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.  

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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.