A Note From Scott | Food is Medicine, and Medicine is Food.
March 29, 2017
By Scott Chaskey
Yesterday our near neighbor, Bill M., happened to pass by on Town Lane as I was closing the gate to our Town Lane South field. At this time of year -- given the minimal traffic -- Bill could actually come to a full stop and address the farmer at the gate: "Ah, now I know it is Spring..." he offered. And I was immediately pleased to part of a yearly cycle that is at once symbol and reality, accessible and conversant.
I replied: "Well there is us...and flower buds beginning to swell, and also the red-wing black birds trilling in the valley."
"I've heard them!" he replied. Then Bill headed west and I returned on the Kubota east to the home farm, feeling the bite of March.
We are filling our seed trays with onion seed, parsley, scallion, and snapdragon seeds, and the trays are filling our new greenhouse. I recently read a moving piece in a soulful periodical published in New Mexico, "Seed Broadcast," entitled "Bees as Seeds."
Melanie Kirby "firmly believes in food as medicine," and so do we. These most remarkable insects "have been nursing themselves through the elixirs of starlight: nectar and pollen, water and propolis. They have long understood that food is medicine, and medicine is food." In fact bees manufacture food out of an interconnection (we too are part of) with root and stem and flower.
Melanie names this other life form we so depend upon as "nectar nomads," and so are we when we awaken to the gifts of Spring, in anticipation of what a flower can reveal.
Scott Chaskey
Senior Advisor, Quail Hill Farm
schaskey@peconiclandtrust.org