Next Year's Pumpkins

This little corner of the earth is breathing again. Yesterday I spread Bonnie’s manure from last winter, mixed with cattail bedding and aged for a season, onto a garden patch earmarked for next year’s pumpkin patch. Last winter’s shit, next year’s pumpkins.

This place breathed still when we arrived 4 years ago. Petro chemical fertilizers were spread, GMO seeds drilled, the sun shone, the rain fell, the green leaves unfurled to cover the fields for a brief season. The combine or chopper rolled in and the leaves, stalks, pods and seeds were removed. A breath. Inputs in, sun and rain, soil to hold the roots, corn silage out. The place did breathe and it was alive. But alive like a tiger bound to a cage at the zoo, or a bull elk pulled from the mountains and put behind an 8 ft chainlink fence. They are alive, they breathe, but without vitality. Without fire. Without spirit. They are waiting to die and are separated from the eternal and infinite energies of nature and her cycles.

The last 4 years has brought this land, Farmcraft, back into the pool of life and vital energy. The farm fairies have awakened. We – Andrea and I, our family, the authors of 100 books, the community, the customers – we have breathed life back into this place. Nature did most of it on her own. Just getting out of her way and stopping the chemical poison and physical violence and general domination – just stepping back our domination and poisoning of the land allowed nature to recover. Amphibians – toads, salamanders – showed up in year 2. Butterflies and dragonflies more abundant each year.

Then we brought our own animals and put them not on concrete but on to the land. They have always been on the land. The cow and land are eternally bound to each other, as are the pigs, chickens, deer, elk, tigers, humans. All bound to the land and the land to us. Neither functions without the other. There was no manure here for years and years, and no crust-breaking seed-planting action of a cow’s hooves, or the mystical growth-inducing dew drops of a cow’s nose spread across the landscape. The land is breathing here again. It is vitally alive, and so are Andrea and I and all who associate here – online, in person, through the stories, through the food on their table – we are all more alive for this place breathing again.

Spiderwebs crisscross the garden and pasture, laden with dew each morning and shining gold in the sun each afternoon. Innumerable thrips and horn flies and God knows what else are caught and eaten, cycled back into the earth each day by these communities of nearly invisible web spinners.

Fifty, a hundred varieties of plants cover the soil of the pastures, meadows and fencelines, not for a month of two but all year, breathing life 24/7, 365 into and out of the soil, carbon and water and sun in, sugars and plant biochemical magic into the soil, minerals exchanged with fungi and bacteria, nematodes and rolly pollys and fairies know what else, all fed and in communion with leaves and roots covering and living in the soil.

And a big mamma to eat the leaves, to make the milk to abundantly feed her calf, the farmers family, the community. To feed and nourish them all with ease just from the ever renewing abundance of natures cycles, natures breath. A big mamma that feeds everyone and everything effortlessly when upon the land. The land and the cow breathe together, and they even make one, two, 10 calves to graze and breathe beside her and to carry on the eternal breathe after her.

And yes, finally, the pile of manure. Who knew all that it was, all that it represented. This place is breathing again and is slowly being reimmersed and realigned with natures infinite vital energy and her effortless production of a nourishing abundance. Another cycle, another breathe - last winter’s shit, next year’s pumpkins.