Great goddess....it's sprouting!

I never thought I'd see the day, but sure enough, very close (as in, nose-in-the-dirt) investigation of the seed flats today revealed that I am indeed growing True Unicorn, an extremely endangered native medicinal. Don't worry--it'll only be 6 or 7 YEARS before the root can be harvested. For now, let's just try to get it to its first set of leaves, shall we?



In other news, I am most excited about my "herb forest" that I've begun adding to the rear of our property. Finally, I am building the medicinal/culinary herb garden of my dreams--a tangle of folklore and magic I can lose myself inside of daily. It will obviously be a year or so before it becomes a true jungle, but I'm helping it on its way by adding mature perennial herbs from last year's garden (dug up with permission from the tenants of our old rental house). My sugar snap peas are also coming along nicely, latching bravely onto their homemade trellis and climbing ever upward. I so look forward to gorging myself on snap peas right from the vine. When we had them in Oregon, they never even made it into the house!

Finally, Jacob dug up the "verge"--the green space between our sidewalk and the street--and I layered it with mulch, then scattered three or four packets of wildflower seeds. With luck, the city officials won't cite us for failure to mow. :/

I'm going to creep back down to the basement now and make sure my true unicorn sprouts weren't just figments of my over-coffee'd imagination.

Here's to spring!

-Kelsie

R-r-r-really, people? Really, America? REALLY!?!?

I wasn't sure at all that we could get any more obsessed with outward apparance/any stupider/any more over-medicated, but, alas, we just did.

What was that I was reading tonight? Oh, yes, about how St. John's Wort, Comfrey, and Coltsfoot have been deemed dangerous by the FDA and are better left as pretty ornamentals in the garden.

Yes. I'm off to see if any of my EXCEEDINGLY DANGEROUS PLANTS have sprouted while ya'll go plump up your eyelashes with some glaucoma medication.

<3,

Kelsie


P.S.--I am well, well, well aware of the fact that there are many extremely dangerous herbs out there. They are, after all, drugs in their own right. HOWEVER, I'm sure many of you can appreciate that the FDA seems a little cracked when they tell us that comfrey will kill us, but that it's okay to take a medication for a SERIOUS CONDITION simply because we want longer eyelashes.

I over-explain.

Garden p0rn!

This is my black mandrake plant that I've been growing (with a period of dormancy...oops) for about a year. He suffered a small injury (see brown spot) when a cat gave him a nip, but other than that, he's doing swimmingly, putting on new growth rather quickly and otherwise taunting me with the idea that we could be seeing a flower or two soon. For those of you not in the know, mandrakes can be rather persnickety, taking up to a year to germinate (if they germinate at all). Mine germinated in a couple of weeks, but it's been slow, slow going. Worth it, though. I pet him fondly everyday.



"Copenhagen Market" cabbage seedling.














Russian Comfrey re-emerging after a long winter's nap.















Happy little Lady's Mantle greeting the burgeoning growing season.










Wild lettuce germinating under the shop lights, with its neighbor, clary sage, popping up to say "hello," as well.











Teeny little pennyroyal sprouts--the seeds were nearly invisible!











Tomorrow, I'll try to get some pics of my super-frugal germination station (which, apparently, is doing its job very well!).

Food, Medicine, Magic

In all honesty, this could be the title of most of my posts for this blog, but I decided to make it today's title for the mere fact that the first of the food and the first of the medicine have begun to sprout down in my fantastic basement germination station. My Copenhagen market cabbage and my wild lettuce have poked their little green heads out from the soil and are saying hello to the bright new world beyond.

I AM SO EXCITED.

Seriously, though. It never, ever, ever gets old--seeing those first sprouts of the season. I don't think it ever WILL get old. At the goat farm, I spent countless evenings elbow-deep in birthing goats, and that final push--that gush of new, warm, bleating life into the world--never, ever got old. It brought me to tears (just a little) each time, and made me feel at once very sexual, very spiritual, and very much a part of the magic and the order of things.

While sprouting seeds are not baby goats, there's definitely something there that gets my blood thrumming and today, as ever, I did a little dance and bounded up the basement stairs to try to find someone--anyone--to tell of this marvelous coming.


And I act as though I've been sprouting seeds all my life, but I haven't. 3 years. It's only been 3 years since I first plopped some soil in a pot, took those miniscule artemisia absinthium specks in my fingers, and sprinkled them over the dirt with a mixture of dubious curiosity and reverent certainty. Why did I start with wormwood, of all things? Because when I moved into the semi-communal disas--err---experiment that was Possum Place in Eugene, Oregon, the one thing I wanted to do more than anything in the world was the exact same thing I'd been wanting to do since that odd day, around the age of 12, when I became OBSESSED with herbal folklore and magic---grow as many varieties of herbs as I possibly could. So, they handed me a battered shoebox of herb seeds and told me to have at it. They then proceeded to question everything I chose to grow, chiding me for planting things with "no real use."

Despite their doubts and my initial disbelief that something so tiny could actually BECOME something, my wormwood plants flourished into maginficent, silvery, plumed things that the local garden expert fawned over (in his extremely handsome/seductive British accent). He even took one home for HIS GARDEN. This was the man that could grow ANYTHING...and he took MY wormwood plant!

Where is this going? I'm not sure. I think it's become a reminiscent ramble.

The point is, for me, food, medicine, and magic go hand in hand in hand. I'm not really talking about cauldron magic--though there's certainly a bit of that what goes into the medicine-making part. I'm certainly not talking about wand-waving magic, though sometimes I fancy a nice wand to make things grow a little faster. I'm talking about the magic that happens through the entire process of raising a plant from seed to seed--from tiny sprout to a tincture that will help a friend get rid of her headache; from a two-leafed seedling into a plate full of candy-sweet tomatoes I'll slice and eat with sea salt and pepper; from a gangling vine to a pumpkin that, each night, reminds me of a harvest moon fallen from the heavens to nestle amongst the weeds. When I'm planting seeds, when I'm kneeling in the dirt, when I'm macerating, canning, straining, bottling, stirring, sniffing, tasting, experimenting, dancing through the tomato vines looking for fairies, I get an almost indescribable feeling that a). all is right with the world b). I am very old c). I am more things than I ever thought I could be and d). I am the luckiest person the world. I often find myself talking to my plants, and I suppose they must be talking back, because I can go on for hours. And already this season, there has been so much magic....for the first time ever, I've coaxed some aconite seeds into sprouting. One day there was nothing. The next? Aconite babies! I sowed them in November and that first warm day, they began to emerge en masse. I've also had tremendous luck with my shooting starts, so far, and I'll patiently wait the three years (!) it could take for them to bloom.

This weekend, we're borrowing a truck and getting compost (from the city facility) and soil, and we're filling the first of our raised beds. Soon, it'll be time to sow the carrots & the beets, and to set out those little cabbages who appeared today. It's happening. It's really, really happening. I finally have a garden to call my own--a garden to grow with.

I joined a website called "Freedom Gardeners" (a modern day twist on "Victory Garden"). It's essentially the Facebook of gardening, so, like a tool, I created a profile and waited pathetically for someone to friend me. It didn't take long--not to get a friend request, but to get a question regarding my profile. Here's what my profile said:

I believe in the omens of Indian pipes and pale green moths.

I want to be a folk song. Or a daguerreotype. Or a daguerreotype of a folk song.

I think plastic packaging should be outlawed and that everyone should put everything in blue Mason jars, like the good lawd intended.

I believe heirloom tomatoes will save us all.

I believe in catfish the size of Volkswagens.

I believe in pie magic.

I believe it's time to dig our toes in, grow food, make medicine, and take charge of our own happiness and simple prosperity.

So this guy in a cowboy hat sends me a message entitled "?" which I knew couldn't be a good sign. It says, "What's pie magic?"

I half expected him to follow that with "Sounds like Orc mischief to me," but he didn't. I fumbled for an answer, which said something to the effect of everything you've just read (above).

"Hmmmm....I've never been much of a mystic. I'm more of a practic," he replied.

And then he friended me.

So far, he's my only friend on freedomgardens.org

If you have a garden, join (and be my friend!). The forums are actually a really fantastic source of information, and there's a fairly hilarious/sad/useful thread right now on "Happy Homesteaders vs. Doom-and-Gloomers" where they're keeping tally on how many people are happy and how many people think the world's going to change drastically. What if you think the world's going to change AND you're happy? Well, there's a place for you, as well.

Coming soon--pictures! I have much to show you all. For now, it's time to find an Ent to put me to bed (and if that doesn't work, I'll have to take myself there).

<3

Kelsie

The seeds are coming! The seeds are coming!

Delighted today to check the mail and discover two of those much-anticipated bubble mailers--one from Horizon Herbs and one from Seed Savers Exchange.

Seeds from Horizon:

*Lungwort--Excellent shade plant used to make...surprise! Respiratory tonics.
*Wild Lettuce--Excellent sedative for practicing insomniac like myself.
*California Poppy--Milder sedative than wild lettuce and also an excellent mild analgesic for things like menstrual cramps.
*Flanders Poppy--This is the classic "Wizard of Oz" poppy...yet another sedative, stronger, with less of a woo-hoo-cuckoo effect than the Wild Lettuce...I plan on making a tincture of whole California poppy plants and blossoms from the Flanders poppy.
*Zahir Poppy--Yes, Virginia, this is a black opium poppy. Am I going to produce opium? Most likely not. I just love "black" flowers of all manner, and this will make such a rich contrast to the sunny orange and red poppies in my poppy patch.
*Clary Sage--To be completely honest, I absolutely hate the smell of clary sage, despite the fact that multiple people have called it "seductive" or "lusty." I stand by my assertion that it smells like cat piss. HOWEVER, it is a BEAUTIFUL plant and the bees absolutely adore it, so into the garden it goes, if for no other reason than to bring all the bees to the yard.
*Bittersweet (Climbing) Nightshade--Is it medicinally useful? According to my books, a low-dose tincture could treat herpes, but otherwise, no, it's not useful medicinally. However, I am utterly, and, perhaps, disturbingly smitten with baneful herbs--the deadlier the better. Fortunately, bittersweet nightshade is very unlikely to kill anyone unless they decide to feast on a quantity of raw berries. The flowers are lovely, the berries lucious to look at (and supposedly beloved by birds), and we had some growing wild through our garden in Oregon, so I decided to give it a go and see if perhaps it would like to trellis up the holly tree.

Seeds from Seed Savers Exchange:

Dragon Carrot--If you've never seen what one of these looks like, they're pretty remarkable. They're an extremely red variety of "purple" carrot. Jacob agrees that they remind us a little of a dog penis, but still, I can't wait to give them a go!

Blue Jade Corn--I'm pretty excited about this variety of corn. For one thing, it's one of the few blue corns that can be boiled and eaten off the cob (most blue corns are good for cornmeal or decorations). For another, it's one of the ONLY sweet corns that can be grown in a container. I'm not actually going to grow mine in a container, but it produces plants that are only 2-3 feet tall, which means this corn will be PERFECT for my little garden. I tried regular old field corn last year, and it was a disaster. The plants sprouted and formed ears, but they were stunted and then got some sort of incredible corn fungus that made each kernel puff up to roughly the size of a walnut and exude some sort of black sludge. Those plants all found their way into the compost heap. :/

Parisian Pickling Cucumber--I have been an adamant hater of pickles for many, many years. It baffles my parents, because they claim that as a child, I could sit and eat my way through an entire jar of bread and butter pickles and...AND...DRINK THE JUICE. So, this Christmas, my father ordered a bunch of crap in Currier & Ives tins and gingham-capped jars. Among these were some fat little gherkins from a farm in Arkansas. My father all but forced me to try one and....I LOVED IT. So, I decided to give pickle-making a try this summer and plant these fantastic little cukes that have been around since the late 1800s. Of course, I shall post the results here.

Marconi Red Pepper--Last summer, I got an unexpectedly good yield from my bell pepper plants (just your stock-standard California Wonders), and I decided to add a new variety to my pepper fleet. This is an Italian heirloom pepper that's supposedly very sweet and can get up to TWELVE INCHES LONG. For a girl who likes to eat bell peppers like candy, this is very good news.

Oxheart Carrot--These carrots live up to their name. They're fat, bulky, and pretty ugly. They can also reach ONE POUND APIECE, even in clay soil. They sound perfect for carrot soup and carrot juice, and they're good keepers, which means my plans to pack some of our root and squash-type veggies away in the basement for fall/winter eating might very well pan out...if I don't eat everything the minute I get it off the vine/out of the ground.

Okay, so clearly, those aren't all of the seeds I'm planting. We're waiting on a load of veggie seeds from a couple of other places and, of course, I already have an embarassing quantity of seeds ferreted away here at home. Thankfully, I was able to foist some seeds over on a friend yesterday, who, incidentally, had come over to be herbally cured of a headache she'd had for five days.

I am proud to report that her five day headache went away within the hour thanks to my hobgoblin-ish ministrations. Here's what I gave her:

"Everything But the Sink Headache Cure"--

1 bag of chamomile tea w/ 1 bag of Yogi "Bedtime" tea combined with....
*dose of homemade lemon balm/catnip/chamomile tincture
*dose of homemade feverfew tincture
*dose homemade lavender tincture
annnnnd
*dose homemade skullcap tincture

Normally I would NOT combine all of these herbs in an attempt to cure a headache. Not because they're dangerous to combine, of course...they're all quite gentle/innocuous. I wouldn't do it simply because I would want to know exactly WHICH plant it was that did the healing. Unfortunately, the poor girl had had this pounding headache for FIVE DAYS, and she had to go to school, so I essentially threw it all into the kettle and ended up with something that actually worked. I'm willing to bet it was the feverfew that did it--it usually helps my headaches, at least--but the other nervine herbs in the mix couldn't have hurt. Besides...I got to share my seed wealth!

In other news, Lord Freecycle has gifted us with a free garden shed (no more lugging the iron push-reel mower up from the basement when it's time to cut the weeds!), railroad ties for raised beds, and bricks for edging the front beds. Additionally, my friend Nikki gave me a VERY NICE stainless steel shelving system in exchange for dog-sitting, and my friend Victoria gave me about thirty grow lights last year sooooooooo I can finally get rid of my awkward seed-starting system and actually set up a legit. operation in the basement. Of course I'll only be growing veggies and herbs, but given that I live in a neighborhood where people are busted nearly everyday for growing pot in their basements, I'm going to have to be careful to block the windows so that the familiar fluorescent glow doesn't draw attention--not because I'm afraid of being arrested, but because I'm afraid of someone breaking in while we're gone. At any rate, this system will be far superior to last year's. Last year, I ended up putting plastic sheeting down on the floor of my office and starting all of my seeds there. Jacob and I would haul them daily out to the porch for sunlight and then bring them back in at night. We dropped several flats and lost some really difficult-to-grow/rare herbs in the process, not to mention the fact that there was constantly dirt everywhere. I'm thrilled to find this FREE solution to my problem (thanks Nikki and Victoria!) because it means that a). I can start MORE plants sooner (some of the herbs take weeks to germinate) and b). keep them at a more constant light/temperature level so that they'll be more likely to grow up big and strong.

Last spring, I ended up with so many extra plants, I tried to have a plant sale. More like a plant FAIL. In Oregon (two years ago), I had a smashing success of a plant sale. Not so here in ol' Paducah. No one was remotely interested in buying my plants, and I was in a very piss-poor location for attempting to convince people that heirloom veggies were the way to go (not too many crack addicts are inclined to grow their own food). Now, I'm still in a piss-poor location (ah...but the house! the house!), but the nice, fair trade/organic coffeeshop in the hip arts district (just a couple of blocks away) has offered to let me have a plant sale at the shop. HOW EXCITING IS THAT? Etcetera (the shop) gets TONS of traffic, particularly on the weekends when the galleries are open late. And we all know, of course, that artsy coffee drinkers tend to revel in growing their own veggies/herbs, even if it's just a tomato or basil plant. So, hurrah!

I'm pretty sure that's just about everything. I'm completely swamped in work right now, but all I can do is keep stopping to gaze at my seed packets, and it's taking all of my willpower to wait until this weekend to get my seed starting shelves set up. Outside in the home-made cold frame, the lettuce seeds are sprouting, and some English bluebells have poked their heads out from their cold stratification area along the back wall of the house. I'm pretty much burning up with spring fever, and I know many of you are, as well, so I leave you with this parting shot:








Grow for all you're worth, little Arnicas!











Green blessings & watermelon dreams,

-Kelsie

Pie Magic

This summer, in addition to all the other yum-ables, magic-als, sniff-ables, and medic-inals we grew in our garden, I planted two heirloom pumpkin plants, both of them of the "antique French" persuasion by the name of "Cinderella's Carriage.

Here (at left) are my two vines as they made a bid to take over a whole corner of the yard (and succeeded)

From these two vines, we ended up with three very beautiful, almost luminescently orange pumpkins, deeply lobed and fun to thump fondly whenever I'm down in the basement (where they can keep for months and months). At Thanksgiving, I chose this pumpkin for two pies:
I was so pleased with the flesh of these pumpkins--rich orange, sweet with very little stringiness, and incredibly easy to cut through (some people have to use saws to cut their pumpkins....I had to only use a medium-large carving knife). There was very little "junk" in this pumpkin--lots of seeds (hooray! more pumpkins!) and very little gunk to scoop out. To get my pumpkin pulp, I steamed big slices of the pumpkin, scooped the flesh from the rind, and pureed it with my most favorite of all anachronistic kitchen tools, the hand-cranked mixer.

I whipped up one of my FAMOUS blue-ribbon pie crusts (Seriously! The local coffee shop uses my recipe for their quiche and pie crusts!), mixed the spices (cardamom, nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, hand-ground cloves, and lemon zest) in, and let it sit for awhile.

You're probably dying to see the finished product, so here she is:



This pie was MAGIC from start to finish. It was the seed nestled into black loam. It was that first hint of green breaking through the soil. It was bees drenched in pollen as they emerged from the flaming torches of the pumpkin blossoms. It was that first acorn-sized fruit, growing visibly bigger every day. It was the good earth under my bare feet. It was a secret dance with the fireflies at dusk as, mason jar of wine in hand, I twirled through the pumpkin patch in an ecstatic outburst that was born out of cricket song, moonflower nectar, and the mud between my toes. It was the coming of fall and the feeling of cradling all that dense beauty in my arms. And then it was that first breathless slice with the blade, the rich and unequivocal smell of pumpkin filling the kitchen, the slow grind with the pestle over a mortar full of cloves, and, finally, into the oven for a long hour of watching and waiting as the filling bubbled and baked. Four full moons and firefly light. Appalachian spoons and coal-town cast iron. That's how I make magic (and pumpkin pie).

And the taste? Like moon butter. Like sugared sunlight. Like a gilded feast in Elf-land. Like a lantern-lit meal in a log cabin. Like wooden carts full of flowers and vegetables whose names we've forgotten, creaking towards a table set for an endless picnic in some grove we must be led to blindfolded.