CHESHVAN MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD
LATE FALL MONTH OF TURNING LEAVES OCTOBER-NOVEMBER
The oak leaves have turned and the chlorophyll is slowly leaking out of the hickory leaves. The trees are done growing for the year; they are putting reserves into the root systems for next year. Their wisdom tells them that Winter is coming, and Spring will follow, a time of rest and then a time of growth.
The green in my garden is hardy vegetables. The carrot crop looks great, but I haven’t dug any up yet, and I’ve never grown chard or bok-choi as well as I have this year. Instead of harvesting and putting it by, I’m leaving it in the ground for a while, at least until I get the promise of hard frosts. I’m not much of a gardener and it is long past time that I added something to eat in Fall. The kale did not do as well, and it hasn’t frosted yet so it still tastes like kale (it gets sweeter once it has been frosted upon), even though we are past the average first frost date. Last year’s first frost date was a month later than average. The pushing back of the frost date hasn’t seemed to make a difference with the plants yet. The warm season grasses that grow in my garden and at the edge of my lawn and wherever this is a sunlight opening in the woods have died back for the year between the cold and the shorter days. Just as they should.
The first leaves have fallen from some ornamental trees in my front yard, and being a good suburbanite, I have been seen raking them up (hey at least I’m not leaf blowing them). But instead of bagging them, I’ve been dumping them onto the garden where they will break down. Speaking of leaf blowers, one of the banes of suburban existence, we haven’t yet entered into the season—I think that noise and carbon pollution comes with Kislev. Yet the mower is now in the garage for the winter, I think. The season of mowing is over. I like to think of myself as imitating what grazing would do to my lawn, but really I am keeping it neat enough to pass.
It's the time of the year to plant certain crops that can overwinter and start growing early in the Spring, or profit from exposure in some way. The first thing I ever planted in my life was garlic when I was 22, a patch next to the path on the commune where I had placed myself after college. I was a nervous wreck, and it is a good thing that garlic is a forgiving being. I felt like I had witnessed a miracle when it came up, waving green as everything else turned towards brown and grey. We planted winter wheat which germinated and stayed green all winter, then, like garlic, had a head start on the growing season. We grazed the winter wheat once with the cows and then let it mature and turned it into flour.
We also broadcast red clover seed during Cheshvan. Broadcasting seed is a fancy name for dumping the seed on top of the earth which is a lot less work and better for the soil than creating a smooth sed bed and putting the seed directly into the soil. Broadcasting seed in the Fall depends upon the movement of the earth freezing up and then unfreezing during the winter months (technically called “heaving”) to move the seed from on top of the soil to just below the surface where it is ready to sprout with the first warmth of Spring.
The cool season grasses, like my chard, are still growing, but slowly, without the explosiveness of the spring. The grass doesn’t have sex on its mind, knowing it won’t reproduce, but it should put some sugar into its roots for the upcoming winter, just as we put the last of the tomatoes onto the shelves and fill the root cellar with the last of the pumpkins, squash, carrots and apples.
It is also time to slaughter the meat that we will eat for the winter. I imagine that in days before freezers when we had to use the cold weather itself as the freezer that the slaughter of animals came later. But today we know that there isn’t much growth left in the grass and we are mindful of how much hay or baleage we have to feed them for our ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats. Our backyard chickens, turkeys and pigs growth rate slows down, so slaughtering them now makes sense. Killing animals is something that not everyone can do, and if you don’t want to do that, being a vegan is a sound choice.
There’s been a movement for a while in the grass fed meat community to use “harvesting” instead of “slaughtering” to ease the pain on our gentle souls that understandably don’t like the idea of killing another being so we can eat. Our sensitivity rests on the fact that it is easier to identify with a cow or a pig than it is a broccoli plant—as a fellow mammal, of course it should be easier. And that broccoli plant is going to die anyway, whereas that mammal could live for a good many more years. As I said, being a vegan is a sound choice.
When I had a farm, I always used to thank the beings I was sending to market for their sacrifice so we humans could eat. I thanked them by name, cried a little bit and got on with it. I really didn’t like it. There’s no farming without killing animals. I used to think that dairy was OK, but the reality is that to have a dairy, you have to have the cows giving birth every year. The gestation period for cows is the same as it is for humans, so you start trying to get a milking cow pregnant as early as 35 days after she has given birth—yeah, ouch. For both beef and dairy, the vast majority of male calves are turned into steers and slaughtered for meat and the average beef momma lives a longer and more suitable life than the average dairy cow.
Most farmers have come to some kind of acceptance about killing animals. A lot of times, in my experience, this is done through denial of feelings, which is no way to live. Some folks I known have become grain or vegetable farmers because they don’t want to deal with causing death. We humans only live because of the millions or billions of beings who die every day that we should live—but that’s equally true of all beings. There is no death without life, there is no life without death. This is the cycle of life. And I would wish that we sent our fellow beings off with much more gratitude and reverence than we do, for our mutual dependence upon each other is sacred.
It's time for the squirrels to put away nuts for the winter. I worry about the squirrels in my little neck of the woods, because my trees don’t seem to have cast any mast this year at all. That is, I don’t see any acorns, hickory or beech nuts in the woods. Mast trees, by design, have years of heavy fall and years of no fall as a way to control the population of squirrels and other beings who depend upon their nuts and to ensure that some of their stash is forgotten and has a chance to germinate a little farther away from the mother tree. If they masted heavily every year, we’d all be overrun by squirrels and deer (yeah, I know some of you think we are anyway, I get it). While I am worried about them, I don’t think my squirrels are—I’ve noticed no difference in their behavior as they chase each other up and down trees and hop merrily along.
It is late fall. The time of sandals and shorts is long gone, trading it off for hoodies, though I haven’t worn my winter coat yet. The world turns, the way it is supposed to.
QUESTIONS
How can we cultivate gratitude for the beings who die so that we may live?
How can we keep ourselves open to painful experiences?
What needs to be planted now so that it can get an early start for Spring?
What is still growing, even as it is aging and without the explosiveness of youth?
