DesignTrek

Today, I harvested some of our comfrey to transplant and prepare for making fertilizing tea.

Comfrey is a popular permaculture plant, for its excellent bioaccumulating of minerals and nutrients from soils, which can serve multiple purposes in and outside our home.

I transplanted a few leafy stems and rhizomes to spread under our apple and peach trees. They will offer new sustenance for our trees and we will enjoy the fruits of their labors. 🙂

I then coppiced a lush clump of comfrey (from under our cherry tree) for the fertilizing tea. Before placing in a five-gallon bucket, I prefer to chop the comfrey to hasten its decomposition and allow for more nutrients and goodness to leach from within.

I filled with water to the top and set aside for about three weeks. The result will be a stinky, wonderful liquid plant food which we will use around our gardens and shrubs – any where we wish to add a burst of energy for our summer providers.

I’ll add the remnants of the comfrey tea to our compost, to add further benefit to our soil-making efforts.

There you have it – get outside, plant some comfrey (easy to harvest rhizome from a friend) and charge your garden with nutrient-packed comfrey.

Social workers – show your clients and efforts of empowering people and communities with food, soil, and nutrient security!

Welcome back and thank you for being apart of my blog for nearly 20 years (beginning as a website before the dawn of blogging). I continue to write and share perspectives on a range of topics cogent to our successful living within the confines of Spaceship Earth (Thanks, Bucky).

This week’s headline topics:

• Implications of US withdrawal from / violation of Iran nuclear deal
• Hawaii volcano eruptions
• Fall-out from NY attorney general resignation
• Fresh food safety concerns via romaine lettuce / e-coli risks
• On Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviews Robert Kuttner on whether “democracy can survive global capitalism“
• Video depicting implications of China’s “new silk road” agenda

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I have been re-reading and further digesting the work of Jack Alpert, and one of his remarks informs this entry: “There are limits as to how much one astronaut can inconvenience another because there are no resources in the budget for conflict.”

This rings true in so many ways.  I often ponder how local / global unsustainable realities might be different if we were to progressively / carefully address various conflicts and aggressions around us as we evolve day-to-day.  No actions taken are benign — all have embodied systemic interactions which, admittedly, can quickly become mind-boggling and overwhelming in scope and meaning — yet require our urgent attention.

To reconcile or progressively take responsibility for such conflicts (which imply that our actions have reciprocating direct / indirect deleterious impact on “others”), we must begin to discern what / where / how such conflicts occur, and reveal connections about their respective significance to the critical causes of our world, beginning in our “own backyard” so to speak.

Flushing a toilet, munching on toast, receiving an email, starting a car, etc. all implicate many systemic capacities which carry unseen / unfelt / unknown energy, carbon — externality-laden — burdens for “others” to manage. We are all parties to this contract, regardless of where or how we live. As Alpert would likely agree, we must come to terms with the unseen by beginning to perceive and “see” more continuously and effectively. We can unite senses and sensibilities.

How we do so can and (I assert) should be enjoyable, value-added, psychologically healthy, socially-enriched, and mutually empowering — “nutritious” as I have often commented.  And, doing so should be apparently contiguous across our whole-personal and professional roles and relationships.  Disconnects or incongruence ultimately undermine benefits.

So, “no budget for conflict”. No time to waste.

Looking ahead, I aim to share experiences, lay-out insights, and chew on questions from which to tap ideas for practical innovation – as if our lives depend on such.

Stay tuned.