June Vibes and Pu'er Tea

A bucket of butterflies, rattlesnake as an unlikely meditation, and pu'er

This summer, I am not traveling for work (teaching beautiful people to ferment), and as such, I have committed to a few things for myself—a large vegetable garden and getting back to working on a book of essays. I hope my summer will feel less fractured and I will find myself in a rhythm of outdoor work in the cool mornings and long dusky evenings, and writing indoors during the hours of sun and heat. So far, I am good on getting outside to work—driven by long, quickly drying grass and overwhelm. And yet, I still ask myself, is it work when it feels nourishing? The more I am outside, the more I don’t want to be inside. I find this interesting is because I would say the first fifteen or so years of living here, my life was at times completely analog, and when not completely, mostly. I am reconnecting with the self that I know I am, the one who loves to putter about, outside, creating gardens for butterflies, creating shady spots by planting trees, creating meals for my family, not creating content for the sake of content. Instead, I want to continue to communicate with people, like you, who are fermentation curious or fermentation passionate in an authentic way.

Oh, and yes, all those years ago I was living my best Luddite life not because I didn’t have access to all that the cyberworld promised; at the time, Christopher worked remotely and depended on the best connection possible. I just wasn’t interested. There was food to grow and kids to corral and teach when I caught them. It all changed when we wrote a little book about what I had learned using fermentation for the preservation of those garden vegetables. I became someone who left home a lot! And more surprisingly, someone who spent most of the time on the computer, writing, sure, but mainly with the details of promoting (read spinning the plates of first blogging, then social media and content creation) and teaching (and all the time and emails that go into setting up events). The garden got smaller, and some years, it just didn’t exist because my travel schedule made it a sad, neglected affair. (Although over a period of two days last week every visit I made yielded more plants that had been reduced to stumps. As we tried to figure out where a doe was getting into said garden and I did wonder, why do I like this?)

Row of lavender I planted in 2006 with yet to be cut tawny, drying grass on a recent stormy evening.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change a thing; it has been, and continues to be, a remarkable journey, but over the last year, I have been actively trying to create a space where I can do a better job at the things that brought about this work, like grow food and ferment the abundance. It began to feel wrong that I didn’t have the time to do the things I tried to help people do. All that to say, the memoir essays are still getting shoved aside for the particulars of managing a small online fermentation school, a never ending in-box, Substack, and planning some very cool events in the fall. About that, stay tuned to hear more about Angi and Erin’s Bacteria Bazaar in Hamilton, Montana. And a fermentation experience in Peru.

Cool, early mornings, finds Checkerspots sleeping on showy milkweed.

Since I am home, I can share the small particulars I might have missed. Squeaky, squawking from the fig tree brought me outside where I stood face to face with a terrified little wren gripping the branch with shaky claws. By the next day, the bustle that had been a nest of growing babies and busy parents was silent. The elderberries are in full bloom, as are the Himalayan blackberries, and the ceanothus (wild lilacs) at the edges of the woods are painting the landscape purple. We have seen one monarch in our milkweed patch and last week, hundreds of checkerspot butterflies swarmed the aforementioned blooms. My best guess is that they are Edith’s Checkerspots. In the early mornings, I found them sleeping on the blossoms. Unlike monarchs, they stay fairly close to where they were born. This week most are gone and the ones still alive are looking a tad ragged around the edges. Their lifespan is short, only two weeks. During the flurry our grandson came up to our house to show me his little red bucket which he’d filled with bedraggled butterflies. He rescued about twenty from drowning who’d gotten a little too wet when drinking in the small stream by our house. They were soaked, but he’d put some grass and a lump of wood in the bucket to help them dry. One by one, they flew off. He was delighted.

Northern Pacific rattlesnake, not pictured the rest of it and its seven rattle segments.

Our deck is lined with galvanized troughs, many of which recycled from when we had cows, goats, and horses that needed such things. They are not filled with dirt and flowers. I’d been adding new flowers and rearranging pots for most of the morning. I’d gone to the car to get something and rounded the corner and a rattlesnake was crossing the path. It was not bothered at all by my presence. I wouldn’t say I was bothered but I was concerned. I watched it and followed it as it slithered along the foundation of our house. It wove in and out of the many ceramic pots and troughs. It put its head down a gopher hole but decided against it. It moved slowly and I moved behind it. I texted my son who isn’t squeamish about catching and relocating these guys…no reply. So I kept watching it. It’s movement was fluid and mesmerizing and in an odd way relaxing. I wanted to keep track of the snake so that when our son returned we could move it. I wasn’t sure what else to do. After about a half hour I lost it in the deep grass headed towards my son’s family’s house and the rock wall of their garden. For the next week we all moved cautiously. All the shrubs that seemed harmless felt suddenly dubious. I am happy to report, moments before (the kids were all buckled in their car) our son and his family left to go camping for a week, this snake showed itself and is now residing elsewhere deep in the landscape away from homes.

Fermentation explorations

I have two posts I want to share. The first is for those of you interested in cheesemaking or more specifically fungi used in cheesemaking, check out this article about the cheesemaking microbe Geotrichum candidum by master cheesemaker, Gianaclis Caldwell.

I also posted about garlic fermentation at

The Fermentation School

.

What is Black Garlic?

My current tea explorations continue, as I am tasting my way very slowly through the tea menu at our local tea room. In the post about fermented tea in Myanmar I promised an overview of what I learned recently about pu’er (or pu’erh) tea.

Pu’er (or pu’erh) tea 普洱茶

I don’t profess to know anything about pu’er tea but as it is one of the things I am most curious about at the moment, I thought I’d share a recent experience I had at Dobrá Tea Room. A very dear friend of mine heard I was interested in learning more about pu’er, so she organized a tea tasting with her friend, Kristina. Kristina put together the perfect introduction to this tea.