Exploring /  by Karie Luidens

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One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Edward Abbey

Preparing /  by Karie Luidens

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With the home garden going into hibernation for the rest of the year, and holidays on the horizon, now is as good a time as any to hit the road…

Hibernating /  by Karie Luidens

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With temperatures in the teens these last few nights, it’s official: the garden is done for the year. Thank you for thriving along with us all summer, dear plants! Sleep well.

Restoring /  by Karie Luidens

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Indigenous languages, lifeways, and relations with the land have all been subject to the violence of colonialism. Maize herself has been a victim, and so have you, when a worldview which cultivated honorable relations with the living earth has been overwritten with an ethic of exploitation, when our plant and animal relatives no longer look at us with honor, but turn their faces away. But there is a kernel of resurgence, if we are willing to learn.

The invitation to decolonize, rematriate, and renew the honorable harvest extends beyond indigenous nations to everyone who eats. Mother Corn claims us all as corn-children under the husk; her teachings of reciprocity are for all.

I’m not saying that everyone should go back to Three Sisters agriculture or sing to their seeds; although I admit that is a world I want to live in. But we do need to restore honor to the way that food is grown. Agribusiness is quick to point out that we cannot feed a world of nearly eight billion people with gardens alone. This is true but omits the reality that most of the corn we grow is not going to hungry people: it is feeding cars. There is another kind of hunger in our affluent society, a hunger for justice and meaning and community, a hunger to remember what industrial agriculture has asked us to forget, but the seed remembers. Good farming should feed that hunger, too.

Robin Wall Kimmerer,
“Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System”

Cooking /  by Karie Luidens

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What better way to cook up my corn kernels than with the other two sisters, beans and squash, especially now that it’s so cold out and we’re craving soup. No recipe here, just some instincts and a little creativity…

Kernels /  by Karie Luidens

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Six-foot-tall corn stalks, a great pile of green husks, fistfuls of soft silk, all for this: the tiny, sweet kernels that will nourish us.

Silk /  by Karie Luidens

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I confess, I’m a little sad to see how underdeveloped my corn is within its husks. The cobs are slightly flaccid; the kernels are tiny and pale.

Corn is a notoriously hungry crop that sucks an abundance of nitrogen and minerals from the soil. I think the previously neglected dirt out back didn’t have enough organic matter to support a full, healthy corn harvest this year. Now that the ground is tilled, a year’s worth of plants have put down roots, the surface is mulched over with vines and stems and leaves—now that I’ve got a compost pile and worm bin breaking down the yard’s fallen leaves and kitchen scraps into rich humus to spread in the garden come spring—we’re well on our way to amending that dirt into a richer, healthier soil for next season.

Still, just look at that shiny silk. The corn plants grew beautifully with what they had and followed their natural pattern to produce seeds. Each tiny kernel put out a soft, slender fiber; together, those fibers slid up and out into the world as the ear’s tassel, dangling and reaching over the weeks for whatever pollen its neighbors released. Well done, little corn.