tinctures and community assets

July 5, 2006 at 12:59 pm | In transportation, humanize, food, Chicago, friends |

My friend Nance is an amazing asset to the Little Village community of Chicago.  Several weeks ago she hosted a dinner conversation in her garden about The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.  She showed us around her garden suggesting items for the salad, and then let us forage our collective dinner.  She calls it foraging because she doesn’t plant things in specific spots.  She’s more interested in seeing where they come up.  Where do they want to live?

Anyway, very interesting conversation about the tradeoffs between shipping organicly grown food long distances (lots of fossil fuels for transport) and closer-to-home, yet not organic.  We also talked a lot about food as conversation, as relationship.  If something is grown in the backyard, even if not organic, we have a relationship with that plant, or with the people that grew that plant.  This matters.

This past Saturday, I foraged some more in Nance’s garden, this time for herbs to make tinctures.  We learned about a lot of different herbs and their healing properties, and how to harvest the flowers, leaves and roots and convert them to a usable form using alcohol, glycerin or vinegar and time.

Good stuff and very inspiring.  I want to grow more!

4 Comments

  1. I love the idea of seeing where plants “want to live”–I have a bit of this going on in my own garden with seeds that I just tossed in to see how they’d grow (didn’t have the patience to cultivate in the little seed trays and then pot and then plant in soil [grin])…it’s fun to contemplate the intentionality of plants…reminds me a bit of Findhorn…

    Comment by Karen Sella — July 5, 2006 #

  2. Hey Ted,

    That is so cool that she opens up her garden like that and shares…it is such a wonderful way to bring the community together. We just planted our first garden this year with our lawn compost from last year and it truly is exciting to see where things end up.

    Oh and Karen, what is Findhorn?

    Namaste,
    Heather

    Comment by Hsheatherpoet — July 5, 2006 #

  3. She has some plants in her garden that she didn’t even plant anywhere. They must’ve come in on her shoes or something. :-)

    At my house it’s going to take a long time to be able to follow this path because our courtyard is paved and all our growing is happening in containers. Tuesday I did our first depaving work. It was just a small area I broke up and it’s hard work!

    Comment by ted — July 6, 2006 #

  4. Hi Heather, your message got lost in my moderation queue with the spam while I had email trouble the other day so I’m only just seeing it, after answering Karen’s comment yesterday.

    Yes, Nance’s a wonderful person and great community-builder. She charged us $10 for materials for the workshop and $20 for the workshop itself, encouraging equal-value trades instead of cash for the $20 part. :-)

    Comment by ted — July 7, 2006 #

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