Organic Saffron
When I was living in the SF Bay Area, I paid a lot of attention to the politics of what I was eating. I lived in collectives, and we'd shop at the farmers' market. We'd shop at the Rainbow Grocery. There was a while, I remember, when some of the anarchists were going around getting out of date dairy products from various stores (probably lying through their teeth about the intended use of said dairy products, is my guess) and then selling them cheap, real cheap, and we were buying them, till I put my foot down and said I hated buying cottage cheese and milk that had gone off, and I wasn't going to do it any more, and I didn't care if the world was going to hell in a handbasket and it was my duty to eat nasty dairy products, I wouldn't do it, and that was the end of that, for our collective at least. I think that probably I was just the first in the collective to voice the general opinion, and that none of us were eating up the anarchist-provided gone-off dairy products with glee.
Farmers' markets and Rainbow Grocery, though, that was fine. Support the small local farms. Eat organic. Buy interesting stocking stuffers made out of hemp from Guatemala. I was ok with that.
But when I got to Pittsburgh, it wasn't so easy any more. And for some time now I've been living in the South Hills suburbs, and the nearest farmers' market is on the South Side, 30 minutes away, on Tuesday afternoons, and it's hard to get to. And there is indeed a Whole Foods, but it's in Pittsburgh proper, and would take us basically a two hour commute.
And what with one thing and other, for years now we've been getting up on Saturday morning and driving over to the Giant Eagle, where the child gets to play video games in the child care center, and Sam and I go up and down the aisles buying everything we need, pretty much, and it's all been trucked in from California if it's fruits and vegetables, or it's been trucked in from the giant hog farms and poultry factories, if it's dead animals, and basically from that moment when I refused to eat the dairy products that had become elderly, it's been all down hill, and I'm spending a great deal of my time and energy oppressing the hogs and chickens, and helping to drive the small farmers out of business.
I realized all this on account of teaching freshmen -- there you are, reading the essays in the "genetically modified foods" section of the composition textbook, and all of a sudden you're Convicted, and so you have to go Witness and Make Amends. This is the problem with education.
Poor Sam. I expect he's probably used to living with regular upheavals -- I have a sort of Dramatic Inner Life -- but he does enjoy pork chops. He'd like not to lose them out of his life. Though he was pretty disturbed by the news that they're bring oppressed by the Giant Hog Industry, too. He's a rural South Carolina boy. He knows how to slaughter hogs, and use up all the pieces of them. And before they get slaughtered, he knows they're not supposed to be living in tiny cages, going insane.
He likes the fact that the Giant Eagle gives us discounts on gasoline, though.
That's the thing, you know. It's not just the time, and trying to get on over to the Whole Foods. It's cheaper, not just easier, to shop at the Giant Eagle. Like shopping at Walmart. Wicked, but tempting.
Anyway, we're agreed that I'll drive on over to Whole Foods after work, to see how much of our shopping I can get done there, and then the rest of what we need we can buy at the Giant Eagle, so he can get the Very Exciting gasoline discounts.
And in the meantime, we've got our various crops at Bear's Retreat. True, true, the mysterious fruits that turned out, mysteriously, to be pears, even though they looked like pears -- how mysterious is that! My dear lady! What a bizarre coincidence! -- were kinda small, and so were the apples, and the black walnuts turn out so far to be empty, mostly, nevertheless, we are harvesting a new crop of saffron, and that seems to be turning out well.
Wait, you say. Saffron? Are you kidding? You're growing saffron? But isn't that, like, $800 a pound or something? And you're growing it in your yard?
Well, yes. Yes, we are. And it's organic, too, on account of we didn't put any chemicals or anything on it. Sam planted it, about a month ago, and this morning he discovered that it was blooming (much to our shock; we knew it was a fall bloomer, but we were expecting to see it next year), and so I've harvested, at this point, 12 stamens, since there were 4 blooms. I figure this is worth about $8.00. There are 100 bulbs planted in the yard -- if they all bloom, and we successfully harvest all their little stamens, we might even package them in little cellophane envelopes for Christmas presents. "A Present From Bear's Retreat." That'll be nice.
We're happy about the saffron, of course -- which was a gift from my mom, and an extraordinarily excellent gift, too -- cause we like saffron, and we're glad to have some and save the money. And also we're chuffed to be growing saffron, cause who the hell does? Not many people, that's who. So it pleases us, in our neverending quest for true eccentricity.
But we're also happy because now Bear's Retreat is just a little bit more like Saffron Walden, which we visited the year we were living in England, and which we thought was a hoot. Its name derives from the saffron fields that fueled the local economy in the middle ages -- back when the English could grow saffron for sale, cause the labor was so cheap. It has beautiful old houses decorated with an ornate plastering technique called "pargetting," and it has a turf labyrinth. The child (who was three at the time) and I loved the turf labyrinth. We'd all been through the excellent yew labyrinth at Hampton Court earlier, and we'd pestered Sam to agree to put a labyrinth in the backyard -- which I believe he seemed inclined to do -- but the turf labyrinth was even better -- we could walk it at different paces and still see each other. And it would be easier to create than a yew labyrinth, for sure. So we figured Sam could EASILY build us a turf labyrinth.
Well, he never did.
But now we are at Bear's Retreat, growing saffron, and I think there's room on these 2 acres for a turf labyrinth. And then after that we can start in on pargetting the front wall.
And indeed, now that I come to think of it, surely the organic saffron can help pay for all that archaic plastering, which cannot come cheap.
Farmers' markets and Rainbow Grocery, though, that was fine. Support the small local farms. Eat organic. Buy interesting stocking stuffers made out of hemp from Guatemala. I was ok with that.
But when I got to Pittsburgh, it wasn't so easy any more. And for some time now I've been living in the South Hills suburbs, and the nearest farmers' market is on the South Side, 30 minutes away, on Tuesday afternoons, and it's hard to get to. And there is indeed a Whole Foods, but it's in Pittsburgh proper, and would take us basically a two hour commute.
And what with one thing and other, for years now we've been getting up on Saturday morning and driving over to the Giant Eagle, where the child gets to play video games in the child care center, and Sam and I go up and down the aisles buying everything we need, pretty much, and it's all been trucked in from California if it's fruits and vegetables, or it's been trucked in from the giant hog farms and poultry factories, if it's dead animals, and basically from that moment when I refused to eat the dairy products that had become elderly, it's been all down hill, and I'm spending a great deal of my time and energy oppressing the hogs and chickens, and helping to drive the small farmers out of business.
I realized all this on account of teaching freshmen -- there you are, reading the essays in the "genetically modified foods" section of the composition textbook, and all of a sudden you're Convicted, and so you have to go Witness and Make Amends. This is the problem with education.
Poor Sam. I expect he's probably used to living with regular upheavals -- I have a sort of Dramatic Inner Life -- but he does enjoy pork chops. He'd like not to lose them out of his life. Though he was pretty disturbed by the news that they're bring oppressed by the Giant Hog Industry, too. He's a rural South Carolina boy. He knows how to slaughter hogs, and use up all the pieces of them. And before they get slaughtered, he knows they're not supposed to be living in tiny cages, going insane.
He likes the fact that the Giant Eagle gives us discounts on gasoline, though.
That's the thing, you know. It's not just the time, and trying to get on over to the Whole Foods. It's cheaper, not just easier, to shop at the Giant Eagle. Like shopping at Walmart. Wicked, but tempting.
Anyway, we're agreed that I'll drive on over to Whole Foods after work, to see how much of our shopping I can get done there, and then the rest of what we need we can buy at the Giant Eagle, so he can get the Very Exciting gasoline discounts.
And in the meantime, we've got our various crops at Bear's Retreat. True, true, the mysterious fruits that turned out, mysteriously, to be pears, even though they looked like pears -- how mysterious is that! My dear lady! What a bizarre coincidence! -- were kinda small, and so were the apples, and the black walnuts turn out so far to be empty, mostly, nevertheless, we are harvesting a new crop of saffron, and that seems to be turning out well.
Wait, you say. Saffron? Are you kidding? You're growing saffron? But isn't that, like, $800 a pound or something? And you're growing it in your yard?
Well, yes. Yes, we are. And it's organic, too, on account of we didn't put any chemicals or anything on it. Sam planted it, about a month ago, and this morning he discovered that it was blooming (much to our shock; we knew it was a fall bloomer, but we were expecting to see it next year), and so I've harvested, at this point, 12 stamens, since there were 4 blooms. I figure this is worth about $8.00. There are 100 bulbs planted in the yard -- if they all bloom, and we successfully harvest all their little stamens, we might even package them in little cellophane envelopes for Christmas presents. "A Present From Bear's Retreat." That'll be nice.
We're happy about the saffron, of course -- which was a gift from my mom, and an extraordinarily excellent gift, too -- cause we like saffron, and we're glad to have some and save the money. And also we're chuffed to be growing saffron, cause who the hell does? Not many people, that's who. So it pleases us, in our neverending quest for true eccentricity.
But we're also happy because now Bear's Retreat is just a little bit more like Saffron Walden, which we visited the year we were living in England, and which we thought was a hoot. Its name derives from the saffron fields that fueled the local economy in the middle ages -- back when the English could grow saffron for sale, cause the labor was so cheap. It has beautiful old houses decorated with an ornate plastering technique called "pargetting," and it has a turf labyrinth. The child (who was three at the time) and I loved the turf labyrinth. We'd all been through the excellent yew labyrinth at Hampton Court earlier, and we'd pestered Sam to agree to put a labyrinth in the backyard -- which I believe he seemed inclined to do -- but the turf labyrinth was even better -- we could walk it at different paces and still see each other. And it would be easier to create than a yew labyrinth, for sure. So we figured Sam could EASILY build us a turf labyrinth.
Well, he never did.
But now we are at Bear's Retreat, growing saffron, and I think there's room on these 2 acres for a turf labyrinth. And then after that we can start in on pargetting the front wall.
And indeed, now that I come to think of it, surely the organic saffron can help pay for all that archaic plastering, which cannot come cheap.
<< Home