Pods and Preparation

Hi all! Hope you're enjoying the fall colors out there, it's a particularly good year for them. November 1st marks the midpoint between fall equinox and winter solstice, so we're officially in late fall. It's a good time to wrap up your outside projects and start getting ready for snow. In the meantime, here's this week's newsletter:

Emergency Food Buckets

We've made lots of progress on the Emergency Food Buckets project. I talked to the folks at Montague Foods, and they're up for helping us order the bulk food. They're also going to save their empty frosting buckets for us, so we all have a civic duty to buy lots of baked goods with frosting from Montague Foods 😉

The current plan is to hold the big bucket-packing day in January, so that we've got time to get our ducks in a row and we aren't competing with holiday events. We don't have an exact day/time yet, but I've been talking to Jeff at City Hall and we should have the details nailed down soon.

We lucked into a huge batch of buckets this weekend thanks to Tim at the transfer station. I'd mentioned the project to him at the Solid Waste Authority meeting a couple of weeks ago, so when someone came in with a bunch of buckets they wanted to toss, he saved them for us. They don't have lids, and they need a good wash, but those are both solvable problems.

We might do a test-run of the bucket packing day sometime this month, now that we have the buckets for it. It would be nice to do a small-scale test with 4-6 people and see where our procedures need work before we invited in the whole town. If we end up doing that, I'll be sure to let you all know ahead of time.

Help our local food banks!

Speaking of food-related emergencies, now is a really good time to donate/volunteer with local food banks. Normally when there's a government shutdown, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is kept afloat using contingency funds. Our current ballrooms-over-babies administration is breaking with that tradition, and they cut off funding for the program on November 1st. The courts are trying to make them turn it back on, and hopefully we'll see progress on that front by the time this newsletter goes out, but for now the food banks are being hit HARD.

Locally, I'm most familiar with the food bank at Lebanon Lutheran in Whitehall, which feeds about 135 families a week. I mailed them at check last week so that none of my donation would get siphoned off by PayPal and used to elect more anti-food politicians. If you'd like to donate as well, their mailing address is 1101 S. Mears Avenue, Whitehall, MI  49461, and if you'd like to volunteer, you can meet up at Lebanon Lutheran at 7:30am on Wednesdays. They are particularly looking for drivers who can pick food up from Hart and Shelby, and you can reach out to Doug Ogden for more information.

Currently Gather-able: Milkweed Seeds

Milkweed is an important native plant that provides crucial habitat and food to Monarch Butterfly caterpillars, as well as other local pollinators and insects. It's going to seed right now, so if you want to add it to your garden this is the perfect chance to gather some seeds. After several years of making a giant mess trying to separate milkweed seeds from the silky fluff that normally helps them use the wind to find a new home, I came up with a method a couple of years ago that feels worth sharing:

First, you want to find a pod that has dried enough to split open, but where the seeds haven't fanned out yet to catch the wind.

Carefully remove the little "pinecone" of seeds from the pod, keeping it as intact as possible.

Close your hand around the cluster of seeds so that only the fluff is poking out.

Hold tight to the seeds with one hand, and use the other to pull out clumps of fluff. (Note: it is still very possible to make a big mess at this point. DO NOT try to do it inside. I usually do it right where I found the seeds, so that as much as possible of the plant material that I'm not going to use stays where Nature would have put it.)

The fluff will act a little like tissues in a box, and pull up more fluff as it comes out.

Eventually, you'll start getting down to the little papery membrane at the core of the seed bundle where the seeds and fluff were originally attached. Keep pulling all the fluff you can reach, and try to avoid pulling directly on the papery membrane. Most of the time it'll just tear, but occasionally it won't, and in those cases it can disrupt the rest of the seeds/fluff that are still in your closed hand.

Here's a half-done seed bundle, and the seeds that have been de-fluffed already

And here's a finished batch of seeds! These can be scattered anywhere you'd like to see extra flowers and butterflies. I like to carry them loose in my coat pocket and scatter them around town when I'm on walks.

Artisan Market

The season is starting to wind down at the Artisan Market, but it's not over yet! We'll be there every Saturday until the Holiday Walk on the 22nd. We've still got acorn flour to grind, and on rainy days we'll be in the cabin crocheting baskets.

We finally added up the sales we've had at the market this year, and as long as we ignore the cost of materials, we're only $43 away from breaking even on rent for the season! Luckily we are extremely not profit-driven, so we're already planning to come back next year. Even if it didn't turn out to be much of a fundraiser, we enjoyed meeting so many new people and sharing our skills. We learned a lot this season, and we've got lots of ideas for new projects and better retail displays next year.

Recommendation Corner

This week, I'm recommending One Nation Under God by Kevin M. Kruse. If you've found yourself wondering how we ended up in a world where the most loudly "Christian" politicians are the ones doing their best to starve the poor, this book will fill in a lot of the gaps. It explains how rich businessmen in the 1930s got together to finance preachers like Billy Graham who turned people away from traditional love-thy-neighbor Christianity and towards the Prosperity Gospel. The author is a Princeton history professor who specializes in 20th century political history, and the level of context he's able to bring to the story is amazing. The writing is engaging and accessible, and it's a book I've been recommending for years.

This week's nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! I went with an autumn theme this week in honor of all the beautiful leaves. Between the different backgrounds and the different flaky toppers, it involved eleven different bottles of nail polish, but I'm quite happy with how it came out.

Have a good week, and get out there to enjoy the fall colors while they last. If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.