The arrival of John Quincy Adams, aka Quincy the Cute or Darth Quincy, and his esteemed mother Martha Dandridge Custis Washington was heralded with friendship and feasting. We received Quincy and are borrowing Martha from the same great family friends for whom we moved irrigation pipe this Summer. Our gratitude for their mentorship overfloweth. Definitely part of the Bliss.Quincy, Martha, and Carnation, the bred heifer we initially agreed to purchase, represent a significant development in our permaculture homestead. One of the fundamental principles of permaculture as outlined in David Holmgren's excellent, accessible book Permaculture, Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability defines the importance of relationships in self-reliant systems:
- each element performs many functions
- each important function is supported by many elements
The cows obviously give us milk. Looked at more closely, milk cows transform forage plants (which we puny humans with our single belly cannot utilize) into mineral and enzyme rich nutrition. What we don't consume as a beverage, we turn into butter, cheese, kefir, yogurt and cream. What we don't use for these high value storable foods, we share with our chickens either alone as clabbered milk or added to grains to aid in their digestion. (Chickens are notoriously poor grain digesters, utilizing only a small percentage of the nutrition in whole grains.) Someday, Jeff's dream will come true and we'll have pigs to share this sprouted grain recipe with as well. This Fall, Martha will be allowed to "clean-up" the finished stalks of our Summer garden crops - adding fertilizer as her pointed hooves gently aerate the soil and work in the cover crop seed.If all this weren't enough to set the Whole Life meter a-howling, consider this: we will purchase our winter hay provisions from the same great family. They called this morning to find out which particular part of which hay field we walked through six days a week for the last three months we want baled for our animals. Our answer was immediate. One field had been a glorious combination of yellow sweet clover, alfalfa, Timothy and Orchard grasses, and wild oats. All during August, the field was a heady mass of color, sweet scent, and the hum of bees. I wanted to roll in it, to bathe in it, to eat it every day forever. Alas, my aforementioned lack of an additional three stomachs prohibited such meal time enjoyment.
But wait, now Martha gets to eat that lush bouquet. And I get to drink the milk she so graciously creates from the hay and our pure well water. Getting a hint of the bliss? Permaculture homesteads can take quite a few years to establish simply because of the time it takes for individual systems to mature to the point of an interdependence which is not dependent upon my physical labor to connect the pieces. Sort of like trying to build a functioning ecosystem from scratch.The day the cows came home felt like the hand of Grace connecting the dots for us, laying the path of a beautiful old growth forest at our feet if we were willing to step up. In the company of wonderful friends, we accept.
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