Dear Folks, August is one of the best months around here. The nights are cool, the days are warm and sunny. (Since I bragged to you last month about all the rain we were getting, we’ve hardly had a drop.) Morning fogs signal that the nights are lengthening and the soil cooling — by October it can take till 11 in the morning for the sun to burn the off the valley fog, but in August it disappears as soon as the sun lifts above the hill to our east.
The mating songs of the migratory birds are over, but I can hear the chatter of parents teaching their young to fly. (With pileated woodpeckers in the locust trees in our front yard, that can be quite a chatter!) Flocks form to stuff themselves on ripening honeysuckle berries and thistle seeds for the coming trip south. Cicadas scratch night and day. Crickets invade the house and strike up high-pitched violin solos in the corners. Out in the chicken house the roosters just reaching maturity make ridiculous noises, practicing their new-found art of crowing.
The gardens are in their glory. We can choose dozens of kinds of flowers to fill the house with bouquets. At the moment we have a dazzling bunch of red, yellow, pink, and orange zinnias and dahlias on the back porch. In the kitchen are pinks and blues of statice, ageratum and cosmos. On the living room table we have a bowl of sunflowers better than anything Vincent van Gogh ever painted. (The seed companies are beginning to sell packets of mixed sunflowers — traditional yellow, pale yellow, orange, striped, and even deep red. We tried them this year, and they’re towering over our heads at the far end of the garden, cheering us every time we look out the window.) The bathroom sink has a little bud vase with delicate pink old-fashioned roses, the kind that smell wonderful.
And on the dining room table, the first thing you see when you walk in the house, is a tall vase of callianthus. Callianthus is my Great Flower Discovery of the Year. It’s a gladiolus, and like regular glads it reproduces through corms that you plant in spring and dig up in fall. But its bloom stalks aren’t stiff and upright like glads, rather they arch over gracefully, and the blooms are white, with deep purple centers. And it smells! The whole dining room is sweet with it. I stuck into the vase with the callianthus a few tall feathery pink flowers from Chrissie’s Mystery Garden (rejects that she scooped up from Edgewater Farm; I’m not sure what they are) plus the first of our regular gladiolas, a red-and-yellow one, rising high in the center. I think it’s the most gorgeous bouquet we’ve had all year. But I say that about every bouquet.
There are so many flowers that Chrissie is bunching them and taking them to the co-op to sell, along with buckets of statice from the huge garden of everlastings she and Scot planted down by the brook. She started taking them in this week, and after just one day the co-op called back and asked for more; the flowers were walking right out the door with the customers!
I’d guess Chrissie and Scot would say their Great Flower Discovery of the Year is tithonia, a huge, hollow-stemmed bright orange flower that grows on a bushy plant that I thought was eggplant, until it started shoving up gaudy blooms. A few tithonia make a bouquet into an extravaganza.
We have eggplant too, great big purple shiny ones, along with peppers and zucchini and yellow squash and cucumbers. The veggies are reaching the peak of their annual crescendo, unfortunately for us folks who do the harvesting and canning and jellying and freezing and pickling. There’s a big basket of something to deal with every night, and Scot’s picture-perfect tomato garden and my sweet corn plantings are only beginning to roar into high gear. So far the freezer has been filling mainly with beans, broccoli, and cauliflower. Yesterday when we had our monthly community meeting, everyone helped harvest, blanch, shuck, and freeze nine quarts of green soybeans (one of our wintertime favorites).
The jams and jellies in the root cellar so far are: carrot-rhubarb marmalade, gooseberry, strawberry (lots), raspberry (lots), black raspberry, and crabapple. The Clapp’s Favorite pears are hanging heavy on the tree; I’ll try to get them canned tomorrow. Emmett the pup has discovered how good they are; he searches under the tree every morning to see if any have dropped.
The eating is great around here any time, but in August it goes into orbit. We’re feasting on cole slaw made from savoy cabbage, carrots, celery, dill, and parsley. Three-bean salad with red kidneys, slim green French beans, yellow wax beans, and fresh basil. Soup of yellow squash, carrots, cheddar cheese, and turmeric. Ripe, fat, slurpy tomatoes. Slender scallions. New potatoes. Baby beets. AaaaaannnnnnnndddDDDDDD SWEET CORN!!!!! Five minutes out of the garden into the pot! Wow! Though we freeze quarts and quarts of it, I forget, through all those months that aren’t August or September, how AMAZINGLY good fresh sweet corn is! If you have only bought it in a supermarket or at a roadside stand where it may be an hour or more past picking, you have no idea what I’m talking about. We’re rhapsoding already, just eating the earliest crop, a plain yellow called Spring Treat (the best early corn we’ve ever planted). The first bicolor corn is just ready (Kiss & Tell), and last of all will come my favorite, the white Silver Queen.
Chrissie and Scot have also just hauled in the results of their first experiment with garlic, which came out great. Chrissie planted the bulbs way last November, they popped up at the first spring thaw, and they got about 4 feet high before they formed big bulbs in the ground and zillions of tiny bulbs high up in the blossoms. We know what to do with the big bulbs; we’re contemplating planting the little ones to see what happens.
Oh, yes, we have animals and people here, as well as flowers and vegetables. I just knocked off the two-year-old, exhausted Silver Wyandotte hens and shifted into their space (with the one-year-old Buff Orpingtons) the Barred Rock pullets. (I have a 4-year chicken rotation scheme, so I’ll know exactly how old each chicken is by its variety.) Still in the “chick side” of the chicken house are a dozen handsome cockerels, who will go into the freezer, but that won’t get done until I come back from Balaton. We’ve separated Satchmo the ram from the ewes in the pasture and brought him up to the orchard, so he won’t make surprise January lambs. We brought up two of his sons to keep him company, and there are two more still down there, whom we’ll have to bring up pretty soon, before they get mature and start making lambs with their sisters. The ducklings in the garden are now ducks, eating slugs, we think. In any case, the slugs aren’t bad this year. There’s another pair of ducks and three gray geese down on the pond. At this time of year they’re on their own; we hardly see them, unless we’re down there working with the sheep.
The old dog Basil (who looks like a golden retriever) mostly sleeps in the hot afternoons, but he perks up in the cool evenings and mornings. The young dog Emmett (who looks like a yellow lab) is a marvel of teenage energy and power. He loves to run, to swim, to chase sticks, to eat (anything); he’s up for any adventure that’s going on and has to be in the middle of it. The two old cats Poppy and Simon, laze in cool pockets in the garden and hunt at night. The younger cat Kitty lazes in the herb garden where there’s a good view of the bird feeder.
Narayana departed this morning for Smith College and a master’s program in biology. We’ll miss him, but he’ll be back for vacations. He and Emmett have formed a deep attachment this summer; without Narayana Emmett is bored and restless and hassles chickens.
Chrissie is running around madly trying to keep three farms going at this hectic time of year. She works five days a week at Edgewater Farm, a commercial place a few miles from here, which has a pick-your-own strawberry operations, a bustling farm stand for field vegetables and flowers, and a bunch of greenhouses for bedding plants and beautiful hanging flower baskets in the spring, and coming up, hundreds of potted chrysanthemums. Chrissie works in and around the greenhouses. One day a week she works up in Etna at the huge garden of the Sibleys, old friends of mine, great people. That leaves her one day a week, plus evenings, for the extensive gardens she has masterminded here. Right now that’s all too much — but she looks very happy and healthy.
Scot is also frustrated, because his heart wants to be working on the farm on these beautiful and busy days, but his mind wants to be working on his thesis. He’s preparing for a long field season in the Northwest this fall, plus trying to get his thesis proposal written and approved, plus training to be a licensed scuba diver, because he’s helping on the winter term abroad that Dartmouth biology majors spend in Jamaica and Costa Rica, where they study rainforests and coral reefs. He spent quite a bit of the last week at the bottom of a lake up near the Canadian border, and at the bottom of the ocean off the Maine coast.
Well, we’re all too busy, me too. I’m preparing for the fall teaching term and for the annual Balaton meeting in Hungary. I was also away for almost a week earlier this month, in both Washingtons — state and DC — to work on commodities and indicators.
I started that trip by flying into Portland and driving up the Columbia River Gorge, past the Bonneville Dam and over a bridge into Washington. Spectacular scenery — the mighty river (even dammed to death, it’s mighty), the high forested cliffs on either side, decorated with plunging waterfalls. I was entranced by the view out of the car and also by the conversation in the car, because I was riding with Dee Hock, the remarkable guy who founded the Visa credit card system.
You may not realize that Visa is a very strange organization. It does something like a trillion dollars worth of business every year, but no one owns it, it has no stock, it has hardly any hierarchy, only about 500 people coordinate it, worldwide. What makes Visa work is a VERY carefully thought out purpose statement and set of strict guiding principles, all of which have to do with maintaining integrity toward the purpose. Any bank or organization that wants to issue a Visa card can do so, as long as it obeys the principles. There is a huge benefit to joining the system — you get to use the Visa name. But basically, as long as each card-issuing agency follows the rules, it is self-governing. The system runs like Alcoholics Anonymous or the Internet, producing incredibly useful results with no one in charge.
This structure arose from a combination of Hock’s upbringing in a strict Mormon household in Utah, which gave him an allergic reaction to hierarchy, and the fact that the Bank Americard was failing about 25 years ago, and Hock was brought in to save it. He created a worldwide system that runs as a network, not an empire. He calls it a “chaordic” organization — a combination of chaos and order.
The nifty part of the story is that Hock retired about 10 years ago, full of glory, eager to hang out in his California homestead, play with his grandchildren, and do nothing but garden (boy, can I identify with that!). But recently, like a Bodhisattva, he has felt a call back to the world. He is saddened and outraged by the damage almost all huge hierarchical institutions — from governments to corporations to large nonprofits, such as churches — are doing in the world. He thinks the only chance to save anything worth saving is to get off the power, competition, and control trip and onto a trip of cooperation, mutual support, service, high purpose, and dancing with opportunities as they come, rather than trying to predict them and grab the benefits, shedding the costs onto others.
Thousands of feminists will say “about time you woke up, Hock! It’s the patriarchy you hate, testosterone incarnate in organizational power. Chaordic organizations are nothing more than the yin to that yang.” Yin, yang, whatever, the Balaton network is (though we didn’t know the word) a classic “chaordic” organization. (I’m not much of one for classic feminist analysis myself; I’ve always thought the strength of Balaton was the balance of yin and yang, supplied initially by Dennis and me, and now by all sorts of people, many of whom have a fine balance of masculine and feminine strengths within themselves.) The new community we’re trying to form will be chaordic too, I hope.
Well, as you can imagine, Dee and I had great fun talking as the Columbia Gorge flew by, and then we spent three days in a West Coast equivalent of the community we’re trying to create in the East. It’s the Cold Spring Conservancy, a homestead owned for 25 years or so by Hank Patton, with big gardens, goats, guinea hens, chestnut trees, and children, to which another farm has been added to provide an office for the consulting work of Hank’s new wife Sue Hall, a Harvard Business School wonder, who is trying, among other things, to get the wood products industry to think about sustainability.
I had the most fun while I was trekking through the Douglas fir forest with Hank’s 8-year-old daughter Wren, but it was also interesting to listen to the industry guys. And Amory Lovins and Jason Clay were there, who inspired a proposal I’ve just written about modeling commodity trade, tracing both the physical and money flows from the extraction of a product from the earth, through transport and processing, till it gets to the final consumer. We hope to find the leverage points that cause the system to a) push extraction beyond the point of sustainability, b) enrich the folks at the transport, warehousing, finance, or retail end of the chain, while impoverishing the farmers, miners, or loggers at the extraction point, and c) fluctuate wildly in price. If we understand why these behaviors happen, maybe we’ll be able to figure out how to transform them. We want to do three different kinds of commodities — a nonrenewable such as bauxite/aluminum, a short-regeneration renewable such as sugar or wheat, and a long-regeneration renewable such as trees. Hence I was at the forest products meeting, learning how the industry works.
From there to the other Washington, for a day at the World Resources Institute. A philanthropist named Bob Wallace — who helped fund our Balaton workshop last April on sustainable development indicators — called together a “summit” of folks who have been working on indicators, trying to get us to work together, sort through the hundreds of indicators people are suggesting, pull out the very few that really have something to do with sustainability, and get them implemented. There were just about 8 people in the room, and it was a good discussion. I hope something comes of it; the Balaton Group will surely do all it can to help.
Well, since I leave for Balaton in 2 days, I’d better bring this letter to a close and start getting organized. When I get back from Hungary, there will begin a changing of the guard here at Foundation Farm. Narayana has left for school. Art Blundell, who grew up in the same town as Scot on Vancouver Island, and who’s in the same graduate program at Dartmouth, has been living here this month, but he’ll be leaving for his new apartment nearer the College. Cam Webb and Kinari will be returning from Indonesia, and we hope they’ll stay here at least through the fall, because Scot and Chrissie will be going to the Pacific Northwest for field work. And we may have some interesting new farmers moving in! All this is working, I believe, toward the larger community, which has been having interesting and productive meetings this month, which I haven’t even had time to tell you about. It’s mostly “process” at this point — crucial stuff, hard to describe.
More on all that later, as it unfolds.
Happy harvest to you!
Love, Dana
