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I spent the weekend in the midst of quite a fascinating and strikingly beautiful group of people… at the Doo-Nanny in Seale, Alabama. Sadly, it kept raining suddenly so I got camera-shy and hid it in the car. Most of the memories will have to stay in my mind, but sometimes that’s alright.
doo-nanny.com
A couple weeks ago I learned how to preserve tomatoes, thanks to the lovely Lindsey Turner. Here’s a quick look at how it went:
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A sunset view of entangled trees. Oh, Alabama. It’s so hot now that even the thought of walking around with no clothes on isn’t comforting. Only A/C or water will do.
The Homegrown Alabama crew took a trip to B&S Farms in Brent, Alabama this past Sunday. Smokey Smith and his son Gary farm 15 acres by themselves, except for the three or four days per year when the beans need a’pickin’. The farm’s pretty impressive!
These guys grow tomatoes, beans, peas, squash, potatoes, okra, cabbage, lettuce, peppers, eggplants, carrots, collards, onions, and a slew of other veggies that I can’t seem to remember right now. The list is a long one.
{^Smokey boasts about his most beautiful patches of collards}
{^Broccoli!}
{> A field of cabbages. Some are almost three feet across!}
{>Digging potaters}
As soon as we hit 388 feet, the air smelled of gunpowder and the wind switched directions from 24 degrees to 66. My ears popped. The harsh golden sunlight of the early morning hit the treetops and the fronts of the balloons we followed, creating strong extended shadows on the earth.
The funny thing about being a thousand feet in the air in a giant balloon is that you can see everything around you, but you can’t hear anything. Unless the burner’s going, it’s silent. Peaceful and inspiring.
Monday I joined the Growing Wild group (a once-a-week class at the Tuscaloosa magnet school) on a field trip to the UA Arboretum. A friend, Lydia, and others are teaching this course to teach young’uns about gardening, local food, and the value of the veg. So the kids took a trip and got to:
Make friends with the worms,
Plant tomatoes and basil,
See into the treetops,
Play with college kids,
And be kids.
For me, the visit was more than a couple of hours of running back and forth between the two groups. (Though I certainly did that. Got sweaty, and almost got poison oak!) Watching the ways that each child interacted with his or her surroundings gave me reason to remember my own absurd attention as a kid to the macros and micros of nature.
One yells and screams while holding a worm six inches from her face, while another solemnly pushes soil aside to reveal a black under layer, places a tomato plant inside the hole and pulls dirt steadily back to where it began. Some chew sassafras, some rap; all insist on having a spitting contest off of the treetop platform.
The differences in the way individuals experience are sometimes puzzling, and always intriguing.
And kids will be kids.
A 6,000-Easter egg drop went from this…
to this…
to this…
all in about ten minutes.
