Hello, and welcome back to Scrap Kitchen.
This is episode five, I'm calling it Needful.
Right now I'm recording/writing this in the sunny back garden of the house that I'm house-sitting. So if you hear some wind or some rustling leaves that's because they're are.
Recently I've been thinking about the poem A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay which talks about the murder of Eric Garner at the hands of the police. It came up, just popped into my psyche, before I remembered that I'd actually seen Ross Gay recently at the University in Ann Arbor.
He was doing a speech. A talk. I don't know. What people do at universities with this kind of stuff. A poem thing. He read from his latest book and it made me really want to get back into writing. When this poem popped back up for me, I was like, oh damn I've seen this guy he's great.
The poem itself is very mournful quite hesitant but also with a hint of hopefulness and that is the feeling that I'm feeling at the moment. Some of this has to do with Palestine, the Congo, honestly all of the places in the world where colonialism is ongoing.
A Small Needful Fact
Ross Gay
Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.
Of course, there are things that we can do we do to combat (maybe not combat, this isn't a war), like boycotts, sanctions, divestments while we still can, protests, and chaining yourselves to arms dealers.
There's a lot of stuff that can be done. But also at times, it feels like there's nothing that can be done. That's not true.
In all of this like mourning and sadness and righteous anger action there also has to be noticing of the inequality where we live. In our very hyper-local spaces. We need to be thinking about the people who face injustice in our daily lives and by freeing them we can also free Palestine, free ourselves.
But we also should chain ourselves to arms dealers.
I just thinking about this, since this morning I was at a bike co-op where volunteers fix each other's bikes for the local neighbourhood. There were all sorts of people there; businessmen, unhoused people, hipsters. Getting their bikes fixed for free. Add into this the community gardens near me (or maybe they are allotments) have wheelchair-accessible raised beds. This is something I always dreamed of for the farm that we eventually are going to have. Getting to see it in action (before I even got to dream it up or have to figure it out) is really wonderful. To see something that you had thought about, people are doing this already and I don't have to wait until I have my own land for this to exist. I still want it to make wheelchair-accessible raised beds exist, but blueprints help dream a new way forward. To me, this is a small needful fact that even within this morning there are people doing things and people striving to make their communities a fairer and more equal place. Working on things that will outlast them.
So yeah, on that fun and cheery start.
Honestly, it feels weird to be making anything that is overly fun and cheery at this time. It feels disingenuous. But here we are, I said I was gonna do this every week, so I'm gonna do this every week.
Current Farm Updates
For the current farm that we're working on, the potting soil finally arrived.
That was a sharp pivot, wasn't it?
So we have done a lot of seeds. Seeds on seeds.
We've been seeding all our alliums, so a lot of onions, some leeks, and then lettuce, Asian greens, so bok choy and ming choy, and I think that's it. It feels like we're really starting to grow stuff. All these little seedlings peeking out the dirt.
We've been direct seeding a lot as well. The water's working again (it got fixed by Glen, kind soul). Now we can actually water all the stuff that we've put in the ground. Which is pretty nice.
In other news, I dropped a tray of leeks. But in the grand scheme of things that really doesn't matter.
We’re also getting ready the the staff to come back to work (I think we're hiring one more person). Everyone's starting on the 14th of March. So there's a sort of gearing up. A ramping up towards mid-March. We're gonna be printing out special things (processes, instructions, Most Wanted Bug LIsts etc) and laminating them and I don't know whatever else people do to make their Standard Operating Procedures very clear. It’s a lot of organising stuff and cleaning out the fridge. Lots of washing, lots of bleaching.
Future Farm Updates
On the current farm and for our future farm, things have been pretty much on pause this week. My partner just finished his other job a Monday back so I think a break was needed. We weren't going to push so hard on our future farming plans for a little rest week.
But now we're going to get back into it. Hopefully working a bit more on the business plan.
We also got an offer for a first right to refusal from my mother's friend for when they buy land, possibly. No pressure.
For anyone who doesn't know a first right to refusal is something that we were introduced to by our bosses in Virginia. They have in their will. This means that for their farm, should something happen to them (hopefully not, touch wood) the people that they list as their first right to refusal have the first chance to buy the farm. That means they have the first right to say no to buying the farm and then after that, it goes to everyone else (the open market).
So to be offered the first right to refusal is to be offered the chance to say no first.
Kind of what it says on the tin.
In our case, it wouldn’t be to buy the farm but to work the land. It’s a really wonderful thing to be offered, so thank you.
We're still going to be applying for the land match scheme. It’s a far-away land offer, time-wise, so we will still be working on securing short-term land. It’s great to have the option for the future.
For now, what we're going to be working on is a business plan. And eventually the visa. With the visa we’re going to wait a little bit, I think, we're going to get a little further ahead on the business plan. Send that out, then send out the visa, and get back some land offers (so simple lol). I mean obviously, that's not necessarily what's going to happen but that's the dream so that's the plan of action right now
Ok wrapping up. It feels like it's been quite a long week but not a bad one. But in some ways a bad one.
I hope there is sunshine wherever you are that is listening to this.
See you next week.
M
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