Pity the frog

Pity the frog, identified so often as either sitting on a log, making decisions, but not taking action, or being slowly boiled alive. I have a picture in my head of a frog on a log in the sun, deciding to jump into the water, but without thought, he simply stays where he is basking in the sun; it is where he wants to be. It might be reasonable to ask if the frog is even aware of making a decision. If it is, indeed, unaware, then we should hold the frog harmless and living without motivation or intention beyond the need to eat and procreate.It's much easier for me to understand the frog slowly reaching the boiling point in water, unaware that the water is getting dangerously hot. I feel like I've jumped out of the pot, which was not so much of my own doing, but a reaction to something deep.

So it is that I want to write a book. It seems clear to me today that I need a book proposal, but it is most assuredly autobiographical and my brother assures me that there is no point trying to sell book like that before it is written.  But in this case I want a co-writer, and so a book proposal is essential to starting a collaboration.

In rough outline this book would be about how it came to pass that two people came to be in a hot tub together in Whistler, British Columbia, on February 13, 2024. I hope we can give the reader a clear eyed and honest depiction of who we were at that moment, and how, by God, we had ended up there. This obviously allows for autobiography. It allows for poetry and for block prints. The list goes on.

For myself, I know that if I am able, I will be attending the international convention of alcoholics anonymous in Vancouver, Canada in early July 2025. What if we prepared to meet then, and be hopeful today that we might even be editing a first or second draft. And what if this book also covered the period from now to July 2025; we might even reflect on how the writing affects us. And just for today, continuing until then, there might be no need for an ending.

Donald Trump and the Red Letter I

Last Thursday one more of Donald Trump’s legal problems ended up before the Supreme Count and I listened to some of the oral arguments.  It is clear that the question of whether or not Donald Trump is an insurrectionist will certainly be postponed, again, as the justices are not ready to admit (nor accuse) him of being one.  Liberal and conservative justices alike are unwilling to litigate that question, though I expect they will have to at some point.  Conservatives clearly want to use their federal power to quash Colorado’s decision, upheld on public appeal to Colorado’s courts, that Trump is an insurrectionist, but they cannot do so directly.  They are loath to conduct an evidentiary hearing, on the grounds that Colorado’s evidentiary process may be flawed.  Conservative analysis of the 14th amendment is that it was meant to restrict state rights, not embolden them as Colorado has done and many other states are ready to do. Cavanaugh and others feign fear over the political and legal wars they envision should they let Colorado’s decision stand.  Justice Alito et.al. insisted that since adoption of the 14th amendment there has never been a candidate kept off the ballot for federal office due to insurrection, it follows that the amendment cannot be construed to have allowed it in federal elections.

Evidently there are no convicted insurrectionists in the United States today; we don’t charge people with insurrection to begin with.  We charge them with conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding because crimes like that are easier to prosecute and carry sufficiently high sentences as to meet the need for harsh punishment.  But nobody today is in jail because they were found guilty of insurrection.  And yet you and I know they are either insurrectionists or some kind of private militia fighting on behalf of their leader for greater glory.  To my mind, they used their strength (without many armaments) to pursue their target, identified to them by Trump as Vice President Pence, in order to overturn the results of the election.  That is an insurrection against the Constitution whether or not you believe that is a good thing or a bad thing.  Donald Trump was the leader of an insurrection; he had his armed militia at the ready.  I do not believe that a man like Trump, surrounded by the likes of Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Kash Patel, did not also have field generals and a battle plan.  Were it not for the Secret Service, Trump would have been at the Capitol demanding Pence’s fealty, not at gunpoint, but surrounded by his militia.

Donald Trump is an insurrectionist as surely as any other January 6 defendant, but will never be convicted of it.  Yet the State of Colorado applied that conclusion after a thorough judicial review and specifically cited the 14th amendment’s prohibitions, however they might be applied, in managing access to the primary ballot.  Trump was represented by counsel in a five day judicial hearing and offered no rebuttal to the underlying claim of insurrection.  The Colorado Secretary of State then won on appeal to Colorado’s highest court.  In Colorado it is legally correct to call Donald Trump an insurrectionist.  Given that the Supreme Count will not take up a review of Colorado’s legal evidence, it can only limit itself to the question of whether or not he can be on the ballot.  The fact that Donald Trump is an insurrectionist in Colorado is not in dispute before the justices.  The Colorado Attorney General encouraged the court to review all of the evidence, but they won’t, yet.  It may be that when it comes to insurrection the Justices are like frogs in a pot of water being heated, slowly.  It is most assuredly very discomforting.

This conservative court is faced with the ironic invocation of federal law over state’s rights and insist, with a straight face, that no state can be allowed to challenge federal supremacy lest many other states undertake their own objections using their own processes and rules of evidence; such an outcome would be so very unsettling.  Welcome to our world, Honorable Justices of the Supreme Court.  As unsettling as it may be, we already have an overwhelming number of such cases and this is just one more.  This Supreme Court is willing to support state's rights in other realms such as abortion and public funding of religious education.  Do they only accept division on some issues and not others?  It might even be true that the justices fear the specter of violence always present around Trump.

It has always been true over any reasonably long period of time that these battles are a normal part of human affairs.  I have faith that our political and judicial processes will adequately protect us if other states want to exclude candidates for any reason or for no reason at all.  Which is to say I accept that each state is allowed to determine the manner of selection of their electors to the Electoral College.  It was always thus whether I think it is a good idea or not.

While the justices might see a ghastly fauvist battle of states against one another, perhaps it can also be seen as a cubist’s tension-filled body pushing the rock uphill, unarmed, to depose of one more autocrat for whom “L’État, c’est moi.”. If this cannot be done before the Supreme Court very soon then the justices will have failed to do their part to advance the rock and we will roll, again, back downhill into the implied and explicit threats of violence and bedlam, for having opposed Donald Trump.

Soil and Spirit by Scott Chaskey

Scott Chaskey stimulates so many lines of thinking.  Wedded as I am to my devices, I could not but help chase down reference after reference in “Soils and Spirituality”, even after telling myself that just one or two might be sufficient to frame this review.  But which ones? Evidently any of them.

Chaskey is a writer.  Whether writing in prose or presenting us with rich poetry, he invites us, even beckons us, to broaden and deepen our understanding of what I call regenerative gardening.  And better that we should do it quickly:

“Quick, quick, as rain falls/Remember your rake! Today peasants sow the seed“

He does not deliver instructions informed by wisdom and insight, as did Rudolph Steiner in “Agriculture”, rather he succeeded in broadening and deepening my understanding of the relation of regenerative thought to ancient forms and ideas.  Both men, Steiner and Chaskey, use their skills as though working patiently in an ancient quarry and both observe their world with keen contemporary eyes.  The topics at hand are different, Steiner warning of the dangers of inorganic agriculture and Chaskey to a broader audience urgently confronted with the need to rethink and adapt.  This includes gardeners.

I want to explain that my relation to this book is that of a gardener now more or less devoted to regenerative practices and thinking of the soil regeneration movement as it might be practiced in the American community garden.  Within the regenerative movement is a sense of returning to that which we see as essential and eternal in rocks and soils, in plants and landscapes, in people and community.  I don't think a day goes by that I do not think of soil and fungi, community and sociology, science and spirituality.  This work, “Soil and Spirit”,  landed with me just as I began to approach the organizational and sociological aspects of community gardening and the ritual January practice of garden planning. I’ve recently been reading academic papers by sociologists on the tension between collective thought and organized individualism of the American community garden.  I find much work to do, carefully.

Chaskey’s book was a most welcome diversion from community gardening.  At first slightly overwhelmed by references, I soon recognized I had to try to be still and let him be a guide pointing out as many avenues of inquiry as I might later pursue.  He glides and flits, as do his poetic birds, seeding the land, offering paths I found to be fungal rather than static or merely bibliographic.  His story telling is immersive and personal.  Just long enough too hold our attention they often end with the personal and poignant as when he concludes a discussion of clay and potters

“The products I most respect and cherish come in the shape of bowls and plates and cups (formed on the wheel by potter friends in Cornwall) I hold in my hands daily”

Personal narrative on the woods of Maine, the rocks of Ireland and the heather of Scotland established a solid foundation to trust the author and know he is capable of awe, even standing in a field.  You and I do that, too, if we're lucky.  Chasky can write about it. Discussing his own observation of peasant-farming in contemporary China (a strong line of inquiry, for me) he uses quick lines of verse to hurry us toward, or back to, peasant ideas of bounty and beauty:

“A quick breath above winter grains:
the sharp-shinned hawk
dives from a locust post”

Or, discussing rock, establishing a firm hold, a strong foundation:

“I had my existence.  I was there.
Me in place and the place in me."

The book is a masterpiece for the regenerative, farmer and gardener, familiar with the language of plants, soils and single celled organisms, who seek to place regenerative thought within the context  larger universe.  Chaskey offers many journeys, whether you want to travel 6000 years to China or back as far as 2 billion years to blue green algae. There is a living connection today to those first thoughts and practices of a successful agriculture and Chaskey recognizes and describes his first hand observation of it as easily as he describes the practices and people themselves.  It sometimes seems he wants to offer us everything all at once, but this is only because he sees that every moment has its context: physical, historical, ecological, cultural, spiritual, etc. each connected to an unknowable whole.

The “Spirit” in this title is suffused throughout the book because Chaskey is telling stories of people he knows and the practices of civilizations and of tribes.  Artisans, priests, farmers and many, many writers whose passions reflect the action of spirit upon them and their work.  These spirits and their archetypes have evolved with us, and with our agriculture, since the dawn.  I was recently struck by the idea, for which I lack attribution, that all living things on earth are equally evolved.  For Chasky this is so much larger “as if syllables and stone evolved through centuries of communion”.  I have been taught that faith permits me to see the spiritual and the Devine acting in my life and I know my life is better for it.  I am also aware of some of the dangers in that thinking, but Chasky’s testimony is reassuring.

In the end, I’ve concluded this work is fundamentally and unarguably fungal; it’s a mycelial network of branching thoughts and observations, prayers and poetry, science and spirit.  Each hypha traced backward toward its source and connected forward with new growth.  I was easily drawn to a thread about Charles Perkins Marsh, a Vermont diplomat, linguist and naturalist. His work “Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action” published in 1864 is considered by some to be as seminal to agriculture, ecology and land use as Darwin’s “On the Origins of Species” had on biology and evolution, both towering contributions in their field.  Close proximity and a shared Vermont citizenship (and evidently not the knowledge that there is a building named for Marsh on the U.V.M. campus) inspires me to look closer knowing I’m entering another fungal community.

I invite you to read this book and see if something similar doesn’t happen to you, too.

Unperfected commons

Donald Rumsfeld famously remarked on the differences between "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns, or things we do not know we don't know".  I've just learned that I did not know that sociologists have studied community gardens as spaces for collective action.  I'm relieved to know that my experience in promoting "collective gardening" is not simple and the difficulties are not at all unusual.  One paper recognizes three types of garden management depending on the relative importance of individual versus shared plots and whether or not there is a need to be a "member" of the garden to participate. 

Institutions for Collective Gardening: A Comparative Analysis of 51 Urban Community Gardens inAnglophone and German-Speaking Countries

So my purpose today is simply to acknowledge areas of disagreement and continue a discussion of how the L4 Collective can move forward without undermining the support for community gardening as it has been widely practiced in the United States.  According to the definitions in that paper, the West Street Community Garden is classified as a "closed garden group" managed by a "nested enterprise" (the Essex Junction Recreation and Parks Department).  Plotholders grow for themselves and largely by themselves with some (low!) level of collaboration to maintain paths and facilities.  This is basically the most restrictive model and the least welcoming to any collective gardening.  Thankfully, to my mind, this model is ceding ground over time to collective models or at least to share space with them.

I have found that the biggest objection to collective gardening is directly related to the degree of theft and damage that occurs at West Street.  Even kind and generous gardeners object to "inviting the public" into the community garden whether that be for gardening, gardening education or social functions.  Plotholders grow food, the public steals it, as it were.  A second objection involves the problem of membership and who is entitled to what.

I wish it were otherwise, but I am naive.

I have been fortunate to visit several community gardens and be made aware of more open and collaborative approaches.  Gardeners at West Street are generous with their friends and make donations to food pantries often, but there is little acknowledgement that a "collective enterprise" can operate for the benefit of many groups and not just the plotholders.  The state land at West Street is an enormous asset for all residents.  I believe collective action can help many more residents in many important ways, but it is not my intent today to think much beyond the next growing season.

Instead, I'd like to focus on two aspects of the garden that commanded my attention after the torrential rains in the summer of 2023.  The flooding of local farms and of several large community gardens in Burlington and elsewhere made clear that the well drained, sandy soil (Adams soil type) at West Street has the advantage of drying out quickly, never approaching saturation.  The first aspect is that there is unused space, both in and around the garden boundary, to produce healthful food for the benefit of our community.  The L4 Collective, in partnership with others, grew food for Aunt Dot's Place because there were abandoned plots and because we understood that fresh local vegetables were to be in short supply.  The second aspect is that West Street could become a teaching garden, formal or informal, without fear of the flooding that closed other educational gardens in 2011 and again in 2023.  We are as high and dry as one can get in a Vermont community garden.

The idea we are pursuing for now is to commit to grow on plots that are unused or donated to the L4 Collective for the purpose of supplying local food shelves.  We planted a small orchard last Spring and plan to use an adjacent plot this year for annual vegetables.  This takes nothing away from any plotholder and defines a "garden within a garden" with clear boundaries and relatively clear responsibilities.  It provides ample opportunity for collective action while inconveniencing no one.  It does, however, involve inviting the public to participate.  I should like to draw a distinction between "the public" and "people who want to participate in collective gardening."  I have complete faith that nobody who has worked with L4 Collective has ever stolen or vandalized any crops.  And I will assert that increased participation will decrease theft.  I wish I could prove it.

Now, as we are all about gardening, it seems only appropriate when we gather together as gardeners that we discuss the latest science(!) of soil health and its connection to environmental and human health.  We have the knowledge and skills in our community to teach about the soil health principals informed by science and nature.  The USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) has researched and published important work that applies to our gardens as much if not more than to farms.  In my opinion, NRCS is a governmental organization that executes its charter faithfully and professionally.  Their findings and recommendations deserve to be discussed.  We've paid for them already.  As before, this activity necessarily involves inviting people to the garden, people I do not believe will steal food.

So I invite you to comment and I invite you to join us.  Let's se if we can create something valuable while respecting the soil and respecting one another.  Acknowledging our humility, let us work on “unperfected common in the making”.

One man’s journey to soil

​

I am in love.  I am in love with two soil scientists, Christine Jones and Nicole Masters.  These women from down-under make me swoon!  My knees tremble when Christine talks about quorum sensing or Nicole talks about vericompost slurry.  If they (and my current wife) would agree to bigamy I would ask to marry them both. I’m not sure what I would bring to the marriage, but I’d be so very well informed and entertained by their work and research.  

And I love soil.

I can’t tell you for sure why soil health fascinates me the way it does, but it likely started with the complete failure of my first garden in Manassas, Virginia.  Back in the day we had magazines and somewhere I read about “double digging”.  I dug into the red Virginia clay in my backyard to a depth of about 18 inches.  Loosened ‘er up real good!  I planted six tomatoes, as I recall, and watered well.  Mind you, it is hot in Virginia so I made sure to keep those plants watered, yes I did.  But armed with just a little knowledge, I had in fact created a large clay bathtub full of water and all six plants quickly succumbed to some rot or fungus.

In another magazine I read about the importance of compost and during the 1983 World Series I hauled pressure treated 2x4’s into the house, watched the Series and built a “Cadillac of compost bins”, a three-bin behemoth to make lots of great compost and slowly improve the texture of the clay.  I was sure I was on my way at last, but my employer had other ideas and we moved to New York’s Hudson Valley after one failed tomato patch and without the Cadillac.

A couple of years later my wife and I built a small pole barn and she started to raise goats, just for fun, and I had an unlimited supply of goat manure mixed with spoiled hay.  My organic journey had begun.  It was a mixed blessing, I’m afraid.  On the one hand I had tons of raw material.  On the other hand I had TONS of raw material.  (Once I had to hire a bulldozer to move the three foot thick trampled mat of hay outside the barn door just to get into the barn where there was four feet of trampled matted hay to be moved by hand.)

So I started to use lots of compost, expanded the garden year-by-year, and was pretty happy with the results most of the time.  I remember a photo of Bean, our rabbit, enjoying a meal of parsley from a plant that could have fed him for a month.  So sometimes it was really glorious, but mostly I spent my time at work, at baseball and soccer fields or trying in vain to keep the goats out of the garden. That is hard.  Hint: do not build a four foot tall compost pile just on the outside of your four foot garden fence if you have even just baby goats.  And don’t even think about planting a fruit tree anywhere on the property.

After my divorce I ended up in an apartment in the Village of Millbrook, Dutchess County and the landlord, Bob Hefele, gave me permission to do just about anything I wanted to the yard.  The only thing he ever objected to was the fish pond.  I had already bought a pond liner, one of my first online purchases.  It may still be in the rafters of the garage in Millbrook for all I know.  Bob later sold me the building at a price I could afford, well shy of any reasonable market price.  I don’t know why he did that and have concluded that he must have been a saint.

The house had once been on “the wrong side of the tracks”, inhabited by “the wrong kind of people”.  Which is to say they were immigrant Italians who knew how to garden and raise goats.  The soil was incredible.  It had been a garden for perhaps 60 years, though it was all grass by the time I moved in.  Let’s just say it was in good tilth.  In fact I did say it was in good tilth and by that time I even knew what that meant.  It meant I could plant just about anything and it would thrive.  Veggies, vines, flowers, fruit trees, grapes, raspberries; you name it, if it was hardy in my zone (6B?) it thrived.

I got some chickens and built a coop and a pen that extended up the side of the garden.  It was unlawful to raise chickens in Millbrook at the time, but I spoke to the mayor once when he stopped at the neighborhood restaurant.  He said I could give it a try and he would let me know if anyone complained.  Somebody did complain about the rooster, but not to the mayor.  He complained directly to the rooster.  I found the decapitated bird and its head in the coop one bright Sunday morning.  The rest of the neighbors loved them, even the rooster, because they were the children and grandchildren of Italian immigrant gardeners.  So I had mostly happy neighbors and chicken manure.  When I decided to enter my sunflower in the Dutchess County Fair I needed all of an eighteen foot Econoline van to get it to the fairgrounds.  I came in second.

Then I got a little crazy.  I studied biodynamics, learned that gnomes govern the soil and sprayed so much anaerobic “tea” that my very kind neighbor, Joe, ran out to ask me what the hell I was doing.  (Joe was later my guest for the finest strawberry rhubarb pie I have ever made.)  I took classes at the Pfeiffer Center and made all the biodynamic preparations, sprinkling stirred horn manure on the garden with a coarse paintbrush by moonlight.  It was a bit like being the Pope, I imagined.  Nobody at Pfeiffer talked about soil life except to acknowledge that soil was alive. Little did I know that I was just at the edge of learning about the world of microbes.  We had a visiting biodynamicist from Switzerland lecture about a whole-farm approach and I asked him what I could do on my tenth of an acre in Millbrook since I couldn’t raise cows, plant oaks or build a pond.  He replied quickly:  “Feed ze vorms”.  And feed them I did.

After the crazy I got sober.  In the AA twelve step program we are encouraged to find a power greater than ourselves that can help us.  (Here’s where Christine and Nicole begin to enter the picture, bear with me.).  I started to pray by prostrating myself like a Muslim, but instead of orienting myself to Mecca I oriented myself to the garden.  When I spoke at an AA meeting from the podium, I acknowledged my higher power by the miracle of soil life, saying that “at the very tip of the very finest root hair science is unable to distinguish animal from vegetable from mineral, but there is surely a power greater than myself hard at work.”  And the good people of AA told me that was good enough.

One year, 2016 or 2017 perhaps, I needed to care for my father while his wife went to visit her family in Morocco.  My dad was easy to care for, at the time, and I had a lot of free time in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  There is not a lot to do with free time in Fredericksburg other than shop at the mall, so at some point I stumbled across John Kempf.  Kempf opened my eyes to the even greater miracle that is the deep, ancient symbiosis between plants and microbes to utilize photosynthetic energy to store carbon.  That is about the most important thing we need to understand about plants and soil and we must always make it the basis of our work as gardeners. When I speak from the A.A. podium today I have to amend my words to say that science can absolutely distinguish animal from vegetable from mineral and even identify specific enzymes and autoinducers.  The great work of a higher power.

I’ve been on a regenerative path ever since.  I’ve watched a lot of videos.  I've learned that, roughly speaking, everything important about soil health was discovered (or re-discovered) in the last fifty years (in spite of the Green Revolution) and what we’ve discovered about the symbiosis between plant and microbe happened in the last fifteen years.  Significant tax dollars are involved thanks to USDA and other worldwide pioneers who've done the research. This stuff is new!

To explain the fix we’ve gotten ourselves into when it comes to soil, the ramifications for the health of plants, animals, people and the environment there is no one better than Christine Jones.  To her everlasting credit she can also explain and never shys away from the science, whether it be the effects of inorganic fertilizers and biocides or how we can use quorum sensing to our advantage.  (Look it up!).  This woman calls it like it is:  90 years of chemicals from Big Ag has actually killed life in the soil.  Period.  Full stop.

But we can do something about it and I am thankful for the advice of Nicole Masters.  Most soil health consultants concentrate on large farm operations and I’m glad they do because that is where change is so desperately needed.  But each once in a while someone like Nicole scales down the message so it can be understood and applied at garden scale.  She taught me that I can make really cheap and really effective amendments especially meant to supercharge microbe activity at the exact time and place that I need it, when I plant the seed or transplant into the soil.  She recommended a slurry consisting of good compost or vermicompost, handfulls of soil from healthy gardens and the chopped up roots of healthy plants mixed with some milk and molasses, kept moist until ready to use.  I call this the “mother” and I always have some on hand and use it anytime I’m doing anything in the garden.  Planting a seed?  Soak it in tea from the mother.  Transplanting?  Cover the root ball with the mother.  Watering the garden?  Make more tea from the mother and sprinkle it about before watering.  Weeding?  Chop up a little bit and add it to the mother.

Today I have another garden or two in Vermont.  The largest is in a community garden where the sand is 30 feet thick and has been tilled twice a year, every year, for God-only-knows how many years.  I practiced organic gardening in my plot for 5 years and never saw a worm, so I left.  I returned 5 years later when I volunteered to be a coordinator at the garden and my plots have not been tilled since.  It’s been four years of soil regeneration using compost, cover crops, mulches, rock dusts and teas.  Now there are a couple of inches of new topsoil and one particular spade-full of soil contained 23 worms.  Yields are good, not spectacular, and I still deal with my share of pests.  (Community gardens are the the graduate school of gardening.)  But the food is amazing!  This year, for the first time, we didn't till the smaller field and almost all the plotholders are OK with that.  Lest I forget, we planted a small orchard on an unused plot, too.  So we're making progress, as I measure progress.

Christine and Nicole (and John) assure me it will just keep getting better. (Exactly what’s said in AA, by the way.)  I believe them and I love them. And I will label as hearsay any suggestion that I ever wanted to marry John Kempf.

 Spring cover crops planted at West Street and at home.  Mustard, oats, field peas and berseem clover all drilled in rows on 6" centers.

Filaree Garlic planted Oct 27.  5 rows of Music, 5 rows of German White Stiffneck.  Watered using worm tea and a dose of Myco+ then covered with 4" finely chopped leaves.

Over wintered well with good emergence.  Here is the bed on April 1 under a blanket of snow.