FROG FOUND: JUST IN TIME
The other day, I received an urgent message from one of the many citybillies
following this blog: FOUND A FROG.
Just in time too. She sent the
following photo within the last days of the Frogs Return Moon:
This particular citybilly works in the produce section of a supermarket and,
as she was unpacking a box of local asparagus, she found a frog.
I think this photo would’ve really tickled the ancient Wheelmakers. Frog and asparagus, two totems of the second
spring moon of Wabun, the Golden Eagle.
We enter, this week, Wabun’s third and final moon of the year, the Corn
Planting Moon. It’s time to start
preparing for the long slog and the bountiful harvest of the upcoming summer
months. Most of the tree-flowers are gone,
the leaves are out, the frogs have returned and the asparagus? That quintessential spring crop? Time to let it go wild and weedy.
STALKING THE WILD ASPARAGUS
Just recently, I asked one of my farmer friends, “Why does asparagus season
have to end?”
I mean, as I understand
it, the asparagus shoots out of the ground, you let it grow, you snip it at the
base and you take it to market…then, a week later, another asparagus breaches
the surface…and it’ll keep coming back and coming back. “Can’t you just keep picking it all summer?”
“No time,” she said. “There’s too
much else coming up. Got to pick, got to
plant and you gotta weed.”
Gotta weed.
I went over to her place, the Urban Girls Produce farm located at the
Schuylkill Center, to watch the wild asparagus.
So this is what happens when asparagus goes wild. This is what happens to your favorite vegetable
when you gotta weed.
Trees can go to weed too. There is a
whole roster of trees that are unwanted, uninvited, undesired, blackballed and
ostracized. In the books, it’s called
spontaneous urban vegetation. In the
college classrooms, it’s sometimes called Urban Ecology. Down here on the mean streets, we call them
weed trees and I’ve found a couple worth talking about.
