Preparations for Bountiful Harvest – You Gotta Love It!

Sometimes I wonder about the things we do to make events successful.  Take the 2 days leading up to the last Day of Culture.  We had a “to do” and “shopping” list that included some unusual things.  The list for pottery: galvanized garbage cans with lids, medium box of horse manure, bale of wood shavings, stack of newspaper and kindling.  For arranging: grasses, cattails, thistles, dock weed (Rumex), cornhusks. For natural dyeing: chokecherries, beets, onion skins, wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), and purple cabbage.

Wormwood for making plant dyes and arrangements.

So we did a bit of gathering ourselves.  Thursday had me out in the back barn pitching dry, aged to perfection, horse manure into a cardboard box, borrowing my galvanized feed cans and pilfering the wood pile for small, dry wood.  The first two acquisitions “delighted” my husband as the manure stunk up my car which he had to drive the next day and using the feed cans for pottery making – well that’s fine if your horses like “smoked” grain.  Oh well.

Next day, I announced to my co-workers that my farmstead’s chokecherries were non-existent so we needed to find others in Jamestown.  Fortunately during a staff “drive-about” last week we discovered a bush with the biggest, blackest berries I’d ever seen. So we set off armed with paint pails and a broom (for pulling branches closer).  What we didn’t anticipate was that the berries were so big because no animal could reach them. The chokecherry “tree” was in a ravine. Unprepared, wearing sandals and light colored clothing; we scaled the cliff only to realize that we’d left the broom in the truck. After much stretching, swatting (bugs), itching (bugs and thistles) and maybe some swearing we came away with a quart of berries.  Getting back up the hill was another challenge, good thing thistles and North Dakota grasses are so tough…you just hang on and pull yourself up!

Monster Chokecherries for Dyeing

Saturday started at 6:15 am when I woke up and realized there was barely enough time to collect the remaining items. I rolled out of bed and into my rubber boots, grabbed a basket and bucket and headed to the garden.  In the veggie garden, I pulled beets (for dye) and picked basil (to use when tasting the homemade cheese).  In the pasture, I picked the dock and wormwood (a weed we are desperately trying to kill as it takes over everything…maybe we should start making the spirit absinthe … remember the Degas, Manet, and Picasso’s paintings?).  We have more than enough of these “weeds” should anyone want to come gathering.  On the way into town I stopped in the ditch and cut cattails and some grasses that were taller than me–amazing what a plant can do in a short season with all that rain.

To be continued…