Learning years ago

From an article I'm working on: 

Tens of thousands of children, often barefoot and dressed in clothes sewn from flour bags and worn by several other children before them, walked to schoolhouses each morning across Ireland. Their tiny hands often carried bricks of hand-hewn turf, or sticks that they picked up along the way, to keep their single rooms warm – or less bitterly cold – as they studied. School budgets effectively did not exist; children often carried a few coins here and there for the teacher when the parents could afford it. Nor did children go to school all year; they left whenever the parents needed an extra pair of hands on the farm, or to baby-sit their brothers and sisters, or to bring in the turf for winter, or to make some extra money at a job. Some children described going to school until they were 16, or 14, or 12, or 11, and then never again.

Now: Tell me what kind of education they got. 

Every modern person, without exception, assures me the results would be pathetic -- the “three Rs,” so named because we assume that backwoods hillbillies would have spelled the subjects “reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic.” We assume that the poorer you are, the worse your education, and these days that’s true – in the USA today, two-thirds of all adults cannot read at a proficient level, and a third cannot handle a basic level. They are adults and can’t read.

Also, some of these children lived a century ago, and since we assume knowledge only becomes vaster and more refined over time, our learning must soar far beyond anything they could have imagined, and our children’s learning farther still. This is why we spent 25,000 hours of our best years in giant cement warehouses – our parents wanted us to keep up with the competition in a race forward. It’s is why so many of us spent years in college, and decades paying off college, to join the future and not be left behind.

Not a bit of that belief, though, stands up to the simple test of listening to accounts of schools a century or two ago, or reading actual school papers on file in Irish historical societies, or reading newspapers from the time, or looking at the books everyday people read. Children then often read classics and sophisticated literature that few college students – or professors – attempt anymore. So did mechanics and farm-hands, house-wives and fishermen.

They did not read them to boast that they had done so, as a few college elites might today, but out of a passion for learning. They talked about these works with friends. They wrote about them in their diaries. All this, you’ll recall, in addition to their practical skills, their knowledge of local lore, of the natural world and the people around them – all of which are also rare today. 

... more on this later. 

St. Necklace Day

Myself and my daughter, some years ago.

  

One morning years ago, as I tried to sleep in, a metre-high blond person jumped up and down on me shouting, "Look what St. Necklace brought us!" I liked the "us" - she was as happy for me as for herself.

The sixth of December is St. Nicholas Day, when many families would leave presents in children’s shoes. That year my daughter got chocolate coins and a few other goodies. In my family -- and this part seems to be unique to us – St. Nicholas leaves tins of sardines and octopus. The Girl was calling him "St. Necklace" -- she got a necklace on this day a year or two ago, and the name stuck. In the Irish countryside our every Christmas was small and somewhat isolated, but these moments make them meaningful.

Meaning is something we often lack in modern Christmas celebrations, where we feel pressured to spend too much, eat too much, drink too much, listen to the same terrible rock songs, watch certain television specials, put up enough lights to make our house visible from space and pretend to be cheerful when we are not. There’s nothing sacred about these pop-culture traditions, though; Santa Claus and many of the carols we sing are of surprisingly recent invention, often less than a hundred years old, and often created as advertising campaigns.

I’m not trying to be a Grinch about this – by all means, enjoy the holiday. I simply don’t feel obliged to hear all the songs, over and over, for a few months. What’s more, the new ones are squeezing out many local and truly traditional family rituals that date back longer than we can measure.

Take Wren Day, when local families gathered in the nearby woods for a ritual called the Hunting of the Wren. Men dressed in straw – “straw boys” – stole a statue of a wren, and its defenders – “wren boys” – gave chase with all the local children. After all the children had been nicely exhausted – while their parents sat back sipping tea around the fire – the Wren Boys and children came back holding the Wren in triumph. The Wren Boys and Straw Boys shook hands, made peace, and the Wren served as King of Birds for another year.

I brought my daughter to this ceremony, but it is one of the last times it would be celebrated. A ritual that might date back to Druid times, two thousand years ago or more, will soon be another casualty of the Great Forgetting of our era; my daughter might be one of the last people who will remember it.

Take wassailing as another example: neighbours walked from house to house carolling and being invited inside, giving everyone a chance to meet their neighbours. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen anyone do this in a long time, nor do many people these days feel comfortable introducing themselves to their neighbours.

Many families do use Christmas to see loved ones, share meals, sing songs together, and tell old stories, and that’s wonderful. But here’s the thing: people used to do these things every day. Here in Ireland, for example, wassailing wasn’t just once a year, but all through the winter; neighbours gathered at each others’ homes, brought instruments, played music, sang songs, and told stories that broke up the long darkness. It allowed each family to share what they had, making deposits in a community favour bank. It strengthened the feeling of community, so that burdens were lessened because they were shared, and joys were heightened because they were shared. Every day used to be more like the best parts of Christmas today.

This year, when many of us are strapped for cash or will have an unusually quiet and empty Christmas, you have permission to ignore the usual spending, eating and drinking extravaganzas. Perhaps you can turn off the television, put away the phones, go for walks, read A Christmas Carol to your children, make gifts with them, and perhaps go carolling at the doors of your elderly neighbours. You’re not here for the holiday; it’s here for you, and you decide how to enjoy it.

When I was raising my daughter in the countryside, every Christmas became sacred. Those moments, with her climbing into bed with me and sharing her contagious awe, were my comfort and joy, and when I prayed, they were the engine of my gratitude. 

 

 

Building a forest garden

 

Here in Ireland, most gardeners will plant conventional annuals like potatoes, onions and carrots, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Most, however, neglect the myriad varieties of each of these crops, in myriad colours, and you could plant blue potatoes or purple carrots if you like. More neglect the more adventurous crops that might do well in this climate but remain little-known; yacon, daikon, oca, and others. Creative or lazy gardeners with a bit of extra land might decide to let it fallow, getting mileage from the nettles and dandelions for a while.  If you want to build a garden that truly looks to the future, though, you could plant a forest.

It might seem like that growing a forest contradicts the idea of growing a garden, that one means low, edible and annual plants in rows, while the other means a landscape of tall trees and few edible plants. When you plant a forest garden, though, you are combining the best of both worlds – perennial crops, vines, shrubs and trees that produce food every year but do not need to be re-sown every spring.

A forest garden also has a vertical dimension that many kitchen gardens do not; low trees and shrubs that bear fruit, berries and nuts; vines that bear similar fruit and berries, and ground-cover plants that can be harvested anew each year. With many varieties of plants close together, moreover, you can harvest throughout the year, gathering leaves or buds in spring, summer crops, fruit and nuts in autumn.

The various plants help each other, as different plants require different nutrients from the soil and so do not starve each other. They also help keep different pests away, as the smell of one plant not only repels insects from it, but from the plants around it. In this way, plants in the wild help each other, and by planting them alongside each other we let Nature do some of our heavy lifting.

To make a forest garden, you should first look at your landscape and see what could grow there –in the case of our land, a relatively dry patch of earth surrounded by bog. Then you begin planning a design of trees that will yield what permaculturists call the seven Fs: food, fuel, fibre, fodder, fertiliser, “farmaceuticals” and fun.

Take a compass and mark which direction is the south, and considering putting have the highest plants on the north, to cut down on the colder winds, and the lowest in the south to catch the maximum sun. You also want to pay attention to the rising and sloping of the property, to make sure you know what plants are getting the most sunshine and water runoff.

Plan a forest garden in vertical layers, starting with the pieces that reach the highest and around which the rest of the garden will turn: the trees. Make sure you allow a circle of sufficient breadth for each tree to grow; until it grows out, and find out ahead of time how large they tend to grow. If you plan a certain circle of space for them, and they grow slightly beyond it, you can prune them, but you should let them have a certain minimum of space.

You could plant fruit and berry trees like apples, plums and cherries, as well as lesser-known species like guomi; nut trees like walnut, hazel and oak also would prove valuable over time. Such trees aren’t going to yield vast quantities of food right away, of course, but in the meantime you can plant food-producing vines to climb up the trees – blackberries and kiwifruit, for example – as well as shrubs under them, like blueberries and lingonberries.

Further down still – for a forest garden has food at every level – you can plant edible weeds like Good King Henry and Fat Hen, as well as herbs that return every year. You can even plant some regular crops like carrots and onions around your trees and shrubs, and gradually segue from a regular garden into a forest garden over a course of years.

It is true that a forest garden requires some patience, and if you buy small trees from the nursery rather than growing apple trees from seed, it could be several times more expensive than a conventional garden. With the right species, however, you only have to plant them once; you are investing in infrastructure like a house, only a forest garden could last longer.

 

Getting rid of food waste

 

Several years ago a study found that up to a third of all food sold was thrown away uneaten – inexcusable in a country where farmers struggle and children go hungry. That country was the United Kingdom, which has a generally good record of conserving its resources, so pundits wondered what a global study would find.  Such a study was released later – by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, somewhat surprisingly – and looked at impoverished Third-World nations as well as the prosperous West. Unfortunately, their findings revised the figure … upwards. 

The IME report found that “30-50% (or 1.2-2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach” across rich and poor countries alike. The reasons varied, however; poorer countries had less money and technology to harvest and store food properly, while countries like ours waste food mostly through “retail and consumer behaviour.”

The retail part accounts for a third of all crops brought to stores, they said, when “supermarkets, in meeting consumer expectations, will often reject entire crops of perfectly edible fruit and vegetables at the farm because they do not meet exacting marketing standards for their physical characteristics, such as size and appearance.” For ten thousand generations humans ate or preserved what was ripe; now we demand food appear before us in all seasons, looking like it came off an assembly line. 

Then, once the food is on the store shelves, “commonly used sales promotions frequently encourage customers to purchase excessive quantities which, in the case of perishable foodstuffs, inevitably generate wastage in the home. Overall between 30 percent and 50 percent of what has been bought in developed countries is thrown away by the purchaser.” That’s up to 50 percent in our homes on top of the 30 per cent at the store – up to 80 percent overall.  

Such depressing findings studies do have a glass-half-full side, however: we could cure world hunger right now with what we already have. Of course, there’s no one giant pool of food – if we waste less, it won’t mean a village of Africans suddenly receives more. It might mean, though, that lands being used to grow crops for us – bananas, coffee, whatever – could instead be used to feed local people, or some other effect.

Conserving our food waste would also save money in bin charges, and would help reduce some of the greenhouse gases that are making the global weather go haywire. Properly composted kitchen waste gets munched by worms and oxygen-loving bacteria, but when thrown in the regular bin and buried deep in a dump, a different type of bacteria have to work on them – methane-producers. Methane is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide from our cars and factories, so while our food waste is only a small part of greenhouse gas emissions, it’s a powerful part, and one easily eliminated.

The first way to cut food waste, obviously, is to use as much as possible, whether store-bought or from your garden. If you have extra fruit or berries, or find they are a bit too ripe, make them into jam to preserve vitamins over the winter. Freeze them to use later as pie filling. Mash and dry them into fruit leathers for snacks over the next few weeks. Pile the fruit and berries into a jar to the rim, pour spirits like vodka or poitin over them, and make liqueur.

If you have too many leftover peas, for example, try juicing them, mixing them with lemon juice and vodka, and making peatinis. Make them into a dipping sauce. Dry them by the closetful for pea soup over the winter. If you have too many courgettes (zucchini to Americans), incorporate it into bread, cakes, casserole, soups, stir-fry, sandwiches, frittatas, moussaka, tarts and latkes.

If you are overloaded with herbs, cut them at the base, hang them upside-down in the closet or greenhouse to dry, and use them over the rest of the year for flavourings or tea. Alternately, mash basil and other herbs with pine nuts and olive oil to make pesto.

Most of all, remember my favourite weapon in the fight against home food waste: quiche. This fancy-sounding French dish – typically cooked vegetables covered in cheese and eggs and cooked like a pie – works well to disguise any number of old dishes.

Raw vegetable waste unsuited for human consumption – carrot tops, coffee grounds, peelings and woody stalks – need a compost bin. If you don’t already have one, start working on it now or ask permission to use an inconspicuous corner of someone else’s yard. Compost turns your waste back into soil that you can put back in the garden after a year or two, soil rich in the kind of nutrients that might otherwise require chemical fertilisers.

The most basic kind of compost is for raw vegetable waste – things like animal waste or mulch need a separate bin, and need to “cook” for longer. Don’t put meat, cooked food, fat or eggshells in, as they could attract vermin. Don’t put too much that would be poisonous, like potato leaves – farmers around us pile up the potato leaves to dry and then burn the dried pile in spring.

For things that don’t go in regular vegetable compost, there are few kitchen disposal units better than chickens. They are basically pigs with beaks: they eat both meat and vegetables, cooked and uncooked, and they don’t care if the rolls are a day old or the carrot slices have gone woody. Also, they will readily turn all your waste back into protein again.

Consider hot composting, which I have written about before – with the right ratio of carbon-rich to nitrogen-rich materials, and you flip it with a pitchfork to oxygenate it, you can “farm” bacteria that generate heat rather than smell. I have taken a hot shower in the middle of a field on a very cold Irish morning, the water pipe heated by nothing more than compost. For more information on how to do this, I cannot recommend highly enough the research of Bruce Terrell in Ireland, seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_731DFSY0  

With measures like these, most of us could reduce our waste to almost zero in a short time, and while we’re not directly responsible for supermarkets and other companies, we can influence their behaviour. If you have a lot of chickens or a big compost bin and they have fresh food they throw away each night, you can talk to them about alleviating their waste disposal costs.  Such experiments have hazards, of course – you want to make sure you don’t generate disease or a neighbourhood odour – but when done properly they could solve multiple problems with a single solution.

And, of course, you can grow your own.

 

WRAP study:
https://www.ns.is/ns/upload/files/pdf-skrar/matarskyrsla1.pdf

 

Institution of Mechanical Engineers study:
https://www.imeche.org/policy-and-press/reports/detail/global-food-waste-not-want-not

 

Photo: Parsnips from our garden.