It’s been a busy month since birthing
The Cumquat and
Land Cultures. There has been much late winter, early spring labouring under an occasional sun.
With another family we planted out chestnuts and walnuts on common land for the next generations.
Each of us contributing in our own way.
We planted trees, and we grafted medlar scions onto hawthorns.
We attempted this several years ago in the little forest near home with no success.
With a little more understanding we are trying again, and are willing the sap to flow into these fruiting branches to make more fruit possible.
With food forest work the natural order of things to follow is bee work. The boys have been making new housing for native bees.
Now we’re awaiting the warmer weather for the occupation.
Community gardening has been an ongoing priority for several years now. This winter we hosted two pruning workshops with Ian Clarke, a knowledgeable tree elder.
The pruned cuttings were cycled home and sat in the snow,
before being made into biochar, to feed back the flowering earth.
Each day the boys are involved in what Gertrude Stein once called the processes of circularity.
It has been a great relief for Zeph to be outside the strictures and inflexibilities of institutional life. Removing fences at a community garden working bee is not just a metaphor.
He has begun work on a critical-creative research project of his choice — The history of street art. For two hours every day he reads, writes and explores this world. And we’ve been on excursions to help better understand this world.
For country kids the city offers colour and excitement, as well as an understanding of the context for how urbanisation makes ill the world’s worlds. Such illness, such an interruption to life, is the very medium for graffiti writers and street artists who are not well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
On another day the boys take old tip-discarded timber and build a new bridge over one of the swales in the garden. Zeph taught his younger brother to use tools and calibrate his eyes and arms to the task of making the home garden more functional and productive.
Zeph has moved into the Cumquat. Imagine being 14 years old and living in the little home you co-built! Each morning between 7-9am he works on his street art research project and during the day he heads out to work with various skilled friends in our community. On organic and permaculture farms, at light earth building sites, stone retaining wall constructions, selling local produce at a market stall, and learning traditional restoration work on an old church have all been part of his experience over the past two weeks since he left school.
And we’ve been sharing our skills too. Here Meg teaches the art of fermenting grains: sourdough bread and rejuvelac making.
And for the first time we have been eating our own oranges throughout the winter. Drying the peel to grind up and use to flavour fruit bread or using them as fire lighters to start our wood oven.
Most of the world’s worlds are flowering places, and these places that flower nurture and keep well the communities of the living. That this understanding is absent from the teaching that occurs in schools is why our culture is involved in permanent forms of destruction. To be involved in the sacred realm of buds and bees, seasons and cycles is what we want to pass on to our kids. And to further grow our understanding of what keeps life flowering, fruiting and making more life possible.
