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?

We have been learning to recognize qualities such as warmth, coldness, dryness, and moisture in ourselves. These same qualities are also used in traditional herbalism to describe how herbs may influence the body. Consider ginger and peppermint. Ginger is traditionally considered warming. Its pungent character and warming sensation make it a familiar choice when someone feels chilled or experiences sluggish digestion. Peppermint on the other hand is generally considered cooling. Its menthol content produces a cooling sensation, and it has a long history of use for digestive discomfort, particularly when cramping or tension is involved. Traditional herbal energetics helps us understand these qualities and how they may influence the body. Warming and cooling are not precise measurements of body temperature, but they are traditional descriptions that help guide herbal selection alongside our understanding of an herb's actions and safety. This brings us to an important relationship between the person and the plant. If someone already experiences excessive warmth, a strongly warming herb may not be the best fit. If someone tends toward coldness, a cooling herb may not provide the balance they are seeking. But we cannot make that decision from one quality alone. A person who generally feels cold may still benefit from peppermint when experiencing digestive cramping because peppermint has actions beyond its cooling quality. Likewise, someone who generally feels warm may find ginger helpful for occasional digestive sluggishness. We look at the particular discomfort, the herb's actions, the person's usual tendencies, and how they respond. An herb is not automatically a poor choice simply because one of its qualities seems opposite to the person's constitution. As we continue learning, we will also encounter drying, moistening, relaxing, and toning qualities in herbs. Together, these descriptions help us understand why an herb might be a good fit for one situation and a poorer fit for another. The goal is not simply to memorize what each herb does, it is to understand why its qualities might fit the person and the conditions we observe.

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?

Have you ever removed a tomato seedling or young fruit tree from its nursery pot and found roots circling around the inside? When growing roots reach the container wall, they may turn and follow it. If the plant stays in that container too long, the roots can become crowded and tightly bound. Why does this matter? In a vegetable transplant, tightly crowded roots may slow establishment in the garden. In a tree, a thick root circling close to the trunk may eventually press against it as both grow, restricting healthy development. Before buying or planting, slide off the container and examine the root ball. Are there a few fine roots near the outside, or a dense mass of circling roots? On a tree, locate the root flare, where the trunk widens into its main roots. The flare should be at or slightly above the finished soil level, not buried under soil or mulch. What happens to roots while a plant is in its pot can affect how it grows after planting. Recognizing the problem is the first step. How we correct it depends on the plant. Which observation is the clearest warning sign of a potentially serious root problem in a container-grown fruit tree?