Books, Documentaries, Reviews: THE LOST LANGUAGE OF PLANTS, Stephen Harrod Buhner

Books, Documentaries, Reviews: January 14, 2013

The Lost Language of Plants

Stephen Harrod Buhner

I read this book over two years ago.

It still haunts me.

This book haunts me because it describes how far down a very-wrong-road mankind has traveled–a road that ends in a cliff with no where else to go. The cliff is sickness, starvation, and certain conflict for resources.

Can we turn around and backtrack?

Increasingly, I think it’s unlikely as a species that we can–because the losses of traditional knowledge are too great, so great that we cannot recuperate them. And doubly unlikely because most of us are not in touch at all with what has been lost or what, as a species, we have created. The tragedy springs from our fatal flaws–pride, arrogance, and greed. We set about with chilling abilities–that grew stronger over time–to change the environment within which we found ourselves and, in the process, set in place what is killing and will kill…us.

Pessimistic?

You bet. It’s why I called my essays “tipping points.” I wondered where the tipping point would be for needed corrections to our behavior.

But now, when one out of two people are getting cancer and when we still continue along the road without making changes–caught as we are in an immense system that increasingly ties our hands and muffles our voices–I have lost hope in seeing change in my lifetime at least.

Change will come eventually, but only after this planet has swept most of us off its surface. Hopefully, those who survive will begin to understand that mankind is part of Earth’s system, not in charge of Earth’s system, and that we must learn to live within Earth’s systems and alongside other life forms–each of which is important–for survival, let alone for flourishing. And, yes, I recognize that we have multiplied and are, maybe, living longer, but what we have done to create this situation is not sustainable and will crash.

There is an awful lot in this book to take in and understand. Yet, Buhner, a master herbalist whose life work has been understanding the chemistry and life force of plants, walks us through what has been lost and what we need to understand in accessible prose.

The “lost” language of plants is a language that used to tell us about our system, where we fit in, the importance of the other life forms (animals, plants, soil, bacteria), and how they worked within the system. Here, nature is not always “red in tooth and claw,” but synergistically connected. Here one huge loss is the loss of the understanding of the whole of things–lost to modernity’s constant move to separate out the parts for study or control. Or, destruction.

Buhner makes the connection of mankind to the system and mankind’s destruction of the system in many places. His use of this quote by Wendell Berry from Berry’s The Unsettling of America may give you some food for thought.

[Our bodies] are not distinct from the bodies of plants and animals, with which we are involved in the cycles of feeding and in the intricate companionships of ecological systems and of the spirit. They are not distinct from the earth, the sun and moon, and the other heavenly bodies It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A Medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease.

And here’s a quote Buhner uses from the renowned scientist Edward O. Wilson (59):

Other species are our kin. This statement is literally true in evolutionary time. All higher eukaryotic organisms, from flowering plants to insects and humanity itself, are thought to have descended from a single ancestral population that lived about 1.8 billion years ago. Single-celled eukaryotes and bacteria are linked by still more remote ancestors. All this distant kinship is stamped by a common genetic code and elementary features of cell structure. Humanity did not soft-land into the teeming biosphere like an alien from another planet. We arose from other organisms already here.

Now before some of you react to this view, as some of you immediately will, before you grab the polarity religion/science, take a moment and think about what is being described. Here is a whole design. A magnificent design–within which we are a part. And I can tell you that what Buhner is moving towards is trying to show you how intricate is this design– down to the cellular level. He uses the work of Barbara McClintock, taken from her 1983 Nobel lecture, to reinforce his understanding of the intelligence that is involved. And Buhner does hold a huge place for spirit underlying this system, as I will show below.

Antibiotics, it has been found, can act as bacterial pheromones, biologically based chemical motivation signals, that literally pull bacteria to them. Once in the presence of an antibiotic, the bacterial learning rate immediately increases by several orders of magnitude….Bacteria also intentionally inhibit the internal mechanisms for reducing mutation in their genetic structure in order to promote quicker resistance development. Nor do bacteria compete with each other for resources, as standard evolutionary theory predicted, but rather, they promiscuously cooperate in the sharing of survival information.

The recognition, long delayed by incorrect assumptions about the nature of genetic structure, is now widespread that genetic structures in all organisms are not static but fluid, sometimes within a wide range. (This is part of a growing recognition that nature may not be red in tooth and claw but much more mutualistic and interdependently connected than formerly supposed.) Barbara McClintock, who early recognized the existence of transposons, noted in her 1983 Nobel lecture that the genome “is a highly sensitive organ of the cell, that in times of stress can initiate its own restructuring and renovation. She noted as well that the instructions for how genotype reassembled came not only from the organism but from the environment itself. The greater the stress the more fluid and specific the action of the genome in responding to it. This has had a great many unlooked for consequences. (122-123).

The growth of our disease rates, Buhner argues, parallels “the decrease of diverse plants as foods and medicines” (206). The substitution of man-made chemicals, born out of reducing the whole to various parts, treat symptoms, not the underlying causes of disease. This is not a new argument Buhner makes. But Buhner notes, as do many others now, that our ability to create technical “fixes” is coming to an end, for we have nothing in the pipeline to treat superbugs, superweeds, and super mad living entities that we have incited to…survive…us.

One of the most poignant–and useful–sections of the book is when Buhner describes the development of a plant community. He begins by noting how the “naming” of plants (taxonomy) involved grouping plants that looked similar or had similar evolutionary origins does not work. Plants need to be “seen” by how they function within their community: “To understand plants and Earth’s ecosystems they have to be viewed as living systems, not isolated within the language of Western taxonomy” (176).

And:

Naming plants instead by their function, by their relationship to their habitat, connects people to that habitat, to the communications and purposes that run through ecosystems. Such naming carries within itself the implicit knowledge of what will happen if a plant is driven to extinction or declines in population. Many older folk taxonomies–often more complex than Western systems–have long recognized that plants play unique and important functions in ecosystems. Their names for them (as with such plants as Elders and Ambrosias) often reflect plant/ecosystem connections and interdependencies and describes more accurately their true nature and functions.

Plants mean nothing in isolation; they are a life-form rooted in and identified by their community, by their relationships to and interactions with all other life on Earth. Individual plants form local neighborhoods and neighborhoods associate together in communities and those group together as ecosystems that interconnect together to form biomes which together form the larger system called Gaia. Ecosystem function determines the plants that grow within them and the nature of plant associations (176-177).

Buhner goes on to describe a Sonoran Desert plant community and how it formed and how it has an Ironwood tree (an Elder) at its center. The description of the anchoring Ironwood, the understory plants, the ground plants, the interrelated insects, the chemical smells produced to communicate and heal is…mind-blowing. And, allows one to begin to see what has been “lost” when we mindlessly cut down and clear land and plant monocrops. The integrity of the system is ripped apart and various components simply do not know how to relate. Sickness evolves.

Buhner describes the framework in another way–by listing the basic components of a basic framework found when nonindustrial epistemologies are compared. Here is Buhner’s list–it offers much food for thought. Note that the starts with “Spirit.”

At the Center of all things is spirit. In other words, there is a central underlying unifying force in the Universe that is sacred.

All matter is made from this substance. In other words, the sacred manifests itself in physical form.

Because all matter is made from the sacred, all things possess a soul, a sacred intelligence or logos.

Because human beings are generated out of this same substance it is possible for human beings to communicate with the soul of intelligence in plants and all other matter and for those intelligences to communicate with human beings.

Human beings emerged later on Earth and are the offspring of the plants. Because we are their offspring, their children, plants will help us whenever we are in need if we ask them.

Human beings were ignorant when they arrived here and the powers of Earth and the various intelligences in all things began to teach them how to be human. This is still true. It is not possible for new generations to become human without this communication or teaching from the natural world.

Parts of Earth can manifest more or less sacredness, just like human beings. A human being can never know when some part of Earth might begin expressing deep levels of sacredness or begin talking to him Therefore it is important to cultivate attentiveness of mind.

Human beings are only one of the many life-forms of Earth, neither more nor less important than the others. Failure to remember this can be catastrophic for individuals, nations, and peoples The other life in the Universe can and will become vengeful if treated with disrespect by human beings (37-38).

Well, there isn’t much in our education or training or, often, in many of our religions, that constructs a list like this one.

The first time I read it, I dismissed parts of it out of hand. Then I read it again after reading the book, especially the parts of how a natural plant ecosystem is created, looks (messy by our standards), and functions, and the list called to me in different ways. Reading it now is, yet again, a different experience, and I am reminded of how much has been lost when so many of us have become so profoundly disconnected from nature, from the land, from plant ecosystems, from animals, from our food, from…each other.

Turkey Tracks: Diva Update

Turkey Tracks: January 13, 2014

DIVA UPDATE

I went to sleep last night after watching the weather. We will have a few more mild days and then the bitter cold will return.

I knew my severely frostbitten Anconda hen would not be able to stand any further damage.

I went to sleep knowing that she would have to come inside, or I would have to put her down.

Inside, first, I determined. She has been through so much, and her spirit is so strong. She deserves a chance.

So, this morning I got up and organized to bring her inside.

When I went out to feed the coop chickens and let them out, I saw the Diva on the hillside. She had not gone into the coop’s cage last night. She sat so still that I thought she might have frozen sitting straight up. But, it hadn’t been that cold last night… She moved a little as Penny dog went to sniff at her. She was weak, but alive, just sitting on the hill above the junipers. When I called to her, she moved and tried to come toward me, and limped her way down the hillside as if she were very stiff, and I gave her a hand full of mealy worms, which she began to devour. So, I went on to let out the coop chickens and to throw the leftover food in the coop to the twenty or so turkeys who are now bold enough to come right up to the coop. It is quite something to see four or five turkey males in full puffed-out plumage strutting around not ten feet from you. And it is fun to have them talk to you when you call to them.

After I fed the dogs and dressed, I organized a big box for the Diva in the kitchen. Two trips to the garage retrieved what I needed: a tarp to put under the box, the box, a screen to cover, and materials to line the box. When I had the box ready, I went outside with the fish net to catch her, which it turned out I did not need.

She was very weak when I picked her up inside the coop, where she had gone as the other chickens were outside. She hardly struggled and only squawked weakly when I picked her up. There was no weight to her–just feathers and…air.

But, she was outraged when I put her in the box! Where was this? What was I doing to her?

Before I could get her into the box and put the screen over it, she flew up into the far left window and flailed around weakly.

I had to weight the screen on top of the box with books to keep her inside.

After a time, she accepted the box and settled down. And in the past hour or two does not stand up and scurry around as I go in and out of the kitchen. These Ancondas are very, very skittish.

She ate all of the hamburger I gave her. But not the sunflower seeds. She has scattered her food all out of its bowl.

The box is the box that the electric lawn mower came in–saved for just this sick-chicken purpose–summer before last. The screen was a gift of the Swap Shop–back when we raised Chickie Annie after incubating eggs. (You may recall she was the only one who hatched due to problems with humidity. Later, she got eaten by a fox–which broke my heart.) I lined the box with newspaper and an old towel–so she will have a little warmth and traction around her feet. Later I will drape another towel over the box top to make her feel safer and to keep her warm tonight.

And I will sleep without worrying about her freezing to death outside or being eaten by something that goes bump in the night.

The rooster flies up to the porch railing and calls to her. He was very upset when I picked her up and she cried out.

I will not take a picture of her for you until she is better. She is very disfigured, but her feet and neck do seem better.

Interesting Information: Red Palm Oil

Interesting Information: January 13, 2014

Red Palm Oil

I read a really interesting article on red palm oil a while back. Sometimes it takes me a while to act on information, and it took me about an hour to refind the article! I was shocked to realize I read it back in the spring–which shows you how backed up my blog information pile is.

“Red Palm Oil: A Healthy Fat with a Daily Dose of Vitamins,” Bruce Fife, N.D., Well Being Journal, May/June 2013, 8-13. (This journal has an url, but does not let you read articles for free.)

Anyway, a week or so ago, I bought a jar of the red palm oil.

Turns out that the shopping booklet that the Weston A. Price Foundation sends me every year lists this Nutiva brand under its “best” category.

First I tried it instead of olive oil when roasting some cauliflower. Hmmmmmm. Pretty color on this white veggie. Taste, and, Delicious! Buttery and warm with an intriguing red/gold color.

Next I tried it instead of butter over the top of a roasting chicken. Again, delicious!

So, what’s so good about this delicious, pretty fat besides the taste?

First, Fife writes that red palm oil has been a traditional part of the human diet in areas where oil palms have grown for “at least 5000 years.” These oil palms started in tropical Africa, but now are an important crop in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and South America.

Besides being used in food preparation, red palm oil is used as medicine. At the first sign of illness, one living where red palm oil is in the economy would down a cup of red palm oil. And, red palm oil in these regions is “regarded as essential in the diet for pregnant and nursing women in order to assure good health for the mother and child.”

Red palm oil supplies essential fatty acids, yes, but it is also “packed with an assortment of vitamins, antioxidants, and other phytonutrients important for good health.” The rich, deed red color comes from carotenes (like beta-carotene and lycopene)–which are also found in tomatoes and carrots. But red palm oil has “15 times more provitamin A carotenes than carrots and 300 times more than tomatoes”–all of which makes it an excellent prevention for Vitamin A deficiency, which causes, Fife reminds, blindness, weakened bones, lowered immunity, and degraded learning abilities and mental functions.

Carotenes in fruits and vegetables, writes Fife, “can supply the needed vitamin A if an adequate amount of fat is also consumed.” Voila! Red palm oil is the whole package of nutrients and needed fat. (And I would add that big strides have been made in the past two years towards recognizing how much humans need good fat sources to be healthy and towards restoring the role of good fats in recommended diets. Good fats are NOT the highly processed vegetable oils which are devoid of nutrients and the fat-soluble vitamins. Good fats are the animal fats, coconut and red palm oils, and properly processed olive oil.)

In addition to the carotenes, red palm oil “contains at least 20 other carotenes along with vitamin E, vitamin K, CoQ10, squalene, phytosterols, flavonoids, phenolic acids, and glycolipids.” Red palm oil is so full of good nutrients and fats that it is being encapsulated and sold as a vitamin supplement. Indeed, red palm oil is one of the richest natural sources of vitamin E.

Fife describes several studies–done with appropriate control groups–that show that red palm oil can stop heart disease and, for some, reverse it.

Fife writes that the antioxidants in red palm oil work to keep inflammation under control. As such it helps lower blood pressure and may serve as a “potent anticancer food.” It also protects “against neurological degeneration.”

Fife writes that red palm oil is excellent for cooking and baking–and my fledgling experiments begin to confirm its uses. The label on the bottle I bought said it was good for medium heat, so I would not use it for high heat searing. For that I use lard, tallow, or coconut oil.

So, I’m on board with adding this fat to my kitchen.

Besides, it’s just so darn pretty!

Turkey Tracks: January Thaw!

Turkey Tracks: January 12, 2014

(I don’t know why some recent posts are not separating paragraphs… Sorry…)

January Thaw!

It’s a January thaw!

It’s 50 degrees!

We can see grass in the snow paths again, and the chickens came out of their coop/cage and are re-exploring the yard. There is all sorts of talking and crowing and clucking and general delight going on in the yard.

Today’s job was to retrieve TWO glass bowls that the chickens have dragged to the back end of the cage. The chickens, in their boredom and hunger for different foods, literally lick those bowls clean and drag them around. Did you know that chickens have tiny little tongues?

Until today, I could not reach them from the front end of the cage with the crab net. Or poke a broom handle through the chicken wire to push them forward from the back end as the tarps were knee deep in snow. I’m going to try the very tall tree/limb cutter which has a curved saw on the top–and if that does not work, will try to life the tarps at the back end.

I NEED those bowls to continue feeding the chickens things like warm mash, leftovers, meat and milk, and so forth.

Well! The tree saw was too tall to wedge into the flap/gap between the coop and the cage. I finally got the bowls with a leaf rake–the longest one I had. The tines kept collapsing, but patience and effort was rewarded, and I gradually was able to turn each bowl over and over until I could reach it with the thick pole I use to prop open the coop roof. Yeah!!!! I am easily amused, apparently.

Meanwhile, the rooster herded his girls up together next to the house and told them I was an extremely dangerous intruder into their space. He is so cute and has come into his own. He crows all the time now. I’ll try to get some pictures of him soon, but we are getting more weather coming in over the next few days.

Last night I sewed the fifth row of seven of Celtic Solstice. It’s so pretty. Only I sewed one of the units upside down, which threw off the pattern. I took the offending block out of the row, fixed the unit, and resewed the row together. Now I had TWO blocks upside down. I took it all apart and fixed both units and resewed and QUIT for the night, thinking I would finish the rows today. But I have not yet, and I’m not quite sure where the day has gotten to.

I have downloaded another audio book: P.D. James’s DEVICES AND DESIRES. Oh my gosh! There is a mini-series of this book:

There is something so seductive about having someone read a story to you while you sew. I finished BEST OF WOMEN’S SHORT STORIES, Vol. 1, William J. Locke, yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it. There were a number of stories I read in school, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and it was a pleasure to hear them dramatized.

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I spent some time yesterday going through ALL the 1200 titles of the audio books as the search engine is not great on this system. I found so many books I will love to hear and made lists of the same. I thought a mystery would be fun for a change.

Turkey Tracks: Dianne Hire: Master Quilter

Turkey Tracks: January 12, 2014

Dianne Hire: Master Quilter

Yesterday was a miserable, rainy, icy, threatening day.

BUT, the Coastal Quilters met, and many members managed to make it to the meeting–where we were treated to a history of Dianne Hire’s gorgeous quilts and books, and the story of her latest book, “APP is for Appliqué.”

Really, we all felt as if in the middle of this challenging day we were basking in so much warmth. Dianne’s gracious humor, her own color-drenched and amazing quilts, the quilts of so many local quilters made from Dianne’s new patterns and brought in to share up close and personal, and our being all together made for a wonderful morning. And by the time we left, the weather had warmed considerably and grass was appearing in the snow paths.

For this new book, her fourth, Dianne drew fourteen complex, amazing patterns, and quilters she knew, many of them local, some of them met while she taught around the country, each took a signature pattern for their personal quilt–which would be included in the planned and approved book. The quilters could also use the other patterns in their quilts. And if you know quilting and quilters at all, you can begin to imagine the diversity these quilts represent. No two are even remotely alike, and all are astonishing!

Here is a quote from Stevie Kumble, Coastal Quilter’s press person, describing the new book in our press release:

The book itself has received acclaim from the quilting world and beyond. According to one reviewer, “The result is a nicely disguised technical manual as a feast for the eyes and an exciting project book. Fourteen stylized floral pattern designs provide the reader with the right place to embark on a unique journey of creativity. Tips and techniques from each contributing quilter will advance the reader’s sewing expertise in multiple ways. This book will either set appliqué design on its ear, advance it for the ages, or both.”

Dianne is famous for her use of color, and she helped pioneer the use of curves, innovative piecing, and so on. Dianne was on the cusp of taking quilts out of the traditional and into the contemporary.

Here is a web site with a lot of her quilts pictured–just scroll down and enjoy: http://dhquiltsandclasses.blogspot.com.

As you perhaps know, I can applique, but I am very drawn to and happy with my ongoing scrappy piecing project and using up my stash. But Dianne swears that these complex designs are not hard to make. The results, I can tell you, are well worth the effort.

The quilts of Coastal Quilter’s members Gail Galloway Nicholson and Roxanne Wells appear in Dianne’s new book.

And, this program was arranged by Gail Galloway Nicholson. Thanks, Gail!

And Dianne’s information is as follows:

Dianne S. Hire

One Hundred Bayside Road, Northport, Maine 04849

207-338-4789

email: alternatives2@bluestreakme.com

Turkey Tracks: Dump Run!

Turkey Tracks: January 12, 2014

DUMP RUN!

What do we do with our trash and garbage in Camden, Maine?

We take it to the dump–where we have a massive recycling program.

I start by recycling as much of my garbage as I can here at home. I have three compost containers out back of the garage for anything I can compost, and I have a bin of worms in the utility room here in the house. (There is a blog post on the worms–vermiculture.)

I sort trash in the garage. There is the garbage that can’t be composted (meat, oils, for instance). Other categories include returnable bottles (Maine has a returnable tax/refund on bottles), cans/steel, aluminum soda cans (I don’t have any of those really), glass, milk jugs (not many of those as I buy milk in glass containers), food plastic, newspapers, mail and boxboard, cardboard, brown paper sacks. You get the idea…

Here’s a video of our dump, and you can tell I went on a very windy, cold day. I speak at first of the blue bins at the front end of the dump line where bottles are deposited.

Recyclable/refund bottles get sorted by clear and color–and there are bins where the Lion’s Club picks up bottles for the refunds. Just off-site is another organization (Coastal Workshop) where one can drop bottles and the organization gets the refund.

Here’s a long shot down the recycling containers–you can see the entry point–the little red building–behind the car. I’ve never been sure what goes on in the big building to the left. There are offices in there–and probably dump equipment.

Here’s a container. There are big openings to throw stuff in along both sides of the containers.

My goodness! My car is waaaaayyy dirty!

What can’t be recycled goes into yellow pay-as-you-go bags–I think they are $1.50 now–and gets burned. This method is thought to encourage people to recycle as much as they can.

This trip I have two bags:

The bags get thrown into a hopper as one leaves the dump–where the bags are crushed into a much smaller footprint.

The dump also has a “Swap Shop”–which is closed for the winter. The Swap Shop is run by volunteers and is beloved by the community.

In the summer, there are always interesting items to be found at the Swap Shop. It’s a great place to take items you are not using, but which someone else might treasure. I got a small dog house there that John painted and repaired. The chickens adore it! I used it the year we let a mother hen hatch and raise babies.

And in the summer, or warmer weather anyway, you never know who you will run into at the dump. It is often a place for a quick visit with someone you maybe have not seen in a while.

Turkey Tracks: Dead Diva

Turkey Tracks: January 12, 2014

Dead Diva

I have not posted for a few days.

Mostly because I knew I had to tell you that one of the two Divas is dead, and the remaining one is very sick.

Winter in Maine is harsh, and this winter has been particularly difficult for us, with the ice storm at Christmas with all its power outages, and for all the animals. We have had sub zero temps and wind chill factors way below zero. The weather has taken a toll–and the Divas have suffered it.

One of the Divas was dead last week–dead in the coop as I opened it in the morning. She had terrible frostbite on her neck and around her head and her wounds were open and bloody.

Perhaps the others killed her. Birds will do that. And, given the Diva’s condition, it was a mercy killing, if so. Here is where “Nature” is “red in tooth and claw.”

The frostbite and open bleeding explains why the Divas were refusing to join the others in the coop at night. (Chickens will attack and peck at other birds with open bleeding.) And, by staying out, were risking more frostbite. The other Diva was in terrible shape as well, but living.

The remaining Diva is hanging in there. I am feeding her high protein foods and fats as much as I can. Some of her wounds are better; some are still fresh. She looks terribly bedraggled and has lost all her vibrant color.

I have such mixed emotions about her. Should I put her down or help her to live? Is she in pain? If so, how much? She is eating. As long as she is eating, I will not act.

I will keep you posted…

Turkey Tracks: “Songbirds in My Grandmother’s Garden” Quilt

Turkey Tracks: January 6, 2014

“Songbirds in My Grandmother’s Garden” Quilt

I began to realize sometime during making this quilt that it reminded me of my grandmother Louise Phillips Bryan of Reynolds, Georgia.

Although she had fabulous gardens with flowers of all colors, Grandmother loved the color brown best. She had brown eyes and fine, curly dark hair. Her laugh was HUGE–a belly laugh from deep inside. And she knew how to have fun and to laugh. She loved life and loved her life. She sewed and she knitted. She gardened, as I said above. She put up food and set a nice table. She welcomed guests.

I am named for her, and I spent a lot of wonderful time with her at all stages of my life–especially as we were an Air Force family and moved a lot. When my father had an overseas deployment, mother took us back to Georgia, to Grandmother and Pop. And, as I make this description of her, I am realizing how much of her ways I have adopted and believe are good ways to be in this world.

I had a lot of fabric pieces left over from the “Earth” quilt–and I wanted to keep them together as I was enjoying how they played with each other. And, to tell the truth, I have enough for one more quilt besides “Songbirds,” especially as I have lots of fabrics that will work well with this bunch already cut up in my stash. I am working on Bonnie Hunter’s current “leader/ender” project with what’s left of these earthy fabrics–a block with light and dark sides–allowed by strategically placed half-square triangles. Here are four of these blocks–and they can be combined in countless ways.

(A leader/ender project lets you work on two quilts at once–the one you are piecing, and when you need to cut your thread, the one that’s your “leader/ender” project. You always have blocks for the second quilt ready to stitch so you do not break your thread but just keep on chain piecing. Sometimes I make the half-square triangles and when I have enough, I make a few blocks as I sew along.)

Well! here’s “Songbirds”:

It’s another “Dancing Nines” from Bonnie Hunter’s web site, quiltville.com, where she has tons of free patterns. I made this one with 2 1/2-inch squares though, as that was the size of the strips I had. Bonnie’s pattern starts with 2-inch squares. The piano keys border though is from 2-inch strips.

Here’s a close-up so you can see why Bonnie says these blocks “dance.” They are off-set. The pantograph is “Check and Chase” by Lorien Quilting. I ordered it from Urban Elementz which has a huge selection of pantographs.

I love the borders on this quilt. the binding is a very, very dark muddy red.

And, here’s where the “songbirds” came from. I fell in love with this very contemporary fabric–and think it works with the more traditional front of the quilt. These little guys make me want to cup them in my hand.

Here’s a block close-up:

I loved making this quilt–which reminds me so much of my grandmother.

Turkey Tracks: The Divas: Two Ancondas

Turkey Tracks: January 4, 2014

The Divas: Two Ancondas

I have two beautiful chickens of the Anconda breed.

Here’s an image:

It’s an Italian breed, and like my Italian friend Gina Caceci, they talk with their whole bodies and souls!

They also lay beautiful white eggs.

Unlike my friend Gina, the Ancondas are having a hard time building up any trust in me as a caregiver, food bringer, coop cleaner. Everything I read says they are very cautious and prone to extravagant emotion, but will settle down eventually.

At the slightest wrong move–oops–off they go flying up, while screaming at the top of their lungs.

Their names are Annabelle and Queeny. And I can only tell them apart when I see them together, though Queeny is darker and larger than Annabelle.

Last week one of them flew out of the coop as I went to fluff the bedding with my trowel one morning. She landed on the roof, and when I went to shoo her back inside, off she went down the snow path to where the turkeys hang out. It was clear she was not going to come back inside until she got ready to. As I didn’t want to leave the whole roof open in the bitter cold, I dug out and pried open the lower coop door–thinking she would go home when she got cold or hungry.

The lower door is the flap at the bottom of the coop in this picture.

And here’s why I would not want to leave the roof open for very long–the heat loss is too extreme. I am cleaning out the coop here–thus the red buckets at the side of the coop and the open egg box door.

By the time I got to the kitchen and looked out the window, the other Anconda had joined the first. One sat in the limb of the pine tree, watching the turkeys below her. The other sat on a snow bank, sunning herself. I was too outdone to go out and take more pictures. Besides, I did not want to spook one of them into a snow drift that I could not get to easily. Or drag on my boots, mittens, hat, coat, etc., again.

Here’s what my friend Toni Venz wrote me from California after I told her about these babes:

Not only are Annabelle and Queeny emotional, I do believe they are divas, too. There is proof with one above on the lower branch and the other catching some rays. Next you will be supplying sunglasses and SPF 30. With more snow there or coming, no wonder they are emotional. I would be. Actually I am thinking of all you are doing.

So, the DIVAS they became…

When I went out to lock up the now exposed coop at dusk–which is about 4 p.m. these days, I could not find one of the Ancondas. One had returned; one, it seemed, had not. I did not see any evidence of violence in the snow. And it was so bitterly cold–well below zero–that by the next morning, the remaining Anconda had bloody feet, likely from frostbite. I installed a red lightbulb in the coop, which I’m leaving on day and night. I am never sure where the line is between the weather being too cold–beyond the birds’ ability to cope–and letting them sleep in the dark as they hate being lit at night. (I have seven chickens to up the body mass and warmth in the coop in the winter.) And often, it is the moisture the chickens generate that causes the frostbite, rather than the cold itself.

There was no way I could check outside of the shoveled paths as the snow is thigh deep and we live on a hillside. I gave it up for the night, and spent the night thinking of a documentary I watched years ago where a Maine woman found her missing chicken (she had a nice flat yard) in the cold, frozen, brought her inside for some reason, and was startled to have the “frozen” bird wake up and to recover–which took a few days. I wondered if my chicken would miraculously appear in the morning.

When I checked the chickens two days later in the morning, Queeny and Annabelle were both in the coop. ??????? How did that happen? Then I realized that I had opened the door to the cage and had gone back in the house for fresh water as the faucet was frozen, and I didn’t want to stress it too much. My missing chicken had been hanging out in the cage!

Last night, both Ancondas were choosing the cage over the coop. These DIVAS are sleeping in the heavy mat of bedding at the very back of the cage–which means they are mostly safe, but not entirely. Here’s what I wrote Toni:

The divas are now refusing to go into the coop at night. I think they don’t like the red light bulb. They are sleeping in the piled up bedding at the end of the cage–and the cage is covered with four or five tarps for protection from the elements and heat retention and banked with snow, top and sides. I locked the other chickens into the coop, after four trips out in the dark to see if the divas had relented, as I didn’t want to risk the safety of all. Chicken coops are often breached by predators and everything inside killed. A determined animal could get into the cage… But not likely into the coop itself… One hopes…

Today there was more drama as I took advantage of the break in the weather to clean out the coop. It gets dirty much faster when the chickens are so confined.

It didn’t take long for one of the Ancondas to fly out of the coop. And she landed in a snow bank, feet down. Stuck! And at least a stride or two into thigh-high snow for me to get to her.

Here she is before she decided to depart the coop–half in and half out of an egg box. She was planning escape all along as she was the only chicken present as I shoveled out old bedding . And I had thought she had just been visiting with me, in the way chickens do. Or, maybe, wanting to lay an egg. (They are starting to lay again, and I’ve had to throw out about six frozen eggs over the past few days.)

And here you can see the fresh water bowl with a heat warmer in it and the red light bulb burning. John put the cage over the bulb as the chickens attempt to get close to it and break it off–which is a real fire hazard. Remember that I am no where near a fire hydrant so not presenting fire hazards is always an issue.

I am adding these pics so you can see what the inside of the coop looks like. Here’s the doorway into the cage. You can also see the two roosts–one across the coop and a lower one in the corner. I pile a lot of fresh bedding into the egg boxes and behind the lower roost/perch as some of the chickens like to sleep in those spots. You can also see how wet the inside of the coop gets–which is from the chickens’ moisture. That’s why I leave that little vent window open.

I was able to lift the DIVA up with the flat of the shovel from the lower side, and she flew to this shrub–where she sat and observed as I finished cleaning out the old bedding:

Meanwhile, the starving turkeys were gathering in hopes that I would be putting out some food. The bedding is full of food “billed out” while feeding and…other nutrients. As soon as I dropped the first load, they closed in.

Once the coop is cleaned out, I put in clean bedding. Here’s what a “bale” of bedding–pine shavings in this case–looks like.

These pine shavings are a local product from a lumber mill not too far west of Camden. And these shavings are really good absorbers of anything wet.

I pried open the lower door once more and, after moving the Anconda up and down the snow paths a few times quietly, in she went.

And now that I am finishing this post, it’s dusk and time for me to lock up the chickens for the night and to make a cup of tea and quilt a little.

My friend Gail Nicholson says we have picked up seven minutes of daylight since the solstice.

Books, Documentaries, Reviews: Alice Munro’s RUNAWAY

Books, Documentaries, Reviews: January 4, 2013

Alice Munro’s Runaway

Alice Munro is from Canada.

She is the 2013 Nobel Laureate for fiction.

Munro writes short stories.

Here’s a link describing her work, etc.: Where to start with Alice Munro, the newest Nobel laureate for fiction · The A.V. Club.

The third book I downloaded from the library and am listening to while I quilt is Munro’s Runaway.

I’m a bit into the story of the title and am really impressed with how Munro writes, what she says, and the characters she draws.

She has been compared to Chekov.

Personally, I think so many good writers come from Canada because they have a real winter.

That winter gives them time to reflect and to think.

Oh my goodness! What they dream up!

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