Monthly Archives: March 2012

Guest blog post by Leah Kostamo: Practicing Gratitude

Photo Credit: Brooke McAllister

A friend recently connected me with Leah Kostamo, a local writer and environmentalist, and I’m thrilled to announce that she’s written a guest blog post today for The Farm for Life Project! Leah and her husband Markku have worked for the past ten years to establish the ministry of A Rocha in Canada (an organization that I’ve long been a fan of). As part of A Rocha’s work they established a Christian environmental center in Surrey, B.C. The center is a hub for a myriad of conservation, education and sustainable living activities. Leah blogs about their salmon saving, stranger welcoming and organic gardening adventures at leahkostamo.com. In today’s guest blog post, she writes about gratitude – something I think about often as I spend my days frollicking in the soil with people I love. Big thanks to Leah for sharing this!

Practicing Gratitude
by Leah Kostamo

The hallmark of a truly “simple” life is gratitude. “Gratitude is the heart of faith,” writes Mary Jo Leddy, author of Radical Gratitude. In this vein, she relates a lovely prayer of gratitude the Jewish people pray every Passover as they celebrate the deliverance of the Hebrew people from Egypt. The prayer centres around the Hebrew word Dayenu, which in English means, It would have been enough.

~ If you had only led us to the edge of the Red Sea but not taken us through the waters, it would have been enough.

~ If you had only taken us through the Red Sea but not led us through the desert, it would have been enough.

~ If you had only led us through the desert but not taken us to Sinai, it would have been enough.

Leddy suggests using this template as a helpful spiritual exercise in reflecting on one’s own life. For example: If I had only been born but not had a twin sister, it would have been enough. If I had only had a twin sister but hadn’t visited Orcas Island, it would have been enough. If I had only seen the sun set off Otter’s Point, but hadn’t experienced a snowfall in the Rockies, it would have been enough.

When we are satisfied with our lives as being enough, we are able to resist the whispers of consumerism that tell us we don’t have enough or we are not enough. When our sense of satisfaction is rooted in an amazement at the givenness of every gift—from friends to home to our very own lives—then we are grounded in the firm grace of abundance.

Gratitude’s starting point is wonder. I love what the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel says about true spiritual living: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement.” He encouraged his students to take nothing for granted. “Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” The amazement comes as we realize everything we have and every gift we experience is pure grace. To be born would have been enough, but then I’m given a loving family. Wow! To be raised in a loving family would have been enough, but then I am surrounded by caring mentors. Amazing! We are invited not only to consider the big gifts, but the little gifts as well—the light slanting through the fir trees on a fall afternoon or the caress of a small child’s hand on our arm. It’s all grace. It’s all amazing. It all warrants our gratitude.

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Seed Sharing at the Farm

The guys get goofy while trading beans and tobacco seeds.

This past weekend, we sat around Chris and Julie’s farm kitchen table and shared seeds over beers. Chris K. and I had a shoe box containing seeds he’s been saving for a few years as well as all the seeds we’ve bought for our farmer market business this summer. Chris M. had the official ‘farm family seeds’ (seeds paid for through our internal community farm fund for personal food growing usage). Since we had different varieties of plant seeds in each pile, we decided to dedicate an evening to doing some swapping and sharing. It was fun to create new little DIY seed packets and expand each of the seed collections. There was also lots of talk about saving seeds at the end of this season so we can participate in more official seed swapping events next year. Seeds, seedlings, almost-spring-weather…2012 is going to be a great gardening year, I can feel it!

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“Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof. Take that Poppy seed, for instance: it lies in your palm, the merest atom of matter, hardly visible, a speck, a pin’s point in bulk, but within it is imprisoned a spirit of beauty ineffable, which will break its bonds and emerge from the dark ground and blossom in a splendor so dazzling as to baffle all powers of description.”
~ Celia Thaxter

Growing Shiitake Mushrooms in Bags

We picked up some bags of Shiitake and Oyster mushroom starters in bags from The Mushroom Man at the Richmond Seedy Saturday event last weekend and here are some photos of their progress, one week later. Pretty awesome.

The mushrooms are growing on a substrate block of Fraser Valley Red Alder hardwood sawdust supplemented with millet grain, wheat bran and crushed limestone. When we purchased them, the mushrooms hadn’t started showing themselves, but after a week with the top of the bag open, they’ve grown really quickly. Chris and Julie harvested some of theirs for breakfast this morning and said they tasted incredible.

As the mushrooms grow, you cut the surrounding bag down or out away from them to give them space and whenever the block appears to be drying out, you place the base of it in some water for about 30 minutes, followed by holding the bag upside down to get out any extra water out.

The mushrooms do better in cooler temperatures so Chris and Julie have been keeping theirs in the ground level entryway to their home and my Chris and I are keeping ours in the garage for now.

We paid $10 for each bag and each should yield about a pound and a half of mushrooms. Considering how organic Shiitake mushrooms can cost up to $12-$14 per pound, growing your own is the economical way to go and is a super fascinating experiment at the same time. The nice thing about doing them in bags means that apartment dwellers can grow their own as well.

I don’t know a lot about creating these from scratch. We’ll start here and figure out the DIY details later, but Scott aka The Mushroom Man (linked above) is enthusiastic about growing mushrooms and he was happy to answer all of the questions we had. He’s located in East Vancouver so these mushroom kits are really accessible for Lower Mainland dwellers. Super fun. I recommend trying them out!

PS: check out the mushroom growing out of a mushroom in photos 4 & 5 above. Seriously fun.