Agriculture and Bias

Orchards count as agriculture

In the past day or three, I've been reminded of how weird our understanding of agriculture is in modern America. Another blog that I regularly read, written by an educated, smart woman, linked to an article about the novel theory that the introduction of agriculture actually led to instability and population collapse in Europe. Then today, working with some other archaeologists and archaeologists-in-training, we talked about how generations of our forebears (and their cultural anthropology kin) have sworn that in the Northwest there was no indigenous agriculture or horticulture, just hunting and gathering.

Like most children of Western civilization, I was taught that the rise and refinement of agriculture allowed production of surplus, which was what allowed humanity (some of it, at least) to step off the dreary treadmill of subsistence, so that some people could become businessmen, priests, bureaucrats, artists, and all of the other divisions of labor that make up a civilization. Even among the cynical who viewed some of these jobs as blights upon humanity, there were few that argued the basic tenet that by making the transition from gathering and hunting wild foods (yes, in that order, if you are to be honest about where the calories came from) to farming domesticated crops represented an advance, creating some respite from the struggle for survival.

Only, if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view (so long, Bible Belt readers), agriculture does not provide stability. It is inherently unstable. From a diverse spectrum of wild plants, adapted to local conditions over millenia and more, people came to depend on a select and quite small group of species, using temporaryu success to grow larger human populations. Over time, this became more pronounced. Hundreds of wild starches gave way to dozens of grains and roots, and ultimately to a handful of cereals and russet potatoes, often grown outside their optimal range through generous application of non-renewable chemicals. Nomads moved to villages, which became cities and morphed into megalopolises. We stand now as the coyote did in the old road runner cartoons, over a canyon on a board nailed to a board nailed to a board, cantilevered so far out on a gamble that we are doomed to fall, unable to skitter back to solid ground. Evolution punishes monocroppers and urbanites who forgot how to find or grow their own food.

In our hubris, we have assumed that human selection can successfully replace natural selection, when in fact all domestication amounts to co-evolution. From corn's point of view, it has caused humans to adapt their behavior toward its own ends. We winnow down the gene pool to emphasize the parts that maximize kernel production, eliminating competition from weeds and even regional maize variants, maximizing acreage, extracting fossil fuel to fertilize and distribute the crop. Zea mays has domesticated and trained Homo sapiens to its benefit, not ours.

What amounts to genocide of other grains and the once diverse array of locally adapted cultivars of corn has resulted in such a narrow, patented gene pool that we are now at greatly increased risk of collapse in a major element of our food supply (and the same goes for soybeans, rice, wheat, and any other major food crop) should evolution create super-bugs, fungi, weeds, or diseases that could rip through the millions of acres planted in the same damned genome. Or maybe  the dirty work will be done by climate change, or the growing scarcity and cost of the chemical additives and artificial genetic alterations that are already deeply entrenched responses to the biological and climactic threats we already face.

Our smug modern bias that by replacing a "primitive" society (in which nearly every family produced its own diverse and locally adapted bread, vegetables, and protein) with a few corporately owned farms churning out the national output of food and food-like subtances is misplaced. Even before evolution engineers collapses in production, the elmination of diversity and removal of people from the healthful effects of working the land has created epidemics of heart disease, diabetes, and the other diseases of civilization that decrease individual fitness and create increasing drains on social resources. More angioplasty, less art.

Camas fields do not count as agriculture

But let's step back from that brink, back to the early days of agriculture. The domesticated crops all began as wild plants. As a young anthro, I was taught that this happened in a few select places: Mesopotamian cereals, Mesoamerican grains, Andean tubers, and a few others. While this select club would be expanded from time to time, membership rested on transformation of primitive forms to highly productive domesticates. People who ate "wild" foods were not agriculturalists, or even horticulturalists. They were foragers.

A prime example of that class were the indigenous tribes of the Northwest, who stood out among hunter-gatherers in having a higher level of social stratification and cultural elaboration than anthtropologists expected of tribal, non-agricultural peoples. Being an exception only proved the rule, however, since it was pointed out that a peculiar natural abundance of food, from salmon runs to camas meadows, was what allowed them to advance beyond, for example, their Great Basin counterparts.

But the more we look, and the more we listen to the Native cultures, the more we see that the Northwest tribes (and although I am ignorant of the details, I would have to suspect the tribes in other parts of the country) were not passive collectors of a random bounty. People burned meadows to return nutrients to the soil to such a degree that once-poor glacial outwash became black loam, while at the same time arresting succesional processes that would have liked to establish forest where berries and root foods grew. Harvesting techniques aerated the soil, gave next year's crop room to grow, rotated the burden of harvest, and propagated new generations of food. There was weeding and transplanting. Just because Tribal knowledge acknowledges first and foremost the role of Coyote for the origin of many foods does not mean that the actions of mortals played no role in the perpetuation of those foods. My suspicion is that the "wild" characterization of foods like camas and cous has as much to do with our lack of investigation as with absolute reality--the same people who weeded out the death camas, who harvested roots and berries over millennia, am I to believe that they never rooted out smaller, sicklier plants in favor of tastier or more productive ones? Are we supposed to think that because a food plant is found within it's "natural" range, it was not the result of transplanting or establishment of patches convenient to trails and settlements? I find that hard to swallow.

But our bias is that if a plant is native to its range (typically defined thousands of years after people began eating it, hmm...), it is wild. If it is not ridiculously oversized, the food part dwarfing the other elements, it must not be domesticated. If it is merely tended, rather than planted in rows or milpas, it is not agriculture. Our bias is that hard farming work, rather than knowledge of how best to feed off of natural systems with minor inputs, is superior.

We see what we want to see (I'll admit that I want to see humans who adapted to a place over millennia as pretty wise to its ways), and so Euro-Americans who conquered continents generally want to see that as progress. Casting agriculture as a noble effort, even as a single God's will that Man exercise dominion over the earth and its lesser creatures (Indians included), serves that goal. Defining what everyone else did as inferior helps make the stealing and subsequent transformation of the land more justifiable to most Americans, eases the guilt of wiping out thousands of little societies attuned to nature to make way for a large one attuned to itself. Bad as that particular bias may be, the one that may come back to haunt us more deeply is that other bias, the one in which we presume that civilization is always getting better, that we are exceptional, and our agriculture is smart and sustaining, rather than unstable, a dangerous taunt toward evolution.

Cannabis Envy

The estate of Mr. Peter McIntosh is reportedly in talks with the State of Washington regarding advertising, Colorado having already inked a deal with the estate of John Denver.

By now, many people have learned, then forgotten, and then totally found out again that voters have legalized marijuana for recreational use in Colorado and Washington (the state, not DC, where congressional overlords will not stand for it). Meanwhile, in the 'lower' 48, everyone else is either bemoaning the collapse of American morality or making travel plans. But we don't need the (church) ladies crying 'cause the story's sad, oh no, 'cause the Rocky Mountain Way is better than the way we had.

Incidentally, the big media news--John (Deutschendorf) Denver fans, every one of 'em, now that Hunter Thompson is gone--all chimed in with "Rocky Mountain High" repartee, missing the much cooler Walsh song for the most part, and coming up empty for Washington. Me too, to be honest. [Although I do think that when it comes time to promote Amsterdam on the Puget, we might want to talk with the Hendrix family about licensing "Are You Experienced?" (wink-wink) for the tourism campaign.]

Smoke pot and you could be this cool!

"Why the obsession with advertising, dude?" I know that's what you're asking. I guess all I can say is that the deal in WA is that yes, it becomes legal (if the federales don't invade), but only in a way subject to regulation, licensing, and taxes. The State won't want to highlight this argument except in retrospect after it has come true, but they finally bought the argument that every stoner for decades has proposed: "Make it legal, slap a tax on it, and kiss your budget woes goodbye." Well wake up, dude, 'cause your dream just came true. Oh, but your dealer is still illegal, and you may not find a store open when you want it, Midnight Toker. [Steve Miller's reference comes in halfway between Denver and Walsh on the official coolness scale, although I personally like the song because my given name happens to be "Space Cowboy."]

But the rest of the country isn't worried about NW stoners having to go to the man to get their weed. A lot of them are plain envious. I was in Oregon this week, and kept hearing people talking about it approvingly, from the guitar duo performing at a brewpub (not such a surprise, even though they kinda had narc haircuts) to a couple of 50-something women. Oregon got their own vote on the subject, and failed, making many of its people green with envy when they gaze across the river. 

One thing that wagging tongues say is that ending reefer Prohibition should tamp down the madness that goes with it. Legal products don't require gangsters or cartels, the logic goes. Unfortunately, we left it illegal for so long that said criminals are entrenched and may decide to corner the legal market (or at least lobby to outsource production) or branch out into other criminal lines of work, like expanding the kidnapping business into US territory. Who knows?

So I guess that's another reason I look at this economically; it's more predictable. Washington and Colorado, as early adopters, have a head start on the money to be made by honest citizens (as well as corporations). Washington's initiative was supposedly crafted to avoid any hint of interstate commerce or anything that would make the feds clamp down,...other than the "We just legalized a Schedule 1 drug prohibited by federal law," aspect, of course. 

But until the clampdown those nice ladies from Oregonian might pay us a visit. There is a sizable 'respectable underground' in this country that would like to smoke pot without worrying about it, and I suspect that there will a pronounced up-tick in people planning trips here to, uh, go salmon fishing, or sailing, or skiing, or hiking, or all those other things that are so fun to do while stoned.

Both Colorado and Washington have outdoors-oriented tourism sectors, which are a good fit with ganja tourism, but other businesses should gain as well. The Seattle music scene stands to become appreciated once more. Excellent craft breweries, wineries, and coffee houses provide models for profitable new revenue streams. Both states boast, I am sure, goodly numbers of professionals who grow very high quality product, as well as legal but struggling farmers who may do very well turning out mass quantities of commodity pot. It will be very interesting to see what niches and markets emerge as hidden talents emerge from the shadows.

So for the time being, only a couple of states have legalized this extremely popular, US-made, un-subsidized, herb. Even if they do not become tourism magnets, Colorado and Washington stand to gain by replacing court and incarceration expenditures with tax and fee revenue. I think there are 15 or so states with legalized 'medical' marijuana, as WA and CO had settled for until this week. [To all the critics who said that was just a sneaky way to legalize pot for recreation, who warned that this medicine was a gateway drug to, uh, well just to more pot--you were right!] The point is that Washington and Colorado might want to consolidate their positions before other states jump on the bandwagon.

Speaking of which, there's always the possibility of national action. I would think that the Republicans in the US House of Representatives would take notice of what looks like a win-win:

• Legalized pot could be taxed, and the Speaker could act like it's not really a new tax
• (And besides, it would be a greater burden on liberals than on the GOP, as long as you're not counting the wastrel scions)
• Supporting legalization might just bring the Libertarians back into the fold
• It might just work to have liberals lazy and happy
• In 4-6 years the GOP could claim credit for the whole idea if it works. 

In the meantime, Washington and Colorado will have fun and maybe reap the benefits of liberaltarian policy. The Tea Party will rail against the Wrong plant-based intoxicant and the socialists who smoke it, while grandmas fret about what is happening to the world. The general public might repeat the "Rocky Mountain High" quip, but mostly just won't care. A few (million) will start making travel plans...

Grass

Some while ago, I took to upon myself to turn a sunny westerly slope into Eastern Washington. Sure, Olympia lacks basalt and the interior's ferocious sun, but drainage was good and due to some oversight there was no second-growth doug-fir blocking the sun. In came a few plugs of prairie and some shrubbe-steppe-seeds. Sages tridentata and ludovica with whatever rhizomes and bulb hitchhiked in the root-balls. Camas (nevermind the single common name, this includes multiple species).


But one thing I've learned, is that if you aim to reproduce a meadow, a wild-esque prairie, you need to have a major grass component. 


OK. I learned that from reading books. Which--in order to be produced in sufficient quantity to reach an occasional book-buyer like myself--must be produced in mass quantities, and therefore subject to dumb-down market demands or a dedicated/devoted publishing house. Sometimes, I would like to think, I find a rare treasure of ethnobotany or farm-team Esoterica agronomus through sheer determination, but these cases are random, and I'm not religious enough to attach any particular significance to such revelations. 


Whatever doubt I may have about "the literature," there's no particular reason doubt the importance of grass in meadows, and so I've only weeded out the cheatgrass and that rhizomatous, centapedoid crap is that creeps in from the relict (and, were I to ignore it, revengeful) lawn. I've even gathered seed from certain grasses that look cool. One day, I'll get around to ID-ing the species in the photos above, but for now it is enough to know that I got some pretty Plateau grasses growing in Olympia (without too much ecologuilt, since species from over there will succumb to dark-damp cold before they can get to be too much of a problem on this side of the mountain, in an area already heavily disturbed).


If you waded through those ramblings, my apologies. Really, I just posted because I'd spent time tweaking those photos, and didn't want the time to goto waste.

Backroads: Habitat

Mmmm. Shoulder verdure.

Roadless wilderness is a sublime thing...I've been told. Like most of you, I've never been that far from some sort of road. Maybe I have a pretty loose definition (re-arranged lines of 'a'a lava that would kill any car, 'Opihi Road on Moloka'i, Grays Harbor County ruts sporting alder just small enough to barrel through, tire tracks through pastures,...the list goes on), but still, I've rarely been more than a couple of miles from a motor vehicle trail of some kind. Old rail grades, rotten remnants of corduroy, routes traveled once by horses iron or meaty--maybe little more than a scar on the land now, but evidence of prior human traffic nonetheless. Sometimes these routes are harder to walk, much less drive, than the non-road nearby, but the point is that these are not pristine, wild places.

And yet, nature always reclaims them. Weeds sprout (rudely or restoratively so? depends on your perspective, or maybe your human hubris score) into the most heavily traveled roads in the nation. Even if the DOT crews manage to spray them, still the undersides and crevices and shoulders support spores and seeds and all manner of microbial life ready to start the reclamation process again.

Until there is a verdure. I've driven enough places poorly traveled to recognize the progression: forbs climbed by vines pierced by seedlings topped by a relentless future that tunnelizes the road before erasing it entirely. As long as the road is still maintained, the progression stops somewhere along that line, but on the back roads I spend so much time driving, it has begun, and stands poised to pounce. The day after construction, the artery begins to narrow. Some growth happens between tire tracks, but the real action is at the boundaries of this incursion, flanks subject to constant attack as nature abhors the biological vacuum of exposed subsoil or fresh gravel. Grading, mowing, chainsaw work all sweep it open to one degree or another, but in fact all back roads are terminal patients, and the further out they are, the more reliant they are on extensive life support.

Or from another angle, they return to life support. The early succession plants feed critters from mice to moose. Tribes used to burn their trails and other clearings in the forest for exactly this reason, to provide forage. Where can the four-leggeds find something to eat? Not in the dark understory of decades-old trees, but there's plenty along the road shoulder mowed last fall. Eventually, salal and salmonberry establish themselves, setting out a berry buffet. Roads tend to track in weeds, it is true, but this includes blackberry and other species that despite their alien-ness (and maybe egged on by their invasiveness) quickly establish themselves as abundant food source for native animals. On each shoulder lies a line of edge habitat, between the flat barren road and the forest or field or sage beyond is a strip of ecotone, often with resources not available outside it. There may be a ditch in a dry land, a berm raised above swamp, some anomaly that creatures will recognize and exploit.

These back roads, the more remote of which only see the occasional vehicle, have been adopted by some of the wildlife for travel as well. In a park where they know they are protected, you can see deer and elk making use of the open paths, pausing sometimes until cars come to a standstill, but in wilder places the animals generally yield the right of way, bounding off in that moment when they can hear your truck, but before you see them. Bears make heavy use of the roads, much easier traveling than having to haul those big bodies through the woods (not to mention the berry buffet, always a sure lure for the ursine).

I'm not an advocate for more roads. There are too many already, and it bums me out to see the number of newer roads failing to make use of older road beds, adding insult to injury, braiding ever broader impacts. Something about sitting up on a D-9 makes a guy want to cut new ground, not dress up something pioneered long ago. Pressure from environmentalists and the First People mean that a new road now may be less likely to be an ecological disaster than a new one 50 years ago, but they still become scars. Culverts clog and become landslides sometimes, ripping far larger gashes in the landscape. Sadly, some of these are built for a single use, from the wagon roads built by the army and abandoned all in a few 19th Century years to the ones still built for a timber harvest that won't be needed for another 80 years or so (at which time the dozer operator will scoff at the design and rip open a new one).

But it is also a mistake to plan as if this will stop. Or to believe that we humans are so powerful that we've permanently ruined a placed by driving into it. We drive back to our homes, and the plants grow, the animals traipse and browse. Nature cushions the blow, eventually makes the road something only an archaeologist would recognize. She shrugs it off, beginning with the shoulders.

Garden 7: Volunteers

 

They come every year, volunteers. If they didn't, I'd despair at the bare areas. Even when their aim is off and I transplant them to another spot, I depend on these plants that come back on their own, no tilling or planting, no slaving at saving seeds and protecting them from damp weather and damned predators.

The volunteers just pop up. Some I've come to expect. The calendulas, dill, and red shamrock pictured above all fall in that category, just like the little Hawaiian currant tomatoes that I plant exactly once at each new abode, thereafter peeking between and beneath each Spring's growth to spot the volunteers that will ramble and rove, dropping enough seeds by fall to ensure the next generation. 

Some gardeners look down on volunteers and weed them out. Even varieties they like, they want from new seed or starters, placed in their appointed position. These may be the same folks who pray to a god for some particular outcome, who think that deity and power concerns itself with placing all the pieces of creation just so, with dictating their moves forever after. Me, I'm happy to be a lackadaisical creator, casting some seed and letting evolution take its course. Maybe now and then playing the vengeful god, ripping out a greedy weed, cutting short the life of an underachiever, unnaturally selecting out the obnoxious and weak. 

But then again, I tolerate a fair number of what some people call weeds. It might be different if I gardened in a more pristine environment, but I live in a residential development, in what was once an orchard in what was once a clear-cut in what was once a successional forest in what was once a prairie in what was once a virgin forest. Maybe not all of those, but a disturbed landscape nonetheless, where a red shamrock or a tomato does no real harm. If the weed be yummy, fragrant, or otherwise delightful, it is a volunteer.

In enough abundance, a patch of volunteers might be thinned into something approximating a row, but their nature is never so boring as that. A geometry more fractal and chaotic than linear, expanding sometimes exponentially, their math has what my dad always loved about that field, wonder and elegance, something very different than the cut and dried thing it is thought to be by the unimaginative.

Each volunteer is a mystery and a miracle. I never know how many there will be, or where they will emerge. Some, I don't remember having planted last year, or maybe ever. They may be gifts or offerings from the birds and rodents who also enjoy the garden. They may have awoken from some long dormancy, echo of a garden decades old. Some trickster may have planted them to see whether I could recognize a gift. Others reappear year after year, sensing that they are wanted and loved.

Every volunteer is a step on the evolutionary journey. Drifted from the carefully selected product of the seedsman, perhaps, but closer to being perfectly adapted to this place. Diversified and crossed, selected by nature so local it knows my yard better than anywhere else. Roots feeding hyphae feeding soil, growing a horizon particular to this garden, which will spawn who knows what new variation. Volunteers save us from the hubris of over-selection, from the trap of uniformity sought by the big corporate seed builders. 

And besides, who can hate something that pops up on its own, offering gifts? Whoever cannot love an echo that returns and blooms is deaf to the joy of creation.

Garden 6: We Love Weeds

 

Weeds. I've waxed spewetic on the subject before, but cannot let it be. Weeds are in the eye of the beholder, and the stupider the eye, the more abundant they are. Or in some cases, the more educated the eye. I work with people who know native plants and their exotic foes so well, but myself, I fall back to the questions of the earthling: Is it edible? Therapeutic? Good smelling? Just plain purty?

If yes, it don't deserve eradication. UNless maybe you can answer 'yes' to: Is it a bully?

Pictured above is a foxglove, Digitalis. It as uses to those who know how to heal hearts with it. For me, not so knowledgeable in pharmaceuticals, it's just pretty, and that's healing enough. I likes me some purple and green. I imagine how the hair inside tickle honeybee belly and laugh myself. Tempting an tubular, oh the bells. 

So yeah, I may yank a few of these here and there: where they take up space more fruitfully filled by something else, where they'll grow only spindly and weak, but not in the odd corner, not in the driveway egde where a flower would liven things up.

I love me some weeds. Accidental (didn't see them coming), ornamental (but my, aren't they lovely), blessings (going with the flow has its rewards).

Not Opening Day

Turns out I jumped the gun, and the Farmers Market opens the first Thursday of April, not the first weekend. Bogus.

But that left more time for foraging. To begin with, garage sale style. I happened on happiness: a sale underadvertised, a house with a lifetime of stuff, miraculously unravaged by early birds and dealers. Then it turns out that the guy who accumulated it shares my name, right down to the non-standard pronunciation. I now have his thermos, the kind my dad and namesake uncle both carried, right down to the replacement handle (it's missing the cup, but I have one). And a vice that can clamp to the workbench, which is something I've been looking for for decades. Perfect. The guy's bowling ball even fit my digits like a glove, a crazy head-konking fatigue-inducing glove. 

Then later, some outside foraging. My younger daughter walked with me to a neighborhood park plagued with stinging nettles, which are still pickable. She played on the swing and explored the woodland path while I squatted and snapped the tender tips, filling a couple of grocery bags. I'll make a quiche for dinner tonight, and freeze the rest. Probably will pick another couple rounds, freezing some and drying the rest for tea, before the season is over. Once you cover yourself to keep from getting stung, nettles are easy to gather, because they form dense patches and love to colonize trail margins, and nobody laments their disappearance or diminishment.

I guess I'm supposed to have some nice photos, food porn shots: macro focus on the hoary purple-green leaf buds (ok, maybe marijuana porn) laying on a richly orange wooden table fuzzing into the depth of field, the hand-made Andean basket filled with a Van Gogh swoosh of sprigs, stuff like that. But what I have is a pair of plastic grocery bags full of wet  smooshed leaves.

But they were free. It was a nice opening day.

Sprout

Since the winter solstice (26 days ago), I've been cooped up aside from wandering the wind-froze canyons of Portland for a couple or three days. Tending the fire and a cold, scrounging up meals, near hibernation. A big cold snapped and sent clouds running for a few days, but the little cold kept me in for the most part, watching the hoar accumulate in the long winter shadows until it looked like we'd been snowed on. I ventured no farther than the woodpile and the bus stop. (And let's be honest, like most middle class enviros, I took the car ride when offered and the bio-fueled bus thus rode on one rider less efficiently.)

But coming home from work the other day, done with a hard week and virtuously waiting for the bus, I saw the light. Twilight, I guess, but anything that keeps the 5:30 sky from being something other than dark counts in winter. Like thousands of generations before me, I breathed a sigh of relief that the days would not just keep getting shorter forever, felt in my ear the tenderotic breath of Persephone.

So today when the clouds thinned and the rain that has pissed incessantly on the south sound since the sunshine daydream let up for a couple of hours, I fled outside. Needed to flea the air in this house: smoked by fireplace, caughed by denizens, staled by cold and spored by mold.

Required as well--fingers in the earth. So it was into the front, to a triangle of bare dirt and its assortment of uninvited and well intended plants. Down on my hands and knees pulling weeds, killing my back but healing my soul. On a material level, the goal was to get rid of dandelions and cheatgrass, clover and other aggressives, root out the competition for the collection of camas and lomatia, bitterroot and alliums, a suite of eats native to the northwest, if not exactly the Puget basin. This will be a meadow, dotted with sage and lavendar. I'll probably wait til another round of weeds sprout, then slice their roots and let them die before putting out the mixed bag of seeds I've been collecting east of the Cascades. The front yard, in full sun and tilted to get the most of it in summer, is my microcosmic eastern Washington.

At the bottom of the yard is a garlic patch. Over a dozen dozen sets surrounding a small cherry tree. Set out last October in the lowest part of the yard, and thus the wettest and coldest, the garlic was a worry for me. The patch froze hard within a couple or three weeks of having been planted, and then it got warmer and wet. The pattern happened again around New Years, with a bigger freeze and complete saturation after. I figured there'd be heavy losses.

And it looks like that even as you walk up to the patch. Only down on all fours, fingertweezing out offending grasses, are the sprouts visible. In the meadow too, tips of tulips and tiny bursts of bitterroot appear to eyes in near-earth orbits. As the weeds come out, violets come to light. Get microscopic in the microcosmos, and signs of emergence are everywhere. In among the mouldering leaves of last year, lavendar shoots emanate. Sedum, beat up and rolled around over the winter, has unveiled the genius of it's strategy, setting down roots from every scattered frag so they can knit themselves together and blanket the poorest ground. Budswell (gods, how I love saying that word)
has begun on blueberries and saskatoon, fat embryonic liko getting ready to greet the air.

It doesn't take much to make me happy. A few more minutes of daylight, the tintiest indication of growth...the promise of a phenomenal future when grey births green, when foliage feeds flowers, when seeds escape their stale dull insides and start growing, reborn and eternal.

Holy Water! (said like Robin in the Batman TV show)

It's half past noon on Sunday, and the vast parking lot of the church at the end of our road is empty. The lot filled up for an hour, shuttle buses brought people from satellite lots, then everyone left. Some come back on Saturday for something or other, but for the most part people seem convinced that popping in for an hour is all they need to attain salvation. Oh, that and tithing to the church.

This particular place is called Church of the Living Water, but Church of the Killing Irony would be better, since they paved over a spring to build the place. More than an acre of impervious roof and asphalt, and so of course there's a big bulldozed basin intended to mitigate the damage to the wetland, or at least catch some of the storm runoff they create. By way of landscaping, there are parking lot islands of grass and some trees, and a genteel kill zone of pure grass on the street wide. Pure, luxurient grass and nary a weed in sight, which of course means hefty doses of chemicals. These run off into 18th street and eventually down to Indian Creek, a waterway as abused by the American experience as the people it's named after.

And this outfit has the gall to proclaim itself Church of the Living Water.

Of course, truth be told, the Lutherans, as old a Christian church as you can get without sticking to the original Catholic brand, have recently expanded their church (a block away) and also had to dig a big stormwater 'pond' (yay government!). There's is nicer looking, having some shrubs instead of just weeds.

Meanwhile, a block or so in the other direction, the Jehovah's Witnesses just started on a new Kingdom Hall. Ripped out some trees and of course all the blackberries a few weeks before they would have ripened. For two solid months now the construction crew has showed up, pushed dirt around, and left for random lengths of time. Basically all they've done is make their wetland pit. Last week they put down straw and hydro-seeded it. Which, in case you are not privy to landscaping terms means they pulled up with a tank truck full of water, chemicals, grass seed, and green dye, and sprayed it over the ground. The least natural and most ungodly way imaginable to make something grow.

It will work, establishing a hideous alien monocrop that will, chemical warfare aside, turn host to whatever other weeds drift in. I'm hoping for blackberries, personally, as a sign that even if god doesn't mind having flocks out trashing all Creation, at least evolution can achieve balance, or at least a bit o irony.

Maybe, maybe not. Better odds than hoping for a vengeful lord to smite the Church of the Living Parking Lot, though.

Fringe Flora

For a while I did archaeology on Kaua’i, which is at least as fun as you would imagine, despite a psychopathic thug who kept threatening me and one long, rainy, snot-filled stint when I did permanent damage to my wrist wrestling through packed clay. The reward for that was spending days in the presence of Makana (watching the wind place misty lei around the mountain again and again), that and some secret things you cannot hear.

I did more excavation there and then than I had since my initiation in a certain O’ahu valley. A fair volume of dirt moved, for sure, but more importantly a high rate of hitting things. Not cool artifacts and valuable museum pieces, but deep stratification, a cache or two, clear-cut features. And lots of charcoal.

Which is what helped me come up with the idea of a “settlement fringe flora.”

Generations of farmers, cooks, and eaters lay down blankets of soil. Cultivation and fallow, cooking and cleaning, occupation and abandonment: all these things lay down a record. All these things make rubbish and soil, holes and backfill, deposits and discontinuities that archaeologists come along later and read. Charcoal that gets buried in the process, the carbon sequestration incidental to human life, embodies a history of the environment (at least the woody part of it). Locked in charcoal is the cell structure of a plant, and patient experts could be hired for a dollar a minute to decode this. The information gained is especially useful when you use it to choose samples for radiocarbon dating, and start looking at things over time.

By buying a few hours of this service, I was able to find the obvious: that the 20th Century had wreaked havoc. Also an earlier chapter: arrival of Polynesian farmers caused discernible but less drastic changes like disappearance of some endemics and introduction of some useful plants. Both of these are examples of selection, intentional or not, cultural or natural, evolution’s famous cutting edge.

But what was really interesting to me was that in taro fields and villages alike, certain species managed to stick around through centuries of human presence. Akoko, Kukui, Lama, Ulei,...these four tended to show up whenever there was a fire. The first and last of these make perfect sense in terms of their own adaptation--they can colonize disturbed areas, they are abundant and not too long-lived, they flood the landscape, especially when humans are around and not planting exotic weeds.

Kukui? Not native, but also not necessarily the type of aggro plant that invades and takes over. No, it’s one of those plants that accommodates people so well that they help it along. The plant one, and it will provide oil, wood, dyes, glue, compost, medicine, even a reminder of a god. The hardshelled nuts will roll downhill or hide in soil for years, ready to sprout and make more.

Lama? This is the surprise. Diospyros sandwicensis, Hawaiian ebony (paradoxically pale wood and all). Not the fastest grower or reproducer, possessed of spiritual significance, and not what you would necessarily expect to be burnt willy nilly. Yet it shows up in many a fire pit. Partly, this is just a physical peculiarity, the hardwood probably preserves better than many species. But I have recovered it in areas where it would have been wiped out in a generation of uncontrolled harvest, where the only way for it to have been used over the long run would be for people to maintain its presence (conservation or cultivation? I dunno).

These four species, I think, are part of a fringe flora. Plants that occur around human settlements. All had uses in the organic technology of Hawaiians, all provided fuel to warm and cook, all escaped extirpation. All maintained some place in an environment settled and farmed, all occupied a Polynesian landscape in evolutionary stasis.

Tender

Native blackberries of the NW snake along the ground. They weave windfall twigs and failing fronds and each other into the mat of forest soil. They snag hiker feet and even though the thorns are pretty small, people pretty much think of them as a nuisance. A few know that the berries are supremely tasty, but they are tiny and sparse on the ground compared to the Himalayan blackberries clinging to every roadside and vacant lot in the NW like some savage velcro mutant.

But I've been letting them carpet the wildish back strip of the yard for the past couple of years, and this year I spent a few more hours messing with the weave. I plucked mustard weed, which unchecked will shade out the berries. Pinched some leaders, rerouted and rooted others. Avoided walking through the patch.

Gave that blackberry blanket some tender loving care. Because I am tender of this tiny piece of earth, and tend to think that something that's native and nutritious is worth tending to.

I could, and sometimes do, make like I do stuff like this for noble reasons (just ask my family who have to hear my spoutings, not just via blogview, but at any odd hour), but I just like spending time outside rapt up in some job, especially when it will end up yielding food. The work itself is pretty easy if you remember that nature is boss and sets the schedule; a few minutes of weeding now might take an hour in two weeks, and still won't bring back the sun swiped in the interim.

In this case, the earth reciprocated. The berries this year are huge compared to what you generally find in the wild. Freed from some of the competition by my selection (seemed natural enough to me), they sucked up soil and sun and now lie fat and sweet and happy in the morning dew.

Which is probably how people became tenders in the first place. Those big eyes saw something tasty and the big brain figured out that it was because of the gap in the canopy or the lack of some other plant or last summer's fire. Most archaeologists would say agriculture is on the order of 10,000 years old, and recognize that humans have used fire to change the landscape for tens of millenia. I think it's also pretty likely that there are a bunch of behaviors invisible to archaeologists that are deep in our past and have to do with tending the earth to get more food. Things like weeding, clearing, peeing at the base of a tree, ripping down branches for shelters,...who knows how long our kind of ape has been doing these things? (Maybe longer than we consciously did anything to make food grow; corn is not the only plant that evolved to trick humans into giving it an unfair edge.)

So, the blackberries can depend on tender-hearted me.

New Old Tools

Ever since I stopped passing myself off as a landscape professional, diverting always some share of the income to new toys, I've had to curb the buying. Garden purchases mostly come in 4-inch pots. And to avoid debt, the total budget for gardening has been cut back pretty hard this spring.

So having a couple of new tools in the past week has been a treat. And these are the best kinds of new tools: old ones.

First, I took a handle-less shovel I'd found and cut away all but the leading edge and the, uh, handle-hole, or whatever that's called. Then I ground the resulting crescent to a sharp edge all around, taking the time to douse it in cold water every few seconds, preserving the temper. Fortunately, a branch I'd just cut off an alder fit the tool just right, it's long arc perfectly swooping up so I can stand there and shuffle the blade across the ground, slicing roots quickly and ruthlessly. Works like a dream (if your dreams are as strange as mine). So there you have it: trash to tool, abandoned spade reborn as a weed-slayer.

Then there's the thing I picked up at a local school yard sale. Lovely leaf-shaped blade, tapered also from a stout center to the sharp edge, worthy of a lance in some forgotten emperor's honor guard. The handle is basically a D welded to the base end, hammer marks evident. The name engraved on the blade is "C Wells & Sons, Rochester NY," which turns out to be a firm operating in the 1890s. No idea what it is, but the history alone is worth the 5 bucks I paid (maybe even $5.50), and I've already used this to pop some old growth dandelions from their earthfast homes, slice some edging to crisp perfection, and scare the kids. Once again, yard sale preservation at work.

Oh My Biomass

On some Sundays, before the righteous are even dressing for church, I'm out in creation laboring away: pruning, weeding, digging, planting.

For some reason, there's always something left over. Twigs and branches and boles. Dandelion roots and blackberry canes. Sods of clover, grass, and weeds.

Residential neighborhoods tend to evict that stuff. Maybe just toss it into the municipal woods to fend for itself, but more likely put it in a greenwaste bin, a couple of mechanized dumps and a short drive from municipal compost heap. Or if you don't want monthly bills for that service, you can haul and pay it yourself when the mood strikes.

The mood strikes me just about never.

Big enough branches and the tree I took down last year provide home and cooking heat. Sticks that suit become bean and hop poles (if I cn get them before they become tipi poles for the kids). Whippy withes become all sorts of things, as befits their flexibility. Wee twigs and leaves subside into soil eventually.

Then there's the less benign stuff, weeds exotic and aggressive. Not that I'm a persistent eradicator, but when I dig a new bed or eliminate less tasty competition from garden ground, I don't let the biomass escape. Because grass clods re-root so readily here in the misty northwest, I pile them in a couple of places, tamping them down into new topographic features: a terrace in the front, a low escarpment in back where blueberries will one day be that much closer to the sun. In the darkest backest part of the back yard, a few pick-up loads of mixed windfall wood, weeds, sods, stray gravel, and bark have developed into a woodland plateau.

Just as the various sizes of alder wood have their specific uses, so do other vegetative resources. Conifer bark weed control, cedar leaf acid mulch for berries, alder leaf blanket mulch for dahlias, alder and hazelnut catkin soil amendment, and on and on. Every leftover is a feast, seen from the right angle.

Meanwhile, a box of redworms quietly eat their way through all the vegetable trimmings and leftovers, pooping out fertilizer. I just added a second box. After cookouts (using the downed alder, as if you needed to ask), I cut off the oxygen flow, and the next day stir ashes and charcoal into the soil. Besides the fertilizing benefit for this year's garden, the fire leavings will be good substrate for morel mushrooms. As an archaeologist, I've often seen another benefit of this: buried charcoal is durable and persistent in the soil; it is low-tech carbon sequestration. (And yeah, I know, a bunch of CO2 smoked up off the grill, but I had to eat.)

So, no green-waste can here. A partial can of recyclables every other week. A 25 gallon trash can on the other every other week. One trip to the dump in a year. That's about it. The rest is destined to return to the earth right here.

Until I have a lot more time, I'll be a net importer of biomass. I don't grow hardly any food, to be honest, so almost all of those veggie scraps came from some other piece of earth. In the past couple of years, I've also brought in somewhere between one and two pickup loads of compost, mulch, and peat moss to amend the sandy soil here, and to help along new trees and such. That rate should slow down this year, and I am hoping that as I keep cycling the yard's biomass back into soil, and start producing more fruit and vegetables here at home, the trade imbalance will even out some.

The funny thing is that this is all pretty radical to most people, even in crunchy green Olympia. I have a neighbor who always offers me any spare space in her greenwaste bin, but actually I think she's the only one who notices hat a biomass hoarder I am, and that's just because she knows I use it all, not so much because she can point to some pile of weeds or moldering wood.

Weedboy

To be a weed: an ambition most rare. A bad joke to most, but a guiding principal to me. I want to grow like a weed, to survive and thrive beyond my native range.


For what is a weed but a success in the wrong place? Globalization, climate change, even good old fashioned cross-pollination, what are these all if not foreminders that the finicky curators of the world will never win? Most of the “pristine” environments of the world are illusions—the Amazon rainforest was once an Indian garden, the Virginia woodlands of 1606 an oft-burnt game park—and all of them will change and morph as new arrivals come. Some of the new arrivals wreak havoc when freed from the strictures of their homes—the frowning disapproval of elders, the clampdown of the predator’s jaw—some species are like those drunken sailors on liberty, running roughshod over locals and dispersing their seed wherever they can. Even in this, though, even in their sneaking or invading, there can be value, as like a virus they test the strength of their hosts, the strongest of which gain immunity, bear stronger offspring, and adjust or outlast the exotic pathogen.


But I am no apologist for the weeds that wipe out the native species, and don’t aspire to that. I seek humbler weedhood: the kind that takes hold in harsh un-vegetated lava flows and sidewalks, that crawled out of a swamp but can make do in a desert, that can be whacked all summer and sprout anew in the spring. Stubborn, ineradicable, persistent, stoic, broken but not bowed: possessed of a continuum of obstinacies despicable and fidelities admirable.


Weeds grow paradoxes. I am the ugly flower nobody suspects of wafting sweet airs, a mysterious and unexpected gift, rewarding most fully only the curious who will take the time to put their nose to the dirt. I am the koa haole, scrawny invader tree whose spindly shade nurses young endemics, whose taproots break eroded hardpan and start soil growing again, feeding it with nitrogen fixing nodules, whose succession eventually runs its course and moves elsewhere.


I am the medicine hidden in the cells, known best to the uneducated peasants.


I am the dandelion in the lawn, relentlessly poisoned or pried up by most, but still offering gifts to any and all who can see them. Yellow cheer to the sad. Fluffy toys to the ticklish and the kids whose breath still blows happy winds. Healthy greens and roots to the hungry. Wine to the parched. Life’s renewed foothold in the paved and smothered land.


Weeds wander, and make homes wherever they can. Quick to recognize the hospitality of the plowman. Wont to spread their seed far and wide. Ready to try new fields. Happy to occupy the fringes and exhausted places spurned by affected cultivars. Able to pull up roots and move in when it is time, or to put them down as opportunities arise. Likely to improvise with roots from stems, sprouts from half-eaten bits and old damaged seed. Always a thumb out to hitch a ride in a boot, a feather, a gust.


Unafraid to land and try growing in someplace new and unexpected. Weeds pioneer where others would hesitate, and are seldom heard to complain when the place they improved gets gentrified, pushing them out again (although they do tend to sneak back in the second you turn your back).