Achieving One of Our Goals in Sustainability- Winter Harvest!

Every night now the frost sweeps through the hills and forests around us.  All the tender plants have collapsed, discolored to the Earth, returning quickly to her to become soil as the freezing temperatures destroy their delicate leaves and stems.  The trees stand naked, stretching upwards with their expressive trunks ranging from deep brown to grey and silver and even purplish hues.  We watch carefully the depth of the frost every night to determine when to pull out our potatoes whose delicate stems and leaves have long since disappeared to the chill of winter.  We consider whether to mulch over them with straw and leaves and leave them within the natural winter refrigerator of Mother Earth or to pull them out before the frost penetrates to their depth and store them in a cool room or basement.  

Meanwhile behind a crate of potatoes the garlic begins its cycle of growth, just pushing up above the compost, impervious to the chill of winter.  Little by little we pull the potatoes from the Earth, looking to see what condition they are in.  They are crisp, with perfect skins, red, purple, yellow, delicate fingerlings, russets.  They are the legacy of Indigenous Wisdom and generations of careful plant selection from our Relatives of the South- Genius Gardeners, Genius Plant Breeders, Genius Botanists, who continue to gift us the Potato which embodies not only incredible nutrition but also the wisdom of these generations, the Ancestors!

For us Sustainability is not only an ideal, but it is also deeply ingrained within the choices and actions that we take everyday.  These purple Potatoes skins glisten with a deep purple color and when cut open an intense purple with fascinating designs within it is visible.  The energy of them is striking.  Although purple potatoes, red potatoes, yellow and fingerlings can be purchased at a health food store or in the gourmet section of the not so local supermarket at times, the texture, the crispness and the earthy smell of these freshly dug potatoes is in a world of its own in comparison.   The difference is in the Spirit, the Vitality of the potato itself.  While research has shown that organically grown food and specifically homegrown food is in general more nutritious than the ordinary supermarket equivalent, this does not acknowledge the Spirit.  What we eat becomes incorporated into our physical, mental and spiritual bodies, and food that is produced by machinery, by chemical onslaught and then shipped thousands of miles has a depleted Spirit, and then we eat that depleted spirit.  Our vegetables are complete hand raised!  Our garden beds do not see a plow or chemical and we incorporate spiritual practices directly into the growing of them.  

It is common knowledge (to many) that our Taino Ancestors buried medicine right with the plants in the form of stone Cemis, directly linking Spiritual-Ancestral Power and Wisdom with the Agricultural process. This was in addition to other natural additives that they enhanced the soil with (bat feces, etc).  This was (and continues for us to be) all about bringing the Ancestral Spirit, Mpungo and the Spirit of Mother Earth together along with our own Spirit and Energy within the planting and harvesting process. Additionally attention is given to the Moon and other Celestial movements to bring further vitality to the food which will nourish the body, mind and Spirit!  

Rather than fighting to grow tomatoes in a green house with all kinds of burning of fuels to heat it and bring light to it to force a tomato to grow in winter or to burn fuels bringing a hard, flavorless tomato thousands of miles, we "GROW WITH THE FLOW"!  Here we harvest arugula and mustard greens which will survive many nights of frost before succumbing to the cold much later in the winter.  While these plants struggle to survive the onslaught of bugs in the spring and turn bitter and stringy in the heat of summer, they stay tender and crisp at this time of year, totally free from pests.

Meanwhile in the cold frames our lettuce is growing in abundance interspersed with cold loving greens like mache, endive, cress, strawberry spinach, spinach, swiss chard and cilantro.  These will continue to thrive throughout winter and as soon as the light starts to return in the new year they will resume their rapid rate of growth.  The cold frames allow us to eat fresh greens all through winter with no fuel input other than the radiant heat of the Sun!  (Below: dark green spinach in the center, lettuce to the left and mache to the right).  

While as adults our sensitivities may have become numbed due to years of consuming spirit-less highly processed foods or limp tasteless vegetables, canned veggies or frozen veggies, we can see in our children a sharper mirror image of the vitality or lack of vitality of the foods that are eaten.  In an infant who is first eating vegetables after months of only Momma's Milk we see a Spiritual-Mental Leap that takes place in the child's development when they begin to taste the various vegetables!  And it is a well known fact to those who follow the research that children who eat wholesome organic and homegrown or garden grown vegetables, meats, eggs and fruits are healthier and more mentally alert, more able to learn and develop.  The children are a sensitive mirror of the facts of healthy living, and healthy living IS Natural Living, IS Sustainable Living, IS Living with Sensitivity to Spirit within the continued movement of the Spirit of Our Ancestors!!!   

There is an prevalent arrogance especially in so called "developed" countries where some people look down at those who "Live from/ with the Earth", derogatory phrases such as "subsistence farming" are utilized by ignorant and arrogant people.  These people forget that their sustenance also comes from the Earth although they may be desensitized to this fact through distance from the source of their food and an array of plastic and metal barriers between themselves and the Fertile Earth!  Working as Tainos and as Paleros with Our Mother Earth directly is a great blessing in multiple dimensions, from an abundance of vital nutrients, rich and vibrant textures and colors year around, the beneficial exercise and mental stimulation (positive vibration!) that comes from working with Our Mother, and an Ancestral Connection to all those Ancestors stretching back generations who also worked with the Earth directly.  From the most miniscule of soil bacteria that is invisible to our eye (Mycobacterium vaccae) we learn what we already know: working with the Earth stimulates Serotonin (hormone linked with feelings of well being, decreased stress and anxiety and increased ability to learn) (Note to Paleros:  Think FUNDAMENTO)!  Our Camino  within this Physical Experience of Atabey (Mother Earth) is inextricably linked to growing that which Nourishes us directly from her rich, fertile soils!  The ignorant term "subsistence living" gives us images of depressed people struggling to grow a straggly bunch of crops from poor, abused and compacted soil.  Nothing could be further from the Truth as Our Taino Ancestors and all Our Ancestors from this whole Continent understood very well, Growing "crops" in the permaculture style of the Past and utilizing the Indigenous Practices of Agriculture contains within it a whole University of Wisdom, Knowledge and Positive Spiritual- Mental Development; a healthy body, mind and Spirit!!!

Garlic Planting

This fall we created a new garden for the garlic, a raised bed garden made from stones and filled with the rich forest soil that had been further enhanced by contributions from a series of goats, horses, donkeys and a bull!  In this particular place on the Land the bedrock of Mother Earth literally is right at the surface and it would be very challenging to attempt to grow plants directly upon the rocky soil here.  By creating a raised bed we give the plants a foot of rich fluffy soil that creates ideal growing conditions.  The soil will be able to retain more water because of its high humus content and will be able to drain off any excess water because it is raised which will help the garlic from getting mold conditions while growing if we happen to have a year of an abundance of rain.  There are many places upon the Earth where either due to natural conditions (such as our bedrock area of the Land) or due to the abuse of the land through conventional agricultural practices which compact the soil, the soil is very hard and depleted.  Raised beds can transform these conditions immediately and allow us to grow a greater abundance of vegetables in a smaller space, which saves water and is easier to keep tended!

We have an assortment of garlic (hardneck, softneck and elephant) and some shallots ready to plant.

Above one clove of elephant garlic is as big as Anani's palm!  These are huge cloves, and there are only four cloves per garlic plant and they tend to have a milder flavor than regular garlic.  Garlic is planted in the fall, it begins its growth and then overwinters through ice, snow, frozen ground, to then emerge in the spring, grow throughout the Spring and is ready for harvest in the summer.  Garlic is a powerful medicinal plant, excellent for boosting the immune system.  The mere fact that it not only survives but flourishes through the cold conditions of winter is reflected in its medicinal power!  We utilize it crushed with honey or olive oil and taken by the teaspoon, or made into a garlic tea for colds and flus during the winter.  It is a natural antibiotic.  It is of course also a awesome addition to every meal!  We love to roast it directly on the grill in the summer!

We plant the garlic deep enough for about 2 inches of soil to cover its growing tip, then as the weather gets cooler we add a thick layer of mulch (leaves or straw) on top of the soil to further protect and feed the garlic.  The sticks are to label the different varieties for the purposes of discovering which garlics prefer our soil and weather conditions.  As we continue to select the best of our garlic crop for future plantings we naturally guide the garlic to flourish in our unique conditions.  This is the benefit of saving your own seed or in this case saving your own clove.  It is the very best of the garlic harvest that gets planted for the next year because we want to continue to improve the crop and if we would only plant the mediocre garlic we would be guiding the garlic in a mediocre direction.  There is a spiritual tool or truth to this simple process of choosing the garlic for the next year's harvest!

Anani loves to be involved  in planting all things, but the garlic is especially easy for children because the cloves are big and are easy to handle.  She also discovers that when planting garlic you do not take off the husk like you do when you cook, and that garlic requires patience, in fact almost a whole year of patience!  Whereas arugula and other greens will emerge within days and be harvestable within weeks!  This is a way for her to learn the natural rhythm of the foods she eats, and the rhythm of life and death and the seemingly contradictory elements of being able to plant garlic at at time when everything else is being harvested.  She is seeing that even within a cycle of "death" meaning winter, some things thrive and begin their process of life during this very season of "death".  

Anani is seeing that the Garlic that is harvested is "reincarnating" as we place its clove within the Earth, and that it then sends up a shoot, fills out its root bulb and becomes a full garlic plant once again.  She also sees this with the seeds from the tobacco, the vegetable seeds, and she sees this occurring naturally and through our action to collect and plant seeds.  She sees how every year tomatoes, borage flowers, calendula flowers, holy basil, and other unexpected plants come up because of the seeds they threw down the year before which have re-incarnated once again in the most unexpected of places as the wind or a bird or bee or even an animal that ingests the seed such as a fox takes a seed and drops it in a more distant place.  She sees that tobacco grows by the Sacred Fire from the seeds of the Tobacco that was offered ceremonially to the fire the year before.  This occurs more and more frequently as we enhance the fertility of the soil and bring in a diversity of crops and herbs to the Land.  We have naturalized plants upon the land that simply were not there when we first arrived.  Sweet Annie grows all over the field now, Amaranth grows everywhere, cilantro throws its seeds everywhere and tomatoes come up in every place where we have ever planted them.  This year in our tree nursery tomatoes came up from two years ago!   Holy basil (Tulsi) also came up and it turns out that holy basil is very very medicinal and makes a tea that is slightly spicy and delicious!  All the medicinal herbs can and are utilized for bilongos, cargas, and other Medicinal purposes.  

Plants are vital to us as spiritual-physical warriors!  At a time when the diversity of plants upon the earth are being attacked, at a time when the use of plants medicinally is also being attacked, at a time when the health of the people of the planet is also under severe attack, the plants are our life line!  We love and honor the plants upon the land, we are always bringing more plants to the land and reaching out to our Mother Earth in the spirit of Reconciliation through placing our hands, our sweat and our love upon her to grow an abundance of vegetables, herbs, fruits, nuts, flowers!  We don't bother to roll up our sleeves anymore, we cut the sleeves right off!  Not only is this process healing for our Spirits, our Souls and our Relationship with out Mother Earth, with the Ancestors, with the Spirits of the Earth, but it is also deeply satisfying!

As we continue with the Spirit of Action/ Medicine/ Sustainability

As we continue with the Spirit of Action/ Medicine/ Sustainability, it is very important to realize that without REAL steps, REAL actions, we can never manifest that which we say we strive for. The foundation of an Individual, Family and a Community is the foundation of Sustainability that they stand upon. If that foundation is only composed of fantasy, or of total involvement in an "economic system" that is designed and implemented to give a foundation only to a relatively small percentage of the population, and to leave the remaining people to be the servants, (slaves), servers, employees, to the ones that benefit, then that foundation will crumble and its casualties will always be the people.  It is a system that for all practical purposes keeps the exploited totally reliant on the corporate system, it systematically has taken the Ancient Strains of Seeds from the People and replaced these with hybrid (infertile- meaning will not produce seeds that can generate a future crop), or even worse genetically altered seeds or even terminator seeds. Even a fool can see that in spite of their best efforts this system is cracking, but again the cracking is occuring at the expense of the People.

Not only do we have to be concerned with pesticides, herbicides and "ready-roundup" being sprayed on the crops and poured into the waters, but we also need to be concerned with the TOXIC sludge which has skillfully been used to place toxic waste from many factories onto AGRICULTURAL FIELDS... and now of course cloned animals are on the brink of hitting the supermarket racks. Recall after recall, salmonella scare after salmonella scare come our way, bird flu, swine flu, all generated from downright bad agricultural and slaughter practices.

All this and the food doesn't even taste good and the prices continue to rise... Bread that is flavorless, juice that is so old all that remains of even 100% fruit juice is sugar, lettuces that are tasteless and overpriced, not to even mention the fact that even in season crops are coming from as close by as CA or further. There is only one word for all this and that is SCAM!

All this, and now let's take it to the Heart and Soul of our Identity as Indigenous People, LOVE AND RESPECT FOR OUR EARTH MOTHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! None of the practices involved in getting the food that we buy from the supermarket is Earth Friendly, that is the bottom line. Even the supermarket "organic" brands are dubious at best, an overpriced choice for those who are attempting to eat healthy. Even those "organic" brands are still benefiting factory farmed agribusiness profits. Even they have their salmonella scares! Being angry and / or frustrated is not enough, complaining about the availablity or price is not enough, feeling helpless and limited is not enough, because remember we say that "WE LOVE AND RESPECT MOTHER EARTH!" We talk about how our Taino Ancestors were wonderful agriculturalists with their conucos, how they fished, how they cared for the Earth and each other... Yet, today we care only enough to hand someone a soda, a twinkie, a battery raised chicken, worm infested pork chops, and then throw the numerous layers of packaging and promotional material concerning these things in the trash. What Hypocrisy!

It is great to educate, it is great to share articles from the internet, it is so wonderful to recommend books regarding Taino to eachother, it is great to have presentations (AS LONG AS THEY ARE GROUNDED IN THE TRUTH and ARE NOT THE EXPRESSION OF A PERSONAL FANTASY or a Personal Psychological Breakdown).

It is also wonderful to "CUT AND PASTE" as so many of us like to do, sometimes not even crediting the original author (which is not so wonderful and can bring the accusation of plagerism to us). But if CUT AND PASTE is all you do, and you are calling that "Being Taino" then you are very, very LOST AND CONFUSED and/or MISGUIDED, or you are simply only interested in whatever agenda of egomania, need for recognition, inferiority complex, that you hold!

We are so far from a utopia at this time, we are so far from the "PARADISE" that Jan Carew describes in "RAPE OF PARADISE" or from the obvious agricultural and botanical genuis of our Ancestors as described by Charles C. Mann in "1491" that it would be laughable or cryable to even attempt to compare! However we have the innate Power of our Spirit and our Ancestral Tree that we can manifest and express to the best of our ability in the here and now. With that thought and with the strong Vision for "how it could and should be" in terms of Love and Respect for the Earth who can provide everything ALL of us need if we apply our Love, Intelligence and Hard Work, we, in our humble and miniscule way continue to empower and expand our Actions towards Sustainability, understanding that LOVE is an ACTION and that RESPECT is an ACTION, not two words to be used to manipulate other people.

Every year, we find ways to take more steps towards sustainability, towards empowering the Family and Community, towards the healing of the small area of Land that we are the Caretakers of! As we take these steps we are simultaneously taking steps away from the abusive relationship of supermarket- consummer, overpriced tasteless unhealthy food, and the resulting frustration and stress that comes from those relationships. We also continue to take steps away from dependence on the so called "medical experts" who are in fact (most, not all) barbaric prostitutes for the pharmacutical industry, and many of whom are greedy and arrogant towards the people they allegedly serve, that they apparently took an oath to serve, that oath having come from Imhotep, African multigenius, inspiring Ancestor! May the Spirit of Imhotep and his Ancestral Tree combined with the Spirits and Ancestral Trees of All Indigenous Medicine People of Integrity hold those barbarians accountable to the OATH that they took in the form that IMHOTEP originally wrote it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The photos below are some of the steps that we have taken this Spring, in the Spirit of ACTION/ MEDICINE/ SUSTAINABILITY! We offer these things in the Spirit of Education, Generosity and Empowerment, that we may all benefit from these Actions in that it may empower others to take ACTIONS in a like Spirit!

These seed boxes are a step up from last years (poor quality, one use only) plastic seed boxes. These boxes are made from old shipping pallets which can usually be found as "trash" from most contractors, shipping companies, etc. They are usually made out of oak, a very strong wood, and sometimes even from exotic hardwoods. They could even be used to make cabinets, flooring and the like. These boxes will last for years and are a wonderful way to "recycle" these pallets, many of which would otherwise be burned or simply tossed out. Last year we experimented with paper egg cartons and paper towel and toilet tissue rolls, which were okay but a little "soft" once they got wet. 

Cucumber seedlings!

Broccoli Seedlings, with Hysop and Valerian (two medicinals) which are very very tiny seedlings at this time!

Flowering tobacco and Huichol tobacco for the Spirit! We grow all the tobacco that we use for the Mysterios!

Zuchini Seedlings, to the left of them Sugar Baby Watermelon Seedlings are just starting to emerge!

Lettuce (Green- Optima and Red Galactic) from seeds that are 3 years old (never believe the "expiration dates") and parsley (on the left). Parsley will flourish well into the frosts of late Fall!  

Seedlings that look like grass are Onions, Red Onions on right side germinated much better than yellow onions on left.  Red onions are very healthy, in part due to compounds that express in red color!

Another view.  We do not have a sunny place indoors for our boxes, and these seedlings are sensitive to frost.  Once we plant the seeds, we leave them inside until they germinate, then they go outside on warm days (over 50 degrees) and come in if there is any chance of frost.  It involves a lot of carrying boxes back and forth but is well worth it.  Health above all things!  Of course all this would be easier if we had some huge sunny windows or a green house!  But there is no reason to make excuses when with a little creative thinking we can find a way to get it done.  

We are very happy with our pallet seed boxes!

Remember the dandelion (leaf, flower and root) from the previous article, here it is being juiced (with apple).  It is a very STRONG, FLAVORFUL spring liver cleanse!  The dandelion is very bitter, especially the root, which is why we cut it with apples!  Even with apples it is still a bitter tonic!  We used about 5 of the plants from the photos in the article. Which amounted to approximately 3 of the bundles they sell for $3.99 at whole foods.  So we drank approximately $12 worth of dandelions that we were given by the Land we caretake!  

Glass of dandelion apple juice!

The Bread above is our homemade wheat bread (NO BREAD MACHINE).  This is not rocket science!  While at first there can be some disappointing results, after a small time, the results are fluffy and flavorful, not to mention that there is no more than 4 cups of flour in this loaf!  A bag of flour gives multiple loafs!  More importantly you know what is going into the bread that you will be serving your family, friends and yourself!  Fresh, warm homemade bread is the BEST!  We have virtually eliminated store bought bread.  

Next step, grow our own wheat and mill our own wheat and other flours!  

By the way for those looking to criticize, this is not our only "job", we also run a business,  are building a house, do spiritual work, and are in the process of publishing several books!  So no excuses about "I don't have time for that", and no validity to the popular accusation direct in this direction of "pontificating from an isolate computer screen".  It is a little more work than cutting and pasting articles on the internet, but it is Good Work, Healthy, Vitalizing, Harmonizing and Exciting!

ENJOY!