What would happen in your household if the electricity went out, the water stopped running, or a storm forced you to leave home unexpectedly? Most of us have experienced some interruption to our normal routines. Sometimes it lasts a few hours, and sometimes several days. Being prepared doesn't mean expecting the worst. It means understanding what our household depends on and having a reasonable plan when those things aren't available. I'm working on an Oasis Builders 72-Hour Emergency Preparedness Program and Checklist, and I'd like to involve our community in developing it. The idea is to help households become reasonably self-sufficient for the first three days of an interruption, whether staying home or temporarily evacuating. Here is our starting checklist: Water and Food: At least one gallon of drinking and sanitation water per person per day for three days, with additional water for pets and individual needs. Include familiar, shelf-stable foods that don't require cooking. Light and Communication: Flashlights, extra batteries, a battery-powered radio, charged phone power banks, and a written emergency contact list. Health and Sanitation: First aid supplies, essential medications and a plan for obtaining or safely storing them, personal hygiene supplies, toilet paper, and a way to manage sanitation if water services stop. Clothing and Shelter: Weather-appropriate clothing, sturdy shoes, blankets, and supplies for staying warm or cool safely. Important Documents: Copies of identification, insurance information, emergency contacts, some cash, and spare keys. Individual Needs: Supplies for children, older adults, people with medical or mobility needs, and household pets. We also need to distinguish between supplies kept at home and a smaller, portable bag that we can take if evacuation becomes necessary. But having supplies is only part of preparedness. Do we know where everything is, can we use it, and can every household member who needs access find it?

If we gathered onions, garlic, leeks, and parsley from our gardens today, we would be bringing together foods named in Mayster Jon Gardener’s instructions preserved from around 1440. The spelling looks different, but several names are recognizable. His opening lines include “leke,” “ownyns,” “garleke,” and “percely.” Across nearly six centuries, these are still familiar garden crops and kitchen ingredients. What interests me is how easily we can picture using them. Onions and garlic might begin a meal in the cooking pot. Leeks could become part of a soup, and parsley could supply leaves for a sauce. Medieval English cooking records also connect these plants with soups, sauces, and other preparations. Mayster Jon gives parsley particular attention. He describes cutting it repeatedly during the season, while leaving plants intended for seed uncut. This was a crop to manage for continued use, with some plants serving the kitchen and others providing seed. That does not mean his parsley or onions were identical to the varieties we buy today. The familiar crop name does not establish the same size, appearance, flavor, or growing behavior. Nor does one gardening text tell us what every household grew or ate. Still, these recognizable foods give us a practical connection with the past. We can begin with something we know, then ask how people grew it, prepared it, and carried it into another season. For our next look at Mayster Jon’s garden, I would like to follow these familiar foods a little further, from the growing bed toward the household table. Which of these four do you grow, and which earns its place most often in your cooking?

A fallen leaf may remain recognizable even after it softens, develops holes, and begins breaking into smaller pieces. Those changes can involve several kinds of activity, each changing what other organisms can use. Last week, we explored why the compost community changes. This week, let’s follow how the work connects. Bacteria and fungi break down organic compounds, obtaining resources for their own growth. Their activity changes the material itself as a leaf gradually becomes a different food source from the one that first entered the pile. Where conditions suit them, shredders such as millipedes and sowbugs consume decaying plant material and break it into smaller pieces exposing additional surfaces for microbial activity. Microorganisms change the food available to larger organisms, while those larger organisms change the surfaces available to microorganisms. The microorganisms also become food. Protozoa and some nematodes graze on them, moving resources through the food web. Worms consume decomposed material and associated microorganisms, then redistribute material through their movement and castings. Droppings and dead organisms provide further resources for decomposition. These relationships help explain why a list of organisms tells us only part of the story. We also need to understand what they consume, what they change, and how those changes affect other members of the community. The connections vary with the system. A hot pile’s center does not support the same larger organisms as a cooler leaf pile or worm bin. We do not need every group present everywhere for decomposition to continue. Next time you notice a leaf softening and breaking apart, consider how several kinds of activity may be contributing. Microorganisms can soften the tissue, shredders can expose more surface, and other organisms can feed on the microbes growing there with each activity changing what is available to others. We can observe some of these changes, while much of the work remains unseen. Those observations help us understand decomposition, but they cannot tell us whether compost is mature or free of pathogens. As we learn these relationships, we can better understand why supporting suitable conditions matters more than trying to assemble a particular collection of organisms.

Who has harvested cowpeas. What harvest advice do you have... and tricks or short cuts to make it easier. Below is what I follow for most beans. @Sarah Lauren , hope this helps. Fully mature cowpeas can be harvested for fresh shelling or dried for pantry storage and next year’s seed. The steps depend on whether they are still soft or already hard. 1. Pick and separate by condition. Harvest after dew has dried. Support the vine while picking, or snip the pod stems. Keep plump, flexible pods separate from brown or tan, brittle pods. Pick dry pods before they split and scatter their seeds. 2. Handle soft peas as fresh produce. Shell the plump pods promptly. Refrigerate the peas while waiting to cook them, or blanch and freeze them for later. Fully grown peas can still contain too much moisture for shelf storage. 3. Finish drying the dry-harvest batch. Spread mature pods in a shallow layer on screens or trays under cover, with good airflow. Avoid deep piles and closed buckets. In humid fall weather, bring them inside rather than repeatedly exposing them to dew or rain. 4. Shell and sort. Once the pods are brittle, put them in an old pillow case and slap the pillow case on the floor repeatedly. The pods will break open easily, you can then pull the shells out for compost and the peas are left on the bottom of the pillow case. Sort through the peas and discard moldy peas and those with obvious insect damage. 5. Dry thoroughly before sealing. Spread the shelled peas in a single layer with airflow. They should be hard throughout, without a soft center. A hard surface alone does not establish safe storage moisture. If you are uncertain about dryness, you can freeze rather than risk sealing damp peas in a pantry container although pretty easy to tell when they are well dry. Keep dried peas in a cool, dry place. 6. Set aside planting seed. Choose fully mature, sound peas from healthy, productive plants. Finish drying them on a rack, then label the variety and harvest year and store cool and dry.

A beetroot on the kitchen counter tells us something about the harvest. Understanding how it grew means looking beyond the root itself to the soil, weather, season, and care that helped produce it. Rudolf Steiner used a similar example when he began his agricultural lectures in 1924. Before following those lectures, it helps to know a little about the person behind them. Steiner was an Austrian philosopher and lecturer, born in 1861. He studied science and philosophy and spent years editing the scientific writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German writer who also studied plants and other natural phenomena. Questions about how people observe and understand nature were part of his work long before he addressed agriculture. He also developed anthroposophy, a spiritual worldview through which he sought to understand human life and nature. That background is important because his agricultural lectures combined practical concerns with spiritual and cosmic explanations. In June 1924, Steiner delivered eight agricultural lectures at Koberwitz, in what is now Poland. These became the starting point for the later biodynamic farming movement. In the opening lecture, he argued that describing a beetroot’s appearance and composition did not adequately explain its life. Understanding it also required attention to its relationship with the field, soil, and season. That gives us a useful question to carry into this historical series, what becomes visible when we study the relationships surrounding a plant? We also need to distinguish what Steiner observed, how he interpreted it, and what evidence supports an explanation. His spiritual claims are part of the history we will examine although their presence in a lecture does not establish them as scientific findings. As we follow these lectures, we can consider the questions Steiner raised, the explanations he offered, and how people later tested or developed his ideas. Have you encountered biodynamic gardening before, and what have you wondered about it?