catkins, cat eggs, averting catastrophe

I can see signs of things waking up, even up here at 9000'. The aspens are spreading out their catkins, robins are starting to give the jays hell. We experimented with plant dyes on easter eggs this year. The kids especially loved how bright pink cabbage juice makes for blue and green. I wondered how much better they'd absorb dye if you hollowed them out and soaked them in vinegar or alum first.

Sometimes I take the scenic route when working with dyestuff. A while back my aunt and uncle
obliged my request for a few boxes of pruning leavings from the fruit trees in their orchard. After soaking this pot-full of the fruit wood twigs for a week I set them on the stove to steam one day and added yarn to the pot the next.  After a cold soak over another day or two I put it back on the stove and repeated the steaming. What had been a decent pale yellow deepened into an almost rusty ochre.

 And then I thought about adding iron water. So I did. Looking back now I wish I had left this first batch alone. But the resulting cool medium gray that developed on those middle skeins of silk is a color I've never gotten before. I keep thinking of things I'd like to knit them up as. With the weather warming I keep thinking of camping, fishing in the early morning hours and the perfect hiking hat. Maybe this one, or this?

visiting

We went to visit family last weekend and brought home what's become a regular assortment of veg and dyestuffs. There were even a few immature cotton bolls to play with and a surprise patch of japanese indigo. The kids splashed around in the ditch and picked popcorn and ran around with the dog. Most of what came home has been eaten or processed by now. The tomatoes were roasted and canned up, the green beans were munched like edamame with leftover ham the first night we got home. There was even a baby ladybug that hitched a ride in the squash and got transplanted to an aphid-ridden artichoke I'm attempting to overwinter.

                                                 

The dyestuffs have been put to work now, too. All of these are hanging out in various canning pots and those giant pails you use for beer brewing, tucked into a corner of the kitchen to ferment and soak up the color. Some were heated beforehand to draw out the dye, some were not and some don't even have fiber in them yet because I haven't quite made it to that step. I'll get there...eventually. The only plant I haven't harvested yet is rabbitbrush. I'm not sure what I'd put it in, I seem to be out of large pots. Maybe I'll skip it this year, unless I run into a good patch of it out there. There's no shortage of it, but sometime soon it'll all have gone brown for the year. 

Grassroots, caterpillars

Alright chickens, I'm going to make this a million times easier for those of you out there who want to help but don't have a thousand or so dollars to spare. I have up to $500 dollars in the bank that I can shift over AND I have a PayPal account (and Square, too, if it comes to that). So if you have $10, $20 or even some spare change under the cushions of your couch you can PayPal it to me and I can wire the total directly to the bank on Tuesday and my landlord will never know the difference. Tweet me (@eatagar), text me or message me for my PayPal email or if you need a walk-through on how to do it. We are so very close and I want to make it possible for anyone to help White Buffalo Farm out, regardless of the size of your savings account. Little things become big things when we work together. A big thank you to the folks who have already donated, THANK YOU!

The video below should give you a better feel for what Wayne and the farm are all about and the difficulties small farms like this sometimes find themselves up against.

 

WBF call for aid from WhiteBuffaloFarm on Vimeo.

 

Help wanted

A couple of weeks ago the family and I meandered our way over the mountains to Paonia for the Mountain Harvest Festival. We packed up our vintage Explorer RV, the S. S. Bill Murray, and camped out in the town park. My mom came up and drove us around to visit grandparents in the area. We picked tomatoes and hit up Taco Time and my Grandpa Harold loaded us up with boxloads of apples and pears.

In between I was there to sell yarny stuff at the bazaar part of the festival. I wasn't sure what to expect because I've never done a craft show on the Western Slope. The feedback was pretty awesome, though. And the sales weren't bad, either. I had my first real custom order and got to demo spin for a bit during the farmer's market.
And something practically magical happened. Myriem stopped by my table and mentioned that she was from White Buffalo Farm. I think I may have squeed out loud a little. Paonia is a small town and the odds are probably smaller than I'd like to admit, but it felt like kismet to have connected with her. I discovered the organic farm online, while looking up things like permaculture and intentional communities. Myriem and Wayne(the current owner) have a plan to create an ecovillage within the farm, a place where artisans can develop a bit of "community-sufficiency" while working on both their craft and the farm. I have been daydreaming about running away to live there, or someplace like there since the doldrum-y dead of last winter. Myriem and I got to talking and we ended up taking a tour of the farm the day after the festival was over. It's situated by the river like the orchard I grew up on, with Akane apples(my favorite) among several other types of fruit and veg. They have lots of exciting plans for the place, including cob house-building workshops and farm-to-table events. Wayne is retiring soon, but it's also really important to him to preserve the legacy of the place. I think it's terribly clever of them and I want my family to be a part of it.

So of course there's a hitch. When is there not a hitch? This one comes in the form of a payment due to the bank by next Monday. They've raised the majority of it, but still need to come up with about $12,000. Here's the plan, in the form of an email Myriem sent to me this morning:

Dear Friends of Desirea! : )

Come on out for this lovely week of blue skies and aspen colors!
On the farm, we harvest tomatoes last week and are now harvesting Asian Pears.

I would be delighted to take you on a tour now that we are making such headway!

As you know, I am fostering the conditions conducive for a farm-based ecovillage in our region! As I write, we are setting the groundwork for an on-farm transition team and putting together an informal advisory board. In order to complete this process, I have an urgent appeal!

We need to raise 12k by Monday.
We are seeking loans of 2k to 5k with 25% interest.
Folks are to send payment directly to our bank in Paonia for deposit.
Funds need to be mailed by Wednesday afternoon or wired TH or FR or even on MON.
If we don't reach our goal, we'll return the funds immediately.
The farm has equity of $1million from which we would pay off this loan.
The early freeze hit us hard last week on our tomato crop.
Please spread the word.
This funding allows us to continue with building a transition team and move in the direction of a farm-based ecovillage.

Please call for bank account number.

Paonia State Bank
128 Grand Ave
Paonia, CO 81428

Once past this immediate hurdle, I would like to create a farm-to-table dinner and present our plans to Slow Food and others in the Roaring Fork. I'm looking forward to creating an exquisite event rooted in my French heritage. Je suis francaise heureuse de vivre dans une region gastronomique du Colorado! Folks from all over are welcome!

With gratitude,
Myriem

-- Myriem
Communications and Development
WHITE BUFFALO FARM
16877 Grange Road
Paonia, CO 81428

{What's in it for me?}
I mentioned a while back how I'd sometimes like to go home and this is one way of approximating that without condemning my kids to lonely-induced social awkwardness. I'd get to work on my fiber art and explore the other post-apocalyptic skill-set stuff I've been dipping my toes into all these years. Add community development to that and it's like I'd be doing my dream thesis in real life. "How do cultures on the verge of collapse perpetuate/preserve collected knowledge?" Let's find out! Then there's the potential for creating space for my mister to work on his guitar building thing and the Waldorf school down the road for the kids...

{What's in it for you?}
You mean, aside from the good, old-fashioned altruistic glow you'd get from doing an extra-good deed? When was the last time you were offered 25% interest on an investment? Or an invite to a picturesque, farm-fresh supper? Plus, if you happen to be of the notion that small farms are good and good food is hard to come by these days, this is an excellent opportunity to put some action where your heart is.

As I sit here on the floor of my kitchen, among the boxes and boxes of apples, pears and peppers we hauled home(I put up the last of the tomatoes yesterday), wishing I had a magic wand or maybe just better financial savvy, I'm also confronted with the possibility of making one dream into a reality, of flipping a lot of negative elements in our lives back into positive ones. Room to run, to develop my craft, to do work besides that I feel is meaningful. It's got some scary parts, too. There's a bit of risk involved in taking such a big leap. I'm willing to take it if it means getting to be a part of something so potentially amazing. But none of that can happen if there suddenly is no more White Buffalo Farm.

{More info on White Buffalo Farm}
http://whitebuffalofarm.org
https://www.facebook.com/WhiteBuffaloFarm
http://directory.ic.org/1691/White_Buffalo_Farm_Ecovillage
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/us/colorado-communities-take-on-fight-against-energy-land-leases.html

Thank yous

Last week we finagled our way over to the Western Slope to harvest some of the Japanese Indigo my grandparents were growing for me (thanks, grandparents!). Getting there turned out to be an adventure. Both of our cars' brake systems stopped working by the time we were supposed to head out there and my mom ended up driving up just to drive us back to Grand Junction the same day. And then, after the indigo project and a trip to the Mesa with the Grandparents Holton, she drove us home. (Thanks, Mom!)

This was my first attempt at growing my own dyestuff from seed and I've been psyching myself out a little. There are just so many steps to it and alkaline dyebaths seem to be a little more chemically than more acidic ones. Plus, there is that whole thing where I try to read directions, I really do (sometimes), but in the middle of everything I tend to just go for it and hope for the best. That works for me about 90% of the time. The rate of success tends to go down the more steps there are and this indigo process has quite a few. In fact, in the future I think I'll be taking a combined note from India Flint and Rebecca Burgess and use fermentation vats. There are fewer steps, bran and corn syrup aren't nearly as icky as Spectralite and heat doesn't play quite so big a role.

Everything turned out fine, if a little pale. Next time I'll know better than to stuff so much fiber in the pot. And to slow the heat down somehow...my Dad lent me one of those propane powered set-ups you use for deep-frying a turkey and it was actually pretty perfect for dyeing on the road. I also claimed one of the old camping backpacks he had in the garage. And a tent. And discovered he has a polishing tumbler thing that might come in handy if I do end up making my own copper toggle clasps for woven cuffs. He caught me eyeballing it and said I could bring the clasps to him if it came to that. Thanks, Dad!

The kids are still asking about when when we'll go back to the cabin. It's my Uncle Milo's (Thanks, Milo!) set up a little ways up Grand Mesa on some property my Dad's parents own. They've had plenty of rain so there were lots of mushrooms and, to the kids' delight, frogs! Not to mention mud. Toby lost his shoes shortly after breakfast. I found a bonus crop of stinging nettles in the woods to toss into the dyepot when we got home. I have scabs on my hand from the itchy blisters they gave me as I was picking them, but (thanks to all that rain?) they hadn't flowered yet and the color looks pretty deep so far.

All weekend I felt supported and encouraged by my family. I usually do on trips back home. We aren't a touchy-feely bunch of people, generally speaking, but actions speak louder sometimes and I feel really lucky to have them all in my life, putting up with my black sheepy ways.