Author: Paul Deaton

Categories
Home Life

Busha’s Birthday

Mae Jabus

LAKE MACBRIDE— My grandmother was born on June 24 or 25, 1898 at home on the farm, west of the Catholic church in Wilno, Minn. The official record is unclear as to the precise date, and the clerk in the recorder’s office in the county seat told me that often births were not directly reported, but only when someone from the farm made it into Ivanhoe.

The church records show she was born Salomea Nadolski on June 25, 1898, and baptized on July 10, 1898 by the Rev. J.F. Andesejewski. Her godparents were Ladislaus Kuzminski and Maria Nadolski. I believe this version of the truth is closest.

The certified copy of the birth record I got from the county seat in Ivanhoe listed place of birth in Royal Township, Lincoln County, Minn. as Soluma Nadolski on July 10, 1898. Parents listed as Frank and Katie Nadolski.

Her certificate of death lists June 24, 1898 as the birth date of Mae N. and then Selmae M. Jabus, and those names and date were provided by my mother. The newspaper listed her as Mae M. Jabus in the obituary. Whatever may be official, we called her Busha after our daughter was born.

She told countless stories of life on the farm near Wilno and those stories came to life when I visited the home place, the church and the county seat after she died. If I am a story teller at all, it is because of her.

Her birthplace was still standing when I visited, and the owner kindly let me look around inside. I think he and his wife were looking to tear it down and build a more modern home for their growing family, although he didn’t say it. By today’s standards, the house was very small. There were shirttail relatives everywhere I went, including a gent who lived across the road from our home place. He was not doing well so we chatted only for the briefest of moments. He was connected through my great grandfather.

Like many descendents of Polish immigrants, my grandmother was fully assimilated. She still spoke Polish, but only with her sisters, and to the occasional wrong number who also spoke the language. There are stories about that for another telling.

Despite all the stories that have been and might be, I’ve been thinking about Busha’s life as I knew it the last couple of days. When I last saw her, she had moved to a nursing home where she used to work. She was mentally alert, and worried that the staff was stealing from her, even if there was not much to steal. She fumbled with her hearing aid so she could pay attention to what I had to say.
She got it to work, and we talked as we always had.

It has been 115 years since she was born, plus or minus a day. I feel so lucky to have known her for so long. The memory of so many things we did together persists as the sun sets over the Iowa prairie. I’m glad for that.

Categories
Sustainability

After the Hailstorm

Cherry Tomato Plant
Cherry Tomato Plant

LAKE MACBRIDE— The garage door opened on a wet driveway. The rain had stopped, leaving a pool of water that crept under the door. I swept it outside. The nearby seedling trays were filled with rainwater, so I dumped them into the flowerbed and moved the trays into the garage. I need to plant the next iteration of leafy green vegetables soon. No damage was done to the plants by the hail that fell around 4 a.m.

President Obama spoke in Berlin this week, and I have been waiting to listen to the speech, doing so this morning. Friends have been talking about Obama’s call for a new series of steps toward nuclear abolition. One friend, who is not an Internet user, called and left a voice mail message saying he hoped that Obama’s speech would generate new energy around nuclear abolition within Veterans for Peace. I don’t know about that. The speech was less than inspiring, even if filled with lofty ideas, many of which have been heard from this president before. Referring to the global AIDS initiative, Obama spoke about peace with justice,

“Peace with justice means meeting our moral obligations. […] Making sure that we do everything we can to realize the promise– an achievable promise– of the first AIDS-free generation. That is something that is possible if we feel a sufficient sense of urgency.”

That last part, “a sufficient sense of urgency,” is always the problem in our consumer society, isn’t it? At the same time, we can’t ignore the president’s call for new energy around what threatens life as we know it— nuclear proliferation, a warming and increasingly polluted planet, and social injustice.  Obama touched on all three in the speech.

The heavy lift of the New START Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation was a signature achievement of Obama’s first term. I was proud to have been part of the effort toward ratification. There was a sense in the conference calls with key State Department leaders, even shortly after Russia’s parliament ratified the treaty, that it was the last big thing regarding nuclear abolition for this president. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I heard it from people in a position to know.

Nuclear abolition matters, so it is important to consider the president’s announcement in Berlin, his plan to move forward in slowing nuclear proliferation. The U.S. will negotiate further reductions in deployed strategic nuclear weapons, by up to one third, with the Russian Federation; the U.S. will negotiate with Russia a reduction in tactical nuclear weapons in Europe; we must reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking; the U.S. will host a summit in 2016 to secure nuclear materials in the world; the administration will build support for ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; and the president called on all nations to begin negotiations on a treaty that ends the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons. These are all continuations of previous administration policies.

The day after the speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, posted an article in Foreign Policy titled, “Death by Cuts to a Thousand.” He wrote, “while (the president’s) remarks are overdue and welcome, the pace and scope of his proposals for further nuclear reductions are incremental at best and changes in the U.S. nuclear war plan are less than meets the eye.” I met Kimball in Washington in Fall 2009, and he is a key person among the non-governmental organizations that work on nuclear weapons issues. One suspects he was putting the best face on what was a disappointing policy announcement.

Despite this, as Kimball wrote in the article, “doing nothing in the face of grave nuclear weapons threats is not an option.” My work with others toward nuclear abolition will go on. It is a core part of working toward sustainability in a turbulent world.

Categories
Environment Kitchen Garden

A Local Food Saturday

Saturday Farmers Market Produce
Saturday Farmers Market Produce

LAKE MACBRIDE— Herbs are abundant in the garden, so I have been making dishes that taste better with fresh herbs: red beans and rice with fresh thyme, pasta sauce with fresh basil, and bread with sun-dried tomato and fresh rosemary. Each iteration of a dish, prepared in a moment of time, has consequence in our lives. Every bowl of soup, sandwich and plate of pasta is different for a home cook. Sometimes the food is better than others— our homemade meals speak to who we are, what we want to be and what we can be.

The idea of local food Saturday is simple. In order for there to be a vibrant and sustainable local food system, individuals must want to find, purchase and cook with local food items. We have to make a market in the things we hold dear. That’s how I landed on the important role home cooks can play in sustaining a local food system. Saturday is a weekend choice that fits a lot of people. It’s not like I am the first to come up with this— I’m not.

It is possible, and rewarding, to change our outlook from a being a consumer who goes to market to being a producer of home cooked meals that includes local food. One could do as well to develop a meal plan that includes local food and local food outlets, since almost no one cooks all, or even most of their own food at home.

The act of buying is such a brief part of our lives. We should make the most of it by unchaining ourselves from the mega-mart and relegating grocery stores to a more proper role as supplemental sources of provisions. It costs nothing to change one’s perspective, and the financial and personal payoff can be superior.

What did I do with the items in the photo from last Saturday’s farmers market?

The turnips were an impulse purchase as I could have waited a week to get fresh from my garden. I cut and washed the greens, cutting about a cup into quarter inch strips for soup, and putting the remainder in a container to use as cooking greens later in the week. Using the bulbs, I made turnip soup that included a quart of homemade stock, carrot, onion, celery, the turnip greens and the finely sliced stalk of the broccoli in the photo. I added dried chervil, salt and a bay leaf to make four servings.

The kohlrabi was for an experiment cooking it with potatoes. There will be a number of kohlrabi from the CSA, and a couple are growing in the garden. I’m trying to figure out how to use them. They also go well in a salad, cut into raw, matchstick-sized bits.

The radishes, cucumbers and zucchini were for fresh salads. The garden and CSA are producing lots of lettuce, and we have salad almost every night— sometimes as a meal. Lettuce and other leafy green vegetables are an important part of a local food system, and because we produce our own, there are none in the photo. The yellow squash was to slice and cook with greens.

Broccoli was to steam with dinner as it is a favorite and the broccoli in the garden was not ready yet. One stalk is not much, so we also steamed the last of the fresh asparagus from the CSA. A vegetable side dish to soup and a salad seems a bit weird, but was delicious nonetheless.

Finally there is the local honey. I got it home and realized there was another open jar in the pantry. I made the previously mentioned bread with local honey, fresh rosemary, sun dried tomatoes and a custom mix of flours.

In all, I spent about two hours in the kitchen with local food preparation, not including the rising time of the bread. On average, people spend a lot less kitchen time in a day, but ganging up on the prep work on Saturday made for better meals later during the week.

The revolution in local food will come when we change our attitude from being a consumer of goods to a producer. There will be a time when our lives are more interesting than who gets booted on the television program “Chopped.” For some of us, that time is already here, at least on Saturday afternoons.

Categories
Home Life

Some Summer Pest Problems

Cucumber Plants
Cucumber Plants
Tomato Leaves
Tomato Leaves
Zucchini Leaves
Zucchini Leaves
Categories
Social Commentary

Spring Ends

New Pioneer Garden
New Pioneer Garden Toward Sunset

LAKE MACBRIDE— Spring ended at the New Pioneer Food Co-op in Coralville where we did periodic shopping for specialty items. A man with a microphone attached to his ear was speaking to a group of wine-sippers on the mezzanine. His words drifted over the bakery, frozen food cases and rows of brightly packaged dry goods, barely audible. A few patrons shopped with carts, and after a while I went outside to wait on a bench for fulfillment of the trip— a month or more of supplies that can’t be purchased elsewhere.

A fly got into the house yesterday, signifying the invasion of insects. There were broccoli beetles at the farm on Wednesday, and something is eating the cucumber leaves in our garden. The small white butterflies continue to lay their eggs near the broccoli and Brussels sprout plants. A dash of chemicals would kill the pests off, but I don’t use them in the garden. Today’s activities will include identification of the cucumber pest and research on organic remedies. Summer’s struggle may not reach epic proportions, but the cucumber problem kept me awake last night. The pest control part of gardening is less exciting than harvesting.

Some rain fell last night, but not much. The wet spot on the driveway will soon evaporate, leaving what is expected to be a hot, dry day. There is a 30 percent chance of rain mid-afternoon, so here’s hoping it does rain. We don’t want another drought, and any rain would save watering.

Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring” is playing over the radio waves, a version conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Somewhere there is a cassette tape of the piece. It is one of my favorites and I listen to a version of it most springs— n informal ritual. The radio has moved on to “Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss. It must be a morning of popular favorites on the classical station.

A pot of pasta sauce is simmering on the stove. It was made with yellow and red onions, salt, finely minced garlic scapes, fresh basil, a quart jar of tomato sauce from last year’s garden, and a can of prepared tomato paste. It will make a lunch, so I had better get busy working up an appetite. Spring is over, and the hot, long work of summer begun.

Categories
Environment

On Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan
Photo credit: Fran Collin

LAKE MACBRIDE— Few people who work in academia are as well known, admired and reviled as Michael Pollan. Safe to say that a vast majority of the people on the planet have never heard of him.

Readers of this blog should know a). an answer to the question who is Michael Pollan and what does he do; b). I am familiar with most of his books, along with some articles, speeches and particularly his tweets on twitter; and c). I am not a “Pollanite” as some derisively refer to his followers.

The dust jacket of his latest book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation,” has the briefest of biographical snapshots and is likely the best. He is an author, a contributor to The New York Times, and Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley. In a bit of self-promotion, he added the sentence, “in 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.” Maybe more people have heard of him than I thought. More information about Michael Pollan is available on his web site MichaelPollan.com, and his full biography and curriculum vitae are useful for getting a brief overview of the man and his work.

Where Michael Pollan influenced my thinking was in three of his books that are mentioned less often, beginning with his 1997 effort, “A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams.” The other two were “Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education” (1991) and “The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World” (2001). What impressed me about “A Place of My Own,” and was a bit irritating, was that the book was about building his personal study, tying in a number of disciplines to tell a story about a building on his property— how he planned and built it.

My first reaction to Pollan was that he was a narcissist. What he does well is to take a common activity, like building a study, hemp growing, whole hog barbecue, or growing and tending lawns, establish a personal experience that relates to it, and lay a foundation to transcend the narcissistic impulse to focus on broader points. His inclusion of so much of his personal activities is a literary device, although my immediate reaction prevented me from understanding that at first. Sometimes the device works well (Iowa corn growing ), and sometimes it doesn’t (North Carolina barbecue).

There is really little point in writing, as I have done, about trivial things like cooking buttermilk biscuits, pruning trees and downsizing my book collection unless there is something relevant to say about the rest of society. My takeaway from reading Michael Pollan’s books is that we can base broader social criticism in our personal experience. As an academic, and now famous author, Pollan has access to information that most of us do not. That, and the unique perspective he gained from years of study, are reasons to read him.

Categories
Home Life

Brush Piles and Yard Work

Brush Pile
Brush Pile

LAKE MACBRIDE—  To say yard work has been a low priority is an understatement. During the 20 years since we built our home, landscaping has been a haphazard process governed by whim and fancy— and a vague sense of design that sufficed to get trees and a large quantity of lilac bushes planted.

An important consideration of buying a 0.6 acre lot was planning a large garden, but there is more to it than that. Trees were planted with an idea of gaining privacy on what was a barren piece of farm ground turned residential lot. Until the neighbor’s bordering evergreen trees began to die and were cut down last year, we had succeeded in getting as much privacy as one can in a rural subdivision.

The only surviving tree from the two that came with the lot is the mulberry tree. Since arriving we added four bur oak, one pin oak, two maple, two green ash, four apple, one pear, and two locust. With the mulberry, that makes 17. It took me a week to prune and cut up the fallen branches from all of these.

Burn Pile Storage
Burn Pile Storage

We don’t have a fireplace or use an outside burn pit for entertainment, so the brush needs to be cleared and disposed of. I’ll make a burn pile after the garden season, and store the brush for now. It should be a big fire.

If we lived in an apartment or condo, any yard work would be included in our association fees— others would do it. A state legislator recently said, “people want to live in cities,” but I don’t know about that.

Clearing the brush on a residential lot in the country is not the same as on a large acreage, but it remains a connection with nature and our attempt to cultivate it. This work runs through the heart of our lives in society, which might be less without it.

The exigencies of yard work and making something of the place where we live, in harmony with what remains of nature, takes work sometimes neglected. For a brief moment, when one job is done, and before another begins, we can feel good about our work, and that is something.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Garden at the End of Spring

Garden
Garden
Morning Shade
Morning Shade
Fruit Trees
Fruit Trees
Harvesting Spinach
Harvesting Spinach
Clouds over the Garden
Clouds over the Garden
Categories
Writing

Consuming Local Food

Asparagus and Mushrooms
Asparagus and Mushrooms

LAKE MACBRIDE— White butterflies have arrived to lay eggs in the cruciferous vegetable patch as spring enters its final days. Part of gardening is the notion that there is a world of deer, rabbits and rodents; caterpillars, beetles and aphids; microbes and bacteria; all ready to compete with us for food during the cycle that defines each year’s garden production.

Lettuce
Lettuce

A home cook who gardens is more acutely aware of this as a deer munches the top leaves of a pepper or green bean plant; as caterpillars make a home among broccoli and cabbage; or as potatoes considered from planting in early spring through growth and flowering are touched by Colorado potato beetles and the tuberous roots are eaten by rodents before we can dig them for the table. Application of chemicals is not an option in our garden, so more vulnerable crops like sweet corn and potatoes are leveraged from other growers, the bugs get picked off by hand, and complex webs of chicken wire and netting work to deter wildlife from access to garden plants— at least until after harvest time.

Broccoli
Broccoli

Gardening is a constant symbiosis that sustains a diverse and complex community of species in the context of an ever changing planet hurling itself into space. To say the future sustainability of local food systems rests in what home cooks do in their kitchens is putting a lot of pressure on a process that is far more complicated. Home kitchens are a part of the process, and human centered.

When considering a bigger picture, the assertion that home kitchens require a revolution to sustain local food is more a statement about marketing than anything else. What matters to sustainability of local food systems is how they fit into a broader context of a supply chain that includes grocery stores, pantries, gardens, farmers markets, CSAs, community food banks, government programs, neighbors and friends, and other sources of foodstuffs.

Bits and Pieces
Bits and Pieces

That said, farmers markets like the June 15 market in Cedar Rapids seem critical to sustaining a local food system. It is the behavior of a consumer society that attracts as many as 20,000 people to a Saturday market, and without consumers, there is no market for local produce.

One hopes that the cravings for sugar, salt and fat inculcated in us by industrial food processors get replaced with something better. However, changing how people behave regarding production and consumption of food is like piloting a large battleship in that changing course takes more than a few driving personalities asserting this or that needs to happen. Having a local food Saturday (or any day) in a home kitchen can work to correct a course currently fraught with obesity, chronic disease and ill health.

Supplies
Supplies

My recent local food Saturday is past and I look forward to the next. But before leaving it, there are some points  to be made about what it was and could be for others. By bearing witness to the efficacy of local food Saturday, perhaps readers will consider likewise. Like Scheherazade, I hope to keep you interested.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

June Lettuce Planting

Lettuce and Broccoli
Lettuce and Broccoli

LAKE MACBRIDE— According to a local organic farmer, “one of the most common mistakes home gardeners make is not planting sequentially.” What does that mean?

Certain crops, like lettuce, spinach and radishes, have a short planting to harvest cycle, and multiple crops can be planted during a season. That is, as soon as one row is harvested, another can be planted as long as the plants can tolerate weather as it get hotter and dryer.

What I learned at the farm this year is that lettuce produces the best crops when they are planted as individual seeds in a starter tray, then transferred to the garden as seedlings when the ground is ready. This accomplishes two things.

First, and this is really important, when planting lettuce, plant individual seeds, using a starter tray, or an old egg carton. Because lettuce seeds are so small, the temptation is to sow more than one together. By using a starter tray, and one seed per cell, if one cell fails to germinate, no problem when planting the seedlings in the rows in the soil. If the seed didn’t produce in the starter tray, there is no seedling to transplant. Planting single seeds ensures sufficient moisture and nutrients for each head of lettuce by avoiding over-crowding. It makes for larger leaves.

Second, by planting seeds in trays, the garden space can be more productive. A four week old seedling will take less time to mature once it is planted in the garden. If timed properly, a garden can be in lettuce most of the summer, into fall. For example, I have two and four week seedlings started in successive trays. They’ll be ready to plant when the current crop is harvested.

Avoid a common mistake, plant lettuce sequentially this June.

~ Written for Iowa City Patch