Lessons from the land of surrogacy (part 2 of 2)

“I had a dream that I am supposed to carry your baby. I want to be your surrogate.”

“No you don’t. You are crazy.”

Katie and I have that kind of friendship. Eight years ago we were thrown together in a unfamiliar Midwest town for our husbands’ surgical residency training - and we created our own family.

What started out as regular Sunday dinners and movie nights morphed into Katie driving me home from medical procedures. Her two-year-old son would jump on the trampoline at summer BBQs - the trampoline I had purchased to detoxify my lymphatic system.

A few years, three frozen embryos, and several biopsy scars later that same son turned to me one Super Bowl Party, “Corinna, put your hair back on, you look better with it on.”

His father, mortified, turns to me, “He didn’t mean that, he doesn’t understand.”

“No, it is a good point, I am a bit of a egghead - especially without any eyebrows.”

My husband’s birthday one year happened to occur when I was still in quarantine on the Bone Marrow Transplant Floor. Katie and her family were the only friends we invited.

We finished our residency. Katie and her family returned to the West Coast and we returned East. A new biopsy scar in my armpit joined the ones on my neck and I said goodbye to my hair again. I also said goodbye to waddling and complaining of swollen ankles, to cute shirts over leggings, to resting a glass of carrot juice on my belly and watching it dance with hiccups. Goodbye to being kicked from the inside. Goodbye to George kissing my belly with paternal pride. We read pamphlets filled with pictures of the Gerber baby and saved money for a surrogate.

In February, just when we are ready to sign a surrogacy contract, Katie called me. I was not able to talk her out of her extraordinary offer.

Later that year, the doctor placed one embryo we had frozen 6 years ago into Katie’s uterus. She gave herself daily shots, made appointments for acupuncture because she knew I wanted it, stopped exercising, educated her children about momma cells and pappa cells coming together, and prayed with her priest.

The day we came home from the implantation at the clinic Katie’s 5-year-old daughter ran up to her momma laying on the couch, leaned over, and kissed Katie’s belly, “Grow baby grow. Grow baby grow.”

During our husband’s training, our friendship became familial. We are adding complexity and depth to that familial relationship by literally adding another member to our family.

Our baby is due in April. Katie, mine, my husband, her husband, and her children - all of us are having this baby. Grow Baby Grow.

 (this is the first one in this short lived series - some things are better to be kept close to the chest)

Farm Beginnings: The End of the Beginnings for Sweet Showers Farm

This is my last posting about Farm Beginnings because I feel we have passed by the Beginnings part and are onto the beginning of the Doing part.

The Doing part, as you know, is the steady pace learning and exploration tango contained within every moment - you try corn on the lower field for the first time, the squash borer kills all of your cucumbers, goats escape (again), the strawberries are too wet, the chickens are decimated by a hawk, you hold a baby lamb as the sun rises, the sunflowers are pulled down because you planted your peas too quickly to trellis along and everything falls onto the pumpkins. (In the future, may all of my “problems" be as simple as sunflowers falling onto the pumpkins!)

We are calling our land Sweet Showers Farm, courtesy of my Chaucer days. Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote. Sweet Showers Farm works two ways. The Sweet can be a noun showering down upon the Farm and/or the Sweet can be an adjective describing the Showers of rainfall. It makes me wiggily with happiness.

For my future questions there are many online resources to help me: Start2Farm.gov, Virtual Grange, Greenhorns, Beginning Farmers, Young Farmers Coalition, and I have been cultivating neighbor mentors.

Courtesy of my Permaculture Design Course (PDC), which I highly highly recommend as a way to recharge your educational, spiritual, and joy of life batteries, we have a farm plan and goals for the next 25 years.

The PDC did a wonderful job inspiring me - but it also left a bug in my ear. The first day, our instructor Andrew Faust, punctured through my idealism in one obvious comment. It was along the lines of, “You know, people want to run away and create their little paradise, which is great. But what happens when your well is poisoned from the leachate from the municipal landfill, your air quality is so poor you can’t leave the house some days [which happens to those close to Concentrated Animal Feeding Organizations - aka factory farming, the EPA did a study on it], your weather is so weird that you can no longer plant the crops of your grandparents [see Tabasco], and your animals are stressed from the heat and stop producing enough milk to feed you.”

Duh!

So there it is - the balancing act of life. I am you and you are me and we are all in this together. The choices rest in the Doing.

Here is the post on Real Time Farms

Farm Beginnings: Bacchanalian Burn Bonanza

Join us for a Bacchanalian Burn Bonanza!

Bacchus is not a controllable god (as you may remember from your Euripides in school) - and neither, it turns out, is fire. My lesson from burning a pile of wood 25 feet wide and 15 feet tall is this - don’t have any guests nearby but do have an excavator.

Don’t have any guests nearby because it is hard enough to watch the large fire catch the grass on fire without having witnesses join you in trepidation. Also, it felt better to have a smaller more sober crowd for when the fire marshall showed up to make sure we had everything under control. It is only because of the excavator that we were anywhere near under control.

The excavator is necessary because as the grass scorches along the ground outward from the fire, the excavator can dig a moat around the area. Helpless, I watched sparks fly into the tall grass. The excavator quickly would rotate on the treads, tamp those out with the bucket, and turn back quickly towards the the line of fire. “Behind you!,” I wanted to shout, “the grass is burning towards the tall grass behind you and on the left, and on the right and did you see it on the other side? The other side is moving fast and...”

and then it was over.

45 minutes after the flames were reaching 30-40 feet into the air, the intense heat pulled the dry wood down upon itself and the focal point of our Bacchanalian Burn Bonanza celebration turned into Mordor.

But I am learning that even Mordor can be put to good use, our neighbors with the horse farm will take the ash and spread it on their pastures for the potash and the lime.

Cheering to sharing with neighbors.

(Here is a video of the fire starting, a haybale was drenched in diesel fuel and lit on fire...)

Farm Beginnings is the chronicle of a city girl starting to farm. Last installment Corinna spoke of growing what the deer won’t eat. Today she gives an update on the land.

Upset about Fracking? Get excited about Biogas!

I woke up this morning excited, nay wiggly with excitement, because I want to learn all about Biogas generators and put one on our land. I don't know if it is legal to do so in my county (probably not, considering that you are not allowed to put in a composting toilet in your house), in which case I am excited to get that ball moving.

Once I have put one on the land, I think our town needs a big one for our waste - we currently have a beaver problem near the landfill flooding the land, which might be a good segway to focus the community's attention.

Biogas is what happens when anaerobic bacteria eat organic waste, manure (from humans, etc) or biomatter (plants), and give off gas as a byproduct. For countries who don't have quite such a generous excess of land to throw landfills onto they are already utilizing biogas technology: UK, Germany, China, etc. There are a few instances of biogas in the US, however, Wikipedia seems to conflate biogas with Landfill gas, which is incorrect.

My first desk job was working with landfill gas - the ability to take the methane generated by the bacteria and turn it into electricity and put into an industrial boiler. However, due to airborne siloxanes (a type of plastic) from the breakdown of certain beauty products (often in deodorants) the plastic would gunk up the moving parts of the turbines as the gas was heated in the generators. Biogas is a clean gas, no plastics from industrial waste are coming out of your chickens. (at least, we hope not)

We learned in our Permaculture Design Course this weekend that 2 cows, OR 7 goats, OR 170 chickens (and not counting humans or other organic waste streams) can generate enough gas to serve the needs of heating/cooking for 3-4 houses (this is in China). Not that our teacher was recommending that everyone run out and get two cows to keep in the shower in manhattan to run their Wolf ranges. But this notion of a decentralized, regionalized power grid is VERY important and one that our country needs to address.

In the next 30 years nearly 50% of our high power transmission lines will need to be replaced on the east coast and 13%-30% of the power is lost as it travels (that's the buzzing you hear near the wires). One of the principles of permaculture is that pollution is just waste that hasn't been put to better use.

(On a side note, landfills will 100% become super fund sites EVERY TIME because the liner only lasts 30 years and we are mixing industrial waste with organic matter which creates toxic leachate that goes into our groundwater, among many other fun/sad/horrible things. Check your well water if you live near a landfill and tell your neighbors.)

What does this have to do with food? Well, organic waste from the farm in whatever form: corn stalks, human feces, sheep manure, tomato vines, squash leaves, etc all have to go somewhere. You can compost the waste and feed the organic gold back onto your land and watch the pile steam in the winter from these bacteria - or, I would posit AND, you can harness the energy that is coming from the steaming pile and heat your house or run your stove or even your tractor with the biogas. To me, biogas is common sense - the bacteria are doing all of the work!

Upset about fracking? Get excited about Biogas!

It all brings us back to the old adage, "Waste not, want not."

I wanted to write this out because I felt so wiggly that I was having a hard time focussing on my morning meditation. Still feeling wiggly with possibility and promise of the world and ideas and things happening, but I will try again to focus on my mantra!

As Abraham Hicks would say, I am feeling "tuned in tapped on!" ie, the power of the Universe is coursing through my beingness! What a wonderful wonderful thing!!

I wish the same for you today!

Farm Beginnings: Boxwood; Loving What the Deer Don’t

Farm Beginnings is the chronicle of a city girl starting to farm. Last installment Corinna spoke to why she farms. Today she speaks of farming with deer and boxwoods.

Farming with deer might bring visions of Bambi and all of his cousins running around a field prior to harvest into delicious venison steaks. That is not what I am talking about. No, farming with deer is growing goodies I want to eat/enjoy without having the deer demolish them first.

I have a very complicated relationship with deer. I love to watch them run and jump and whisk their tales and yes, I have seen Bambi. Yet I feel the anthropomorphization of the deer population by Disney has adversely affected the biodiversity of our forests. I also like eating them - they are a good source of protein (free range anyone?) and delicious.

Part of planning where to plant goodies on the land involves protecting them from the deer. Deer like to eat most everything in the garden I want to eat and certainly many of the ornamental plants that I would like to smell and look at.

My first step is to plant boxwoods, a trick I learned from Toby Hemenway's book, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. Deer don’t like boxwoods. According to a recent NY Times article, “boxwood contains alkaloids that are toxic to deer.” (and a small side note for me to thank them for such a great title). I plan to use boxwood as a fence.

Boxwoods appeal to me for several reasons. They are evergreen, we are renting in an apartment that has many full grown specimens of the slow-growing plant, and I was curious to try propagating from cuttings. I know I am going to be needing a lot of them to make a shield of any utility and the idea of purchasing 50 plants at 20 dollars each was not exciting.

I read recently a book that described a woman who started her arboretum, now filled with 70 foot trees, from seed. “It was cheaper, and she was quite frugal, which is considered sustainable today. She would trade seeds. As she said, plants people share; antiques people don’t share.”

Inspired to be frugal, I purchased Dip N’Grow, and following the directions snuck out very early 2 months ago to barely prune the boxwoods around my apartment. I dipped them into the solution and popped them into the earth. As I lifted the small cuttings from the soil this morning, I did not see any indication of root growth - but Martha Stewart says that it can take up to 3 months.

Besides, it is more fun to sneak out in the early morning before my neighbors are up to take cuttings than to contemplate the cost of a deer fence.

Here is the article on Real Time Farms.

Farm Beginnings: We Farm because Seeds Grow

Farm Beginnings is the chronicle of a city girl starting to farm. Last installment Corinna spoke of farming trees for the wood stove. Today she speaks to why she farms.

A few weeks ago I gently tucked tiny black and silver specks into wet soil. I placed plastic covers over the soil, put the flats under a sunlamp on the radiator and waited. The soil was very wet. I did not disturb the flats at all, water condensed on the inside of the mini plastic greenhouses.

Four weeks later there is a green carpet of tender strong dynamic life reaching upwards, unfurling new leaves with the courage of a new day.

That is what this whole thing is all about.

Sigh.

In my Master Gardener class a few years ago, the teacher stood at the front of the room the first day and asked us, “Why are you here?” Responses varied: “I love to garden,” “I volunteer at a farm,” “I want to keep my husband company when he gardens,” “I like to grow my own food.”

She listened patiently and then summarized all of the disparate sharing into one shooting star, “You are here because once upon a time, maybe when you were young, you planted something and it grew.”

It grew! Without any sleepless nights, or bank loans, or driving across town running late to an appointment, or jealousy, or broken hearts, or any of the beautiful facets of our human existence - you can place a tiny seed into moist dark earth, show it the sun, and the universe will give you a tree.

Or sunflowers, or kale, or barley your animals can eat. It is the most humbling and beautiful thing to me. On the days when I think I need to be in charge, or even may want to be in charge, am I kidding?

The universe can grow a tree.

Beyond Grateful.

Here is the post on Real Time Farms.

Farm Beginnings: Farming Trees for the Wood Stove

Farm Beginnings is the chronicle of a city girl starting to farm. Last installment Corinna spoke of inoculating logs with fungus plugs. Today she speaks of farming trees and splitting firewood.

When I think of farming, I think of neat rows of greens interspersed with chickens and a cow in a field or endless rows of corn - but as you know, one can “farm” many things: honey, Christmas trees, apricots, maple syrup, hickory nuts, mushrooms, etc. As I become more and more excited about perennial cultivation instead of annual plantings (my bedside table is currently groaning under the two volume tome Edible Forest Gardens), I am beginning to shift my timeline for what farming can encompass - like the farming of trees.

Tree farming is a long term endeavor. I think immediately of the story from one of the Oxford Colleges where they planted oak trees when the college was founded in the 1400s; 450 years later they had the wood they needed to replace the 2 feet wide and 45 feet long beams in the dining hall. That kind of forethought and planning is a long cry from the annual gratification of most vegetable farming.

According to the rings I counted on the trees we harvested when the land was cleared, most were probably around 50 years old, and most were around the diameter of my hug. (They would not have worked for the Oxford College dining hall.) Fifteen years before I was born these trees started taking in the sunlight and turning it into carbon. This winter we will release that carbon back into the atmosphere when we heat our house. On a side note, I am sure you read that we are just about to cross over 400 ppm for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - but that is a whole different can of worms.

Or is it? Living in a northern climate means we need to keep ourselves warm somehow in the winter. After three layers of long underwear and a few thick wool sweaters, it is still nice to not have to wear gloves inside the house when cooking, or typing, or reading a book. So therefore what are our choices? We can heat our farm with propane (economical these days thanks to fracking). Or we can heat our buildings with electricity - generated from coal, natural gas, biomass, or the 13.2% garnered from renewable sources. We could add solar panels and insulate the heck out of the house (thank you Transition Challenge Month for listing those as energy challenge ideas), but the sun goes down every night and it is nice to be warm in bed. Ideally we would not be adding more carbon to the environment at all, but that is not the current reality most of us live in.

Using wood to heat our house will be one way we can reduce our carbon emissions to help the Keeling Curve return to the 350 ppm so touted and celebrated by 350.org.

Because at the end of the day an issue that seems like a Gordian Knot the size of a fire breathing Leviathan is really very simple. I don’t think anyone but Mother Nature knows how to plant more propane or coal, but I know I can plant more trees.

Here is the post on Real Time Farms!

Farm Beginnings: Inoculating Logs with Mushrooms

Farm Beginnings is the chronicle of a city girl starting to farm. Last installment Corinna spoke of mulch. Today she speaks of inoculating logs with fungus plugs.

Innoculating logs with mushrooms is like playing Wack-a-Mole, immensely satisfying on a visceral level. Also on a visceral level, like so many of perks that have to do with working to grow your own food, at the end of the day there are glorious mushrooms to eat! (Or in 9-12 months.)

The most fun thing about the process was sharing something new. Whereas the majority of my friends have grown tomatoes, harvested kale, or even made cheese - no one had ever banged a spore-infused dowel into a mushroom log. So there were a lot of questions as we waited for the portable drills to charge: What are we doing? Why are we doing this? When will there be mushrooms? I thought you promised to bring beer? etc etc

Just so we are all on the page, here is 3 minutes about mushrooms. I am not a mycologist, so this is neophyte’s attempt to explain an entire branch of terrestrial life. Fungi - mushrooms, yeast, and molds - are an entire taxonomic kingdom onto themselves (like animals, plants, amoebae, etc). Mushrooms that we see and eat are only the fruit of fungus. A fungus is a collection of weblike strands that thrive on the organic compounds in a decomposing wood, or pollutants like oil derivatives. (Last year there was a big outcry about Amazon fungi which thrive eating plastic bags in landfills.) Wood that is left to decompose on the forest floor becomes colonized with many different species of fungi. The fungal species that is able to outproduce and thereby dominate the other colonizers will be the one that eventually may fruit on that log. Fruiting happens when there is enough water in the soil (or log) to force the fruit to the surface.

Here is a short snippet of a real mycologist, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwMH0tMfeWchp" target="_blank">Nicholas P Money who wrote the book Mushroom, explaining how mushrooms reproduce once the fruit emerges (and he has a great accent).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwMH0tMfeWc

However, as I am sure you remember from high school, there are many different types of mushrooms and not all of them are fit for an omelet. Therefore if you want to eat mushrooms you need to make sure that your spores are the ones that are going to dominate any other fungi that might want to start colonizing your log, which brings us back to Wack-A-Mole! (you knew we would get there eventually).

After scouring the permaculture listservs, I purchased the starter kit from Fungi Perfecti and extra plugs of shitake (as well as morel spawn and maitake from Gourmet Mushrooms). The recipe for inoculating logs is simple: drill, plug, paint, water, wait (water). When you order your own spawn they will give you very detailed instructions (what size bit to use, how close to drill the holes, whether or not they recommend you paint the holes with wax afterwards to keep the moisture in and deter bugs, etc). 

Here is what I learned from the process. Make sure the logs are not more than four feet long - ours were five feet on the theory that we could bury them into the earth a foot (helping to keep them moist), but five feet logs are difficult to maneuver when your body is tired. Make sure you have either a drill that is attached to a plug, or many extra battery packs that you can recharge in the car while you drill - on average one battery pack would last us about one log (100-60 holes). If you want to go whole hog and paint wax on the holes make sure you have access to heat where the logs are - I ended up transporting the logs back and forth to our apartment.

The weekend resulted in 4 fully inoculated logs. An entire veggie drawer in the fridge is full of plugs awaiting their logs. I am still committed to growing more mushrooms - however, pushing forward before we have power on the land (or at least not during the burn ban so I could melt the wax in a fire) throws up unwelcome hurdles. More mushrooms will wait until we have the infrastructure in place to make this easier.

In the meantime, I have seen several places that sell mushroom kits where one can grow mushrooms on your kitchen counter. Back to the Roots out of California will send you one if you are not lucky enough to live in Ann Arbor, where the mushroom man comes to the Farmers Market!

  Here is the piece on Real Time Farms!