Thursday morning. The piglet meetings are normally a small crowd in the winter, and Helen and I have been the only ones willing and able to brave the weather. Still we find our way to the common house, present with big smiles and shiny noses from the cold; but soon the hot tea and check in connection have us feeling warm inside and ready for the day. But today is different, we have a special guest! Kai and his father Moe are visiting the area, and are friends of Brent’s, so they are staying for a few days in the guest room. Kai is a former garden intern from 2016, he spent the summer in the garden helping and creating what we have today. Moe is visiting his son, and has lived in New Zealand for many years. I invited them to join us when I first met them the night before at dinner. We had a short conversation, and I decided I would love to get to know him more, and thought for sure he would be interested in seeing how the garden has changed since he last saw it. Thankfully they agreed to join us, and sure enough we met them the next morning for breakfast and tea.
After getting acquainted we discussed plans for the day. Helen, being the amazing leader that she is, layed out the strategy, and off we went. First order of business was collecting and redistributing the cardboard that had flown off the garden aisles because of high winds the night before. The wind was so strong that night, the lights flickered as the utility poles swayed in the wind. After laying it back on the rows, we put rebar and fence posts on top to weigh them down. We are out of wood chips, so this solution will have to do for now. We were expecting bad weather soon and this was first priority. Compost was also important, and needed to be flipped, so I was very excited they were willing to roll their sleeves up and shovel compost in the cold as dark clouds started gathering above us. Alas, we were done.
“Many hands make light work.” In fact, we were so efficient, we completed all our outside tasks right on time before the rain started to come down around us. We all rendezvoused back in the common house to finish out the day. Because the Snohomish seed swap has been confirmed, Songaia must be present, and we needed to prepare and sort the many seeds Helen had saved from our 2018 season. Today were Brassicas, four giant bags full of seed pods that had been drying since harvest, several months ago. This has been our normal routine for a few weeks now, and I have started feeling like a pro. It's really just a trick of shaking and grinding the stems together to break open the pods and release a tiny tiny speckle of a seed. Its most interesting and can be tiresome, but today it was an experience in showing and discussing the process to others. It felt invigorating being able to share knowledge with another person with a genuine interest in learning about it. You can see the joy in their faces, it's quite rewarding. We released the seeds, and sorted and separated the chaff using a colander, then scooped about a teaspoon (about 30-40 seeds) into small envelopes, closed them and labeled them by their name. “Dinosaur Kale, Harvested 2018, Songaia”. It's a seal of authenticity. These seeds were produced from plants in organic soil, that never needed artificial nutrients, or herbicides or pesticides. I feel pride in representing Songaia in a positive and responsible way. I believe in the core principles that the community was originally built upon. To see these seeds be distributed to other local communities is a source of overwhelming possibility. It’s exciting to know that others will pass on and grow these life sustaining foods.
Kai, Moe, and Helen process Brassica seeds in the Common House. These seeds are destined for the 2019 Snoqualmie Seed Swap in February!
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