A simple grey-water system

At the Grove, we do not have a hose nearby to water plants in the gardened area. Instead I bring buckets from home (it’s right next door) of used dishwater. Dishwater, wastewater not too full of other substances besides organic wastes dissolved, is quite nutritious and a way of giving back to Nature. What the city sewer systems do on a huge scale, I can do on a tiny scale with my simple system. Granted, I’m not about to start bailing out my toilet as well. The city is welcome to that!

It’s quite easy to create your own source of grey-water.

1. Get two plastic wash basins for the kitchen

No matter what sort of sink you have, it’s possible to find something that will fit, and that you can empty easily into a nearby bucket for the garden.

2. Use one as ‘pre-soak’ for dishes

With a large single sink, hopefully both basins fit inside. If it’s a double sink, there will be less splash from placing one basin at counter level. This is where the plants get to taste your leftovers.

3. Use the other for soapy water.

Scrape as much loosened food residue as you can off the dishes before they enter the soap. This also cuts down on how much soap you use.

4. Rinse into the ‘pre-soak’ basin.

Rinsing is what uses the most water. Letting this basin fill quickly means more water for the garden bucket. When it’s full, scoop or pour it to that bucket. This is your grey-water. The amount of soap is dilute enough not to bother most plants.

5. The soapy basin becomes the new ‘pre-soak’.

When the dishes are done and you have finished wiping down here and there around the place, let the food-containing remainder sit and await new dishes. Don’t worry if it gets a bit scummy from living organisms between now and the next washing up. The garden loves microbes, and the soap will kill them when they are washed off the dishes later. Of course if it is too smelly, you may want to hasten it outdoors instead and start fresh. But otherwise,

6. Scrub the former ‘pre-soak basin well, let dry until the next washing up.

The reason for this is hygiene. Bacteria are either aerobic or anaerobic, depending on whether they are killed by the presence of oxygen. The anaerobic ones will all die from being dried out, meaning it will take less soap to kill those that remain when the time comes again for soap.

7. Deliver the nutritious grey soup to your plants.

It’s beastly hot out where I am just now, and the plants can get quickly stressed, especially if the nearby trees are using the majority of the soil moisture themselves, with their deep and established root networks. My little plantings are a mere peach-fuzz in comparison, and the surface, even mulched, gets thirsty at peak growing time.

by Frida Kahlo

Remember, Nature is good! and Nature is good. All else follows from that.

This year’s biological ode to borscht

LIFE IS BORSCHT–BORSCHT IS LIFE

There is no finer belly-filler than a hot bowl of thick vegetables. I am one quarter Slovak, but it’s on the distaff side, meaning my femininity and nurturing capacity are intimately connected with my borscht.

Borscht can be haute cuisine, or the place to use every last leftover at the back of the icebox. Winter is waning and green shoots will arrive soon. Or it may even be shreds of last year making way for the new harvest as the winds blow chill. It can have any number of ingredients, be dairy free or meat free or both, but it always contains the big four of season’s end:

ONIONS POTATOES CABBAGE and BEETS.

Sometimes the cabbage or beets have even been pickled. The chemistry of it means that the red might fade once boiled, but boil it you must. Boil it well until all the anaerobic organisms have foamed and the foam is gone, so your insides will be safe.

Some folks carefully use only red ingredients and others allow the concoction to verge on golden. My borscht happens once a year in my largest kettle and part of it goes into the freezer because it is more precious than gold in this tiny household. This year it also has ground meat, garlic, beans, a splotch of tomato sauce along with the bay leaves and the pickling juices. The onions were sprouting. The beets and spuds were turning grey. The cabbage was limp. Borscht has saved them. With borscht I choose life.

I have not always chosen life. I have not always practiced borscht. Sometimes I have skipped over it in favor of compost. But I have found that compost needs its own recipes. It can’t just accept anything and everything undigested. Far better to have a feces intervention, whether ours or an animal’s. My compost has improved now that I think of it as feed for the local critters who leave scat in exchange. That mean feeding me, the Druid, too, even if my contribution is piped away by the municipality.

Eating borscht can also be as elaborate as you like. Some people fish out the bay leaves and then blend it all smooth. Some blend up only part of it for a ‘richer’ broth. Myself I like the chunks. And because it often ends up too sweet despite all the salting, I will serve it with a dollop. Traditionally it’s sour cream but I’m happy enough with plain yogurt.

At breakfast the ‘dollop’ could also be a poached egg. Borscht is good, hot or cold, at any time. I will eat it steaming hot into my nose or I will drink it blended with ice. Prepare to feel healthy and strong for the rest of the day. Spring cleaning. BORSCHT POWER.

Some other things I have put into borscht:

carrots peppers mushrooms seaweed celery greens squash eggplant meat stock fish sauce sriracha vegetable juice peas miso what you like

THANK YOU BORSCHT

• 

General strike for Beltane/Samhain

  It is Beltane in this hemisphere, Samhain in that hemisphere, the gateway to either summer or winter.  Whichever one you dwell in, the humans are having a world wide GENERAL STRIKE.  That means this day we will not work, we will not pay, we will not purchase. It is time to pay attention to our WORLD instead.

The early founders of the international workers of the world were wise to choose to celebrate it on Beltane.  All the civilized riches and craftsmanship flow from the abundance now manifesting.  It is not for fighting over; it is for sharing and fertilizing.  Care of the cow brings good fortune.  Audubon Society has discovered that controlled grazing of herbivores actually benefits the diversity and capacity of prairies, allowing endangered birds to return. https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/some-ranchers-and-conservationists-agree-grazing-and-logging-can-save-birds/

Even though the pandemic has us unable to gather in human crowds,  we are free to dance around like the flowery king,  Adonis revived,  Flora enthroned.  We are free to look through the briefly lifting veil at the intelligences who have preceded us,  who are safeguarding the cycles of withering and unfolding.   Every cycle of our Mother Earth has a rhythm and that means it is a MUSIC.  Let us listen and marvel at this music now. It is vastly more important than any of the activities we may be giving up for the day.

In other nations, there may be an emphasis on the bonfires,  or the making love,  or the eating and drinking.  Internally it is time to OM it all.  Fill yourself like a cup up to the very brim and it will spill out into the world in a thousand ways.  ‘An it harm none,  do as thou wilt’.  Gratitude is the very opposite of harm.

Our misguided societies need us and today they must learn to be grateful to us.  We will give them great hints by how we prioritize LOVE, Harmony, Beauty and the SOURCE,

which is Our Mother at PEACE. PEACE. PEACE.

 

Have a lovely UNBIRTHDAY!

 

Healthy forests mean healthy people– guest repost

 

‘Now and always, we need to protect, conserve, plant and restore forests, wetlands and other natural areas — to help in the fight against climate disruption and disease spread, and to ensure more people have access to areas that keep us mentally and physically well.’

https://davidsuzuki.org/story/healthy-forests-mean-healthy-people/

Eating hostas: guest repost

I have learned something new! Where I am located the hostas have not yet come up. I will be ready!

Of Plums and Pignuts

One of my favourite seasonal treats from the forest garden is the hostas. No, no spelling mistake: hostas are really edible. In fact, they are a near perfect forest garden crop. Woodland is the natural habitat of many hosta species, so they like moist soil with plenty of organic matter and tolerate a considerable amount of shade. A friend tells me that they have a positive allelopathic relationship (i.e. they secrete chemicals that help each other) with apples, and since the research on it is published in Russian I’ll have to take her word for it. Hostas are no novelty nibble: they have the potential to be a major productive vegetable.

The best part of the hosta is the ‘hoston’, the rolled up leaf as it emerges in the spring, although many varieties are still pretty good even once they have unfurled. The best way of cooking them depends on the…

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“Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

 

https://activismjoystudio.com/keeping-quiet-by-pablo-neruda/

Happy vernal equinox

Here since 2009

 

 

Some new age types insist that it is a mistake to dwell upon what is wrong around the world, that is will induce more of the same to pay it attention.   Instead the most helpful course  is to only broadcast the positive, that which deserves magnification.

I CAN’T DO THAT.    The world is my mirror and I speak truth that I see.  Not all truth is pleasant or comfortable.   Reforms and healing cannot happen in a state of ignorance.  The light is nourishing to many,  disinfecting to many,  encouraging to many.  No matter how low frequency the vibration, there will be beings who are soothed by it and others who are repelled.  And Helgaleena is designed to have eyes open. My observation is my filter; my comprehension is my filter.  It does not remain interior for any longer than it takes to create my emissions.  My product is my artifact.   Sometimes my own process is to me mysterious, but that is the nature of the collective known as a living being.  Autonomic respiration, sublimation, digestion, reproduction, circulation, elimination  and creation of my art.  Then when exteriorized I may decide it is worth a polishing.

Things that by nature work best in darkness must also take place.  Compost happens.  Now and then I resent my inability to make them happen as I watch, but oh well.

 

 

Living upon the Earth.   Some ways of doing it don’t hurt as much.  Let’s do those.

 

 

 

 

 

Dark Roast Press Lovers Daily

is what I filter.   It’s the main thing I edit nowadays.   It’s also available on Facebook as a page and as a group.

peace peace peace

 

 

φυτόν σκέψη

Through Hollow Lands and Hilly Lands

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Conscious evolution: guest post from Accidental Gods

https://accidentalgods.life/conscious-evolution/

Accidental Gods is a podcast/blog started by two seers in UK at the start of the New Year this previous Samhain.  It is clear and beautiful as a method of laying out steps to remain positive toward our future upon our Mother.  Thanks to Nimue Brown for providing a link to this originally.

I am firmly in the camp of those who feel ‘Age of Aquarius’ is in process in this decade and have been intersecting with a number of ways of embodying this, especially as a creative person.   This initiative with its focus on individual consciousness is the most ‘Druid’ one I have yet seen.

peace peace peace

Changing our eco stories

guest post from Nimue Brown

Druid Life

There are a lot of stories being put about right now about what it means to live responsibly. For the examples below, I’ve taken words from stories I have encountered. Nothing here has been made up.

There are people who will tell us that talk of the climate crisis is fearmongering, brainwashing and not to be believed. They ask what we are afraid will happen. I’ve taken to answering this by pointing at the things that are happening – the fires and floods, the tens of thousands who die from air pollution each year, what plastic does in the oceans, that it is in our bodies too, and so forth. Climate denial is a dangerous story that is going to kill a lot of people.

Then there are the people who say things like ‘you can’t possibly care about the environment if you eat chocolate.’ There are many variations, but…

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