The Daily: 3 September 2024

The Blueberry Moon went dark at 9:56pm last night. Today, the sickle Harvest Moon follows the sun into the western horizon. The Harvest Moon is full on 17 September at 10:34pm. Moonrise so close to the full will be a lovely sight, but at its fullest it will be dimmed. This year in North America the full Moon will be in eclipse. It is a partial eclipse, only 9% shaded at maximum, so there will be no color shift. But it will take some of the shine off of the Harvest Moon. This eclipse begins well after moonrise though, so our satellite will be large and lovely as it breaks over the horizon. Then, the dark Harvest Moon falls on October 2nd at 2:49pm and there will be another solar eclipse, but this one is an annular eclipse, a ring of sun around the black moon. However, it’s only visible from the deep south of Chile, Argentina and parts of Antarctica (which saw sunrise back on August 18th).

Day length is changing rapidly this time of year. Today is last day with more than 13 hours of daylight. The 25th is the last point in my local calendar with more daylight than night. It is the actual equinox in central Vermont. And the sun passes the ecliptic on the 22nd at 8:44am. It will rise in the southeast from now until around March 21, 2025.

It is fully autumn here in Vermont. The maples are turning. The birches seem to be brown. I hope this isn’t some new disease. Birches are the trees that most speak to renewal and elegance, the ability to bow before the storm so that you can stand tall afterwards. But maybe they’re just tired of being wet. I get that… The weather is cool and perpetually damp. We’ve had several days with lows below 50°F already. Most mornings begin in dense fog, though there is sun or light cloud by evening. This year there’s not been much wind. Also though there has been frequent drizzling rain, we haven’t had many heavy showers in a couple weeks. My garage is finally dry. So maybe the birches will bounce back next year.

But for now, it is definitely the Harvest Moon! Food of all kinds is flowing out of the fields and into the kitchen where we are all frantically trying to preserve it for the winter. There is hardly any time for anything else… but I am trying to make time, to remember that this is the time for balance. I don’t know how successful I am today… but I’ll get there. Like the birches, I suspect I’ll bounce back.

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The Venerable Bede (does anyone else want to call him the Venereal Bede?… no?… ah, well… anyway… that guy…) tells us that the Anglo-Saxons named the month around the autumn equinox Haligmonath. We often say that this is their name for September, but they didn’t follow the Roman calendar. Theirs was another version of lunisolar time reckoning. So it wasn’t September, but it was the month around the autumn equinox, the Harvest Moon. This word translates as “holy month”. However, there are few recognizably holy days in this holy month — no large festivals, no ritual trappings, no stories. The equinox itself was observed throughout the world, though there are strangely few Continental customs tied to the autumnal equinox and few Megalithic public works projects aligned to either of the equinoxes. And there remained few public rituals associated with the Harvest Moon time until the Victorians romanticized the whole thing. We are left to wonder how the Anglo-Saxons celebrated their holy month. I suspect there was warm beer.

Bede sniffily informs us that there were heathen sacrifices, but that sort of goes without saying for a heathen holy time. Also, “sacrifices” was something of a dog whistle among the medieval Christians. Especially when qualified with terms like “heathen” and “pagan”. It had more to do with propaganda and justifying domination than with any actual practices or attibutes. It meant roughly “things those nasty yokels will insist on doing in their sadly benighted state”, and the word has come down to us with that coloring. Even when it is a noble sacrifice, we hear “dead human” in the act. And “sacrificing on altars” is almost exclusively sordid and perverse. Not only dead, but usually violated as well. But in Bede’s day, and for most of human history, the word just meant “to make sacred”, to set something outside the mundane world. To Bede, celebrating the Mass is a sacrifice. You set aside your mundane persona and your mundane time and you dedicate yourself to your god.

After which there is warm beer…

So the Anglo-Saxons probably feasted and honored their deities. They probably set aside a certain portion of their harvest as a reminder of where that harvest came from. They probably had contests and market days and other harvest-themed activities, days in which doing regular work would earn you a snarl from the local morality squad. But there wasn’t much regular work at this point in the year for northern peoples. Just about every job in the Anglo-Saxon world was tied to agriculture in some fashion, and at this time of the year, the harvest was gathered in. Maybe that’s all that needed to be said to make the time holy. (Let the Oktoberfest begin!…)

What they probably did not do was kill humans. For all the titillating tales of human sacrifice offered up by [mostly Victorian] historians, there is very little physical evidence that it ever happened. One or two ancient bog bodies does not make a trend, especially as they are far older than the cultures that supposedly conducted heathen rites. There are far more sanctified pots and blades and beads and coins than there are dead body parts of any kind, human or animal. Now, I am sure that feasting usually involved the ritual killing of the feast animal. It would be rude both to animal and deity to just slaughter a cow and eat it. But the important thing was that they ate it, this was a sanctified killing for a quotidian need, not killing to kill.

I know the late Romans (which Bede never sniffed at) killed to kill. They were not supporting life with their cute little Coliseum games. They were sending an untempered message to their conquered subjects and to those beyond the civilized world who were resisting civility. See how powerful we are that we can waste lives in these bloody circuses! Best take note because this is what we do to those that annoy us. I can’t see how a deity should have been impressed by such useless carnage. A lowly slave — who probably didn’t even recognize the local pantheon — ripped apart by lions really doesn’t carry much meaning as a sacrifice. Seems kind of an offhand insult actually. But then sky gods are perverted.

Anglo-Saxon gods were not distant abstractions. Their deities lived with them and drank the same beer. (Warm…) Their deities suffered from hunger and cold and delighted in full bellies and merry camaraderie. They loved and they grieved and sometimes they died. They might have fought and killed for good reason (though there is much less warfare than trickery in northern mythology) but they would not have been amused at wanton destruction in their name. You don’t waste lives in the north. The North does a good enough job at that on its own.

The more ancient Republican Romans, too, did not waste lives. A dead slave did not harvest your grain. A dead pleb did not bake your bread. A dead goat… was eaten, along with most of the other ritual victims. In fact, the oldest rituals required actual sacrifice from the celebrants. The wealthy had to give away their wealth in the name of holiness. They had to ritually slaughter their livestock in order to feed the poor or the priestly caste. They had to give of themselves — often to those in need — in the name of their gods. The killing was not the sacrifice; it was the sharing.

Victorians clearly had issues with sharing… completely foreign concept… so they missed much of the meaning in sacrifice. The potlatch feasts central to many tribes in the Pacific Northwest were not seen as spreading resources throughout the community so that everyone was more healthy and happy. Victorian writers (and many still today) said that leaders were displaying their prestige and wealth… by giving it all away?… Similarly, festival celebrations in medieval Europe, in which the wealthy paid for food and clothing and sometimes even paid the bonds-price of slaves in the name of whatever they considered holy, are described as status displays by 19th and 20th century anthropology. These leaders couldn’t possibly be engaged in altruism without a venal ulterior motive. Redistributing wealth to create strong communities is bass-ackwards and upside-down nonsense to the capitalist elites who write books about other cultures. And redistributing wealth simply because it is the right thing to do is just pure abomination.

Hence our ideas of sacrifice…

But anyway, this is the holy month with very few holidays. This is probably because the harvest is still ongoing at the beginning of the Harvest Moon. No time for holiness yet. It’s all intense mundane 24-7 for many weeks.

And then suddenly it is over. The grain is cut and threshed and stored. There is probably warm beer, definitely bread. And mead! Along with all sorts of sugary alcohols. The cabbages are fermenting in crockery. The roots are filling up bins in dark cellars. The onions and garlic are hanging in long braids in the driest warm spaces. There are prunes and dried cherries and hazelnuts. There are still walnuts dropping on your head, while porcini and chanterelle mushrooms are popping up at your feet. The apples are layered whole in cellar barrels or dried in strips and hanging in the pantry, and the best are carefully saved to be combined with fennel and juniper berries and turned into sauces to grace the game birds on the winter festival tables. Lentils and peas and beans are dried and bagged in burlap. The yearling livestock are sold and the breeding stock are sleeping contentedly in the byre. There are cheeses ripening in dank caverns, and the first of the sausages are being smoked over apple-wood fires.

And then the sun rises above the mountain peak that points due east and the moon rises full and as golden as the corn dollies that hang in the kitchens.

Of course, this is holy! This is a time to give thanks! A normal human can’t help but be incredibly grateful when the harvest is brought in. And hell yes! you’d want to give back to the land that gave up such abundance! Give to every body! Because everyone knows that the more you give, the more good you receive. And no, this isn’t “you get more wealth than you give”. It’s that when every body shares, every body is happy and healthy and strong. And you get to live nestled in that vibrant community.

And there is undoubtedly beer.

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This is all imaginary. (Not the beer.) But it’s a likely story. We don’t have evidence of much else, but it only makes sense that the holiness found in the autumn is related to the harvest. We still have harvest festivals. In fact, the Victorians absolutely loved them, possibly out-doing the Saxons in ostentatious thanksgiving— though also probably lacking in meaning.

By Victorian days it was all for show, ostentation for the sake of ostentation, and yes, a fair degree of preening status displays. The enclosures of the 17th and 18th centuries and the colonization and empire building that began in the waning days of the Renaissance and never stopped decimated communities. Turned people of all classes and castes against each other. Even life itself was described as dog-eat-dog, cut-throat competition… Altruism became performative… To the point where English-speaking anthropologists had no words to describe a potlatch. Or a community without hierarchy. And nobody believed that nature provided the wealth in their balance books or in their homes and extravagant bellies. No reason to give thanks. God helps those who help themselves, after all…

However, the tradition of celebrating Harvest Home around the equinox persisted. But since we don’t follow a lunisolar or even a strictly solar calendar, the festival has become attached to the third quarter day in the year, the day when rents were assessed and collected, the day when the markets were closed and families could gather. This was Michaelmas, the feast of St Michael (who is not a saint but an angel, but who’s counting…). Michaelmas is an old festival and is most strongly celebrated in the very places that Angles and Saxons settled most thickly.

Michaelmas has almost nothing to do with Michael. In fact, if anything the Archangel Michael stands between humans and abundance. He evicted the hapless Adam and Eve (though he seems to have missed Lilith) and he still guards the gates of Eden with a flaming sword. He does not preside over agriculture so much as he inflicts agriculture on the former inhabitants of paradise. There are promises of weeds and stones and sweat and thorns, where nature used to provide a full belly for free. So there is little reason to celebrate his day with a thanksgiving feast.

But that is exactly what Michaelmas is… So maybe this is the holy day that Bede was sniffing at.

Significantly, Michaelmas falls just a few days after the sun rises and sets due east and due west in northern Europe. For societies without calendars, somebody would have been responsible for noting the day when the sun rose over a geographical marker for east. This day would be noted as the equinox. Any festivities associated with the day would have followed afterwards. When calendars became common, the other solar time-marking days stuck to the 24th (for various reasons mostly related to Easter…).

But I think that in East Anglia and other Anglo-Saxon strongholds, there was an old festival already attached to the 29th of September, a few days after the autumn equinox (which had nothing to do with Easter), and it very conveniently was celebrated as autumn harvest festival, an ideal quarter rent day. So Michaelmas became the autumn equinox, and we celebrate it today as Harvest Home, the old thanksgiving of the northern peoples.

I celebrate this old festival. It is my thanksgiving, too. But if Bede was right, you could probably celebrate any day within the Harvest Moon as Harvest Home, as long as the harvest is actually home, I suppose. Still I like the name Michaelmas… and I like the apocryphal stories of Michael and the dragon… and I really like the Scottish traditions that were later attached to Michaelmas.

But that is a story for later in this moon…

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Today, the Harvest Moon is brand new.

Fittingly, I am in a welter of harvest activity right now. Over the weekend I made peach butter (my own peaches), plum jam (plums grown elsewhere), applesauce and apple butter (a mix of my apples and purchased fruit). I froze 10 pints of sweet corn bought from the local corn guy who sells out of his pick-up at the traffic circle — $10 for a dozen ears, which tend to multiply if he likes chatting with you. I roasted and puréed and froze three small pumpkins that I bought from the farm market north of town. The lady running the cash register said it was early for pumpkins and I agreed, however she also said that the farmer who brought in the load was picking so early because the deer were starting to eat the vines. Deer are harder than adolescent males on pumpkins. Another few weeks, when people are more in the mood for pumpkins, and his fields would be shredded, a field of smashed pumpkins.

That was my experience with deer and squash, anyway. They didn’t eat the fruits, just tossed them aside to get at the flowers, the growing tips of the vines, and the youngest leaves. There is nothing so depressing as your prized jack-o-lantern, the pumpkin you have been nurturing for months, giving it extra water and compost, pulling all the other blossoms off the plant so that it can focus on this one swelling fruit, the pumpkin that you have protected from squash bugs and cold nights and mold and all the other vectors of squash discomfort, the pumpkin that was days away from its full orange glory, the most beautifully magnificent expression of all your caring labors, yes, that pumpkin callously kicked aside and gutted and riddled with hoof-prints. (But I’m not bitter or anything…)

I don’t have much in the way of winter squash this year. A few vines survived the marmot and one or two bear fruits, but they are so small that I doubt they will ripen before frost. But even when the squash are allowed to live, I can’t grow pumpkins, as in plural, as in more than one. I can have pumpkins or I can grow something besides pumpkin, but not both. I don’t have the space. Even mini-pumpkins ramble all over, covering many square feet with broad hairy leaves. My favorite winter squashes — blue hubbard — are even worse. One plant can grow multiple vines, each up to fifteen feet long and all covered in leaves that could each serve as an umbrella for quite a large marmot. That is, one plant could cover most of my garden. And one plant will only produce one or two squashes. Now, you don’t need much more than one or two hubbards, huge and meaty as they are. But still, it is a choice between producing one or two hubbards and producing anything else. I tend to go with the variety — and I buy the hubbards from farmers who have whole fields dedicated to this sort of thing.

I know many gardeners who feel that the harvest is only what comes out of your own property, the work of your own hands. But I buy a good deal of my harvest. This not only helps fill my pantry, but it supports farmers. Buying the local harvest makes local farming possible. But it also provides me with a variety in my diet that I just can’t produce. I don’t have the space. I don’t have the time. And there is plenty that my garden just can’t grow. It lacks the sunshine and long growing season for large melons. It lacks the sweet soils necessary for corn. And there is this marmot… But sometimes I feel somewhat ashamed — or perhaps shamed — because I can’t produce those foods, as though I am insufficient, not sufficiently skilled or savvy to grow what I need. Or worse, that buying my hubbard squashes reveals a certain kind of undeserving laziness, that I’m not putting in the work, so I don’t deserve the hubbard…

We harbor strange notions of self-sufficiency, that to be a true gardener you need to grow all your own food, that anything less is just dilettantism. Not only do I think this is chest-beating hogwash, I think it’s patently impossible — even if you have those dedicated fields. I don’t believe it is possible to produce all your food on one property, much less by your own labor. Leaving aside our cravings for variety (which is not exactly frivolous, as this taste for variety evolved to keep us eating a balanced diet), it is extremely difficult to produce everything you need in one place, no matter how many acres you have to dedicate to food production. There are only so many hours in the growing season. Still, even if you had many hands helping you farm — though remember that each set of hands comes with its own belly, the more labor, the more calories needed — still, even if you could grow the crops on one property, you still don’t have food. You have crops. All of which take a good deal of processing and storing to be food that will feed you in the lean months.

And there will be lean months. We moderns also have a strange idea that nature provides perennial food and we just have to be smart enough to cultivate the right plants. This too is hogwash. I don’t know every climate well, but I also don’t know of any climate that has perpetual growth and fruiting. Plants need annual rest cycles, which is why most foragers supplement their mostly plant-based diet with small game like reptiles, rodents, and rabbits as well as fish and other aquatic foods. Most foragers also move around a good deal, following the seasonal cycles of food. They don’t rely on one space to provide all their needs because no space can do that all year round. Most foragers also practice some form of cultivation and husbandry, nudging along the edible plants and creating environments that favor their food animals. But all humans have strategies for coping with the substantial portion of every year in which there is nothing to gather. Every living being does. Because no living being would survive without an ability to process and store the harvest — whatever that entails.

We tend to romanticize hunting and farming and forget that these labors by themselves do not feed us. Growing the crops and killing the animals is preface to the work that makes food. The harvest is only the beginning. A field of grains requires much more labor after reaping, often more than went into the growing. It also takes specialized tools and storage spaces and skills. A field of grain is nothing but inedible grass until you learn how to thresh the seed heads out of the plant, how to keep the seeds dry and free from pestilence, how to grind the seeds into meal, and most magically of all, how to work with fire and unseen beings to transform the indigestible meal into sustenance. But the grain harvest is at least reliably rewarding after all that effort. A field of cabbage requires much more effort to grow, much more energy and space to process (which processing usually involves turning it into sour, briny goop, not delicious bread) and yet provides fewer calories than you will burn in producing it. (My garden is very good at growing cabbage…)

Which is rather a non-trivial point… There comes a time in every gardening life when you have to admit that the garden does not produce the most practical food crops. In fact, much of what we garden is really just grace-notes on the summer diet. The things that are the easiest and most abundant in the harvest baskets are not going to feed you in the season of dearth. Some, indeed, you probably shouldn’t be eating much at all. Canned peaches are delicious. They are also an effective way to keep peaches edible for more than a few days after severing them from the tree. But there is really no good way to can them that doesn’t involve quite a lot of unhealthy sugar. I suppose I could skip the syrup and use the freezer to preserve the peaches, but my freezer isn’t big enough to hold an entire winter’s worth of food. Not even for one person. It also can’t hold all of any one thing that I produce. My rather lean orchard harvest would fill it to capacity, leaving no room for anything else.

But at least fruit does store with the proper tools and techniques, and it provides both nutrition and calories. Many of the garden crops we most obsess over — eggplant, mesclun salad mix, chard, lettuce, radish, filet beans — provide us little in energy and hardly serve as stored energy at all. It is possible to freeze beans. They don’t taste all that great coming out of the freezer, and a good deal of their nutrient content is leached out in the process. But to begin with, green beans just don’t have that many calories. They hardly count as food even before you abuse them with blanching and sub-zero temperatures.

I find that the veg with the least calories usually takes the most energy to turn it into food, and much of it won’t store at all. The only way to have lettuce year round is to grow lettuce year round. It does not store. This requires your year-round efforts as well as not insubstantial energy inputs to protect the lettuce from heat, cold and drought. In my part of the world, it needs more light than the sun provides in the depths of winter, also using energy. And growing anything in artificial spaces means you must also grow soil, or more accurately, try to synthesize soil and all the nutrients a plant needs around its roots. This takes a great deal of energy. All to produce something that is nearly devoid of calories. You’d have to eat something like thirty whole heads of lettuce a day to obtain a human body’s minimum daily energetic needs — which is not physically possible for a human stomach. It may be a nice nutritive supplement that provides a toothsome crunch alongside tomatoes, but it is not food.

And don’t even get me started on tomatoes… Here is a whole quarter of the veg garden that produces nothing more than condiments and sauce. Though at least you can store tomatoes. With a bit of effort. And quite a bit more expense in the way of storage space and canning tools than I like to think about…

In any case, I think the swaggering on about self-sufficiency is balderdash. I also think there is far too much said about growing veg and far too little said about turning that veg into food, especially food that will last the winter. If gardening, or even farming, was truly about self-sufficiency, then there would be very little in the way of tomatoes and quite a lot more potatoes. There would be more space dedicated to root cellars and more books on storage techniques. The harvest season would not end in the gathering basket. In fact, the harvest would not end at all. If you don’t have a harvest, you starve.

But most of all, there should be recognition of all the work that needs to be done after you grow a plant. Of the time you will need to spend to turn it into food. Of the skills and knowledge required. Of the dedicated spaces and tools you will need. Of the energy it will take and how that compares to what you will get out of it. A basket of tomatoes is lovely… for about a day… after that, it is a stinking mess. And if you don’t put substantial work into that basket in that short window of time between loveliness and mess, then the tomatoes are nothing but a waste. Of everything. But the worst thing about tomatoes is that all this focus on them obscures the fact that you could spend acres and months on them, you could produce the best tomatoes ever, you could painstakingly preserve every last one, you could eat tomatoes year round for every meal…

And you would still need to buy most of your actual food.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024