Great to get a comment recently from another blogger in Roseboom! Check out Full of Beans. Some delightful posts, many of them about a subject dear to hearts around here: food, preparing it, growing, digging it.
As tourists start to return to the area–many motivated, no doubt, by the prospect of a less expensive vacation this year-they are seeing one of the best seasons. Apparently it is the “Spring is sproing!” season. If you’ve never experienced this part of New York state before, let me tell you, the way that plants and trees and crops burst into life in the month of May is amazing (get the double pun there: aMAYzing/aMAIZE-ing, sorry).
No wonder there were so many people living here in the centuries before us Europeans arrived. Many parts of this area were planted for maize in fields set among managed forests that had been carefully tended over time, planted with a specific mix of trees.
I’ve been reading about this recently in a book titled 1491. There’s a lot more in this book than the short title suggests. Okay, so the full title is 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbusbut what I’m saying is, this book is stuffed with good stuff.
In fact, it’s such a good book that I am now reading it for the second time. I don’t read many books twice, so this is quite the accolade (others so honored in the decades since college courses include Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero and Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (the last of these having more than enough ironic content to warrant the long title).
What I’m doing with 1491 right now is dipping into several different sections at once. It is a testament to the superb authorship of Charles C. Mann that one can do this. I can flip from the amazing city of Cahokia on the Mississippi to the feuding among Mayan city states. I can read about the vast earthworks of the Beni and the sophisticated aquaculture of the Amazon, then travel via Norte Chico, a Peruvian civilization older than Egypt, to the indigenous forest-scaping of the North Eastern U.S.
And all the while I can follow the plot, which is basically this: America was a heavily populated and highly civilized land before contact with the Europeans. This truth had been slowly emerging in scientific papers and publications for decades, but Mann pulled all of the data together and the effect is almost overwhelming. At last, the sophistication and scale of indigenous culture and civilization is now being revealed.
So, some food for thought to go with what you grow.
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