Squirrel Tales

Squirrel Tales


The other day I ran into Joe at the food Coop. He explained how I had short-changed the truth in one of my previous journal entries. At first I was inclined to let sleeping dogs lie but Joe persuaded me otherwise. He very graciously told me a much more interesting story than the watered down and misleading version I had told.
Joe has always been a good teacher for me. He is an omnivore of conceptual thought and a connoisseur of knowledge (but not a Factinista). He's one of the people I run ideas by - to find out if they are sound. Often he sees connections that I have missed. He's better than a fact checker - he's a concept checker.
I make no apologies for mangling the truth. If you believe anything - all the way - on the first hearing, without digging deeper, then you deserve to be fooled. People will always tell you stuff they don't know. Usually they'll do it with a straight face and a degree or too.
Believer beware.

Squirrels, Mushrooms and Douglas Fir Roots.

Joe explains to me that the roots of Douglas Firs will naturally graft themselves together because they are they are genetically nearly identical, i.e. clones. When a Fir gets cut down it's root-mates will donate the juices to heal it. The living tissues grows from the outside of the stump over the top - providing a protective layer of living tissue.
It is one of the eighth wonders of a walk in the Northwest woods - to come upon one of these healed over stumps. I don't ever remember reading about this in a book and I came up empty handed after a few half-hearted attempts to find an Internet source, but local forest-lovers talk about it all the time.
“The part of the story that you probably don't know about is the connection between the Douglas Squirrels and the mycorhyzal fungi associated with Douglas Fir - it's a story that will make your hair stand on end.” Joe says.
He has my undivided attention, but not for long - a young and lovely friend shows up. Our squirrel/mushroom talk is temporarily on hold.

She wears big stylish, over-sized sunglasses and I have to ask her who she is. “I'm Sierra” she says, lifting her glasses and revealing a face that I recognize but can't quite place.“I've been down in Eugene for the last two years.” Sierra says. She's lost a little of that first flowering of youth and looks better for it. She talks about personal growth and radiates a quiet, down-to-earth joy without getting missionary about it.
I drift a little and miss some of the conversation, until I hear Sierra say: “... I finally figured out what my role is at the Festival. I'm a go between for these two women (Rose and Willow) who share the same space. I just listen to both, without taking sides.”
Sierra climbs up a notch in my esteem for her friendship with Rose.
“Rose is one of my best friends . So many of my friend have such a hard time with her. I know she can be difficult, but she's worth whatever effort it takes. For me Rose is a test. Anyone who is friends with Rose is a better person for it.” I say.
“It's one of the ways you can tell who's really part of the community.” Joe adds.
We all laugh.
Joe mentions another person who is an 'indicator person' - difficult for some to love. The person he mentions proves to be a perfect challenge for me. I can't help but laugh at myself, for the limits to my love and the absurd boundaries I create to protect myself, from this person who means me no harm. I explain this to Joe and Sierra.
“Yeah, but at least you recognize that it's not all her and that you have some responsibility for how you feel.” Joe consoles me.

This Time for Sure: Squirrels, Mushrooms and Douglas Fir Roots.

After Sierra leaves we grab a table in the deli and Joe begins to tell his story in earnest. To understand his story you have to know a little about mychorrizal mushrooms. Mushrooms live underground in the darkness of the soil but they bear their fruits above ground. We base our definitions and descriptions of fungi on the above ground parts. Out of sight, out of mind. This is the same as studying the apple, but forgetting about the tree. (unfortunately we do that too)
Welcome to the underground world of the mushroom. Fungi form networks or webs of minute tubes, spreading through the soil in three-dimensional tributaries. They play several crucial roles in the ecology of the soil. Above all they make connections - connections between the living and the dead, the world above and the world below. You can see this in their shape which resembles a nervous, circulatory or root system - systems designed for greater connectivity and exchange.
Joe comments: The trees work like a pump, their evapotranspiration - a major component of the trees' photosynthesis - is pulling water and nutrients through the fungal web. That is the core symbiosis. The horrible rotting smell that follows the clearcut of a mature forest is the fungal web - biomass approximately equal to the above ground biomass - suffocating, dying and eventually putrefying.
Fungi break down organic compounds in the soil which include dead and decaying materials, as well as, petroleum and petroleum by-products (pesticides). (It may seem weird to consider petroleum as an organic compound, until you remember that it comes from dead dinosaurs.) They also mine minerals from the soil.
Fungi form partnerships with plants, trading the bounties of the soil, for the riches of the sky world. They negotiate the difficult connection between the mysterious world of the soil and the creatures of light – most of whom could barely survive the darkness without their help.
In short they perform most of the tasks we usually associate with roots. Fungi that choose to partner with plants are described as mychorrizal. Check out Paul Stammets web site and books for more amazing mushroom lore.

Most plants have mychorrizal relationship with fungi. Take away the fungi and the plants usually perform poorly. Take away the organic matter and the fungi languish. Fungi are key players in one of the great cycles of life.
Of course there are countless other players, each with their own special role. One such character is the Douglas Squirrel who eats the mychorrizqal fungi for Douglas Firs. We tend to think of eating as an act of aggression, a one way ticket to oblivion for one of the partners in the process. When it is done properly, eating can also be a step in one of the great cycles of life. Not for the individual being eaten but for his species.
The Douglas Squirrel spreads the mychorrizal fungi associated with the Douglas Firs when they take a dump after eating the mushrooms. Their droppings contain a dose of mushroom spores, some fertilizer, a sprinkle of bacteria and all the good things needed for a new mushroom patch. Take away the Douglas Squirrel, and no new mychorrizal mushroom patches.

Joe comments: Paul Stamets made a fascinating connection for me at lecture he gave at the Fair year before last. He explained WHY he does not eat raw mushrooms anymore. They are totally armored on a protein level and are not bioavailable in any useful way. This protects them from parasites that would otherwise infest or ingest them. Which also allows them to pass through the G-I tract of the squirrel w/o becoming squirrel.
The scary part of the story involves Gray Squirrels, East Coast transplants who are displacing the Douglas Squirrels in the Northwest.
“The Gray Squirrels will have to learn how to plant the fungi. Otherwise the Douglas Firs are in trouble.” Joe says.
I can imagine a shrewd observer saying the something similar about the first white settlers “The Native Americans will have to teach them how to fish. Otherwise the salmon are in trouble.”

Some of the first Gray Squirrels to show up in Port Townsend, hung out at Chetzomoka Park. I remember asking Steve Cora if they planned on getting rid of them.
“We know they'll become a problem but we just can't bring ourselves to kill them.” he said.
When I was a kid I knew some older kids who could have have helped the Parks Department with their squirrels. One kid in particular liked to hunt squirrel even more than coon. He could spend hours talking about skinning and eating them. I know he did it to make me sick.
“There can't be enough meat in a squirrel to bother with.” I'd complain.
“You'd be surprised.” He'd say with the knowing smile of one who had killed.
I couldn't argue with that.
Even though I was used to eating cows and pigs and chickens, it bothered me that he ate squirrel. I laid awake at night thinking about how weird it would be to eat squirrel, and what a pervert he was, and how jealous I was that he had a gun and got to kill stuff, and I didn't.
In hindsight I realize that the suburban life-style of my family was displacing my squirrel-hunting friend and his family.

Recently I learned that the Douglas Squirrel mostly hangs around the same neck of the woods. The flying squirrels travel much farther and are more important for introducing the mushrooms to new places. My friend Greg who lives in Olympia worked on flying squirrel studies. He's not so worried about the Gray Squirrels.
“They mostly hang out where there are people. They can't survive in the forests.” He tells me.
I decide to quit worrying about the Gray Squirrels. This month I'm going to concentrate on worrying about global warming. Next month ...

we had an awesome time

We were mostly slackers today, so glad that school was over. Slackers are good for the environment - they conserve energy. How many slackers do you know who own a car?
You could say that we dedicated our day to studying the environmental impacts of goofing off.
Work is highly overrated. The world would be a better place if most people quit their jobs, cut back or at least took a vacation at home. Maybe we could finally get around to doing all of the things that really need to be done, like taking care of ourselves and each other.
Most of the working people I know are total stress monkeys, afraid that if they slow down the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

Three kinds of clover are flowering in the garden: Dutch White in the remnants of un-mowed lawn, the Crimson clover that we sowed last Fall as a cover crop, and a single Red Clover by the garden gate. Later we can pick some Red Clover for tea,
The lawn grasses are flowering inside of Beanhenge, along with the dandelion-look-alike Hawkweed. The corn is up and half of the beans. The Squash have flower buds forming and we have one marble-sized tomato.
The blue/green leeks have gotten smaller, or so it seems. Already they are dwarfed by the beans which stand a head taller.
Neighbor pass by riding their bicycles or walking their dogs. Some stop to chat. We listen to the buzz in the power lines across the street.
Rebbecca who lives next door stops by to bring us gifts for the garden. She says she loves to watch the garden and the kids from her window - she spends a lot of time at home struggling with cancer.

The kids organize a bucket brigade to water the corn. Hopefully next week we will install the irrigation. We planted the corn in rows that gradually took on a greater curve with each new row. The corn is so tiny, it took us some time to find where the rows were when we weeded and mulched.
Farmers like long, straight, evenly spaced rows - so they will never get lost.
I heard somewhere that astronauts are trained and trained until everything becomes familiar, everything becomes routine. When they are in space, they are always kept busy , so they won't look out their window and see God, or freak out.
One astronaut did look out the window and he saw the whole world in a new way. I heard him speak years later, at some New Age-y conference out at Fort Worden.
The straight lines, the repetition, the routine - all of the order in our lives, keeps us from getting lost in the magic.
As someone who gets lost all too easily in the everyday magic of people, plants and places - I've learned the hard way that I cannot endure too much wonder, too much joy, too much of the everyday magic of life.
Awe is a great word for this feeling. My handy-dandy on line dictionary defines awe as: a mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might.
I was introduced to the word at /Our Lady of Good Counsel High School/ in 1967. The religious context of the word was that man could not look at the face of God because the experience would be too overwhelming for him.
My friend Jeff is deeply perturbed that such a powerful word (awesome) has been misappropriated by popular culture.
“There are simply no synonyms for the word in the entire English language.” He laments.
He refuses to believe that a young person could have the same awesome intensity of feeling for a pair of tennis shoes that past generations had for God or great works of art. I would disagree - young folks have a much larger capacity for wonder than we give them credit for. Who are we to say that it's not OK for them to squander it on a pair of tennis shoes or the person who's feet inhabit those tennis shoes?

We dig ourselves into a hole

Last week I forgot to tell you about the worms we found. I've been too distracted making future plans and not quite as down to earth as I would like to be. Worms are a good sign. Worms in the begining promise a healthy soil that has a capacity for holding moisture without becoming water-logged. Our local soils tend to be either or. Either they leak like a sieve or they turn into a swamp. It appears that we have found a happy middle at the Grange.

But appearances are often deceptive, and I've been fooled by first soil impressions more times than I care to admit. Soils that feel friable in the spring can turn rock hard in the summer. Soils sometimes change dramatically over short distances. Builders do the craziest things like dumping hardpan on top of perfectly good soil. The possiblities are endless and it pays to withhold judgement until we've had a choice to poke around a little more.
We haven't penetrated the soil all that deeply yet. The decent soil might have been hauled in - it might only be a few inches deep.

So far all of our efforts have had a destructive impact on the soil. We stripped away the the lawn (skin), pulverized the top few inches of topsoil with a rototiller and left the soil exposed to sun and wind. This wouldn't matter if we were dealing with an an inert medium - we could pour some chemical soup on the mess we've made, and all would be well. But in truth, a greater biomass of creatures live in the darkness of the soil than on the surface. Clearcutting, bull-dozing and rototilling are just as damaging to life in the soil as they are to the forest.

As creatures of light we avoid the dark world of the soil until we die. Most of us have to be dragged there kicking and screaming. For us, the concept of so much life in the soil is weird and hard to grasp and we're not so willing to take our turn as food for the creatures that haunt the darkness of the soil. We seal our bodies in fancy boxes or burn them - any thing to avoid our turn to be eaten.
In our lives we eat our way through acres of wheat and corn, flocks of chickens, jungles of chocolate and bannanas, herds of cows, wallows of pigs, the blood and sweat of the sugar cane harvest ... and we plunder the ancient burial sites of dinosaurs to fuel the trucks and ships that ferry our food from far away, and when we're done eating we chop down acres of forests to wipe ourselves.
Our kills come wrapped in plastic, far from the scene of the slaughter, without feathers or fur, squeeks or squeals. Our hands are clean - our ignorance is bliss.

It takes a few turns around the seasons, working in the garden, to learn how to appreciate and cooperate with the life in the soil. We start by digging a hole for a soil profile. What we see is a thin crust of dusty, dried-out dirt mulching the surface. Underneath we find a foot and half or more of nice soil before we hit a layer where the soil becomes hard and gray. Gray soil signifies oxygen-starved or anerobic conditions.
Iron in the soil shows up as a rusty red/brown color when oxygen is available. In oxygen deprived conditions iron tints the soil in shades of blue and gray. The bluer the color, the less oxygen in the soil.
The compacted layer was formed by mile high ice during a period of global cooling. While eighteen inches of workable soil would be considered pretty shallow in many agricultural areas, we are fortunate that the compacted layer is so deep. Sometimes, in our area, it sits right at the top and makes life miserable until it is enriched with gobs of organic matter.

Last week we found earthworms, this week we found the fruits of their labor - crumb structure. Crumb structure is something that you don't see all that often around here. When you do, it hardly ever survives a few passes with a rototiller. Soil with crumb structure is held together by humus (composted organic matter) and earth worm droppings. There is a sponginess to the soil and it breaks apart in discrete chunks or crumbs.
Crumb structure is one of the hardest to come by attributes of an ideal soil. It greatly enhances the fertility of the soil by creating larger pores. Pore space is where the magic of life happens in the soil . It's the space between the mineral particles of the soil. In a typical soil the pore space amounts to about half of the total volume.
That's right. While the dirt we stand on, feels all too solid, half of it is made up of air and water.
Soil with crumb structure has more opportunities for the living half of the equation. Larger pores provide convenient routes for roots and water to penetrate the soil. They create larger reservoirs for storing water and air. They also enhance the accesibility of soil nutrients. Crumb structure is one of the qualities of an ideal soil that is hardest to get if your are not gifted with it upfront.

Our soil profile hole came in handy when we were looking for a diversion. This was a younger group of kids with a shorter attention span, less endurance and prone to outbreaks of chaos when they got bored or tired. I noticed that some of the older kids have an interest in adults but this younger group of high-schoolers is mostly peer-oriented.
Already several girls were barefoot (our first barefoot kids in the garden). Cecilia sat dangling her toes in the cool moist earth at the bottom of the hole. When she stood up, a mischiveous kid tossed some soil into the hole ontop of her feet. When she laughed other kids joined in and planted Cecilia.
Cecilia didn't stay planted for long, so we re-dug our hole. It was much easier going the second time around. We were left with a perfectly good hole without a purpose. The first thing that came to mind was a trap. We gathered sticks from the nearby forest and made a flimsy structure that we covered with straw. When we finished mulching the rest of the squash patch - you really couldn't tell where our trap was - it was a job well done.
At the end of the day I insisted that we have a discussion about the wisdom of leaving such a well hidden trap behind when we left. In our free-wheeling, far ranging conversation we explored many options, ranging from: we should have dug it deeper if we wanted to catch anything, to: we'll probably end up maiming our prey rather than catching it.
After much discussion we decided not to capture or maim people in our trap. (This decision was far from unanimous) One good option was to put a sign up. that people could read but deer couldn't. Possible signs included: 'Watch Your Step', 'Trap Ahead' or 'Enter at Your Own Risk'
A little later someone brought up the story of the deer that a careless hunter had maimed, and how hot and bothered eveyone got over it. We decided to consider digging the hole deeper next week to avoid the pitfalls of alienating deer-lovers.
In the meantime we did our civic duty and disassembled the trap so that it would be easy for people to spot.

This was our first week without the support of Sebastian. It was his birthday and he called in sick. Sick on your birthday?
Fortunately a dynamic trio of girls showed up to fill his shoes. What an awesome display of girl power. I'm talking about Kia, Justine and Rene. They totally saved the day with their experience and spirited efforts. I was plagued with low energy and ready for lunch by ten. We were hampered by a shortage of tools. Yet nothing could stop these girls in their determination to do a good job while having a good time.
Once I got them started these young women kicked into geer and took the lead and I had a chance to rest on my laurels a bit, to make some notes for the garden journal. At lunch I had time to explore the fallen blossoms underneath our Madone shade tree. (Madrones are always dropping something interesting, be it bark, berries, leaves or blossoms). The blossoms have tiny holes at both ends and fused petals. They looked just like tiny paper lanterns.
Last week Justin made a cool art sculpture that included Madrone blossom strung on a blade of grass.

I even got a chance to paint one of the bean poles. With a bit of breathing room, I was one happier camper today

The bean pole painting provided a good alternative to digging and mulching. Kia took the lead. She set things up and got the other kids started. I won't spoil the the surprise but you should stop by to check out our fabulous bean poles for our monumental project - BEANHENGE!
Enter the garden at your own risk and watch your step!
The painting quickly got out of hand. In their enthusiasm the kids painted the lawn, flip flops, shoes, each other, as well as the poles. They probably had a better time than they should have. My biggest fear was that a kid would sit on the spot where someone had kicked the bucket over - they were so focused on their art, that this was a distinct possibility.
I intervened and spread the poles out to diffuse the potential for kids painting each other - accidentally. This didn't stop one girl from painting a flower on her cheek and her left foot a lurid shade of green.
Later on I saw one girl washing her jacket. I didn't ask questions. These are some spirited kids. I sure hope I'm exaggerating.
By the way my bean pole was nick-named the rainbow pole by the other painters, and it got a few favorable reviews.

One thing that I learned is that there are always a few kids who take a while to warm up to the garden. It takes them a spell to find their bodies. At first they stand around on the edges shirking their duties. I've noticed that given enough time and the offer of a challenging job, they will often meet that challenge with a strenuous effort. They just need time to discover themselves.
Just like I found myself when I rolled into the Saratoga Community Gardens thirty years ago - one weary and lost soul.

You wouldn't believe how quickly things could change. It all started in the morning when Sebastian told me that he doesn't want to commit to the garden for the summer. Plan # 86 was falling apart, right before my very eyes and I was left staring at another failed project. That's why I've mostly been a do-it-myself kind of guy. Usually if it's something that I don't want to do, no one wants to do it.
I was sorely tempted to resort to the leadership practices that I learned when I was not much older than him, working deadened jobs, like dishwashing, burgers and lawn mowing. Shame is the first weapon in that arsenal and guilt is the second. It's strange but after all these years I still struggle to resist the urge to use these highly effective tools - despite all the damage I've seen and felt.
When I let Sebastian go with my blessings - the blessings bounce back on me and I'm happy and already busy on Plan # 87.

The Community Garden has been pretty much business as usual. First I tried to dump the garden on Tinker. I wasn't the only one. Tinker's was everyone's first choice. Unfortunately she had a mind of her own and I have firsthand experience of the consequences of messing with Tinker when her mind's made up.
I have a feeling Tinker will be coming by the Garden this summer. More about that later.

I have this sinking feeling that I'm going to end up managing the garden myself this summer.

In the meantime we dig a main path for the garden that circles around our grassy meadow with a rock cairn in the middle of our garden. We dig the earth and shape a bed encircling our centerpiece. We decided to not to make a bean teepee because it would be too much work to find long enough poles. We decide to plant Beanhenge instead. Beanhenge will be a circular line of bean poles enclosing our grassy nook where we will hold secret garden meetings and hide when we don't feel like working.

We worked like dogs. Our tongues were dragging on the ground. At lunch we decided that we deserved a break today and that we would visit Corona Farm. Bob and Sharon were glad to see us and Bob put the kids to work right away. I know it sounds crazy to go somewhere for rest and relaxation and let them put you to work. But the gardens at Corona was so beautiful compared to the deathscape at the Grange and the work was much easier than the earthwork we did all morning long.

Deathscape sounds harsh but it's an apt description. Most our work so far involves killing the lawn that occupied this space before we got here. Gardening requires much more death and destruction than most people imagine. That's why the gardens of the faint of heart always look like such a mess.
Like my friend Matty always says: "I'm a gardener - I kill plants for a living." It's true. For every plant planted, dozens, if not hundreds are killed. There is no end to the killing in a garden. You only have to look at the nearest vacant lot to see how far what we prefer is from what nature intends.

Part of the appeal of the garden for some of these kids/young men is the destructive nature of the work. There is nothing like hard physical work, for working out frustrations. Nothing like pitting your body against the forces of nature. Whether the urge to dominate nature and each other is a primeval instinct in adolescent males, or it's an outcome of the industrial revolution - it is a force to be reckoned with and harnessed.
Death was recurring theme in our day. At Corona one of the cats caught a vole and we spent more time than we probably should have watching the cat entertain itself with the struggles of its prey. Hanako, who grows great salad greens at Corona, pointed out that the cat was probably showing off for us. It was a chilling thought that we might be prolonging the vole's suffering by the mere act of watching.
I think there might be a physics principle that describes how the act of watching can change events but I'm uncertain about that.
In any case our potential role in prolonging the suffering of the vole did little to discourage us from further watching. The cat put on an awesome show while the vole on the other hand was rather weak in his or her role. A good time was had all, with the possible exception of the mole. (he was so far gone, he may have been beyond suffering.) Most important of all we learned a lesson - although I would hesitate to say exactly what that lesson was and I have some lingering doubts over whether the lesson learned outweighed the crass entertainment of the event.

I had another motive for going to Corona Farm; I wanted to talk to Bob and Sharon about their daughter Justine working at the garden for one day a week during the summer. Without Sebastian there probably wouldn't be a garden this summer. I desperately needed to beef up the labor force which was now down to zero.
Justine was an important element of Plan # 87. Not only is she an excellent worker with a happy attitude - she's friends with Kia and Rene.
Taken together these three girls represent a certain critical mass of teenage coolness and energy. Their precense will most likely encourage other kids to show up. It appears that the energy crisis in the garden is taken care of - if this deal holds.

I made promises left and right to put together Plan # 87. I promised Sharon and Bob that we would send some of the Grange Garden crew over to Corona to make up for the work that Justine will miss. This was a no-brainer. With the Jefferson Community school program we can use a place to send some kids when we are too hopelessly outnumbered in the garden or we need a change of pace and/or place. Corona is perfect and has much to offer that the Grange Garden lacks right now - like plants.

I promised the girls that they would have fun. Another no-brainer. They are good friends and will have a good time even if they have to work some. We're already talking about bringing speakers to hook up to an Ipod.

Kia is a welcome addition to the project. She's Tinker's daughter which more or less insures that Tinker will show up that now and then. Some Tinker energy in the garden is no small gift to the project. Although Kia is not my daughter, she's part of my family and I love her as if she was.
This is how small towns and villages work. Our obligations are to family and friends. Making it work for everyone becomes second nature. A chance meeting on the street can become part of a garden project.
There are other kids who are interested as well. If you asked me right now I'd say the prognosis for the summer garden is excellent. Who knows what I would say tomorrow? If this deal goes down, I'm fresh out of plans for this summer.

By the way we could use a lap top and wireless connection at the Grange.

The one missing ingredient in the garden project is cash. The best things in life are free, but I'm not. My retirement plan is more or less bop 'til you drop. The most painless plan that I could come up with is summer school. Teachers I've talked with, assure me that parents are always looking for good summer things for thier kids to do. The high school kids could help with younger kids.
At the Saratoga Community Garden I learned the value of school programs for both cash flow and community outreach. With the young adults we already have lined up for the summer I know that we could set up an excellent program. Julie Marston has offered to help us. The pieces are falling in place. I just have to make sure that it would be ok with everyone before I add it to my list of alternative plans.
If you have a better idea for fund raising or know why this idea would not work please let me know.

I ran into Erica Delma today. She talked about the play ground project. Check it out at www.dreamcityplaygrounds.org More to the point she expressed an interest in bringing her pre-schoolers to the Grange Garden. I figure that we could use her pre-schoolers as test kids to see if we can deal with kids of such a tender age. In my experience pre-schoolers in the garden present special challenges but the rewards are great.
One instance of pre-schoolers in the garden comes to mind right away. It was at the Saratoga Community Garden. Each child came with a mother. The mothers were mostly interested in each other and had lagged behind their children, deep in conversation.
The kids were touring the animal portion of the program, when they showed up ahead of thier mothers, at a stall where several garden apprentices were killing chickens. (death is a recurring theme in this message)
The kids were awestruck. The death of the chickens captured thier complete attention. They wwatched quietly with respect for the solemnity of the act. The fullness of thier focus and the depth of their silence still moves me to this day.
The mood was broken as soon as the mother caught up. They broke out in cacophony of 'yucks' and other sounds denoting gross and disgusting. Now most of those women were probably chicken-eaters but, unlike their kids, they didn't want to see where food comes from and where it goes - where we all go someday.

Sometimes it seems like we are destroying ourselves with the blinders that we put on to separate ourselves from the unintended consequences of our actions. In the Absence of the Sacred Jerry Mander argues that our blinders, our separation from nature is becoming so complete that, from a distance, it looks as if we are colonizing planet earth in preparation for traveling to other planets.
People are giving up on the planet right and left. Many fundamentalist Christians are biding their time, waiting for the second coming while many environmentalists live in fear of the destruction of the earth's ecosystems. Chose your own scenario of doom and destruction or chose life.

That's what cool about kids. Until we teach them otherwise, they are open to the world. When we quit learning from our kids, no matter how small they are, we're in trouble. The younger the kids the greater the sense of wonder they bring to a garden and the more magic happens. Kids can be our best teachers and the garden is a great place for them to open their eyes.

At the end of the day I said goodby to this group of students. In the last hout we finally got around to the opening lecture that explains some important details - like the purpose of the garden project. This group was so gung-ho for the physical experience of the garden, the weather was so lovely and the garden was in such great need - that we almost never got around to the lecture part of the experience.

This was such a wonderful group of kids. As I drove away at the end of the day, tiny puddles of moisture gathered in the corners of my eyes. Must have been my allergies. There will always be this little emptiness in the garden now that they are gone or at least until next Monday when the next group shows up.

Grange Community Garden

Two groups of students came to the garden this week - twice the fun, twice the confusion - the same awesome effort on the part of the next generation.
I won't bore you with the grueling details but we busted more sod, started a compost pile, tillied in the cover crop and mounted beautiful kid-made prayer flags on the deer fence in honor of May day.
It was a lovely, sunny day. The cold winds mostly drifted high overhead, and we missed the worst of the cold that plagued the other garden sites where the rest of the kids worked. Another good omen for the Grange Community Garden. Wind is the second most loathsome garden pest in Port Townsend following deer. Shelter from the wind is a great blessing and it takes so long to get if you don't already have it.

The Jefferson Community School students have so much energy - they could easily form the bakcbone of a successful garden. Until they showed up most of our volunteers were my age - at least. It's nothing personal, some of my best friends are my age, but we don't really have the sustained energy required for a start-up garden. Besides we're all too busy.

The last community garden I worked at in Port Townsend was on the corner of F and San Juan, by the golf course. You would have been hard pressed to pick a more difficult site. Kah Tai valley was a lot windier back then - trees were fewer and farther between. The garden bore the brunt of all of the winds, and all of the cold summer breezes from North Beach. tucked in at the bottom of the valley - it was in a cold pocket and prone to frosts.
All of those minor inconveniences were nothing compared to the nasty soil. Where you would expect to find good bottom land soil, we had to contend with a landfill. Lots of gravel, chunks of concrete and asphalt. In some places it was like taking out a parking lot and putting in a pardise - only the aspahalt was buried under six inches to a foot of what passed for soil at our garden site.

Back then I was young and dumb, even so, I had enough sense to know we were crazy. I never would have got involved if I hadn't got paid. That's right I got paid to grapple with tilted-windmill by the Ferderal Government. This was back in the eighties when your federal tax dollars were put to work in your community supporting do-gooders and young folks with ideas and/or lots of energy.
There were community gardens all up and down the West Coast. All of them different, all of them cool. A major chunk of my generation of West Coast organic gardeners were trained at community gardens funded in part by CETA, the WPA of its time. These gardens were an amazing community resource - they not only fed the body, they fed the soul as well.

Tinker and I met at a Bio-dynamic / French-intensive teaching and demonstration garden started by Alan Chadwick. We started out as apprentices. It was an excellent progam that covered a wide range of gardening experience.
I learned more about plants and life in Saratoga community Garden than I did working at Brookside Botanical Gardens in Wheaton Md. where there were extensive grounds, a serious library and several horticulturalists on the staff.

The Grange Community Garden competes a full circle in my life. A gardeners life is full of circles of all different sizes. If all goes well, the longer the life the larger the circles.

Maybe I should be sharing with you more of the details of our fabulous day at the garden but my mind is stuck on the big picture right now - which starts with finishing the garden fence, getting water to the garden and asking Tinker what to do next. Keep this under your hat but I haven't had a serious vegetable garden for a longer than I care to tell you, and when I did, I mostly relied on Tinker for the details like when and what to sow. I'm a landscaper by trade or at least I was until the rheumatoid arthritis kicked in.

Here's the latest version of what I know, or think I know, or have decided to make up until I know something better. Julie Marston and Missey Miller, teachers for the Jefferson Community School are very excited about the program. We have already started talks about next Fall and a possibly expanded program. Looking foward to next school year, it would be nice to plant some crops for the kids to harvest then - to illustrate one of the basic seasonal circles of the garden.
Of coures, lurking between now and next fall lies the dogged-days of this summer. I have visions of Sebastian spending a summer of quiet exile, diligently plugging away at his work. I have other visions of Sebatian swimming, playing video games or whatever it is, kids do these days.
I know I sound like a pessimist and a nagger but that's my job. I've been constantly putting the brakes on this garden until we can find all of the necessary ingredients for success. More garden projects fail from expectations outracing available energy and resources, than anything else.
Sebastian already has experience with a garden project that didn't make it - a build-it-and-they-will-come scenario that didn't pan out. Sometimes the best plans of mice and men go astray.

Now I'm not opposed to failed projects. At one time Milo Redwood and I were seriously considering starting a failed business. We noticed that some of our favorite places in Port Townsend had disappeared - in particular /Circa 1912, /a Victorian reading room which was more or less a beautiful living room downtown and a nice, quiet place to hang out. We had an innovative business plan: we planned for failure instead of success. We failed so fantastically that we never opened the doors.

So I'm not opposed to failure on principle, as long as no one gets hurt and a good time is had by all . People jumping out of sky scrapers, wars and famines definitely cross the line - but we can learn from our smaller failings.
We just had an awesome mistake when we were tilling the Grange garden. Last week we forgot to sew two sections of deer fencing together and a small corner of deer fencing had drifted with the breeze into the area where we were tilling.
The fence got tangled in the tiller blades, the tiller stopped and one of our nearby, chintzy but cheap fence-post-extenders snapped off. As a child I was taught to freak out and get my excuses lined up whenever I was within spitting distance of a mistake.
My attitudes about mistakes changed when a Japanese gardener told me mistakes were god's way of telling you to slow down. Since then I've quit fleeing my mistakes and learned to enjoy them. Most of all I ever learned, I learned from a mistake. I look foward to making many future mistakes.
The kids were surprised by how unfazed I was. They figure out all of the possible horrible outcomes and all the good reasons for feeling miserable over our mistake, but I shot them down one by one.
Meanwhile the kids figured out all of the steps necessary to untangle the tiller - they learned from their mistake. They totally had to figure it out for themselves - it was obvious I wasn't going to help them - I was too busy not worrying about it..
Besides it might be cheating, if I help too much in this garden made by kids. So far.

When we first started talking about a community garden, we got countless offers of land to work. There are lots of people looking for someone to put in a nice garden on their property. While most of these offers were generous (some of them were blatant attempts to exploit some free labor) - they missed the point - we have too much land and not enough workers.
It turns out labor, and not money as some would expect, is the bottleneck in our project. Let's do the math. We can start with the old contractors equation that are three things and we can only have two of them - time, money and quality. If we can find a legal source of abundant inexpensive labor then we're in like flint - we can have both cheap and good.

I know what you're thinking: we could cut quality. Believe me I've tried it and it won't work in this situation - take my word for it - we're stuck on the quality issue.

It turns out what we need most of all is a willing labor force. Underline willing. If you'v ever tried to get a kid to take out the trash or work in the family business, you will know what I mean. It's also true for many adults. In my former incarnation as a landscaper I had to wake workers up, drag them to the job-site, pay them at lunch time so they could eat, and hold them at shovel point to keep them on the job after lunch.
In the non-profit business willing is not enough. Most non-profits are blood-suckers. Never get involved with a non-profit - they'll steal all your time and energy until you are a dried-up, empty husk, cast off in the weeds of an emptyt lot, broken-hearted and disillusioned. Since the Grange is a non-profit we should make every effort to make sure a good time is had by all and that we do no harm.

What does the Grange Community Garden have to offer young people? What do young people like that is cheap, wholesome (mostly) (at least under some adult supervision) and readily available? Other young people is the correct answer. This also dovetails nicely with the community part of community gardening - encouraging people to spend time in the garden and at the Grange.
I put out some feelers - tested the waters - for other summer interns for the garden. It became apparent that we would need a critical mass of kids to attract kids of quality. We would save ourselves buckets of trouble by finding kids who actually like each other. If this was school we could probably resort to a mild form of coercion - do it or you won't pass. We're stuck with sweeter ways.

We ran in to a snag with one of our potential garden interns. I found out quickly that her parents were well aware of thier child's worth in the garden. In fact they had plans that she would work in the family business.
I'm currently working on a suitable bribe to offer her parents. I can't tell you the details just yet - I don't want to jinx the deal - but part of the proposal involves having two of this child's friends working at the garden.
One of the friends is not only a good worker but brings certain intangibles to the project that I can't mention yet as I don't want sour the deal. Securing these kids would score major bonus points for the garden.
The goal is to create an atmospere where the kids look foward to their time in the garden.

If all of this is starting to sound a little convoluted to you, all I can say is you're getting the Cliff's Notes version. These are just a few highlights of the the various twists and turns and tangents - we've taken to get this garden project off the ground. Or should I say on the ground? It has only been a few months since Missey Miller came to one of the Grange Garden meetings looking for a place for her students to gather garden knowledge. We've been improvising like crazy ever since.

Teaching kids gardening in school doesn't work. The school year is broken up by summer break which coincides with the peak growing season. The original idea was that families needed their kids at home to work the fields and farms in the summer. Farming and gardening weren't on the curriculum because kids learned all they needed to know in the fields.
In a few generations skills that were once widespread and essential have languished. This group of kids would already have the calloused hands and the experience that comes from a life spent outdoors engaged in strenuous activities.

If I could teach these kids two things, the first would be the bond between a gardener and the land she works. It's a relationship that grows with time and patience - this love of the land. We care for the land and it cares for us.
The second would be to pay attention to the details. The garden has a million things to teach us, so much beauty and even drama to show us.
That's why I always try to start out by looking. These kids have sharp eyes and quick minds. This is a new garden and doesn't look like much at first. It would be easy to pass right by, noticing nothing.

We take the time to look closely.

Right away we find a mushroom. I teach the same lesson I taught to the last group about fungi and the role they play in the garden. Almost all plants have a relationship with one or more fungi, which perform most of the tasks we associate with roots, like mining minerals from the soil. They trade raw materials mined from the soil for carbon compounds photosynthesized by the plants. Take away the fungi and the plant growth slows incredibly and health deteriorates.
They also connect plants to each other. the classic example of this is Douglas Fir. If you can see this for yourself in our local forests. A Douglas fir that is cut down will often grow over the stump. It starts from the ouside where the living tissues are found. It rolls over the top of the stump and grows its way into the middle. The network of fungi enables the other trees to send the plant juices needed to create a bandage over the top of the stump. this is wrong - see Depart ment of Corrections
Fungi also have an amazing capacity for breaking down toxic substances like oil and other petroleum based polutants. they definitly deserve more credit for all the good wok they do hidden away in the dark of the soil. All an all they are one of the most underated (by humans that is) species on the planet.
Next week the mushrooms will be gone and an important lesson will no longer be conveniently close at hand. Everything has it season. The temporary nature of all garden props reminds me of Betty. I learned a lot about teaching gardening to youngsters from Betty Peck at the Saratoga community garden where I met Tinker and we made Sam.
Betty was awesome. She had beautiful silver hair and wore long flowing dresses. She had regal bearing and a flair for the dramatic. Her performances always captured the wandering imaginations of even the wee-est pre-schoolers. She was not a serious gardener, she was much too permissive. Her favorite plants acted out like a mob of unruly chilren and Betty had more favorite plants than there are stars.
While she was weak in garden rules and regulations, she excelled in garden magic. If there were any garden fairies to be found, Betty would bring them out . I swear, she someitmes brought them with her.
Now there are two kinds of magic: the kind that seeks to manipulate and control, and the kind that opens our eyes to everyday wonders that we are too busy or too flustered to see. When you try to force magic you get atom bombs and pornography, but if wait for the magic with an open heart and a little patience - it will alway come on its own. Whether you call it magic or god, we were put here to admire these wonders too fleeting and beautiful to explain.

Betty would scope out the garden beforehand and make her leasson plan. She would find all the best stages and props for illustrating the wonders of the garden. One week, when she came to one of her lesson spots, she found that someone had cut down one her favorite garden props and hauled it away to the compost.
It was the only time I ever saw Betty at a loss for words. Such agony and sorrow. If could have brought the plant back I would of - to heck with good gardening. Betty momentarily stepped out of character to mourn the loss of one of life's great lessons, conveniently illustrated close at hand. Much to her credit she was able to complete the garden tour and garner rave reviews from a discerning group of third graders.

One of the coldest, hardest facts of the garden is that all life comes out of death. Gardening is no task for the overly sensitive or faint of heart. As my friend Matty is so fond of saying: "I'm a gardener - I kill plants for a living. Underneath his flippant attitude lurks a deadly truth - for every plant a gardener plants he must kill dozens, sometimes hundred or thousands.
Gardeners are always saying good-by. Good-by to plants they have nutured from infancy, goodb-by to each season as if fades into the next, to the peaonie flowers, to the plum blossoms ...

I already know I'll miss these mushrooms growing under the Madrone tree. Madrones are dying in droves yet some stay perfectly healthy. Researchers are looking into the possibility that fungal networks connect Madrones to Douglas Firs and the Firs and fungi help the Madrones to survive and flourish.
Our Madrone is a long way from the nearest Firs but close to a fungus. I decide not to worry. I've never found that plants grow better when you worry about them. Just in case I might plant a Dougals Fir closer to our Madrone (my daughter's middle name is Madrone)

Mean while back at the garden: next we find a peppercress. They weren't even here last week or at least we didn't find any. We taste the pepercress and the concensus is that they suck. Once we find one, they magically appear all over the place. We have a phenomenol capacity for pattern recognition - a skill that should be exercised daily.

The stems have hairs on them. Hairs are one of the ways that plants protect themselves from chompping insects. All of our vegetables started as weeds. We bred many of the insect repelling properties out of the vegetables we eat. Often the same properties that repell insects repell us.
We pull up a peppercress to look at the roots. They remind me of those cool nodules that grow on the roots of legumes and fix nitrogen. Before I can whistle Dixie one of the kids has dug up a clover and we take a close look. Sure enough tiny nodules are forming already. They're hard to see, just barely visible. (we give ourselves major bonus points for spotting somehting so hard to see) The nodules are a good sign and a good omen for the garden.

Next we find a plant I call ground ivy and Sebastian calls somehting else, I can't remember what. Its Latin name is Glechoma hederacae. You can see what it lookis like for yourself by searching for it in Google images. We admire the tiny pink flowers and the square stems which indicate it is in the mint family. It doesn't smell or look like regular mint.
Really it smells sort of funky/musky like decades old cat pee when it rains and you're never quite sure whether you are really smelling it or not.

Then we find small, black spiders scurrying over the ground in a hurry. Some of us are afraid of spiders. One kid is afraid of dogs. It is such a wonderful spring day and we have such a short attention spans that our minds wander off in a thousand different directions. Sometimes the tangents are the best part of the day ... so many delightful tangents to take, it's hard to choose.

We find some more cool stuff, like deer prints, eagles soaring in lazy arches overhead and opium poppies mixed in with the scotch broom growing just outside of the garden. The poppies excite an inappropriate amount of interest on the part of the kids. They are totally blown away that opium poppies are growing like a weed, in their hometown. To these kids, this is some serious garden magic. One kid samples a bit of leaf - a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Of course the poppy leaves in spring are no more potent than the white sap that leaks from lettuce stems when they are getting ready to go to seed. Lettuce sap is a mild opiate too.
Some of the kids remember seeing milky sap leaking from lettuce stems. That's a good sign. It means they are paying attention to the other living things they share the panet with.

I've been eyeing the shade of a nearby Madrone tree and considering the glories of a nap outside. I try ditch the kids on Sebastian and head for the shade, but before I get three steps, Sebastian reminds me of all of the next steps we have yet to figure out and soon.
I kiss that nap good-by. By this time the pain in my legs is excrutiating. I just got diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I'm taking these chinese herbs which help immensely sometimes. This week is a big not.
Without Sebastian I would be next to useless as a teacher for these kids. Talking only goes so far in the garden. Most garden skills are learned by osimossis. You work alongside someone and you absorb their stance, the rythhm of their movements, the way they touch the earth.

Sebastian has the elegance and economy of movement of an old hand at the gardening business. Though he is only a few years senior to these kids, he is an excellent role model.
I only wish they could spend a full year working with him. One time around the seasons, under the sun the rain and the wind, in the garden with Sebastian and these kids would be changed for life.

This week's group has one girl and the rest boys. That's an amazing amount of not-yet-ripe male energy all at once. Most of them take to sod busting with a will. With so many young men let loose all at once, progress is quick. There's a nice destructive energy to sod-busting that they find satisfying. They like to posture with their shovels. I enjoyed watching one or two fairly cool martial arts demonstrations.
While they work, they talk about cool stuff like chain gangs. I tell them about the chain gangs I saw traveling through the south as a kid. They were the real thing with chains, shotguns, mean-looking sheriffs and all-black convicts. They worked along highways hot enought to fry eggs on.
We all agreed that the old striped jail fashions were far superior to the orange jumpsuits they put you in now. No self-respecting criminal would be caught dead in an orange jumpsuit. Crime just doesn't pay like it used to.
Some of them have already taken their shirts off. They turn them into bandanas. Worn on the head so they look like pirate gear and around the neck like bandits. I always used to wear mine around my waste - it looked like a skirt - these guys are way cooler than that. For years I worried that my generation had already done all the coolest stuff when we were young. Fat chance.

We get a lot done considering it's such a short day. We hand dig around the rest of the fence. A neighbor comes by to ask why we didn't use a rotto-tiller. I don't have a convincing answer and he walks away shaking his head and muttering. We start cleaning out the flower beds by the entrance and I never did get that nap. There's always next week.

Grange Garden goes to School

We had our first day of school at the Grange. We talked about the history of agriculture. We explored the site for the up and coming community garden. At first it looked kind of boring but with a closer look we noticed a dense cover crop of crimson clover. We found some beautiful clumps of moss and a cool fungus under the madrone tree next to the parking area by the entrance.
Alas most of the weeds were grasses that looked suspicoiusly like those nasty grasses with the creeping runners. We didn't bother to find out because we forgot to bring shovels with us. Actually most of us were not dressed for the wet and cold, so they lack of shovels was no big deal. Maybe next week we will show up with tools and pratical clothes.
Don't get any notions that we were a bunch of slackers. We figured out how much fencing and how many fence posts we needed. We also figured out the where the posts would go for the gates and how we would keep the corners from collapsing. We decide to do each corner in a different way, just in case. Figuring the lenght of fencing was easy and went quickly. We came up with several different numbers of fence posts. We never could agree on an exact number. In the end we decided to vote on it - we chose the higher number to be on the safe side.
Next week we plan to start putting the fence up if we can get everything we need to the Grange by next monday. We might do some sod busting too. There's this place in the middle where there was an obstacle that Rick Erickson had to avoid with his tractor. He left a circle of sod with a cairn of stones to mark the spot not to hit with his tractor. It was the nicest thing in the garden. A sculpture in the middle of the garden.
We decided we liked the idea of a circle with a sculpture in the middle of the garden. We also talked about decorating the the top of the fence with streamers. We never decided whether to imitate the tibeten-prayer-flag model with cotton that will fade over time or to go with brightly colored and more durable synthetic streamers. A small but vocal contingent favored the highly reflective materials much to the dismay of the adults who were present - Julie Marston and John Barr.

It seems like the latest plan is that Sebastian will be the head honcho of the garden for this summer. He already has experience with another community garden project. He has already shown his worth - he helped us figure out that too many fence posts were a good idea - we can use them on for bean trellises. We would of just got too many posts in the first place (hey we're no fools) but I'm such a cheap skate? stake? snake? that I insisted that we not get too many. Sure we could take them back but I'm too lazy - we're talking real world math and carefull planning.
We are off to an awesome start.