Dr. Peter Graham- or Carrying on without our Champions

Dr. Peter Graham- admiring prairie legumes

Early last Monday morning I walked across my own bean field creating and composing an idea to work on with my esteemed friend and colleague Dr. Peter Graham. I was thinking about nitrogen fixation in edible beans under organic production practices. I was excited to pitch the idea to Peter and knew he’d share my interest.

When I sat down at my computer I learned that Peter had left us- unexpectedly over the weekend.

Peter changed the course of my life for the better in so many ways. Through the years he was my boss, adviser, mentor, colleague, and at last a friend. I am the person that I am today because of Peter’s generous and large investment of his time, teaching, and resources. I worked with Peter since I was an undergraduate in his lab- and stayed for nearly 8 years- working both in Minnesota and Ecuador. I found a home in his lab was a touchstone of my life.

Peter showed me first hand what it meant to really love the work that you do.

My interest and work in sustainability comes from him and his applied research in nitrogen fixation in legumes. Peter, a respected academic, was also an unsung hero of sustainability. To my mind and experience his work in South America, where he lived for many years, was the opposite of the green revolution. He worked with small farmer on low input (hence N fixation) bean production to improve peoples diets, not exports.

At a time when I was young, lost, and poor Peter brought out the best of my potential. I really am who I am and do what I do today because of the many years that Peter nurtured me with a free rein. There are so few people in life that look out for us (me) in the way that Peter did. Without him, my world is more uncertain and I've lost an umbrella of protection that he held over me for more than 1/2 my life... Even if he held it lightly.

Grasp the Nettle

Grasp the Nettle= means to face up to or take on a problem that has been ignored or deferred

At first light on Sunday morning I'm sitting in a patch of frosty nettles watching Jens running across the backyard to find me. He's in his footy pajamas with bright blue puddle-jumper boots and wearing a huge red sweatshirt that hangs a foot beyond his hands and down to his knees. He has just turned five and is up early to ride the bike he got for his birthday the night before. In the chill of the morning he rides and I run up and down the driveway.

That is the image of my life I want imprinted in my mind forever...

The reason I was sitting in the nettles on Sunday morning is that Audrey (Moonstone Farms) introduced me (and Alma) to a new world of local foods on Saturday. I joined a group of folks to take her class "Grasp the Nettle" on eating native foods that grow all around us. This was another of those eye and world-opening experiences. We walked her farm and grove picking and eating all kinds of spring greens.

Then we prepared those greens into one of the finest meals I've ever had...
Nettle pasta with basil pesto (out of this world delicious!)
Steamed, buttered nettles with wine vinegar
Spezzati- spring onions, dandelion greens, Virginia Waterleaf and eggs
Ham and dandelion greens
Dandelion flower fritters
Burdock root sauted and mixed with wild rice and hazelnuts
Apple leather and dried elderberries

All that food grows around our farmstead without having to plant, weed, or water it. And it's free for the taking.

So we had nettles and eggs for breakfast and I even harvested enough to freeze some for next winter. Here's Jens eating the nettles- the thumb is pointed up, but his face says something different.

Fruition...

Megan demonstrating to the Community Service Club how to plant the fruit trees

Last weekend we planted 177 fruit trees across the entire school district (which is about 50 miles wide) at the home of every elementary age kid in the school. For me it was a fun and interesting adventure.

My back of the envelope calculations are that those trees, at maturity, would provide enough food to feed the entire school district population for 4-5 days. Now that's a step towards community food security. What's more, it gives those kids access to healthy, local foods right out their back doors.

There are so many lessons we learned doing this project that I'm going to have to write them all down in a paper. But we couldn't have done this without the support of the Foodshelf, school board, Mr. Dreke (3rd grade teacher extraordinaire), the Community Service Club (farmers who left the field to plant other children's trees), Lou's Greenhouse in Big Stone City, SD, my husband, and Megan the student supported by the U's Community Assistance Program.

I want to say a few words about Megan the U of MN horticulture student who has an intuitive way with these trees- you have to see this woman pruning a few dozen trees to appreciate her skill and confidence with fruit trees. She whips out her pruners, hanging from her belt, and moves around the tree like Edwards Scissorhands (a dated reference from my youth). Megan's work with these trees brought to mind the book about scientist Barbara McClintock "A Feeling for the Organism." McClintock's discoveries in molecular biology were 30 years ahead of the times and she credits them to the intuitive sense she gained over years of working/being with corn.

Our traveling the county showed me the need for a home-scale horticulturalist to teach people to care for trees. People would grab Megan by the arm and take her to see their fruit trees and ask her to guide them in pruning. Next year (to which Mike quickly adds "there is no Next Year!") we will combine the fruit tree planting with some kind of tree care/pruning/maybe fruit preservation session.
Small enough to care about. Small enough to make a difference. What a great weekend.

This Week's Firsts - Spring 2009

photo credit: Carolyn McDonald

~First frog calls in the pre-dawn morning
~First sighting of snake trails across the dusty gravel roads
~At the Prairie Preserve during my morning’s gaze to the N, S, E, W, sky, and ground, I put my bare hands into the yellow thatch of prairie grass and it felt warm for the first time this year
~With my hands in the grass and I heard wild turkeys gobbling for the first time out here
~First mosquito – honest
~First new lights out on the prairie- a new hog confinement unit with three bright yardlights startled me a few days ago shining a few miles off across the prairie to the NE of our house (I’ll have to drive and check that out)
~First green grass sprouting out of the flood flattened grass on the SE corner of the farm
~8 of the 10 Aronia berries (chokeberry) I planted put out new growth

What I gave up for Lent

http://dilbert.com/strip/2009-04-16

I gave up economics for Lent. It wasn't easy, but I quit checking the stock market, business news services, Bloomberg radio, blogs, futures markets and the Baltic Dry Index. Alma overheard me telling someone that I had given up the economy for Lent and she said "But mom, you ask Dad everyday "how did the market do?" Alma gave up her MP3 player, Jens wanted to give up naps (didn't let him), Lake just scowled at the idea. Mike said, from his Baptist tradition, that everything that everyone gave up for Lent they gave up all year.

Even a Blind Man Can Tell When He's Walking in the Sun

Child in from sledding on a mid-winters night

Yesterday the kids came running, yelling "Grass! We found green grass!" We have a calf hutch on the north-east corner of the house as a play fort for the kids. Inside the hutch was green grass- all three kids jumped inside to enjoy the greenhouse effect that grew the grass. MIke and I stacked wood while they played nearby. Mike guesstimates that we stacked about 6-8 weeks of mid-winter heating.

Last January the days were so short that in order to get in any decent amount of sledding, a kid had to put on a head lamp to play into the night (which would start around 4:30 in the afternoon). One particularly cold, snowy, long evening of darkness, Earnest came back in from sledding in the dark with his brother and sister. His headlamp shining like his eyes-- he cut through the darkness of winter both inside and outside of the house.

The sun is setting decidedly north of our west pointing driveway, there is green grass to be found if you want to crawl inside a calf hutch, and right now the full moon is shimmering on the lake west of our grain bins (wait- that's suppose to be our field). Point is... "Even a blind man can tell when he's walking in the sun." I think it is safe to say spring is here.

...Like no day has been

photo credit: Alma (this is one among dozens of staged horse photos I found on the camera)

The sun is rising slightly north of due west. That means we are really starting the time of year where the sun’s intensity warms the earth. A pink blaze comes through my kid pawed dining room windows and with the sunlight at this angle I can see all the fingerprints, lip and kiss marks.

What a wonderful Saturday. It was cold enough to slow the flooding of Fargo—but that sun angle made the south facing porch sunny and warm. I watched the soil on our farm giving off steam and make ground fog clouds. And then about 6 pm waves and waves of 10 of thousands of snow geese made their way from south to north across our farm. The sun was low enough in the west that it shown on their white undersides—they look like clouds of white sparkles filling the sky. I was at a loss for words. Stunning/magical/breathtaking.

The kids and I moved the table and chairs out of the kitchen to make room for a dance party. Alma is at the age where we are listening to both Disney tunes and Jonas Brothers. We danced until our sides ached. The weekend also included grinding wheat, making our first batch of hard cheese- some Monteray Jack, and a plush toy parade around the farm.

Late Saturday night I realized that I had forgotten to put in the chickens (Mike was out of town for a Blues Fest). So I walked into the dark night (yard light off) and through the dark barn to our chicken coop. Happy was too afraid to go in the dark barn- and I don’t blame her. My flashlight was about out of batteries. Having locked the chickens in the coop, I all but run back past the empty cow stalls towards the door. I stand on the concrete slab outside the barn door- the house lights a couple hundred yards away, the sound of geese honking in the dark all around me, a half moon in the sky. I hear a large metallic clunk from inside the steel barn ceiling and am propelled towards the house.

As it turns out, in putting the chickens to bed in the dark, I locked a skunk in the coop with them. None of the chickens were killed, luckily. But what a shock to find a skunk in the corner of the coop the next morning.