A Season of Plenty

Feelin' thankful... and granola.

Money, one way or another, is causing everyone (myself very included) some aches and pains these days... How do we cope?

Well, first of all, take a look at Tracie's Happy Garden... it feeds so many with sweat equity. And yesterday, when I picked Silas up from school- he demanded fried green tomatos as his after school snack... Tracie hooked me up with a greenie turning yellow one- and it was AWESOME. If you want to learn more about natural ways of eating and living (read FREE) then read Tracie's monthly publication: Agrarian Urbanite. Also, you can always joint the Knoxville Permaculture Guild- its fun!

And I am also a fan of the guerilla gardeners out there who just put food into the world. Jon planted some maters in ditches in the hood, and I have some friends who shall not be named who have a GIGANTIC GUERILLA GARDEN on an empty lot in the hood.

And guerilla gardens allow us to scavenge, to forage... Much like wild blackberries (which make the bestest bestest cobblers and jellies- and tons of them are on the way to Seven Islands) and wild persimmons, which I can eat till I am sick, I scavenged some pears from a Fourth and Gill Street Corner yesterday. (14 pears to be exact).

The tree is a huge, old fashioned, baking pears tree. (I don't know the pear species, but suffice it to say that the pears are the kind your grandma grew, crisp and hearty and so sweet that they make your hands sticky, nothing like the smooshy ones in the grocery...) The tree is so ignored, that its branches are bending from the weight of the fruit, near breaking. Pears cover the street and the sidewalk beneath it, and there are so many people around just ignoring this gift from nature. .. So I accepted the gift thankfully.

I'm going to make pear preserves, and baked pears, and gift the pears, and plant one of the seeds in my yard. How beautiful life is, even without money...