Of love, learning, and soil: A farm and garden update
When Demeter, the Greek Goddess of harvest, grain, and fertility, lost her daughter, Persephone, the Goddess of springtime and vegetation, she cast the world into a great famine. Hades, the God of the Underworld had kidnapped Persephone and insisted on keeping her with him forever. Finally, it was decided to allow Persephone to return to the world, but for four months of each year, she would again descend to the Underworld with Hades. These four months are when nothing grows during winter.
Many ancient cultures recognized, and explained through myths and legends, this dark period of the year, and celebrated the point when the natural world once again began to stir from under winter’s weight. The Ancient Celtic people marked this significant date, when plants began to grow again, February 2nd , as the celebratory Imbolc day .
During this dark season, the Persephone season as many agriculturalists know it, with less than 10 hours of light per day in this hemisphere, plant leaf growth comes to a near halt. However, come Imbolc, it begins to increase with ever growing vigor. Otto Specht students have come to know this holiday as the one dearest to my heart. The high school students have been maintaining cut and come back crops, like lettuce, spinach, mustard, and chard in the greenhouses, and selling them to the Café through the winter as part of their study of the economics of food production, while other students have grown a bounty of head lettuce for the Fellowship Community kitchen.
Preceding Imbolc, mornings on the farm are spent harvesting the last of the winter cash crops and preparing the beds for the next crop rotation of high yield, high return plants, listening to stories of mythological characters from Ancient Greece and the gods’ and goddesses’ roles in our season. Students explore, intellectually, the geologic explanations of the Persephone season, and experience through their own senses of perception, its effects on the plants they tend. They revere the Ancient Celts’ powers of observation of the Natural World, and gratefully make this ancient wisdom their own. Sharing in the plant world’s joy and excitement for making it through another winter and anticipating the coming warmth of the sun in Spring and Summer, they hurriedly get more seeds in the ground and start seedlings for transplanting. Imbolc is as much the welcomed and celebrated culminating day of this dark season for OSS students today, as I imagine it was for the Celts so very long ago.
Imbolc also designates the time of year when the life sap of trees begins to flow again, more specifically Sugar Maple Trees. A spot in the woods where a large red maple has fallen is now the site of many industrious hands busily using axes, hatches, and saws to remove the limbs of this tree and process them for burning in our outdoor maple syrup cooking pit. The love of sweet maple syrup ignites the appreciation for the forest, the gift of the fallen tree, reverence for tools, and the compassion and solidarity of their fellow humans as they work together towards a goal. At the end of it all, OSS will gather together and enjoy a pancake party, with more than enough syrup to go around.
It is no wonder Valentine’s Day falls in the middle of this cold month. Love is in the intention the students put into the growth and maintenance of the garden and its plants, the harvest and drying process of the plants, and the transformation into a useful product. Love is in the delicate tending of our growing plants over winter and in bringing the fresh salad greens to the community. Love is in the new life being placed into the ground as seeds. Love is coming through the darkness together, with shared hopes and goals, even if the goal is sometimes as simple as maple syrup. Love is witnessing, in the students’ interactions and in their appreciation for the natural world, the true magic of their education unfolding. And this education, this living, growing, dynamic pedagogy, is itself, essentially, a manifestation of love.