Biomass revisited
July 20, 2008
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A travel arrangement for seedlings
Some days ago I filled my tiny travel trolley 75% with winter veg seedlings leftover from the raised beds up in the Polar Circle, and left the Land of the Pitiful Sun to return to the Occitanian kitchen garden. While the unpractical but pretty summer dresses & sandals, and the nomadic office with it’s space-absorbing cables were unceremoniously crammed into the remaining nook and cranny, the seedlings of several varieties of broccoli and kales, two sorts of precious artichokes (one early, one late), handy edible flowers and my beloved leafy greens were all delicately packed urban-style into a shoe box, formerly of the pretty summer sandals.
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She thinks that my baggage is funny and I think that she is funny.
In the months of my absence the garden has produced a teeming hot mess of biomass. Before I left in April I had planted alfalfa and phaecelie to keep out the weeds and nourish the soil, but it’s something of a running joke between my friends that I call the vegetation obscuring the contours of the garden, intentional biomass and they call it weeds. On some level I can understand the confusion, but the alfalfa is blooming in blues and purples, the mints and bergamot burgeoning in the canals waft head-clearing scents every time I brush up against them, swarms of bees are a’buzz on the profusion of flowers, and under all the canopy I found my indulgence of dahlias, planted as markers at the ends of the canals.
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Look, a raspberry and blooming alfalfa
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Lavender and echinacea, from here I can go no further
Even entering the garden requires navigation and I’m thankful for the lavender and echinacea blooming vigorously at the upper corner for providing a point of orientation. In the coming days I’ll re-establish the paths and fold over the intentional biomass, allowing it to rot into plant beds intended for nomadic urban seedlings. What is amazing is that under 120 cm of plant-matter, the previously mulched beds remained intact and free of weeds (I mean biomass), convincing me even more of the efficacy of my permaculture absentia, a garden that can thrive without me.
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Kids loved us,
loved our food
July 8, 2008
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Chef Paul says ‘Eat your pumpkin RotiRol’
Lucky Mi, purveyor of in-situ snacks, enjoyed its new-kid-on-the-block status and dished up some Surinamese fusion food in our spanking new snack laboratory at the Zuidoost Kwakoe Festival this weekend. We dodged tropical size raindrops, gave the lab its first ever test-run, and were ultimately quite popular amongst the under-sevens.
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Raoul and Paul wait for the rain to subside while the gameboyz get physical discussing the children’s menu.
Not wanting to waste one drop of local expertise, we put the gaggle of charming chilluns straight to work advising us on our Kinder Menu for next week. It will be called the Lucky PiKind and will likely consist of a tiny pom croquette, a teensie pakora-tje, & a banana beignet called bakabanaantje. Pikin means small or pequeño in Surinamese. The kids think the menu should cost € 1. We don’t agree.
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Lucky mouth model Jeevan tucks into a pumpkin Hofwijkse Roti Rol, his first taste of pumpkin ever.
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and Daniele moderates the discussion of the child’s menu
The Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking Snacklab will be at the Kwakoe Festival each weekend until the 10th of August. The Kwakoe Festival is a perfect family activity where happily playing children will amuse themselves into the wee hours of the night whilst adults enjoy adult things.
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Butternut Brutalism
July 1, 2008
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Upon returning to the new kitchen garden the next day, I felt that the parcel along the fence just wasn’t speaking to me and I traded her in for the plot next door. Giddy with the even newer digs, I noticed what I had failed to see the day before, namely, useful in-situ building materials, in the form of cement curbing at the entrance to the drive. Imagining them to be perfect for fashioning raised beds, I started moving the blocks to the newer, sunnier allotment with the intention of quickly lego-ing some brutalism for my utopian permaculture kitchen garden.
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Turns out these blocks of béton brut were filled with a gooey, dark-matter centre and weighed in just a few grams shy of 75 kilos a piece. I was able to teeter-walk 18 of the gravity absorption buzz-killers over to the parcel, trying to experience the exercise as a meditation. I failed miserably in this endeavour. The entire raison d’être of raised beds is that they’re supposedly physically easier to deal with, but at this stage of the design and realisation, the pain-in-the-ass factor was dipping deeply into the negative. It was time to suck up and summon up some friendly muscle for the positioning of the blocks.
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It took Oumar and me all of the next day to raise the beds, but the job was so absorbing and transformative that we neglected to go to two art & design exam shows and two separate adult birthday parties! Landscaping and gardening are easily as addictive as crack, watching television and urban planning. Just let’s do another block.
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