the festival. People could be found there at all times of the day lounging on the cushions and making new friends. I would love to feel that wonderful sense of community in my daily life. It was jarring when I returned home and smiled at the first people who passed me on the street, only to have them avert their gazes and look obviously uncomfortable (though granted, it could have been that I looked like a derelict, dirty hippy... that is if it weren't still happening).

There is definitely something primal missing from my life. I realized this when a marching percussion band performed throughout the campground. People were drawn to them, and an impromptu parade formed as people followed them around, dancing their hearts out. It was reminiscent of the pied piper. That night we went to the woodland masquerade ball. I'll admit, before I went to it, I thought it sounded a little hokey. A masquerade ball? While camping? Outdoors? In reality, it was astounding. There is something profound about people wearing masks. Your identity becomes less important, and your ego melts away. People danced with abandon, unconcerned about whether they looked like idiots. And dancing outdoors... it's magical. The energy from the earth combined with the energy of the music and the other people was unreal. During the ball, it felt like I was part of a tribe, and I want that feeling back.

One of the things that was stressed over and over again by many different people in many different ways was that we shouldn't beat ourselves up when we fail to live up to our own expectations. The context was always that of living sustainably, but I think it applies to everything. When we try to change things 100% all at once, we are bound to slip some. I try to eat organic food as much as possible, but sometimes, I just need to buy a pizza, and that's OK. It seems to be human nature (well, American nature, anyway) that if we fail a little bit then we should just give up. Instead, we should be forgiving of our slipups and keep right on trucking, doing what we can. That's what I'm working on - doing what I can. For now I'm in Seattle in a small apartment with a cat who will eat anything green that she sees, so starting indoor window gardens isn't possible. I'm not going to be able to grow all of my own food on my shaded balcony. I can, however, keep maintaining my little garden (which I fully intend to truly maintain next spring/summer. I've mostly gotten over my bee PTSD and am pretty sure I'll be able to actually do work in the garden soon), and doing my best to eat organic and sustainably farmed food whenever I can. While it would be great if I were able to live in a perfectly permacultured (I've decided this must be a word) home that was completely self-sustaining. I don't, and I won't be able to do that for a long time. So I take baby steps, which are better than not doing anything at all.

John and I have big plans to start a club where we can spend time in nature, learning how to do awesome things that we learned about at Rootstalk, like making rope from plants, starting fires using the bow and stick method (essentially, rubbing 2 sticks together), wild foraging, and other awesome nature-based activities. We hope that by doing this, we'll manage to keep ourselves sane until next year's Rootstalk. I can't wait.

Covered in Bees!

I love bees. I love that they make honey and beeswax and pollinate our food. When I see fuzzy bees buzzing around flowers, I am happy. I am concerned about the decline in the bee population. I someday want to have a hive or two. Today, however, I had a bee encounter that wasn't very happy.

I was gardening on my tiny balcony, happy as a clam that the weather was finally nice enough for me to want to garden. There was a bag of things that needed to be composted sitting on top of a pot filled with dirt (but with no plants). The bag had been there for most of the winter because I had been too lazy to bring it to the compost bin in the parking lot. I gathered up a newer bag of stuff to be composted and the old bag and walked into my apartment.

I felt something sharp and stabby over my shoulder blade, and then I immediately saw a bee flying around. Then I felt something stabby in the back of my neck, and my arm, and OH MY GOD! There were bees flying all around me, stinging me. I realized they were coming from the old bag of stuff that had to be composted. I had the presence of mind to fling the compost bags back out onto the balcony (screaming all the while - turns out, I scream like a girl). Then I did a crazy run/dance into the kitchen trying to rid myself of bees. They eventually left me alone and went to the windows. Just then, my friend called to confirm our plans for the evening. I answered the phone sobbing and in a bit of shock. She suggested putting out bowls of sugar water to attract the bees, and she also suggested vacuuming the bees with a long hose. The bees were still quite agitated, flying around my apartment, trying desperately to get back to their hive.

I lit some incense (also suggested by the aforementioned friend) to try to calm the bees down (if beekeepers use smoke, why not try it?). My cat thought that the bees were great fun and was doing her best to catch one, which freaked me out. I didn't want her to get stung too. Eventually the bees settled down. There were 5 or 6 total. I sucked 4 of them up with my vacuum (crying all the while. I wanted to let the poor bees go home, but I didn't want to let any of the ones that were outside into my apartment, and I certainly didn't want to get stung again. I hated killing the poor bees that hadn't done anything to me). I trapped one of the bees between the screen and the window in my kitchen (I also feel dreadful about that). Because I'm not entirely sure if there were 5 or 6, there could be a bee in the belly of my cat, there could be one hiding somewhere in my apartment, or they could all be accounted for.

Looking on my balcony, it appears that the beehive is somewhere in the vicinity of the big pot that the compost had been resting on. It could be in the pot or somewhere nearby. I'm certainly not going onto my balcony today to try to figure it out (though I might check it out tonight when the bees are in the hive). Now I need to find someone to remove the bees, which I'm sure will be another adventure. Hopefully, they will make a beekeeper somewhere very happy.

I also have to mention the irony... I'm on a dating website, and my user name is a variation on Covered in Bees! (from an Eddie Izzard bit). It turns out that being covered in bees isn't very fun.

:Edit:
I just found the 6th bee. It has been vacuumed up with the rest of its cohorts, and my apartment is once again free of bees.

In Which I Discuss my Garden (WARNING: if you don't care about the state of my garden, don't read this. You will be bored)

My garden looks like a jungle. My plants are all growing at rates that far exceed what I would have ever expected - especially since I haven't used any fertilizer yet beyond what was in the potting soil. Although everything is growing well, not everything has proven to be successful (due to user error, not because of the plants themselves). My broccoli, for example, produced a beautiful floret that was perfect for eating right when I went on vacation. My roommate, who watered the plants while I was gone, didn't cut it off, so it flowered. I also learned that 2 broccoli in the same pot doesn't work well. One of the plants grew to be enormous, while the other just stopped growing because the first was taking all the nutrients. Some of my herbs (my oregano, cilantro, and catnip) are producing flowers so quickly, I can't keep up with them. This is particularly bad for the cilantro, which when it flowers, stops produing the useful and tasty leaves that are used for seasoning. I got two varieties of lavender, one which hasn't flowered at all, and the other which turns out to have the wrong kind of flowers for harvesting. It's really pretty, but it's purely ornamental. My oregano got some sort of oregano disease. I separated it from the rest of the plants, and it hasn't spread to anything else, which is good.

On the other end of the spectrum are the plants that have done exactly what I wanted them to do. My strawberries gave off a nice amount of fruit. To be truly worthwhile, however, I think I would need twice as many plants as I had this year. My everbearing plants produced a small amount, while my June bearing variety had the highest yield - plus, they just tasted better. My sugar snap peas have given me enough peas for 2 small side dishes, and there's enough on the plants for one more. Once they start to bear fruit, they look horrible - the leaves all start to die as the plants give all of their energy and nutrients to the seeds. I planted a second round of peas - this time with about 2 1/2 times as many seeds as I used for the last batch. They're one of my favorite foods, and as far as I'm concerned I can never have too many sugar snap peas. My cherry tomatoes have far surpassed what I was expecting. My balcony gets partial shade, so I figured I'd be lucky if I got anything at all from the plant. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. The first cluster of tomatoes ripened on the vine - there were too few to make anything from, so I gave them to friends (I hate raw tomatoes, but love them in sauces). Currently, there are dozens of green tomatoes that all appeared at the same time, so they should ripen and provide plenty of fruit for cooking.

It's still too early to tell if my carrots and zucchini will be successful. The zucchini looks like something from the Jurassic era - huge leaves that just keep getting bigger and bigger. They haven't flowered yet, but I'm confident that I will soon have more zucchini than I know what to do with. Zucchini grows really well in this part of the world. My carrots are growing, and I think they will turn out well. I had to separate a few that were growing too close together (if you've ever tried to plant carrots, you know that the seads are absurdly tiny, and it's hard to avoid accidentally dropping a couple of seeds in the space where only one seed is supposed to go). I tried transplanting the carrots, but they don't seem to be doing well. I might just have to give those up as a lost cause and just be happy for the ones that made it.

Then there are the plants I bought from my school's plant sale (Bastyr has a wonderful medicinal herb garden, and they sell herbs and seeds whenever they are available). I decided on a mugwart plant - specifically the Chinese variety that is used for moxa, a calendula plant, and a valerian plant. All three are doing amazingly well. There are 3 baby mugwart shoots in the pot that were really unexpected since it hasn't flowered. The Calendula keeps on flowering, and the valerian is looking good. I need to research how to harvest valerian becuase the root is what's used for medicinal purposes.

Overall, I would say that my garden experiment has gone extremely well. At some point, I seem to have developed a green thumb. I managed to kill almost all of my plants last year, so the difference is impressive. Plus, it's a lot of fun.

Help Save the Ecology Program at my Nephew's School

The Pepsi Refresh Everything program is giving away money to some awesome programs. My nephew's school is in the running to get $25K to keep their ecology program running. They're currently 33rd place, but only the top 10 get money. If you help out and vote for this, you'll be supporting a public school in Chicago (the majority of the students are from minority and low-income families). This program is particularly relevant in light of the BP fiasco. Regardless of whether you want to plug the oil leak with BP executives or Sarah Palin, this is something that kids can benefit from for their entire lives. I know I wish I'd learned more about ecology as a kid.

The program has a heavy focus on gardening and teaching the kids how to eat well. They get hands on experience in the edible garden and get to eat the fruits of their labors. If they win, the money will go toward the salary of the teacher, putting up a greenhouse, and paying for gardening supplies.
So please, please, please vote for this program. (It's easy, just click the following link and hit the Vote button). Unless you request it, Pepsi won't send you any emails, so you don't have to worry about spam. refresheverything.com/watersecology

Please pass this to anyone you think might be willing to help.

Thank you so much!

How Does My Garden Grow?

My garden is growing a little bit at a time, and it makes me very happy. I have basil, oregano, cilantro, peppermint, catnip, lavender, rosemary, cherry tomatoes, and strawberries. I have also planted the seeds of zucchini, carrots, broccoli, and sugar snap peas. The peas have begun to sprout (which makes sense, since they were the first seeds I planted). Soon I will have to get some sort of support structure for them to climb up, unless I want my deck to be taken over by vines.

I'm quite amazed at how well the plants are doing given how little sun my deck gets, and especially given that it had been overcast for weeks. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they continue to do well, and that I will have a bountiful harvest this year.

I Belong in a Field

I started reading Neil Gaiman's blog this morning. He's one of my favorite authors of all time, and his blog is wonderful to read. I was tickled pink when I read the post he wrote on my birthday. Halfway down the post he answers a letter from someone asking him about his garden. Part of his reply was, "...American Supermarket vegetables and fruit don't tend to taste like very much. They're grown for looks and for hardiness in transportation, I tend to think, not for taste." He also buys local. I think it's safe to say that a lot more people read his blog than mine, and it makes me happy that he put in a little plug for eating locally grown food.

On a related topic, lately I've been feeling more and more like I need to get out of the city and into the country. I have begun my small balcony garden, but I long to have my own land to sink my fingers into. Not only that, but I want to be able to look at the sky at night and see multitudes of stars. Last night, I went up to Anacortes for my friends' engagement party. Anacortes isn't my favorite town, but it's right near La Conner and Mount Vernon, two absolutely charming towns in Skagit Valley. There are probably many more adorable towns there as well. Skagit Valley is a fertile valley on the Skagit River in Western Washington. Multitudes of tulips and daffodils are grown there, and they have an annual tulip festival. I feel at home there, and it doesn't seem unreasonable that I could live in La Conner and have a practice in Mount Vernon. Of course, it doesn't have to be there. I need to explore more. I need to find the place that feels most like home. Home isn't, and has never been, Seattle. Don't get me wrong, Seattle is a great city, and I have come to love it. But it is a city. A single family home in a good neighborhood costs more than I could ever hope to make in a lifetime, and a home with land... well, that would require that I win the lottery or find a very rich sugar daddy to marry. I've never been a fan of suburbs, with the exception of places like in New England where the suburb is a town in its own right and not just a series of strip malls and tract housing.

I'm not entirely sure what happened to make me want to leave the city life for the small town life. A year or two ago, I would happily and loudly tell anyone who asked that I planned on living in cities for the rest of my life. I even said that Seattle is too small. Now... well, now I just want a quiet, simple life. I'd like to live close enough to the city for the occasional day trip, but the urban life isn't for me. A Strokes song sums up my feelings quite well: "I'm stuck in a city, but I belong in a field."

I'm not planning on moving anywhere for a while, and I probably won't even switch apartments until I'm done with school. But nature and small town living are calling my name. It's only a matter of time.

Happy Ostara

Two posts in one day? What is the world coming to??? I guess that's what happens when I am free from the burden of finals.

Today is Ostara, the spring equinox, the first day of spring. A lot of Easter traditions come from this Pagan holiday - specifically the eggs and the bunny, two potent fertility symbols. According to lore, Ostara is the day the Goddess and God get it on and conceive... the God (he gets reborn in nine months on the winter solstice). This is the perfect time for new endeavors, and of course, it's a great time for sex if you have someone special.

My original plan for the day was to go to the garden store, buy loads of gardening supplies and begin my experimental vegetable garden on my extremely small balcony that only gets partial sun. After all, today is all about growth and seeds becoming something new. Alas, my back decided it wanted none of that and has been killing me all day. I guess my little garden will have to wait until I am able to bend over again. I have been online for a good deal of the day perusing gardening websites and blogs, getting ideas and trying to figure out how best to use the very limited space I have. I wish my cat didn't like to eat plants so much, or I would try an indoor garden as well.

Tomorrow, I will be having dinner with my parents, and my mom is going to give me a bunch of pots that she and my dad aren't using. Hooray for free pots! Figuring out how not to spend more money than I have on this garden is just as much work as gardening will be.