The Brilliant May

This is the brilliant time of year here, when sunshine floods the countryside, the forest floor erupts with cowslip and bluebells, and the apple trees bud with their first flowers. The petals fall from the sloe trees, forming the hard green fruits that we will pick six months from now, and the hawthorn leaves are in their last days of tenderness before growing tough. Most importantly, we feel just a tiny bit warm, the chill in the air disappearing for the first time in several months.

Predictably, this being Ireland, my co-workers immediately begin lunging for the air conditioning, and the buses begin blasting frosty air over the passengers, to prevent us from enjoying the warm days. It also means they will stagger in from outside, sweat dripping from their flushed faces, panting from having to endure the luke-warmth.

We are also seeing the first of Ireland’s spring crop of nettles and dandelions – nettles for soup and beer, dandelions for fritters and wine.  We also found the first edible mushrooms of the year, which also became my lunch the next day.

Nettles are in their prime for picking now, and I have spent moments here and there down by the river gathering them into giant bags for freezing – and later for making into vegetables, tea, soup, wine, beer and other things. Fat hen, jack-by-the-hedge and Good King Henry should be appearing soon. 

Hawthorn leaves remain somewhat edible, although they are getting tougher and less tasty every day as they get ready to bloom. Dandelions are spreading across the fields, ready to be made into fritters, wine, salad, coffee and many other things.

Lime trees, also called lindens, are just beginning to leaf, and as their leaves come in they can be eaten like lettuce. The cowslips we need to pick for wine this year, along with the related primroses. In short, this is prime foraging season.

During every available moment, we’ve been transforming our garden; The Girl and I have been building a hedgerow along our back property to keep the cows out, and are replanting the apples from our grafting adventure a couple of years ago. We’re also replanting the gooseberry bushes and loganberry vines there, creating our own barbed wire.

The swallows have returned to our shed, which means I have to watch myself when I go in lest I be smacked in the face with an outgoing bird. Most months we have a heron who lives along the canal by us, and he’s been especially busy lately; we saw him with a fish just this afternoon. For a short time, we see two of them, as the usually solitary animals come together to have a family.

May’s sun and warmth offers a good opportunity for green manure crops like comfrey – its deep roots bring nutrients from deep in the soil, and its soft tissues decompose quickly in the compost. We like to take the comfrey that grow wild down the road and cut them, and bring them in wheelbarrows to our compost bin; in six months or so they will give us rich compost that we can add to our soil for free.

Our chickens are producing more eggs, but we’ll need to get more soon – we’ve had them a few years, and their shells are getting thin. We still have our rooster, which we never intended to have and whose noise we can never completely tune out. We’d like to let them out a bit to keep them fit and the grass well mown, but spring also brings mother foxes looking out for their cubs. Then again, perhaps one of these problems will solve the other.

The other problem with letting the chickens out is that they will start laying eggs for us – everywhere. Even when they were confined to the run, the chickens tried to lay in creative places – under the coop, for example – but when they’re free range I will find eggs in the vegetables, in the grass, with the lawnmower, and in the manure composter.   

These are the months that speed by too quickly, when we race against the clock to build, repair, weed, mow, gather … and enjoy, reminded that we don’t have an infinite supply of summers.  

***

Each spring here sees a remarkable sprouting of indigo across the woods: bluebells, which bloom profusely until the overhanging leaves grow back in full, and the forest floor grows dark again. Other places in the world see such an annual blossoming, but few have such uniformity.

As glaciers a mile deep retreated from Ireland and plants and animals migrated up the the exposed land -- tundra, then conifers, then the cold rainforest that remained until humans -- the sea flooded in, cutting off England from the continent and Ireland from England. So England wound up with fewer plants and animals than the continent, and Ireland even less. Surprising as it sounds, rabbits and fallow deer are not native to either island -- they were brought by Normans less than a millennia ago. Red deer and roe deer made it to England, but the latter never reached Ireland. Neither, of course, did snakes.

Plants did the same: only some of the Continent's variety worked its way across the warming land before an ocean rushed in. The bluebells were one of the ones that made it.

No substitute for newspapers

One of the few web sites I read religiously is the Archdruid Report, by John Michael Greer, celebrating its 10th anniversary this week. Some months ago he wrote a piece about newspapers, and I wrote back this comment:

This piece hits home for me, as I boarded that sinking ship of newspaper journalism in the 1990s, even as newspapers were shrinking their articles and redesigning their pages to look more like web sites.

Before my time, newspapers carried a vast range of information. Many had labour sections written for the majority of people who work for a paycheque, and not just a business section for investors. Some ran synopses of the Sunday sermons of their area’s most prominent religious leaders – important not just for piety, but for politics, as the local preachers and bishops had, and still have, enormous influence. Many came out twice a day, so people could read the news more often than most of us check web sites now.

Our modern culture tells us that we have more information today than anyone in history, because of the internet – but that assumes that data that could theoretically appear on a screen has the same value as words read from paper. In truth, few web sites will cover the library board meeting or the public works department, and if they do they are likely to be a blog by a single unpaid individual. Yet these ordinary entities shape our children's minds and our present health, and as such are infinitely more important than any celebrity gossip -- possibly more important then presidential campaigns.

Even if a blogger were to cover the library board or water board, no editors would exist to review the material for quality or readability, and the writer would be under no social, financial or legal pressure to be accurate or professional, or to publish consistently, or to pass on their duties to another once they resign. Transcripts of church sermons are even harder to find online, so some of the most important shapers of public opinion go unknown by anyone outside their circles.

I’ve worked on a number of issues with community activists in the USA, some left-wing and some right-wing, but no one wanted to associate with a church unless they belonged to one, and then only with their own. When I suggested to one auditorium of activists (left-wing, in this case) that they go to various churches and learn about them, I was actually shouted down; animal sacrifice, I think, would have earned less outrage.

Of course, as people readily point out to me, you can surf the internet and do your own research, but you must work diligently to winnow the accurate material from the dubious claims – anyone can create a web site that says anything. Moreover, most people are not going to do all that trouble themselves – we have lives, after all – and you shouldn’t have to. We used to have people who did that for us, and they were called reporters.

When I talk about newspapers this way, people often respond that we have made progress, for we no longer destroy forests. Of course some people used to harvest trees for newspaper and not replant them, but it doesn’t have to be that way – you could plant willow and get ten tonnes of wood to the hectare per year in this climate, and never fell another ancient forest of giant trees. 

Contrast that with the mountains of coal we have to burn to feed server farms, the rare-earth-metal mining, the semiconductor factories and the global shipping that we need to employ just to create a mammoth server farm and global telecommunications network, all to do what we did with a piece of paper.

Once a newspaper was read, moreover, it had only begun its useful life – then it would be used to wrap gifts or groceries, then to line insulation or chicken coops, then as tinder for the fire, and the resulting ashes could then make soap or fertiliser. Once an electronic device has a single minor problem, however, it tends to go into a dump, with all its heavy metals and plastics, perhaps to contaminate the soil for thousands of years to come.

Computers are useful for some things, of course – I’m writing this on one, and you’re all reading this on another one. What I don't like is that we have come to depend on them entirely for everything else in our lives -- reading, organising, music, storytelling, faith, and general human interaction. Moreover, when everyone is doing this, we no longer feel the need to maintain paper records or photos, and even if we wanted to look at card catalogs or the telephone book, no such things exist anymore. We burn our bridges, and raise generations who forgot that bridges ever existed to anywhere else.

Stretching the spring

We had a guest staying with us who was a massive help on the property, and her industrious hard work, plus, the fine weather of spring, has allowed us to re-do much of our garden. We now have a potato bed, have torn down much of our wooden garden, and will be putting it back in brick. We took the berry bushes and transplanted them to the back edge of our land, where we planted them in a newly built raised bed. We'll be creating a thorny hedge along the cow fence, creating our own barbed-wire hedgerow to keep out our neighbours' cows in case they get adventurous.

Our guest also planted some of the willow shoots we pollarded some weeks ago, and they will fill a gap in our hedgerow. I will put cardboard between the shoots to keep the weeds down, and lay down the now-rotted boards that made up our garden beds; as they compost down, they will feed the young trees, and we will be able to lay them down, year after year, into a hedgerow, a solid living wall of wood.

We used to have shower doors made of plexi-glass, or transparent plastic, until one of them came off the hinges. We could spend a lot of money to put it back, or we can just use a shower curtain and use the two-metre-long, one-metre wide transparent slab to make a cold-frame.

Cold-frames are ideal for people who lack the space or extra money for a greenhouse or poly-tunnel, but they allow you to do the same thing: to let you grow plants in a space that will let in sunlight but trap heat. Even when the temperature outside dips below freezing they keep out frost, and allow the gardener to more easily control water, pests and wind-blown seeds.

A cold-frame is just a box with glass or transparent plastic on top, ideally with a top slanted toward the south, and a bit taller than your waist so you don’t have to stoop to get into it. Fill the box with earth and plant seeds inside, and over the slanted top secure a sheet of glass or whatever you have. You could install the window frame with hinges at the top for maximum convenience, but just taking off the glass gently will do.

To keep seedlings going during the winter, you can insulate the back and sides with anything from straw bales to foam. You can also do what the Victorians did and pile in manure under the bed, which generates a lot of heat when it decomposes. Put soil on top for the seedlings, and you give the baby plants warmth from above and below.

Around this time of year, most of us are only just beginning to put in our plants outside – and we still have the occasional frost. Plants are at their most valuable when they are seedlings, and can perish quickly with a drop in temperature, a deluge of rain or a nibble from a passing critter. Seedlings are also expensive to buy; you can grow annual plants from seeds, but that means that you lose up to a month of growing time.

Cold-frames solve this problem, allowing you to start your seeds early under conditions that you control, while it is still cold and miserable outside. The additional month of growing time means that you can get a richer harvest than you ever thought you could in this country.

After the seedlings are out, moreover, cold-frames remain useful for growing warmer-weather plants – Victorians grew tropical crops in Britain this way. During the winter months, it allows your crops to continue growing without threat of frost.

If you want to start small, though, you can create cloches, transparent coverings for one or a few plants each. Victorians, again, mass-produced glass bells to cover plants to create a microclimate inside. You can do the same thing, however, with soda bottles.

To make a cloche, cut the bottom off an old two-litre bottle and place it around a seedling in the garden. Once the bottom is off, the plastic becomes very flimsy, so you might want to bury the edges several centimetres deep to keep it stable. Alternately, you can place a ring or solid structure inside if you have one, something that will keep the bottle in place but allow the seedling to grow. Or you can place it around a flowerpot whose diameter is smaller than that of the bottle.

Cloches, like greenhouses, allow you to regulate the amount of water a plant receives – here that means not getting waterlogged in the rainy winter. You might want to keep the caps of your soda bottles in a drawer, so you can put them back on at night if it gets too cold.

A step up from a cloche is a row cover, something to put over an entire bed. We clamped flexible plastic piping over our raised beds to make hoops, draped clear plastic over them and secured the plastic to the wood below the hoops with staples. Alternately, instead of plastic, you could put horticultural fleece over another raised bed– we did both this year, and it worked so well that our corn salad survived the darkest part of winter.

Photo: Grapes growing in Ireland, thanks to greenhouses and cold-frames. 

Ireland's Quiet Revolution

Originally published in the American Conservative. 

Once every four years my social media feed goes bananas; hundreds of colleagues in my native USA promise that the upcoming election will the most important moment in history, the last chance to fulfill our promise as leaders of the planet or save ourselves from sliding into totalitarian darkness. This time around I know people who have supported Trump, Rubio, Paul, Cruz, Carson, Clinton, Sanders, and Stein, with every fan base seeing themselves as hobbits standing up to Sauron. Too few of my friends on the left or right pay much attention to the other 195 countries of the world, or the fact that some of their elections and voter frustrations parallel the USA in instructive ways.

Here in Ireland, for example, we saw the same 2008 crash and Potemkin recovery, similar anti-government protests and civil disobedience. And in last month’s election, just as in the American primaries, many voters abandoned the mainstream choices and flocked to political independents promising radical change—and no one knows quite what will happen next.

The two countries’ upsets filtered through different voting systems: In the U.S., independents Trump and Sanders had to declare themselves a nominal Republican and Democrat, as the system effectively shuts out third parties. Ireland, though, is parliamentary; voters select their representatives in the Dail (the parliament, pronounced something like “Doyle”). The majority party—or coalition of parties—then create the ruling administration.

The U.S. is unlikely to chuck the Constitution for a parliamentary system any time soon, but Ireland has a few other innovations that my countrymen should consider. We vote for up to several people to represent one district, usually from more than one party. Voting districts are not gerrymandered into bizarre shapes, so seats are not pre-determined. We rank our choices first to last, and if candidates don’t reach a certain quota on the first round, voters’ subsequent choices are factored in—like being able to choose Rand Paul over Sanders, Sanders over Trump, and Trump over Clinton. Such rules allow voters here to fire their public servants more easily than in my native country, where one group gains extraordinary federal power by some slim margin, and voters have only one choice more than in authoritarian states like North Korea.

The two main parties, Fianna Fail (rhymes with fall, not fail) and Fine Gael (actually does rhyme with fail) parallel American Democrats and Republicans in some ways; in theory, they were ideological opposites descended from the bitter rivalry of the Irish Civil War. In practice both were centrist, pro-business parties sustained mostly by old family loyalties, reliably getting a large chunk of the votes and taking turns holding power.

On our most recent election night in February, though, the mainstream parties were shocked to receive their worst results ever, 25 and 30 percent each, while almost half the votes went to third parties and independents—the nationalist Sinn Fein, an alphabet soup of small activist parties, and an army of locally-supported wild cards. Now the government hangs in limbo, as representatives of many parties must duct-tape a coalition together.

The U.S. and Ireland also entered the 21st century with very different pasts that shape voter expectations. Americans today grew up in a superpower, surrounded by the massive infrastructure of suburban wealth; Ireland remained an agrarian and traditional society until the last few decades, and only then, during an economic boom in the 1990s, was modernized at bewildering speed.

Millions of Irish built homes with the new wealth, commuter towns increased several hundred percent in size, and the construction was financed by an escalating debt bubble. When the banks collapsed in 2008, the Fianna Fail government made the fatal decision to guarantee all bank debt with public funds. Those promises came back to haunt them in 2010, when the country went effectively bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the European Union and International Monetary Fund. Ireland has chafed under its debt burden ever since, and many of my neighbors feel that they left the boom worse than they entered.

After this economic crisis, in 2011, the once-dominant Fianna Fail lost 60 percent of their support—the greatest fall of any party in Irish history. A Fine Gael-led coalition took power, but support for third parties and independents began to rise. The new government’s honeymoon quickly wore off; the terms of the bailout limited their power to make changes, and a series of new taxes and fees angered an already struggling populace. (Water charges introduced in late 2014, for example, spurred massive public protests that are still going 18 months later, and almost half of all households have simply refused to pay them.)

When the time came for a new election this year, Fine Gael’s slogan, “Let’s Keep the Recovery Going,” garnered only horse laughter from people who weren’t feeling the recovery. In the end, Ireland’s recent history of bubble, bust, and bailout effectively destroyed generations-old political loyalties, leading one wag to comment that Angela Merkel had finally ended Ireland’s civil war.

In the U.S., populist groundswells for Trump and Sanders might be strong enough to tear the two parties apart without actually leading their candidates to victory. In the same way, Ireland’s surge of independents crippled the two main parties, but are not strong enough to take power themselves; even if they could all work together, they would be just shy of a majority.

That leaves every politico and pundit in the country frantically shuffling numbers around to see what kind of government is possible, and whatever agreement party leaders reach in the coming weeks will result in the strangest in the Republic’s history. The possibilities include:

1. The two mainstream parties go into coalition with each other. Picture Republicans Rubio and Kasich forming a government with Hillary Clinton to stop Trump and Sanders, and you see how much pride would have to be swallowed.
   
2. A minority Fine Gael government cobbled together with many, many independents, who are meeting with Fine Gael leaders one by one and presenting lists of individual demands in exchange for co-operation.
   
3. Everyone gives up and a new election is called, and all the candidates re-open their campaign offices.

In theory, if the next election results tip even further away from the main parties, the next government could be run by the largest third party—in this case the socialist Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army during the terrorism of the 1970s and ’80s. That’s not as frightening as it sounds: they abandoned violence two decades ago, and have been increasingly accepted as a legitimate party. But it would be unprecedented, with unknown effects on Ireland’s relations with Britain and Europe. 

For now the country feels strangely like the U.S. did in November of 2000—but with a few important differences. People here don’t demand global dominance or an endless boom, just jobs and basic infrastructure. Since the system allows for many parties to participate, voters know they can blow off frustrations without destroying the established order. 

Most importantly, voters here lack the sense of imminent apocalypse that haunts Americans. Some Irish are celebrating after the election, some are chastened, some are making deals—but no one is panicking. Whatever happens, they’ll get through this.

Published by history magazine

The very nice people at Medieval Histories have reprinted my piece on bog butter -- check it out here, and the rest of their magazine.

Photo: The bog after a rain.

Ireland's 100th anniversary

A century ago this Easter, 1,200 Irish soldiers tried to take the city of Dublin by force; 500 would be killed, and 3,500 Dubliners taken prisoner by the British. The uprising that marked the beginning of the War for Independence.

Today Ireland saw its largest-ever parade to honour the 1916 Uprising.

Also, Happy Easter!

Published in American Conservative

They have just published my piece on the Irish election, so check it out.