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K and I rounded out our August Challenge this past Labor Day Weekend just spending time here and there reading in the park, heading to the beach with friends, and simply thoroughly enjoying the perfect weather the weekend afforded.
If you haven’t read about it already, the August Challenge was a challenge K and I put to ourselves to spend August Saturdays outside in an effort to get out of the climate controlled boxes of the workweek and to experience what is actually happening in the world around us. While our expectations of the challenge were varied, it became clear through writing about the experience that the challenge to get outside led to an exploration of place.
In going to Humbolt Park, a few different stretches of beach along Lake Michigan, and a suburban farm last month, I noticed differences in how people choose to interact with the natural environment of a place. In Humbolt Park, the designers attentively preserved patches of prairie and designed structures to interact with the natural scenery; on the stretch of beach in western Michigan where I was raised, the ecosystem underwent changes despite human interference to stabilize the landscape; in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, industry flanked 15 miles of ‘protected’ lakeshore despite the impact that industry might have on the surrounding environment; and surrounding a suburban farm we visited was a homogenized design and lifestyle that did nothing to take into account how the design/lifestyle would interact with the landscape.
In every action we take, we make a decision about how we will interact with the people and the place around us. We can choose to take nothing into account about our surroundings like the developers swallowing up all types of land for the same purpose, or we can take a thoughtful look at our surroundings and then slowly move with constant reflection of the both the positive and negative impacts of our involvement with our surroundings.
K and I this past Saturday took some liberties with our August Challenge, as we were only actually outside for an hour or two. We remained in the spirit of bringing seasonal ecosystem occurrences into our lives, though, as we traveled to a farm just north of Chicago to pick and then can fresh, local tomatoes.
Getting our produce primarily though a CSA this growing season, we’ve learned more about the seasonality of vegetables, especially the narrow window during late summer to enjoy fresh tomatoes, and the versatility of dishes that rely on the ripe fruit. Not wanting to rely so much on store-bought “fresh” and canned tomatoes in the coming year, we decided to try our hand and the craft of canning, and picked a half-bushel of tomatoes, which yielded ten quarts of canned tomatoes.
This being our first year canning, I’d rather not try to offer a guide to safe canning, but will point readers in the direction of Ball’s comprehensive Blue Book of Canning, and suggest researching the plethora of canning tips that can be found online, including this clear guide from Chow.com: Make Your Own Preserves. I will mention that our day of canning was a very rewarding experience, and that all went well as far as we can tell, save for two jars that didn’t seal properly, so are now in the refrigerator for use this week.
Our trip to the u-pick farm in the morning proved an interesting experience, as we observed the trend of small farms rapidly being engulfed by suburban development. It seemed paradoxical that in an effort to live more sustainable ourselves, K and I had to travel to an area that was developing in a largely unsustainable manner, with automobile-culture an expectation and the measurement of prosperity based on conspicuous consumption. There was a notable lack of walkability in the area teeming with new housing development, and central shopping and eating areas in the community came in the form of strip-malls surrounded by large parking lots and consisting mostly of chain-businesses that will do little to sustain the local economy.
While the farm we visited managed to survive through development, I wonder at how many acres of land in the area that once were home to rich food crops and seasonally-shifting landscape had now been morphed into monotonous topography widely disjointed from the natural terrain and clime. At what point had moving out to the country no longer meant seeking a life more in-tune with nature and instead meant keeping up with facile trends?
