Allons-Y! Le Pays!

It begins with the land.

Organic farmers stress that it all begins with the soil. And this is true--it's not about feeding the plant, but rather enriching the soil so that it is grateful and able to give you its extra, in the form of food/plants (or animals fed plants), through garden or the larger-scale version of same, the farm. But I would argue that a further-back origins point is le pays---the land--the ideas that we as humans have about how we navigate the planet, and eat to live (live to eat!), stay alive both in the physical sense but also the psychical sense.

This blog is an exploration of ideas around food, farming and nature, and the frugality (frugalité/simplement) underpinning the approaches to these matters of concern. They're all connected --I mean, honestly, we all eat, so even if you live in downtown TO or DC or Paris you've still got that connection of soil, of land-ideas, to your tongue; there’s still space, it seems, for some more conversation on the inter-connection of these issues...and so this is why I decided to begin this blog.

I have struggled for some weeks what to call this ‘thing’....and why, even, there was a need to write such a forum/in such a form. Those who know me know I’m a 19th century person – though (wearing my historian hat), most 19th century people would have had a greater knowledge of electricity than I do, and of the basic technologies that most take for granted now. What this means, though, is that while as a poet and writer I’m tremendously complex and convoluted I try to live simply, and locally, but with a sensibility expressed in a love of travel, love of foods from all over the globe, and struggles to farm a bit, where I live and also (long story; later) in a country other than the one I live in.

This evening, about 16:30 Atlantic time, I went out to the garden. The foot or so of snow that had bedded it down--or so I thought--for the winter, had now been melted away by the above normal temperatures (12 degrees C today) that keep reminding us of the phrase climate change. In the gloom of rain and wind and pensive skies, however, what had been exposed were not only the embarrassingly naked patches of insufficiently mulched garden, but also the spinach bed, planted August first: and so, on December 10, 2008, what will likely be the last harvest of spinach was taken. What had fed me, and helped dress the salads of one community dinner, had emerged flattened but undaunted from the early November snows that had me cross country skiing the earliest ever.

I was too exhausted, before the snow came, to place a window frame (old window, with glass intact) over this square of wood—an old picture frame—and thereby create a ‘cold frame’ in which the spinach could grow for as long as the winter would let it. Spinach and kale and a few other things, gardeners know, can live even when it’s below freezing, if they have a bit of protection. But I made the decision not to go about framing the bed of spinach, even though this weird weather had given me an opportunity. I was too tired tonight. But I would eat again a harvest salad of spinach, already harvested and stored in the fridge carrots and purple cabbage, and be grateful.

Before heading back into the house to mark (grade, in the lingo of American professors) student papers, I went to the very end of the plot and harvested a handful of kale, the final cut from a bed planted just as the previous winter’s snows were retreating last April. Tomorrow, or soon (as I’m sure some markets are still featuring kale, fresh kale from better stewards than I) will post a recipe for a bean/kale/potato soup that uses the leftover rinds of gouda (or parmesan) cheese to flavour it. And talk about the FFF talents, skills and joys of making, making do, or doing without. And other things connecting food, farm, and frugality.

toujours---
Deborah