Plants & Politics

I mean, if you wanted a hearty citrus relative, why didn’t you just grow Osage Orange? They can grow as far north as Michigan which is surely further north than anyone could reasonably expect to grow a citrus tree. They’re not edible but then hearty orange isn’t either. Osage Orange are so cool and such a interesting historical plant from the Shelterbelt era of American agriculture. Apparently they do smell like citrus.

Developing new breeds of plant is extremely fun. 

It’s less challenging than citrus, but the Blue Haired Girlfriend and I are also developing our own strain of pumpkins (sometime called a “landrace”) with genes adapted to the very hill we live on. We started with seeds from every sort of pumpkin we liked. We ordered kabocha seeds from Asian seed suppliers. We kept seeds from particularly tasty holiday pumpkins. We bought seeds from local nurseries. We planted them all together and let the bees mix their genes. 

Every year we keep the seed from whichever plants do best, and the bees weave together their genes. So each year’s seeds have one parent who did well the previous year, and two grandparents who did well two years ago. You start with a broad and chaotic set of genes, and gradually tune in on what works best in the space we have for them. Every year, the pumpkins as a group do a little better with the thin rocky soil here, with the mischievous wind called TENĆOLEЌ that is shot at us from the mouth of a fjord on the next island over like water from a hose, the way the Blue Haired Girlfriend and I get overenthusiastic and start seedlings too early in the spring, that we fertilize mostly with chicken poop and have a bit much nitrogen, that the chickens scratch and bathe in the earth and eat cutworms when the beds are fallow, that we grow garlic, that we water at night but sometimes turn on the sprinkler randomly in the day to scare the deer. Year by year our pumpkins learn the rhythm of our lives and sing it back to us. The story of us and this place is written in the pumpkins, if we could but read it. 

This is the Slow Magic, one of the oldest and best of the human magics. I think everyone with a large enough garden should try it at least once.

Here’s a story: Once upon a time there was a weed that grew in wheat fields. Farmers preferred wheat to useless small-seeded weeds, so whenever they spotted the weed, they pulled it up and tossed it out of the field. But some years a few weeds escaped unnoticed, if their leaves were particularly pointy and they looked extra wheat-like. Their seeds got mixed in with the wheat and replanted. So as the years rolled on, the weed got better at pretending to be wheat. It developed pointy leaves, and tall seed heads, and eventually huge wheat-like seeds, which made it wonderful in the same ways wheat is. At which point, someone realized you might as well plant this pesky large-seeded thing in its very own fields and harvest it and make tasty bread out of it. And so we got rye.

Given long enough, weeds learn the rhythm of scythe and sickle, and sing it back to us. 

The story of rye is important to me because this is also the Slow Magic: every year the human species becomes a little stranger, a little truer, a little kinder. We work the Slow Magic on ourselves, even while the world falls apart, and we put it back together. We sing and we listen and we hold each other’s dreams gently in our cupped hands. It is such slow work. It will not be done in our lifetimes, or our children’s, or their children’s. We plant seeds whose fruits we will not see. 

A Cabin Afield, Little Compton, Newport County, Rhode Island, USA,