Bags of Fertilizer

I wonder how many bags of fertilizer are spread on a single field to grow corn. In the United States alone we grow corn on 90 million acres. How many 50-pound bags of synthetic fertilizers are emptied out and fed to the soil?

I’m obsessed with this thinking, it’s formed a loop in my mind, like a morning dream that repeats over and over. And while one detail changes, nothing significant enough shifts to allow an escape. The parking ticket can’t be found, the man is still in the bar drinking, how to get out of the parking lot and to safety.

After World War II ended, the companies who made nerve gas and poisons reprogrammed their products, calling them fertilizers. Then, they persuasively changed the way of farming all over the world, poisoning the earth instead of the enemy, while in the long term, harming both humans, insects, and soil. How did we arrive at this idea that we need to manufacture synthetic materials to help the earth grow plants? The microorganisms in the soil are all part of a complex soil web:  the bacteria, the fungal populations, the earthworms, the nematodes, the mycelia are the real farmers.

Sketchbook page, Julia Tricca

In Beirut this week, thousands of tons of fertilizer exploded and took the lives of 150 people, injured thousands, destroying the homes of hundreds of thousands of others. A country that was already suffering from oppression, injustice, war and corruption is in chaos. Bags of fertilizer, or shall I say explosives, from Batumi, Georgia destined for Mozambique, one of the ten poorest countries on the planet, has shaken this country to its core.

Fertilizer bags are usually cheap paper just thick enough to hold the weight. But if they lay around and attract moisture, the paper decays, the bags leak, and moving them becomes a huge mess. Hazardous waste. Human trash needing to be gotten rid of.  We’re good at manufacturing materials that harm the planet, that have a long shelf life, that don’t disappear even after hundreds of years.

We are caught in a loop of our own creation. How are we going to get out of our destructive cycle?  Surely the farmers in Mozambique know how to grow food naturally. Buying expensive synthetic fertilizers is not going to solve their country’s many problems. It’s not solving the problems in our country. For example, in Kansas, where 90 percent of the state is agricultural land, one in five people go hungry. Kansas isn’t growing food, it grows feed for cattle, ethanol for fuel, and high fructose corn syrup, while a large percent of its population starves.

We have to envision a new model. We have to collectively re-envision the world we want to pass on to the unborn. We live on the planet, we need to eat food grown in its soil, and drink water from its underground rivers. Here is where we need to begin.

We need to believe that nature works and there is a natural way to live in accord with nature. The system is designed to work. We need to trust. And we need to make changes. Almost 70% of agricultural land on the earth is used to grow feed for animals we eat. And this meat provides a much smaller percent of calories to the world’s population than plant-based crops. If we are to provide food for the growing number of people on the planet, farming needs to be a journey in which we relate to the land and all its creatures. 

Sketchbook page, Julia Tricca

The good news is that a United Nations report in 2014 stated that 80% of the world’s food is still produced by family farms. The future is not in industrial agriculture, but in intelligent small-scale farming. I heard a surprising statistic while listening to a podcast between John Kempf and Zach Bush, two modern agronomists—70% of our food comes from farms that are five acres or less. This statistic gives me hope. But for the people suffering in Lebanon, an outpouring of aid is what is needed. A few of the organizations you can donate to are:

The United Nation’s World Food Program
Unicef
Impact Lebanon
Project Hope

And remember to support your local farms!

Sketchbook page, Julia Tricca

Note: Artist Julia Tricca was a farmer at Old Frog Pond Farm during her high school and two college summers. She graduated this spring and shared her final art project with me. Julia will be installing a new sculpture at the farm this fall. We’re all proud of you, Julia!

The Sermon of the Blue Heron

I walked out of the house early yesterday morning and saw a blue heron preaching from the roof peak of the little hut at the waterfall next to the dam. I feigned disinterest and sauntered quietly down the hill towards a new garden bed, hoping the heron wouldn’t fly away. It turned its head 180 degrees, but didn’t fly off.

This garden was planted last week, watered well, but not since—and we’ve had no rain. We’ve had no rain all summer, not a full day of soaking down wetness, not since too much rain in early May when we lost half our apple crop from poor pollination. We water the crop plants and the fruit trees and a few gardens pumping water from the pond, but much else is dry, parched, and crunches underfoot. 

We’re lost without water, like we’re lost without a road map. Plants genetically receive all kinds of direction. Grow towards the sun, make your leaves larger because you are in the shade and need more photosynthesis, switch to ‘dry’ mode and pull in so that you can survive this drought. I think about where my inner direction comes from, how can I be sure I am hearing it. Sometimes my deepest yearnings feel like quicksand, holding me in inactivity without a guiding star. I was relieved to see the garden was alive, the transplants had survived the hot week.

I walked back up the hill and over to my studio. A few minutes later, I was upstairs at my desk with my morning tea when the heron flew by and landed near the pond. I thought it might be preaching to turtles, water snakes, maybe even the water lilies opening from their tightly closed night to better hear the heron’s wisdom. Herons know water; for they are fishermen and spend long hours watching water. 

The heron, however, surely didn’t know it was standing halfway between the summer solstice and the fall equinox, on the pagan holiday, Lughnasad. This holiday is celebrated on the first of August and marks the beginning of the wheat harvest and the sun’s slow descent towards winter. For us at the farm, early August is when we harvest the first tree fruits, peaches, plums, and early season apples. It’s also the last time to get seeds into the ground for late fall crops. In the midst of a global pandemic, while areas of the world suffer extreme drought and other places experience massive and destructive floods, the heron stands at the boundary of earth and water with equipoise, catching its food, a guardian of the old ways.

As we shift to this new season, maybe it’s a time for us to reassess our ways. Make some choices of what we are carrying into the next phase. Spring flowers are a distant memory, while yarrow is in bloom, Queen Anne’s lace is at its peak, and goldenrod is opening to yellow. The night insects have begun their incantations. What to take with us and what to let go?

What do you want to put energy into? Energy flows where intention goes. What’s driving you? What brings you joy? We can’t do it all, not in one season. But we can be part of it all.

At the farm we now have fewer bluebirds, the orioles have migrated, and only one pair of barn swallows are still sitting on eggs. But the heron remains—majestic, otherworldly, its squawks coming from deep in the earth, a wisdom that calls out, “Take heed. What are you doing with this one precious life?”

What's the Buzz?

Our bees had a productive spring, and our beekeeper, Don Rota, presented us with seven pounds of ravishing, golden, lucid, liquid gold. On Thursday afternoon, we bottled the honey in six- and twelve-ounce glass jars in the farmhouse kitchen.

But what exactly is honey? When bees gather nectar from the flowers, they receive a jolt of energy in the form of carbohydrates (sugars) to keep them going in the hot sun from flower to flower, but the excess is stored in their nectar stomachs. When they return to the hive, they regurgitate the nectar and offer it to another bee. As this nectar is passed from bee to bee, an enzyme in the bees’ stomachs begins the process of turning it into honey. Then the consolidated nectar is put into cells in the hive. Fanning completes the water evaporation process and what’s left is honey. Bees make honey so they can survive the winter.

Bees have been on the planet for 120,000,000 years. A bee was found preserved in amber from Myanmar dating back 100,000,000 years. Despite the longevity of the species, individual worker bees, all female, only live a month in the summer. It’s hard work to be a worker bee, but then they do have the glory of visiting flower after flower, and gorging on lovely nectar. In winter, however, their physiology changes and worker bees live up to three months.

Drones, the male bees, live longer, do no work, just laze around the hive waiting for a queen to be born. After her birth, the virgin makes a maiden voyage outside the hive, sending out a pheromone to attract the opposite sex. The drones mate with the nubile queen and then die soon after, completely spent after such their lovemaking. She stores this lifetime supply of sperm to use as needed, controlling fertilization of her eggs by releasing sperm as the egg passes through her oviduct. Come fall, any drones still hanging around are booted out of the hive, and left to starve to death.

Queens can live for five years. If the hive’s queen is old or ill, the new queen may fight her and possibly take over. Sometimes worker bees bring a new queen into a hive because it is large and needs a queen so part of the hive can swarm. It’s the decision of the workers to feed royal jelly to larvae bees to make new queens. The worker bees democratically decide about everything that happens in the hive. Depending on the size of the cells the worker bees create, the queen lays unfertilized eggs to become drones (male) or fertilized ones to become worker bees (female).

Some people consider bees to be mammals. They view the hive as an animal without its ‘skin bag.’ The different kinds of bees are like cells in a body with different functions. The ‘swarm’ is the offspring. I like this notion because the hive becomes a larger system, one creature, one body, one ecosystem. 

In summer the hive may grow to over 30,000 bees, but in the winter they drop down to a thousand bees as they conserve resources to survive the winter. The life of the honey bee is one deep and abiding concern for their food supply. Surely this is why they have survived on the planet for so long. In comparison, our ancestors have occupied the planet for only six million years, and we have become dangerously complacent about our food supply.

Humans have a long desired honey. A drawing on a rock face in Spain dating back to 6000 BCE shows two people climbing a rope ladder to get to a hive high up on a flat rock wall. Another drawing found in Zimbabwe from 8000 BCE shows the wavy lines of natural honeycomb with a person approaching it holding some kind of smoker. People in remote areas of Nepal and Macedonia still ‘hunt’ for hives, sometimes climbing steep rock faces to gather prized honey. In Romania, bee hive trucks follow the flowering from the South to the North, parking for a few weeks off highways, giving their bees lots of wild forage. I imagine the colors and shapes help the bees return to their own hives.

Bee hive truck near Vitri, Romania, 2016

The Egyptians described keeping bees for the medicinal properties of the honey in paintings and writing. They used honey for all sorts of sicknesses from diabetes to contraception. There are even paintings depicting ritual circumcisions with the wound being dressed with honey. Today we know there are high levels of antimicrobial activity in raw honey.

Beekeepers are dedicated to their hives. They also are enthusiastic to share information and help each other. Melissa Ljosa used to keep two top bar hives here until she moved to Vermont a few months ago.

Don Rota is the one without the bee suit. Melissa (left), is checking a top bar hive. We miss her!

Don now takes care of ten hives at Old Frog Pond Farm. He loves to keep them here because we are committed to organic practices, and the farm grows healthy forage all season long for the bees. Don told me one spoon of honey takes twelve bees their entire lives to gather. I think of them each morning with my dollop of honey in my morning tea.

A few of Don’s more colorful hives at the farm. Yellow for the sun and blue for the dome above.

And what’s the buzz? As the bee beats its wings, we hear the vibration as buzzing. But the flower feels the buzzing as movement. Pollen may fall off the flower and onto the bee’s body. Some is carried to the next flower the bee visits; the rest is stashed in the bee’s pollen baskets on its hind legs. It will travel back to the hive for the nurse workers who stay in the hive to feed the young.

Pollen Baskets are Full

There’s so much more I could write about bees—but perhaps best to stop here and invite you to stop by our farm stand for a taste of local, raw honey. Its truest secrets are only conveyed by the spoonful on the tongue.

Raw honey for sale at our self-serve farm stand.

Farm Moments

We hear the earth’s joys and sorrows . . .

Sweet Peaches

Red Bartlett Pears

Passion from River Stones Installation, LH

Japanese Bell

Cocoon from Anne Eder’s Boneyard

Peering Around the Corner, Joseph Wheelwright

Wildflowers, detail, Zach Gabbard

Lovely Apple

Giant Broccoli

Tempo, Arial Matisse

Queen of the Prairie, Red Monarda, and Cattails near the Pond

. . . within our own heart.