Last month while chasing pigs through the woods (a story that I will write about soon) I stumbled into a large area filled with Common Mullein – Verbascum thapsus. Mullein likes to grow in recently disturbed areas, and this place was really disturbed – trees uprooted and bulldozed away into giant piles.

Mullein is a fascinating plant. It easily colonizes disturbed areas, but its growth requirements prevent it from becoming invasive. Too much shade and it is all over for this plant. Rapid succession from other plants will crowd it out.

This early succession plant can actually make itself less viable by its own presence. A study in the Journal of Ecology conducted in our area concludes that as the years progress, the plant will become smaller and smaller and seed production will drop off significantly each year. According to the study, the first generation produced five times as much seed as the third generation.

Our friend Nick came over, so he and Kristin decided that we should go out to the spot and harvest some of the mullein leaves.  These first generation plants had some giant leaves, meaning less time harvesting and more time picking the ticks off our legs.

Mullein has many medicinal properties – it can be made into a tea or smoked to battle a cough. Sounds counterproductive, right?

The plant is also referred to as Nature’s Toilet Paper, but the irritating hairs that cover the plant make me think that you would need to be in some dire need to use it for that purpose more than once in a while.

The dried stalk contains many oils that supposedly make it a good torch.  I am going to try it out this Fall after the stalks are up.

February’s Crop Mob event at Edible Earthscapes was recently featured on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Now. I think this is one of the best presentations on the crop mob that exists – there are some great voices represented in the video and the visuals of a mob in action are great.  Check out the video on the UNC-TV site.

It is busy here. Transplanting is brisk; up-potting is tight. The turkey poults arrived in the mail yesterday and are chirping under the red light of the cardboard box brooder. Radishes are ready for market as are transplants and eggs. Our CSA starts on Tuesday.

With added plant and animal life at Circle Acres comes added stress.  Some of the things I worry about are late frosts, hail storms and loss of power to the brooder lights. None of these things come under my control.  My livelihood is not exactly on the line, but the livelihoods of my pack certainly are. So I worry about pests and plant diseases and stray dogs.  If we could fast forward to a time in the future where we are just living and working at Circle Acres, taking care of our community and ourselves, I wonder if I will dwell on these same worries as much.

Living that ascetic life is never far from my mind.  I live among a pack that yearns for that life and lifestyle.  Yearn might not even be strong enough.  Ever reach for something so much that you come into a sickness for it, that unattainable abstract that you wish you could have but get physically and mentally pummeled for moving towards it? If I could think of a word for that then I would like to use it.

For an easy life it sure is hard to get there.

My weekends have evaporated into something that I have yet to name.  They have become something that I enjoy – warm, heavy with work and chores, meaningful in the way that objectives are completed. But at the same time, there can be come tedious monotony in the day, a weird existence in blisters and staring down a long row of uninterrupted wild garlic.

Then, between the chickweed and the grass clumps, the first strawberry flower of the year comes into peripheral vision.  I stop. I stop and I think deeply. At some point this flower will turn into a berry, starting off white and green and solid.  From there the fruit moves into pink and on into deep red, the yellow seeds dimpling the fruit in diamond patterns.  Someone will eat it.  It could quite possibly be me or someone else from Circle Acres. Or it could be a CSA member or a market customer.

Not a big deal.  It is just a strawberry.

But it is a big deal when I think on it some more. We are growing something that someone is going to put in their bodies. They are going to use the sugar and vitamins in that berry to do things. They will walk to the mailbox or push in the clutch or scramble an egg using the energy from that berry. When I sat there weeding and thinking about that flower and following it through its development and on through the blood vessels and organs and paths of digestion and protein building and ATP and the breaking and formation of energy bonds and cell walls and divisions and… Well, it all made me a bit insane for a second.  I had to catch myself, get my head back together.

It is just one strawberry.