On Planting Seeds for a Healthier Future

“…And a voice was sounding … As the fog was lifting… Saying this Land was Made for You and Me… Bạn Và Tôi…”

Hoping this post finds you healthy and holding strong, we’re staying flex with Big Gretch, moving our May Mushroom Hunt and Nature Walk to Friday May 29th, a perfect way to bring Michigan’s May 28th homestay to a close, reconnect with nature and ourselves. In the meantime, we’re taking advantage of the warm days and in between thunder storms are prepping our garden for planting. Continuing the previous posts’s conversation on soil health and regenerative organic farming methods, the consensus is a return to ‘the old ways’, efforts of our ancestors that more closely mimicked the movement of nature. Taking from but in turn feeding the soil grows healthy, resilient plants, as well as crops that grow healthy, resilient people. Doing our small part in regenerative agriculture, we’re fond of starters seeing as how we’re starters ourselves, but this year we’re even growing some beets and early season radishes from seed — Cherry Belles and Crimson Giants, Early Wonders and Detroit Dark Reds. All with guidance I like to call ‘The Dirt’ from real local farmers Phil and Jeff Ryan. the Arugula Kingpins of aptly dubbed Folly Farms.

So we’re planting seeds on several levels, eager to take safe, sound, baby steps forward late this month, and in doing so hope you’ll join us, to feel a bit more apart of rather than apart from, to close out one funky chapter in worldwide well-being. As it turns out, planting seeds is simple, but the growing takes patience and practice. There’s always certain constants to growing seeds — soil, water, sunlight — but most of the fine-tuning depends on the crop, and even the specific variety. Most seed packets provide growing instructions — everything from days to maturity (how many days from planting to harvest) to plant habit (bushy or vining, determinate or indeterminate). But the real operating instructions are imbedded in the seed itself. Each seed is a blueprint for the future — an opportunity to envision and enact the kind of food systems and thus healthier lives we all now wish to create. More soon on our upcoming late Spring and early Summer offerings. Until then, Stay Well.

On Eating Well and Feeding the Soil

“This land fed a Nation this Land made me so Proud. And son I'm just sorry there’s just Memories for you Now…”

Are you familiar with Patagonia the company and its founder and Philosopher King Yvon Chouinard? In addition to their inspiring catalog, I received a colorful publication titled Provisions 2020 with the copy We’re In Business To Save Our Home Planet. It’s all about caring for ourselves and caring for our planet and how those two efforts are inextricably linked. “I think the path forward is pretty clear”, writes Chouinard. “What’s good for us humans is also what’s good for the planet we live on. And the best bet for saving both is to change the way we produce our food.” As he cites, food grown in ways that regenerate the environment, that produce biodiversity, that deliver the most nutrition, are one and the same. And the best part for all of us is that these foods also hold the most spectacular flavors. Chouinard and Patagonia’s focus is on large-scale farming, but I loved their awareness and ideas, finding hem relevant in light of our upcoming Nature Walk and foraging event, as we seek and find healing, natural remedies from the forest floor. And well be getting into the garden this week.

“Have you ever traveled and been advised to avoid fruits and vegetables, sketchy road side stands, and no matter what, don’t drink the water!? I didn’t know anything about the gut microbiome or the immune system a few years back, but I recognized that the locals in far-away places ate and drank without worry and stayed healthy. It’s not like there was something inherently wrong with Mexican food and water, but rather that our American guts, fed a steady diet of commercially produced food and chlorinated water, hadn’t built up any resistance to naturally occurring microbes. And if you look into it, it’s pretty disturbingly bad news for a world that subsists, for the most part, on the products of industrial agriculture, a system that’s robbing our food of essential nutrients, and at the same time, flavor. Worse, our reliance on monocrop food production and chemical pesticides may be degrading the diversity of our natural gut microbiome, leaving us susceptible to a host of health issues.

 With our current industrial food chain being broken, modern food, pushed to maximize yield, and grown on soil depleted of organic matter and microbes by decades of tilling, chemical fertilizer and pesticides, is losing its nutritional value. A study published in the Journal of the American College of Nutritioncomparing the nutrients in 43 crops from 1950 to the same crops in 1999 shows that modern vegetables demonstrate “statistically reliable declines” in essential nutrients, including protein, calcium, riboflavin, iron and vitamin C. Compare the nutrients in free-roaming buffalo to feedlot-raised buffalo or cattle and you’ll find the same thing. When you sit down to dinner tonight, it’s most likely a lot less nutritious than the same meal eaten by your parents or grandparents fifty years ago. A study conducted by Mother Earth News found that free-range chickens, with their complex diet of seeds, insects, worms and plants, produce eggs with one-third less cholesterol and saturated fat, two times more omega-3 fatty acids, and three times more vitamin E, beta carotene and vitamin D than standard commercial eggs. One theory of why bees are dying from viral outbreaks around the world is that their immune systems are depleted from feeding on the same industrial crops we eat. That’s a frightening canary-in-a-coal-mine scenario.

 The emphasis agribusiness industry places on speed, efficiency and size has caused our food to lose its naturally intense flavors. At the grocery store, you can now find strawberries the size of your fist, but they have about as much flavor as Styrofoam packing peanuts. Modern chickens mature to market size in about 40 days, which means we can produce a lot of chickens in very little time. But the birds, confined to cages and fed a diet of commercial chicken chow are tasteless and watery. In contrast, I once ate a carrot that was grown in organic soil and didn’t mature until it had survived two hard frosts – the complexity and concentration of flavor blew my mind! Compare a bite of free roaming buffalo, full of exquisite flavors from the diversity of native plants they feed on, to the insipid blandness of feedlot buffalo or beef. It’s no surprise that the foods with more flavor are the ones with significantly more nutritional value. We are what we eat eats. 

When we look ahead to new ways of producing food, ways that are better for us and our home planet, the solutions often turn out to be The Old Ways. We search for ancient perennial grains that build soil health and stop erosion; we choose livestock native to the land and let them roam freely to feed on, and increase the health of, the native grasses they evolved with; we fish for mackerel, a naturally abundant species, with centuries old hook and line techniques that keep the population strong and prevent bycatch.” Note that many of these ideas are on a global scale, but we’re doing what we can here by teaming with local Chef and culinary light Chris Ferris of The Farm House Deli, tending to our garden, and exploring the nexus between flavor, nutrition and soil health. More soon on where the food industry and our farm is going — more local, more nutritious, and 100 percent more delicious. 

Our Late April Update

Still water, I'm laying over, Still water, lay my body down… Sad eyes in the weary night have you seen your Brother?

We hope this post finds you and your family healthy and holding strong. Here in Michigan, The Higher Haven’s native soil, our homestay, with some relaxed restrictions, has been extended through May 15th. While we’ll continue to stay aware and work together to protect one another, this will hopefully put us in the clear for our first gathering, a late May Herb Walk and Mushroom Hunt with our resident amateur Mycologist Anthony Blowers during the very heart of Morel season. You can revisit one our former walks here, and to learn more about Anthony’s knowledge, foraging skills, photography and culinary works, check out his Facebook page I Love Wild Mushrooms. While all is well as always in nature, safety precautions in the form of social distancing, proper PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and pre-walk plan communiqués will definitely be put in place. We’ll also post a terrific article or two on the importance of gut microbiomes, demonstrating the vital link between your body’s health and internal ecosystem and the ecosystems of the Earth, as it turns out that what’s good for your is also good for the planet.

We also hope you took in and enjoyed the former posts and talks from my teacher Shinzen Young, on how having a regular meditation practice can be so beneficial at this time. Taking part in an online retreat was a great boost, and depending on how the late spring and early summer unfold, we hope to continue with June classes and weekend retreats, although safety precautions and social distancing may limit the number of available spots. In the meantime, with so many experiencing extraordinary levels of stress and loss, one simple, effective way to bolster our individual and collective emotional health is to remember how we can help ourselves by helping others. Much of the scientific research on resilience — which is our ability to bounce back from adversity — has shown that having a sense of purpose, and giving support to others has a significant impact on our well-being. Look around and you’ll see it everywhere. Companies completely switching gears to go from providing products for the auto industry to producing hand sanitizers. Independent mask-making ventures with home sewing machines. Organizing community food deliveries from local markets and restaurants. Finding creative ways to educate kids who are at home. Brave people manning grocery stores and gas stations, to say nothing of the front-line nurses, doctors, and others jumping into the fray at hospitals, even risking their own lives. In the face of much darkness, stars shine bright.

Matching many of the horror stories of difficulty are equally encouraging tales of hope and transformation. My sister turned me on to an extremely engaging NPR On Point interview with Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, who speaks of distilling life to its essence, questioning our relentless busyness and how quieting the din of life could be making room for something more. “There's actually something quite beautiful, in the midst of this storm that is around us, and all of the uncertainty and all of the suffering that we see,” said Safi. “I think there's some sense that the pace of life that we were living before was not so humane.” Another professor, Brian O’Connor, author of a book titled, "Idleness: A Philosophical Essay” challenging the case against activity, had this to share: “There's a kind of busyness that’s dedicated to sort of making a name for oneself, you know, establishing an identity. Whether it be a social media identity, a presence, a personality or a professional one where visibility, relentless visibility, is required. I think that probably the most stressful thing that many people put themselves through is building a visibility, which is highly dependent on whether anyone wants to look at you and whether anyone wants to regard you as worth looking at. I think that an escape from that strikes me as a pretty liberating possibility.” Listen to the interview, read a few additional positive, creative stories on this extraordinary period, and we’ll pass on additional information shortly.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.” - Rumi