Many of my Appalachian friends, including my dear husband (as his surname implies), came from Scotland, many of them originally from Ireland and “transported” to the New World as indentured servants; others were simply driven to leave by the higher rents imposed by the Scots lords.  These Scots-Irish folks are proud, polite, gracious… and prickly.  They like to go where they like and do as they wish, so many of them sneaked away from hateful overseers in the north and hid out in the shady southern mountains.  The plant that typifies this spirit is one that, like my hubby’s feisty forebears, sneaked in and goes where it likes and does as it pleases. It’s the beautiful, but often despised, thistle.

The Scotch thistle has a big, long, Latin moniker: onopordum acanthium.  Freely translated, it means “thorny weed that donkeys eat.”  (Though another interpretation that I like is “thistle that produces wind in, ahem, asses”: onos = “ass” or donkey;  perdon = “I disperse wind.”  Look it up!)  This image of the donkey, however you choose to stage it, inspired the British to give the plant the moniker “The Eeyore Plant” because thistle was the favorite food of Winnie the Pooh’s dear, if grumpy, donkey pal.

And it’s important to note that, though donkeys may be able to tolerate it, Scotch thistle is impossible for cows to eat.  Its defense mechanism works extremely efficiently on the soft mouths of cattle.

The thistle is a biological paradox.  It has gorgeous flowers, a lovely shade of pinkish-purple, soft and inviting, but those blooms sit atop a stalk that will attack you, viciously, if you try to pick it.  Or even brush your hand along it.  If you’ve ever tried (like me) to uproot one, you know that the thistle plant seems to be literally coated with extremely sharp spines, little ones along the stalk, all the way down and into the ground, and giant ones on every leaf. One pair of gardening gloves is not sufficient protection for grasping this wily weed.

Scotch thistle is native to Europe, and is a member of a very large family, the asteraceae that includes sunflowers, daisies, burdock (which it greatly resembles), plenty of non-aggressive plants, and lots of other kinds of thistle.  But the micro-portrait of this thistle takes us to Scotland, where it apparently proliferated so happily that by the 1500s, it was abundant enough to save the whole country from invaders.  The legend is that Vikings were ready to take over the Scots domain.  Scottish soldiers were alerted and ready, but one night, when all were sleeping, the Vikings crept in for a surprise attack.  The planned conquest was thwarted, though, when a sandaled Norseman stepped full-on into a stand of thistles.

His screams awoke the Scots warriors and saved the country.

However true (or not) this story may be, it’s a fact that by the early 1500s, the thistle had become what we now acknowledge to be the first “national flower,” its unusual contour appearing on heraldic scrolls and shields from then to now.  Legend does not specify the precise variety of thistle, and though the donkey-beloved type is appealing, it could as easily have been milk thistle, or cardus marianus.  The Scots, a proud people, still, even now, trying to wrest independent status from their British occupiers, like to think of the thistle as symbolic of their national character.  It combines beauty, battle-readiness, bravery, and a determination to stay rooted in the land where it has chosen to reside.  The motto accompanying the flower’s picture in the ancient Order of the Thistle is “Nemo me impune lacessit” — “No one provokes me with impunity.” But I prefer the Scottish-English translation: “Wha daur meddle wi’ me?”

Thistles were brought here in colonial times, probably for their medicinal uses, and also as ornamental plants, the florets providing quite a show when growing in abundance.  Once it got here, the thistle went where it liked and did as it pleased.  It really likes riverbanks, even ditches, and it is particularly fond of land that has been neglected, or land that looks neglected by virtue of having had all the weeds eliminated.  Oh yeah, give the Eeyore Plant half a chance and it will creep over to where you have just laboriously gotten rid of every stray weed in preparation for a new stand of corn or cabbage.  It is justifiably referred to as “invasive”; if it sees some cleared land, it regards it as an invitation to move right in.

One modern homesteader has had a learning experience with thistles and shares his wisdom on the subject.  Edwin Shank, operating a Mennonite family-farm business, found thistle spreading like, well, like thistle, along his fence rows, after the family had dutifully sprayed the area alongside their cultivated field with Round-up.  This spraying created what Shank calls “competition-free ground”—basically, thistle-ready soil.  Shank says, “Thistles do not compete well with other plants.  They are opportunistic plants and thrive in the absence of beneficial plants like grass, dandelion, and clover.  They love bare ground.  If you have ever noticed how vacant lots and construction zones so often erupt into a rip-roaring thistle bloom, you know what I mean.”  Only when the family let the natural vegetation come back did the thistle give up and go elsewhere: when “clover and other beneficial plants began to grow with a renewed lushness, the thistle population, almost as if by magic, began to die off.  The more we encouraged and supported the beneficial plants the less problematic the pathogenic plants.”

Thistle seems like a real pest so far, doesn’t it?  Its name has been sullied wherever it has presented itself; even Shakespeare called it “rough” and “hateful.”  And no wonder.  If it takes up along riverbanks, it can spoil an area of parkland meant for camping.  And hiking?  Who wants to hike in a thistle jungle?  Just ask that Norse invader!

Thistle is biennial and can only propagate by seed, but once that process has started, you can expect a lot of growth the following year.  Best to get rid of the little boogers before they set seed, right?  Because one Scotch thistle plant can produce thousands of seeds.

But maybe you don’t want to get rid of your thistle plants.  Maybe you suspect that these “pests,” like other kinds of vegetation generally considered invasive or simply annoying, might have positive qualities worth cultivating.

Here’s the good side of thistle (it’s not just for warding off Viking invaders).  Scotch thistle and other thistle varieties were used by the Scots for a lot of healthy, useful purposes.  Specifically, Scotch thistle has been used as a “cardiotonic” to stimulate the heart.  This use is mentioned in the reliable website, WebMD, with the proviso that “there isn’t enough information to know how Scotch thistle might work as a medicine.”  It was used by the ancients for cancers and ulcers; its stalk contains a milky fluid that, like cow’s milk, is used as a remedy for any internal upset.

We don’t know what cancers or cankers or ulcers may have beset our ancestors, because the terms were used in a less medically precise way in our grand- and great-grandparents’ day.  But it’s reasonable to infer that a plant that showed such strength as Scotch thistle could be used to give courage, that is, to foster a “brave heart.”  And anything milky and gooey would look like a natural cure for flaring internal pain.  And over time, these simple assessments have often proven true.

Another odd twist to the thistle profile is that though a cow cannot chew the plants where they grow, the leaves, when chopped up, make excellent animal fodder.

A British website, Botanical.com, adds this information to the plus side of the Scotch thistle ledger from long ago wisdom: “that ‘the leaves and root hereof are a remedy for those that have their bodies drawn backwards,’ and [Nicholas] Culpepper explains that not only is the juice therefore good for a crick in the neck, but also as a remedy for rickets in children.  It was considered also to be good in nervous complaints.”  I speculate that those with their bodies drawn backwards (a horrible image) might have been suffering from tetanus or other poisoning.

But the list of pluses goes on.  Scotch thistle is not only choppable and drinkable, it’s quite edible.  The flowers of the thistle sit on a little globe, and that globe was eaten, and can still be, like an artichoke (the commonly known artichoke is also a thistle, another member of the asteraceae clan).  If you look at it you can see the resemblance.  Other varieties of thistle are also touted for the edibility of the “bud”, as it is called.  But the stems are also a food source, something like celery, boiled after being stripped of all their prickles.  Leaves, and the entire young plant, can be boiled and eaten.  Of course, the thistle does not yield its various parts kindly, and you can imagine that the Scots who decided to eat thistle must have been pretty darn hungry.

Still, there are yet other reasons to grow thistle.  Even today, it is said that some people use thistle oil, extracted from the seeds, for lighting and eating (one source says that twelve pounds of seeds may produce about three pounds of oil).

Since Scotch thistle is also known as cotton thistle, this aspect of the plant has not gone unexploited.  The cottony fiber clinging to the stalks was collected by our (very) hardy Scots ancestors and used to stuff pillows.  Ouch!

Another gold star for most kinds of thistles is that the flowers dry well, and can be sold for that purpose or used in home decorating.  One variety especially appreciated for that purpose is called, romantically, Blue Super Nova (aka eryngium), with blooms so big that a single one may fill an entire vase.

It is necessary to warn anyone who decides to cultivate thistles of almost any variety, that, in some places, it is actually banned. You can get in trouble with the law for propagating thistle, and you can alienate your neighbors too, if your thistle decides it likes their newly cleared patch of garden.  Milk thistle, a cousin of the Scotch, begins its cycle as a very prickly, dark-green leaf with white marbling, and winds up with the tall, distinctive purple flowers so dear to the Scots.  Yet despite the well-known medicinal uses of the plant (for liver disorders primarily, though many other claims are made on its behalf) and its undeniably lovely florets, milk thistle (aka Holy Thistle) is classified as a noxious weed in many places, and if found, is required to be eradicated.  In Washington State, for example, it is illegal to sell, transport, distribute, or buy milk thistle.  Canadian thistle creeps, and we know that can’t be a good thing; it has delicate pink flowers and is considered highly invasive despite being a preferred food for many birds and butterflies.  Even those seeking to get rid of it in farmland commend it as an aid in honey production.

Most thistles are on the “Least Wanted” list wherever found.  And the reasoning behind this hands-off, zero-tolerance thistle policy is sound.  Thistles can ruin a farm, as the Shank family nearly found out.

So how would you get rid of thistles if you found them?  Hopefully, like me, you will find only one.  It will be young and perhaps only in the first year of its biennial cycle.  It will be easily uprooted, though you have to be careful to get rid of every bit of the root, or it will come back next year.  Pulling them up is really the optimal method of eradicating thistles.  My advice: wear heavy or double gloves, long sleeves, long pants, and high socks.  Once stung, twice reminded.

Rough, tough thistles are, not surprisingly, quite resistant to most standard pesticides.  As chemistry is applied to the problem, some pesticides have been developed that do work on thistles.  My advice: read the labels of pesticides just as you would for medicines.  Those side effects can be scary.

If you’re like me, or if you’re Scots-Irish like my husband, you may find yourself quite resistant to trying to wipe out a perfectly decent, historically significant, and rather lovely plant just because it has a bad reputation in some circles.  Perhaps you are a bit of an Eeyore, stubborn and hard to please.  Maybe you’d like to explore some of its touted uses or just keep it for a spot of color on the mantle.  Maybe, like Scots poet Robert Burns, when you see a thistle springing up, you will simply decide to “turn the weeding hook aside, and spare the symbol dear.”
If you are not seduced by the thistle’s charms or its store of legends or its practical applications, then follow Edwin Shank’s example.  After all, isn’t it more tolerant, more nature-friendly, and indeed, more sensible in the long run, to ignore the thistle and let it decide on its own when it’s time to hit the road?  It won’t like your well-tended lawn, your heavy cultivation, double digging, raised beds, and such other examples of good agricultural practice.  It avoids well-cared-for land, is persnickety about sharing turf, and will pack up and go.  It probably would have preferred never to have moved at all from the bonny braes of Scotland but now it’s on the run and there’s no turning back.  So leave it alone, let your garden grow, and your Scotch thistle will, in its own time, grumpily, seek another home.

A Pansy for Your Thoughts: A Walk Through a Shakespearian Garden

The post Thistle: The Pretty Pest appeared first on Homestead.org.

Josephine announced that she does not like strawberries.

Surprised, I invited her to give the berry to me, and this she did, and then with a flourish, she forked over the cabbage sprig as well, with the disdainful comment, “And I don’t like broccoli!”

Without knowing it (I consider all my grandchildren geniuses, but only up to a point), Josephine had correctly surmised that the curly, colorful leaf was a brassica—just not the right type. Clever child!

It was not until I was well into adulthood that I learned the Latin name for my green, leafy veggies, the ones your mother always ordered you to eat (but the brassica family does not, repeat, does not include spinach). The basic brassica is cabbage, a humble plant found growing wild just about everywhere in the world. Its name appends to all sorts of smelly cousins like swamp cabbage and skunk cabbage, and many brassicas are known for their hefty perfume. The brassica family is large with many eccentric relatives (my family is a bit like that). Inbreeding and a little genetic experimentation (maybe you have that in your family too?) have resulted in many alterations to the simple cabbage plant.

Let’s start the brassica introductions with my favorite, brassica juncea: Mustard.

Since it’s commonly used in cooking in the Middle East, it could be one of the many plants that originated there. It is cruciform (a nice word meaning that its leaves form a cross). Its seeds, ground to powder, provide the color (ranging from bright yellow to coal black) and flavor (sharp, sharper, sharpest) for mustard, that condiment so beloved of hot dog and deli sandwich fans. When homegrown, it’s loaded with selenium because its roots go deep, mining the earth for minerals. From its tender youth to its mighty adult state, mustard leaves are tasty—either velvety sweet when small, or later, pungent, biting back a bit. We in the South combat its bite with a bitter, better biter—vinegar—making a salsa-like delicacy from what could be seen as merely a limp “mess” of greens.

Mustard seed is a symbol for potential. Jesus of Nazareth said, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” He didn’t mean that one’s faith should be small; he was speaking allegorically of the power of a tiny seed to produce great works of nature. Mustard has been fruitful and multiplied, spreading itself to the far corners of the globe, and allowing its simple form—dark green leaves, straight tall stalk and attractive yellow flowers—to be transmogrified into such weird conceptions as broccoli, cauliflower, collards, turnips, and kale, with colors that range from white and pale green to deep green and purple.

Because frankly, the brassica is a class-bounder, a wild, rather promiscuous leafy clump that has leapt way above its station in life, feeding the poor happily, but also gracing the plates of the elite in the form of purple cauliflower and Dijon poupon.

All the mutations and permutations of the brassica clan can be explained by the mysterious Triangle of U. U was a Korean (real name, Woo Jang-Chu) who in 1935 confirmed that three brassica varieties – Nigra (black mustard) , Oleracea (cabbage, kale, sprouts, and caulie) and Rapa (turnip and Chinese cabbage), were able to interbreed to create three more, and so ad infinitum.

The new combos were Napus (rapeseed and rutabaga), Juncea (Indian mustard) and Carinata (more mustard). And they went on combining.

But the question remains, how did brassica change its shape, its product, from a flat green leaf to huge weighty roots and pristine multi-colored florets?

The bio-dynamic gardening method introduced by Rudolf Steiner (and widely accepted in Europe as good husbandry) speaks of plants “expressing” one of their four essences: root, leaf, flower, and fruit. Depending on the desired outcome, one plants at the proper phase of the moon. If you want a brassica that is leafy (such as kale) you would plant it when the moon is in a water sign. For a good root brassica like turnip, plant in the earth phase; air signs affect flowers that must interact with the air (like cauliflower), and fruits need strong energy, or fire (like the unfortunately named “rape” whose seed produces oil).

I don’t suggest that all brassicas were developed by this careful, thoughtful method. But I do know a little about how breeding works. The rule seems to be, we humans get what we want, eventually. If a woman wants a lap-dog, she will cause one to be teased out through a few generations of mutts, by eliminating big dogs and aggressive dogs until she gets Fluff-fluff, the ideal pet. Whether it be producing Yorkie-poos from the grey wolf, or making a mustard plant renounce its flowering ability in favor of more leaves (cabbage, kale), or throw itself wholeheartedly into flowering (broccoli, cauliflower) or put all its energy in its roots (turnips), you can be sure that all these permutations came about because humans had a yen for them.

My husband Donnie and I moved a few years back from a rural small-holding to a millhouse on a postage-stamp lot in town. We have gradually bloomed our tiny pied a terre into an intensive small scale garden, with tomatoes, squash, mustard and berries abounding. Donnie, a man of the hills, opines that I should call brassicas “cole plants” to avoid being thought pretentious. He is correct—brassicas are cole plants. Indeed, you can use this useful fact to never again misspell the word “broccoli.” It can’t have two l’s, you see. Many other brassicas can be identified by the “cole” in the name: kohlrabi, collards, cauliflower, kale, cole porter (just kidding). But if you think of brassicas solely as plants named cole, you might ignore Colonel Mustard. And you would be omitting cabbage and watercress, and those evil, reputedly edible little balls of green leather known as Brussels sprouts (and Brussels can have them, as far as I’m concerned—I’m sure Josephine would agree). And what about chard? And that most intriguingly titled rutabaga?

Besides, “Brassica” has a lovely musical lilt that “cole” lacks. It is regal as befits the Queen of Green, an elegant but hard-working lady with many offspring, who has managed to keep her figure.

To my mind, the turnip is one of the least appetizing brassicas, but it offers itself as both a carbohydrate-rich root and a vitamin-rich green, so who am I to complain? And, cross turnips and cabbage, and voila! Rutabaga! Not only is this huge ball of wax a zesty-sweet addition to any stew, but it will feed your animals all through the winter, and you can carve masks out of it, as the Irish traditionally did, to scare off evil spirits on Halloween. The Irish made much of their brassicas, awarding them special status in the naming of a famous delicacy, Colcannon, or “cabbage white,” a wintry mixture of potatoes and cabbage or kale, itself immortalized in an old ditty:

Oh, wasn’t it the happy days when troubles we had not,
And our mothers made Colcannon in the little skillet pot.

If you take a broccoli and keep it out of the sun, will it turn into a cauliflower? The answer is: sort of. Even though, according to U, the cauliflower was a progenitor, not an offspring, it has a pesky way of not obeying the rules. Or maybe the problem lies in our belief that a cauliflower is a big white ball, when that wasn’t how it began life at all. If you have ever tried to grow cauliflower from seed you have collected, you will have found that left to its own devices, it reverts to any number of predecessor forms. It will want to be cabbage with a few spindly pale green florets, or just a rather unappealing collection of yellow stalks and leaves harking back to its days in the wild.

To make the big white “curds” that you want, you need to start with modern hybrid seed. As they grow, wrap the florets in their own large, cabbage-like leaves to keep the light from making them green. Or buy varieties that are “self-wrapping”—what a neat concept! Cauliflower will also want to change color: orange and purple are deviants that may arise, but if you seek those colors you need to buy mutant varieties that will produce true from bought seed. Otherwise, you will probably get a sloppy, slatternly cole that is barely edible and unappetizing in appearance, genetic monsters that will make adequate fodder for goats but hardly the gourmet treat you were hoping for.

And another caution: brassicas are notorious for bolting—too much heat (they like it cool and dreary) will make the plant panic and stop producing leaves, concentrating instead on flowers and seeds. It’s annoying because once the plant goes into bolt, the leaves won’t be good to eat. Cut your losses (and your plants) and move on. Luckily, though, some brassicas, like mustard, make excellent green manure.

So why mess with a plant group that can be so consarnit uppity? The secret to brassica’s survival is her sassy, brassy flavor. To be appreciated it should be eaten as fresh as possible. Store-bought is no substitute. Since late March, Donnie and I have been able to enjoy mustard greens every night, picked fresh. Our corpuscles are singing! Our taste buds are zinging! (Please note: we are modern, cholesterol-conscious Southerners, and never sully our greens with pig fat.)

Brassicas give us more than selenium, though that little-appreciated element is important enough and hard to get in a world where factory farming, with its pernicious top feeding, keeps roots from getting down deep into the soil where they long to go. Cabbage used to be known as the “poor man’s medicine.” Brassicas provide Vitamin C, beta carotene, folic acid, and… flatulence…..whoops!

I like the way Hannah Holmes, on her website The Skinny On, explains the gaseous properties of cabbage (and this applies to some other brassicas as well though cabbage has a well-deserved reputation for producing the rudest moments). Please skip this next section if the whole idea of flatulence offends you:

“Beans, as well as such gassy goods as cabbage, soybeans, peas, and onions, are naturally sweetened with a family of sugars called oligosaccharides. These sugars are big, clumsy molecules—too big to slip into your body through the lining of the small intestine. Normally enzymes in the small intestine would rush in and snap these molecules apart like Legos. But due to a gross oversight, an anti-oligosaccharide enzyme is not standard equipment in a human being. So these complex sugars pass unmolested through the small intestine and enter the large intestine still bearing valuable nutrients. Unabashed at digging into leftovers, the less reputable bacteria among the 200 strains in your large-intestine start to chow down. Their population grows as they divide into new generations to take advantage of the bounty. And as they gulp in the big sugars, they let out gas. In essence, your gut accumulates millions of wee bacterial farts.”

Now you have grown your first crop of cauliflower. It took a lot of energy, finagling, and minor skirmishes with Mother Nature. Was it worth it? The answer lies in what you do with the resultant curdy caulies.

Years ago I learned this recipe, refined it over time, and while in London I tried it out on a Cordon Bleu chef who demanded my secret:

Cheesy Cauliflower Soup with Garlic Bread Chunks

Gently boil and then finely chop a head of cauliflower, retaining the water.

Make a roux* and add one/half teaspoon of ground cardamom, two of ground coriander, and a large dash of salt. Slowly stir in one cup of grated cheese (parmesan is scrumptious, but the one you like best will do).

Once the mixture is of a smooth consistency, add the cauliflower pieces and the cauliflower water. That’s your soup. Keep it on a very low heat and….

Throw about half a loaf’s worth of bread chunks (whole wheat, rye, sourdough) in a pan with liberal amounts of butter and a tablespoon of garlic (or more—no such thing as too much garlic, right?).

Serve the cauliflower soup with the pan-roasted garlicky bread chunks (not store-bought croutons, puh-leez) on top. Be prepared for compliments. This is a no-fail kudo-magnet.

Have a dog handy to blame the flatulence on.

*Roux: Melt two tablespoons of butter on very low heat. Add two tablespoons of flour (whole wheat is okay). Slowly and gently stir until you have a smooth paste, then add one cup of milk and continue to stir slowly until you have a smooth mixture.

No matter where you were born or where your family came from, it’s almost certain you grew up being ordered to eat some form of brassica. It’s a refined taste, but one we all need to learn to love. Even Josephine.

While writing this article I conceived a Cunning Plan: next time Josephine rejects her brassicas, I will tell her that Brassica is the Queen of Green, and demands to be eaten. I think Josephine will swallow it.

https://www.homestead.org/gardening/best-of-bamboo-bamboo-projects-for-your-home-and-garden/

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…I first heard the word “prepper” when someone asked me if I was one.

He was an absentee landlord doing some yard maintenance on his property next to ours about two years ago.  Pleasant chap.  I was impressed that his whole family pitched in, from the two-year-old up.  He and the family took on the job of dismantling an old shed in our yard for a small fee, and they did exactly as they promised, leaving no trace behind.

At the time, Donnie and I were in a spate of canning, and that seemed to intrigue our neighbor.  Finally he asked, either slyly or shyly, I’m not sure which, “Are you guys ‘preppers’?”

I had to confess I had never heard the word.  Mind you, Donnie and I are not big TV watchers and our main interests—canning, bluegrass, biking and road trips—are not exactly on the cutting edge of anything.  But I was writing a book about homesteading, and I knew instantly that “prepping” was something I ought to find out more about.

Our neighbor hung out for another few days cutting trees and dragging away branches, during which time, we had our oil tank moved to expedite the removal of the shed.  The neighbor was at pains to tell me, in guarded tones, that I needed to have a special security lock installed on the tank in case “they” tried to steal the oil when “it” happened.  He was never very specific, but it didn’t take rocket science to figure out that the one who posed the question about prepping was probably a prepper.

So I asked him, shyly but slyly, if he knew any preppers I could interview for my upcoming book.  He suddenly became evasive, telling me about someone he knew who “might be” a prepper but probably wouldn’t be willing to talk to me about it.  After that, it seemed as though he didn’t come around as much and our brief friendship waned.

But by then I was on it, researching the prepper M.O.  A pretty thorough Internet search revealed many prepper websites and communities.  But they were not very accessible.  In fact, the prepper organization in my home state had such a complicated process for joining up that I was not able to successfully contact anyone except a kindly webmaster who promised to vouch for me if I ever did get past all the passwords and into the system.  But I never did.

By that time (mid-2012) the Doomsday Preppers reality series on the National Geographic Channel had been airing for a few months.  I tuned in to a show about a couple living in a semi-truck, constantly rolling.  It was pretty clear that this couple were ipso facto not “homesteaders;” in fact, if they were representative of preppers, always on the move, then it was less likely than I thought that prepping intersected with homesteading, despite both having some common roots in the “survivalist” movement.

A vague picture was beginning to form in my mind of what prepping might consist of as we were barreled along full speed ahead to 12-21-2012, the date when some people were sure the world would be ending, based on “evidence” from the Mayan Calendar.

They were wrong, as it turns out.

See, there have always been end-of-the-worlders, probably since, like, the beginning of the world.  Preppers, I reasoned, were just another version of the cartoon guy pacing the streets holding the sign proclaiming, “the world is ending.”

I was wrong, as it turns out.

With the exception of my mysterious neighbor, I had yet to meet up with a genuine, card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool, self-acknowledged prepper, even online.  But I continued to brood about who and what a prepper might be.  As my speculation increased, the prepping ethos was slowly morphing into something a lot more accessible, even a tad more mainstream.

Still, the stereotypes kept getting in my way…until I read a real prepper book by a dedicated prepper, and began to see where and how my aspirations could and did intersect with those of preppers…..

As a book reviewer, I was lucky to get a copy of Jim Cobb’s The Prepper’s Book of Disaster Readiness.  It was in reading and reviewing this useful manual that preppers gradually came into focus for me.  The more I thought about them, the more like us they seemed.  Didn’t we have 68 jars of local-orchard apples, and 35 jars of homegrown tomatoes (read my Homestead article, “Rotten Tomatoes”, for the reasons why we had so few quarts of tomatoes this year) and, especially for Donnie, about 40 jars of Virginia peaches, all neatly lined up in the larder?  And hadn’t I put a first aid kit and an ice scraper in both our cars, and filled a bottom drawer full of warm, fuzzy work clothes and heavy socks, just in case?

Just in case what?  Was I—shudder—thinking like a prepper?

After reading Jim’s book, I decided to ask him a few questions about himself.  He cheerfully obliged, wiping out my early sense that preppers are paranoid.  In fact, that’s one of the questions I asked him:

Is there a point at which prepping and paranoia intersect?  Jim’s reply: “I don’t know if it is so much paranoia as it is just being keenly aware that disasters can, and will, affect almost everyone at some point in their lives.  About 5-6 years ago, there was a massive blizzard that hit south-central Wisconsin.  Despite numerous warnings ahead of time, hundreds of drivers were stranded on an interstate highway overnight due to the weather.  This is just one example, and a very minor one at that, as to why it is important to be prepared for life’s little (and not so little) emergencies.”

In TPBODR, Jim says that his own first lesson in preparedness came when his wife had her first baby: what he did and did not take to the hospital for that event prompted him to develop what he calls a Get-Home Bag.  In the GHB, you should carry a water, food, fire, and shelter.  Really, these are the basics of survival anywhere and anytime, and having them, or the wherewithal for them, in your car in a portable sack is a great idea.

What’s in your GHB?  I have a bicycle in my car.  I like to think that trumps a lot of smaller items as useful equipment in emergencies.

Jim told me that his maternal grandmother grew up on a farm: “Her family was very rural, very poor (at least in terms of material things).  It was probably her influence that was my first exposure to the idea of setting things back for a rainy day.”

He also recalls, “My childhood home was on the outskirts of a rather small town.  I spent hours on end traipsing through forests and marshlands.  Having a keen interest in Native Americans, I read everything I could get my hands on about how they lived.  I’d then go out and try to duplicate the skills and woodcraft I’d read about.  As time went on, I started making my own ‘survival kits,’ using trial and error to discover what worked and what didn’t.”

He was obviously a fearless kid, because instead of burying his head in the metaphorical sand, he met the end-times head on. “When I was about 12 years old, I purchased a copy of Dr. Bruce D. Clayton’s book, Life After Doomsday.  I read it cover to cover, several times.  Around the same time, I read Jerry Ahern’s series, I”  Pretty dark stuff for a kid, and Jim admits that, “At that point, my fate was sealed, in a sense, to be a prepper/survivalist.”  Jim works as a private investigator and recently has become a writer—of prepping books.

Besides working and prepping, Jim comes across as a pretty average sort of guy.  He likes to read, relax with his family, and maybe shoot some pool.  But it’s because he cares about his family that he preps.  He doesn’t know where the term “prepper” came into being—”I’m going to say it was around ten years ago, or so, that I first heard the term.  When it first started to be used, it seemed to a more politically-correct version of “survivalist” or “survivalism”.  Nowadays, due to the impact of various TV shows and other media, the terms seem to be interchangeable.  It used to be, at least in my opinion, that preppers were more concerned about the common types of disasters (power outages, severe weather, etc.), where survivalists were preparing for the extreme end-of-the-world scenarios.  That dividing line has blurred considerably in recent years.”  For him, prepping is just “the act of actively making preparations for your family’s needs in the event of a crisis.”

There’s no doubt that the unreal reality shows have played a role, for good or for ill, in bringing the notion of prepping into mainstream consciousness.  Cobb puts it this way: “On the one hand, the popularity of such shows has allowed us to make great strides in getting more people interested in being prepared for emergencies, which is a great thing.  But, most of those shows are so over-the-top… I think the overall message gets clouded.”  In fact, Cobb asserts, “the media has managed to taint the image of a ‘prepper’ to a degree that anyone who uses that term in self-reference is automatically seen as someone fearing the end of the world.”

Prepping, by the way, is not the same as hoarding, although there may be a point of crossover.  The older generation that came up during the Great Depression developed a hoarding mentality, as do many poor people with a lick of sense.  Who knows when you might need those jars?  Those apple crates?  That spare tarp?  Grandmother’s cast-iron skillet?  Of course, hoarding can develop into as, Cobb describes it, “an overriding compulsion to collect and keep items that have little to no value, whether monetary or otherwise,” whereas the prepper is concerned with “the collection and stockpiling of food and supplies that, even if a disaster were to NEVER happen, can and will still be used.”  Some people might not see the distinction as clearly as Jim Cobb, but I take the point that preppers have an avowed purpose in stockpiling useful material (like squirrels do), while hoarders just want to keep stuff for the comfort of having stuff (like packrats).

The author builds several scenarios that might make any of us think—hard—about how prepared we are for disaster.  Let’s look at some in detail.

Flu outbreak.  Between 1918-1920, hundreds of thousands of healthy young Americans and others around the world died of what was called Spanish Influenza.  The flu’s second wave, in which the virus mutated, was as devastating as the first.  More people died of Spanish influenza in its nine-month peak than died of the notorious Black Death in Europe in four years.  Although we like to think (note “like to think” as opposed to “actively feel convinced”) that modern science has eliminated, or can eliminate, any new flu virus, consider the strange outbreaks of other diseases that pass across the headlines: meningitis, pneumonia, diseases that suddenly crop up with no apparent cause.  Because we live in more crowded quarters than we did in, say, 1918, the spread of infection is more likely, and yes, it can infiltrate the country folk, too, despite our best control efforts.  The spread of disease causes panic, panic causes unrest, and unrest causes certain behaviors that might make us want to reconsider our PREParations.

Power outages are another increasingly problematic scenario, often following natural disasters like flooding and freezing.  Are you ready for a protracted outage?  And—thinking like a prepper here—if you have a generator, is it protected from possible looting?…..

…Because civil unrest is another scenario that preppers brood about. Civil unrest can be the ugly stepchild of any disaster, especially if the disaster and its effects cause lengthy dysfunctions of the systems that usually tie us together.  If we don’t believe that civil unrest is possible, we have only to look at the aggressive behaviors spawned by something as apparently benign as pre-Christmas shopping!

Cobb recommends a 3-D strategy: Deter, Delay, Defend.

Deter: Make your home, your personal and family living space, however you define it, look too secure for a looter to bother with.  We lived in Mayberry for a few years, so charmed by the friendly, moral base of the community that we never bothered locking stuff up.  Then we had a break-in.  “Surprise, surprise!” as Goober might say.  Now we have motion sensor lighting and a coded lock.  That’s Deterrence.

Delay: Warning systems, like the motion sensor lighting, can produce the Delay, giving you time to assess and, if necessary, move to the next level…..

Defense: this is what happens when the first two systems break down.  Plenty of homesteaders have weapons, and many are prepared to use them against menacing humans as well as annoying, tasty deer.  No one can advise you about this, but we all need to consider it seriously.

Cobb recommends doing what you do about home protection without talking about it to those outside your 3-D system.  That way fewer people will know about it and be able to take advantage by hacksawing the locks or hacking the codes.  His general take on this level of preparedness, let us call it preparedness with attitude, can be summarized like this: “Think of it like this: if I’m prepared to survive and outlast a nationwide epidemic of some nasty disease, I’m sure prepared to survive and outlast anything else that rises to that level of severity.”

Cobb, and we all, know that prepping is not a simple concept, any more than it is a simple practice.  One thread leads to another.  One thing he is clear about, though, is that prepping is not a selfish effort: “I don’t think trying to work towards keeping your family and loved ones alive is selfish at all, quite the opposite, in fact.”  And, “If more people actively prepped for emergencies, it would certainly allow first responders and other aid agencies to concentrate on helping those who truly need assistance in times of trouble.”  Sounds sensible.

When I was reading The Prepper’s Complete Book Of Disaster Readiness I decided to ask a few friends to chime in with questions they would like to ask a real-life actual prepper.  Here are the two questions I liked best with Jim Cobb’s responses:

Q1:  Why do you want to survive (not just how)?

A1:  To put it simply, survival beats the alternative by a long shot.

Q2:  How do you choose who survives with you?

A2:  I take my responsibilities as a husband and father quite seriously.  I feel it is my job, my duty, to protect them and keep them as safe as I can.  While I have no guaranteed way to decide WHO survives with me (assuming I’m among the survivors to begin with), I feel it is the responsibility of every parent to do whatever is within their power to ensure the safety of their children.

By a long way around, it seemed I had bridged, to my satisfaction, the divide between homesteading and prepping, and found it to be less like a narrow rope-bridge over a bottomless chasm, and more like a rainbow bridge, filled with many shadings of color, some mysterious murky depths, and a few twinkling stars.  The debate between the pepper way and the homesteader way may go on forever, but as for me, I’m going to STOP (another of Jim Cobb’s acronyms): Sit down, Think, Observe, and Plan.

The post Prepping: Not Just for Preppers, Anymore appeared first on Homestead.org.

What in fact is an apron? Only the most ancient of garments—in some people’s minds, maybe the Original Garment. The dictionary defines apron as: A garment used to cover a part of the body or protect one’s clothing.  As such it is mentioned prominently in the first book of the Bible. It is recorded in Genesis 3:7: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” Not exactly their proudest moment, but it does indicate that Adam and Eve were a) inventive, b) modest. And that the first clothing ever worn was an apron.

There are, of course, other meanings for apron:

• A garment similar to an apron that is worn as part of official dress, as by a bishop or Freemason.
• A sheet of lead worn to shield the body during an X-ray examination.
• A small area adjacent to another larger area or structure.
• A hard-surfaced area on an airfield used for maneuvering or parking aircraft.
• A projecting strip of stage for playing scenes in front of the curtain.
• An area of asphalt where the drive of a house meets the road.

But here we will concentrate on its first and by far most familiar meaning: a garment designed to cover a part of the body or protect one’s clothing in work situations or even, occasionally, for adornment.  In many ancient cultures, statues of gods, goddesses, priests, and priestesses were depicted wearing aprons like those invented by Adam and Eve, designed cover the private parts, but far more elaborate, not made of leaves but fashioned with beads, gemstones, and precious metals.

The apron evolved in European cultures as a practical garment purely for occupations, mostly for men, and became a way of differentiating those occupations.  Men still do don aprons for work, even the most macho of men—those who play with fire in the occupation of welding and smelting, men who cut meat, men who cook bar-b-q. Some chefs wear aprons that reach to the ankles.  In Japan, sumo wrestlers wear a sort of loincloth with an apron-like flip-front.  Native American and African tribesmen have traditionally worn the same flip-front covering, which some scholars (yes, there are apron scholars!) believe to have been a first garment—a theory that finds scientists in rare agreement with Biblical experts.

The wearing of aprons, in Europe and later in America, gradually became synonymous with being in trade.  Men who worked with cement dust wore white ones, and cobblers who worked with shoe polish wore black ones.  Leather aprons protected those in rough professions, and heavy cloth kept blood and gore off the bodies and clothing of butchers.  Later, up to the current day, aprons may signify the strata of jobs.  Wait staff may only need a simple waistband with pockets for pen, tablet and straws or napkins.  The lowly dishwasher must have a full coverage apron with no pockets, denoting the physical nature of his or her tasks.  Similarly, nurses’ aides may wear a child-like pinafore while registered or licensed nurses graduate to uniforms, scrubs, or crisp jackets.

In the world of women in industrialized countries, the over-all apron construction—a yoke (the part that circles the neck), a bib over the chest, and a skirt, made of light to heavy-weight fabric depending on the work being done—became common attire for housekeepers, nannies, and nurses.  Some aprons had long sleeves.  Victorian English women, who wore numerous layers of clothing to conceal their unmentionable body parts—such as—gasp—legs—added yet another layer, the apron, either bibbed or starting at the waist, to protect everything underneath from splatters, spills, and speculation.

Aprons made by women for women gradually grew stylish.  Sashes were fluffier, decoration like rickrack strips and even lace was added, small almost useless but cute puffy pockets appeared, and some pinafore style aprons became almost a dress, but still worn to cover another dress.

By the 1950s, aprons were enjoying a widespread vogue.  Most “stay at home moms” (and most moms were staying at home in the 1950s) wore them; they wore practical ones until Daddy came home, and then they donned what were shamelessly called “flirty” aprons to dish out Daddy’s dinner.  This transformation was aptly expressed in an apron history book whose subtitle says it well: Aprons of the Mid-20th Century: To Serve and Protect (A Schiffer Book for Designers and Collectors) by Judith Florence.  This useful book reminds us that aprons, like the retro one I fortuitously found in a thrift store, are among the most sought-after icons of the twentieth-century cloth art. Aprons may incite sexual fantasies (what is under all those ruffles?), or, paradoxically, remind us of home and Mom and Grandmother.  They may keep ladies from ruining their clothes, and keep women in their place—chained to the stove, at Daddy’s beck and call.

Mother’s apron has infused itself in our folklore, its strings tightening around certain of us, binding us to home and maternalism. It is the apron strings that keep some young men from pursuing potential wives by constantly pulling them back to Mommy Dearest.  “He never married because he was tied to his mother’s apron strings.”  It’s an old, old notion and as likely to be true now as it ever was.  “Cutting the apron strings” is synonymous with gaining one’s independence, taking charge of one’s life.  At its best, apron says home, hearth, and happiness.  At its worst, it says servitude… of man over mate and mate over offspring. Amazing, isn’t it, to think that a single garment holds such portent.

After the early 1960s, when Women’s Lib emerged in the mainstream of American culture, the apron began to lose its resonance among the fair but unfairly-treated sex.  It never disappeared entirely, however, and nowadays, though both genders wear aprons, there is still a notable gender gap in apron use.  Women may wear aprons designed for men, but men typically don’t wear women’s aprons (though they may if they wish).

These days, women may choose to wear aprons at home.  It is no longer required, and though aprons are still sold and sewing patterns for every kind of apron are still available, aprons are not a fashion item as they were in their heyday. One difference between mid-20th and now is that women are no longer “chained to the stove,” and so they spend less time in the kitchen.  Meals can be put together quickly and often from prepared ingredients, with less chance of spilling and soiling.  Except for special occasions, the kitchen is no longer a woman’s automatic go-to place.  And houses stay cleaner with constantly improving cleaning products and machines.  A woman doesn’t have to get dirty while making her house sparkle.

Unless that woman is a homesteader, maybe living off-grid, maybe a prepper trying to get back to the basics of food conservation.  Homesteading women (and men) need aprons!  They take more time preparing meals from scratch and have fewer machines to help in the cleaning process.  Another obvious justification for the apron for thrifty homemakers and conscientious homesteading women is to protect their smaller, more sensible wardrobes.  Even tough work clothes need to be cherished, and not thrown in the wash tub after every little spill.

Wear the apron, make your own apron, make it from sturdy fabric and keep the pattern to make a few more as time permits and circumstances require.

It’s been pointed out that a woman’s apron does a lot more than just “serve and protect.”  As an extra piece of cloth (the original word for apron was napron—a big napkin) it can do so much more.  I recall watching my grandmother shell peas—she threw the empty pods in a bucket and dropped the peas in her apron/lap.  Once finished, she gathered the apron up like a big sack, strode into the kitchen and dumped the peas out of the apron and into the cooking pot.

There’s a lovely sentimental poem circulating on the internet, written by Tina Trivett, who composed it as a tribute to her grandmother.  It brings back memories for some older folks, but anyone who wears an apron can identify with it, now and always:

Grandma’s Apron Poem

The strings were tied, it was freshly washed, and maybe even pressed.
For Grandma, it was everyday to choose one when she dressed.
The simple apron that it was, you would never think about;
the things she used it for, that made it look worn out.
She may have used it to hold some wildflowers that she’d found.
Or to hide a crying child’s face when a stranger came around.
Imagine all the little tears that were wiped with just that cloth.
Or it became a potholder to serve some chicken broth.
She probably carried kindling to stoke the kitchen fire.
To hold a load of laundry, or to wipe the clothesline wire.
When canning all her vegetables, it was used to wipe her brow.
You never know, she might have used it to shoo flies from the cow.
She might have carried eggs in from the chicken coop outside.
Whatever chore she used it for, she did them all with pride.
When Grandma went to heaven, God said she now could rest.
I’m sure the apron that she chose, was her Sunday best.

You can buy aprons in most big general stores (not naming any names here, just sayin’). You can buy them on the internet, or you can make your own as Grandma did. And there’s that box of sewing stuff you keep tucked away for just such an opportunity… It’s been neglected, but here’s your chance.

Making an apron is simple. Though I have a sewing machine, I believe it is easy enough to make an apron by hand-sewing. Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers made them by hand, just like they made quilts and most clothing.  Thank about that!

The apron consists of the parts mentioned earlier:

• Yoke and ties can be the same material, ribbon or heavy strips of cloth, the yoke to go around the neck and two ties for the waist.
• Bib can be a small square measured to cover your, ahem, front — to your comfort specifications.
• The Skirt is a rectangle, to cover from halfway around the waist on both sides, and in length, anywhere from above the knee to all the way to the ankle, though knee-length is a norm.

Sewing these pieces together produces a simple homemade apron.  If you are lucky enough to have a fabric shop nearby, you will probably be able to purchase a real apron pattern while there, or you can trawl websites like eBay, Pinterest, and Etsy for aprons and patterns more in keeping with what granny used to wear, and tie her children with, symbolically and lovingly, to keep them from straying too far from the safety of home.

I began by talking about my Apron Dream for my dream apron.  You can live this dream, too.  Here it is:

It’s Thanksgiving (or Christmas, or a big family birthday or anniversary…). Our friends and family have gathered at our modest Mayberry homestead for munchies and music. I labor alone in the kitchen, cheerful and uncomplaining, basting the two turkeys, stirring the steaming rice, calculating the timing for the sweet potatoes, and arranging plates, cups, desserts, and other delicacies on the various counters in our spacious, homey kitchen. To keep my party dress from harm, I am wearing my time-worn apron, Old Faithful, a red and white checked cover-all that reaches from shoulders to dress hem and all frontage in between, to keep all splatter-space safe from foody funkiness.

Then, at the exact appropriate time, I slip out of Old Faithful, gently depositing it in the washing machine, and bring out the newfound treasure: I call it Miss Priss, a concoction of delicate white cotton with red floral embroidery gracing both the bib (the top panel) and the skirt (the lower, wrap-around panel), with ruffles on the edges. Then, assured of the happy reception my news will garner, I invite everyone in the music room to come to the kitchen, where guests will marvel at the transformation of the kitchen into a dining fantasy world. We will say grace around the big oak dining table. Guests seeing me adorned with ruffles and flowers, will not know that I didn’t do all the greasy, sweaty work in this confection of a covering; they will marvel at my ability to cook and serve a variety of tasty dishes while keeping such a choice garment spotless.

And that was my dream.  To look domestic, competent, dedicated… but spotless and cheerfully attired at the same time.  I graciously accept all compliments that come my way.

Secretly, I thank the apron.

The post Aprons: A Cover Story appeared first on Homestead.org.

Rudolf Steiner, born in 1861, is generally pictured in a dark velvety suit, gazing, it seems, into the far distance (or more likely, into some inner, astral landscape).  He was the child of ambitious class-bounders who had the good sense to put their only son into a science school.  Perhaps they hoped to drum some common sense into the lad, as they were less than comfortable with his apparent ability to see through the physical world into a parallel, etheric universe.

It was this second sight which impelled Steiner to teach, invent, amalgamate, lecture, and to gather a band of followers to study what he named anthroposophy.  One of his primary interests was child development, about which he advanced many fascinating theories, and schools with the appellation Waldorf are his educational legacy.  He was also intrigued by the relationship between movement, dance, and communication, and this concentration spawned the semi-occult art of “eurythmy.”  But perhaps the best known of his obsessions, and the one whose name falls most trippingly off the tongue, is biodynamics.  Bio, for life, dynamic, for energy.  This was arguably the brightest jewel in the anthroposophical crown, the work which has done the most to popularize Steiner and keep his name alive into the 21st century.

Because Steiner was able to see not merely the forms of all living things but their existence on a higher plane, he postulated that plants and animals are interdependent.  Not one to stop at some simple scientific story about photosynthesis and chlorophyll, Rudolf Steiner taught that a plant is nourished at every level, by the soil, the air and of course the warmth and moisture of the heavens.  He believed that plants, like people, will differ according to the day and hour of their birth.  And he proposed a unique “medicine” for plant health, the “biodynamic preparation” based on the principles of homeopathy.

Because Rudolf Steiner was involved in so many different disciplines and an early exemplar of multi-tasking, he needed able lieutenants.  Prominent among them was Dr. Erhenfried Pfeiffer.  Pfeiffer, about 40 years Steiner’s junior, codified many of the visionary’s teachings about agriculture by putting them into consistent practice.  This was necessary work.  Steiner was the idea man, leaving it to those around him to test out the many theories that seemed to flow out of him like beads on a string.  Pfeiffer was a likable, practical sort of bloke who suggested that one day, mankind would erect a monument to the earthworm.

Unfortunately, Steiner himself tended to speak in long, fabulous rhapsodies, sometimes obfuscating the good sense of his utterances and possibly losing a great deal in the translation from the original German.

Here is one tiny example from the man’s prodigious lectures, giving a flavor not only of his ornate speaking style but also the fascination of his unique inner vision:

“Finally we get the impression that all quartz rocks are like eyes through which the Earth can see into the Cosmos. We are reminded of the many-faceted eyes of insects which divide into numbers of parts whatever comes toward them from the outside. We should, and indeed must, picture innumerable quartz and similar formations on the surface of the Earth as being eyes enabling the Earth inwardly to reflect and indeed inwardly perceive the cosmic environment. And gradually the knowledge dawns in us that every crystal formation present in the Earth is a sense organ for perceiving the Cosmos.”

If all this sounds a bit daunting, consider how I felt, as a newcomer to England, a lover of sunlight now totally deprived of the rays of warmth I had been accustomed to in my native North Carolina, and under the tutelage of people who seemed at best wooly-minded and eccentric.  And the tuition, I must add, was high, with no chance for a Pell grant.

Had all of this not been clothed in the best of intentions and every attempt at trans-Atlantic friendship, I might not have been able to stand it.  Luckily, I stayed, I listened, and I learned, so that now, years later, I never put a trowel in the earth without remembering some aspect of the training I received at Emerson College.

First of all, I had to stop using the word “dirt.”  Dirt, I was told, is what you collect in your vacuum cleaner.  The place where a plant puts its head (not its feet, mind you) is soil, a life-affirming worm-engendering atmosphere divinely conceived for the nursing of our food, our animal’s fodder, and our flowers.  Flowers enliven the spirit with color and fragrance.  Rudolf Steiner addressed the whole person.  Hence the sweet peas.

I recall how lovingly our instructors handled the tender sweet pea shoots that we were to en-cradle in the soil – so concerned lest the wind dry out their little hairs, so solicitous of their feelings as we gently placed them in their new homes.  Yes, their feelings.  Of course, plants have feelings and it was no joking matter.  If I tried to crack wise about the scalding execution of a cabbage for our belly’s needs, some handsome German named Axel or wizened but wise Brazilian crone in a purple shawl would frown and shake a chiding finger in my direction.

Not only do plants feel, but they love – in order to grow properly, they must nestle just close enough to one another to touch, and form a green umbrella that will shade the earth underneath their outstretched arms.  Water, too, has a sense of purpose, and the best watering devices are those in which the liquid has been swirled in kidney-shaped descending bowls.  This motion is called “sensitive chaos,” a phrase I found impossible to forget.

Companion planting was another vital piece of the biodynamic puzzle, and I grew to understand that if one plants tomatoes, one should without fail put some basil among the tomato plants.  I came to respect the many uses of chamomile, nasturtium (which appeared in our communal salad bowl one fall day) angelica, and the sine qua non of all good gardens, comfrey (which healed a rather deep cut on my pinky with a swiftness I am tempted to call miraculous).

But the two most important components of biodynamic gardening are the digging and the preparations, or “preps.”  The digging arguably has its roots, so to speak, in the best husbandry practiced by European small-holders and truck farmers.  Leaving little room for paths (those elaborately designed fripperies of the upper classes) the biodynamic garden may look a little like an ancient Native American burial site, with compost mounds up to four feet in height in one area, and mounds of double (or triple) dug beds in another.

Double digging has as its purpose the re-enrichment of the soil with organic matter and special homeopathic meds (preps) and it works like this:  A gardener cuts into the earth to the depth of two spades.  The cuts would typically be about three feet across and a foot along to an over-all bed length of about 8 feet.  The soil from the initial cut is saved on one side of the trench.  Organic matter of a rough texture such as straw is put in the first cut to the height of one spade’s depth.  Then another cut, again a foot forward, is made to one spade’s depth and this topsoil (with all its attendant grassy nutrients) is turned upside down on top of the straw in the first spit.  Over that is placed fine mulch/compost which has been blessed with preps.  Then the second spit is cut to the second spade’s depth, and the very fine lowest layer of refined soil from spit two is dressed on the top of spit one.  Spit two is now open and ready to be treated like spit one, and so on down the line.  Straw, topsoil, compost, and rich dark loam – this is the order of the layers in double digging.  The result is a gentle mound of churning vital materials creating the ideal home for our plant friends.

Seeing it illustrated is better than any verbal description.  For that one can consult the colorful books of John Jeavons, an enthusiastic English proponent of the method who claimed abundant yields from double digging.  Practicing it until your back screams is better still.

What are the preps?  Rudolf Steiner, whose upbringing was a slow drift from rural to urban with a lifelong respect for peasant wisdom, adored the cow.  Sometimes I wondered (to myself – it wouldn’t have been cool to speculate out loud) if he’d been a Hindu in a previous incarnation, so much did he respect humble Bossey.  He dubbed her milk “the perfect food” long before the American dairy pundits used that slogan.  He “saw” the peasant farmer and his bovine partners living in perfect symbiosis, and cherished all cow production, including her manure.  Preps, we were told, are a combination of cow manure and “certain herbs.”  Their precise chemical combinations were not revealed to mere mortals such as me.  Indeed the composition of biodynamic preps is a secret reserved only for those who have been welcomed into the innermost sanctum of biodynamic gnosis.

This is not only where the rubber meets the biodynamic road but also where the logical may depart from it.  Preps are concocted in secret and administered in tiny homeopathic doses in carefully proscribed rituals involving lunar cycles and the correct stirring techniques.  Remember the sensitive chaos of water?  Well, preps have to be handled using an arcane set of movements.  An important ingredient in one of the most common preps, Number 501, is horn silica, incorporated into the mix, I was given to understand, by compressing manure and herbs into a cow horn (generously donated by Bossey, posthumously, of course).

As one biodynamic practitioner reports, “When sprayed on the plant 501 works as a sense organ for the plant to feel and thus perceive the light coming from the sun and the entire cosmos. This enables the plant to become a better material image of its heavenly archetype on earth.”  Prose that Steiner himself might have envied.

The classes I was taking at Emerson were geared toward working in Third World communities, and one classmate from Cote D’Ivoire opined, politely of course, that in his country, if someone were to make secret potions, pack them in a cow horn and insist on applying them to the fields by the light of the moon with ritualistic stirring motions, there would be rumblings of “witchcraft.”  It would not, he felt, be a welcome intervention.  But he, like me, stayed the course because he could see that biodynamics was a method that, in general, enriched and enlivened the soil and resulted in delicious vegetables and luminous flowers.

In color, in size, in bloom, and in beauty, you could scarcely hope to find a more inviting broccoli than one grown biodynamically, and it is this quality that attracts the proponents of the method.

Be advised: the majority of information currently floating in cyberspace about “biodynamics” is a mishmash of organic best practice and some passing respectful references to Steiner and the preps.  Generally, American gardeners want to keep the baby and send the bathwater spiraling sensitively down the drain.  Preps are used only by a very few, mostly in Camphill and other Steiner-based communities.  Almost no one outside the Steiner sect would attempt to apply biodynamic principles to anything other than small home gardens, because of the incredibly intensive labor involved, and the reluctance to get into the arcana of the preps.

Hardcore Steiner followers are a generally cheerful, robust lot, idealistic and willing to give over their logical processes in favor of the magical thinking that biodynamics, in the end, requires.

Communities gathered around Steiner’s teachings often include the loving care of the extremely mentally handicapped, people whom modern medicine has despaired of helping.  There is a strong Christian element, but very far from the church-going mainstream. There is usually a lot of good-natured coming and going as the newly converted soon burn out on the hard work and the cultic ambience.

Loving obeisance to the great leader is valued more highly in the biodynamic world than competence or scientific method, which begs the question, “What would Rudolf Steiner do?”  It’s doubtful that he would have preferred to see people follow him unquestioningly without continuing to experiment and break new ground (or soil).

But still, I believe that the practices – double digging,  reverence for the entirety of the plant’s earthly home,  avoidance of chemicals, companion planting, respect for the interactions of herbs with one another, and the building of rich soil – are optimal.  And so, even when I plant something as non-utilitarian as a rose bush, I plunge the spade in two spits deep, put in some straw, and so on and on.

Seeds of Control: OMG it’s GMO!

Gardening by the Moon

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…These words come from the journal of young Mollie Dorsey, living in the grassy sea of Nebraska somewhere between Beatrice and Nebraska City. She began keeping her diary in 1857 at age 18, and as is often the case, her journal became a place of peace where she could express her true emotions.

With her father and her someday-to-be-husband Byron often away working as carpenters to build structures for the new town of Helena, Mollie and her mother were in charge of the care of the younger siblings. They were kept busy with home-making chores, but because of the daily tedium, Mollie often recounts that there was no reason to write for a week or more. Once, upon being given a cow and some chickens by her father on one of his short trips home she wrote: “We are happy, as far as it goes. Yes, well, happy anyhow. We might as well be.”

After getting settled on the homestead acreage secured by her father, Mollie honestly recounts that she has begun to look “a little rough”—that her main pastimes are picking berries and pulling off potato bugs. Once she could not write for two weeks because she had no ink. Occasionally, travelers came through and since the house was well located between two settlements, they found the Dorset homestead a good place to spend a night. They paid a bit to stay over at the family’s house, welcome income. But then, Mollie wrote, “it is a little hard on me,” as the burden fell on her to do all the cooking.

A rainy period was described as “disagreeable” as the family was stuck indoors, but Mollie sagely observed that this “is only a prelude to the winter that is coming.” Rain posed its own problems because their house had an unfinished roof and all the children had the flu. Mollie decided to “cure” her flu by ducking herself in the local, very cold stream. It worked! A brother nearly chopped his arm off and was treated by a man who happened by from a neighboring farm and had “some knowledge of stitching.”

Then Mollie’s mother began to brood: “My mother’s birthday 40 years old. I think she is a little blue today. I do try so hard to keep cheerful. I don’t know as it is hard work to keep myself so, but it is hard with her. She knows now that the children ought to be in school. We will have to do the teaching ourselves.” In the circumstances, we might imagine that “a little blue” is an understatement!

Once Mollie’s 19th birthday rolled around, she admitted to a lot of “moping” and felt she had aged many years in just the past few months. She tried to picture her future—would she be a happily married wife and mother, or “an abused, deserted one, with 8 or 9 small children crying for their daily bread?” Readers could reasonably ask how such dark ideas had crept into the thinking of an apparently well-adjusted, religious young lady.

Christmas came and despite the family cohesion with the grandparents now in residence on the next homestead, there were no presents (“nothing to be had”), and the little children were told Santa couldn’t come because the house had no chimney, only a stovepipe. “I wish I might write something nice tonight, but cannot.” New Year’s Eve, 1858, brings only “sober reflections.” Mollie began to complain of “neuralgia.”

Mollie’s outlook brightened considerably when she moved to Nebraska City, boarding with a female acquaintance. She concluded her diary in 1865 after she married her longtime sweetheart, Byron, and the couple had chased the gold rush west to Colorado. They and their children were settled in the far suburbs of Denver. Byron would later work for the US Mint. Mollie passed away in 1915.

Mollie’s frank observations of homestead life on the Great Plains are often cited as an example of the subtle workings of a mysterious disease known as “prairie fever.” In the lens of hindsight, it seems unsurprising that prairie fever arose among the early settlers, particularly among the women. Though everyone who encountered the plains with their panorama of grass unbroken by trees or other guideposts probably felt instinctive fear and awe, it was more often the womenfolk who were left as the only adults on the homestead, far out of contact with neighbors or travelers. Men went to the settled places to conduct business or find work, since many were completely unpracticed as farmers and would rely on the cash economy more than had been anticipated. So men had a social life of sorts, and their own forms of prairie fever could be to some extent vented with trading, carousing, fighting, and well…whatever entertainment was offered in the settlements.

But for women, hard work was supposed to suffice as the antidote to insanity. The combination of alone-ness, fear and cultural isolation could lead to suicide. One “treatment,” which Mollie clearly decided on, rather like her dunking cure for the flu, was simply to get off the farm to a settlement, where, like the menfolk, she would have a social life and chances for income and advancement. Older women, younger ones with small children, and those lacking education were simply marooned, immobilized on a boundless ocean of grass. Added to the formula was the fact that many of the early Great Plains settlers came from foreign countries, facing not only prejudice from their American neighbors, but a lack of anyone apart from the close family with whom to converse.

Author Willa Cather described the Nebraska plains as “the dark country” and “the end of the earth.” E.V. Smalley, writing in 1893, painted this bleak picture: “On every hand the treeless plain stretches away to the horizon line. In summer, it is checkered with grain fields or carpeted with grass and flowers, and it is inspiring in its color and vastness; but one mile of it is almost exactly like another, save where some watercourse nurtures a fringe of willows and cottonwoods. When the snow covers the ground the prospect is bleak and dispiriting. No brooks babble under icy armor. There is no bird life after the wild geese and ducks have passed on their way south. The silence of death rests on the vast landscape, save when it is swept by cruel winds…” (The Isolation of Life on Prairie Farms).

According to Wikipedia, symptoms of prairie fever or madness were revealed in “crying, slovenly dress, and withdrawal from social interactions.” Suicide, when it happened, was reportedly more common among women than men (though no true statistics exist). Sarah Sortum, on the website visitthepriarie.com, notes that her great grandmother gave up some of the valuable space in her homestead abode for a birdcage: “Judging from my own family stories, one strategy of the pioneer woman to combat these challenges was to employ the company of birds as companion animals. Using up little space or food, a bright cheery bird might have been a wife’s only distraction while spending weeks alone on her husband’s claim while he worked away to draw a wage.”

It’s worth remembering that leaving women at home was typical of our culture well into the twentieth century, and was regarded as a necessity in most pioneering initiatives in America. Consider the life of Rebecca Boone, whose famous hubby left her for four years to fight the Indians, and doubtless for many shorter but protracted periods to hunt and trade. Rebecca had five children, took on the care of six grandchildren, and was known to have the following jobs: community midwife, family doctor, leather tanner, sharpshooter, and linen-maker. This was a Woman! Yet no picture exists of Rebecca, much less a diary to let us know how it felt to be consigned to a small cabin in the forest with a huge brood of children and babies, called upon to defend herself and her children from any manner of intruder and cure everybody’s ailments.

So, with Rebecca as an example, we can postulate that if madness did not overtake her, a prairie woman might prove resourceful, brave, and highly skilled in her isolated circumstances.

Mollie, a city girl from Indianapolis, had at least the value of basic education, and many such women made observations about their situation for future generations. These were in the form of letters and journals, making educational reading for us modern homesteaders—and especially for those females along us who now choose, like some prairie women did, to live alone despite the dangers and deprivations.

Some recollections of women on the plains have been gathered in a treatise entitled “There is Some Splendid Scenery” – Women’s Responses to the Great Plains Landscape by Julie Roy Jeffrey. In Jeffrey’s account we see that the dangers confronting women could be as simple and recognizable to us as rushing out to get the laundry off the line when a rainstorm suddenly blew up, to the more arcane and frightening possibilities: “Anna Ruppenthall, a Kansas settler of the 1870s, recalled that her ‘last act at night, after seeing that the children were all asleep, and all quiet among the livestock ‘ was to sweep the entire horizon for signs of flame.”

An added threat for women, of course, was childbirth. It was not uncommon for a woman to birth a child entirely without adult help, and it is a well-known fact that infants frequently died within a few hours or days of the event—and some women too. One historian noted that “in 1875 Leavenworth, nearly fifty percent of the 354 burials were those of infants and children” (Charles R. King). Of course, men might wish to assist, fearful not only for the loss of a new child but the loss of a wife and helpmate. But postponing a journey might simply be impossible and too, a due date is never certain, and was even less so in the nineteenth century. Also many men at the time considered childbirth to be the province of women, and their wives would not have wished a man to provide assistance.

As a female who has given birth in comfortable hygienic circumstances, I can imagine few scenarios so terrifying and depressing as enduring childbirth without the possibility of any assistance, and totally, completely, absolutely alone, in a tiny house made of dirt in the middle of a faceless, person-less terrain. Add to that the stark possibility of burying a newborn infant without ceremony in what must have seemed an alien land.

One psychological dilemma that women dealt with was the comparison of their Great Plains homesteads to their lives in the towns or cities they had come from. In the early years of the Homestead Acts, before the railroads had created routes and decreed towns along the lines, people suffered from lack of churches, town halls, markets, and other simple social gathering places. The requirement of the Acts was to “prove up” minimum-sized claims of 160 acres, and though land-hunger was doubtless a prime mover in uprooting town-dwellers and sending them west, the sheer size of the claims dictated that dwellings would be far, far from each other. As Mollie noted, “transportation” was often by foot; trips away for those who had to go were lengthy affairs.

Some people simply couldn’t cope, and went back to somewhere, wherever, “busted and disgusted”—the land proved up under the several Homestead Acts was about 10% of the total area in the US, a much smaller portion than the total area of the Great Plains plus Alaska.

If ambitious and literate women like Mollie could find a place to stay in a growing town, chances were good they could get work as teachers. Others became barmaids or washing ladies and still others followed the lure of the gold rushes. Perspectives could change depending on a woman’s circumstances. To women trapped at home, living at ground level, the landscape was dull, flat, featureless, desolate, uninviting. To those from the East, the open spaces could give a sense of relief at first view. To women passing through, the Plains might have charms that came both from the very act of passing and the fact that, as one woman wisely noted, the passer possessed a return ticket. Many homesteaders had no return ticket, no way out but acceptance… or madness.

One way of coping with the flat and monotonous view-scape once a house had been built was that which women have always employed: growing flowers. Yes, there were wildflowers among the grasses, but women like what they like, longing for certain colors and contours around and in the house. Such a positive goal could keep prairie fever at bay once achieved, proving that the land could be conquered one bloom at a time. Owing to the lack of water, producing a flowerbed could take months of watering a straw coating night after night, but the results were always worth the trouble.

Mary Dodge Woodward was one who succeeded in the seemingly impossible task of raising pansies and peonies around her Dakota homestead. As Ms. Jeffrey notes, “Even though one can view some of these gardening efforts as pathetic, for it was often hard, as Woodward found, to succeed with flowers, one can also see them as signs of female determination to make a small mark on the landscape, to carve out a piece of land that was colorful, pretty, and an appropriate setting for a home.” One woman made use of her flowers to produce paintings and quilts with a floral theme; her self-administered therapy was clearly her antidote to the perils of the lone prairie, allowing a talent to blossom.

Prairie fever gradually disappeared as women (and men) got their hands on the basic tools of contact: wagons and horses, roads, and places to go beyond the farming lands. This good news on the mental health front was accompanied by these happy facts:

1) Showing a gradual change in society’s expectations and an amelioration of the general conditions on the Plains with the growth of towns, roads and railroads, between 1900 and 1920 there was a great upsurge in homestead claims by independent single women;

2) Though this change was longer in coming, it is no longer expected that women will always and only stay at home while spouses/partners work outside the home;

3) There has been a slight increase recently in the very small (less than 2%) number of US women who have babies at home, and this is generally due to an increase/improvement in midwife services, so that, according to the CDC (Center for Disease Control) “it looks like low-risk women are being selected as good candidates for home births. And that’s a good thing.”

4) Women still plant flowers.

“Prairie fever” has been the subject of one rather absurd movie by that name, and is alluded to often in the fictional works of Willa Cather (My Antonia, O Pioneers! ) and discussed in many nonfiction articles and essays well worth reading—on a lonely night while the wind howls outside the cabin.

Check out another pioneer woman: Matilda Jackson: Making a Home on the Last Frontier

Hooch and Hell Raisin’: Women Bootleggers

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Though Time didn’t say so, the settlers in Tygart Valley were undoubtedly thrilled to see the First Lady arrive at their recently constructed community center. After all, without her, they would not have been there either.

Largely forgotten now, America’s last wave of settlers pioneered in government-subsidized colonies engendered by the charitable work and political leanings of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her impact on the projects was profound, so much so that one settlement town still bears her first name—Eleanor, West Virginia; another, in Pennsylvania, was called Norvelt, the last two syllables of her first and last names combined.

Eleanor, who had made many incognito forays into areas of America hardest hit by the Great Depression, pushed for the settlements. They were woven into the patchwork of the New Deal, integrated into the National Industrial/Economic Recovery Act set up to help dislocated workers survive. Tygart Valley homesteads were specifically overseen by the Federal Subsistence Homestead Division, an offshoot of the WPA (Works Progress Administration, or as it was known to its detractors, “We Piddle Around”). The Tygart Valley deal was brokered through the political clout of the local congressman, Jennings Randolph, with Eleanor standing staunchly behind him.

West Virginia was not the only place where settlements were planted. Johnny Cash’s family migrated to a WPA encampment in Dyess, Arkansas, and in North Carolina, a settlement was created out of a disused plantation in Pender County. In all, nearly 100 such projects sprang up in the United States in the early 1930s. But, arguably, conditions in West Virginia were most dire, earning the small state five federally-sponsored cooperatives, including Tygart.

The homestead villages were targeted to assist populations enduring extreme poverty and to purchase and develop lands promising economic potential. You had to be an expert to separate poverty from extreme poverty in the early 1930s, and it took a long view of progress to envision economic potential in a country staggering from the blows of the Great Depression. But folks in Appalachia were suffering more than most. The old forests had been logged out and the price of coal was down. Deprived of even their tiny incomes, people in the hollers were simply starving out. The pitiful situation in Appalachia would have been plain to view from a train coach or a “White House car” when the Roosevelts traveled from Washington, DC to Warm Springs, Georgia where Franklin took treatments for his polio.

Eleanor, to her everlasting credit, had a genuine interest in the plight of disadvantaged people and pushed for welfare programs, so much so that she was often labeled a “Red.” But the settlement program also had its roots in the “back to the land” movement then being touted by early environmentalists like Helen and Scott Nearing who believed that small-scale subsistence farming was an antidote to the alienation of modern life. Quakers (through the American Friends Service Committee) were also deeply involved in settlement initiatives. Many settlement organizers feared that the desperation of laid-off industrial workers would in fact lead to mass riots and “Red agitation.” Settling the workers peacefully could be seen as an effort to bury, not praise, Soviet-style communism.

The families who came to live in Tygart Valley were dislocated mine and sawmill workers, victims of the chronic destruction of their environment as well as the acute worldwide economic depression. Demands for natural resources had long let capitalism hold sway in Appalachia; wealthy industrialists prospered ruthlessly on the backs of the poor. If that sounds like hackneyed rhetoric, so be it; in West Virginia, at that time, it was reality.

The settlers of Tygart Valley were not getting an unconditional hand-out. They had to work for what they received, pay for it as they went along, and build their communities. It would be their pioneer spirit that would make the settlement function, that would create the cohesion of small-town America out of a made-up place. Though they did not have to hew their homes out of the dense forests or stack them out of blocks of sod, they were on a new American frontier, an experiment in democratic collectivism.

To earn the right to be chosen for Tygart, men working on other WPA projects such as CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) had to give away labor so many days a week, those wages counting as a “down payment” on their home. Meanwhile, other CCC workers were constructing the houses and outbuildings destined to become 3 small townships—Valley Bend, East Dailey, and Dailey—in the wide Tygart Valley bordered by the Rich and Cheat Mountains. The CCC-ers, living in tents, would also dig sewage systems, clear roads, and plant shade and fruit trees. It was a planned paradise for the poor.

American artists of the era venerated the folk vigor of home crafts and simple, functional architecture. The houses at Tygart were designed with the dignity of porches and the practical blessings of electricity and indoor plumbing, grand luxuries to their Appalachian occupants. The floor plans were standardized but houses were oriented to the sites in such a way as to reduce the sense of repetition. In Tygart Valley, most were chalet or “Dutch” frame houses, some with barn-style rooflines. Some were two-story, a literal step up from the typical Appalachian one-story board shack. The details of the dwellings would make a modern-day home builder twitch with envy: oak flooring, knotty pine paneling, and exposed chestnut beams. Every homestead included a small outbuilding, meant as a combination garage, chicken coop, and tool shed. Tools were supplied, and many houses had an appliance most people in Appalachia had not heretofore seen or even imagined—a refrigerator.

Once a family was selected, the day came when they, with what meager possessions they could gather, would be taken to a newly built, respectable home surrounded by about two acres of land on which to grow food, maintain a family orchard, and store the fruits of their labors. The expectation was that each family would pay a monthly rent-to-own amount supplemented by the “sweat equity” required to maintain the property in good order, would tend the garden, keep cows or chickens, and feed themselves by their efforts. This was not a project for slackers. Neatness and good husbandry were mandated. In some cases, the residents painted their own houses and were given a hill of dirt with which to cultivate a lawn. Self-sufficiency was not a theoretical concept; it was the cornerstone of the settlement movement.

A focal point for the three Tygart townships was the school, an “art moderne” brick structure considered to be one of the finest in the state when it was completed in 1939.

To most of the residents of the Tygart Valley homesteads, the place was indeed heaven on earth after the privations they had previously been through. Of the more than 1,600 applicants, only 202 would gain a place in the three small villages. Though some of them had never farmed, they would soon learn the basics of tending a garden and “putting up” produce, so that nearly all settlers reported being well-fed. And there were other work options for the men. A sawmill business became a central hub for the community, and the federal government supplied a nursery school, a general store, and medical care.

The hope for cohesion was in large part realized, at least initially. Mrs. Roosevelt’s four visits to the valley were fondly remembered, and she undoubtedly felt that she was seeing her inner vision coming to fruition at Tygart. Here is a vignette collected by West Virginia’s cultural publication, Goldenseal, an excellent source of various articles about the settlements:

“Because of Eleanor Roosevelt, I now live in a well-built home beside other well-built homes. Because of Eleanor Roosevelt, I’m blessed with a large lot to dig and plant and to fill with as many flowers, shrubs, and trees as I have the time and energy to do. Because of Eleanor Roosevelt, I live in a community where friendliness is common, and neighbors stop by to pass the time of day. I have the advantage of rural living with close proximity to the luxury of what a larger town a few miles down the road can provide.”

We first “discovered” the Tygart Valley homesteads project while we meandered through West Virginia on one of our many explorations by car. As our navigator I was reading the American Guide Series volume, West Virginia—A Guide to the Mountain State, to enhance our enjoyment of the local landscape. The American Guide Series, itself a WPA project for writers and artists, was compiled in the late 1930s, giving a fascinating reminder of what life was like in our country some 70 years ago. West Virginia—A Guide to the Mountain State took us on a tour along US 219, describing Tygart Valley Homesteads in 1941 (the guide refers to it as Tygarts):

“The homesteaders occupy their houses under a temporary rental agreement, paying from $11.80 to 13.50 monthly against the final purchase price… As the site was settled, homesteaders organized the Tygarts Valley Association which has charge of all industrial enterprises. Chief among these is the dimension-stock lumber mill designed to employ 90 men… other co-operative enterprises include a rock and lime quarry… a large potato warehouse, a general store, filling station and garage, restaurant, beauty shop, and barber shop.”

The guide also offers us a clue as to what the women were doing (besides cooking cleaning, gardening, sewing, canning, and childcare, of course) and how the children might be faring:

“The homesteaders have formed numerous clubs and social organizations; two of these provide recreation and study for adult women; there are two 4-H clubs for boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 18, health and burial associations, a recreational and music organization, which sent a group to the National Folk Festival, and a Fair association, which sponsored the first annual Tygarts Valley Fair in September, 1938.”

Since the WPA writers had common cause with the WPA homesteaders, it’s not surprising that the authors painted an idyllic picture as they traveled through, mapping and describing the area mile by mile, in 1941. But significantly, at the end of that same year, the bombing at Pearl Harbor would bring changes to Tygart.

Most information about Eleanor’s dream project written in recent years emphasizes rural nostalgia and the fading memories of the original settlers, but there were undercurrents that eroded the idealistic foundation of all the settlements. As the owner of the settlements, the federal government held power and made rules. Though compensated by their ability to grow all the food they wanted to and take advantage of the communal facilities, settlers found wages to be low. Some men chose to migrate out of state to places where better wages could be earned, leaving their families behind and flying in the face of the intent of the commune. And then came the call of Uncle Sam, causing even more males to depart and leaving Tygart, like the rest of America, to be run by women.

By 1942, the country was in the depths of war. The government began to see the settlement program as a financial albatross, especially since wartime jobs were available to improve the lives of working-class people. Operating large subsidized businesses (like the Tygart sawmill) was running the federal agencies bankrupt. The settlements were gradually sold off, most of them dissolved by 1944. In some cases, institutions or private entrepreneurs purchased the properties and the former pioneers drifted away. Tygart was an exception; it was the only West Virginia settlement that reverted entirely to its residents, who purchased their houses for an average price of $3,000, about what it had cost to build them.

It was that independent spirit that distinguished the Tygart project from many others of the era. Paul Salstrom, author of Appalachia’s Path to Dependency (University of Kentucky Press) argues that rather than creating autonomous farming families, the settlements generally fostered greater dependence on government hand-outs because of the heavy federal hand in the projects. Salstrom suggests that this “top down” domination prevented true autonomy, rule by the people and for the people. But the denizens of Dailey, East Dailey, and Valley Bend saw that the project had evolved in an organic way; it had become part of who they were, and staying would benefit them in the long run. Not only did they take full advantage of the home buy-out, but their children often returned to buy houses in the old settlement, surely a tribute to a childhood well spent and a sense of community well entrenched.
The brick school, no longer looking so “moderne,” is still used as a childcare center, and many of the original community buildings are still standing, though not in use, along US 219. You can drive through the pleasant low hills of the Tygart development and look at the little houses, many now greatly enlarged and so altered as to be almost unrecognizable from the original plan, others still rather modest and little changed. The feeling is one of calm and self-sufficiency, a far cry from the blight of empty storefronts and abandoned dwellings so common now in Appalachia.

The Tygart Valley homestead settlement houses stand like a modest, respectable testimony to ideals that sprang out of our country’s worst—so far—economic crisis. Do they have lessons for the present?

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The only clue to her about-face, at around age thirty, a time when she had a successful professional life and much to look forward to, was a bout of diphtheria… perhaps it forced to face her mortality, or brought back thoughts of the college girl she had been, who had predicted her future would be “somewhere on a western farm.” By then her parents had retired to Ponca City, Oklahoma. Caroline found a job as a schoolteacher in the tiny town of Eva, staking a 160-acre homestead claim just across the road from the school, where she would live most of the rest of her life. The nearest big towns were Guymon and Boise City. There was a railroad line, and a federal highway cut through the panhandle.

Maybe she liked the challenge of living in a place called No Man’s Land. But as the offspring of successful and prosperous farmers, she could not have anticipated the hardships she would discover and endure there.

Short, painless history lesson: No Man’s Land (now identified as the Oklahoma Panhandle) was so called because since the earliest days of western settlement, no state claimed it. During the Civil War era it was designated as “neutral” territory (neither slave nor free), but by 1890 there was a push for more land for Americans to homestead; this led to an initiative that made the panhandle legally belong to Oklahoma (after a brief bid to annex it to Kansas). All this was so much paper-chasing to the squatters who had already grabbed land there, but it was necessary even for them, so that they could legally own what they were already farming.

As I recently watched the Ken Burns PBS series, The Dust Bowl, in which Caroline Henderson’s writings formed a central part, I felt that I should celebrate Caroline’s life with a bit of my own writing. At the time, my husband Donnie and I were planning a Christmas-to-New-Year road trip out West; I insisted we pass through No Man’s Land (not for the first time, I should say), and see for ourselves the terrain and its implications, perhaps as Caroline saw it 100+ years ago, in the tail end of the official (government-controlled) homesteading era.

Always drawn to nature, to its special events both grand and tiny, to first causes and from there to the results that humans could affect with labor, dedication, and conviction, Caroline penned her life in a series of letters and articles that reveal youthful dreams, womanly contentment, and in the end, some scars that hard work had dug into her spirit—hard work and nearly the insuperable obstacles that were cast in her way, the unwinnable battles she fought with the natural world she so revered.

By the time Caroline arrived in No Man’s Land (the name stuck for many years)—single, bold, and willing to work for wages while doing the hard work of “proving” her claim—it was ripe for homesteading, and neighbors were all around.

When the schoolmarm met the cowboy, sparks flew fast, and in 1908, Carolina married Will Henderson, former drover, itinerant well-driller, tall and very thin, a man’s man. In the long history of their life together, as detailed in Caroline’s papers, it seemed there was almost nothing Will could not do—except remember their wedding anniversary or buy the right kind of ribbon when dispatched to do the shopping. Though he would leave the claim for a few days at a time to bring in cash by helping newcomers drill for water, Will could tend cattle, plow the often unyielding dirt to raise wheat and corn, build fences, maintain every kind of machinery from simple hand tools to well-drilling rigs and, later, tractors and cars. To be fair, Caroline was always by his side. It was she at the other end of a pump shaft, or helping to pound in fence stakes and pull wire around their eventual 240 acres of farmland, tending the chickens and turkeys, watering the cattle, cooking the cornbread, sewing, taking care of their one child, Eleanor, and…writing. Reading and writing.

Caroline’s existence as a homesteading wife was central to her sense of what people ought to be: producers, in touch with their origins and the origin of their own subsistence. But equally important was the world of her imagination and her intellect, that could not be set aside entirely, that had to be given voice. And let us give credit where it is due: veteran cowhand Will was not so macho that he could not allow his woman time and space for her need to compose and communicate. In fact, as a man who always carried a Bible, he had deep respect for her book learning. Whenever they could, the couple made time for reading to each other in the evenings.

Caroline’s correspondence on their daily doings and her activities as a farmwoman comprised a series of articles that appeared in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly from about 1913 to 1937. It started out as a money-making ploy: she wrote to Ladies World magazine asking for ideas on how to make money, since they were always suggesting such schemes for their readers, and, impressed with her inquiry, they suggested she write for them, so she became their “Homestead Lady” columnist. Her writing, which extended to letters to family, friends, and once, to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, made Caroline a rather well-known twentieth-century pioneer—and agrarian survivor.

Caroline and Will, with Eleanor’s help, raised wheat and rode the boom. Her articles reflected their love of the land despite the difficulties of farming in a dry land. Her often poignant, often blunt, always organized descriptions of conditions in the panhandle would take on new significance in the desperate days of the Dust Bowl.

Brief, painless history/ecology lesson: The Dust Bowl was what we might call today “the perfect storm” (in the most negative sense): a combination of (1) usual climate conditions in dry land, (2) unusual stresses including the deforestation of such few natural barriers as once existed in favor of thousands of flat acres grown in wheat, that, a result of (3) the zeal of the U.S. to produce said wheat for its own people and for the necessities of WWI, and, by extension, perhaps, (4) the determination of settlers to put into practice the long-held “Jeffersonian ideal” of the United States as a nation of farmers, capable of feeding themselves and others and, indeed, were obligated to do so.

But behind Caroline’s impassioned rhetoric to friends, family, and politicians, were the horrible realities she, Will, and Eleanor experienced during the Dust Bowl years. “Wearing our shade hats, with handkerchiefs tied over our faces and vaseline in our nostrils… ‘Visibility’ approaches zero and everything is covered again with a silt-like deposit which may vary in depth from a film to actual ripples on the kitchen floor.” The dust came rolling through in giant clouds, day after day, for weeks at a time, filling everyone who saw its approach with a sick sense of dread. She once noted that “old sheets stretched over doors and windows, sprayed with kerosene” still offered little protection from the black powder.

Often, Caroline recounts, there was nothing to do but lie in bed with a cloth over one’s face while the wind, unchecked by any natural barrier, howled for hours and deposited in the house pounds of fine silt that sneaked into the tiniest cracks. “Today we went to Texhoma—26 miles from home… and were amazed to find ourselves out in another of the raging dust storms which have made life miserable here for so long… we left town about 2:00 and had to creep along burning our lights all the way home.”

Caroline’s letters and articles during this period (most of the 1930’s) reflect a sense of dragging depression that was only conquered by the need for daily survival and an occasional small blessing: little flowers growing in the dry grass, a miraculous cooling rain. And, because she was at heart a spiritual person (who argued with the church establishment, became liberal Unitarian, and, ultimately, Universalist in her religious views), Caroline was also wise enough to put her travails in perspective, knowing the entire country was in a state of unsettled panic and privation: “During the winter we have had several letters from a young friend engaged in social work in Chicago… often I feel ashamed of my own bitterness when we read of conditions there: ‘Only oatmeal has been eaten for days… a loaf of bread must serve six children for a meal… children have gone without food until they do not feel hunger pangs any longer.’” America was down, fighting to get back on its feet.

And maybe those who were foolhardy or single-minded enough to stay in the regions of the Great Plains most affected by the dust storms were the very ones who had caused the disaster in the first place.

As Caroline would write in her famous letter to Henry A. Wallace, U.S. Agriculture Secretary under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1935: “In one limited respect we realize that some farmers have themselves contributed to this reaping of the whirlwind. Under the stimulus of wartime prices and the humanizing of agriculture through the use of tractors and improved machinery, large areas of Buffalo grass and blue-stem pasturelands were broken out for wheat raising. The reduction in the proportionate area of permanent grazing grounds has helped to intensify the serious effect of the long drought and violent winds.”

Proving—in this lengthy epistle meant to influence government and bring help to the region—that Caroline knew a thing or two about agriculture as well as her local culture, and was not afraid to speak Truth to Power… though even she was not at all sure what help would be best for the panhandle farmers, since, as she said to Wallace, “The largest amount of direct cash benefit [in the Dust Bowl region] has come through the rental checks under the wheat acreage control program… [but] such measures are contrary to the whole theory and habitual practice of agriculture.” For “rental checks” read “agricultural subsidies” that paid farmers not to farm. Caroline had a hunch that this “rental” scheme was somehow wrong, though she had not formulated her reasons beyond a strong belief in the primacy of farming and the resolve of the American farmer.

By the late 1930s, owing to new policies instituted as part of the New Deal, the dust devil began to give way to better crops, more rains, and a lifting of spirits. In the WWII years and beyond, with better farming techniques—contouring, windbreaks, hybrid seed—things were looking bright for those who had stayed, though many had gone, “migrating out” as Caroline called it. Left behind were empty houses that the wind blew through, increasing her sense of intense loneliness. Once, when Will was away working and Eleanor off at college she wrote, “There has been another long day of wild wind and blistering heat. Tonight I am quite alone… the wind has gone down and the quietness leads me think of Will’s memories of his cold cowboy days, of silences out on the open plains…”

Caroline stopped writing for money in 1937 but kept up her copious correspondence, written to Eleanor, to friends, even to political figures such as communist organizer Eli Jaffe. At the age of 58 she got a master’s degree.

Perhaps concerned about their health and feeling unable to continue the homesteading existence—though they had toughed it out with no help well into their eighties—Caroline and Will went to live with Eleanor in New Mexico in 1963. But after three years, pining for the homestead, they returned to Oklahoma. Will died three days after they got there, and Caroline, a few months later. It was Caroline’s wish that their home and acreage be left intact, and never be farmed again.

In her letter to Secretary Wallace, Caroline had written, perhaps over-idealistically, that, “I do not know of any real farmer who would not gladly produce all that his acreage and equipment and weather would permit him, if he was sure of being able to secure by his labor the means of continued production, of clean, reasonably comfortable living, of education for his children…” This expression of the Jeffersonian vision proved myopic, as industry overtook agriculture, arguably the more important gift America has to offer.

In the Panhandle region, Donnie and I saw great stretches of implacably harsh scrub, utterly flat (to our foothills mindset) plains of brown dirt. Everywhere we went on our search for the Henderson homestead, we saw wrecked and abandoned homes, barns, and vehicles.

I later learned that James Fallows, a modern writer for Atlantic Monthly, had passed through the Henderson’s former homesteading region not long before we, over Thanksgiving, but with more success (probably having a map!). He located their old place, now owned by a grandson who has leased it for goat grazing but not, of course, to be farmed. Fallows promises more recollections of the Henderson home and Caroline’s writings in upcoming articles that can be read online.

The new story of the hard-luck panhandle, as we observed, is still written in water: the underground Ogallala Aquifer now allows those who can afford it the luxury of green fields in the desert, curiously dotting the dry desert expanses. These green swathes are generally cultivated in huge circular furrows (giving “crop circle a new meaning), irrigated by center-pivot machines that have changed the outer skin of the once arid Plains.

But for how long? Estimates are that the Ogallala Aquifer will be sucked dry as early as 2028, and would take 6,000 years to regenerate.

And despite the aquifer and the circular irrigation that is consuming it at a rapid clip, drought is still no stranger to No Man’s Land.

I feel sure that if Caroline were living in the No Man’s Land today, she would be advocating for dry-land strategies (such as growing sunflowers and other less thirsty crops) and badgering her congress-people about the shockingly rapid depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. After all, during the “dirty thirties”, she lamented that it was disheartening for those left behind to see that “migrators” were selling off their well shafts, thus, it seemed to her, callously abandoning such precious water procurement as once had been available. Faced with the threat of the disappearing aquifer, a pioneering, pen-wielding, homesteading woman like Caroline Henderson would not have let this matter rest.

Mollie Dorsey Sanford: Frontier Wife, Frontier Life

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A twenty-first-century author, Julie McDonald Zander, tells Matilda Jackson’s story, interweaving available historical facts and vivid imaginative powers. It’s a story that begged to be told and brings to light the resolute daring of all those who left the known eastern states to tame the wilderness of the great northwest—without maps or railways, in wagons bumping along a trail just barely carved out of the vast American heartland. Zander, a dedicated non-fiction newspaper reporter, created Chapters Of Life to highlight family histories. She was attracted to Matilda’s saga because she lives in the region Matilda would eventually call home, the region known in the 1800s as the Washington Territory. The result is a pensive, thoroughly researched biography, Washington Territory’s Grand Lady: The Story of Matilda (Glover) Koontz Jackson.

Matilda Glover was born in Maryland in 1811, when America had yet to be occupied much beyond the east coast. Her parents, opposed to slavery, intended to move Illinois, a new state and at that time not allied with the institution of slaveholding, but a family endowment caused a move to Missouri. There she grew up and married Nicolas Coonse (spelling later changed to Koontz). Times weren’t easy for the young couple. Their first year of marriage was marred by triple upheavals: the economic Panic of 1837, an enormous flooding of the Missouri River, and a cholera epidemic in the state and beyond.

When the Oregon Territory was officially designated, Nicolas, like thousands of other intrepid Americans, resolved to move there. It was hardly a decision to be taken lightly, but the potential gain would, they believed, outweigh the pains and perils of the trip. There was rich agricultural land to be had for homesteading, with fewer restrictions than in the settled east.  Maude and Nicolas had wed in 1837 in Missouri. By 1847, when they started out to join a covered wagon train along the Oregon Trail, they had four sons, and Matilda was probably pregnant with a fifth child.

The Trail was barely established when they joined up, beginning in western Missouri and winding through Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho. The Koontz family transport consisted mainly of six pairs of human feet since their six oxen already had a huge burden: a wagon filled with hundreds of pounds of supplies; everything they anticipated they would need to make the journey and arrive well-supplied: “blankets, clothing, flour, sugar, rice, coffee, bacon in brine, and dried peas, beans a fruit.” For advance preparation, they and fellow pioneers read and followed the suggestions of a book entitled Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California with the subtitle, All Necessary Information Relative to the Equipment, Supplies, and the Method of Traveling by Lansford W. Hastings, published in 1845. Hastings advised that children would be especially affected by the lack of their usual foods, and that the idea of buffalo hunting, while seeming practical, was actually far too time-consuming. He enumerated the needed provender to include kettles and pans, money for ferries and extra food, and a good gun with at least five pounds of powder

Undertaking the envisioned 2,000-plus miles by covered wagon, arranging and re-arranging their possessions almost daily to keep the family fed, clothed, and protected from hostile influences, Matilda cooked and cleaned and watched over her sons. Along the way, babies were born, others died, and many graves were sited as the group progressed, so “Matilda kept her boys close.” She found time to bake a pie from foraged gooseberries. The party assayed higher ground and crossed the Great Divide. When they reached a particularly treacherous bend in the Snake River, Nicolas was among the first to attempt the crossing.  He was sucked into oblivion by a whirlpool as his wife and sons watched helplessly on the bank. The sudden overwhelming shock caused Matilda to go into labor early. Two days later her little daughter died and was buried near the site of her father’s passing.

Matilda suffered extreme trauma. Zander, who was determined not to create dialogue when none had been recorded, manages to give us a sense of the depth of her suffering at that crucial juncture. Yet turning back was never an option. Matilda and her sons pushed on to the Willamette region of northwest Oregon. There, despite her sorrows, she was among only a few women in the new territory, and soon attracted the attention of one of the region’s earliest settlers, Englishman John R. Jackson. Their marriage offered an opportunity for her sons, who would work on Jackson’s Highland Farm. Jackson had not only the hard work ethic of a landowner, but an entrepreneurial bent as well.  With Matilda at his side, he set up a little cabin courthouse to try local cases, and, seeing that travelers often passed through or near their modest homestead, they eventually expanded their holding to include “a wayside hotel and trading post.”

It was then and there that Matilda, finally settled and feeling more secure about her sons’ future prospects, gained a reputation as an excellent cook and welcoming hostess, entertaining in Jackson’s various enterprises, such notables as Generals Grant, Sheridan, and McClellan. Her domicile provided her comfort zone, perhaps not surprising after the horrors of her one youthful expedition. At her death, at home on Valentine’s Day, 1901 at age 90, she was remembered as so staunchly attached to home and hearth that she had never ridden a train, and had seen one only once!

Author Zander has employed diligent research to focus sharply on this courageous female, distinguished by her intelligence and her grit in the face of loss and hardship. A few letters exchanged between Matilda and her family are provided, and historical record reveals the dangers of the Oregon Trail at nearly every step. Matilda’s granddaughters later sought to immortalize her, chronicling her daily life on the homestead, stressing that those who came her way were always treated to warm hospitality and simple but memorably tasty cuisine. Through the many letters and papers written to, from, and about Matilda, we learn that she was a woman of Christian faith that never wavered and often inspired those around her. With Jackson, she engaged in patriotic activism—including helping to sew the first American flag for the newborn Territory of Washington. These historic papers, with their archaic spellings and highly formal prose, give a meaningful glimpse into the settler mentality.

Think about it, Dear Reader, especially now, during Women’s History Month. Matilda Jackson crossed the country in its early days, from the quickly urbanizing east coast states, through the disputed lands of the Midwest torn apart in the cruel context of slavery, and, despite suffering the tragic loss of husband and child, pushed onward to homestead on the last frontier. Some hardships she faced were common to all, but as a woman, there were the added burdens of pregnancy, infant and child care, and the need to keep a family fed and clothed while husbands and other menfolk risked, and like Nicolas, sometimes lost their lives in the barely known wilderness marked only by a thin dirt trail to the far ocean.

When I asked Zander about her obvious devotion to her central character in an interview segment on the well-established book review website Feathered Quill, she offered this reply: “Female pioneers are often overlooked in recounting the history of the region. Matilda Glover Koontz Jackson was known throughout the territory—even in the nation’s capital of Washington City—for her hospitality, but most of the books and articles focused on her husband… Matilda’s story struck me because, as a wife and mother, I couldn’t imagine the terror she must have felt watching her husband drown, leaving her a widow with four little ones heading west into an untamed land. What would she do? How would she survive? These questions plagued me, so I decided to find the answers.”

Though a modest Washington state park bears Matilda Jackson’s name, it was Zander’s perseverance that has brought this remarkable woman’s name into the spotlight.  Invoking the issue of Matilda’s place in the pantheon of notable pioneers, Zander told me, “When we launched the book live October 26, 2019, at the historic cabin where Matilda had lived, the Lewis County commissioners declared it ‘Matilda Jackson Legacy Day.’ Matilda’s role in the history of Washington Territory was significant, but she was a humble woman who never sought recognition or accolades. I hope this book stands as a testament to her strength, faith, and courage in the face of adversity.”

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Mostly, if you look up Helen, you find “The Nearings” since she is most often commemorated as the other half of a longtime partnership with Scott. But I wanted to invite the spirit of Helen, just Helen, into my cozy, imaginary kitchen, for a nice long chat.

Helen Knothe was born in 1904. Her family was well off, as we used to say, her mother an artist, and they were Theosophists. “Theosophy,” or “God wisdom,” is still an active belief system, with many followers around the world. Helen was affected by its universal outlook in almost every sphere of her life. A probable influence of this creed was that she was always a vegetarian. So deep was this practice ingrained (haha, get it?), that even in the last year of her life she would tell an interviewer, “I can’t imagine nice people eating animals.”

Theosophy also led her to a relationship with a well-known Indian spiritual figure, Jiddu Krishnamurti. His teachings were delivered mediumistically, and Helen sometimes served as his spokesperson. Krishnamurti, who had a large Western following, was in love with the young attractive Helen; but he had taken a vow of strict celibacy, and at some point, they parted ways. By her mid-twenties, Helen had traveled in Europe and Australia, in part to study classical violin. When she returned home in 1928, she met Scott Nearing.

One could say that, for Scott, born in 1883, politics was his religion—he was a pacifist, a socialist, and possibly had an association with the Communist Party as many radicals of his generation did. He was known as a brilliant writer, debater, and speaker, espousing many inter-related causes, one of which later became known as environmentalism. And though about 20 years her senior, he espoused Helen. They lived together for 20 years, then married and remained together until his death in 1983. Scott had many other relationships with women, before and simultaneously with his partnership with Helen, but she alone endured.

After they tied that proverbial knot, Helen, with Scott, began to forge a lifestyle that would garner them the informal title of “honorary grandparents” of the Back-to-the-Land movement.

Because they walked the walk.

To be sure, Helen and Scott were not the first to propose returning to the land and basic self-sufficiency. They had read the writings of predecessors in the yet-unnamed movement. In the early 1900s, a man named Bolton Hall (Three Acres and Liberty), an Ireland-born American agrarian and thrifty living proponent, was already decrying the inflated price of land (as much as $100 per acre!).  He proposed a plan for “vacant lot gardening” and even went to England to study their system of allotment gardens. Though Hall was anti-communist, he believed that sharing land for community sustainability was possible among like-minded people. Helen felt a special connection to Bolton Hall through his book, Halo of Grief, which gave her comfort after Scott’s passing.

Maurice G. Kains, an American agricultural academic, wrote the classic whose title—Five Acres and Independence—would later become one of the mantras for the Back-to-the-Land movement.  Written from a horticultural perspective in 1935, his book was the first widely publicized homesteading “bible.” Interestingly, Helen and Scott’s last homestead in Maine, Forest Farm, comprises five acres.

But what the Nearings did was different and gave their activities special credibility to a newer generation. I believe that one reason why their work and philosophy gained prominence was that they were a couple—Helen was an equal contributor. It made them seem, well, like family. It made homesteading seem like something a couple could do. It wasn’t just a macho deal. It was as much for strong idealistic women as for their menfolk.

The Nearings initiated their homesteading experiments in the early groaning years of the Great Depression, first in rural Vermont and then Maine. They devised a philosophy that developed with the century, rooted in Scott’s socialist idealism and Helen’s spiritual ecumenicalism. Helen would later say, “We were merely living in a very simple way… we had no money… we grew our own food, cut our own wood and built our own houses, made our own clothes… that was the way things were with us.” But it’s also true that Helen once opined that the “good life”—theirs and that of anyone who acts on the deep impulse to return to simple, basic living—was not so different from what drove the Pilgrims to leave their homeland and settle in the New World: because whatever it was they most wanted to do could not be done in an atmosphere of urban sprawl, urban squall, and government intervention.

The couple launched a bold experiment, putting into practice some of their shared beliefs about how a “good” person—homesteader, activist, communard, pacifist, spiritual seeker, vegetarian, artist—should spend her or his time. They formulated some rules for themselves that still comprise a reasonable, if idealistic, guide to life on the land, dedicated to the acreage but acknowledging the necessities beyond the hedgerow. Their rigorous formula for the optimal use of one’s waking hours might strike present-day homesteaders as needlessly restrictive.  But it worked, doubtless because they agreed about the need for the rules. Together they rigidly practiced as well as preached a daily routine that involved

• four hours of civic activity,
• four hours of “bread labor” to maintain basic food, clothing, and shelter,
• four hours of professional pursuits.

The professional pursuits included co-authoring their homesteading classic, Living the Good Life, first published in 1954.  Few tomes have had as great an influence on the homesteading explosion of the ensuing decades.  By the 1970s reading the book was virtually a sine qua non for hip homesteaders.  The Nearings were in large part responsible for bringing the word “organic” out of its musty closet and making it part of the parlance of modern life.

For “bread labor,” Helen cooked and canned; Scott and she built buildings, many of stone, including a greenhouse and an outhouse (oh yeah, they were way off the grid); they gardened most of the year and for a time they harvested and sold maple syrup or blueberries for a modest income. The New York Times quoted in Helen’s obituary from a letter she had written: “In November, the rafters in our big country kitchen are hung with braids of onions and shallots, with ears of dried corn, with drying herbs (mint, tarragon, thyme, parsley, celery, sage, and lovage)…of bottled canned goods in the kitchen cellar, we have 160 quarts of vegetable soup and tomato juice, 132 quarts of rose hips, 80 quarts of applesauce, 146 quarts of raspberries, and jars and jars of jam.”

Civic activity included their writing and outreach to maintain a large network of colleagues and followers. They also traveled, mostly in the cold months. Their co-authored book, USA Today, details some of their winter season journeying, speaking to anyone who would listen about their ideals, warning against materialistic and militaristic governmental policies. As described, probably by Helen, they lived for the most part in their car and ate simple meals from local sources. One suspects that Helen kept up with the domestic aspects of the journey, but they both spoke—at Quaker meeting houses, picnics, and private homes. And at least once per tour on their way southward, they visited Washington, DC, which they called the “Dark City.”

Wanda Urbanska, interviewed for my book Generous Fruits: the History of American Homesteading, “cites hearing Scott and Helen Nearing speak in 1974 at the University of Maine in Orono as an early influence on her complex thinking about the idea of ‘simple living.’ Not long after her youthful first encounter with the famed simplicity gurus of the middle of the 20th century, Wanda, while still a student at Orono High School, interviewed the couple for The Maine Times, spawning ideas that led to her life-long public advocacy of the idea.” Again, it is easy to imagine that the young Urbanska was innately charmed by the fact that Helen was Scott’s equal on the podium, a co-speaker (a rarity at that time) who shared both the intellectual and physical aspects of their work.

Helen outlived Scott, though he lived longer. He died at age 100, and she stayed on their farm. Please note that carefully: she stayed on the farm. Alone, but not reclusive. Her later, widowhood photos show a smiling, open face and strong tanned frame. She had many visitors. In fact, she and Scott had put up a sign at the end of their driveway: “We will see visitors from 3 to 5 to help us live the good life.” But Helen didn’t keep those strict hours; her door was always open.

And she continued to can, garden, cook, plan, and write. After Scott’s passing, she wrote Light on Aging and Dying, Loving and Leaving the Good Life, Simple Food and the Good Life, and Wise Words for the Good Life: A Homesteader’s Personal Collection.

Helen Nearing remained feisty, gloriously opinionated, and quite quotable, such as this declaration from Simple Food and the Good Life: “When you are faced with food that has been sterilized, fumigated, hydrogenated, hydrolyzed, homogenized, colored, bleached, puffed, exploded, defatted, de-germed, texturized, or if you don’t know what has been done to it, the safest rule is not to eat it.”

After Helen’s demise, Forest Farm was taken over by a consortium of “Nearing-ites,” renamed and re-purposed as the Good Life Center, offering residencies and welcoming visitors who are brought into the fold by residents ready to tell tales of the Nearings’ “good life.”

On Maine Public Radio at age 90, a year before her death, Helen shared this simple message: “We finally will realize what we can make of our lives and what there is ahead.  The important thing is to be brotherly and to help when we can and to learn all we can…and I think that is coming. I hope the human race will finally learn to do that, and I think that’s our future.”

I would suggest, gently, that had Helen Nearing been born a couple of decades later, she would certainly have said, “The important thing is to be brotherly and sisterly…”.

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