NEWS & UPDATES

NEWS DEC 30 2011
    It's been a pretty good year, with (incremental) progress towards most of our current goals:
* water: finally activated the catchment pond on our little branch, a project at least 5 years in the making. This allows us to efficiently harvest the runoff water in our cove with much less silt and maintenance than the previous method (a pipe jammed into a crevice in the bedrock). On the related matter of water storage, which is ever more urgent as summer droughts continue, we took advantage of a crop mob and several college class visits to make good progress on a large pond in the center of the garden (below the lawn / bee yard). It's a slow process, as we are moving the topsoil down the driveway to the new fruit terraces described in previous news.

* food: we made good progress in increasing vegetable & fruit production (for our own use). There is now an abundance of wildfoods and perennial vegetables to supplement the kitchen garden. Very good production of berries of all kinds, and it will only increase as the new terraces come into production starting 2012. Serious tree fruit is still a couple years off, but we'll propagate dwarfing rootstocks this year for grafting next spring - by then the terraces should be ready to plant out the new trees.  The biggest hindrance to increasing food production is lack of sunny areas.  It's always painful and it takes me a year or more to decide to cut a tree, but this winter we're coppicing several which were shading too much and yielding too little: a cherry, mulberry and mimosa, and took out some dense wild grape vines - all of which will significantly increase the area for vegetables and sun-loving herbs. 
   As described elsewhere, we've added a lot of new fruiting plants, perennial vegetables and wildfoods. A goal is to grow (for our own use, and to sell seeds / cuttings) every hardy plant in Eric Toensmeier's excellent Perennial Vegetables and every wild food in Samuel Thayer's excellent Forager's Harvest and Nature's Garden. Maybe this winter I'll get around to posting the complete list, I think we're at least 80% there. The new ponds will help with that, as they will provide habitat for a lot of aquatic and wetland food plants.

 

    

NEWS MAY 2011
     One thing we've been doing is planting a lot of fruit: strawberries, brambles, shrubs and trees including both the standards (apple, cherry, etc) and improved/selected varieties of 'wild fruit' (hawthorn, mtn. ash, viburnum, etc.).  As the garden has become shadier (those 'dwarf' conifers which I planted in shelterbelts 25 yrs ago have turned out to be not so dwarf , but it's hard to axe a 15 or 20 foot shrub which you grew from a cutting) I've been on a search for sun, and when a big, leaning hickory came down in a windstorm and took a couple of smaller trees with it, I realized that the slope just above the road next to my driveway is an ideal 'sunny slope.'  So we are terracing it, using at present locust (rot-resistant) slabs (offcuts) from the last of the local sawmills. Terraces approx 6' wide, walls about 2' high. As we build the walls, we lay in strawberry plants between the slabs. Strawberries do great in walls: not much competition, the dangling fruit is beautiful and totally clean; only problem is that the runners constantly invade the bed below - we peg them back to fill gaps in the wall.

    The idea is that each terrace will be a different fruit: ras/black/blue berries, currants & gooseberries, grapes, apples & pears, peaches, plums, cherries.  However things are getting a little skewed as I keep ordering other kinds of fruiting trees/shrubs and don't have anywhere else to put them, plus I want to grow these hulless pumpkin seeds, so we stuck half a dozen of them out there to run around between (hopefully not over) the young trees. Then I also put out some dwarfing rootstocks, to propagate for grafting.

    Getting good at grafting & budding is a big current goal; I bought a little grafting machine (makes the cuts) and caught a workshop at the local extension office. I need to make a lot of dwarf fruit trees, because there's no way I could afford to buy as many as I need for the kind of intensive fruit production I have in mind, which is fruit trained on wires and severely pruned (apple cordons (single stem) are spaced 1' apart in the row!!!) for maximum production.  (My main text for this is Growing Fruit by Harry Baker, it's an RHS Handbook, replacing The Fruit Garden Displayed, also good.)  I have no idea if these methods will work here, but keen to try.  Why?

    Certainly there is a discrepancy between this kind of intensive manipulation of the plants & the environment and sentiments expressed elsewhere on this website about aspirations toward a more 'natural' lifestyle. So here's where I'm at with that, at the moment:  I have about 4 acres of land, all of it was young woods (25-50 yrs.) when I acquired it. I'd like to leave as much as possible as woods, to pursue it's own course of development, but I'm also committed to meeting my needs (primarily food, and some cash income) from this piece of land, in a sustainable way. While I devote a great deal of effort to increasing food and income from my woodlands (see below), there are limitations, which come down to: sun = production (biomass accumulation).  To jump to the conclusion - the more intensively I cultivate my sunny clearings, the more land I get to leave uncleared.  Intensive/extensive is another 'axis of diversity' (like sun/shade or wet/dry, acid/neutral, etc.), and while it is possible to do some kinds of intensive production in the woods (wasabi, for example), intensive food production is about maximizing sun and fertility.

    Anyway, we've completed five terraces now, each about 30' long - that will be at least doubled eventually (10 x 60').  Each terrace began as a trench, used to dump outhouse buckets. Actually, it's somewhat elaborate: as the trenches are dug, topsoil goes uphill, subsoil down; then the topsoil is used to cover the humanure, then covercrop, then plant.

    A complimentary area of interest and news is wildfood. Right now (May 8), there is plenty: woods nettle (my favorite greens of all) is abundant, stinging nettle is still happening, giant Solomon's seal is still available but about done producing new shoots, smilax shoots are everywhere…I should just make a list of spring wildfoods we are working with.

·        Ramps are the quintessential spring wildfood both locally and now in demand by restaurants all  over. This year we collected perhaps 50# - some for us, mostly for Lantern Restaurant in Chapel Hill. I have an ongoing relationship with the owner, Andreae Reusing, which began with me delivering ramps to her about 10 years ago and discovering that her family was residing in the house my parents had built.  We sent about 35# of ramps to the Lantern this spring, wildharvested from a large colony about a half-hour walk from my house.  We no longer dig ramps, just cut them off below ground but above the root; that way the root can grow a new ramp next year.  I was a bit slow with getting my own ramps going (I really enjoy hiking up the mtn. to get them), but 3-4 years ago I spread a lot of seed around the yurt (my richest, moistest area) and the young plants now cover the area like grass.  It takes about 7 years to grow a ramp to full size from seed, so we're still a couple of years away from harvesting our own ramps - I should have started earlier. Ramps can essentially only be propagated from seeds  (but it's as easy as just broadcasting the seeds in autumn and letting the falling leaves cover them), so they will continue to be wild-harvested for the foreseeable future.  Too bad!  The demand goes up, restaurant suppliers are now offering them; but the common harvesting method is completely unsustainable, and indeed has resulted in their total extermination from all but the most remote areas (but no longer remote, thanks to the ATV).  I try to offer ramp seeds to potential growers, but for the past few years have been able to harvest very little seed, due to climate change (dry summers = no ramp seed), so more and more are being dug out while less and less are reproducing.

·        Solomon's seal we are blessed with a large population of 'giant Solomon's seal' (Polygonatum commutatum), which is a terrific edible / medicinal / ornamental  species.  I believe current botanical thinking is that it's a natural tetraploid hybrid of Polygonatum biflorum, a much smaller species, with stems approx. 18' tall; giant Sol. seal gets to 6', which makes a big difference in terms of edibility. The best part to eat are the young shoots which are almost an inch in diameter by about 12" tall: comparable to asparagus in size, preparation and taste.  However, they are not normally that thick; I'm describing my 'wild grown' plants, which are in light shade, rich woods soil, and somewhat reduced competition.  We have this in little semi-wild areas all around the garden clearing, which works fine when foraging for a meal; they come up over a period of several weeks during which there are always some young ones to be found somewhere.  They do grow fast, so the window between too small to harvest and too large can be only a few days.  This is a problem with many spring shoots - they spring up and shoot up. 

    So, in order to harvest them quickly and efficiently so as to be able to supply the restaurant we will be making a large bed, perhaps 6' x 20', of mostly Sol. seal (I'll be trying different companions - ramps might work, or another spring ephemeral - the Sol seal emerges rather late - I'll also try mixing in some ginseng and honewort).  The location I have in mind is beside the driveway, just above the parking spot. It has been enriched over the years by remnants of various piles of organic matter, and was cleared off last year (woods nettles, poison ivy and kudzu), then cover cropped (wispy buckwheat - too shady).  There is a nice Calycanthus on one side, which is suckering like crazy in the absence of any competition, and I am sure there are bits of kudzu to emerge, so I'm going to try the technique (new for me) of laying down cardboard, covering with deep mulch, and planting into that.  We have already gathered some mulch and will collect more - it's the thick wads of leaves and silt piled up in the roadside ditches by heavy spring rains.  I wouldn't be harvesting out of any old roadide ditch, but since I'm the last place on a dirt road which dead-ends at the Nat'l Forest, it's clean.   

    Leafmould is the key to growing all these woodland edibles, it provides fertility, holds moisture and is a mulch to reduce competition.  I get more serious about collecting leaves every year.  I've always gathered the wads of leaves which the spring rains deliver to my garden and piled them up for use as mulch or in woodland potting mix.  (A big advantage of living below a mountain is that fertility is delivered to you: you can prosper by interrupting natural erosion.)  Now, I make hoops of hogwire, 5'- 6' dia. x 3' high, and pack them with leaves; that's pack, as in get in and jump on them.  Whenever I have surplus urine (not needed for compost piles or to combine with wood ashes for fertilizer), I dump it on. I get the leaves from wherever they pile up deep over winter (near walls & buildings), but the best are those from the stream channel or road ditch as they are already somewhat compacted as well as preinocculated with soil.

·        Woods' nettle (Laportea) is our most abundant wild greens at present, and my favorite (to eat). Related to stinging nettle (below): same family, different genus (Laportea has 22 spp., many tropical, shoots of L. alatipes eaten by gorillas, more power to them), and probably has similar health benefits, but I've never seen an analysis. This stings, but signicantly less than Urtica; and grows, often abundantly, in rich woodland coves.

    [Interlude: What is a 'rich cove'? A cove is a concavity, a 'hollow', the low area with a creek / branch running through it, between two ridges. A 'rich cove' is one where leafmould has piled up to a great depth, nourishing a great variety of life, not least because it never dries out. A S. Appalachian rich cove is a sort of temperate zone tropical rainforest in terms of number of potential canopy species, with a correspondingly high level of diversity in the herb layer. The richer the soil layer, the more diversity, or, to rework a common analogy, the better the music, the more folks will squeeze onto the dance floor. Since sun UV burns up organic matter, north facing coves tend to be 'richer,' leading to often repeated, almost meaningless statements like 'ginseng grows on north facing slopes' - unless that slope happens to be covered in pines, or hemlocks, or rhododendrons, or mtn. laurel, or oak-hickory….

    There are, of course,  degrees of richness. It takes a really rich cove to support such shallow rooted ephemerals as squirrel corn, blue cohosh and trillium are also rather demanding; some others such as mayapple, bloodroot, Sol. seal, ginseng less so. Basswood and buckeye are good indicators for the richest coves.]

    Back to Laportea: it's also a fiber plant (as is Urtica, and many other members of the family), rated as 'very strong.'  Spreads by rhizomes to make colonies, therefore easy to propagate, but not so easy to control.

    For eating, I pick the top 4 or 5 leaves - I just pinch them off, they don't sting much at this stage, or I'm just used to it - it takes about 10 min to pick a saucepanfull, which will cook down to 1-2 portions.  The basic technique is steam until wilted, then eat. (I don't think they really need any cooking at all, except to de-activate the stingers)..

    Harvesting 4-5 leaves, maybe 2-3 times during the 2 month spring growth period is not much yield per square whatever , but a)  this is the best greens you're going to get all year and b) they build fertility. Rich coves (by the way, there can be rich ridges too, but pretty rare) and Laportea are almost synonymous   

         

·        Stinging nettle (Urtica)

·        Fiddleheads (Matteucia)

·        Cucumber root (Medeola)

·        Honewort (Cryptotaenia)

·        Groundnut (Apios priceana)

 

 

 

 

Jan 25 2007

INCOME through OUTREACH
Small business opportunities at Mountain Gardens
A NEW ADVANCED APPRENTICE PROGRAM

Here is a list of income-generating projects, some currently operating, others in various stages of development, as indicated. These projects explore the various opportunities which derive from our unique combination of plants, information and tools; they all represent various ways of sharing the abundance of the Paradise Garden.
I try to keep all of these projects moving forward, but even with a full compliment of apprentices (5-6) we cannot come close to developing more than a few of these to anything near their potential. In fact, I think that any one of these projects could yield enough income for a person to live on (since they would already be living in a paradise garden and presumably having therefore less need for money).
So, in the interest of seeing more of these projects realized, and of developing a community / collective of like minds, I am offering all apprentices the opportunity to continue at Mtn Gdns, build your own shelter, and take over and operate one (or more, or similar) of these, with the income generated going primarily to you (with some kickback to the general fund). I'm envisioning that these 'residents' will spend half time (20 hours/week) on Mtn Gdns projects, and the rest of the time on their own space and enterprise. Some arrangement will be devised whereby, if and when residents move on from here, they can take the business with them (or half of it - the business will, like a cell, divide).

· Seed business. Mtn Gdns has one of the most extensive lists of useful species on the web. However, I haven't been doing a good job of keeping it up - the list hasn't been revised in several years, some spp are no longer available, new ones need to be added. Some options I have explored in the past include: retail / wholesale, web marketing, mail order, packets in stores, wildcrafting seed of native botanicals (supplying to growers).
· Plant sales: my major source of income in the spring (retail sales at two 3-day herb events). There are many more possibilities to explore including: promoting retail sales here at Mtn Gdns, other herb events, starts & plugs wholesale and to growers. Currently making terraced beds in woodland to grow quantities of native botanicals / wildflowers for this purpose
· Tinctures: I believe Mtn Gdns has one of the most extensive lists of fresh single herb tinctures, as well as an extensive list of Chinese tonic formulas, which will increasingly incorporate Chinese herbs from our gardens. The plants, information and equipment needed to make small batches of world-class tonics are assembled. Another easy opportunity would involve combining single herb tinctures into functional formulas. I currently make absolutely no effort to market tinctures other than listing them on this website; I sense that there is a large potential market for some of our products.
· Other herb preparations: After several years of teaching an herbal preparations course at Daoist Traditions, I have accumulated processes, recipes & apparatus for a wide variety of preparations such as topical liniments, lotions and salves. Fresh herbal-based cosmetic creams and lotions are another interesting possibility. Our novel contribution is the ability to combine Chinese & native plants, fresh or dried, and use oriental processing methods still little-known in the west.
· Chinese herbs: There is definitely a niche for a business specializing in living, fresh Chinese herbs. Seeds, plants, plugs, cuttings, fresh herbs, preparations made from fresh herbs, information & workshops, photos. In fact we are doing all this, but not nearly to its full potential.
· Oriental Food Specialties: Mtn Gdns plant collection includes some oriental food plants still not widely available fresh in this country, including perennial vegetables like bamboo shoots and fidleheads and trees like szechuan pepper, yam tubers, codonopsis roots, udo shoots. These could be marketed to high-end restaurants and supplied by Fedex. Last year we established a promising relationship with an Asian fusion restaurant in Chapel Hill and hope to increase our offerings to them this year. The idea would be to supply seasonal specialties, and the first fun task would be to develop a calendar of availability.
· Wild Food Specialties: Similar to the above. Ramps (Allium tricoccum, wild leek) are the most obvious example of a wildfood going gourmet. Wild mushrooms are another example. I have been working with several other native wildfoods with gourmet potential: Solomon's seal, cucumber root, smilax shoots, 'indian salad' (Hydrophyllum), toothworts.
· Food Product: Based on food = medicine. E.g. mushroom soup backpack mix with dried shiitake and chinese tonic herbs. Or herbal zoom balls for hikers. Make use of my collection of cookbooks & references on 'Chinese medicated diet'. This is one of the places where the food movement will be going - incorporating rejuvenating / longevity herbs in diet. There is definitely a niche for someone with a culinary background to become the expert on this (recipes, workshops, tv show..) .
· Lectures, Workshops, Tours: Our unique combination of resources makes this the perfect place for teaching a wide variety of subjects around gardening, useful plants, herbal medicine, plant crafts,etc. There is plenty of fascinating material for an hour or an all-day tour. What we do here is, basically, theater; offering a functioning example of a lifestyle based on alternative values, in hopes of affecting lives of some of the audience. We could be doing much more outreach, what's needed is someone to publicize, promote, schedule, leaflet, brochure, webpromotion. We could be offering weekend or longer events with continuing education credits for health care professionals. We could be offering tea ceremony at the foot of the little waterfall above the yurt.
· Wildcrafting: Take advantage of our location & resources, and my knowledge of local flora distribution to take over and expand our small wildcrafting operation, supplying fresh native herbs, or weeds, to buyers worldwide (for example, tincture makers). Very fun work for someone who likes to hike and explore.
· Bamboo trellis & fence, Woodland crafts: Learn a very marketable craft by doing at Mtn Gdns. As always, a nice assemblage of resources is on hand: books, tools, materials. Woodland crafts is a British thing, involving a variety of products made in the woods from small stump sprouts - chairs, baskets, 'hurdles' (moveable woven fence panels), etc. Bentwood and 'rustic' furniture, arbors, gateways…
· Beekeeping: Obviously, huge potential for Mtn Gdns unique medicinal herb honey. Value added products would include syrups, electuaries, meads. Also pollen, propolis and - yes, it can be done - royal jelly. At present I have one active colony and another hive. Now that I've learned we can keep bears off with electric fence, it'll be full speed ahead with increasing the apiary. But I hope someone will come along and take over the project.
· Longevity tonics: A nice little business could be set up building on my collection of books, recipes, herbs, plants, methods and apparatus. At Mtn Gdns we have the possibility to produce the highest quality, 'artisinal' longevity tonics, based on native wild ginseng and organic, fresh Chinese herbs, plus our own honey and alcohol.
· Database, Information, Publications: There are many good databases about useful plants on the web, but all are library jobs. At Mtn Gdns we have the opportunity to create a list - the 1000 most useful plants for this bioregion - which would add to all that information our own first hand observations, data, photos. I have a database program which can absorb all the information one could wish. If we also record location in the garden, we could generate a guidebook, which would greatly enhance the experience of visiting the garden. No doubt there are many other ways in which such a database, as it becomes larger and more unique, could provide a modest income.
· Specialty plants: Several of my specialty plants could provide a significant income. I'd say the sky's the limit for Asian ginseng, wasabi, the purple flowered mustard, Angelica danggui, Codonopsis and perhaps others
· Food & drink events: for example, garden teas (a very typical way for gardens to earn money in England). Serving either garden herb teas or Chinese tonic decoctions, with appropriate selection of snax, pastries, tapas or dim sum. Definitely not open to the public - our facilities are laughably substandard. I'm imagining this as something to do once a week or so, it would serve the local community as another meeting place, place to take guests, etc. Evening pizza & beer events (using bake oven) are another easy possibility.

FEB 20, 2006

If you are reading this, it means I have been successful in posting to the website. Very exciting - I haven't added to the site since shortly after it was designed and published by our talented and generous friend Alphonse (his website is www.thecurio.us ). So, updates will be forthcoming to the apprentice and workshops pages, seed and tincture lists and elsewhere. A few recent photos can be found at www.flickr.com/photos/mountaingardens/ - which I will make into a link as soon as

Quite a lot has happened here over the past two years (since this site was established), and here is a summary: we (myself and apprentices) completed (not that anything much is ever really 'completed' here) the big glass greenhouse visible in front of the pavillion in photos. This has been about a five year project, partly motivated by accumulating, over the years, a lot of free glass, mostly double pane sliding glass door units. I cut these apart (double pane blocks too much light for a lean-to greenhouse in this area) and then had twice as much. It's built into a bank with a retaining back wall of earth filled drums. These I imagined would be for not-quite-hardy perennial plants (E.g. Ashwaganda) or those resenting winter wet (Mandrake), but increasingly I am using them to contain plants too invasive for the garden (some Artemisias, Trichosanthes, sweet grass), and of course they are black and serve as thermal mass. Speaking of which, my next ambition for the greenhouse is a cob 'thermal mass' heater: I envision of big slab of cob, with serpentine flue. The same idea as a masonry stove, actually more like a Chinese kang - the top of the slab could be used for flats of germinating seeds, or racks of drying herbs.

Another big project involved fixing the wall of the pavillion abutting the chimney - there was a lot of rot in the roof and sill from water running down the chimney, so the wall was pretty much rebuilt and improved. Now there is a very solid foundation beside the chimney where another masonry heater / oven / herb drier will go. (We have been making clay (Cinvaram) bricks for it, starting to have quite a pile of them). And - final solution to the runoff problem - a new roof joining the pavillion and kitchen. This roof also covers a thus far unused area adjacent to the kitchen which will be developed as an apothecary (place for making herbal preparations, as opposed to the pharmacy inside, which is for dispensing). Here we can set up the tincture press, herb grinder, new distillation apparatus and all the other paraphernalia and make use of the sink and beautiful cookstove which has recently come to live with us. On that note, I should mention the new rocketstove -five years in the envisioning, one day (less) in the making, works astonishingly well: a handful of twigs will boil water for tea several times faster than any kitchen range. (The plan - it's very simple,basically just an elbow of stovepipe - is from Approvecho, probably available online.) And the adjacent cob bake oven has gotten some use, with the usual round of 'round' parties (full moon, hot tub, firecircle, drums, pizza)..

And the list of refurbishments goes on: the yurt got a paint job and floor refinish, the coop was practically rebuilt - new siding and interior walls, new roof, windows, porch, sink, stove (all salvage material). And now that's all done, this year we get to landscape it! (It's really a charming space). And the old playhouse, which had gotten rather shabby, has been cleaned out, extended and reroofed. It will become a combination visitor reception center and garden shed. The last project of the year was the realization of another long time dream, a solar shower ('breadbox' type: an old water tank inside an insulated, glass fronted box). After much indecision, I impulsively decided to locate it on the slope between the house and garden, the best spot for afternoon sun (when we want a shower), but quite exposed and 'plunked down' looking at the moment (nothing that a little landscaping won't fix).

Recent changes in the garden include several small bogs (kiddie wading pool size, in fact, that's what they're made of): one, filled with sand / peat houses the gruit ale duo of bog myrtle and bog rosemary, among others; the other with regular soil (mud) is for gotu kola, skullcap, cardinal flower, etc. A nice little pool by the hot tub for frogs and wasabi. We'll be running the overflow of the water system to this pool, and then gradually extending a little stream from the pond overflow, using plastic sheet and old carpet (the ground is so rocky (porous) that any water features have to lined or the water just sinks away). Landscaping around the hot tub and stream side is underway - this is shaping up to be one of the nicest parts of the garden. The adjacent stream channel has been formed up into a series of pools and falls and will eventually be lined with wasabi. The giant bamboo planted five years ago is now quite a large colony, sending up bigger canes every year (last year's 3" dia, this year's eagerly anticipated). Elsewhere in the garden, several new stone walls and steps were added near the lawn (an area which has rquired revision as it has gone from sunny to shady over the past 20 years), and very nice steps, rock wall and raised bed along the path from house to pavillion, completing a transition which began about five years ago with ditches on each side of the path which were the recipient of that year's outhouse buckets; and much enjoyed because I walk that path about twenty times a day. New bamboo trellises in the garden were a fun project and hopefully the first of many to come.A lot of our effort last year went to clearing out overgrown areas of the garden (much of it rampant ground covers left over from a former lifetime as a landscaper), as a result of which a lot of space will be available this year for planting out new species more in line with my current interests (herbs and other 'useful plants') Also new: shiitake logs, beehive

I have been doing more teaching every year: workshops at NC Natural Products and Carolina Farm Stewards conferences, regular weekly classes at Mountain Gardens, a six-week series on native plant uses at the local community college, and most significantly, several classes at an innovative new Chinese medical school, Daoist Traditions, where I am also developing a Chinese herb garden with the students. The classes I teach at Daoist, 'Medical Botany' and 'Introduction to Herbal Preparations' have been a great opportunity to consolidate and increase my knowledge in these areas (and, not incidentally, add a lot of great books to the library). They were also very time consuming. In fact, it's surprising to me, in writing up this news report, how much has gotten done, when mostly what I remember about last year is working on the lessons; but now that I have taught each class and have my syllabi, lesson plans and handouts I look forward to refining and improving the classes while not being quite so consumed by them. Among many other discoveries, I'll just mention herb processing, an important aspect of Chinese herbalism but thus far almost unknown in this country. This involves heating herbs with various 'adjuvants' - bran, rice, medicinal clay, brine, vinegar, honey, wine - to alter their energetics, enhance certain actions or diminish side effects, direct the herb to a certain organ, etc. I was fortunate enough to be given access to an unpublished instructional manual, and thus able to learn and teach this to the students and apprentices. I'll be teaching a class in this again this summer at Mountain Gardens

Which leads on to the subject of our involvement in the movement to grow Chinese herbs in America. Last summer I was delighted to host Robert Newman, whom I have been collaborating with for over ten years, but had never actually met, and travel with him and Weiqing to Jean Giblette's High Falls Gardens in NY state for a weekend workshop on the botany of Chinese herbs. It was completely inspiring to see Jean's accomplishments and to visit the biodynamic herb gardens and shop at the nearby Camphill village. Jean's most recent success is landing a large Kellogg Foundation grant to promote the growing of Chinese herbs and the development of a botany curriculum for oriental medicine schools (Daoist Traditions will of course be much involved).

One of Jean's ideas is direct marketing of herbs to practitioners. Mountain Gardens contributed several species to this years 'sample packs' and I hope to offer more in the future. A major problem has always been the difficulty of drying herbs in this humid, off-the grid situation. Last year I helped obtain a grant for a community drier - primarily for shiitake mushrooms, which are being developed as an alternative crop locally, but it will also be available for drying herbs. Or perhaps we'll get that cob heater / drier built in the greenhouse.

Late last year I was honored to be named 'farmer of the year' by the Carolina Farm Stewardship organization, then, two weeks later, 'sustainable farmer of the year' by my county. It's great to know that what I do is recognized and respected, although it brought to mind one of Lieh-tzu's stories:
'I was alarmed by something'
'What was it?'
'I ate at ten inns, and at five they served me first.'
'If that is all, why should you be alarmed?'
'When a man's inner integrity is not firm, something oozes from his body and becomes an aura, which outside him presses on the hearts of others; it makes men honor him more than his elders and betters, and gets him into difficulties...'