purslane and perspective

Have you ever heard of purslane?  This little plant is a wonder, packed with key nutrients, and it's delicious.  It has a slight citrus flavor, and is a little juicy, because it's a succulent like an aloe or cactus. You can eat the stems as well as the leaves, though the roots of the plant are not edible.

It's got more iron than spinach.  Magnesium, B vitamins, folate, choline.  More Omega-3 fatty acids than any other vegetable.  More Vitamin C than cabbage.  More Vitamin A than beets.  More iron and calcium than frozen blueberries.  (More on nutrition here.)  It's used in many cuisines: French (called "pourpier"), Japanese ("grapara"), Indian ("sanhti" or "punarva") and Latin American ("verdolagas"), among others.

It grows easily, and requires no planting, as it's a self-seeding annual.  Growing along the ground, it spreads quickly, and our garden is covered with it.  Covered with it, no kidding.  It flourishes in hot, dry weather, which we've had plenty of this year.  But it doesn't seem to bother the other crops, in fact, it seems to be serving as a ground cover.

But it's commonly considered a weed.  And if we still thought of it as such, we'd be in a bit of a bother.  But once we started looking into it, and realized its tremendous health benefits and the variety of ways to prepare it, we came to see purslane in a new light.  

And I'm so glad for that!  Rather than ripping it out by the wheelbarrow-full, and dumping it in our weedpile, we can harvest it, eat it, preserve it, sell it.  We've been harvesting it like crazy for our own use, using it in salads and stir-fry, making it into pesto and pickling it, and selling 15 bags of it a week at the farmers market, at one pound a bag.  

If you've got a yard, it's quite possible there's some of this stuff growing.  Take a look.  One note of caution: there is a similar looking plant out there that's no good for you.  So if you see what looks like purslane, cut a stem, and see what color the juice inside is.  If it's clear, you're in the clear.  If it's milky, then don't eat it: it's a plant called "spurge," and it's toxic. 

Interested in trying purslane?  Here's some easy ways to prepare it:

1) as a cold salad:  chop it up, stems and all, and toss with olive oil and lemon juice.  

2) as a cold salad: chop it up, stems and all, and toss with chopped cucumbers, and a yogurt-honey-pressed garlic-chili powder dressing.

3) saute it with onions and garlic, then add some beaten eggs and tomatoes, and scramble. (You can use purslane as you would spinach, in general.)

4) stir-fry it with some garlic, and toss with soy sauce and a dash of toasted sesame oil (hot chilies too, if you like)

5) use as you would basil, and make pesto (and then freeze for later use!)

6) add to soups, at the last minute, to thicken (has a slightly mucilaginous quality)

7) add to salads, mixed in with lettuces

8) pickle it! 

Sometimes all it takes is a shift in perspective.  Weed or superfood?  It's up to you.

And what else would benefit from being considered in a different light?  One of the Sisters here just completed a three-month sabbatical, staying in a little hermitage on the property here.  In the first week of her sabbatical, she had set up her laptop, facing a big open window onto the woods, and was planning on doing email and other tasks on the computer.  But the internet connection was slow, and frustrating, and while she sat and sat, waiting for pages to load, she gazed out the window.  And began to watch the birds and other wildlife, becoming entranced.  Her frustration and thwarted connectivity turned into a new passion, as she began learning all about the birds in our little ecosystem, listening to their calls, studying their habits.  What a gift emerged from the failed wireless signal!

This is my meditation for the week: what can emerge, if I'm willing to shift my perspective?

who's your superhero?

Every month, here at the farm, we hold an event called a "Full Moon Fireside."  It's a chance for the Sisters to open their doors and invite people into their life and their work, and to create connections with folks interested in sustainability, food, and Earth.  For much of the last year, we've focused on learning more about the Transition movement, which is a decentralized, grassroots initiative in which local communities work to organize themselves to address the triple challenges of energy insecurity, economic instability, and climate change.  Efforts focus on supporting the creation of more local food production, strengthening local economies, and establishing and enhancing local energy capture and production. The idea is to "transition" away from oil dependence and long supply chains into local resilience.

This month, we talked less about the "what" and the "how" of Transition, and more about our personal experience with trying to make changes in our own lives.  Anne led us in an exercise from the Transition Handbook (an organizing manual) where we contemplated ways that we, individually, are "bound up" in systems or patterns which we'd like to move away from--whether gas consumption, fast-food and packaged food purchases, attachment to money.  After focusing on one of these, in particular, which we'd like to change, we spent some time getting creative.  And rather than focusing on the negative ("I promise never to ... "), Anne asked us to make little superheroes that embody the positive side of the change we want to see.  What kind of superhero qualities would help us realize those changes?

It's funny with these things.  My "oh-god-this-is-so-uncool" censor is always on high alert when it comes to visioning or creative exercises, and I have to actively work to make sure that I don't withdraw myself out of a good time.  And when I do let myself actually play, and not just play along, such experiences can be eye-opening and rewarding.  This time, I took a few deep breaths and decided I would not hold back.

For me, one of the things that I love the most about the farm is the sincere effort to try to eat mostly what we produce.  We buy some staples: flour, sugar, milk, and some things like soy sauce, but the vast majority of what we eat comes from the work of our hands.  That's deeply satisfying, and changes much of my relationship to food.  And gives me great relief that I'm not part of the whole packaging nightmare, with plastic coming out of my ears and flowing into the ocean... But I still have a few "holdovers"--somehow, I still crave, or feel I deserve a "treat" now and then, and that comes in the form of junk food.  Why on Earth do I think I need a treat, when I get to eat wonderful, tasty, fresh food every day...when I get to work in the Earth and pray and cook and write...when I live among funny, wise, and caring people--what on Earth do I need a "treat" for?  This is clearly some kind of old pattern that keeps me connected to an unhealthy food economy, and to unhealthy thinking.  And I'd love to be rid of it.

So this was the problem I chose to contemplate for the exercise, the problem for which I needed a superhero.  And almost immediately, when it came to the most nerve-wracking part--the spontaneous creativity party--it came to me: my superhero is "The Green Yogini" (said in the voice of "The Brown Hornet!").  I made this little apple figurine, and used some twining branches to create the impression of crossed legs, like the seated meditation pose. 

In a flash, I saw that the Green Yogini is all those things that I struggle with when it comes to food and "treats":  centered, aware, and compassionate.  She is calm in the face of temptation and bad habits.  And she makes choices based on her values, her care for food and Earth, her understanding that life itself is the most wonderful of treats...

It may seem a bit cheesy, but the exercise was actually quite moving.  Think about it: what do you want to change?  And who's your superhero?

fighting fertility

It's been nearly a month since I last updated this blog--I knew June and July would get busy, but whoa...it's been BUSY.  And there's so much to tell!  First, the gardens have been amazing, yielding buckets of strawberries, then raspberries, pounds of luscious sweet peas, and greens of every variety, including giant bok choi, crisp cabbages, and buttery lettuces.  June was lovely: cooler, with misty mornings and green hues everywhere.  We've had delicious salads every day, "put up" or stored at least 10 head of cabbage in the form of sauerkraut, frozen 12 gallon-size bags of peas, and enjoyed many pieces of strawberry rhubarb pie.  What colors, and crunch, what a contrast to those last rutabagas in our winter rootcellar...

We'd planted about 20 beds of brassicas, including kale, collard greens, bok choi, tat soi, mizuna, and arugula, and cabbage.  Kohlrabi, cauliflower, chard, broccoli, and broccoli raab rounded out the list.  And because of the warm temperatures in May and June, all these plants flourished, growing faster than we could keep up.  We began bringing baskets of produce to the food pantry, as the crops came in quicker than we could use them, and before the farmers market had begun.

Sr. Catherine Grace at the marketIn mid-June, the local farmers market began, to our relief!  We had planned our crops to be ready for early June, and even the delay of two weeks meant that we were fighting to keep our bok choi and other crops from "going to seed," that is, from trying to reproduce.  Almost every day, we had to go around the garden and chop off any sign of emerging seed pods.  Bok choi, for example, sends out a little floret from the very center of the plant, which needs to be snipped right away, otherwise the plant grows quickly into a tower of seeds and shoots.  We've spent quite a bit of time these last 6 weeks searching for any signs of flowering, scissors in hand...

Anne holds up a new potato

And it got pretty hot as soon as the end of June rolled around.  In 90+ degree heat, we grabbled new potatoes on the 4th of July, carefully feeling around underneath the plant to find the treasures buried there. Then, in the midst of a real heat wave over the last two weeks, we harvested quart after quart of dry peas, socking them away for the winter.  And just Saturday, we harvested hundreds of bulbs of garlic, now sitting in the barn to finish drying out. We had, earlier in June, cut off the garlic "scapes" (curly shoots of the plant), which contain a seed pod.  Doing so ensures that the plant sends its energy into growing the bulb, rather than into reproducing! The scapes are delicious, and we froze and pickled the lot of them, to enjoy their garlicky flavor for months to come.  

Armfuls of seeds and flowers

This business of fighting fertility is a little unsettling.  Just as I am focusing my good thoughts and so much energy on helping this garden grow, I am also running around making sure it doesn't grow too fast, that the plants stay productive without reproducing.  I've pulled out little mountains of plants gone to seed...

And I think it touches me particularly because I'm turning 40 in just a few short months, and I'm aware that my own reproductive "season" is coming to an end.  I haven't felt a biological pull toward having a child in a long time, not since I was about 20, I think.  But I've been feeling it lately.  The drive of life to continue, to arise again in a new form, is ubiquitous, and powerful. I sense that I am part of a much larger framework of fertility, of life striving to live.  Being in the garden, seeing lifecycles up close, having my hand in the work of extending life, or not--all this has impact, and resonance.  I am pulling up plants now full of seed pods, and I feel a little for them, for their thwarted fertility.  I choose a few to keep, to collect their seed, to preserve them for the future.  I marvel at the fact that baby girls are born with all the ovum they will ever have, that the eggs I have remaining have been with me since I was formed.  I feel the life force of my ovaries, filled with eggs like little mustard seeds, with seeming infinite potential.  Life, waiting to be realized.  I'm so thankful that in the midst of all this--fighting the fertility of the garden, and feeling my own biological pull--my sister has just given birth to a baby girl, Isabel, who I'll be able to shower with love in the years to come.  Fertility and life wins, in the end...

How fitting then, that last night, I came across a wonderful poem--thanks to a great blog called "Our Local Life: What We Need Is Here."  The first few lines especially caught my attention, given that I was musing about fertility, seeds, and buds.  The poem is entitled "St Francis and the Sow," and it is written by Galway Kinnell, an American poet from Providence, RI.  I will definitely be looking for more of his work...

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

In this season, I feel called to appreciate the potency of the bud, to recognize the flowering within, and to appreciate the "thingness of things," the intrinsic essence of life in whatever form it takes.

On slugs and sacrifices

One of the less pleasant pests in the garden is the slug.  They're gray, slimy, and voracious--they love greens of all sorts, and can munch through whole crops if you're not careful.  Gardeners try many strategies to defeat the common slug--sprinkling crushed eggshells or coffee grounds around the stems of plants (slugs don't like to slime across them, as they get stuck to the slug's body), putting out little bowls of beer (slugs are attracted, and then drown), allowing ducks into the garden (but ducks like greens too!), and simply snipping them with scissors (the merciless method).

We've tried all of these to little success, but last year the Sisters noticed, despairingly, that the Chinese Cabbages were just riddled with slugs, and eaten so thoroughly that they looked like lace.  Thinking about it, we came up with the idea of planting Chinese Cabbages as a "trap crop"--a sacrifice--to draw the slugs away from the other crops.

Well, it worked better than we ever imagined!  In this picture, you can see a perfect head of Golden Acre Cabbage, right next to a Chinese Cabbage that's been nearly demolished.  The slugs are happy, our other crops are happy, and the folks who buy our produce at the farmers market are happy too.  We used to joke that our crops were "twice-eaten"--first by slugs, then by us.  Not anymore!

But it does mean going without Chinese Cabbage--I don't think we'll get a single one for ourselves to eat.  Which is too bad, because it is delicious!  But giving up Chinese Cabbage is saving us a lot of other headaches and worry, so it's worth it in the end.

As I'm writing, I'm thinking about what else I might be able to sacrifice, to save myself headaches and despair.  One of the most important practices in small-scale organic farming is that of observation--paying close attention to what's happening with every crop and volunteer plant throughout the garden.  If you're paying attention, you can nap those first few potato beetles before they reproduce like crazy, creating more "catch-up work" for you, and eating up all your potato plants... If you're looking closely every day, you can see which plants are about to flower, and select some for seed and prune back others.  If you're being observant, you will see which plants are flourishing and which are flagging, which need to be staked up or supported.  Observing allows you to discern patterns and change course, either immediately or in the future.

The Sisters came upon the Chinese Cabbage solution through careful observation, and we adjusted our plans--and our expectations--to incorporate plants that were intended, from the first, as a sacrifice.  Rather than "fighting" the slugs, we made room for them, in a way.  If I could practice close observation on my own habits, behaviors, "stuff," what patterns might I discern?  What could I make room for, or let go of?

This past week, I remembered that I could work on sacrificing my long anger at "the Church."  I wonder what would grow if I could just leave that anger out there in the field to decompose, rather than feeding it?  There's plenty of slimy stuff about the Church that has the potential to drive me to distraction, to make me want to run away from even the appearance of praying.  I heard this week about a brou-ha-ha between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Episcopal Church in the U.S.--the Archbishop insisted that the Presiding Bishop of the church in the US, a woman, not wear her miter (Bishop's hat) when preaching at a church in the UK.  I suppose that he didn't want to inflame the existing antagonism against ordaining women bishops, and wanted to downplay the visibility of her bishop-ness.  Whatever.  It's lame.  Right now, I could devolve into ranting about patriarchy, authority, and power.  

Or I could remember that Jesus didn't care about fighting the religious institutions of his day, and that he instead focused on feeding people, healing people, and bringing people into his understanding of the holiness that surrounds us.  We are in heaven now, if we choose to be.

This coming week, the Gospel is one of my favorites.  Jesus is approached by someone who says he wants to join Jesus, and Jesus says, "Follow me."  Then the person says something like, "But first let me go bury my relative.  Then I'll follow you."  Jesus responds, "Let the dead bury their own dead."  This strikes me deep in my heart.  It reminds me to go where the life is, and let that which is dead be.  I need to let the flaws of "the Church" be, however petty or devastatingly consequential they are.  I can sacrifice that (self)righteous anger, keep my heart whole, and go where the love is.  I'll let the dead bury their own dead, fighting over miters, and I'll go to the garden, where the life is.

Peas, blossoms, and the present moment

I'm struck by the magic of flowers in the garden.  I can look out into the main garden, and see all the work that needs doing, the weeds that need pulling, the areas still eagerly awaiting their plants...and then I'm just struck by the blossoms.  I realize that I don't really know how it works, biologically--I know that blossoms indicate where a plant will develop fruit, and on peas, at least, the remnants of blossoms are often still attached to the shell.  So somehow, through hey-presto-biology, flowers turn into fruit.  

It seems to happen while we're sleeping, though.  One day, the vines will be vigorous, lush, and full of flowers.  And then the next, they've pulled back a little, and there's a plethora of peapods in their place.  

I've become so aware of transformation this last year, as I've radically reordered my daily life, as I've lived here through the seasons, as I've become immersed in the journey of the liturgical year.  It seems true, that saying, that "change is the only constant."

I think if I really was at peace with constant change, though, I wouldn't try to hold on so hard to things, I wouldn't grieve at the loss that accompanies change.  Perhaps, if I was truly present in the moment, I would be over-awed by the beauty and the wonder of change, rather than thinking back with longing or regret, or thinking ahead with anticipation or fear.  If I was really present to the moment, I would marvel in the beauty of the blossom, or I would happily chomp the pea, or I would gratefully place the empty pod down on the ground, as mulch for the soil.  Instead, too often, I want the pea and the blossom all at once.  Maybe really being at peace with change means reveling in the fullness of each moment, as well as accepting its limits.  In my glimpses of zen-ness, I can be content, and I can say, with total honesty and appreciation, "It is what it is."  But grasping after, longing after that awareness doesn't actually bring it any closer.  The only thing that does is turning on all my senses, being aware of all that surrounds me, perceiving the reality of interconnectedness, and paying attention only to the moment.  Planting the seed, admiring the blossom, eating the pea, building the soil.  Each a wonder, if fully apprehended.