The Pleiades. And with their rising, for some folks, a new year begins.

I have compulsively searched the sky for this little star cluster since I was a kid, growing up in Kiama on Dharawal Country, where these stars are known as the Seven Sisters.

I couldn’t tell you exactly why I love this smudge of stars so much. Six or seven stars visible to the naked eye, a blur of light that sharpens when you look slightly away from it.

But so many cultures hold this star cluster close, and I have spent a long time wondering why.

The ancient Greeks named them the Pleiades, seven sisters pursued across the sky by the hunter Orion. In Arabic they are al-Thurayya. In Japanese, Subaru. In Pitjantjatjara they are Kungkarangkalpa, the ancestral women of the Seven Sisters songline, whose story crosses the continent now called Australia from coast to coast, one of the great songlines of this continent.

Stories of sisters. A hen and her chicks. A shoal of fish caught in a net. Seven women who liked onions better than their husbands, as told by Mono people of California’s Sierra Nevada. And again and again, in traditions far removed from each other; women fleeing a hunter into the sky.

The parallel has led some astronomers to wonder just how old this story might be.

Each of these encoded narratives are distinct, and they belong to the peoples who tell them. What all these narratives share, is the watching. Whole calendars have turned on Pleiades/Subaru/Matariki, this one small star cluster - again, and again.

For the Mexica, this star cluster was Tianquiztli, the marketplace. Once every 52 years, when their two calendars completed a full round together, priests watched for Tianquiztli to pass directly overhead at midnight, the sign that the world would continue and the New Fire could be lit. The west-aligned streets of Teotihuacan, older still, have been found to be aligned to the setting of this constellation.

For the Celts, the moment when Tŵr Tewdws reached its highest point at midnight once marked Samhain - the festival between autumn equinox and winter solstice. The season of the thinning veil between worlds. A time held open for grief, for tending the dead of the past year, which closed around the turning of the year at winter solstice.

Heliacal risings

The astronomical events these cultures watched for have precise names - in case you are vague on them, as I was until recently, let me fill you in:

The heliacal rising of a star is when it rises in the east just before the sun, visible for a few minutes in the brightening dawn before it is washed out. The heliacal setting is the other end of this sky story: the final evening you can glimpse the star in the west, just before it follows the sun down under the horizon, and is gone.

Gone, because between its heliacal setting and its heliacal rising, a star is simply absent from the night sky. It is rotating through the daytime sky during this period, but lost in the sun’s glare. So - as far as the eye of the watcher can see, it is gone. Travelling underground until it rises again, as some traditions say.

Seen from here in southern lutruwita Tasmania, the Pleiades is gone from early May till late June. Seven weeks or so of no sisters in the sky at all. And then, one cold morning, they return - rising once more in the east.

What the return of this constellation signifies depends on where you stand. In the Northern Hemisphere in June, the heliacal rising of the Pleiades falls in summer, and has signalled sailing weather, planting, harvest or the beginning or end of rains.

In the Southern Hemisphere in June, the Pleiades rises in midwinter, in the darkest part of the year, just past the winter solstice. Same stars, opposite season, different encoded narratives.

Matariki

Down here in the south of the south, one of the tellings of that midwinter return belongs to Māori tradition. Matariki is the name of both the brightest star in the Pleiades cluster, and also the cluster itself.

When Matariki rises again in the dawn sky during the Tangaroa nights, during the last quarter of the moon in the lunar month of Pipiri, the Māori new year begins, for some iwi. The stars themselves return in late June each year; but the celebration waits for the correct nights of the lunar month.

This is why the date of Matariki shifts from year to year: it follows the Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar. This year those nights fall in early July, and the public holiday in Aotearoa lands on Friday the 10th.

Most of what I understand about Matariki I have learned from the work of Dr Rangi Matamua (Tūhoe), who, with other knowledge holders, has spent decades bringing this knowledge back into wide practice.

At Matariki, hautapu ceremonies are held in the pre-dawn dark, he explains, and the names of those who have died in the past year are called out to the rising stars. Matariki gathers them up and carries them into the sky, so they have good company on their final journey. Food is offered in steam. Then feasting, remembering, and planning for the year to come.

I am not Māori, and Matariki is not my heritage. I hold these learnings as a guest. But I can witness, and be grateful for the shape of what is taught and shared: that there is a time of year for sitting with grief, and it is now, midwinter, in the dark.

It is also mushroom season here in southern lutruwita, and the mushrooms know what to do with endings. Break it down. Acknowledge that the whole was more than the sum of its parts, and break our bodies down, anyway. To carbon, nitrogen, and water. So much water - and all that water in us slowly returning up to the sky, before falling again as rain.

Cultural astronomy and western science arrive at the same place, on this: we return to the sky - all of us - one way or another.

The promise of return

And in this winter season, as usual, I am surrounded by seeds. Buckets and baskets of them, drying before storage. Carrot, fennel, parsley, dill, all rattling their little maracas whenever I try to find my workbench. The scarlet runner beans take longer, sitting in piles like black-and-purple jewels, nearly ready for the big jar.

These seeds are the evidence of seasons passed. See? those good things did happen. The promise of return. Fuzzy little astronauts, the carrot seeds: time capsules, promises, kisses to a future spring.

In a modern world short on ritual, the cycle of the seeds holds me to earth. My own small version of what the sky is doing this week. After absence, return - and the certainty of the cycle continuing.

So one morning soon, before dawn, I will be on a hilltop wrapped in three blankets, hot ginger tea in my mug, watching the north-east hills for a little cluster of stars. Thinking of my own lost and loved ones, in my own way, while across the sea in Aotearoa, families gather in the cold dark to welcome the new year in.

Mānawatia a Matariki. And if this has sparked something, go straight to the sources - references are below.

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A note for skywatchers, all over:

For a nice change, we all see this star cluster rise together! The Pleiades return to the dawn sky in June across all the mid-latitudes of Earth, both north and south, and because of where the cluster sits in the sky, it rises low in the north-east - whether you are watching from Tasmania or from Madrid, New York or Kyoto.

The difference comes later in the night (Pleiades will arc high overhead in the northern hemisphere, and travels low across the northern sky, for us southerners), but at the rising - the moment is hemisphere-proof.

If you are somewhere north of about 50°, maybe in Britain or Canada, your midsummer all-night twilights may have obscured the cluster at first - but it should now be findable in your dawn sky.

So, to all: look north-east, before the sun.

If you enjoyed this, please consider liking, commenting, or becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is so appreciated, and helps keep this journal free for all (yay).

Some further reading:

• Matariki: The Star of the Year - Dr Rangi Matamua (Tūhoe)

• Living By The Stars - Dr Matamua’s website

• Matariki – te Mātahi o te Tau - info hub at Museum of New Zealand

• First Knowledges Astronomy: Sky Country - Karlie Noon & Krystal De Napoli

• The First Astronomers - Duane Hamacher, with Elders & Knowledge Holders

• The Burunh Program for Cultural & Indigenous Astronomy - new fave!

• Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters - National Museum of Australia

• Our Moon - Rebecca Boyle (especially the chapter on the Nebra Sky Disc)

There is a month in the depth of the year when the dark outlasts the light by many hours. The sun leaves early, sliding behind the hills while the afternoon still feels unfinished, and the nights that then unfold are the longest of the whole turning year.

We could call this the dead of winter. People often do. But there is nothing dead about this place. This is the month when darkness is at its fullest blooming - and when the moon, riding high and bright, has the most night sky to cross.

Call this the Campfire Moon: the season of longest nights, when fire and moon together reach furthest into the many hours of darkness the sun has yielded.

It asks something of us, this month. Not to endure the dark, but to come and sit inside this special place.

The dark is its own country

We have learned to speak of darkness as an absence - the nothing that arrives when the light is switched off, the empty hours to be got through until morning.

But darkness is not empty. It is a vast, welcoming country, fully inhabited, with its own citizens and its own hours of action. Moths set their course by the moon. Owls hunt by the smallest sound. Flowers that stay closed all day unfold their pale faces only once the sun is gone, releasing scent into air that no daytime creature will ever smell.

For all of these beings and for so many more, nightfall is not an ending. It is the opening of the day.

And we are night-loving creatures too, in our deep design, more than the sunlit world lets us recall. Our bodies are built to fall every evening into real, deep darkness - and to be mended there, by the lack of light.

Our sleep cycles stitched back together, our inner clocks reset, the long slow housekeeping of cells that can only happen in the dark. Take the darkness away, fill the night with artificial light, and our bodies struggle to stay well.

Darkness is not a blip in the day to be corrected. Darkness is a land that our bodies yearn for.

The sky hungers for this darkness as well. From a place where the night is genuinely black, the Milky Way is no mere sprinkling of stars - it has great depth, and current, and shadow. Across this continent, many First Peoples read a great emu in those dark rivers of the galaxy, a bird shaped not from the bright stars but from the darkness amidst them.

Emu can only be seen in the night sky in places where the night still runs deep. Let the glow of a city leak upward and it is no longer there - not because a single star has fallen, but because the dark that holds the shape of Emu’s body has been washed away.

So this is one gift of the month of the longest nights. Darkness is not a void. It is a habitat, brimming with life and meaning - and mid-winter is the season we can visit darkness most abundantly.

The long bright moon

A simple moonlit fact sits at the heart of this month… the shortest days make for the longest nights! And these longest of nights, when the moon comes round to full, hold more moonlight than any other nights of the year.

The mid-winter full moon does not bumble low along the horizon the way the winter sun does. It does the very opposite. The full moon of winter takes the high road - soaring above in the tallest arc it will reach all year, sailing nearly overhead through the long winter night, from horizon to horizon.

This is true across the world… wherever you stand, the mid winter full moon climbs highest, and stays out longest, pouring its light into the most generous span of darkness in the year.

Hour upon hour - cool, silver, unhurried light - laid out across the frost.

The living world does not flinch from this abundance of moonlight. Plants read moonlight in another language entirely than sunlight; a night soaked in moonglow does not scramble their inner clocks or rob them of rest the way our own electric lights do.

The moon is no intruder upon the dark. It is one of the night’s own - an ancient and trusted member of the household of darkness, woven of the same cloth.

A campfire, lit

To mark this turning of the year, a simple practice. A handful of sticks. A patch of bare ground. A match.

Your campfire need not be grand. It can be the smallest thing - a few twigs caught alight in a courtyard, a single candle on a windowsill, a flame held against the night sky for only as long as it lasts.

The size is not the point. The point is the lighting of it: the deliberate creation of campfire light when the year’s darkness is deepest, and the choosing to stay beside it a while.

This is the oldest midwinter move there is. Older than any calendar, older than the names we give the months. When the cold closes in and the night grows long, we draw close to a campfire, and to one another.

To intentionally sit with firelight is the simplest step beyond an ordinary evening - and it changes the whole character of your night.

What the campfire does to us

Sit down by a campfire after dark and something in you turns over. You can feel it happen, even without a name for it.

Some of it is chemistry. Firelight is just bright enough to hold the body’s melatonin release, and therefore the night’s sleep, at arm’s length - to keep you wakeful a while longer - yet it falls at exactly the hour when no more daylight work can be done.

And so, in our campfire brainstems, at this time of day we are awake and idle at once: alert, unhurried, with nowhere on earth we need to be. In another place.

And the campfire holds the eye in a way few things do. There is a light-looking that drains a person - the hard, fixed glare of a screen.

Campfire offers the other kind. It gathers your gaze and rests it in the same moment, shifting and flaring and never once demanding. You can watch a campfire for an hour and rise from it filled, rather than emptied.

Campfire light alters how we are with one another, too. By daylight we read each other ceaselessly - the set of a shoulder, the whole weather of a face, who stands high and who stands low. Around the campfire, all things grows soft. Bodies become shapes against the dark. Faces blur and flicker.

It becomes hard to tell the important from the unimportant, and so, for a while, the question loses its grip. The day’s long list of grievances are quietly laid down.

Even time changes shape, by firelight.

What is told in the dark

We know, as it happens, a good deal about how humans tend to behave around a campfire after dusk. The anthropologist Polly Wiessner spent many years among the Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari and did a thing no one had thought to do before: she set down what was spoken of by day and what was spoken of by night, and laid the two side by side.

In daylight, the talk was working talk. Plans and practicalities, who had done what, the grumbles and corrections and steady ordinary business of holding a group together.

By night, by campfire light only, it nearly all became story. More than four conversations in every five turned to tales - of real people, of far-off places, of things long past and people long gone.

By campfire light, the communal talk loosed itself from the practical and went wandering. It reached for those who were not present, for country beyond the horizon, for the dead and the unseen. The imagination ranged out further than the daylight ever thinks to send it.

Campfire light is the hour for everything that binds people at the level of feeling rather than function - the singing, the dancing, the ceremony, the long tale unspooled by someone who has mastered the telling.

Campfire light seems to be a precious space where the greater shape of how to live together is handed on - not taught so much as told, and felt, and laid down in the body to be carried forward in time and space.

Older than memory, and this is its season

None of this belongs to one people or one place. When Wiessner cast her eye across sixty separate land-based societies the world over, she found the same line drawn through every one.

Night and firelight talk, culture after culture, was given to story, to ceremony, to the imaginal realm. As the Ainu of northern Japan hold it: the day is for our own affairs, and the night belongs to the deities.

Some who study these things now suspect the campfire-lit evening is not really part of the day at all, nor just the threshold of sleep…

…but instead, a distinct third place.

Campfire time is a phase of our body clocks that is entirely its own, one that our minds have been shaped within across hundreds of thousands of years.

A time-place that is neither labour nor rest, but something apart: a time where we perceive the imaginal realm as the most solid reality.

A place for travelling far, in time and space, and drawing the faraway near - all whilst sitting by the fire, together.

And mid-winter is the season when the chance to inhabit this third time-place swells to its greatest becoming.

On the longest nights of the year, the firelit hours spill out across hours that any other season would still count as day. The campfire moon is the month when the oldest part of the human day, this third place, grows longest of all.

Many of us have largely set down the possibility of this third place, in our current way of living.

For most of us the evening no longer fades with firelight sinking to coals but ends with the flick of a switch - the day clapped shut, screen-light carrying us right to the edge of sleep.

No slow hours left in which to turn the day over in our hands and our hearts, to mend what the day has bent, or to let troubles cool and settle with the embers.

But the knowing of that other kind of evening remains. It lies only dormant, not lost - waiting just beneath the surface of any ordinary night, in every lineage there is.

The people we each come from knew this once, every one of them, and used this third place skilfully. It has only been a while.

And you are always welcome to return there.

Back to the fire

So here is your invitation: lean into the longest of nights, and a small campfire lit for a while - with the moon somewhere overhead, riding its highest road of the year through all those hours in the lands of darkness.

There is no gate-keeping to this practice, and no permission required. A few sticks, warm enough clothes, whatever company gathers - or none, which is its own kind of company.

Strike a match to the tinder. Sit down for a while, and let the campfire do its quiet work upon you. Welcome the darkness in, as the nourishing landscape that it is.

Let your soft fascination hold your gaze within the embers. And let that be enough.

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Milkwood is a reader-powered publication written by me, a human. You are welcome to join the conversation:

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If you can, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll be supporting me to keep writing + keeping this journal free for all (yay). Thanks for reading, and be well - K

Another darkness-related read:

Sources & further reading

Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen - Wiessner, P. W. - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

How conversations around campfires came to be - Dunbar, R. I. M. - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The history of fire use and its effects on human sociality - Attila, Y. - Eurasian Journal of Anthropology

Hearth and campfire influences on arterial blood pressure: Defraying the costs of the social brain through fireside relaxation - Lynn, C. D. - Evolutionary Psychology

Real-ambient bedroom light at night increases systemic inflammation and disrupts circadian rhythm of inflammatory markers - He, Y., et al. Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety

Whitening the sky: Light pollution as a form of cultural genocide - Hamacher, D. W., De Napoli, K., & Mott, B. - Journal of Dark Sky Studies

Interference of moonlight with the photoperiodic measurement of time by plants, and their adaptive reaction - Bünning, E., & Moser, I. - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework - Kaplan, S. - Journal of Environmental Psychology

We do tend to call this season ‘midwinter’, I’ve noticed, even though the coldest of days won’t come to southern lutruwita for another month. But… perhaps it’s a light thing, I guess? And also, it sounds cool. In the garden, Midwinter is one of my favourite seasons.

Midwinter is bone-gardening time. Weaving time. Observing time. Sparkles of frosty mornings, and so many ideas brewing.

Because frost has now arrived, and nuzzled everything it has been able to touch - and so, who will stay and who will wither has now become apparent. I’m still in ‘planting phase’ of this garden of ours, so I’m still learning which ‘light frost tolerant’ perennials can truly live with how the coldest of nights move through this space. Who will grow there? And who will not?

I’m learning that this place is a mosaic of microclimates - which makes for a lot of guesswork as to where the edges of possibility sit.

We live in a valley on melukerdee / palawa country, beside the southern ocean, on a north-facing slope - and this particular combo of maritime climate, mid-slope sunshine, and the way the frostlines weave through the hills here… seems to result in only light frosts, for this garden patch. For now, at least.

I’m very aware that this frostline and seasonal movements of cold air can change - will change - from year to year. Something as simple as the felling of a few trees, either downslope or upslope from this backyard, could tweak how the frostlines of this valley might settle on this slope… as a result of the details of where the cold air flows, where the wind blows.

And then there’s the progressive effects of climate change to try and guess at. So I’m continuing to plant species suited to both best and also not-great predictions for this landscape, in the nooks and spaces that I have, and learning as I go. Grief gardening meets radical hope, if you like. Such is every gardner’s work, now.

But back to midwinter - in the here, and now. I delight in the arrival of this frost. I sing little songs to it. Look forward to it’s return. Welcome, cold wet garden, welcome. It is bone-gardening time.

For bone-gardening season is to consider the skeleton of the winter garden, and what to work on next. Considering what the frost reveals, and also, far more importantly, a time to focus on my dreams of a garden full of delightful woven structures.

Because bone-gardening time is actually get-your-woven-fence-on time. I love woven fences, And I wish my garden were full of them. I am far from an expert, however, so I have only erected one low woven fence so far, around the blueberries. But I wish for so many more.

In my mind, Winter Garden Kirsten potters about the garden in her well-worn tweed vest, ready to weave fences here and there, her hedging tools on her belt and by her side. She has somehow, magically, already done all the winter mulching, and all the weeding, too - and so now is only focussed on setting up and making woven fences throughout her garden. She hammers in the many vertical stakes that will hold the weavings with skill, and without fuss, bother, difficulty, or swearwords of any kind.

The woven fences are low, and made of many coloured woods and branches - from plum tree prunings to black currant prunings to willow switches and more. Their woven lines flow through the garden, creating beautiful organic form as well as function, directing foot traffic, containing mulch only where it needs to be, and preventing joyful dogs from leaping straight into new planted garden beds.

Winter Garden Kirsten also makes dead hedges, an excellent use of all the bits and bobs that aren’t suitable for weaving fences.

Longish piles of sticks and such, bounded by sturdy upright poles - dead hedges create fabulous insect habitat, allowing all kinds of pollinators and beneficial wasps to make their home right in the centre of the garden.

Now these kinds of garden fences do benefit from some replenishing every other year or so, it’s true - but it is all done with joy, in the sparkling frosty mornings, by Winter Garden Kirsten, with her Very Obedient and also Helpful dogs by her side, with a thermos of tea waiting just over there, on the stone steps…

… … …

Stepping outside of my mind, now, I AM hoping to construct at least one more small woven fence, this winter, if I can find and prune enough sticks…

Because winter dreamings aside - I’ve found that even very beginner woven fences can look okay, and work just fine. And I will learn, as I go.

Tweed and hedge tools aside, wrangling sticks and stakes in the winter sunshine is a happy thing to spend my short-day-season lunchtimes doing, so that is my mid-winter garden plan.

Happy solstice, all. May your campfire burn bright.

(And because I cannot help myself, here is my favourite hedge-layer guy, and also here and here are some great dead hedge how-tos - though not great for snakey backyards)

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Writing, this month:

• Timewater - On tidal lore, the intertidal commons, and the oldest clock in the world

• Grandmother Rhubarb + the Rhubarb Express, which was an actual train. And love-notes written in ruby red stems. And a few recipes, of course.

• How to Touch a Chicken - aren’t these overalls enough?

Reading, this month:

• Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader - by Báyò Akómoláfé

• The Memory Code - by Lynne Kelley

• Folk Wines, Cordials and Brandies How to Make Them - by M.A. Jagendorf, Andre Simon

And also:

An interview I did a while back has just come out:

• Green Dreamer Interview - Kirsten Bradley: Cultivating active hope through small daily actions - by the excellent of . Includes a Very Good List of cool folk doing excellent things (scroll down)!

This article, that I wrote last year, might be of use this coming weekend:

• Solstice Campfire Resources - incase you need a push, or a pull, to get excited about marking the solstice. In whatever way that looks like for you.

Alrighty lovelies - I’m actually cough-writing this from the couch of winter lurgy, with a large pot of ginger tea and dreams of being back on deck for solstice. I do know ginger tea to be quite magical, so I’m hopeful.

May your darkest (or lightest) month of the year be full of many sticks and weavings, in whatever form they may take. Tweed not necessary, if that’s not your thing. And may you and yours be safe and well ~ K

If you can, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll be supporting me to keep writing + keeping this journal free for all (yay). Thanks for reading, and be well - K

Rhubarb was a plant of high mystery, to me as a child. It grew in my Nana’s garden of cold clay in the bottomlands of that cold valley, on the shady side of the house, where the brick garden edges were submerged in moss. That rhubarb was my Nana’s pride and joy.

First of all, I could not figure out what all the fuss was about. When we went to visit, my mother would make admiring sounds and intakes of breath and ‘oohhh… look at your beautiful rhubarb, Mum!’ - which I realise now was a good way to put my Nana in a much better mood. But why were we all standing around in the freezing mud admiring and heaping praise on… some stems? for being red?

While staying at that old house in the bottom of that cold valley, if we weren’t outside admiring the ruby stems beneath their enormous leaves, we were inside, eating rhubarb for dessert.

I don’t think my Nana Doris believed in sugar, beyond the teaspoon-full we were allowed in our black tea, so I remember the stewed rhubarb she would serve being very sour, and… not very lovely. So now - doubly mysterious. What was the deal, here? I did not get rhubarb at all.

Nana’s rhubarb, as it turns out, did not mind, and carried on. Rhubarb is like that.

Rhubarb comes to us originally from China and surrounds - there is a whole family of Rheum species, and many of them have a root that has been used medicinally for many generations. The rhubarb that many of us know and love, from gardens and pies, is a species that was developed over time, mostly in Europe starting in the 17th century, and which resulted in the hybrid plant Rheum × hybridum - the one that we now grow.

Rhubarb is technically a vegetable, but is mostly treated like a fruit-adjacent. It’s also a hardy perennial - dying down over winter, and coming back strong in the spring. An excellent friend for including in the understory of forest gardens, who spreads it’s big green leaves wide over summer, shading the soil, and yielding those ruby-red stems for about 9 months of the year, in most climates.

Rhubarb needs a good cold hit over the winter months to be happy, and winter is the best time to plant it. You can source bare-rooted rhubarb crowns (a dense-looking clod which is actually a rhizome) at this time of year, and/or convince a rhubarb growing friend to divide some of their crowns (digging up and slicing the rhizome rootball with a sharp spade is a good way to do it), and give some to you.

Also - rhubarb is hardy as hell. I know all the growing guides say it doesn’t like heavy clay soils, and to do this and that… but in my experience, if you plant your rhubarb crowns with a good bucket of compost, mulch them deeply, and not let them dry out over summer, you’re prettymuch there.

Like many perennials, rhubarb stores lots of energy over winter in its underground rhizomes, and come springtime, is ready to come out swinging, with very little extra attention other than compost and mulch.

So - you eat just the stems, by the way. I’m sure you knew that? And not the leaves. The leaves have too much oxalic acid in them and are technically poisonous, so stems only, friends! But you can happily add the leaves to your compost and they will break down quickly (and so will the oxalic acid) so they’re not a danger to the worms and microbes in there.

In this most recent garden I’m growing, I got hold of a few buckets of rhubarb crowns a few years ago. Looking up how to best care for my winter-planted rhubarb crowns, it was then that I learned about ‘forcing’ rhubarb.

Forcing Rhubarb:

Forcing rhubarb is where you trick the rhubarb into thinking the whole plant is still underground by covering the emerging crown with a darkness-maker (like a big pot) - so it shoots up quickly with lots of sugars in the stem, in a desperate attempt to reach the light.

Then, at some point, you suddenly take off the big pot and go… “Haha! Fooled you, Rhubarb! And now I will cut away at your pale sweet stems and take them for my own, and you must try again, if you are ever to reach the light, this season.”

Which, all up, I didn’t think sounded like much fun, for the rhubarb plant.

Isn’t that, like, gaslighting the rhubarb? And all for a slightly sweeter stem? At the expense of this dear perennial plant’s ongoing resilience?

Clearly I am Doris’s granddaughter, getting a little too something and projecting all over the rhubarb’s hopes and dreams. I took a breath. And researched further: Turns out you do not need to force rhubarb to get a great crop - you can just let rhubarb do its thing, and all will be well. Breathe out.

However…

It was then I learned of the Rhubarb Triangle. And the Rhubarb Express.

And yes, that is indeed a train full of rhubarb.

The Rhubarb Express

So in the Rhubarb Triangle, a small and specific part of West Yorkshire, England, the early spring rhubarb is grown, in darkness. This rhubarb is grown in great dark sheds, and produced for the first spring markets in the cities. And there in the dark, triggered by whatever growing cues rhubarb needs to start sprouting (I’m suspecting mainly soil temp, as daylight is definitely not invited into these dark sheds)… the rhubarb grows long, and pale, and sweet.

Harvested by candlelight (which plants recognise as separate from daylight for a bunch of reasons, some of which are mentioned here) - the sweet and pale rhubarb stems are gathered in great bunches, and then bundled off to market.

In the heyday of high rhubarb production, the Rhubarb Express was a special train that ran daily at this time of year, transporting all this precious rhubarb to the cities. And during the early 20th century, especially in the war years when sugar was rationed, the extra sweetness of this first spring rhubarb was much prized.

After the Second World War however, rhubarbs’ popularity took a dip, as imported fruits became common, and other sweetnesses became commonplace. The Rhubarb Express stopped running, was no more.

But there are still some faithful growers carrying on in the Rhubarb Triangle - and here is a little doco about them that I found…

The rhubarb in my garden is currently the direct opposite of forced rhubarb - the leaves are giant and Gondwanian, the stems fat, shortish, and ruby red.

This late autumn time is rhubarb’s last hurrah of the season - and it’s time for me to harvest, before it all dies down for winter.

Amongst my harvest this year is the first harvest from a special plant - someone else’s Grandmother Rhubarb.

So just before my Nana’s house was sold, that winter, in that cold valley long ago, my Mum of course dug out all the precious rhubarb crowns and distributed them like the muddy plastic pots full of heirloom jewels they were. I took a big pot-full, because I didn’t want to say no to my grieving Mum.

And that’s how I started growing, and loving, rhubarb.

Years after this, when we were moving south, it became apparent that I could not move to lutruwita with my various heirloom jewels that had followed me from rental to rental over the years. So they were all planted in friends gardens, including the Grandmother Rhubarb, with a whispered goodbye - then south we came.

The Grandmother Rhubarb Abides

But then - about a year ago now, I was talking to the marvellous Sally, at her market stall, while admiring her huge pile of rhubarb. “It’s actually from my grandmother’s plants” Sally said, and I proceeded to have a little moment.

Sally, being a legend and totally getting the Grandmother Rhubarb connection, kindly offered to dig me out a bit of hers next winter - and some months later, a plastic pot of another family’s heirloom jewels arrived on my doorstep.

And so the Grandmother Rhubarb is now back in my garden, via a different lineage of rhubarb lovers. Family heirloom rhizomes, feeding us all, year after year.

And - just to say - this is the stewarding of a continually alive plant we’re talking about here - digging it up every few years, dividing it, then back in the ground - or passing bits of it along to other gardeners… over many generations.

It is a particular kind of awe I feel, for this kind of inheritance. Rhubarb gets me in the heart.

Small proofs - of considered, continual care. Beloved, tasted, tended, and then - in time - passed on. A fiercely normal, everyday kind of love made visible… and rendered ruby red.

And I especially like that it doesn’t really matter whose Grandma it is.

If someone loved their rhubarb enough to carefully steward it forward through generations… then that is Grandmother Rhubarb, to me. And I am delighted to host that plant in my garden as an honoured guest, during this life of mine.

For it is entirely probable that Grandmother Rhubarb will outlive us all, and carry on.

Rhubarb, after all, is like that.

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What I’m doing with my rhubarb harvest this week:

• Making Rhubarb Cheong (but with leatherwood honey instead of sugar)

• Soaking Rhubarb in Fruit Juice, then dehydrating it for sour lollies

• Also dehydrating the leftover cheong rhubarb, incase that is tasty too

• Baking rhubarb with cloves, ginger and leatherwood honey

And… things I realistically will not get around to making this week, but which sound excellent, fun and delicious:

• Rhubarb Sima - Finnish Mead

• Lacto-fermented rhubarb sticks (yes, like pickles, apparently it’s delish)

• Dehydrating rhubarb with sugar - or without sugar

• Making ’s Rhubarb Syrup

• Making ’s Rhubarb Cheong (like, properly)

Milkwood is a reader-powered publication written by me, a human. You are welcome to join the conversation:

Subscribe now

If you can, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll be supporting me to keep writing + keeping this journal free for all (yay). Thanks for reading, and be well - K

Rhubarb-y references:

• All about Rhubarb

• Rhubarb as a Medicinal Plant

• History of Chelsea Physic Garden

• The Rhubarb Triangle

• The Rhubarb Express

• How to Force Rhubarb

• Beyond Pie: Chewy Candied Rhubarb

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The tide went out while I was sleeping, and this morning, the land in front of me is new. Tidemade.

Not new the way a swept floor is new - new the way only intertidal places can be. What was written here yesterday - in footprints, dog trails, a sandcastle or two, the long drag-marks of a kayak - is no more, may never have been.

The tide came in, and covered all. Cleansed all. And then, slowly retreated. This low tide shoreland has been returned to itself, new and clean and briefly, gloriously, patterned with only birds feet, and soldier crabs skittling.

Here on the southern edge of lutruwita, our tidal range is gentle. A metre, maybe two on a big spring tide, when all possible tidal forces converge.

The reveal is modest: a widening of the beach, a fringe of exposed rock, the soft estuary flats revealing secret crusts of oysters and bits of old boats. It is a familiar daily breath, but compared to some places on Earth, a small one.

In some places on Earth right now, I know the tide is going out for miles - a new country appearing, horizon to horizon, to be crossed quickly before the sea returns. Different scales, same space: the tidal zone, appearing.

This sometimes-country - the intertidal, between the high-tide mark and the low - belongs to two worlds and fully to neither. Twice a day it is ocean floor. Twice a day it is land. And in most places, in most legal systems, in every tradition I’ve come across: it belongs to everyone. Or, it should.

Timewater

The Norse word for tide is tidevann. Timewater. I love this word because it names what the tide actually is: not just water, but time made visible - time you can stand in, time that tells you what to do next.

In Anglo-Saxon, tīd meant time before it ever meant tide. The same word held both. Which makes sense, when you think about it: for anyone living in tidal communities, tidal time was time. And some places, still is time. Not metaphor, nor poetic phrase - but the main, actual, practical, organising rhythm of the day.

Then there’s Flood, and Ebb. The Flood tide is the incoming. Also called the Flux tide. At this point, the tide is ‘Making’. The Lively Waters.

The Last of The Tide is just before High Tide, when ships might still embark. Until it is Still-Stood. The Top of the Tide. Full Sea. The High Water.

And then the Tide Turns. The Ebb tide is the outgoing. The Going tide. The Slack Water follows, at Dead-low. The Dead Waters. When the Tidemade is revealed - objects and landscapes only glimpsed - until the Flux begins, and the tide is Making once more.

In palawa kani - the language of the palawa people of lutruwita - I’ve read that full tide is neanta payawaree - woman tide - and low tide is loo payawaree - child tide. The full tide is the mother; the low tide, what she reveals. Tidal knowledge held not just in practice but in the structure of relationship itself.

Each of our tides are local in a way that the sun is not. The sun rises for everyone, everywhere - adjusted for longitude, but reliably universal. Your tide is yours - of your place on earth, specifically. Shaped by your local bays, your headlands, your continental shelf, the particular geometry of your coast. Tide is a place-based timewater - every day, and always.

Born on the incoming

Before Newton and his crew named gravity, and the invisible forces (Moon, Sun) who pull the oceans towards them, while the Earth spins beneath, the tides were already living knowledge. Felt in the body, built into the calendar, woven into language. Coastal peoples didn’t require a mechanical explanation to live in tide-time. Tides rose and fell. They shifted. You planned with them. You read them, moon by moon, season by season, place by place, until they were as familiar as the face of someone you loved.

And then, they did what we people do with the things that matter most: they watched carefully, and placed this tidal knowledge inside their hearts, stories and lives.

The tide has been recognized as a cosmic threshold, holding the lore of birth and death. In Wales and Portugal and Brittany, and along the Cantabrian coast - it is said that you are born when the tide comes in, and die when it goes out. James George Frazer recorded this knowledge woven through dozens of cultures when he was writing The Golden Bough. It kept appearing, held in different forms, arrived at from different directions.

I read of some peoples who buried their dead on the flood tide, never the ebb - lest the retreating water carry the soul somewhere too far to return from.

This shows up in stories, too. Barkis, the old sea captain in David Copperfield, lies dying in his house, and Mr Peggotty explains: “It’s ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it turns, he’ll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide.”

And in Breton local knowledge - butter made at the tidal turn would be good, clover sown at the flood would grow, milk foaming in the churn would keep foaming until high water was past. The hen eggs: best set under a brooding hen on the incoming tide if you wanted hens, the outgoing if you wanted roosters. The tide reaches all the way into the farmyard, the dairy, into household chores, and daily matters.

Folklore, yes. But also… examples of this same deep recognition that the tide marks transitions, thresholds, passages between states.

Slack water as the pause between worlds. Between ebb and flood. The moment the sea holds its breath before turning. This was the threshold: the pause between, the held breath of the world. Even Bram Stoker noted this - Dracula could only cross running water at slack or flood. Even Vampires respect the timewater.

Living in tidal time

The tide ran beneath entire working lives, too - and in some places, still does.

Take the King’s Guide to the Sands - a royally appointed position (still!) that I just learned of, in Britain. The first Guide was appointed in 1548, by the Duchy of Lancaster, to lead people safely across the highest path through the wet sands of Morecambe Bay at low tide - a massive shortcut that bypassed a swamp and a river. Given that it was a sand path across tidal flats, only sometimes accessible, and prone to shifting about, it was also “the most dangerous highway in Britain”.

There’s the alternative route of a train now (and a road or two, I’m sure) however the position of Guide to the Sands has never lapsed. Michael Wilson, a local fisherman, holds it now.

Then there is the wonder of the Brobs - which the King’s Guide to the Sands maintains to mark the crossing: laurel branches pushed into the sand at intervals, showing where the highest sand path lies at low tide - the same road that will be many metres underwater in a few hours.

Laurel branches, as an aside, are used as Brobs because they hold their leaves over many days, even when submerged in the tide. Cheerful little green tops telling you where to go, and how not to drown on your journey across the bay.

The Brobs are moved as needed - there’s been times when the main course of the river has shifted six miles from its previous course overnight, after heavy rain, and so the highest sand path across the bay at low tide changes also. Tidal knowledge is never finished. The crossing you walked last week may not be the crossing you walk next week. The Guide to the Sands knows this. Best follow him. And the Brobs.

Saltwater drovers work in a similar register. Cattle are still mustered and moved with the tides between the lutruwita / Tasmanian mainland and Robbins Island - the tide as gate, opening and closing on its own schedule, and the drovers planning their movements around it as a matter of course. In Scotland, at Kylerhea on Skye, drovers once swam cattle through the shallowest crossing at slack water, from island to market - nose to tail, with the window of safe passage measured in minutes.

In all of these life ways, the tide is the organising principle. Communities didn’t work around the tides; they worked with them. The tide told you when to plant, when to trade, when to cross, when to pray. It was the clock that actually ran the day.

The Ungovernable Commons

The wrack line is the high-tide mark: a dark ribbon of kelp, shell grit, and sea-delivered things left at the top of the beach by the last high water. In many places, this is where private property ends, and the commons begin.

In Australia, law runs to the high-tide mark and then stops. Everything below that is public space. So… low tides are for exploring - for making your way around to that secret beach that you can’t access by land, or simply inhabiting the intertidal commons - a rare remnant of ungovernable space, in this world.

But still so liminal: the tide resets this commons multiple times a day. You cannot fence it, build on it, or easily permanently mark it. Any structure you place there will be underwater before nightfall. This is a commons not by decree, but by physical reality - which the tide will enforce, protect, reveal, and then reset, in it’s own rhythm.

I also love that the legal definition of what counts as intertidal is itself lunar. In Australia, the High Tide Mark is measured by the lunar month. In America, the high tide mark is measured by a 19-year cycle called the National Tidal Datum Epoch - the same Lunistice cycle that drives the slow swing of the moon’s highest rise and lowest dip on your horizon.

These commons is literally measured and defined by the moon.

People have always made the most of these commons - for gathering food and materials, and also for holding space.

In 1843 - during the Great Disruption - a ‘Free Scotland’ congregation in Strontian found itself without a church, and living under a hostile landowner.

So they held their church services in the low tide lands, on the foreshore below the high-tide mark: on land the laird didn’t own, couldn’t own, and couldn’t stop them using. The commons of the tide made them free.

And once apon a time at Great Yarmouth, in England, Dutch merchants used to run a VERY pop-up market called the Dutch Fair on the main beach… which was only revealed at low tide.

Twenty or thirty flat-bottomed boats would beach themselves at high tide; the water would go down, and the merchants would unload on the sand and start selling - herring, Dutch pipes, dried flounders, wooden shoes, apples, and gingerbread. A very quick festival, which brought folk from near and far - until the incoming tide called an end to the market, flooded all traces of both herring and gingerbread, and re-floated the boats who were all well away before the next high water arrived.

No lease, no landlord, no permission required. The commons as a point in time, and an event, as much as a place.

As you might guess, this world being the way it is, the intertidal commons remains a contested space in many places.

On the Isle of Skye, a project called Building the Intertidal Commons has spent the last several years working to enshrine collective usership rights over the Scottish foreshore in law - to make explicit what the tide has always implied.

The goal of the project is that all economic activity on the foreshore must be “ecologically regenerative and socially reparative.” Not just accessible. Held to account - for the sake of both the community, and the more-than-human world.

This matters because the pressure on intertidal zones is ever-growing. Industrial aquaculture, coastal development, sea level rise - as the sea rises, the intertidal shifts, and these commons will shift with it. Whether these spaces remain a commons depends on decisions being made now, in rooms that mostly don’t smell of the sea.

The tide is coming back in. I can see it from here - the flats beginning to flood, the water creeping its way across the sand, the wrack line soon to be lifted and rearranged.

The low tideland is lost, and it is also not. The same rhythms that uncovered this shore this morning will return it tomorrow. The timewater continues.

Paying attention is the invitation, if you want to fold this kind of knowing into your knowing of place.

Taking notes on how to become ungovernable, generous, and how to always show up once more - like the tidelands - is the offering.

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Milkwood is a reader-powered publication written by me, a human. If this journal speaks to you, you are welcome to join the conversation:

Subscribe now

If you can, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll be supporting me to keep writing + keeping this journal free for all (yay). Thanks for reading, and be well - K

References

• Tidal Cultures Website - what a generous trove! Owain Jones is a Good Egg.

• Time and Tide Museum Paintings

• The Fishy History of Dutch Herring

• The Golden Bough

• Building the Intertidal Commons

• Floating Church, Free Church: Naval Policies in the Long Reformation

• Kelp, Clearances, Clanranald, Speculators and Scottish Scoundrel Lairds

• King’s Guide to the Sands

• Testing the Sands - Karen Lloyd

• Saltwater Drovers

• The Wrack Line as Commons: An Intertidal Boundary Marker and Place of Local Coastal Cultural Practices

The first time I was asked to touch a chicken, it was during our first real photo shoot for Milkwood. Our first serious magazine article, where we were meant to be farmers.

While we were indeed actual farmers… representing convincingly as farmers, who also believed in climate change (I know, sounds crazy now) was something that we felt we had to get right, in order to convince others of that same reality.

And so a few days before, I had asked the fancy Sydney hairdresser, because I’d gone to Sydney for a fancy farmer haircut, where I could buy some denim overalls.

I was aware that our seriously scruffy farm attire of weird 70’s vests and way-too-big-even-when-cinched-in but hey there’s lots of pockets Hard Yakka pants might not really be what the magazine piece was hoping for.

I was directed to a retro shop in Redfern, and I found some excellent specimens. And so I had the overalls, and I was ready for the farm shoot.

We asked our dear friends with the very beautiful farm if we could take the pics at their place - partly because it was much closer to the city, and also because their farm was green and lovely, unlike our bare and rocky hill country, in a watershed that we were trying to help rehydrate, but hadn’t managed to, as of yet.

“Just pick up that chicken,” the photographer said, and I froze.

Nick, being a lovely person, picked up the chicken. We got some shots, Nick holding the chicken, me standing there in my new overalls next to Nick. “Maybe pass Kirsten the chicken,” said the photographer, and I froze.

I’m wearing overalls. Isn’t that enough? Surely.

I picked up a pumpkin, instead.

Overalls AND a pumpkin! Enough to be proof of my status as Deep Farmer, yes? Actually no, said the lovely photographer - not the pumpkin - would you try the chicken…?

It was at this point, about eight years into our farming journey, that Nick realised that I could not touch chickens.

Chickens, to me, look like deeply, deeply evil psychopaths that have descended from dinosaurs - heartless, single-minded, evicerating demons who can smell fear - particularly mine. Their beady eyes, their pecky beaks, their scaly legs. They’re basically malevolent dragons in disguise as a bird, who lays breakfast.

I had managed to avoid touching chickens fairly well up to that point, despite us having many chickens. I was fine with eggs, I was fine with plucking dead chickens, I was fine with processing chickens, and fine with cooking chickens.

But touching alive chickens was something that made me want to shriek and flee, as all the voices in my head screamed RUN. RUN, NOW.

And in my 30s, I just didn’t understand that I could verbalize that touching chickens was hard for me. Amongst many other things.

I thought in order to be a homestead-y climate action badass farmer girl, I had to touch all the things, had to do all the things. And I could usually do most of the things… and the things I couldn’t do, I would learn quickly. But touching chickens was beyond the valley of death.

I looked up what this is called, just now… Alektorophobia - an intense, uncontrollable fear of chickens. Also, my teenager just told me that Steve Irwin (the Crocodile Hunter guy) lived with a mortal fear of Parrots! Which is known as Ornithophobia - the abnormal and irrational fear of birds.

Actually, I am quite glad that fear of chickens gets its own distinct name, and are not just lumped in with ‘birds’ - who are, mostly, fine and dandy. It also makes sense, given how scary chickens are.

By the time we shot the photos for that third book, I was no longer in the chicken-touching closet. I had verbalised my fear to at least 3 people on earth, I knew a lot more deep-breathing exercises than previously, and I was pretty sure I could touch a baby chicken, maybe even hold it up and look at it lovingly like backyard-farmers do, to their animal companions.

So Nick scooped up a baby chick, and I held it, and I even patted it, and I smiled, and the sun set behind us, and I was touching a chicken.

Weirdly (but also - of course), I happen to be the family member who cares for the chickens at our place.

I love these chickens. I care for them every morning, rain or shine. I love watching them, love seeing what they think is delicious this particular day. I plant hedges for them, and replant great knuckled silverbeet plants - past their prime but still sprouting leaves - in the chicken run for them to browse over winter.

I love the super-productive chicken-compost system we’ve set up in partnership with the chickens. I love caring for the broody hens, moving them to a warm safe place to chirp over their clutch of eggs for 21 days (their eggs, who are everybody’s eggs, as they gather whatever eggs get laid as their own) and I love watching them hatch their clutches of babies in the spring and the summer.

But touching chickens is still hard. I had always blamed my un-bridled panic on the exterior object (ie the chicken). A bit like characters in greek myth, before the concept of Id and the idea of internal impulses caught on… if you feel panic, it must be the evil monster bird.

Definitely not anything to do with my own internal workings. It must be the fact that the chickens are nightmare monsters. Nothing to do with me and my anxiety and neurodivergence.

Looking back through the mixed-bag of photoshoots over the Milkwood years, by various magazine photographers, I can see that I mostly got away with it:

However, things have improved, of late.

Now - because I am older perhaps, and certainly because I contain both far less fucks and slightly more self-regulation, I can actually touch a chicken as long as I have long-sleeved overalls on and gloves and a hat and eyeglasses.

Which is not, I guess, actually touching chickens, but I still feel pretty triumphant.

I’m thinking all this as tonight we are catching chickens. It has been a summer season of many new baby chicks, now that we have Eric Eriksson-son, the Quamby rooster who ‘works’… as the chicken parlance goes, for fertility.

By the end of the season, all the cutie-pie chicks are grown, and that means we usually have a whole lot of young roosters. Young roosters are beautiful and brave and wild and fabulous, but in any flock of chickens, one rooster is plenty.

When there are many roosters, as there always is at the end of a season of chick-raising, the young roosters will either fight, or in our case this year, all become great friends. But regardless of that, they will all try and ‘step’ on the hens as much as possible. The hens are not delighted by this.

The head rooster, who currently at our place is Eric Eriksson-son, is also not delighted by this young-rooster energy, and it’s just really not good for chicken run harmony. So the young roosters need to go.

So this evening, our friend Billie is helping Nick wrangle the three new young roosters, who have all just started to crow, into pet crates, so they can go to Billie’s house. The easiest way to do this is at night, after they’ve all gone to roost in the coop. It’s a flappy, squawky business, extracting just the birds you want by head torch with all the chickens protesting loudly, but it works.

At the same hour this evening, we have Colin arriving, to try and extract three young Quamby hens from the henhouse. The Quambys are a Tasmanian breed, and last winter Colin gave us a new Quamby rooster (Eric Ericsson-son) who, as said, as been a lovely flock-steward, and who also ’works’ (hence, the baby chicks this season). In return, the plan was to give Colin some of the young Quamby hens in autumn.

So there’s three young Quamby hens to find in the chicken house, three young roosters, and maybe even these two other big, beautiful black hens that we inherited from Bud, who have vehemently refused the attentions of Eric Eriksson-son, and clearly need to go to our friends’ house, to live in a girl-gang, un-harassed.

Strangely, as I’ve recently been fronting up to such things as my CPTSD, I find that I can apply the lessons of (slightly) better self-regulation to things like touching chickens. I might even help out, tonight.

Which surely is the whole point of therapy, right? Not everything is fixable, sure, but still…

Anyway, the moral of the story is: it’s now many years later from that first time. I have been through many pairs of overalls.

I’m still deeply in love with chickens, and sometimes, on a good day, I can touch them. And I would consider that progress and healing, and perhaps the ultimate growth I might expect in this lifetime.

Viva la evil dinosaur monster birds, who lay breakfast. Thank you for the learning.

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Milkwood is a reader-powered publication written by me, a human. If this journal speaks to you, you are welcome to join the conversation:

Subscribe now

If you can, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll be supporting me to keep writing + keeping this journal free for all (yay). Thanks for reading, and be well - K

Happy new moon, lovelies. We’re just over a month from Solstice, now. There’s bowls of curing beans everywhere I look, the fire is on (it’s Sunday), and finally, a small scrap of gentle rain has arrived.

Such a very dry Autumn here - the sound of raindrops on our tin roof feels especially delicious, with a little side serve of heartbreak. May the groundwater begin to re-charge in this valley, and in all dry valleys, from this day onwards.

This dry autumn has meant a bumper season for beans, however. While I love picking beans green and crisp, they always seem to get away from me - both the bush beans in their many rows, poked in here and there, and all the climbing beans which I plant at the bottom of every likely ‘if you squint, it’s a trellis’ structure I can find, in late spring.

From a quick survey of the many beany bowls in my house, the scarlet runner beans definitely won the day, this season. And while they were previously what I would consider a ho-hum bean (they’re great, but not AS great as my other faves)…

it is slowly coming to me that Scarlet Runner Beans might be the ultimate garden companion, both for today, and in all our climate futures following.

Let me speak to you of the Scarlet Runner, just for a moment…

Scarlet runner beans (Ayecohtli in Aztec) have been beloved by growers for hundreds of generations - they come from the seedkeepers and soils of Mesoamerica and have been cultivated for up to 7,000 years, both as food and medicine. Wow.

I know the Scarlet Runner bean as a robust, knockabout climbing bean. They start strong, twine upwards with determination, and will cover an overhead trellis by early autumn.

Also known as ‘seven year beans’, Scarlet Runners can be grown as annuals, but they are actually a short-lived perennial (which is very cool and unusual, for a bean) who re-shoot in spring after they die back in early winter, if you leave their roots in.

Their established root is actually more like a fat little forked tuber - which is where they store their energy for future seasons. They’re a resilient garden buddy who flowers with cheerful red flowers in drought and in frost - and I can’t imagine a temperate garden without them planted on the edges.

So to the bean bit - you can eat the green pods of the scarlet runner bean whole when young (they’re great in a fresh tomato sauce) but most folks consider the pods too ‘hairy’ or something, so leave the pods to mature on the plant until they are clattering bunches of dry, light brown pods. Which you can then pick, shuck, and dry the beans inside - a very low-effort way to produce a lot of big, beautiful, black-and-speckled-red dry scarlet runner beans for winter.

Once they’re all shucked and dried (bite-test them to ensure they’re dry enough - if your teeth leave any indentation on the bean, they need to dry some more)… it’s time to sort em out. Some for seed keeping, and most for eating.

‘Save the best and eat the rest’ is the bean mantra I’ve always gone by - I think it was Jodi Roebuck (another bean lover) who I first heard this saying from. I set aside about a litre of the best looking scarlet runner beans for my garden and the local seed library, put them in their own labelled jar, and then all the other beans go into the pantry for eating - sometimes in jars, some times in buckets - whatever airtight technology I have available.

Dry scarlet runner beans are bigg‘uns - usually between the size of my thumbnail, and the side of my thumb down to the first joint. As expected, they are dark, chunky and meaty - and while they don’t behave themselves in soups like cute little white beans, if you’re making a hearty stew and want something to add texture, break down and generally make that stew sing, scarlet runner beans are a winner.

In summary - scarlet runner beans grow without fuss, are drought and frost tolerant, provide shade and cute red flowers, can be ignored ‘till late autumn if you have other things to think about, and can then be easily dried, stored in a big jar, and make winter stews happy. And with luck, they’ll just sprout next year on their own! What little legends.

Thank you scarlet runner beans, thank you seedkeepers, thank you soil, thank you melukerdee country. I love growing and learning from you all.

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Writing, this month:

» Learning the ways of nama (Kangaroo Apple) - Bush tucker, medicine and resilience gardening... on a plant who shows up when things fall apart.

» Take it Back Upstream (the Compost abides) - Invasive seastars, sprouting broccoli, + active repair, in a bucket.

» The Plenty: Harvest Moon meets Bone Memory - Reworlding, proof that the land loves us back, + switching off time ‘till spring (genius!)

Reading, this month:

The First Astronomers - How Indigenous Elders Read the Stars - by Duane Hamacher, with Elders and Knowledge Holders … a gorgeous and fascinating read - respectful of knowledge holders, mind-blowing of facts, heart-squishing of implications.

The Wax Child - by - I had just read Ravn’s The Employees last month, and I was compelled to keep going with her latest: so excellent, and proof that sometimes truth is so much spookier than fiction.

The Hidden Seasons: The ultimate guide to reading the clues and signs of nature’s calendar all year round: perfect for all nature lovers - by - another phenology book celebrating and considering living cycles rather than strict seasonality! Hooray. Planted in Britain, but that’s ok, northerners tend to do that.

The Darkness Manifesto - by Johan Eklöf - I am currently eating up all the books on Darkness I can find. This one was nothing like Night Magic, which i loved to bits, however I’m here for all of it. Any further suggestions on this subject?

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3 other excellent things:

In the Company of Humpbacks - For the Wild podcast series (and zine!). I felt like I was right there with them all…

Your Imagination Was Always Empire’s Last Frontier - - Enclosure meets Imaginal meets Everywhen meets AI - note that you will need to make a POT of tea to get through this one (a cup of tea really won’t cut it).

Apple Scrap Vinegar - do you have a jar on the make? Best ever useful solution for wonky bits and cores during apple season and beyond (here’s the recipe from page 107 of the Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook)…

And in other news…. I’m deep in writing another book this winter! Hooray, I feel like I’m back in my natural habitat. I’ll tell you all about it very soon.

For now, here on melukerdee country in southern lutruwita Tasmania, I’m rolling with this season of short days, long nights, lots of care work, book writing around the edges, and, as always - composting, singing to the broccoli, and winter mulching.

Rightio then - may your month be free of aphids and slugs, full of beany stews and good conversations, and may your crew be safe and well - K

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Nama arrived in our garden the year that biggest tree blew down in the spring winds - the huge and elderly silver wattle who towered over the chicken yard like a protective forcefield.

The spring nor-westerly winds are the strongest of the year, in this valley - they blow straight from the great western wilderness, and arrive with force and change on their icy breath. It was the silver wattle’s time.

Our chookyard still contains the massive fallen trunk, splintered and immense, and the black chickens often go broody in the little cave of the stump hollow.

It was following this spring, seemingly from nowhere, that nama arrived.

Nama is the palawa name* for the southern Kangaroo Apple Solanum lacinatum - a much-respected native plant to these parts, who grows well in disturbed soil - and moves in after disruption or fire,1 to help stabilize country.

Often called a shot-lived-shrub, nama grows quickly to form woody stems that soon seem like trunks, rising to about 4-5m in height, spreading it’s dark green leaves to shelter the disturbed ground beneath.

Our chickens left the nama seedlings that sprung up well alone (unlike most other green shoots in their patch, which are quickly eaten)… probably because of nama’s protective and toxic compounds in the green leaves and berries2.

As the nama seedlings grew, they formed a wide thicket around the fallen stump - tracing a perfect outline of where the silver wattle’s dripline once extended to.

I take the density of this thicket to be a tribute to how much local birds love the ripe nama fruit - that so many of it’s seeds were in all the droppings beneath every inch of that trees’ outline - all waiting to germinate, as soon as chance and change allowed.

In time, the thicket of nama has flowered with purple flowers that looked JUST like eggplant flowers (nama and eggplant are cousins, both in the solanum family) - followed by green, drooping fruit as big as the top notch of my thumb, which slowly turned yellow in autumn.

I knew they were edible, just like the mainland Kangaroo Apple Solanum aviculare - but I didn’t know much else, so I went digging into my native plants and bush tucker books. And wow. So much to learn.

nama / Kangaroo Apple - solanum lacinatum

I’ve learned that both nama and its mainland sibling Kangaroo Apple solanum aviculare (who has many local names and is revered by many peoples) is a crucial bush tucker and medicine.3 The ripening fruit mark the season of Garrawang in Woiwurrung tradition.4 There’s a rainforest sibling, a desert cousin, and the southern sibling, which we have.5

In east Gippsland, there’s records of solanum aviculare being cultivated by the Guanai people with cool burning to increase its growth and harvest.6 This plant’s range is wide - I found notes on it’s use from southern Queensland to Pitjantjara desert country, to southern lutruwita.

Traditional uses include eating the ripe fruit (after ripening in sand dunes7 - such a genius thermal slow cooking technique) which are full of vitamin c. The medicinal uses are many, including applying a paste of the green fruit externally, as a powerful anti-inflammatory for joints.8 A tea of the young leaves and green fruit are spoken of as a common contraceptive.

Both the leaves and the unripe fruit are listed as highly toxic in all western botanical texts.

Western medicine has jumped on nama’s uses as well, it seems - mainly on the alkaloids in the young leaves and fruit. Grown commercially since the 1960s in both Hungary and Russia, nama contains a steroid important to the production of cortisone, and is used for a base material for producing steroid contraceptives. It’s a whole industry over there, apparently.

Coming back to the garden… I’ve been told that if you have nama planted in your chicken run, you’ll get more chicks that grow into hens rather than roosters in spring, when the broody chickens hatch their clutches of eggs. Because of the oestrogen, or something.

I can’t confirm this tidbit at all, but this was the curious piece of folklore that took me off to dig into the many aspects of nama.

nama / Kangaroo Apple - in the Garden

As a fast-growing screening plant who thrives in disturbed soil and is hardy in a range of conditions - nama also seeds readily, without any special preparation. Sounds like a good friend who I’m going to encourage to grow around the fencelines at my place.

As mentioned, nama’s ripe fruit is beloved by many bird species, which is always a win for garden diversity, and the sprouting seedlings don’t seem to be palatable to really anyone - from chickens to pademelons to wallabies - so it keeps growing without the setbacks that nibbling can create. Another win.

I reckon you could also try hedging nama pretty easily, if you wanted to - creating a tangled, low-ish bank or garden screen, that was full of life and medicine. They are said to live 4-5 years only, but I know a nama in the garden down at our local library who is at least 10, growing in a protected spot, like a shortish, gnarled tree.

Propagation is simple - seeds into soil, cover and wait. Nama also grows well from cuttings, I’m told. I might try squishing some ripe fruit onto paper this year to dry out the seeds, for planting in a few months time.

And grafting! This is totally a thing, with nama and other Kangaroo Apples - it turns out you can graft other types of solanums onto the trunk of a young nama plant.9 Other solanums like tomatoes (hello!) and eggplants. Super hardy native rootstock with a productive vegetable harvest on top? That sounds like a very good thing for our local food supply.

I’d heard of this grafting technique when we first got to lutruwita - some gardeners here do it regularly, to create essentially perennial tomato and eggplant bushes.

The result is something called a ‘tomato tree’ - a sturdy upright stem of nama with grafted tomato shoots ontop, which then grow to produce good harvests of tomatoes, year after year. I haven’t tried this technique myself yet, but my mate Hannah has, and I know of other folks who swear by it.

Perennial tomato and eggplant growing options that are more resilient to unstable climates futures… sounds like just the kind of excellent community skillshare we need, right now. I’ll see if I can rustle up a workshop in spring.

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nama / Kangaroo Apple - ripening, eating

So it’s quite important that nama is properly ripened before you eat it, and ripening the fruit is a little tricky - once ripe, the nama fruits burst and split - so gathering them semi-ripe and ripening carefully, so you can pounce on them just before they split, is the go.

There’s no sand dunes near where I live, so I’m going to try ripening my nama fruit in a basket at the sunny end of the dining table. Other folks put their nama fruit in brown paper bags, and stash somewhere warm to ripen.

Once they’re ripe… the possibilities of nama are many. Ripe fruit can be eaten raw, or stewed or roasted. They taste like a cross between tomato and passionfruit, I’m told, with many small seeds that can be eaten with the pulp. Some cooks say the flavour is best paired with citrus,10 either in a sauce or as a marmalade or chutney.

Other folks, like Rees Campbell, puree ripe nama with apple (a seasonal companion in these parts) and dehydrate the pulp in sheets for later use as snacks and treats.11

The medicinal uses of nama are considerable, as touched on above. I think I’ll stick to eating them for now, given that I’m lucky enough to not be in need of their main medicinal gifts at the moment. Who knows what medicines we’ll need in the near future, though… I’ll tuck that info safely away until then.

I am grateful to have learned a little from nama this week… and excited to try the ripe fruit, which is now slowly ripening (hopefully) in the warm sunshine on my kitchen table, when the sun comes out between the showers.

Grateful to the palawa people, their knowledge ways and to many other peoples precious stewardship of this important plant friend - rich in so many gifts.

Last thought - since nama seeds so easily… when I’m pulling out the odd weed in the forest and costal places where I walk - I could pull out a weed, and sprinkle a nama seed or seven in that spot… cover over and pat it down…

I could whisper a blessing, and then leave the nama alone - to do their thing from there. A little assistance. A small reverence. A pocketful of seeds, as a common prayer. To nama, and to palawa country.

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*palawa kani, the language of the palawa people of lutruwita Tasmania, does not capitalize any words.

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Plunk. Another Seastar flops into the bucket. Plunk. It’s easier to find them here, on the far reaches of the rock shelf, revealed by this lowest of low tides. Five arms each, bumpy orange with purple edges.

Some as big as my hand, but mostly tiny baby ones, hiding in the crevices. They give way easily - not hard to pick off the rocks, bare hands are fine - and plunk, into the bucket.

Wow - once you get your Northern Pacific Seastar eyes on, they truly are everywhere.

The Norther Pacific Seastar is an aggressive ecosystem chomper, in this part of the world. They stowed away to lutruwita Tasmania in ballast water of ships during the 1980s, and tend to out-compete the local marine life - making them a major problem. They will eat anything they come across, and can deal with a greater range of habitat depth than other species.

They are also revelling in the increasing climate-warmed waters of this land, unlike the local marine life. These seastars are sticky little red flags of deep imbalance, but with five arms and a cheeky purple hue.

To ID the North Pacific Seastar is pretty simple, but very important - you don’t want to get them mixed up with the local species: Five long arms coming off a compact body, mostly yellow/orange, with purple tinges, especially when they are young. And most importantly - the arm tips - they are pointy, and turn up, just slightly. Quite different to the blunter tips of local species (who should be left well alone).

It’s considered good community practice to remove any Pacific Seastars that you find in these waters, as soon as you find them. For a while there it was unclear if folks were ‘allowed’ to remove these invasive seastars from the ecosystem, which seemed strange

Not allowed to be collected on boats, the regulations said. Which makes sense, so the seastars can’t accidentally be distributed further up and down the coast… but no further advice on collecting them was given.

I heard a story from down south that Fisheries did permit the gathering of Pacific Seastars if their intended use was specifically to be dried out for Christmas decorations. Hand on heart, I know folks who have used that line when questioned.

Fragrant boho seaside decorations aside, I see folks doing whatever they can to remove these unwelcome guests. There’s community groups up in nipaluna /Derwent that collect great hauls of the invasive seastars (legends) - and folks that go hopping across the rock shelves with a bucket, like me.

Once this bucket is full, I’ll take these Northern Pacific Seastars home.

** first and important disposal step - a big slosh of vinegar into the bucket, while they’re still alive. This sends the seastars into self-destruct mode, and also neutralizes the toxins in them. Hooray.

Then I wrap them in a plastic bag, and stick them in the freezer. They can lay up to 25 million eggs a season, so it feels important to make sure they are definitely no longer alive before I do anything with them.

Once they are a large, lumpy, seastar ice cube, it’s time for them to re-enter the local carbon cycle and the food web, in a less problematic form. Blessings on you, North Pacific Seastars - you are amazing organisms, but not helpful in your current form, to this land, to this place.

In my backyard, this re-entering means sending the seastars back through the web of life… via the compost. The chickens don’t really eat them, but they will scratch them about - and the seastars will soon break down and become incorporated into the rotational chicken compost system I have going on.

By this time next year, those invasive seastars will become sprouting broccoli… via their transformation into sweet, sweet compost - and my wheelbarrow, which takes the completed chicken yard compost back up to the veggie beds, for each season’s planting.

From there, the seastars will become me, and my family, and my friends. And then cycle back through other beings. In the way of such things.

Another way of taking it all back upstream….

Not literally - I’m not plunking this Seastar ice cube in a creek anywheres. I mean upstream in terms of watershed.

Upstream… like up into the landscape. Upstream like the salmon who swim far up the rivers of Turtle Island from the sea, who then get caught and dragged into the forest by bears, and in doing so replenish the high forest soils with nutrient-dense material.

Nutrients that will now cycle slowly back down through the watershed, back through the land, the forest, and through all the life in that forest. Nutrient that will, in time, trickle back down to the bottom of the watershed - through the bodies of many beings - down to the river, or the sea.

And then, ideally, through the bodies of different beings… repeat that same cycle of life. It’s the Carbon Cycle - remember? I’m sure you saw the diagrams in year 8 biology, same as I did.

A watershed, apart from being a great word, describes your local rainwater catchment.

I do not like collecting and freezing the Northern Pacific Seastars, just to be clear. It’s not a fun job.

But it is one way I can practice active repair and give back to this sea country, just a tiny bit, by removing a little of the imbalance, and taking it back upstream. To slowly transform into other life. As with many things, compost is nearly always the answer (no matter what the question).

As this ecosystem shrugs and shifts, and the growing imbalances are un-ignorable - this is not just a quirky composting technique. It is also an act of respect, for this place that I love. And hopefully, a small act of renewal.

Sending the energy back through the ecosystem. As a quiet practice in these times - a way to witness, and be with what is.

I hate that these invasive seastars are choking this ecosystem, and how they are red flags for the acidification of these beautiful waters.

Which makes me think of composting grief as a practice, in these times, and how taking it all back upstream gives the land the opportunity to do what it does best.

Taking it all back upstream gives this land and ecosystem a chance to hold it all, slowly de-compose, filter, and process - the grief, the uncertainty, and the invasive seastars.

Transformation is an inevitable outcome.

The best bit is that anyone who feels moved to, can sign up for this kind of meaning-making… in whatever way this looks like for you - living in your particular body, in your ecosystem.

Witnessing what is, holding the pure hell of what that signifies - and then, still engaging - as best we can - in active repair.

Reverence as compost. Reverence as sprouting broccoli. Prayer, in a bucket.

I wonder when the next low-low tide is.

If you can, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll be supporting me to keep writing + keeping this journal free for all (yay). Thanks for reading, and be well - K

• Vinegar: A secret weapon in the fight against invasive starfish - article on Crown of Thors starfish, but this technique is being used for Northern Pacific Seastars also

• Watersheds - an introduction with Andrew Millison

• What is the Soil Food Web? - Dr. Elaine Ingham on Soil + Carbon Cycles

• Northern Pacific sea-star (Asterias amurensis)

• Make Me Good Soil: Poems of Interbeing - upcoming from

• Please refer all Seastar Christmas Decoration enquiries to

It’s coming up to Harvest Moon - that second half of autumn, when The Plenty is everywhere, in this valley of lutruwita Tasmania.

Enclosed by the dark green stringybark and blue gums - who hug this valley’s tall hills and stay misty green all year - the deciduous trees in the valley are shouting (yodelling, really) in autumn colours. Poplar and birch, the cherry orchards, and all the backyard fruit trees, heavy with apples and quinces.

Still quite warm, some days, but it won’t be for long - and everyone and everything in this valley knows that simple truth.

But right now, it’s nearly the end of the year. Time for one last enormous push, of passata days and apple pressing and grape picking and passionfruit gathering and cucumber distributing and getting all the apples and the quinces in, before the year goes down to dusk.

Harvest moon is a time when we are reminded that other worlds are possible.

Worlds that remind us we DO have the ability to hold, and to share, and to come together to tackle enormous tasks that ensure plenty for everyone.

A time when the future worlds we so desperately need to dream into being can peek through, just for a moment. When the veil is thinner, if you like - Samhain /Halloween are coming up next weekend, after all…

Harvest time reveals worlds where we feel safe enough to share, as a side-effect of just being. Where it just makes sense to store our plenty in the bellies of our neighbours, rather than behind locked doors.

Worlds where it’s ok to ask for help with big tasks, knowing folks will somehow make room to be there (although the wine at the end of the grape picking days does help, I’ll admit that).

Worlds where even if it’s hard work, we can make a party out of it, somehow still get through it, and are reminded that many tasks are far too much for any one household, for any one person, to carry alone.

Worlds full of proof of enough-ness.

Something we often struggle to see, for all the reasons - in a system that screams safety lives only in more, and never in the idea of this is enough.

Harvest time is the living cycles holding us, as best they can.

And then, just to say - harvest can look like many things. And so can The Plenty. Many of us already have everything we need - especially once we start sharing and organising with others.

This can be so hard to remember, especially in this current reality. But it’s also true, a lot of the time.

And then there’s the worlds of many earlier agrarian societies, in which this second harvest marked the ending of the year… with no further time kept, until winter was done. What an excellent idea.1

I am in deep respect of this attitude2, though sadly I cannot take on this early-agrarian / early-Roman calendar3, at least not this winter.

Instead, I’ll go into winter with the knowledge that… I’ve spent another year on this land, and have fed my family and friends from this land, and I am so, so grateful. Knowing that this autumn was a long one, that we got very lucky this fire season, that this coming winter should yield some good book-writing time.

And that spring will come again, when it is good and ready.

Until then, I hope to hold onto that sense of enough-ness - and lean into this next season, with all its learnings from frosty mornings and darker seas. Soon, when this harvest time is done.

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Illustrations by and . Wintering vibe by .

Traditionally, this darkest time of the month is primo stay at home time. A time to snuggle or to wallow, and take no new adventures. In darkness we rest, preparing for the month ahead.

New Moon is the time of highest of high tides, and lowest of lows. The moon and the sun are on the same side of earth right now (hence, no visible moon) - and when they both pull on the oceans in the same direction at once, watch out.

In the garden, different traditions counsel different strategies. New moon garden calendars from Europe say this is a time for mulching it all down, pulling it all out. For weeding and fertilising. A time to compost the month just gone.

In the Maramataka, Maori knowledge marks this dark moon time as Mutuwhenua - all is on pause, for the moon has died (but will rise again). A good time for household chores, and relaxing. Not a good time for gardening or the sea. 1

Here in southern Lutruwita Tasmania, the Autumn rains have finally arrived. All is wet and squelchy, there’s movement everywhere, and the bird families that play in this garden are SO delighted.

The morning chorus, just before dawn, is the loudest and most varied I’ve heard it from many months. Everyone is in flux, and preparing for the next season, whatever that brings.

I think I have officially given up on hope of the remaining tomato vines ripening - between the soil temperature heading south, the soft rain and the shorter days… I think that’s it. Thank you, tomatoes, I have learned from you yet again, this season.

They DO ripen inside, eventually. Yep, even if they are as green and hard as the final pick.

I have always been advised to pick the whole plant, hang it upside down, and ripen the last of the tomatoes that way… and that works - but turns out you can just lay ‘em out in whatever wide basket thingy you have, one layer deep, and they will ripen just fine. In their own sweet time.

This technique has the side effect of making my living area look like a overclocked homesteady photoshoot, as there are arrangements of slowly ripening tomatoes on every surface, and on the floor as well.

Which reminds me… that tomatoes as table ornament (for months at a time) is exactly what Europeans first did with their tomatoes…

“The Spanish invasion of Mexico saw the tomato – a strange fruit with a wonderful scrambling vine – travel to Europe in the 1500s. The Spanish soon incorporated the tomato into their cuisine, but the Italians grew tomatoes primarily as ornamentals, using the fruit as a table decoration for some centuries before it became part of their food tradition.

The Latin name for tomato, Solanum lycopersicum (wolf peach) harks back to the tomato’s close association with deadly nightshade - also a Solanum. Because in the 1600s, everyone in Europe knew that deadly nightshade was the food that witches used to turn themselves into werewolves. So although the tomato was a bit more peachy-looking than the small black berries of deadly nightshade, it was still highly suspicious.”2

Declared ‘unfit for eating’ in an early British herbal, Britons grew tomatoes as a cottage garden summer ornamental for centuries, then eventually took ‘love apples’ into their cuisine in the 1800s, beginning with relish - and all British pies and pasties sighed with relief.

Would my Welsh ancestors approve of my current Wolf Peach table and floor arrangements? I wonder….

This season is consolidation time in my garden - in an active, chop-it-all-back, mulch-it-all-down kinda way. The chooks will scratch through all the spent flowerheads, and enjoy the seeding mustards. All the winter veg is now planted, and nestled in well. The ripened apples are a bit cracked and have black spots, but are still very tasty.

And the cucumber vines are at their seasons’ end, too. Out they all come in a prickly tangle - reminders of faded summer days, now replaced by deep mulch.

Thank you for the pickles, cucurbits! And watch out friends, no front step is safe from me this season - the spare jars of pickles are many. A good problem to have.

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This last month I’ve been deep in…

• Night Mode - thoughts and experiments with darkness as ecosystem

• Pickle Moon - storing abundance in the bellies of friends and neighbours

• The Orach of the Bud - an ode to a elders’ passing (and dimorphic seeds)

And 5 things that lit me up this month:

The Employees by Olga Ravn - a slim book, like nothing I have ever read before.

Pádraig Ó Tuama: In the Shelter & Borders and Belonging - Between the Covers podcast. So damn fine.

Mushroom Log prepping season has come around once again. Oh Happy day. Checking who grows well on what is always worth a look before you start - I do it every year.

Green Tomatoes in Vinegar and Oil - yes, I’m making even more batches, and I’m okay with that.

Slice of Wednesday - Fi is writing again - woot! And it was her kick up the butt that reminded me to write my way through it all, so thank you, dear Fi.

Lastly, my plan is to make this New Moons’ Letter a regular thing, at the end/beginning of each lunar month.

A small experiment in following an alternative calendar to the (frankly - weird) Gregorian Calendar3, and seeing where paying more attention to other living cycles could lead.

Rightio then ~ may your tomatoes ripen, your bird families chatter, this next month bring all the good things to your doorstep, and your crew be safe and well - K

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Milkwood is a reader-powered publication written by me, a human. If this journal speaks to you, you are welcome to join the conversation:

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Hey there, friend -

Kirsten here - I’m a gardener, writer, a wonderer and a wanderer, living gratefully on melukerdee / palawa country - in lutruwita, Tasmania.

I share writing once a week, on a Friday evening (lutruwita time) - plus a New Moons’ Letter, once a month. You are welcome to join me:

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“Wait a sec - aren’t you the Milkwood book person?”

…yes, I am! And here is what’s going on, with this garden(ish) journal:

For the last two decades I’ve been completely consumed with Milkwood - which began as a small ‘climate change farm’ on rocky soil on Wiradjuri country, with my partner Nick.

Milkwood went on to become an Australian educational powerhouse of sorts - teaching skills for living like it matters to folks both locally and worldwide, publishing books, growing plenty of food, sharing skills and helping to cultivate community.

By the end of last year though, I was Completely Frazzled.

‘Twas a heady combo of All The Things, plus perimenopause, which took the lid off my previously-somewhat-masked alphabet soup of mental diagnoses, yoinked off my carefully arranged and long-worn armour, and whacked me over the head with a cricket bat.

Then, quite quickly - down off the front step of advocacy, teaching and everything that Milkwood has been doing… down and out and into the earth I tumbled. Or perhaps melted.

And here in the mud I sit, for now. In the Milkwood garden, which has been such a great teaching and learning space. But it’s just me, sitting here now. Taking stock. Looking up.

Watching the bees. Listening for Currawongs. Cooking dinner on the fire, sometimes. Learning the ways of the rockpools and their seaweed teachers. Paying attention to the small, steady work of living cycles and seasons.

And so this is a journal of… the view from here. And what emerges slowly from this place.

Might active repair look like saving seeds, with careful hands? Look like listening to local elders, for sure. Learning about country, and good fire, and how to be a better ancestor, perhaps.

Could active repair look like noting and naming what is shifting in the fracturing seasons, with clear eyes - all the better to see you and me with - to be better equipped to respond, to care for, and to help collaboratively lean into the futures our communities need, and deserve?

Maybe down here in the mud is the best place for me, just now. I can see the stars from here, when they come out.

So this journal is my current home camp. I share my thoughts every week, on a Friday evening - plus a New Moons’ Letter once a month.

I’m also in the midst of writing a book this winter, but more on that later. For now, writing this journal is helping me make sense, and stay connected. Perhaps it’s helpful for you, too.

Wonderings, and notice-ings, and learnings from plants and place, kinship and responsibility, and the living cycles that shape us, even in a world out of balance.

An ongoing experiment in staying with the trouble, while staying in relationship.

You’re welcome to join me.

Pull up a log. There’s tea.

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Darkness as remnant ecosystem and the ecologies of night are worlds I’m learning to sit with, at the moment.

As we pass the autumn equinox here on palawa country, the nights stretch longer. There is more darkness than daylight, each successive day. And while I love the slow-down and the wintering potential of this coming season, darkness is something that I’m realising I’ve learned to hold at arms-length, if at all possible, until a proper bedtime… all my life.

Dearly held memories of catching breath at an inky dark sky of midnight stars in the desert, overhead and all around as I lay there in my swag on the red sand - has always been a different land of darkness, in my heart, to the everyday kind.

Worlds away from the more mundane ‘better turn the lights on’ darkness of a domestic evening. And I have never thought to connect the two.

And yet - we only know half of the landscapes we live in, and half the world we breathe in, if we only know the world by day.

I’m learning that nearly all plants, and animals of course - including us - need darkness on a hormonal level to be well. That darkness is a cue for rest and repair in nearly all daylight species. That all our immune systems rely on darkness, from trees to flowers to people, in order to live.

When there is too much artificial light at night, as there is in most urban areas of the world, trees can forget to sleep. Forget to drop their leaves in autumn, even, or forget to close their stomata to hold in the precious water they need for the next long day of light and heat. The ecosystems of night are disrupted by light pollution also - from pollinators to plants, thrown off-kilter, sometimes with devastating effects.

We all need the darkness, just as we need each other - in each and every ecosystem on earth.

After a lifetime of sticking to near the streetlights on the long walk home, and certainly never taking the shortcut down the dark side of the sports oval, I am now , tentatively, re-considering my relationship with darkness. And not just the kind of darkness that contains a trip up the hill with a thermos to sit under a new moon’s starry sky (though, I’m all for that - anytime).

My plan is to begin this dark-learning in the backyard.

Sitting on one of my favourite sun-warmed flat rocks, surrounded by flowers having their last huff of autumn bloom before the cold sets in, I wait for the night to come down. Looking Nor-east to the Snug Tiers, the biggest mountains I can see from here, as they lose definition in the gloaming (gosh I love that word).

The honeybees are still foraging in the rosemary next to me, barely - and then they head home, one by one. Daylight creatures. The bumblebees leave also, eventually, and I can hear their low buzzing drones clearly in the evening quiet, as they bumble off into the rising darkness.

A snap, a small dark flitter and a flick, above my head. Microbats! I haven’t figured out where they roost quite yet, but they are always here at dusk, and they lift my heart every time. They eat half their bodyweight in insects every night (including mosquitoes, who are also taking their presence felt just now) - go little microbats, go.

Ok so I’m also aware I’m just sitting on a rock in the dark. And that in itself is not, really, anything. But.

My spidey-senses are already rising, in this lack of light. That state of being I’ve relied on to keep me safe on many, many a poorly-lit walk home, all these years. Hyper aware of every twig snap, every blip, any sound at all. Ready to respond, or flee, or maybe fight. I can almost feel my house keys poking through my nervous fist.

And yet - none of this is needed, right now. Thank you, body and nervous system, for being on high alert all these decades, I appreciate the care. It is surprisingly hard to breathe these feelings away - even here, sitting on my favourite rock, in the precious dusk of my garden, my safest of places.

I guess this is lesson one of getting to know darkness, then. As something other than a void, or danger - a black hole to hurriedly spill light into, as a matter of course.

The night comes down around me, and my eyes are wide, yet no longer what I’m mostly seeing with. The crickets begin, somewhere in the grass, and a few frogs join in, down in the pond. The smell of night in the garden rises to meet the last of the gloaming. The clear pinlights of a few planets and stars begin to prick the eastern sky. A soft whooshing V of silhouettes, wood ducks I think, fly over and onward to the estuary in the south. All is well, all is well. Breathing. Learning.

If I stand up, I can see all the lights of the village. And the floodlights of the sports oval. And the skyglow of nipaluna Hobart, even though it’s an hour to the northeast of here. But sitting down in this hollow, I can begin to appreciate the darkness, and begin to lean into it, like a new secret. Step by step. I am learning.

I would like to work up to night walks, this winter. Down the back dirt roads of this valley, perhaps, though the quiet night lands. I know these backroads so well, but not at all, I now realise, as an animal moving through darkness. I wonder what lies ahead to learn about this place.

Other un-met landscapes, and ecosystems, of this place I call home. So much wonder, right where we live. Thank you, darkness, I am looking forward to it.

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With special thanks to Leigh Ann Henion’s book Night Magic, and Seeker Lover Keeper’s song Dear Nighttime.

3 Things (+1), this 3rd Quarter Moon…

• Leigh Ann Henion’s beautiful book Night Magic - Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark is a delight, and my favourite kind of ‘nature book’ - thoroughly researched, lovingly told, and with the voices of many others threaded through. And she gets to go to Mothapalooza, so, yeah. It’s great.

• There is no beginning or end - seasons change, but no new year - Explainer: the seasonal ‘calendars’ of Indigenous Australia - article by Alice Gaby & Tyson Yunkaporta. A tiny tidbit of the mind-bending universe of ‘everywhen’.

• Dark Sky Country & Sanctuaries - so much to learn here - here’s a great Southwest Dark Sky Country intro to begin with, then there’s Dark Sky International, or this great lil explainer of Dark Sky Ecosystems. And if you’re local (to me), there’s a Dark Sky Event coming up in Franklin shortly.

• Green Tomatoes in Vinegar & Olive Oil (pomodori verdi sott'olio) - making these on high rotation here this week - my favourite too-many-green-tomatoes solution. Above is the recipe from my first book Milkwood. For a deeper dive,I’d highly recommend nabbing (try your local library?) a copy of Preserving the Italian Way by Pietro Di Demaio, which has become an autumn bible in our house.

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‘Tis the season of salty brine. And of pickles. Time to pick, and preserve, and distribute. Time to store the harvest in the bellies of neighbours and friends, against the coming winter.

I’m beginning to chart the months of this place - the moons of the year, if you like - in some kind of internal, seasonal calendar form. Just as a personal thing.

I do not know what the palawa moons for this country are - or indeed if they speak of them, in that way. I am learning what I can, for sure, just as I’m learning more of the names of the plants around here, and the rivers, and the mountains. But I’m not across the palawa seasons, yet - the reclamation of palawa culture and palawa kani language here in lutruwita is a delicate and dedicated ongoing process - so as an uninvited guest of settler descent, I learn what I can, when it’s appropriate for me to do so.

I do know, however, that Wolf Moon, Strawberry Moon and the many other moons I’ve heard of from stories and tales and news items, speak to country far away from this place.

So rather than borrowing moons and calendars from the other side of the world, with their expressions of the turning year in places I do not breathe in - I’m going with what is here, and what my hands touch.

And this month, my spare time is focussed on the high harvest in the vegetable garden. Tomatoes ripening, capsicums everywhere, and of course, the cucumbers. So many cucumbers. In baskets on the table, in boxes on the floor. Jars of pickles in progress, covering the central shelf that is the top of the (not fired up) wood stove - bub-bub-bubbling away, as they do their fermenting thing.

I claim this month as Pickle Moon.

It is equinox season. When the light and the dark of the day and night take up (roughly, nearly) the same amount of time. From here, we go down to darkness, and to the shorter and shorter daylight of wintertime, day by day.

And oh how the vegetables in my garden know it. They sense the changes, and chart the light/dark balance. Some more than others - tomatoes are particularly day-length receptive, in addition to responding to the warmth of summer days to ripen.

And so, everyone from the cucumbers to the capsicums are currently pumping out the fruits of this season, as they sense that it is coming to an end… a season of photosynthesis, some rain, lots of compost, and my variable tending care.

Variable is putting it mildly, actually. It’s been a big summer of change in this house, with lots of normals and expectations turned upside down. Everyone is alive, thank you, and I think it will all work out in the long run, but the result of all this flux has meant that my gardening, preserving and pickling enthusiasm has not been at an all-time high.

The cucumbers have largely ignored this fact, as cucumbers do, and have produced plenty, regardless.

This season I planted one row of ‘eaters’, and one row of ‘picklers’. I am still a recovering farmer, it seems, and tend to overplant - but this year I really tried to go domestic-scale in my expectations. And it went okay, though there’s still enough spare for everyone I know who likes cucumbers.

The eaters were mostly Crystal Apple cucumbers, as they are such a winner in this climate. They store well, don’t need to be peeled, and are downright delicious. There was also some Lebanese-ish cucumbers - and one I lost the nametag of, which is long, spiky and official-cucumber looking. They all taste great.

The row of picklers are my fave variety - National Pickler Cucumbers. I’ve grown these garden friends for years, in quite a few gardens, and they have always been generous. A chalky taste, maybe not best for fresh use (though there would be ways around it I’m sure) - these are my primo pickling cucumbers, for making the lacto-fermented dill pickles that we eat through winter.

So simple to make, so very, very good.

If you can be bothered to make pickles from them, that is - which was my primary challenge this year. I seem to have given all my fucks, with none left to spare - in many areas of life, just now. And apparently, this includes pickling. And preserving in general. And weeding. And a long list of other things I’ll not mention just now.

So I have all these cucumbers - baskets and boxes full, as I mentioned. Such abundance! And zero fucks with which to process them all. Maybe the chickens could eat them? Maybe I could just give boxes of un-pickled pickles to friends who were just as exhausted as I am, and kid myself they would/might have the time/energy to pickle them instead?

Fortunately, it was thinking of my friends that picked me up. That happens a bit.

Thinking about a large jar of lacto-fermented probiotic goodness - dill pickles for breakfast lunch and tea - in the fridges of each of the folks I love dearly… is what got me over the line.

So. Pickle time. If you do have the spoons / energy / fucks to do this sometime, I highly recommend. Also, in a crumbling world with uncertain nutritional futures - lacto-fermentation may well save the day! Just use whatever goal-based motivation you need to make it happen - though if you can avoid fear as a motivator, that would be best.

Anyway. I have written quite a bit about making pickles, so I’ll skip the process bit - but the jars and jars and jars on the wood stove are all 2.5% dill pickles, the basic recipe for which can be found here. And there’s lots more about fermentation here, if you need it.

Lacto-fermentaion IS pretty swoon-worthy, though. The magical process of enhancing the nutrition and the shelf-life of everyday vegetables… with just salt, water, microbes, a basic recipe and intention. It is ancient. It is part of us. And it’s goddarn tasty.

I have a strong memory of Sandor Katz, that gorgeous pickling elder, author and wizard, holding a stadium-seating conference room of chef/foodie folks in Sydney spellbound, as he demonstrated the making of a jar of dill pickles (gasp!).

It was only making pickles, really. But Sandor’s reverence for lacto-fermentation, and his lyrical way of explaining what was happening as he demonstrated the process, had everyone in that room breathless and in love with fermentation by the end. That was a good tour, back in the day.

Back to my kitchen bench. And the pickling cucumbers, and the dill seeds, and the horseradish leaves (for tannin, which keeps things crunchy) and the garlic. Find more jars. Wash them well. Sort the pickles into big ones and small ones. Jar ‘em up. Brine in. Lid on (loosely). And put somewhere to sit at room temperature for two weeks, to let the microbes do their delicious fermenty thing. After that, it’s time to distribute the jars into friend’s fridges for cold storage, and a coming winter of pickles.

I distribute pickles because I want my friend’s fridges, families and microbiomes to be happy and well. I do this because having a fridge full of pickles while my friends do not, makes me feel sad, and pointless. I do this because after two decades of advocating for dispersive, anti-hoarding resilience technologies and skills through our work at Milkwood, sharing is still something I need to practice, in order to feel well.

Giving can be hard. Receiving can be even harder. Understanding our ability to give, and receive, as essential to survival is… a practice we need to exercise, you could say. Especially in this current world. And always.

Protective Dispersal, the Gift Economy - call it what you will. It’s a very old way of ensuring the bank of community health.

This can look like many things - including storing our collective wealth in the fridges of friends.

I have Robin Wall Kimmerer in my head, and her essay The Serviceberry…

“This “problem” of managing decisions about abundance reminds me of a report that linguist Daniel Everett wrote as he was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest. A hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed.

This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t he store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.

“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.

I feel a great debt to this unnamed teacher for these words. There beats the heart of gift economies, an antecedent alternative to market economies, another way of “organizing ourselves to sustain life.” In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away. In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away.

The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity. A gift economy nurtures the community bonds that enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.”

All flourishing is mutual. Yes. The pickles were never just for me, anyway. I just got to grow them, and put them in jars. And then, take them to where they should be. In order to do my part.

And so, in spite of my chronic lack of fucks at the moment, I am glad my deeper senses kicked in, and made me pickle-up. I guess it’s important to keep listening to motivation, wherever it comes from, in times like these.

Chop wood. Carry water. Make pickles. Give, and receive. Continue to care, and grow, and keep going. I find it strangely comforting how this advice still stands, in today’s world, just as in all other pasts and futures.

The Pickle Moon is just over first quarter, now, and waxing to fullness this coming week. There’s still baskets and boxes on the floor full of capsicums and eating cucumbers to be processed, as well as all the ripening tomatoes.

And I’m remembering this time of year from so many other years - autumns of feral fruit foraging with my mum in the hills of Lithgow, to achingly huge buckets of produce at the farm, all needing to be processed.

Of plum season, and apple season. The Fagus will turn soon, up in the high country - I must remember to go. And the mists that wrap this valley round each morning, more often than not, as the days shorten. All under this Pickle Moon.

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Resources:

The Serviceberry - An Economy of Abundance - by Robin Wall Kimmerer - firstly as an essay for Emergence Magazine, and more recently as its own little book.

Palawa tunapri - Knowledge of Our Ancestors - a new book by Trish Hodge, which contains heaps of palawa knowledge, palawa kani and lutruwita plant ID info.

palawa kani - an epic program of reclamation - and now there’s a placenames app!

Sandor Katz - his fermentation info trove, and all his books. We were lucky to tour Sandor around so-called Australia in 2014 with the help of many awesome fermentors (and tempeh Sandor), and it was a most excellent experience.

Lactofermentation - here’s all the fermentation resources, recipes, videos and guides from Milkwood. Lots of inroads and outroads in this trove.

Daves Seedlings - Growing Tomatoes - a great resource from our local seedling guy, with stacks of info about growing tomatoes in these parts (including light needs!).

Milkwood - The Tomato - a chapter for a book I wrote one time - here’s an exerpt, that leads to other excerpts, all about tomatoes.

Entangled Garden is a reader-supported publication. If this journal speaks to you, you are welcome to join the conversation:

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You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, by sharing this journal with friends, or buying one of my books. Thanks for reading, and be well - K

Honestly, at the time I didn’t really get it. Here’s Bud, my elderly, Texan, extremely effusive neighbour, telling me that I just HAVE to grow this one.

So of course, in neighbourly fashion, I accept the packet of seeds. Or actually, the handful of seeds - Bud keeps the packet, folding it back into his shirt pocket, a slight tremor slowing his gnarled hands as he does so. I’m holding a handful of little golden disks - papery shields each containing an Orach seed. And some random black specks, which I assume are dirt or similar, but turn out to be also Orach seeds. Of the same plant. But of a totally different type.

And then I promise to plant Buds’ best-ever Orach.

The Orach seeds end up in yet another small jar in my chaotic seed box, labeled ORACH - BUD. In a small valley such as the one I live in, here on melukerdee country, that’s all the label I need. And even if I somehow forget who Bud is (unlikely) I could take this lil jar to the local Crop ‘n’ Swap event, that happens monthly in Kate’s driveway, and someone would set me to rights.

The Orach gets planted about a year later - in a weird turn of Covid-tumbled events, we seem to have bought a house (long a dream, not expected to actually happen though) - and I’m planting the first garden beds with the rather random seeds that I have - sprinkling them around and about, with hopes for a ‘edible wildflower bed’ type result.

And over the next growing season, this bed grows to become a mirror of my first year in this valley - full of random (but appreciated) plants, grown from seeds passed to me by various locals’ worn and well-gardened hands. Flowers, lettuce, a lot of fennel, and a weird, fleshy-leaved red looking thing - which turns out to be the Orach.

Bud’s Orach sends up great tall spears of red, amaranth-like leaves. It’s way taller than anything else in the garden bed, and somewhat scraggly, and doesn’t really fit the wider garden vibe. I leave them in anyway, and point them out to Bud when he walks (slowly) up the hill one day in Summer to inspect my new garden patch, and house.

Bud is someone I’ve heard about from various angles. He’s what folks would call a Character. He’s got a loud texan accent, used to be a market gardener somewhere over in Petcheys Bay, before that had been an orchardist and a dairy farmer (whether in Texas or over here, I never quite found out), and has a lot of strong opinions on different types of beans. Runner beans, specifically.

While we were neighbours, during that first year of Covid, I exchanged various buckets of soup, vegetables and other treats with this strange, somewhat decrepit, always keen older man. My kid loved when Bud would shuffle in, sit down at our dining table, hold forth on some garden discovery for about 10 minutes, then abruptly finish, rise to his feet, and shuffle out. Speaking in ‘Bud’ - with that broad texan drawl, and his particular manner of speakin’ - quickly became a thing, in our house.

Bud once brought around a huge stuffed zucchini (which Bud called a Marrow, of course), filled with hamburger mince (the kind that is already a hamburger) and topped with ketchup and bright orange, melted American cheese. It looked kinda horrific, to my (at the time) very-wholefood-focussed-brain. My kid took one precautionary sniff, and then set to work eating the entire thing. The one and only zucchini they have ever voluntarily eaten, to date.

Anyways, the Orach spires in our garden grew up, up to well over head height. The whole plant is ruby-red, when growing - from leaf to stem to flower to seed. I snipped the younger leaves off and added them to salads, or pasta sauce. They were good, as Bud had promised. Then the spires turned into shimmering, quaking rods of seed heads - all these little red cymbals, turning golden and papery as the seeds matured.

Bud continued to ask after the Orach’s health, and I continued to commend it as an excellent garden addition. In the Autumn I cut the drying seed heads and saved a bunch, taking them to the local seed library. Bud’s Orach. Drought tolerant. Leaves can be used for salads. Reseeds readily.

As I was saving the little golden cymbal seeds (they’re called ‘bracts’), I had to look up what all the little black bits were - not dirt, but tiny, black and hard - almost like poppy seeds? They were attached to the plant, at the bottom of some bracts, but came away easily. Hmm.

After a bit of research, I discovered that the little black specks were, infact, also Orach seeds. But of a different type… but on the same plant. Huh? Various seed catalogs counselled not to plant the black seeds, if you happened to get some in your Orach packet, as they had poor germination rates, when planted side by side with the bract seeds.

Okay. I was now intrigued. Plants do not bother creating doesn’t-really-work seeds - especially plants like Orach, which are dry country, drought tolerant types. All energy is used for a purpose, when you are a dry-country plant.

Digging deeper, I discovered that Orach is one to hedge its bets, and play a long game, as well as a ‘see you next spring’ one. Orach is one hardy, long-beloved-and-therefore-long-cultivated baddie.

As part of its clever strategy, Orach has three different types of flowers (they are very tiny) on those spires it sends up - one type of flower is pollen-giving, and the other two are pollen accepting - which results in the Orach producing two completely different types of seed. And then, it goes in for two seed distribution methods. In two different time frames.

The tiny black seeds mature first, and fall to earth, around the Orach plant, in midsummer. So even if the season is especially dry, and the Orach cannot stay alive long enough to produce its towering bract seed clusters in autumn, the little black seeds are ready to drop ‘n’ roll. They nestle into the soil that has been proven, by the Orach growing above them, to be, at least, a somewhat suitable place to grow. And then, they wait - and bide their sweet time.

In a good season, the Orach’s tall bract spires then mature over summer, and the little golden seed disks detach as the weather cools - to be wind blown across the valley. To new ground, and new possibilities. And these bract-held seeds then germinate wherever they find themselves, when spring comes back around, to begin again.

The little black seeds, however, stay put (dug in like a tick, as Bud would say), around the roots and nearby the Mother Orach plant - who is now brown and stick-like, pulled out or broken down with Autumn rains. And those little black seeds wait a full two years, in that soil that has proven in the past to be a good place to live… before sufficient weathering and bumping around in that soil (which we call scarification, when we do it to seeds on purpose) triggers those seeds to germinate, and sprout. Trying again, three seasons later, in the same spot where the family used to be.

Bud died around Solstice, this summer just gone, after a short illness - he was calling me (and others) in delirium at midnight asking to be busted-out of this goddamn hospital cause they just wouldn’t let him leave! I went and saw him in there shortly after (he didn’t want the biscuits I’d brought, which I found worrying). The doctors said they thought he was improving slightly, and then… he was gone.

I missed the news of it, somehow, in the midsummer / Christmas flurry - found out a few weeks later, when a friend mentioned it by chance. The news hit me strangely, and not as I expected.

In my garden, looking around, I suddenly realised how many plants came to this patch via Bud. The Orach, standing as tall and awkward as ever, and the special variety of french flageolet bush beans that I’d planted at Bud’s insistence, in a marked departure from his runner-bean bias. The ‘caviar of beans’ he said - and he was right. And that Dahlia, and this one over here too, actually. And the swollen-stemmed spinach. Little pockets of active hope, all around me.

I think that’s a good legacy. I didn’t know Bud all that well, and I understand he was a complicated man - I think I may have gotten the best of him, as a seed-sharing neighbour. But if all that is left of me, in the season that I go, is other folks gardens full of beloved plants, with histories and futures that are twined up in relationship and the casual generosity that comes with community… I will be happy with that.

So this season’s Orach bracts are now harvested, carefully dried and safe in their jars, well labelled. And the little black seeds that the Orach plants dropped over summer are dotted through the soil of my garden, nestled in - dreaming of the years and years to come.

Who knows what will be happening in this garden, in this climate, in this valley, in three years time?

But the Orach is up for it, and so am I. And so, onward - to tend, to be with whatever comes next, to adapt - and to grow.

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• Orach - Seed Savers Connect

• Growing Orach - what you need to know

• A Chromosome-Scale Assembly of the Garden Orach (Atriplex hortensis L.)

• Germination Characteristics of the Dimorphic Seeds of Orach

• ‘Active Hope is a Practice’ – a conversation

• Active Hope - Joanna Macy’s work

• Cygnet Seed Library

• Cygnet Crop n Swap

Entangled Garden is a reader-supported publication. If this journal speaks to you, you are welcome to join the conversation:

Subscribe now

You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, by sharing this journal with friends, or buying one of my books. Thanks for reading, and be well - K

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So I’ve just met Mugwort recently. Or re-met. Down here on melukerdee country, Mugwort is an unusual plant to see - a garden curiosity, who arrived here as a seedling via that time I went a bit crazy at a local medicinal herb nursery.

Mugwort has a very particular silhouette amongst the scramble of our herb-ish garden beds, one which I’ve come to love. Tall, upright green stems streaked with red - the deeply lobed leaves showing a sensible green on top, with a velvety white underside. And the flowerheads - clustered, tiny, full of little purple stars - easy to miss in a summer garden, and utterly captivating if you spend time with them.

My great great grandmother would have known Mugwort well, I now realise, as it’s native to Cymru/Wales, amongst other places. It would have been in her evening tea, and in her shoes, and under her pillow. I live down at the other end of the world, where Mugwort - celebrated wayfinder that it is - has also made its way, via all the ways that plants travel.

And here we both are, Mugwort and I, in my garden, before dawn, breathing in its woody, comforting scent. I am catching up, and grateful for the re-learning.

Mugwort is known for having multifaceted properties, and it has siblings all over the world. These siblings are other forms of Artemesia - Quing Hao / Chinese Wormwood (Artemesia annua), Yomogi / Japenese Mugwort (Artemesia princeps), Majtari / Indian Mugwort (Artemisia indica) and so many more. But this week, I sat in the garden with Y Feidiog lwyd / Mugwort - Artemesia vulgaris.

They carried Mugwort with them

Mugwort comes up a lot in medieval references as the Traveller’s Herb. Time and again I read the line ‘they carried Mugwort with them on long journeys’. As protection. In some little pouch thingy - as peasants do. Yes, and also…

…once I thought about it… what is the definition of a Travellers Herb? If you can only take one bag with you, to far, far away, and you have to carry it… you only add multi-purpose, definitely awesome, can’t-live-without-them necessities.

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Mugwort is used for…

Placing in shoes to assist with aching feet - as touted by Roman soldiers, and probably everyone else at that time, where Mugwort grows. You can still find Mugwort alongside old roman roads.

Mugwort aids the onset of menstruation, and expels afterbirth. It can also be used as an abortificant, apparently.

Know in some places at the Mother of Herbs, or the Women’s Herb, Mugwort is estrogenic - it contains stacks of phytoestrogens which assist estrogen-driven processes - however, in too high a dose, it is anti-estrogenic. So go gently there.

Interestingly, Mugwort is both a nervine stimulant and a sedative, in various ways. It’s used for calming and sleep, lessening of anxiety, lucid dreaming, and ceremony, for these properties.

Mugwort is burned in transitional and threshold times - as Moxa, smoked in pipes (for a legal high… I have not tried yet), and previously known as Sailors Tobacco. Mugwort is smudged to clear air, and ideas, and hearts. Also useful as an insecticide.

Mugwort works as a powerful digestive aid - helping things move along and through, helping us to gracefully release.

Mugwort leaves steeped in oil, or vinegar, is used as a muscle relaxant and tension release. It’s also applied as a fresh-leaf poultice, for its anti-inflammatory properties.

As a sibling of the Artemesia Wormwoods, Mugwort is used for keeping livestock healthy and un-wormy - great in chicken nesting boxes, or as a fenceline browse for cattle.

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Mugwort is also - and fortunately - delicious! In tea with mint at bedtime, in omelettes (like Trứng chiên ngải cứu), and I hope to come across (or make) some Yomogi Mochi soon. So many other recipes to try also.

A lowlands indicator

The type of Mugwort that’s made its way to my garden on melukerdee country is native to Cymru/Wales and other parts of the British Isles, as well as parts of Europe. It’s a lowlands indicator plant, growing up to elevations of 400m - so not found in the highlands of these places.

From what I can tell, in its native places, Mugwort is also a pioneer plant - holding liminal space in more ways than one, as it fills the patches between sandy costal ecosystems and where the deeper soil of grasslands or woodlands begin.

The rootball of Mugwort is a strong one - a sprawling mass of rhizomes, helping to hold ground and place together, until such a time as that place no longer needs Mugwort’s assistance. Mugwort thrives on edges, and on uncertain ground. For this reason, it’s found along roadsides, and in 'wastelands’ in more urban contexts.

In some places (like parts of Turtle Island) where Mugwort has travelled as an essential medicine with colonial settlers, it is considered very invasive.

Mugwort itself is a traveller

Mugwort has travelled across the world, and is now found on every continent except Antarctica. As the Travellers Herb, and as the Womens Herb, I can imagine why folks brought it along with them.

Down here on melukerdee country in southern lutruwita, Mugwort is a cottage medicinal herb which is not considered invasive. All the same, I harvest the flowerheads before they seed. I have no wish to contribute to the pressure placed on indigenous plants in this valley.

Mugwort has travelled so widely thanks to its deep relationship with many peoples, and because there’s many ways to cultivate it - by seed, and also by cuttings, and root divisions. As a traveller itself, Mugwort progresses very sedately through my garden in great seasonal clumps - creeping like a mint, but slower.

This last spring I potted up a big tray of Mugwort seedlings and took them along to the local Garden Market, as giveaways for our local Seed Library’s stall. As an unusual plant in these parts, the seedlings were all snapped up in minutes - and so the Mugwort had their way and travelled onward, through my own community.

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Wayfinder and escort

As a digestive aid, Mugwort is a powerful helper of moving things along, as said. But as part of this, it is also used to promote absorption of other remedies - through its ability to escort and deliver the medicine of other plants deeper into the bony’s tissues, for deeper healing.

Which makes me think of Mugwort’s estrogenic properties, once more, and its ability to escort the blood out of womb-bearing bodies, when it’s time to leave. As a person who has lived with crippling PMDD for most of their life, I wish I had met Mugwort earlier.

This estro-support thread then leads me to wonder about herbal estrogenic support for trans folk… either in addition to hormonal therapy, or at a pinch when that essential healthcare is not available?

Thank goodness, turns out there’s plenty of emerging resources in this field. I particularly loved Holistic Health for Transgender & Gender Variant Folks by the excellent Dori Midnight - suggestions for herbal support for trans masc folk. Link in resources below.

I hope to find an equivalent resource for a deeper dive into estrogenic trans femme support, so I can add that knowledge to my own awareness of how better to support my kiddo, on their own journey home.

A wayfinder herb, indeed…

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So back to the Go-Bags, from the idea of ‘pack just one bag and GO’.

For sudden leavings, both ancient and modern. In this world we share, you are no longer considered a Prepper if you have a bag in the cupboard, ready to go, with all the essentials.

Where I live, Go-Bags are checked and updated in spring in anticipation of bushfire season, primarily. Though having your Go-Bag ready at any time of year makes good sense, and that’s becoming a thing, I’ve noticed.

In other places, like Minnesota, or the Congo, or Gaza, I do not know what folks call their Go-Bags. But I do know that they would be packed as carefully as possible, though sometimes at panicked speed, and I hope, at least sometimes, a packet of dried Mugwort or one of its local siblings makes it in there.

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Mugwort at home

And so…. I’m now harvesting the Mugwort. Shucking all the leaves and unopened flowerheads from those long green stalks. To steep the fresh leaves - in a jar submerged in olive oil (for muscle release), and more leaves in another jar drizzled with honey (for sleep), and more leaves in another jar with 80 proof Vodka poured over, as the first stage of an elixir (for everything).

Drying leaves and flowerheads - for tea, and maybe a little for burning. To aid sleep. To perhaps dream in colour. To help with transitions, and thresholds.

To bring some clarity. And to provide care, and calm, and as much deep healing as I can manage, within my small circle of humans.

Thank you Mugwort, thank you melukerdee country.

Mugwort, Mint & Leatherwood Tea

This is my fave way to ingest Mugwort so far…

• Big pinch of fresh (or dried) mugwort leaves

• Big pinch of fresh (or dried) mint leaves - I used mint julep, cause thats what i had

• Big teaspoon of leatherwood honey (or your local variety) to taste

Place all that in a two-cup teapot, pour over 90ºc hot water, cover and cosy, and let steep 10 minutes. Drink before bedtime. Prepare to dream.

Mugwort Resources

• Artemisia: Colin W. Wright

• Mugwort - the herb of dreams

• Mugwort - main benefits and uses

Health

• Mugwort in the Treatment of Menopause, Premenstrual Syndrome etc

• Holistic Health for Transgender & Gender Variant Folks - by Dori Midnight

• Competent Care for Trans health

• Put together an emergency kit (Go-Bag) - NSW SES

Recipes

• My fave Elixir recipe - I’ll be subbing Mugwort for Rosehips this time.

• Trứng chiên ngải cứu - Crispy Mugwort Omelette

• Qingtuan: Mugwort Mochi (similar to Yomogi Mochi)

• Viking ale with Mugwort - the tip of the Mugwort Beer iceberg, which I didn’t even get to this week. Cheers.

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General Precaution: Always consult a healthcare provider before introducing new medicinal herbs into your regimen - especially if you are on medication, have allergies, are pregnant or trying to be, or managing a chronic condition.

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Two weeks on the mainland - to hold hands with Mammas as they each navigate their final months earth-side. Stepping outside to find the moon.

Skin like paper, on hands like claws. Hands I’ve known for so very long. Hands that are wandering in the air, describing things I cannot see. Step outside to find the moon.

“It hurts. I know I’m loved, but it still hurts” - her only lucid sentence of the morning. Breathe. Step outside, to find the moon.

Pausing the road trip to sleep at a dear friends’ off-grid house, in-between Mammas. Sweet solace. Quiet house, with no expectations, just for one night. Step outside to find the moon. The frogs sing and sing and sing.

Gratefully eating (lovingly made) dishes of childhood staples - with not quite all the ingredients inside. I keep chewing, and smiling. Seems she’s slipped beneath the ‘I just follow the recipe’ line now.

We talk, but it’s kinda the same sentence, just rephrased. Around and around. I’m watching her brain slowing down, synapses de-coupling. We’re moving into deeper time now - the present is unmemorable, and doesn’t really exist.

Step outside to find the moon.

And then a last day on Gadigal land, where Newtown still smells just the same as the 90s (yay?) - fig trees, spices, car exhaust. But with more gin bars, now. Step outside to find the moon.

Heading home - humbled, tired, awed - with a new stick, and precious memories, and more than a little sand in our shoes. Quiet. And sad. Even though we are loved.

Too tired to make the words right tonight. But it needs to be said - love your peoples, and hold ‘em tight. And the moon. And the moon.

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Entangled Garden is a reader-supported publication. If this journal speaks to you, you are welcome to join the conversation:

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You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, by sharing this journal with friends, or buying one of my books. Thanks for reading, and be well - K

Cobwebs seem to sit in in a very particular place in different people’s lives. And that place varies.

Even in the lives of the spider-describers, as they explain whose web is whose, species-wise.

Cobwebs is the word generally used for any spiders’ web that isn’t a radial web, like the ‘classic spider web’ of stories and illustration.

That classic spiderweb shape is called an orb web,1 and it’s exact shape indicates both the species of spider who made it, as well as the context that the web was made in (between reeds, or branches, or fenceposts).

For some texts, cobwebs are just prettymuch every other spider web2 - so all the actual cobwebs, the tanglewebs, the net webs, the sheet webs, the funnel webs, and many, many other types of home.

In other texts, ‘cobweb’ means just the webs that the actual cobweb spiders build, as well as those made by the tangleweb spider species. 3

Some sources describe cobwebs as untidy. Some others describe them with words that don’t impose ideas of neat-ness, or pre-suppose what constitutes order, and structure, and appropriate form, for different versions of home.

Because each fresh cobweb is built, meticulously, by their residents - just so. With purpose, and context, and also good hunting, communication, and family-raising in mind.

There’s no spider species that just spurts out some hard won, gradually accumulated and preciously held, protein-filled random spider silk from its spinnerets, in order to just give this ‘ol web thing a go. Chucks it up there. Hope it works.

And then, yes, there IS the other kind of cobwebs… some cobwebs are the leftover accumulation of seasons of previous residence… all blown together into strands, by the wind and rain. Or by the indoor aircon, depending where they are.

These kinds of cobwebs are entwined seasons of hunting and home, transformed into thick strands that drape the outsides of our house windows.

The windows of this house seem particularly cobwebby, from my memory of other places lived. Might be the location here, on the edge of a village, next to the forest. Might be the fact that I’m no longer renting, so now I notice such things. Either way, there’s lots.

The autumn light filters through these many webs. They accumulate birch seeds - little brown flecks, and the fluffy artichoke seeds, salsify and dandelion seeds, as the autumn winds blow on through.

The Shrike Thrush families - smallish, smooth grey birds with a whopper of a whip-like call who nest in our carport each spring - delight in these types of cobwebs.

These types of cobwebs, the leftovers, the thicker corner-decoration types, contain valuable dinner, at this time of year.

Because many other species of someones get caught in them, especially in the autumn winds, making these window-corners into little protein-filled, insect-rich, cobwebby deposits.

Which means, in turn, that our window-corners are bright with the whip-like calls of the Grey Shrike Thrush… as they flit in to feed on the corners, snapping up all that entangled protein, and flit back to the trees. I love to watch them.

Apothecary learnings, this month:

Spiderwebs are an age-old medicine. It’s likely that many, perhaps every culture, has used them for wound-healing.

Spider web, applied to open wounds, helps with healing. Helps the skin knit back together.4

I love that the word for this process is ‘knit’ - and that the weavings of the spider helps accelerate that knitting.

Spiderweb silk, when used as a wound dressing, serves as a matrix for platelet and fibrin deposition - which are crucial for hemostasis (stopping bleeding) and blood clot formation.

Spider silk is extremely strong, for it’s size, which also helps hold everything together in times of trauma. And then there’s spider silk’s biocompatibility.5 As in, it’s similarity to components of human skin cells.

The spiders, their webs, and us. We are kin, family. Distant family, but still.

Spiderweb is also (nearly) waterproof, which makes it a good wound covering. Though some studies say spider silk is antimicrobial and antifungal, some other studies refute this.

Either way, a waterproof covering, which is similar enough to skin cells to radically promote wound healing for multiple reasons…

…sounds like something to keep in my bag of tricks. Hmm. Good to know.

And, in apothecary adjacent learnings…

Many researchers now consider spiderwebs to be an example of embodied cognition.

Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head… 6

So - a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.

Spiderwebs also have a grand history of being used by us humans beyond wound healing, for all their particular qualities. Examples I loved include:

• Fishing for Needlefish in the Solomon Islands with gathered spiderweb silk, the perfect material for a tricky job.7

• Histories of fishnets made of certain spider silks, for catching certain kinds of river fish in Papua.8

• Cobweb paintings - layers and layers of cobwebs stretched across a frame, then painted upon, with the result being a luminous, semi-transparent canvas. Perfect for enlightened subjects.9

So much else learned, this month of the Cobweb Moon.

I will never see any web as ‘just a cobweb’ ever, ever again.

And then there’s everything I learned about social spiders (yep, the cobwebby ones) chosen family values, and how they order their multi-spider communal lives, selecting new arrivals for compatibility in needed skills, rather than blood relations. Chosen family.10

And then, there’s… the spidergoats. Whose genetically modified milk (thanks to goat-egg-spider-egg-crossover) contain proteins which, when extracted, can be refined into spider silk. For bulletproof vests, and such. And, maybe one day, bullet-proof humans, apparently.11

So much still to learn. If I had a year to spend on cobwebs and spiderwebs, I would do it gladly - even though they do generally contain spiders, who, though I aspire to be totally cool with, send some deep part of me into a panic.

But I’m working with it. And them. And their webs.

It has been a joy.

The prints this month came out of various household cobweb interactions -

Cyanotypes flattened against window glass with cobwebs on the other side, sun shining through.

Cobwebs of the ‘no longer inhabited’ type, from the workshop underneath our house, scooped onto circles of wire and also embroidery hoops, then exposed to the sun ontop of cyanotype. Sometimes containing the skeletons of spider families gone before us.

Milk sprayed onto cobwebs onto glass. Cobwebs that have caught a season within them - dust, seeds, fluff, insect wings.

Wire rounds passed through reeds in a pond, to capture yesterday’s web, or a little of it.

As this month was nearing, I was expecting to be working with… perhaps the many beans I’ve been drying, or the last of the tomatoes I’m harvesting, this late-autumn moon.

But no. The cobwebs called, and I am happy that I heard them.

You can thank me for not drawing large and longwinded metaphors between spiderwebs and wound healing (individual, collective and beyond) later, if you like. It was an effort, on my part - but I kept it mostly in my heart, or tried to.

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But - please do keep in mind that the cobwebs can help heal us.

And if you were to have a small supply of clean web, for such, perhaps kept in a little tin, as I have done…

…well, then. Medicine comes in many forms.

We are held and cradled by so many other living beings, so beautifully. Rosehip and cobweb, to begin with.

And that is good to remember.

11

This Bulletproof Skin is Made of Goat Milk Spider Silk

Entangled Garden is a reader-supported publication. If this journal speaks to you, you are welcome to join the conversation:

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You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, by sharing this journal with friends, or buying one of my books. Thanks for reading, and be well - K

Send your friends pictures of the moon

-

A simple way to say

I know I am over here,

and you are way over there,

but I see you, this early morning.

In all your shining.

-

And they

may send you a picture back.

Of that same moon,

but from their own world -

just over the hill, maybe

or a continent away.

-

The same moon,

the same morning.

-

We cannot see each others face,

but we can each turn our faces skyward -

and be reflected

by the same moonlight,

just for a moment.

-

Our own personal

satellite connection -

no Starlink involved.

Just your face,

the moon,

and my face.

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Drawing a triangle

of comfort and care,

yearning and trepidation.

Your face, to the moon, to my face.

Same morning,

different worlds.

-

I see you,

and I'm thinking of you,

and I know how hard you try,

and here is a picture of the moon.

-

To remind you

that I'm here -

in my own swamp of everything,

but also

looking up,

and beaming at you.

-

Via this satellite

who is not yet owned -

who has always been a part of us,

and who endures with us, though every turning.

-

Send your friends pictures of the moon

to help keep them whole.

A moment of pause

in an age of poly-crisis.

We are both still here,

and I see you -

and sometimes,

that's all I have.

-

Send your friends pictures of the moon.

-

To Maria, and to Beth, and to Anneke - for all the moon pictures, sometimes with helpful arrows (see below).

Entangled Garden is a reader-supported publication. If this journal speaks to you, you are welcome to join the conversation:

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You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, by sharing this journal with friends, or buying one of my books. Thanks for reading, and be well - K

Some of the jars are bubbling. Some of them are sticky with honey. All of them - concentrated sunshine, in rosehip form.

Final days of this Rosehip Moon. I’ve been watching the crescent wane as I’ve travelled across Djaara country in Victoria, this week, the moon rising later and later into the night.

I check on the moon every morning, as soon as I wake in the pre-dawn. There it is. There she is.

I’m so enjoying this emerging knowledge, for myself. No matter what country I’m on, the moon can be found. Learning which part of the sky to ponder, in the pre-dawn light. Feeling the month wind down. It is becoming a heart clock, of a different kind.

Landing for the last few days in Naarm / Melbourne, I was lucky to be offered a bed in a warehouse in Coburg by dear friends.

Coburg feels like the centre of the rosewater universe, amongst all these Lebanese, Syrian and Afghan grocers. Damask rose (originating in Iran, or Palestine, depending on who you speak to) bushes sighted out the front of many homes, down side streets. I wave to each of them as I pass.

And here, I also realise, at least half the community is waiting for this particular moon to end. Paying close attention. Waiting for the new crescent to be sighted, in just a few short days. The end of Ramadan. The end of dawn-till-dusk fasting.

The beginning of Eid-al-Fitr, the blessed feast. Eid Mubarak!

The end of Ramadan is defined by the first sighting of the crescent moon, and is how the ‘new moon’ is defined in Islam. Billions of people, all over our planet, are watching this particular moon wane, more closely than normal, perhaps. And dreaming of the feast to come. I’ve heard that the last days of Ramadan can be hard, especially for families. A whole moon of all-day fasting. Respect.

I imagine Coburg will be a very happy place next week, with Eid-al-Fitr celebrations and feasts everywhere. The Eid Mubarak! (blessed feasting) decorations are already popping up in every felafel shop.

May the rosewater flow freely here next week, and all bellies be full of goodness.

But I’m heading home, with the remains of the small bottle of Rosehip Elixir I brought with me to keep my heart whole, to greet the dark moon back on melukerdee country. I wish i could stay. I can’t wait to get home.

But to the recipes.

Can i just say that all of these concoctions, as I’ve been tasting, sipping and licking as they progress, are SO super delicious.

I cannot believe I didn’t have rosehip firmly in my daily life, before this time. Well, that’s fixed, now.

I sourced these recipes from various places, and modified some slightly, to try and retain as much of the raw rosehip goodness as I could (vitamin C to the max, yo).

Where a recipe called for boiling the rosehips, and I decided I could get away without that step, I did. So some of these recipes contain slight variations on trad (or just popular) rosehip and rose petal preps.

Nothing has exploded on me yet, which is a good sign. And as you’ll see, the ingredients are all pretty simple.

ALSO - I believe you can substitute dried rose hips for fresh ones, in all these recipes, at a pinch. Just re-hydrate them with a bit of water first.

Rosehip Heart Elixir

A rosehip, honey and brandy elixir, gathered with respect, made with love, strained many times, and to be taken as drops under the tongue, when the hear is sore, or carrying heavy weight, and needs fortification. Delicious, fragrant medicine.

I adapted this recipe from the Herbal Academy, keeping the rosehips raw and adding a touch more brandy to ensure everyone didn’t ferment too much.

Rosehip Heart Elixir, part 1:

• 2 cups rosehips (stems removed as much as possible, but don’t stress)

• 1.5 cups of raw honey (warm it a little before adding, if it’s super solid)

• 3/4 cup of brandy (good-ish quality if possible, not the cooking stuff)

1. Add all ingredients to a blender-like thing. We have a Ninja bullet, so I used that.

2. Blitz slowly, and the mix should mush up. If not, add a splash of water to help things along.

3. Once fully mushed, pour into a big jar, and label with the time of month, and what it is.

4. Leave on kitchen bench at room temp for half a moon, shaking (or upending) daily. Admire. Open and sniff, occasionally. The put the lid back on.

Rosehip Heart Elixir, part 2:

After half a moon (or up to a whole moon) of daily shaking, it is time to Strain. Do not be in a rush for this part.

The main thing here is that within rosehips are many small and tiny hairs, of a fibreglass kind. You do not want these in your throat. Not even a little bit.

So… straining this mix very well is key. It does take a while, but you will be happy for the rest of the year that you took that time.

Straining: you can either strain multiple times, through successively finer sieves, or go all-in, if you have some good strong cheesecloth.

I used a not-fine strainer (first round) to remove the big bits, and then poured the strained mix back though a colander w cheesecloth in it (second round).

And squeeeeeze the cheesecloth, to get all the drippy goodness out.

The rosehip goop you are left over with could be put in vodka and left for a month and then strained, if you like. Or you could feed the goop to the chooks, or compost.

The elixir you will be left with is syrupy, red, and entirely amazing. Bottle up into smallish brown-glass bottles with a dropper, and label.

Ideally, leave these bottles for 3 months before using - but if times need it, start using immediately.

A dropper-full under the tongue when the heart is heavy, or you need a pause, is a wonderful and precious thing. I think this stuff is what the word ‘Elixir’ was made for, personally. You will also get a vitamin C hit, as a bonus.

This elixir will keep until next rosehip season, if it lasts that long (unlikely).

Share bottles with loved ones, and let them know how precious they are.

Notes:

1. This prep can look a LOT like passata, with all the red mush and seeds showing through, which is also common in kitchens in Autumn. Label to avoid confusion.

2. Double batches work well.

3. The first batch of this that I made, I kept on a sunny windowsill. That may not have been the best thing re UV and vitamin C, but I really loved that the bottle was warm and sunlit as it steeped.

Rosehip Nalewka

(Polish vodka medicine - kinda like a tincture)

• 1 cup rosehips (freeze them first, if you can, this will help them macerate in the vodka)

• 1 cup vodka

• 1/2 cup honey

1. Put the rosehips in a clean jar, and pour vodka over.

2. Leave the jar on the kitchen bench for a whole moon, shaking daily

3. After a moon has passed, strain well. Give rosehips to chickens.

4. Add 1/2 cup of honey to the vodka/rosehip mix, and leave on bench for a minimum 3 moons, shaking whenever you remember.

5. This nalewka improves with age (like us all) so maybe put some aside for the moons to come.

6. Take rosehip nalewka as needed. Zuza Zak, the author, writes that her mum would take a shot of this each morning. Can’t argue with that.

From Slavic Kitchen Alchemy by Zuza Zak

Rose petal Nalewka

As above, but use rose petals in place of rosehips.

Can be strained after half a moon, once the petals have given up all their colour.

Rosehip Cheong/Hipilo

Rosehips fermented in honey. Can also be done in sugar, same recipe. Yields a cordial of sorts. Mine is still brewing.

• Equal weights of rosehips, and raw honey. Or sugar.

I used raw leatherwood honey, because that’s how we roll in lutruwita, and because it is delicious.

1. Combine ingredients in a jar with a good lid, and sit on the bench for a moon, shaking daily.

2. You may need to release the lid daily after a while, to let any fermenty gasses out. Lick fingers as needed.

3. The mix will slowly ferment, and mush, and bubble. To ensure it all mushes together, you could smush the rosehips first, or freeze them prior to using. I did neither of these things, but now wish i had.

4. After a moon or so, everyone in the jar should be fermented and bubbly.

5. Strain, (see fine straining notes above in Elixir recipe) - and there you go.

A simple, raw, fermented rosehip cordial - Cheong in the Korean tradition of such things, Hipilo in the Italian tradition. Delicious in all contexts.

Sam Black, whose recipe I followed for this, is super generous and has many useful things to say about rosehips. He also shares generously on instagram, and has a great book, The Fermentation Kitchen. I love his work.

Other Rosehip things, on the make

• Rose petals packed in stringybark honey (still steeping, will strain after 3 moons - recipes differ on steeping time from 2 days to six weeks, so I’m trying 3 moons, because I can)

• Rosoliu (rose petal liqueur) is steeping

• Trays and trays of rosehips are drying, whole, for winter teas.

I’m also keen to make rosewater and other rose petal based things, but this season is a time of rosehips. A few flowers, here and there, but mostly the hips.

When early summer rolls around, I will bring my attention back to the petals, and learn some more from the rosa.

The month winds down. The last sliver of moon is *just* visible, in the east, right before sunrise.

For the last quarter month, the moon has been ‘leading the sun across the sky’ - until tomorrow (ish)… more the next day, actually - when they will rise together.

Dark moon. New moon. No moon. Time of consideration.

My astrological friends counsel against decisions at this time of the month. Wait till the new moon is visible, just above the western horizon in the evening sky, at sunset, as it’s thinnest crescent. Eid Mubarak!

Wait until the moon is sighted ‘following the sun across the sky’. And only then, proceed with whatever you have planned, and decided.

And feast. In whatever form that looks like for you.

With rosewater sprinkled over everything, to make it even better.

I’ve also been loving the practice of doing a cyanotype a day, on this road trip I’m just at the end of. Fast and scrappy, with whatever is available.

And a moment of meditation in amongst the business of travel and friends and speaking engagements. Good learning for me. Breathe out, just for a second. Here they are -