Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Summer Moon<\/p>\n
There was a pagan feel to the gathering at Seed Savers Exchange.\u00a0 Ironic, since Luther College in nearby Decorah represents a conservative brand of Lutheranism.\u00a0 There was at least one obvious symbol, a man wore a t-shirt with a Wiccan theme, but the more pervasive and more subtle expression came through in conversations like the one I had with Virginia Nowicki, soon to be Gardener’s Supply Catalogue official national garden crusader.<\/p>\n
“In the garden we feel a connection to the divine, the sacred,” she said while we ate organically raised chicken and pork, kohlrabi salad, heirloom green beans and mashed potatoes.\u00a0 “We feel authentic.”<\/p>\n
“Yes,”\u00a0 her husband said, “We belong to that land.\u00a0 It’s our home.\u00a0 We feel like we’re just one of the animals that live there.”<\/p>\n
Virginia will begin promoting Liberty Gardens in a couple of weeks on a website she’s producing and through\u00a0 the network of those connected to Gardener’s Supply.<\/p>\n
Virginia and Bob live in Downer’s Grove, Illinois.\u00a0 Their home serves as a demonstration site during Permaculture Design classes.\u00a0 They moved in thirty years ago.<\/p>\n
“When the city inspector came, he asked when the lawn would come.” Bob said.\u00a0 “I told him we weren’t planning on a yard.\u00a0 He seemed taken aback.”<\/p>\n
“Well,” he asked, “how will you deal with the mud?\u00a0 I can’t give you an occupancy permit until you do something about that.”<\/p>\n
“Woodchips,”\u00a0 Bob said.<\/p>\n
“What?”<\/p>\n
“Woodchips.\u00a0 We’ll put down woodchips.”<\/p>\n
“Oh, all right.\u00a0 When the woodchips are down, I’ll sign your permit.”<\/p>\n
“We put in eight inches of woodchips,” Virginia says, “eight inches.\u00a0 We imagined where the paths would go, then put\u00a0 trees and garden beds in the places that weren’t the path.”<\/p>\n
There home is in the midst of Downer’s Grove.<\/p>\n
There were many examples of this kind of extraordinary devotion to the land and to growing food in concert with the cycles of nature, rather than against them.<\/p>\n
Another man from Champaign, Illinois told me he fed himself and his wife and his son, his wife and their three kids.\u00a0 Deborah Madison, the vegetarian cookbook maven, signed her books.\u00a0 She’s on the board of SSE.\u00a0 Eliot Coleman, a man who bought land from Helen and Scott Nearing–Living the Good Life, has a success story of intensive gardening.\u00a0 He times his four-season gardening in concert with the Celtic cross-quarter holidays.\u00a0 Mike McGrath, former editor of Organic Gardening and host of a garden show on NPR, is a garden crusader himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summer\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Summer Moon There was a pagan feel to the gathering at Seed Savers Exchange.\u00a0 Ironic, since Luther College in nearby Decorah represents a conservative brand of Lutheranism.\u00a0 There was at least one obvious symbol, a man wore a t-shirt with a Wiccan theme, but the more pervasive and more subtle expression came through … Continue reading Laborers for the Great Work<\/span>