morning thoughts

Morning thoughts (9): doing what comes natural in the garden

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The garden at rest, January 2, 2022

No sooner has the New Year arrived than thoughts about gardening come up like newly-sprouted seeds. Never mind how many times I told myself last summer, as I got down daily on my hands and knees to pull weeds, that I was going to cut back on the size of the garden next season: the seed catalogues have arrived, and this old heart yearns for spring.

So, then why, when I look out the kitchen window, do I smile at the sight of snow starting to fall, with more to come every day this week? Because, on our morning walk, as the dogs and I passed the front garden where I planted numerous rows of garlic last fall, I heard them say, we’re cold. The garlic, I mean.

Okay, I know that’s a tad imaginative, maybe more. But as I approach four-score years of being on this precious little planet I feel like I’m entitled to some flights of fancy. Besides, if there’s one or two things I’ve learned in recent years, anything is possible, both good, and not. But let’s say a prayer for ‘good’ in 2022. It is sorely needed.

The reason why I’m happy to see snow is because an extra layer of insulation is good for the wintering garlic. Yes, it’s winter-hardy, remarkably so, but there is a limit. I follow ‘the book’ on garlic when, after planting, I covered the rows with plenty of fresh, clean wheat straw. That straw is now largely exposed, amid what’s left of the mid-December snow that mostly melted after the unseasonably mild weather that followed. But the temperature fell to -14 Celsius last night, and the sooner the garlic gets a fresh layer of snow-insulation, the better.

And then there’s also the expanded strawberry patch, with six rows of strawberry runner-plants transplanted last September. Some will say spring is better for transplanting; but over the years, I’ve had good luck with early fall. Strawberries also overwinter well, with the help of a good layer of straw insulation. Even so, I’ll be happy to see the snow come for their sake as well.

Jorden and Grandpa, and friends, in the garden

Those who love gardening will understand how one develops a personal relationship with plants. I suppose it’s best described as a matter of faith: the idea that good feelings are expressed, and exchanged back and forth; and that, I swear, is beneficial to the growth of a healthy garden. That and the good, old routine of the gardener’s hard work.

This seems like a good place to say, I don’t and never will use herbicide, including and especially those containing the active ingredient Glyphosate, with the main one being the first, Monsanto’s Round-up. Such herbicides are now used in vast quantities around the world in large-scale commercial farming; to the extent that it’s hard to buy food free of glyphosate residue. I daresay that’s one of the reasons why grow-your-own gardening is booming. Those of us who have the land to do that are indeed fortunate, especially if that land is as far away as possible from areas of extensive, cash-crop farming because of the risk of glyphosate-spray drift.

Yes, I hoe and pull weeds, hopefully before they go to seed; and thus, I kill plants. Some will compose and add organic matter to the soil. Some, like twitch grass, the farmer/gardeners’ worst nightmare, are better burned. But the whole idea of spraying chemicals on the field or the garden before planting or emergence, and thus leaving glyphosate residue in the soil for any amount of time, strikes me as utterly unnatural. Worst of all is spraying herbicide just before harvest, to stop the plant from growing and to begin the drying process. That’s called ‘staging.’ How can that be good, when the fact is glyphosate residue remains in many of the foods people eat? Canadian government food-safety regulators say the levels are not high enough to pose a threat to human health. But do you really want to eat Glyphosate?

Anyway, after that bit of drumbeating about my glyphosate obsession, bon chance with your garden in 2022. And may the love be with you.

A view of the garden, early summer a few years ago. Many rows of potatoes, onions and kale.

Morning thoughts (7): Ravens speak on Christmas morning

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Grey and misty this Christmas morning, as we walked to the touchstone down Cathedral Drive. In the woods over to the west, one of the family of ravens that lives there was calling persistently, a kind of ‘whoop, whoop’ sound. I took it to mean, in the fog, “where is everybody?” For a few seconds there was no response. But then came a lower-voiced, continued croaking, as if to say, “we’re here, we’re here, don’t worry.”

“My ravens,” I called them a few years ago when a mating couple built an impressively large nest up high in the barn where two, big, hand-hewed beams meet. That was in the spring of the year. Later, in the late fall, when we were walking back one morning and the first snow of big, fluffy flakes came down, the parent ravens and their three, young offspring flew over from the barn. And I swear, just over our heads, they danced in the snow, wheeling and soaring joyfully. It was as if they were putting on a show, sharing their joy with us. I stopped to watch, and so did my dogs, Buddy and Sophie. No barking, just watching. And then the ravens flew away into the trees on the other side of the house, where they chattered back and forth to each other for a while, pleased, perhaps with their performance.

I don’t know why, maybe because I took visitors over one too many times to admire the Raven nest, but a couple of years later they set up ‘house’ in the woods near the barn. Or maybe they were just expanding their territory into the hardwood forest that stretches far to the west alongside the old hay field being allowed to regenerate back to the forest it once was — claiming back its territory, you might say.

So much for close to a century of back-breaking work, the hopes and dreams, of the weary, struggling settlers and their children who cleared that long, winding field through the forest; and then, like most of their neighbors, ended up selling the farm too cheap to Dow Chemical almost 50 years ago. But Hope Ness didn’t become one big limestone quarry; all that land about 2.000 acres (800 hectares) of it, became Ontario Crown land, with some of it now called The Hope Bay Nature Reserve, by Ontario Parks. I count myself fortunate to have ended up living here, surrounded by that nature reserve, on a few acres of what used to be one of those farms.

And so it goes, in the life of humankind. Who knows what or who will be here a hundred, a thousand, a million years from now? But I wouldn’t be at all surprised, if I were somehow able to go forward in time, to find ravens still here.

For a while, a few years ago when the family of ravens had vacated the barn, I wondered if they moved away, found a new territory. I even hoped to a certain extent it wasn’t because I had in some way offended them. But if they left it was only for a little while. they seem at home still in the nearby forest. And when the dogs and I go for our morning walk, the ravens greet us with what I fancy may be the ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’ chorus.

I mean these intelligent, interesting, talkative, fun-loving creatures no harm. To be completely honest, I’d prefer they weren’t nest robbers. I can still see the sky-blue remains of robin’s eggs I found one morning on the driveway near the house. For all I know, maybe they saw my reaction, and chose to make a territorial adjustment on that account when they left the barn.

And ravens are the last thing a cattle farmer wants to see around his herd, especially when new calves are about. Yes, it’s true, amid all its beauty, nature can be cruel.

Ah, the myriad of thoughts, some of them perplexing, that come to mind on a morning walk because the ravens were heard talking.

But having a sense of wonder is, after all, the key that opens up one’s heart, mind, and soul to the ultimate wonder: the appreciation of this sacred gift of being alive, this opportunity, this journey of being and becoming, and where it leads.

Morning thoughts (6): An azure-pink sky, the silence, the music of life

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Rising more or less at first light, the beloved ritual of morning coffee and quiet reflection duly observed, the online morning news perused – the Tiananmen Pillar of Shame unceremoniously removed by a paranoid regime at Hong Kong University; a reclusive American heiress living in Italy getting a lot of attention for inadvertently funding the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capital — I look up from the screen for a glimpse out the kitchen window facing west. The sky is a lovely, soft, azure-pink color. Astonishing.

I am moved to capture it: I grab my camera and go outside quickly as the dogs complain, wondering why they’re being left behind. But, outside, the moment has already passed, enough that the pink hue in the sky has started to fade.

I should know better, I tell myself, than to think I can, even for a brief moment, stop the natural flow of the world. “What conceit, man!” I tell myself. Buddy and Sophie, look at me questionably, appearing to agree. I give them their morning meal, and, with their usual joyful anticipation, we begin our morning walk down Cathedral Drive toward our waiting Touchstone.

Right away, I take note of the profound stillness in the air: not like yesterday morning when the nearby forests on both sides of the ‘no exit’ road roared in the strong wind, each trunk and infinity of winter-bare branches an instrument within the perfect, natural orchestra. I stop to observe the uppermost branches of ash and wild apple trees along the sides of the road: not a hint of a tremble among them.

In due course, I know, the still air will soon begin to move as the sun rises, prompting the winds to play their part again in the chorus of life.

But in the silence there is also music: a calmness of spirit, a moment of quiet reflection, a gathering of strength. The sky knows, the clouds know, the sun knows, the trees know, and every big or small creature in the forest, in the grass, and in the soil under the new, snow cover; they all know.

The music does not have to be analyzed, picked apart and explained, though that doesn’t necessarily hurt if you keep the essential ‘thou’ in mind: above all, it is heard and understood in the great mystery of heartfelt wonder and appreciation.

And so, dear hearts, this is how we nourish ourselves, as creatures of the world and of the spirit. And, just as important, this is how we nourish, and bring peace and hope to a troubled world.

Morning (evening) thoughts (4): “He would have proved most Royal”

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“My God, he’s been here before!”

So said my father when he first set eyes on me, just brought home from the hospital, when I happened to open my eyes just as he looked down into the crib. He covered his eyes with an arm and looked away in surprise, and, apparently, shock. That’s the story my mother told me many times when I was a boy. For some reason she never explained, or perhaps knew; in which case she must have felt instinctively it was something I should always remember.

And, so I have, though not precisely this morning when the sun rose in a mostly bright, blue sky. A few clouds were gathering on the horizons over Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. The day stayed cold and bright until late afternoon. But by early evening dark clouds were rising up on the horizons over Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, to the west and east respectively. I fed Buddy and Sophie, and a few minutes later we went for our ‘evening walk’ down Cathedral Drive to the touchstone.

I started thinking about how certain great poems or lines from Shakespearean plays have often come to mind; and not always when I’m in a mood and need that consolation. Sometimes, just the sound of words spoken dramatically, with the wind roaring through the bare branches of late-fall or winter trees — sometimes that’s more than enough reason; and I hold forth with lines like:

“Dark hills in the west, where sunset hovers like a sound of golden horns that sang to rest, old bones of warriors under ground,” the first few lines of The Dark Hills, one of my favourite poems, by the American poet, Edwin Arlington Robinson.

That led me to thinking about my father and how from an early age he loved words and devoured the great works of English literature, especially poetry, Shakespearean plays, and the short stories of Ernest Hemingway, who he regarded as an underrated author.

My father certainly certainly encouraged my own interest. I remembered one time in particular when I was 11 and we were still together as a family. He came into the living room and noticed I was reading a seriously thick, hardcover book. I think I got it from the school library.

“What are reading?” he asked. “Two Years Before the Mast,” I replied. He lit up with keen interest and recognition. He didn’t have to say, he had read it: it was written in his eyes. “A good book for a young man to read,” he said, as he sat down beside me. “You must be enjoying. I see you’re more than halfway through it. Good for you. Quite a story, isn’t it?” It was Richard Henry Dana’s classic, 1840 memoir of his two year journey as a young man from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the California coast. In those days, long before the Panama Canal was built, it was a long and perilous voyage down the Atlantic Ocean, through the Magellan Strait at the southern tip of South America to the Pacific Ocean, then north to California.

“Oh, yes,” I said, happy and proud to have my father’s approval.

It was about that time, either the Christmas before or after, when he gifted me with a bound copy of Mark Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Inside, he had written: “Read as a boy, understood as a man.”

My father’s formal education ended when he turned 15 and he went to work to help his poor family survive the Great Depression. At most he got a year or two of High School, at Western Technical School in Toronto.

He was born in 1923, and adopted as a newborn baby within days of his birth. He was just days away from his 20th birthday when he looked down into my crib and said what he said about me apparently having had a previous life. Where did that come from at such a young age, one might ask. He prided himself on being a rational man by then. But already, he had seen enough of life’s pain and heartache to inform his soul. The death of my parents’ first child, a baby-girl named Susan who died at birth, was especially painful. At that hospital, in those days, my mother was not allowed to see the body of her still-born baby. But my father saw her. I don’t know that he was ever the same again, though my much younger sister, who he also named, Susan, and my brother, David, have told me our father found some peace of mind before he died.

He died in Los Angeles, in August, 1970. He was just 47 years old. With his, literally, last breath, he reached out desperately for more. Life had not been kind to him in many ways, with being abandoned at birth his first misfortune. But he loved life with all the passion of his deep, though troubled being.

“For he was likely, had he been put on, to have proved most Royal …,” Shakespeare wrote for Fortinbras to say, after the death of Hamlet. That’s one of those lines I also often call out for someone to hear, somewhere. My father may have had good reason to do the same.

Had he seen those dark clouds gathering across the skies over Cathedral Drive and Hope Ness this evening, and felt the cold, ominous wind blowing out of the Northwest, I have no doubt he would want with all his heart and soul to savour even that precious moment of being alive again.

But what am I saying? He was there, of course.

Morning thoughts (3): potatoes and glyphosate don’t mix

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Potatoes and glyphosate were on my mind this morning as the dogs and I walked down Cathedral Drive to the touchstone.

That may come as no surprise in the worldwide community of Finding Hope Ness readers well aware of my continuing concerns about the risk vast quantities of weed-killing herbicide containing Glyphosate being sprayed on crops around the world may pose for human health.

And, yes, I have gone on and on about how much I like potatoes often enough, that some might shrug and say, ‘so, what else is new?’ and turn the page, so to speak. But bare with me.

I have taken it for granted that because I don’t use Round-up or any other herbicide containing the active ingredient glyphosate that my potatoes are free of it. But I bow my head. I confess, after all these years it has taken me too long to find out that may not be true.

So, the question now is: what to do? And the answer may be … Well, I won’t go so far as to say ‘life-changing,’ not in a world where ‘life-changing’ events have become an ongoing or sudden reality. Not being able to do the things you love and live to do because of Covid-related travel restrictions or because climate-change-related weather extremes have already destroyed your life’s work – that’s truly life-changing.

As a good friend has often said when something goes wrong, “it’s not the end of the world” if I have to stop growing potatoes. But I love doing it; and I take pride in the way I do it, especially my habit for the past 25 years of mulching the newly emerged plants with good, clean straw. As a result, I’ve never had to spray any kind of insecticide to control the Colorado potato beetle, the major pest of potato crops. Also, I’m old-fashioned when it comes to weed control. I never use herbicide, and nowadays that means products that contain glyphosate, the best known being Round-up. Developed by Monsanto, it was first approved by the U.S. 45 years ago.

Glyphosate has been increasingly controversial in recent years, with the big question being, does it cause cancer or doesn’t it? Several lawsuit cases in the U.S. have answered yes and ordered multi-million-dollar damages. Bayer, the current owner of Monsanto, has set aside billions of dollars to cover similar future judgements. Various regulatory agencies, in Europe for example, disagree on the answer to the fundamental question. A study done for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) from 2015 to 2017, with results published in 2020, concluded levels of glyphosate residue in food product samples taken from retail stores do not pose a health threat, based on Canada’s existing Maximum Residue Limits (MRLs). The study gathered 7,955 food samples from Canadian retail stores. of those samples, 3,366, or 46.3 percent, contained a “detectable” amount of glyphosate. And of those, 99.4 percent were within the Canadian MLR limit, while 46 samples were “non-compliant.”

“The high level of compliance (99.4% of samples with the Canadian regulatory limits) and the lack of a health risk for non-compliant samples indicate that, with respect to glyphosates, the food available for sale in Canada is safe,” the study concluded.

This past August Canadian officials decided after a period of public consultation not to go ahead with proposed increases to some MLRs until “at least” next year. Meanwhile, the government will look at enhancing its monitoring of pesticide matters.

Ah, the beautiful potato, fresh from the garden

In the best of all possible words, I would much prefer to consume no glyphosate. None at all, zero, nada.

Which brings me back to the beloved potato, that which my Celtic ancestors largely survived on; which Hope Ness pioneers, I’ve been told, had nothing else to eat except; and which originated in the Andes mountains a very long time ago, thanks to the indigenous people who lived there.

Winter is the time to start planning for next year’s garden crops. Every year I tell myself not to bite off more than I can chew, but rather, focus on the essentials, of which potatoes are one. So, with that in mind, as well as glyphosate, I went looking online for any possible concerns. Overdue, yes, I know.

I was surprised to find potatoes are, if anything, more sensitive to damage from incidental, wind-drift spraying somewhere else than I imagined. In fact, I thought I was far enough away on the Bruce Peninsula in secluded Hope Ness that it wasn’t a problem, despite the prevailing west and southwest summer winds. I assumed too much.

I found several online sources that spoke of the damage even a small amount of such incidental exposure to glyphosate can cause to potato crops. Most troubling was how glyphosate can travel down the parent-plant into the soil, and the daughter root ‘tubers,’ They are the actual potatoes that are marketed either as food, but most worrisome here, as seed potatoes.

“Tubers may have a normal physical appearance but have glyphosate in the seed that can cause a variety of germination problems the following year,” says a current article in Potato News, written by two associate professors at North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota.

I routinely buy seed potatoes from certified growers to plant in the spring. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is responsible for the federal Seed Potato Certification Program.

“The objective of the Seed Potato Certification Program is to supply Canadian growers of seed, table stock and processing potatoes with certified seed which is of high varietal integrity and is relatively free of tuber borne diseases,” says a CFIA web page. (my italics)

No offence, dear CFIA, but I think I may have to delve deeper into seed potato suppliers and how they deal with possible glyphosate contamination. As other on-line sources note, ‘organic’ is no guarantee regarding the effect of incidental drift.

I want to be able to say, “no glyphosate residue in potatoes grown at Cathedral Drive Farm.” Hopefully, that will be possible.”

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