Outline: Adult Sunday School Introduction to Earth Care Urgency





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Gardening with a gun on my hip

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Yesterday really felt strange to me.   On the one hand it was a great afternoon to be outside.   The snow is gone, the ground is drying out, and the mosquitoes are not biting…much.   I found myself reveling in the work of cutting out some dead wood and making room for the new growth we are planning this year.   I almost never get to do brush-work when there is no snow and no mosquitoes.   What a day! On the other hand, I was doing this work with my Smith-and-Wesson .44 magnum handgun hanging on my hip.   You see, the day before yesterday our neighbor was attacked by an 800 lb grizzly bear .   The bears are particularly hungry this time of year, given that they haven’t had much to eat in six months, and that the salmon won’t be in our river for another six weeks.   The bear chased our neighbor down, clawed him up a bit and the, mercifully, left him alone.   As I enjoyed being outside preparing ground for permaculture-style gardening, it somehow seemed wrong to do with
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06 02 11 Rediscovering Enjoyment

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We hadn’t lived in our bioshelter home very long before Cindee began teaching me about permaculture. In brief, permaculture is about a way of life where the land feeds the people, the people tend the garden in a way where gardening feeds the land without chemical fertilizers (more on this later—but some plants actually build up and feed t he soil, even while producing food), and where the waste from each process of life on the land becomes the resource for feeding something else. In short, it becomes a more-or-less self-sustaining system t hat cares for itself with relatively little labor on the part of the people. From my perspec tive the problem of permaculture is that it takes time to develop the plants and the land. This is especially true for us, because we had more than pure permaculture in mind. We are both allergic to cottonwoods, and our whole 1.9 acres is a cottonwood grove. Why not replace the cottonwoods with berries and fruit trees? We need some paths to go
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06 20 11 How to Identify a Weed

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The potatoes are up—at least most of them. We planted three varieties of potatoes and plants from two of the three varieties have broken the surface. It is somehow very satisfying to see the plants come up, even though harvest is still months away. Watching things grow, by a mysterious power we call biology, is a wonder. At the same time, the cow parsnip and the fireweed are up in the same garden space. As we have been working on the garden I have been trying to decide how to define what is a weed and what is not. Fireweed is beautiful and technically edible. Cow parsnip surely has its uses, too. Do we remove these plants? Some things that I used to consider obvious weeds are actually quite useful. Dandelions are a case in point. As a kid I remember digging dandelions out of the lawn with a knife. They were too prolific and tended to crowd out the grass (not a weed) in our lawn. Dandelions seemed to me to be pure weed. Later I learned that dandelions
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