Soil Redemption Song

Michael Phillips, author of The Apple Grower and The Holistic Orchard, now has a new book, Mycorrhizal Planet, just published by Chelsea Green Publishing. There was some disagreement between Phillips and the publisher about the title for the book, so he conducted a poll asking friends for input. A cattle rancher, a regional publisher, a permaculture guru, a biodynamic herbalist, an academic, and an orchardist/artist, among others, all weighed in on which of three titles they preferred. I voted without hesitation for Mycorrhizal Alchemy, but Chelsea Green decided to go with Mycorrhizal Planet (Mycorrhizal Pathways was the other choice). Alchemy suggests transformation, mystery, and ancient practices, all of which I am drawn towards. It’s a little like taking old found objects and making them into art.

Linda Hoffman (left) and Madeleine Lord working on Belle the Bird in Hoffman's Studio, 2009

In the painting, The Alchemist by Cornelis Bega, a hunched figure sits in a cave-like room, intent on what is happening inside a glass jar. Books, notebooks, and earthenware pots surround him, suggesting a lifetime of mixing substances and studying their reactions. The alchemist is grounded and humble in Bega’s depiction. It’s a lonely art, much maligned as a materialistic quest to turn ore into gold; when, in fact, alchemists made considerable contributions to early science. 

The Alchemist, Cornelis Bega

I think of Michael Phillips like this alchemist, studying the threads of life in the soil, appreciating them, and sharing their magic. Mycorrhizal fungi form a fibrous network stretching throughout the soil, attaching to roots, and connecting plant roots to each other. These fungi process minerals and feed them up to the plants, sending up just what is required. They will even provide storage for a plant’s bounty until leaner times, or pass on needed nutrients to other plants. It's a hidden world that scientists are only beginning to explore.

Photo courtesy of Larry Petersen, University of Guelph

“Each and every Mycorrhizal pulsating with nutrient flow, [is] making our lives possible,” Phillips writes. I consider Phillip’s passion to understand soil devotional.

Interestingly, Buddhism conceives of our world as one in which everything is interrelated and interdependent; nothing is separate in all of existence (or non-existence). Buddhism uses the analogy of the jeweled Net of Indra to describe this global interconnectedness. Imagine a vast net spreading out infinitely in all directions. At every crossing point in the net is a reflective jewel, and each jewel contains the reflection of every other jewel. If I were to put a mark on one gemstone, it would appear on every other one. How we treat one person ripples across the entire world.  

The world under our feet is no different. Trees even share nutrients through Mycorrhizal fungi attached to their roots with trees of different species. It’s a little mind blowing — this network of fungi in the soil supporting the cosmic connection between all beings throughout space and time.

Phillips told me that he actually wanted the title to be Soil Redemption Song, inspired by Bob Marley’s haunting Redemption Song.

[…]
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
Have no fear for atomic energy
'Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look? Ooh
Some say it's just a part of it
We've got to fulfill the Book

Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
'Cause all I ever have
Redemption songs
Redemption songs
Redemption songs

Michael told me that as he pondered the lyrics of this song, he wrote, “Healthy plant metabolism begins with a molecule of water, a breath of carbon, and light energy from our nearest star. The tangible science behind all this unlocks the righteous way to farm and garden, give honor to trees, and plain do right by this earth. Nothing has ever excited me more.”

Mycorrhizal Planet provides practical information for the farmer, gardener, orchardist, and forester, as well as inspiration for all of us who have temporarily lost heart from following the daily news. If you’d like to order the book please go to Phillips’ website. He’ll sign a copy and send it to you.

Listen closely when you next walk among the trees. You might just hear the great alchemist Bob Marley singing — transforming our pain with his courage. Listen!

Food is Primary Care

Sometimes I will buy a big peach, a bright red tomato, or even an apple only to be disappointed when I bite into a mealy peach, a watery tomato, and a tasteless apple.  I don’t like to throw out food, so I often eat it anyway. But sometimes, it’s just so bad that I guiltily toss the entire beautiful glob into the compost pile, burying it under some faded tulips or tough cabbage leaves.

Nutritionists say that we’re not getting the nutrients our bodies need from our food.  Considering the obesity epidemic and the debilitating diseases in America, it’s hard not to agree. Soil health, crop health, and human health are interrelated. Since the 1950s, however, crop yield has gone up, but nutritional value has gone down.  The great monocultures of agricultural production have focused on yield, pest resistance, appearance, and shelf life; not taste or nutrition.

Many of our food systems provide food that is low on both flavor and nutrition — for example, food served in hospitals to those who are ill, people who need healthy food. Turkey with corn might sound appealing when ticked off the menu, but when it arrives the next day, it’s a different story. Pre-frozen turkey rounds and corn niblets grown with chemical pesticides and herbicides, not to mention jiggles of artificially dyed red and orange Jello for dessert, is neither appealing nor nutritious.

The good news is that Marydale Debor, founder of the organization Fresh Advantage (their wonderful tagline is Food is Primary Care), works to put fresh and nutritious food back into hospitals, schools, and other institutions. It’s not easy – the old guard must be removed and new chefs who want to buy and cook with local ingredients need to be hired. Debor knows that buying food from a small local farm is the best way to get tasty and nutritious food.

A healthy diet contains a diversity of foods, but how to encourage diverse and nourishing meals when much of our food no longer has taste — especially when junk food has so much flavor? I heard a presentation by Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor. He explained that not only have our foods lost their flavor, but food is now separate from taste. He gave the example of the Frito-Lay Company that makes Dorito chips. In that product, for the first time, taste was manufactured; and flavor was added separately such that taste had no relation to the product’s food ingredients.  Frito-Lay, Inc. (a subsidiary of PepsiCo) perfected the taste of their chip to be appealing to a wide group of people. This original manufactured taste opened the door to all kinds of manufactured food, in particular, the enormous category of junk food.

Humans can have associations with food taste from childhood like the sweetness of mother’s milk. If a manufactured food is high is corn fructose, it will satisfy this associative sugar craving, but, and here’s the catch, it will not satisfy the belly’s nutritive need because it’s only flavor. We don’t stop eating, because the craving doesn’t go away. We are caught like Tantalus reaching for the apples that are forever out of reach.

I love potato chips and eat more than I like to admit. But if that peach I had grabbed was warm, sweet, and juicy, or there was a basket of cherry tomatoes on the kitchen counter, I would eat a bellyful, be sated, and nutritionally fed. Healthy food needs to be the norm for people everywhere. Everyone should have access to nourishing and delicious food at a price that is affordable.

A Late Harvest of Cherry Tomatoes from Old Frog Pond Farm

Some people believe that our bodies can sense food grown with love and compassion; it feeds the spirit as well as the body, and sadly the opposite is also true.  Food made by an angry cook can make a food unappealing or even repellent. ‘Food is primary care’ — and real food inspires wonderful poetry!

Ode to The Tomato

by Pablo Neruda

The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately,
we must murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

Pomme de Terre

To peel a boiled potato is a rare treat.                                  —François Ponge

Pomme de terre in French means apple of the earth. Like apples, les pommes de terre have been on the planet for thousands of years and have been cultivated on all every continent except Antarctica. They sprout easily from the tuber itself: a rarity among plants, unlike a seed that is often surrounded by fleshy material or a hard pit.

A forgotten bag of potatoes!

The potato had its start in the soil of South America between 8000 and 5000 BCE. Today in the Andes about four hundred varieties of potatoes are grown. A single farmer in Peru might plant thirty to fifty different potatoes. Some of these potatoes she knows are resistant to drought or disease, others keep longer once they are dug, some crop early, some late. Peruvian potatoes, like heirloom apples, have many-shapes: round, oblong, conical, to name only a few, with hues of red, brown, yellow, purple, and blue that are marbled, speckled, streaked, striped, and mottled. Twenty-five or so varieties are sold in supermarkets and it seems that Peruvian shoppers are familiar with each potato’s unique characteristic.

Near Cuzco, Peru, six thousand families live in the world's first "Potato Park." Here residents and scientists test the tolerance of different potatoes to changing temperatures in a 22,700 acre living laboratory. Climate change has affected potato growing in Peru as it has crops across the globe. Potatoes that grew at 3000 feet now must be grown closer to 4000 feet because of the rise in average temperatures at these altitudes. And in low altitudes, it is now too warm to plant them.  I am worried about our unseasonably warm local temperatures taking our fruit trees out of dormancy too early.

In his book, Potato: a history of the propitious esculent, John Reader writes that Juan, a Peruvian potato grower, told him that it had been a bad year for potatoes because an early frost had harmed the young plants. But his crop did all right. He had some plants that were frost tolerant, “and also tall enough to lean over and protect their weaker brothers.”

Farmers learn from their plants; being a farmer is being a nurturer. Humans need to eat, and if we are going to eat, we need to be kind to our crops. Today, so many people exchange money for food that we have moved far away from the mentality of being a nurturer towards plants. Money doesn’t grow on trees, and we don’t have to cultivate money with any sort of empathy. Is it any wonder that we have President Trump in the White House? His product, wealth, requires little compassion to grow, only aggressive boasting to propagate the Trump brand.

There is pressure on the Andean farmers to sell their land for profit. But it is organizations like the International Potato Center partnering with the “Potato Park” to support the Andean farmers so that their native knowledge will not be lost. Trialing the adaptive properties of hundreds of potatoes will hopefully insure that their children will eat food grown in the Andean soil, food will sustain them and their culture, as it has for millennia.  

The French poet, Francis Ponge, wrote prose poems about single objects like the potato.  Let’s not forget in these days of too much bad news to marvel at the simple potato.

La Pomme de Terre

To peel a boiled potato is a rare treat.

           Between the cushion and the thumb and the point of the knife held by the other fingers, one seizes — after piercing— one of those lips of rough, thin parchment and pulls it towards one to detach it from the appetizing flesh of the tuber. […]
          —François Ponge, in Selected Poems, edited and translated by Margaret Guiton

There are some potatoes with such papery thin skin that there is no need to peel away the parchment. And some are too beautiful to eat.

Freshly Dug Love!

Organic Certification

Last week I filled out our annual organic certification paperwork due February 15th. It’s one of those items on my To Do list that I often put off. When a farmer wants to be an organic grower and label her produce organic, each crop on the farm must be certified by a regional certifying agency. First, the applicant needs to demonstrate that for three years the land has been free from contaminating chemicals. Then, the crops must be grown according to organic standards; specifically, any material used on the crop must be on the Organic Materials Review Institute’s (OMRI) list of approved materials or individually approved by a certifying agency. If a farmer chooses not to become certified, yet still follows all the regulations, she can tell customers that the crop is grown according to organic standards, but cannot label it organic. The standards are stringent, and the United States Department of Agriculture can slap on a fine of up to $10,000 for each infraction.

Now that I am filling out the certification papers for the 11th year in a row it doesn’t take me as long as it used to. But I remember the first year I nervously submitted our thirty-page application, including maps of the land, a soil report, a list of materials I had used or planned to use, and harvest, selling, and storage plans. The certifier wanted to be sure that there was no possibility of contamination at any step in the process of delivering the crop to the consumer. The final requirement before receiving certification was the annual onsite inspector visit.

I knew that being certified would create our market. Our certifier had told me that there were no other pick-your-own certified organic orchards in Massachusetts. Without it, why would anyone be attracted to our little farm, when we were surrounded by so many commercial orchards that not only offered apples, but cider donuts, farmstands, mazes, petting zoos, and hay rides — big time agri-tainment?

On the day of our appointment, the inspector arrived with copies of our application and a clipboard of questions. He wanted to see the shed where we stored all of our materials, the tractor, the sprayer and other tools, our spray log, and receipts for all materials purchased—in short, everything related to the farm operation. It was a bit like having a nosy mother-in-law inspect your domestic abilities. I thought I’d done everything correctly, but the inspector noted some inconsistencies that needed to be addressed before the orchard could receive organic certification.

The most difficult issue to resolve was my early season copper spray for fire blight, a standard in the orchard arsenal. Copper is a mined material; I never imagined that it wouldn’t be organic. The product label said it contained copper sulfate and copper oxychloride, both Greek to me (I never took chemistry), and other inert materials. The inspector told me he was not worried about the first two materials, but that I would need to find out about the inert ingredients, which companies are hesitant to reveal because of trade secrets. Those inert ingredients could make us ineligible for certification for three years. With my friend Kavita’s help, we discovered that our product was on an older OMRI list. We were ecstatic and called the organic certifier. He said, “This is good news,” but he cautioned us. “The product might have changed—otherwise, why wasn’t it on the current list? If the material is the same as on the older list, you need to get the company to state that in writing.”

We called the company numerous times and sent beseeching emails. Fortunately, we reached a sympathetic person who explained that the product was changed to a different label due to a “consolidation of product line.” Neither the active nor inert ingredients had changed. He said the company didn’t list it because the paperwork was so arduous. We were very appreciative and the farm officially received organic certification a few weeks later.  Now, I get approval for every product before I use it in the orchard. And because we are one of two organic pick-your-own orchards in the state, and still the only one in eastern MA, we are picked out every fall before Columbus Day.

Apple Tree at Old Frog Pond Farm, 2013  Photo Credit: Linda Hoffman

Today, I wouldn't consider spraying a harsh chemical on our trees or herbicide under the trees, but I continue to apply for certification. Organic certification creates the market for our small farm. But I know that organic is only a minimum requirement for healthy food. The nutritional content of our food makes the big difference in human health and it’s the biological activity in the soil that feeds the plants that feed us. I’ll be writing about nutrient dense growing in a future blog. But that’s why it’s important to know your farm and know your farmer!