Moon’s pull. Wool. Perennial onion.

Travel

14 Apr

I’m insulating a small building on my land using sheep’s wool. I fill each cavity in the walls with fluffy, white wool batting cut with scissors to the exact dimensions. Each bat is slightly felted on one face to make it more rigid. This insulation is a commercial product easy to find online, but the practice of using wool as insulation is ancient. Think of Mongolian yurts lined with felt.

My building will have a kinship with sheep: wooly and warm, protected from wet by the naturally oily properties of fleece. Though we do not have sheep on this farm they do make good vineyard animals if managed properly. And this time of the year (still Aries, the Ram) is all about new lambs being born. In years past I would have been helping the goats to kid. It was a watchful, bated-breath moment in the year. Nature makes a window of opportunity for new life to make its start. The vulnerable babies often face harsh conditions and need to be brought in by a heat lamp in the barn. Or alternately, they can pop right up, have their coat licked dry by their mother and get right down to nursing in the warm sunlight.

Spring is a time of choosing. Discerning the times of pruning and planting. The weather has a strong hand in these determinations. A dump of snow stops me putting my seedlings out in their beds, a freeze halts the development of the pear blossom, and cuts made to the vine in the wrong moment can cause them to bleed sap too prodigiously.

In biodynamics the cycles of the moon are taken into account. This is more complex than it sounds. According to Wolf Storl in his wonderful overview of biodynamics, Culture and Horticulture, the moon has five cycles. Practically, biodynamic farmers do not use all of these, however, the complexity inspires awe. We are part of such a dynamic web, beyond our comprehension; yet clues and indications filter through and can help us attune to these larger influences. The most commonly referenced cycle—the sideric — tells us what zodiacal sign the moon is occupying and gives us which of the four elements is being emphasized in the natural world. Thus, the moon in an air sign like Gemini is a good time to be working with the airy aspects of the plant, harvesting herb flowers at their maximum fragrance, for instance. Possibly spraying the vines at flowering to support immune health. On this farm we’ve found it helpful to refrain from pruning at times when the moon is supporting maximum water, or sap rise — ie in a water sign like Cancer, or waxing, or near perigee.

The five cycles of the moon are:

The Sideric — what sign the moon is in, altering approximately every 2 days

The Synodic — the four quarters of the moon from new, to waxing crescent, to full, to waning crescent

The Anomalistic — altering between perigee and apogee, the distance of the moon from the earth

The Draconitic — the wobble of the moon to 5 degrees above or below the ecliptic

The Tropical — the ascension or descension of the moon, its lowest and hightest point on the horizon which alters every 27 days.

The perennial or Welsh onion is one of the only edibles in the garden just now. Along with nettles, sorrel and dandelion it represents a sort of spring ephemeral — a plant that takes the opportunity to come up before everything else is burgeoning. Little green points that take up the new spring sun before the trees or other vegetables leaf out. They make use of all the extra moisture of spring rains to leaf and flower before hiding below the soil in the heat of summer. These are the spring bulbs and the tender greens, the snowdrops and the Miners’ Lettuce.

Perennial onions are the only onion flavor to be had at this time of year other than green garlic. Even chives are not up yet. And the big bulbs of storage onions are beginning to get soft and sprout in their bin in the pantry. The clumps of perennial onion can be divided and replanted. As you harvest one green stem you pull it away from the clump.

I use them as you would a scallion, chopped across the grain. Or drop them whole into a pot a beans or soup.

This week I roasted them with chicken legs:

drumsticks tossed together with 3 inch spikes of green onion, a few half moons of potato, several cloves of garlic still in their skins, some shards of preserved lemon, a handful of cumin seed, chile flakes, olive oil, salt and pepper. I added a teaspoon of turmeric powder which turned everything an acid golden color. Spread in a spacious roasting pan and cooked at 425 degrees for about 25 minutes until all was golden brown and a bit crispy. The salty syrup of the preserved lemon caramelized with the onions and chicken fat. This was warming on a day of spring snow and crushed daffodils.

The onions send up their flower heads sometime around May when bees are looking for early forage. The flowers appear like little puffy moons — white with tiny starbursts all around in an airy globe.