Japanese Indigo Harvest II, and The Virtuous Greedy.

Yesterday I stopped by our garden in Brooks Park Community Garden to water and check plants.

The first thing I saw was that last two weekends' steamy hot weather had been very agreeable to the Japanese Indigo (Polygonum tinctorium) plants and that they had grown very tall and very big of leaf.   I plucked all the branches with the biggest leaves, but even after that there are still a great deal of up-and-coming leaves growing below the big leaves. 

Now in the direct sun, unshaded by the large leaves up top, they will grow nicely.  I left the garden with about 4 lbs of fresh leaves/stems. 

I also noticed that someone had neatly dug out all of our artichoke plants, every single one, leaving tidy square holes where they'd carefully dug each plant out by the roots.  Now, as irritating as it is when someone makes off with a vegetable I've grown, I usually assume it was taken by someone who was hungry and who needed to gather food.  I've seen a couple of people there, all elderly, mostly women, and I try to 'remember to leave enough for the gleaners'.   But someone actually decided to dig up and take all my plants, as if they were going to transplant them.  There's something very unwholesome about people like that.  Acquisitive people who feel entitled to let someone do a lot of work, and then swoop in and steal it.  Social parasitism.

 

It's been with us for eons, probably, since there have probably always been people that opportunistic and lazy and greedy.   Peter, the manager of the community garden, told me that he'd seen a 'wealthy, expensively-dressed woman' arrive in a fancy, brand-new luxury car, stride confidently into the community garden (the gate is unlocked during the day), and basically go 'shopping' at all the plots where there were vegetables and fruit.  I seem to recall him saying that he confronted her politely, but that she ignored him and kept taking things, and then strolled to her car with her loot.   She is not one of the gardeners; she is not starving; she is a thief.

There's a kind of indecent, acquisitive greed afloat in this country...which, actually, is enshrined as an American virtue.  It has a similar energy signature to that of bullies.  People who like to take other people's stuff.  I've always recoiled from people like that, even as a kid.  I recall my mother expressing admiration of people who were canny and manipulative and acquisitive..."...now there's a man who knows how to live...a real wheeler-dealer...I bet he buys fur coats for his wife," she'd say. 

Gross.  Even as a kid I knew this was not the way I was going to see things.

OK, rant over.



Picture above shows the progress on the kitchen towels.  The first towel is already inching its way towards the cloth-storage beam on the AVL. 

I'm looking forward to finishing this project up and getting ready to mount the Compu-dobby on the AVL, so that when weaving friend Tien comes over on the 15th, we'll only need to hook everything up to a computer and then troubleshoot. 



Anyway, I was yacking about the beautiful huge indigo leaves I'd picked yesterday...

I went home with my backpack full of leaves, and when I got home I dumped them out into the bathtub.  I rinsed them in cool water, let them drain, and just before I went to cook dinner, I sat on the floor of the bathroom tying bundles of the indigo at intervals along a cotton string.  It turned out to be heavy!  Several spiders were apologetically banished from the leaves, an endeavor Carlos helped me with by transporting the spiders in a cup with a piece of cardboard over the top to locations outside. 



And here we are, bathroom festooned with garlands of drying Polygonum, which will turn dark blue while drying.  Hopefully (and it's looking likely, at this point) I will have enough so that in the autumn I can set a fermentation vat with the dried/composted leaves.