Some March

Imagine pitching this idea to a publisher nowadays: A book for kids, about a girl and a pig and a spider; and life and art and death.

Yeah, no.

Thumbs down

Get out of my office.

Give up writing altogether. Clearly, you have no idea how to make good CGI movies, I mean juvenile fiction.

These are among what I suppose would be the hypothetical responses to first hearing about a story that mostly takes place in a barnyard and hinges on one’s pig’s panicky journey toward accepting how life works. Namely, that it is enriched through creativity and ends for all who experience it.

This isn’t an E-I-E-I-O kind of kids’ farm story. It opens with

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?,’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."

An innocent, awakening to death as an order of business, is sentence one. In a kids book.

There’s nothing villainous or evil in E.B. White’s portrayal of the fact that Fern’s father plans to cull the runt of his most recent litter of piglets. John Arable is just starting his day the way many farmers have started many days: humanely ending a young life. He is doing what is necessary to preserve the integrity and efficiency of his home, his legacy, his farm.  

The first chapter of Charlotte’s Web makes you reckon your romantic notions about country life with the reality that there are no freeloaders allowed at the farm. If you won’t fetch a fair price, provide healthy offspring, or make a good Christmas dinner, you will be swiftly removed from the gene pool as soon as you show up.

Yet, something stops him. Fern, doing what many farmers’ daughters have done on many cold spring mornings, empathizes with the piglet under the ax, and pleads with all her heart for his life to be spared. At that moment, John Arable sees and hears Fern differently, knowing that what she is proposing is no way to run a farm.

He decides that her passionate compassion is more important than business as usual. Face to face with true conviction, he recognizes it must be cultivated, unlike apathy which seems to grow like weeds. Rewarding Fern, who “...was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice.” shows that, without fully agreeing with her, he places her right to change things above keeping things the way they are.

Consider this our “Why we marched,” post, because who really cares why we chose to participate in the Women's March, which turned out to be the largest worldwide public demonstration in recorded history?* Isn’t that what the signs are for?

*JKLOL free press, immigrant rights, all kinds of equality, black lives matter, public education, art, science, general civility

Much of the post-march blogtivity has criticized those who participated in that very vocal We Aren't With Him from every thinkable direction. Too idealistic, too safe, too inclusive, not inclusive enough, silly hats, you've probably read it all. As for this blog, why we marched is less important than respecting each other’s right to that very rudimentary expression of values- shouting slogans in the street with a bunch of strangers.

Even, no..especially if you don’t agree with the shouters, consider their noisy presence a vital sign of something so much more important than the farm.

The Garden Dirt: Potatoes: A Personal Voyage

Even the potatoes know what time it is.

This has become a familiar March sight: Potatoes, telling me they are ready to spring into action. That they want to nestle into the earth and convert sunlight and the elements into soft starchy spuds of all colors. Yes, once again, I will be nervous, muddy and tired, but most likely rewarded beyond measure.

Harvesting and eating potatoes from my garden kickstarts an ego trip like no other. Impressively heavy, and substantially filling, they do what a salad can't: convince you that you really could feed yourself from a sunny patch of dirt.

I started collecting these little babies last fall, from the CSA we joined. All the littlest spuds, and some of the biguns went into a paper sleeping bag for the winter. I love to peek at them for the first time months later, surprised by the length and forceful nature of their vines. It's as though they're saying, "It's time to get going again, Lassie!"

 Don't all potatoes have an Irish accent? They do in my wee head.

Credit where it's due, I first heard "It's time to get going again." from Neil DeGrasse Tyson, as he kicked off the recently revived televised spacetime odyssey, Cosmos. Of course, he wasn't talking 'taters, he was picking up where this guy left off.

He and his wife wrote the original TV series, back when I was a little kid. Then, he was just a weird guy in a turtleneck, who wasn't The Electric Company, much to my dismay. Now, he is Carl Sagan, and he will always have a special place in our family's collective heart.

In making Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Carl sought to discuss everything that is or was or will be. Not bad for thirteen episodes of a show from the eighties.  It dances brightly from spectacular space photos to lively earthy snapshots of city street life on the coast of the Mediterranean. Watched all over the world for decades, Cosmos spoke the universal language of all of us, and what we know about our world; sharing all the knowledge and always making a case for learning more.

I find this beautiful, sure, but also very useful. Compiling and sharing knowledge isn't just a noble pursuit for future humans, it's how I go about trying to be more successful at the stuff I try to do, more of the time. Which brings me back to my paper bag of potatoes. I grew them wrong for the first few years, charmed by online claims that they do well in vertical situations. Plant them in a barrel! In a cardboard box! In a straw-filled mesh cylinder! In a cowboy hat! Well, that may work for some zones, and some varieties of potatoes, but I found, year after year, that my potato production was paltry, and was happening at or just above the roots. No golden rosy purple orbs growing all the way up the vine.

Surely, Carl Sagan has something helpful to say on the matter.

 "It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas."

Bingo. For whatever reason, I needed to ignore what worked for so many others and find out what worked for me. So, I dispensed with the gimmicky containers and returned to the ground under my feet, digging up a wide deep loose bed, edged with big stones.

More online digging got me thinking that I should also adjust the soil pH. Spuds love soil that has more than your average amount of free floating hydrogen ions. (aka alkaline, or basic) Where I live the soil is notoriously acidic.(aka the opposite of alkaline) Blueberries, azaleas, and rhododendrons love it, but it's bad news for potatoes.   There are a few ways to amend acidic soil. I went with bone meal, mixed in with the soil in which the potatoes were planted, and to any soil mounded on the vines throughout the growing season.

mmmm, boney

What happened next was nothing short of scientific.

 Only twice as many taters as before, that's what. So, I repeated the successful method last year and had an even higher yield. I was able to feed my family and had even some extras to sell at the farmer's market. I guess I sort of figured out this little corner of the cosmos.

I've encountered these truths before, so there must be something to them: That it's your job to learn from your mistakes when something isn't working; and that there is probably a path to success as you define it, as long as you're skeptical and open, humble and hard-working. This view makes mistakes into lessons. The story of your path becomes a helpful map for people you'll never meet; as long as you share it, and as long as they know when to ignore it and forge their own way.

 Stay tuned to the BU Facebook page to see how we're going about things this year. I'll be planting my potatoes today and will post pictures of our grand new set-up!

The Garden Dirt: Magic Beans

Like many homeschooling parents, I watched the Creationism v. Evolution debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye two weeks ago. As one might predict, both men spoke respectfully from a place deep inside themselves, and returned to their corners, declared the "winner" by each of their respective sides.

Like some homeschooling parents, I spent most of it wondering why on earth they were having this discussion, and calling it a debate. What were they trying to accomplish? How many minds were changed? Is there an absolute truth there that one of them nailed and the other missed?

Unexpectedly, Joe Coffey, an Ohio pastor who appears in the HBO documentary, Questioning Darwin, cleared this up for me when he said, "If that's the way the world works...if it's just this mechanical thing... then you believe in a God that doesn't intervene in nature, That takes away any possibility of miracles, any possibility of answered prayer..."

He's right!

The scientific method doesn't require a "prayer" step, nor does it contend with miracles in any way but to dissect and explain them.

While human history (and the present) is full of scientists who pray, in all kinds of ways, when it gets down to the real sciencing, publishing "God did it." in lieu of research just won't do. I kind of thought that was pretty obvious back when Galileo's life was threatened by his own church for supporting heliocentrism, the radical notion that we live in a solar system rather than an earth-centric planetary system. He recanted. The dude with the telescope.

JKLOL Please, don't kill me.

Many devout believers have pursued the sciences since then, able to reconcile faith and fact. That's why we have the very technology I am using to publish this very blog at this very moment. (Hallelujah for that, amirite?) Maybe they understand that, rather than try to eliminate our beliefs, the whole point of the the scientific method, is to take them into account. To address the fact that our culture, background, beliefs, or just good old-fashioned fear of being burned at the stake, could possibly influence how we form answers to our questions about the world around us, in a way that renders us less-than-objective.

So, to me, debating evolution v. creationism is like saying, "Who is right? Combustion engines or People who love Disney movies?" I don't see how they're on opposite sides of the same point, except, maybe when it comes to the issue of miracles. A miracle is a funny thing, because, by its very definition, it is supposed to defy all that we know to be true; all that we seek to understand using the scientific method. Growing up, I was taught that believing in miracles requires faith, but most scientists just want to take out their scalpels and figure out exactly what makes the miracle tick.  Does this make them faithless, or curious?

As I have lived, year after year, I have found truer definitions for words I learned as a child;  "faith" and "miracle" are the two biggest ones.

 Faith is building a trellis for beans I haven't planted yet. 

The sheer hours of squatting, cutting, and tying to make a couple of simple bamboo teepees will have you wondering if it will all be in vain. If the seeds will be bunk, or get sick quickly, or be invaded by predators, or grow to a stumpy height, leaving the top of the trellis to mock you with its bareness.

 Faith doesn't mean I believe none of those things will happen, it just means I act as though they won't.

It means I am counting on the well-worn miracles of germination, iron phosphate, and photosynthesis to make all that work worthwhile. Sure, those things I call miracles can be explained, but that does not make them less profound to me. I am filled with wonder when those green leaves pop up for the first time every year.

  And I am a grateful primate indeed when my act of faith is rewarded so fruitfully.

Marveling at the magic of science is something I love to share with my li'l miracles. To see our study on germinating runner beans, check out these photos on the Backyard University Facebook page.