Homesteading Middles: Dirty Feet on Chicken Salad = Recycling
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“Momma, are you ready for FULL ATTACK?!”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I am going to go in there and BE VICIOUS!”
“Okay, Dragon, go in there and be vicious - let’s see what happens.”
In November, we planted winter greens in the greenhouse. Hesitant to glean too much, we were very judicious in our harvesting. Suddenly March brought a few days in the 70s and the greenhouse went into overdrive. A good lesson from Mother Nature - gorge while you can. The bok choy bolted first. Then the spinach. The claytonia was able to last the longest - still sweet even with the wee white flowers.*
A seven year old boy told to pull up plants knows full well how to do “full attack.” It was time to “be vicious.” First there was whacking with a stick to see how far the tops could fly. Then there was using a round stick as a scimitar to see if the roots could be unearthed with enough force.
The last method proved to be the best. Bent double, handfuls flew in disarray. The piles gradually shrank as I took carts of greens to the chickens. Upon my final return trip, Dragon was standing on a pile of greens. He was singing to himself.
“Dirty feet on salad!! It feels so coooool and crrrrisssspy. Dirty feet on salad!”
I joined in the melody, “Diiiirrtttyyy feet on salad!”
“Dirty feet on salad. Sitting in the salad salad. Billy billy bulu balad.” Unable to resist his delight, I walked over and stood with him. “Momma, it feels so cool and crispy!”
“The chickens will love it.”
And they did.
This is a nice segue to the food waste hierarchy - a pyramid that came up recently as Bean poured her breakfast milk down the kitchen sink.
I would have liked my sharing to have had it gone like this.
I would have turned and seen what she was doing and said this, calmly, “can you stop what you are doing for a second?”
She would have stopped, put down the bowl, and looked at me.
“Sometimes I forget you don’t have all of the stuff in my brain that I do. ” I would have continued. “When dealing with food waste, or really all waste, there is a hierarchy. The shorthand is reduce, reuse, recycle. Reduce means - don’t take more than you need. If you have extra, reuse it. Offer to someone else - like your brother, or me. If you can’t find any takers, then you recycle it. Offer to animals - like Coco, Minuit, or the chickens. If that isn’t possible - say it is chocolate, or something, only then do you compost it. Throwing food, or anything, away is the last thing you want to do after alllll of those other options have been tried. I will print it off the hierarchy and put it on the refrigerator.”
That would have been a good idea. Obviously, that is not what happened. This is what I did.
“Stop stop stop! What are you doing?”
Sigh.
So, I apologized to my daughter and put the food waste hierarchy on the fridge.
From dirty feet on salad to the mantra of the environmental movement.** Both And.
*I don’t like the back and forth in my depth of field when I wear glasses while gardening, so claytonia flowers … are white and wee. I think.
**In our culture this has to be called a “movement” because not everyone subscribes to the idea we need to safeguard the earth and her resources for ourselves and our children. Instead of environmentalism being mainstream, it is merely those in the movement. However, last I checked, we live here - on this planet. She is our home. She gives us air, water, food, shelter, and beauty. We are made up of earth and we return to the earth. Wow. Just wow. Time to go do my Fists of Anger for today.
