25 March 12
Trees For Contemplation
This morning we went up to FARM 2.6, Pica to feed a couple of lambs there, and I just to check on my plantings. I’m not sure how much clover I’m getting out of my clover field (I do however have quite a crop of mushrooms coming up), but my oak seedlings are doing well. I planted five valley oak seedlings around the perimeter of the property, and so far four of them are budding out or have well-developed leaves.
Trees. Yesterday I went to San Francisco to see upon the suggestion of Dave Bonta an exhibit at the The Contemporary Jewish Museum entitled “Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art, and Jewish Thought”. The title of the exhibit is taken from an injunction in Deuteronomy 20:19 that prohibits the wanton destruction of trees in wartime. This concept has been broadened since rabbinical times to form one of the bases for Jewish environmentalism. I had never been to this museum — now situated near the Yerba Buena Center on Mission Street — and was quite impressed. The tree exhibit was in two parts, the first being a broad look at trees in general contemporary art, the second having more of a focus on Jewish ritual and in particular the holiday of Tu B’Shevat.
Entering the show one sees a sand circle on the ground about ten feet in diameter, covered with what seems to be a forest of two-inch tall trees. Looking closer these are seen to be two-dimensional metal pieces of various plant forms, and getting one’s nose to the ground one sees these to be painted in many different colors. Another highlight from the first section of the exhibit was a 15-minute film entitled The Ground, the Root, and the Air: The Passing of the Bodhi Tree by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba.The final sequence of this film is quite striking. It takes place in Laos along the Mekong River as a flotilla of fifty narrow motorboats are being driven downstream. Standing up in the bow of each boat is an art student sketching the landscape in black-and-white on an easel. The fleet approaches a bodhi tree at the site of a monastery along the banks of the river. Many of the students abandon their easels, leap into the river, and swim towards the tree.
My favorite bit from the second part of the exhibit was a short video entitled Grafted Arboreus sabius, or a failed attempt to propagate the Tree of Knowledge. In Jewish tradition the Tree of Knowledge has been linked to everything from wheat to amanita mushrooms, so the filmmaker opted to graft all those possibilities onto a single base. As she puts it: “grafting may be the only way to propagate the Tree of Knowledge, as it does not grow from seed”.
20 March 12
A Painting a Day
I have not been keeping up with Bird by Bird, but there’s a lot of nesting activity at the moment and I mean to get back to it.
My friend Jennifer has just alerted me to a gorgeous Swedish blog, 365 Akvareller. My Swedish is not up to the task of finding out the artist’s name or gender, but I urge you to take a look at these beautiful watercolor sketches. The translated description:
365 + 12 watercolors in a year I painted a watercolor for each day plus a large watercolor of each month, which is 365 plus 12 watercolors. Here you can see all. I did not have time to paint every day, but I started a new one every day and could continue with the next few days while the other watercolors dried. I usually say that you cannot do one every day but you can make seven in a week. Each watercolor is
a book with all 377 images.
There are lots of birds here, and I’m motivated to get back to it!
13 March 12
Nitrate Report Released
For the past 20 months, I’ve been working on a project at UC Davis that has been examining nitrate contamination in groundwater in two agricultural regions in California, the Tulare Basin and the Salinas Valley. We just released our report today and we all went to Sacramento today to give a set of briefings. Here’s the UC Davis news service writeup on the report, and the UCD Center for Watershed Sciences has a blog entry on the report here . My role in the project was to compile land cover maps, both current and historical, for the study region. It’s been a pretty amazing collaboration to develop the report — it’s not often you get 27 researchers at a single university all working on the same thing!
11 March 12
Sketchcrawl!
Pete Scully organized us all for another sketching outing in Davis. Today we dodged rain showers in the UC Davis Arboretum. I drew lots of birds, some of which can be seen here.
It was a fantastic opportunity to draw early flowering trees and shrubs.
I took my new Maruman accordion-fold sketchbook, and pretty much filled on entire side. This made me very happy, being out with a pen. It was a minimalist pack, too: a pen, my tiny watercolor set, a waterbrush, and the small red book.
4 March 12
FARM 2.6
Back in September we went on Yolo Audubon Society’s fall field trip to Point Reyes. Riding with us was a postdoc from Chile who told Pica that she was involved with a fiber collective, mostly UC Davis students, who were interested in spinning, weaving, and dyeing and had ongoing plans to start a fiber garden. Somewhere along the way, this group had met up with a woman named Robyn Waxman, who several years ago during her studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco had a thesis project where she created a community garden on an abandoned plot of land near the college. She had since started community gardens near City College in Sacramento where she teaches and one on K Street in Davis. Last summer, she and her husband bought a house with 2.6 acres of land about 6 miles of Davis with the plan of turning this into a community farm, dubbed FARM 2.6.
The fiber collective saw this as their chance to start their garden and plant flax, indigo, and so on and began to plan for the farm’s first workday, held in the middle of February. I went to one of their planning meetings, toured the plot of ground, and somehow had the idea of putting in a grainfield. (Now that I’ve been doing some baking again, there’s quite a fantasy of baking bread from wheat I grew myself). The workday was well-advertised and quite a success. The fiber garden got started, about 50 fruit trees were planted to form a food forest, and irrigation pipes were put in. Two big patches had been tilled earlier with a tractor, one for the orchard, one for the grainfield. For the grainfield I decided that I’d put in a cover crop of red clover for now, and plant some portion of it in wheat in the fall, so I did that a couple weeks ago at the subsequent work day. At left and above is a picture of the grainfield plot. It’s huge — about a quarter of an acre. Watering it turns out to be a challenge: we need to come up with a better system than a single high-efficiency sprinkler. At right is the fiber garden, starting to take spiral shape.
27 February 12
Back from the San Juans
I spent last week on Orcas Island in Washington at a spinning retreat with Judith Mackenzie McCuin, one of the world’s most famous spinners. And certainly one of its best teachers.
What I learned, among other things:
1. Not to be afraid of qiviut.
2. That the reason I’ve had so much trouble with my cable plying is because I’ve spun the singles normally, which for me includes a lot of twist. Underspinning and overplying result in perfect cableplied yarn. When this involves bison, it’s a bit unicornish.
3. Almost any lichen will make a dye, not needing a mordant. Almost all the colors are like compost, though. For people with pink skin and white hair, this is a disappointment.
4. JMM and I share a bewilderment at the Canadian obsession with the Queen.
5. Angora bunny is held to have curative properties such as an ability to alleviate arthritis pain, and that it’s REALLY warm. I don’t think it’s as warm as qiviut, though.
6. Spinning flax with spittle is better at breaking down pectins than spinning it with straight water. Break them down further by boiling in Tide.
7. To spin semi-woolen. OMG. The possibilities.
8. That bald eagle courtship happens in late February in the San Juan Islands.
9. That spinning cotton straight from the seed isn’t just possible, it’s easy, no super-fast flyer required. I’m going to try and get all kinds of cotton bolls from now on. We’re planting cotton later this spring at Farm 2.6. Cotton grows in many natural colors.
10. Cross-plying pygora onto reclaimed cashmere yields a yarn of unimaginable luxury and makes the pygora go oh so much further. Pygora, a cross between African pygmy goats and angora goats (the cashmere ones), is the world’s newest fiber animal.
11. One load of laundry from a week’s worth of exotic fiber spinning will yield enough dingleberries for a large tweed sweater.
24 February 12
Windy and Dry
There was a wind advisory in effect yesterday and today — big north winds. Not as windy as I was expecting yesterday but it really picked up today, and the weather station recorded a record gust of 38 miles per hour. The air is very dry, too — 21% humidity, so everything is drying out in a hurry. Not that there’s much moisture in the ground to begin with — I think we’re at 40% normal rainfall for the season. At left is the current infrared satellite view with an overlay of surface conditions: note the big high pressure cell off the coast blocking all the moisture, the winds coming down from the intermountain northwest, and the storm system off the British Columbia coast. Pica is up in the Puget Sound area this week getting all that rain; we aren’t.
11 February 12
The Last Crop
We went to see a showing of a film on Thursday night following the travails of an organic family farm near here, Good Humus. We know the produce of this farm intimately and Annie by sight, since she’s often in Davis talking about local food sources. The filmmaker was in attendance along with the protagonists.
Farmland in the Capay Valley is valued way above its farm value because developers have their eye on it for 5-acre ranchettes that will likely end up in foreclosure if the signs in the English Hills to the south are anything to go by. This is prime land, 6” of topsoil in a fertile river valley that is under threat. The Mains are more concerned that their land be continued in farming than that they leave it to their children, none of whom has expressed a firm interest in continuing in farming.
Looking at the film, you can see why. It’s backbreaking work; you’re always behind; there’s always the unexpected huge expense, so that saving for retirement is a risible suggestion. And yet:
The room was filled to capacity with people across the age spectrum who have a passionate interest in making sure these kinds of farms don’t disappear. Hosted by the Agricultural Sustainability Institute on campus, it drew a wide and diverse crowd.
Something seems to be happening, something big, and it doesn’t seem unrelated to Occupy Wall Street. Food security. A passion for growing things. I feel caught up in it and don’t know where it will go, but it seems much more hopeful than some of the alternatives…
3 February 12
Weather Station
We’ve had a hankering to have our own weather station for a while so recently we finally took the plunge, ordered one, and last weekend I set it up next to the veggie garden. Looking at the displays and graphs on the console in our bedroom of temperature, humidity, dew point, wind speed, wind direction, and barometric pressure has become a frequent ritual. It’s fun watching the anemometer cups spin which they do readily even in the gentlest of breezes. It gets one pondering local meteorological phenomena — for instance the station said that the minimum temperature last night was 36 degrees F, yet there was frost on top of the car. That’s radiative cooling for you. Maybe someday we’ll put the station on the net as part of the Citizen Weather Observer Program, but there’s no shortage of weather stations around Davis so that can wait. If we’d only get some rain now! (we’re at about half normal rainfall for the water year).
30 January 12
Native Daughter
I spent the weekend with my Farm Club friends in San Francisco. We stayed at the home of the Native Daughters of the American West, a house on Fulton and Baker you’d almost miss if you didn’t notice the modest plaque and the flags five floors above the street (US and California).
I have mixed feelings about these organizations. On one hand they’re harmless groups of people doing good works like the Shriners and Rotary, involving arcane and zany initiation rites. On the other they are exclusive by gender, race, birth, status, and no doubt other secret criteria.
Fun: We knit and spun and wove in our jammies in a Julia Morgan parlor and ate buttermilk lemon pie for breakfast (I was skeptical, but am a convert). We shared the floors with the Girl Scouts of America scrapbooking club. We explored the basement and the roof, the rooms decorated by individual chapters (also called Parlors, up and down California). We looked at the museum (tiny boots for six-month-olds, fans for grand San Francisco or Pasadena ladies in improbably sized corsets). We looked in the archive room where lists of all pioneer families who made it to California (and some that didn’t) are listed.
We wandered around the neighborhood stumbling across a silkscreening workshop-in-progress (they also offer cheesemaking classes), two excellent restaurants, and not a single Starbucks.
I was born in California, so I technically qualify to join the NDAW. It provides a very cheap way to stay in San Francisco. But San Francisco is easily close enough for a day trip for us and I can’t handle the politics. I am technically qualified to join the Mayflower Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames, and the United Empire Loyalists for the Tories among you. I don’t sound like I belong in any of them, but my accent would be seen by all of them as a plus, as opposed to my skin color or last name which can so easily be a minus, a fact which writes them off for me. I left all this behind when I left the UK, I thought, 23 years ago. But no. Exclusion comes in many forms and I am not an excluder.