First Snow & 8th Annual Biochar Burn!

Winter is here! Welcome!! On the eve of what was predicted to be our first big snow, we did a whole bunch of harvesting from the gardens before things were covered. Let's see if I can remember: carrots, turnips, lettuce, radishes, spinach, collards, parsley, dill and cilantro. So we had a December salad for one night which was a treat. And then for a spell, it was all covered in a few inches of snow. I believe carrot and turnip digging will resume today!

Oh, there was one other harvest - all the prickly pear cactus fruits. They fruited so well this year and so the desire and time emerged for Jason, with Kali's assistance, to experiment with prickly pear cactus fruit jam. After labor over small parts of 3 days, we have about 1.5 cups of a very interesting jam made with just the fruit and some raw honey. We'll savor it, especially since we still keep finding little spines from the fruits in parts of our bodies! We think maybe the shirt Kali harvested with got in the wash and then the spines got everywhere? They are SO tiny and can hurt an awful lot and be hard to get out. So additional caution will have to be taken if we undergo such a dangerous culinary act again in future years!

And then the snow came! It was a beautiful snow and the girls were out in it for hours every day! I was able to bail on watching a webinar live and carved out a delightful 1.5 hour sledding adventure on day 1. We were able to introduce Tala to sledding for the first time with sledding on our favorite hill over at our neighbor's. While not very deep there was a crusty layer that made the sledding fast! I was smart and left my camera at home so just fully focused on enjoying the time together. It was a much needed break from my computer screen! On Sunday morning, I came out to help with chores for the first time in weeks and went for a few runs right at our place. While a shorter hill, it was fast and we crashed into the prairie patch full of sumac at a rather rapid clip. Still fun but I was a tad more worried about someone getting poked unpleasantly. 

While snow fun was happening for the girls outside, it was also time to prepare for our biochar burn. Step one is distributing the duff that we had loaded into the pit after the old biochar was out of it earlier in the year to absorb water and any excess nutrients in the surrounding soil. It was carted around (in the snow, which was quite an adventure) and placed at the base of raspberries, blueberries, blackberries and fruit trees. The rows of dark duff contrasted on the white snow were striking. While a lovely sight, I won't choose often to do wheelbarrow work in the snow. It definitely made for some sore muscles!

So if we count the first biochar that Jonathan and Jason did on the other side of the garden, this is our 8th annual burn. And this one felt pretty different than the ones preceding it. While we actually had the perfect number to "get the job done," we did miss having others join us for the day. I found myself remembering various people who had joined us over the years, the soccer games happening in the yard in the background, people milling about and gabbing since there wasn't enough work to keep everyone busy, and then coming in to enjoy a potluck and hanging out together at the end (all smelling of wood smoke). This year, it was just our family of 6 (yay, for having Tala join!) and then for our evening meal our table was full as Mom and Dad had returned from WV to their Tangly Woods abode. So the day was still sweet and the ritual still so very meaningful and a perfect way to welcome winter!

I do not get tired of hearing the meditation Jason wrote (he wrote a longer one initially and this is an abbreviated version we read before lighting the fire each year). This year Alida read it for us and I felt the yearly swells of emotions from deep within! I'll intersperse it here with some more pictures from the afternoon. The wood was nice and dry so the burn was clean and went fast (less than 3 hours). We even had time between carting brush and stoking the fire for throwing snowballs at each other. And we ended the burn with a twist that may never happen again - we started extinguishing the fire with snowballs (followed by the hose). 

We kindle this fire for gratitude.  The wood we have gathered to burn is the flesh of plants, our partners and providers on this earth.  We gratefully acknowledge that we need them more than they could ever need us.

We kindle this fire for memory.  We know that without fire, our species could never have become what we are.  To be human is to burn wood; to use its power to change things to our advantage. 

We kindle this fire for light. Through the plants and like the plants, we need light: to fully understand our world our eyes need to see it reflecting off of our landscapes, and we need it striking our skin to promote our health.  Even in our languages, light is truth and shadows are ignorance.  In this shadow time of year, the light leaping from this fire will be a comfort

We kindle this fire for warmth.  As flames spring from the branches burning here, we will eagerly hold our palms out to face them like leaves, absorbing a small fraction of the heat released there.  This world is our home and we know no other, but it can be a cold place, too. 

We kindle this fire for life.  As the smoke rises, we will be reminded that life changes form; it is always being lost and destroyed, it is always being reborn. The char that is left will be used to enrich the soil—a stable place to store nutrients and habitat for soil organisms. 

We kindle this fire for healing.  In these times too many of us are neglecting our connections to the soil, to the plants, to the Sun.  Our willful ignorance has cost us so much; has been so destructive.  We hope that this one small act of burning a char fire can be a part of a trend of restoration. 

We kindle this fire for our descendants. Like trees stretching their roots into the forest duff made of the decaying bodies of their progenitors, we too live by the gifts of our ancestors to us; gifts of resources and knowledge, skill and values that were a response to their time and place.  We have adapted these for our time in this place, and we know our descendants must do the same.  With this fire we mark our desire to leave to them a world that supports their thriving at least as well as it has ours, and our willingness to work to make it so.

For gratitude, for memory, for light, for warmth, for life, for healing, for our descendants, here and now, we kindle this fire.

And now Jason will empty the toilet on the new pit for the first time this morning. And that is coming just in time as last year's was getting rather annoying to find a spot for each new bucketful in recent days! And so now here we are! Having welcomed winter yesterday, we are also eager to welcome a slower pace in the coming days. I look forward to putting on my autoresponder at the end of tomorrow and turning my full focus to our Tangly Woods pod for a bit. I know both Jason and I are looking forward to more times hanging with the kids without the to do list nagging constantly in the background! That is definitely all I want for Christmas!