Round
Comb Honey Alan
Chadwick
Fossil, Oregon, lies in the north central part of the state, a very sparsely settled region between the wooded hills to the south and wheat farming country to the north. A town of fewer than 500 people, Fossil is nevertheless the largest one in Wheeler county and is the county seat. We moved there, Sky’s mother and the little guy, just under a year old, and I because that was where I found work as a counselor, through the good graces, once again, of Elwood Koenig, who had moved to Oregon the year previous.
We first landed in Enterprise, a larger town hard by the Wallowa mountains in the northeast corner of the state, arguably the most beautiful place I’d been through on a 2,000 mile bike journey through the Northwest a few years earlier. But there was no job for me there.
At Fossil I was the sole mental health counselor in a two-county area but had plenty of time on my hands as clients were scarce. We arrived, bee hive and a wringer washing machine in the back of my pickup, and set up housekeeping in an old dwelling in the middle of town. This place had a big yard for Sky, for the bees just outside the fence and, of course, a garden.
There were to be two gardens in Fossil at two different houses. I’ll be writing only a little about them, for they were very modest and designed only to feed my little family. But they were properly double-dug and productive, adding to my confidence and by the end of my time in Fossil I began to consider myself as a journeyman gardener. In the back of my mind, however, I understood that I had not even begun to fathom the mysteries of Biodynamics.
I did gain ground during those two seasons toward three other important skills. I built my first greenhouse, was able to gather some insights about composting, and found many rewards in my relationship to bees.
Greenhouse Rhapsody
Not long ago I said to Barbara, “If I had a greenhouse to work in, it would add years to my life.”
The greenhouse work can begin in January: mixing up potting soil, filling up flats and pots, working ground beds, sorting and ordering seeds. When the sun is shining it doesn’t much matter what the outside temperature is, you’re working inside in your T-shirt, basking and breathing an atmosphere alive with negative ions, oxygenated and enlivened with the growth-vibes of the plants and the soil underneath. There is joy available in a greenhouse as the late winter advances toward spring and the sun rises higher. Seeds are sprouting, seedlings to be transplanted, either into their permanent place or given more root room in larger pots and wider spacing. The shifting rainbows as I water with a misting nozzle. Watering, sometimes two or three times a day as the intensity of the sun warms everything, the floors, the benches, the flats, the soil. From March until June these early plants thrive and bloom and produce and right behind them are regiments of summer greenhouse plants, set to go outside.
A well-planned garden greenhouse [as opposed to a commercial greenhouse] can generate plants that are worth tens of thousands of dollars once their produce is marketed. A square foot of greenhouse space, warmed artificially from February until April, then sun-warmed the remainder of the year, can yield $30 or $35 in a season, having supported a spring crop of seedlings for transplanting outdoors, say 20-30 cabbage plants, then a late-spring harvest of lettuce, then a cucumber or tomato plant to bear in mid-summer. The timing of all this is an exquisite exercise, half intellectual and half intuitive, and the opportunities for gratitude and humility in the face of nature’s abundance are there to be taken and remembered.
How would seasons in the greenhouse lengthen my [anybody’s] life?
• Breathing that enlivened atmosphere is like a trip to the spa, all day every day;
• The repetitive and occasionally physically demanding [loading wheelbarrow loads of compost, mixing it with soil, filling a hundred, a thousand pots and flats] is life-enhancing work with a purpose;
• The manifest cheerfulness of the whole thing…seeds germinating, plants growing, music playing, sun-warmth, worms working, playing with water… how could anyone be glum?
• And finally, the many occasions there are in the greenhouse to express what is best in me: humility, gratitude, a sense of proportion and balance, an appreciation of my place in the harmony and inevitability of a living system designed to feed people.
The second home we had in Fossil was much more suitable than the first, which had been huge and hard to heat. It also had a south-facing front porch eminently suitable for a sun porch/greenhouse. In February I managed to strike a deal for salvaged glass, a lot of it, with a fellow who had demolished an old-style glass greenhouse, and studs, grooved along the edges, to hold the glass in place, enough of both to glass-in the whole thing. It took a few days to do the job, which the landlord approved as it obviously created a winter time heat source.
Soon I had seedlings started and as the winter cycled into spring these grew mightily in the green porch atmosphere. On fine days I began double-digging beds in the vacant lot next door, with help from Tom Smart, who lived with his wife Minnie and little boy, a little older than Sky, in the house on the other side of the lot. The boys, Sky was just two that April, spent hours chasing each other around a big tree in Tom’s yard on their 3-wheelers while their dads dug in the garden.
Tom and Minnie held a Bible study in their home every Wednesday evening and there I met Edwin Derrick, a rancher and lay preacher whose place was on the edge of town. Edwin ran a few cows and their calves on leased land during the grazing season, kept a bull or two, and cut hay on an irrigated field at his home place. On my country walks—you’re never more than a few blocks from the country in Fossil—I eyeballed that hayfield and noticed an unused triangular corner where the irrigation but the hay equipment couldn’t turn around. I’d had a notion about growing sunflowers on a more-than-garden scale; I had a scheme to press oil from them with a home-made hydraulic device, but if that didn’t work out I would be satisfied to have the birds eat the seeds. This field corner seemed a likely spot and I asked for Edwin’s permission.
He was one of the kindest, gentlest, most modest men I have ever known and something about my idea struck his fancy I suppose. He was all for it. In his kindness he downsized my proposal of three acres of sunflowers to much less than that, not because he was being stingy with his land but because he didn’t want me to fail. He knew that three acres of hand weeding would be beyond my capacity.
In the end it was a wonderful sight, that sunflower patch, with the bright yellow flower head bobbing and turning with the sun, and in the end the blackbirds got all the seeds and the cows got the stalks.
The two years in Fossil were marked by two triumphs in my career as a beekeeper, my first honey harvests and successful increase, which is what beekeepers call the process of making two colonies from one very strong one.
I was not prepared to invest in all of the equipment needed to harvest extracted honey which has to be spun from the honeycomb with a centrifugal device—even one holding only two or three frames and spun with a hand crank is bulky and expensive unsuited to a nomadic lifestyle like mine [though, come to think of it, so are beehives themselves]. This summer of 1979 I opted for a system of comb honey production called Ross Rounds in which the bees build their comb in round plastic cassettes, 28 of them in each shallow box sitting atop the main colony. When filled with honey—they weigh about a pound--these round combs are very attractive and require only to have clear plastic covers and labels put on. One of these little honeycombs sitting in a saucer on the breakfast table is a gourmet delight and, with beginner’s luck I harvested more than a hundred of them. Many we gave away as gifts.
The honeybee queen is less a monarch than an egg-laying machine. Under good spring conditions, when weather favors nectar and pollen production, lots of flowers and good foraging for the field bees, queens can lay a thousand or more eggs a day. Colony population increases rapidly and swarming, the bees’ natural tendency to increase, becomes a distinct possibility. At this point the alert beekeeper, reluctant to allow a significant number of his charges to fly off yonder, will order a new queen bee or two and “split” the overpopulated colony into two or three portions, each with its complement of worker bees, feed [honey and pollen] and brood, that is, developing bee babies of all stages of growth: eggs, larvae and pupae. The queen stays with what is left of the original hive and new queens are installed in the other one or two new colonies. With luck and continued good conditions in the field the result is two or three surplus-producing hives by the end of the season where before there was one.
Beginner’s luck again favored me those two seasons in Fossil and the increase went well, with the one colony I’d brought from Nevada expanded to three. I was not so callow as to consider this as a personal accomplishment but rather as a privilege, being allowed to participate in Nature’s plan for the continued welfare of the bees. The increased honey production was gravy.
* * * *
Meanwhile, as I carried on my counseling work that summer and saved some money, two thoughts nagged.
One was that I was no closer to than I had been three years ago to finding a way toward learning about Biodynamics. We did hear that Alan Chadwick was teaching at a community in Virginia, having left California and the various gardens he created there at the University of California at Santa Cruz program he founded, the garden at Green Gulch, the Zen Center, and the Round Valley Garden Project at Covelo. We inquired at Virginia's Carmel in the Valley only to be told that this startup community had no housing for a family, nor any provision for communal child care. We had no way to know, of course, that Chadwick would die at Green Gulch in May, 1980, the following year.
“We need to create the beauty and the quality first.
The quantity will follow”
"It is, you see — though many people seem to find the idea amusing — the garden that makes the gardener."
-- Alan Chadwick
"It is, you see — though many people seem to find the idea amusing — the garden that makes the gardener."
-- Alan Chadwick
With the other nagging thought, however, an avenue opened. I had come out of the Summer Course at Claymont four years earlier half-baked, truly. Those three months of Gurdjieff teachings with Pierre and the Sherbourne House graduates had had a huge impact, sent me spinning off to the Nevada desert to find answers that were not there and since had informed many life decisions, but I remained soggy inside. We heard from Sky’s biological father, who sometimes taught at Claymont, that if we wanted to go to a Basic Course—the nine-month one, of which there now had been four—we had best figure on going to the fifth one which would begin in late September, for there might not be a sixth.
And so the late summer at Fossil, which might have been a quiet time of garden and honey harvest, became a frenetic period of selling stuff, including all the bees and bee equipment, of closing out therapy sessions with clients, of phone calls and application forms to Claymont. Pierre, I think, recognizing my half-baked condition, made it easy to re-enter the situation there. By mid-September I left Fossil with less impedimenta than I had come with, to join the boy and his mother in Reno for a few days before leaving on a cross-country train ride for West Virginia. It was not the most impulsive thing I’ve done in my life, but it certainly ranks among the top few.